Going West stories: part 3
The prequel to Irina's study stay in Italy
Some time ago I started a Twitter thread of Going West stories: of children growing up during the communist regime in Eastern Europe, who then, as young adults, were set on leaving the East to pursue a better life in the West, typically Western Europe or the Americas.
I changed the names and some minor details, but these are real stories, recounted by my close friends and family, and shared with their permission.
In the first one, I wrote about Irina, who went to Italy for her studies, but studying was far from being her main mission there.
The second was about Sanda, who, in her adoptive country, is making everyone around her have so much fun, but she only really laughs with her family and her friends from back home.
Here’s the third: the prequel to Irina’s exchange student stay in Italy
Remember how Irina had a perfect Italian accent as she was negotiating rent for an apartment near Milan?
That’s because she had been to Italy before, when she was just twelve.
It was just a few of years after the Berlin Wall fell, but it was going to be many years before travel between the East and the West would be unrestricted.
However, her Dad figured out a way to send her to the West, via a Catholic church initiative, where Italian families would have children from Eastern Europe stay over for the whole summer. Irina’s family wasn't Catholic, but Dad didn’t worry, because the first book Irina read was the New Testament, when she was four.
It took two days by bus to get to Italy, and Irina shared a seat with at least one other child the whole time. Mom had prepared her sandwiches for the road, but she didn’t eat them. She was so tired, all she wanted was to sleep — whenever the others took meal breaks outside she’d have the seat all for herself and could catch a nap. She arrived in the middle of the night, in a school yard where all these bubbly, well dressed, Italian families greeted the exhausted children with fresh food and drinks. She picked up a yogurt but the taste was so surprising — isn’t yogurt supposed to be sour, why is it sweet? — that, as starved as she was, she was so grossed out she couldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the night. She had to wait until the morning, and slept a bit on the warm cement because they couldn’t find her on any list, and nobody came to pick her up. The air smelled good though, like fresh anguria and panettone. She made a few friends and started putting together a few sentences in Italian.
The family she had been assigned to arrived only in the morning. She was so happy to see them: Luciana was a bright-eyed petite brunette, her husband Enrico was a tall, imposing young man, Erica was this dreamy little girl, and Chiara was her age and looked so cool!
Their house was sparkling clean and beautifully decorated, and the food was just amazing! And they had many friends, mostly from church. They came over on Irina’s very first night with the family and they sang and played guitar together in the living room. She was already in bed when they arrived, pretending to sleep, while they all, one by one, amusingly peeked into her room to see her. She couldn’t wait for everybody to leave so that she could cry just a bit louder. What was she thinking pressing Dad to let her go on this far away vacation? She missed Mom so much.
It became much easier in a few days. In a week she was able to easily communicate in Italian. In three weeks she started playing Scrabble, and one night, after she stayed up reading the dictionary, she beat all the Italian adults at it. They were all amused and brought more friends over to meet la ragazza straniera and hear her stories of life behind the iron curtain. In turn, they would get inquired a lot about Italian grammar. And they all liked her.
Except for the family she stayed with: the girls, Chiara and Erica, and their stay-at-home mom, Luciana. Enrico not so much, because he was almost never home.
When she won in Scrabble they told her, after everyone left, that all she ever wanted was to win, she didn't care about anyone. It was such a shock for her, she’d thought everyone would be happy she won, just like Mom and big sister who always celebrated her wins!
Then the girls never let Irina touch the doll house. And when Irina spent time in the bathroom every morning to come out looking on point, as her Mom had always told her to, they would scold her, and call her vanitosa. Luciana prepared the clothes for everyone in the morning, laying them on each girl’s night stand. But at one point, she stopped taking out the outfits Irina had packed from home, and instead prepped a pair of navy shorts and a navy tank top she had bought for her, every single morning for weeks. At the park, Chiara would whisper in her cousin’s ear how Irina only ever wore navy. Yet the cousin couldn’t care less, because he had a lot of fun trying to teach Irina how to bike.
