The sixth year his wife replaced real sunflowers with silk replicas and her sister’s name was never spoken between them. Not even when she shared the same table with them at dinner at their mother’s home where they all wore harness and blinders, except the grandmother, who was beefy and big and retired from toting any carts she chose not to pull.
He imagined that his tiny mama in Romania was the best friend of this big American grandmother, and when he spoke with his son and daughter, he spoke to them in his Moldovan dialect sometimes and sometimes he spoke to them in English and sometimes a mix of both, but baba was the name he used when he talked of their grandmothers, their American one and the one who lived where the sunflowers bloomed so very far away, and who, during the seventh year, died.
His American wife told him “Go home,” and he touched her face with his calloused fingers, studied the skin where his fingers stayed for a moment, the watery brown tone of her eyes and imagined sunflower centers, multitudes of variations on brown, flecked with gold, flecked with sienna, flecked with the strings of Verdi’s Summer, a vibration of music somewhere, a sounding board that he could not find, had not found, until that single moment peeled away, just at the instant she turned from his touch and said again, “Go home, Michael, Mikail, whoever you are, go home.”
The tiny apartment not much more than a cell where his mama had lived was already occupied by new tenants when Mikhail disembarked from the plane. They did not allow him inside, but shoved a sack filled with soft things and tied off with a length of cord at the top into his arms, and also a stiff paper box big enough to hold a guitar, heavy enough to hold some typewriters or a sewing machine.
He stood for a long time, as much as an hour, on the curb of the narrow street below the apartment. The walls of the buildings ran black with pollution and tall, the sky was a pale slit high overhead but he wasn’t looking up; he was looking at the cobbles paving the road, and he wasn’t seeing the cobbles but the harlequin squares of the floor in his American wife’s bakery shop.
Before leaving Pittsburg, he had stood for a long time, as much as an hour, in the center of that floor, staring at the black and white points and the stool in the corner, trying to make up his mind whether or not he should bring his guitar with him, whether or not he could, or even should, play for his mama even though she was dead — and had decided he could not take the guitar from its corner.
Now, in this black and dismal place with a box and a bag of her world, he believed he had made a mistake.
He pawned his prize leather coat, found lodging and menial jobs until he could pay for his mama’s ashes, buy back his coat, and a return ticket for Pittsburgh.
He had been gone for two months when he boarded the plane in Bucharest to begin his return. In the deep pocket of his coat he could feel the crumpled brown paper bag he had used to print his mama’s good black bread recipe from Romanian into English, had found the recipe in her strong hand in the heavy box the new occupants had shoved his way, had not wanted, should his checked luggage be lost, for that tangible piece of their past to be gone to him forever or for a day. He was, perhaps, heavy-hoofed, plodding, but this thing of his mama’s, of his children’s baba, was the one basic good gift he could offer his American wife.
He would always be the horse; she would never feed from his hand; but they could, he imagined, become something very good, and he liked very much imagining this, and had, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean about three hours after lifting off from Paris, smiled such a smile in his reverie that the gold tooth his wife had replaced that first year caught a ray of light from the window, winked at all who sat near.
