Descendant

Dinner with the Falcons

That evening, my mother made bors cu perisoare, sour meatball soup, which was one of the specialities of her village in northeastern Romania. We sat and ate it in the kitchen, with the windows open, so that the last of the sun shone across the table.

My mother Maricica was beautiful in a dark-haired, white-skinned way, like a Madonna in a church painting. She did everything gently and gracefully. She could even peel apples gracefully, their skins unwinding in spirals. She always spoke softly, too, although the quietness of her voice belied a very strong character.

Dad was fuming. He didn’t like secrets and he didn’t like anything to do with authority. His father had been a biochemist and a violin player and had knitted his own sweaters, mostly green with orange zigzags. He had brought Dad up to believe that a man was answerable only to his own intellect, and God, in that order.

“You can’t even give us a hint what they want you to do? Your own family?”

I shook my head. “They said if I told anybody — even you — they’d shoot me.”

“Oh my God,” said my mother. “They threatened you? They come here, uninvited, into my house, and threaten to shoot you, my son, in my yard?”

“Hey, it’s my house, too,” my father protested. “And my son. And my yard, come to that.”

“We should complain to the army,” said my mother.

“They said I have to go to Washington next week,” I told her. “They’re going to pay my fare and everything.”

“They can’t coerce you,” said my father. “Is this why we pay taxes? Tell them you don’t want to go to Washington.”

I spooned a meatball out of my soup. “But I do want to go to Washington. I think this is going to be really, really interesting.”

“I see. It’s so interesting you can’t tell us what it is?”

“Dad — not only will they shoot me, they’ll probably shoot you, too.”

“Pah!” said my father, pushing his chair back in disgust, the same way he did when I beat him at chess.

But my mother was staring at me across the table and there was a look in her eyes which told me that she had guessed why the army had come looking for me. After all, what was the one thing that made me different from all of the rest of my college friends? I had a Romanian mother, who had told me all kinds of scary Romanian folk tales when I was little. None of my friends had been brought up on stories of strigoi and strigoaica, the creatures of the night, and none of my friends had researched Romanian legends as thoroughly as I had, and published a paper on them.

I have to admit that I decided to write a paper on strigoi out of perversity, almost as a joke. Everybody in my class thought that I was a clown, including my professors, and I guess I decided to live up to their expectations. It’s difficult to grow up normal when your father expects you to recite Edward Arlington Robinson to amuse his lunch guests when you’re only four years old, and your mother sings you Romanian lullabies about what will happen to you if you betray love. “If you betray love, you will squirm like a snake, walk like a beetle, and you will own nothing but the dust of the land.”