The girls always wanted to go to the parco giochi, but when the cousin with the bike wasn’t there, Irina was bored to death at the park. She felt relieved to hear, one day, Luciana telling the girls to go, and Irina to stay and help her with work. She preferred cleaning up, prepping food, or doing laundry to playing with the mean girls.
But that day Luciana meant something else by work: she told Irina she would get to help the family save money for their August vacation in the mountains. A friend gave them this job they could do at home: fitting rubber gaskets onto grooves of metal pieces used for plumbing.
Luciana told her that day they would do it together, but Irina ended up doing them all by herself, because Luciana was busy with house work, her embroidering hobby, and girlfriends coming over. From morning til evening.
Irina's nails broke and her fingertips hurt a lot by noon, but they’d become numb by afternoon. It wasn’t bad though, she liked it most of the time. She had read the little piece of paper she found in the box, and knew exactly how much money she was making, which she found very satisfying especially as she would keep finding ways to become faster.
She started to drink really tasty espressos that Luciana made for her, and found the adult girlfriends coming over to be entertaining company. Sometimes, when she got in the flow with fitting the gaskets, she could think about, even draw in her head, for hours at a time, a geometry problem she had started the night before, from The Mathematical Gazette she brought from home and stashed under her pillow.
Luciana now even let her shower everyday, before Enrico came home, because he couldn't stand seeing the kids around when he arrived. Irina, after all, felt pity for Luciana: her children never listened to her although they never did as much as pick their clothes off the floor. She did everything for her kids, yet she didn’t seem to like them all that much. Enrico coming home always ruined her mood: after she’d chatted and laughed for hours with her Calabrese best friend, she’d become cranky for the rest of the evening and, at night, Irina sometimes heard her crying.
Irina’s Mom was cranky a lot too, but even if she wasn’t very affectionate Irina felt loved and liked and always supported by her. And then Dad! Dad greeted them with jokes and breakfast in the morning, breezed through a hard work day in the agriculture sector, and then managed to get some laughs out of mom at night and draw for Irina and her siblings, after hearing about their day at school. And the dinners were warm and joyful, even if their bread was rationed and their house was cold. They would read novels together, out loud, on the kitchen couch, at candle light, with many layers of clothing on, because there was no electricity and no heating. But back home, they all went to sleep smiling. Nobody cried at night.
Irina did feel it was wrong to labor all day, especially when they didn’t share any of the earnings with her. They didn’t know, but she had calculated that her work did, in fact, pay for the August vacation in the mountains. They heard them talking about how much it cost: for some reason they often talked as if she wasn’t there or she couldn’t understand. But children hear everything, Irina thought, and she vowed that when she’ll be a grownup, she would never talk as if the children are not listening. It made her angry when Luciana told Enrico that the pair of jeans Irina had her eyes on were not worth it, even if they cost a minuscule fraction of what she had earned.
But deep down she felt strong and unbreakable, grateful that she’s not part of this family. The only time she was really hurt was when the girls laughed at her for not being able to hold her tears when she missed the one time Dad managed to call her (they didn’t have a phone at home and the connection was very hard to establish at the public place he was trying to call from for hours, every Saturday).
She soon went back to being happier because they were now up in the mountains: friends started to come over with whom she could talk about the Revolution, play Scrabble and argue about the Bible. (She kept in touch with Mauro, Armando and Fabrizio, the friends she argued with the most, for many years: they even came to visit her back home, and found Dad as cool as she had described him over and over). She still did all the house work, but it was August already, and she just kept smiling.
Because she knew that she would go back home and Dad would be at the train station, and will hold her and never let her go. And she’d be back to sharing a room with her sister and her brother and they’d stay up all night talking and giggling. And Mom’s smile, rare as it was, would make her feel safe because Mom really knew how she always felt. And Mom always wanted to win also.
Indeed, everyone was there at the train station. Not just Mom and Dad, and her brother and her sister. Also her uncle’s family, and Dad’s best friend’s family. And Dad all but jumped on the train while it was still running to get to his girl. Once home, he held her for a long time. She made a mental note, the only one she ever did:
I want to remember forever how happy I feel in this moment, in Dad’s arms.
Wow... This is such a moving story🥰