Domnica Radulescu - Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life

Bucharest, the spring of 1983. The lines for food are interminable, the secret police omnipresent, the potholes in the sidewalks as deep as graves. Only the forsythias break the grayness with splashes of dazzling yellows. At street corners, the Gypsies sell posies of ghiocei, snowdrops, the first flowers that bloom, creeping out of the snow, white on white, bell-shaped beauties that grow in the wooded regions around the capital city.

During the day, I attend my courses in English Literature at the University of Bucharest. I hop on crowded slow buses that seem to have forgotten their destination, and I move through the tired Bucharest masses of people grinding my teeth and staring at the pavement covered in slush from the recent snow.

At night, I go to the theater: The Master and Margarita, Iphigenia, The Tempest, Caligula, or just a good old Romanian comedy of mistaken identities and purloined letters. After the theater, I go to another theater. I go to the theater held in the attic of the Headquarters of the Communist Youth. This theater is called the Attic.

On the first floor of the headquarters, the halls are studded with large portraits of the Communist Gods: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the Romanian Dictator with his touched-up lips that make him look like a dreamy pig. I rush up the stairs all the way to the top of the building and open the door to the Attic. There arent any portraits of any of the Gods here.

The brooding theater director and my theater comrades are practicing their different parts in the hallway or inside. I realize that once I enter this space, I start breathing at a steady pace. I change into my practice clothes, which are also our costumes for everything.

At first, I did not like the gray and black costumes, the gray canvas stools that serve as a set for every show depending on how we set them up or stack them up or line them up. The modern theory of theater has reached us too despite our ferocious dictatorship. I thought, Hell, isnt everything gray enough in this stupid country? Arent our clothes drab enough? Isnt our food lousy enough?

The director had decreed that we needed to create something out of nothing; that was the great secret of that theater practice. But it was in the acting, in the mind-body wholeness, the breathing, the authentic gesture, the truthful voice that the colors emerged. That made sense to me, particularly since we had plenty of nothing in our country, so we might as well make it into something.

Once during a show inspired by an old Romanian ballad, my arms lifted like wings of their own will, guided from a point in the center of my being, just as he had taught us. The theory worked. I was an eager bird ready for takeoff. That was when the colors emerged too. I was mauve and vermilion, the colors of my favorite candy sold at the corner shop when I was a little girl. I became all candy. I wanted to eat myself. Now I love the gray of our costumes and furniture, because there is gray and there is something worse than gray. The gray in The Attic turns into myriads of colors and makes you fly. The gray of the outside brings you down into a pile of shit.