“Are you finished?”
“No. Be patient,” Alexandru scolds. He shifts, lifting Vasile’s arm out of the way and adjusting his grip on the ballpoint pen. They sit next to the mussed bed, the floor around them cleared of rubbish, their suitcases and twin violins resting in front of the window obscured by the dirty canvas curtain they’ve kept closed since sneaking in.
Vasile inhales, his head tilting back and eyes slipping shut. The wood beneath him has long since lost its varnish and is rotting at the corners; cold from the damp earth below seeps into his bare thighs and palms. The tip of Alexandru’s pen just barely dents his skin, black ink curling over his ribs and making him shiver, as if he could shake off their problems—if only for now.
Being fired from their jobs.
The alarming state of the dilapidated house where they were staying temporarily.
The quickly declining number of leu bills in their wallets, even though they’d withdrawn everything from their bank accounts.
Alexandru’s hand is warm and firm as it smooths over Vasile’s chest, the pen trailing after in long, sweeping strokes. “Sometimes I wish we were birds,” he says softly. “We wouldn’t have to worry about what people think of us. We could fly away to the Pădurea Hoia, and Muma Pădurii would take us in.”
“Because we’re broken things?”
“No,” Alexandru says. “No, we’ve never been broken. It’s the rest of the world that is. But I think she’d protect us. One outcast helping another. Don’t you agree?”
He doesn’t, but rationality could hardly dim the flame of Alexandru’s unwavering fancy.
The air around Vasile grows colder as Alexandru sits back on his knees with a soft smile, Brown hair curls messily around his round face, any slapdash attempt at styling ruined by how much Vasile had been running his hands through it a half hour ago.
“Iată,” Alexandru whispers.
Vasile peers down at his side and the owl scribbled there—feathers splayed wide and half-finished, the mess beautiful in a way only Alexandru could make it.
“My turn,” Vasile says, and Alexandru holds out the pen.
Vasile takes it, and Alexandru leans back against the bed’s ugly, fading quilt, sewn in pale greens and purples, raising his arms to rest over the mattress. The pose pulls his breasts nearly flat, dark bruises there a mocking facsimile of the colors of the quilt, standing out starkly against pale skin where he’d bound wide strips of cloth that morning—again—to disguise his chest.
“I wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself when you do this.” Vasile touches a stripe of skin rubbed raw from chafing.
Alexandru’s lips twist wryly. One of his knees comes up, almost self-consciously, as if to shield himself from Vasile’s eyes. “It’s fine, Valy. What other options are there? There’s no one else here who can advise me on what I’m supposed to do with… this, until I get it fixed.”
When Alexandru won’t meet his gaze, Vasile leans down and kisses one of the bruises, feeling the even rise-and-fall of Alexandru’s quiet breaths, dragging his lips lightly along skin as Alexandru’s hand winds into his hair.
He lets Alexandru hold him there for a moment, their hearts beating together, then presses a last, delicate kiss to Alexandru’s sternum. Alexandru cups Vasile’s chin as he draws away, a smile hovering at his lips and creasing the corners of his eyes before he lets go.
Vasile leaves the topic alone, reaching over to his backpack and pulling out the photo he always uses as reference. He settles his hand on Alexandru’s waist and begins to draw, avoiding the yellowing edges of bruising as he shapes the heart face of a barn owl, then its broad wings flared wide. Alexandru tips his head back lazily, his pulse fluttering under Vasile’s touch like a caged bird trying to fly.
“Notice how I don’t ask you when you are done, even though you’re taking longer than I did,” Alexandru murmurs after a while.
Vasile snorts. “I’m doing mine right,” he says. “It actually looks like what it is. Yours is so sketchy. It could be a bat, for all I know. Did you draw Dracula on me?”
Alexandru laughs. The unexpected movement makes the pen slip, an untoward mark skidding after it.
“You made me mess up!”
“Just draw over it.”
Vasile makes an angry noise. “I can’t. It’s not going to look like the photograph now!”
“It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy, motănel. It’s not sheet music for the orchestra. Just make up what comes next.”
Frustration looping tight around his neck, Vasile licks his thumb and scrubs at the mistake. That only makes it worse, smudging the ink like another bruise on Alexandru’s skin.
Alexandru sighs, fondly exasperated, and tugs the pen from Vasile’s tight grip. Pulling his breast out of the way with his other hand and craning his neck to see, he begins jotting down swift lines, sectioning the owl’s wing into its different parts, feathers appearing like slashes of moonbeams over the bars of his ribs.
“There,” he says, scrawling a narrow, sloppy ‘V’ for the beak. The drawing is chaos but, as always, Alexandru embraces it in a way Vasile never has been able to. “See?” He holds out the pen.
Vasile takes it.
Rising to his knees, Alexandru reaches onto the bed and pulls on his shirt. “Don’t frown, Valy,” he says, putting a hand on Vasile’s cheek.
Vasile glances away, sullen. “It didn’t go how it was supposed to.”
Nothing in the past month has been going like it was supposed to. They should have been at home in their separate apartments in Andrei Mureşanu, then meeting at a café the next afternoon before heading to orchestra rehearsal to practice Tchaikovsky—Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. Even before the two of them had been fired, Vasile hadn’t been picked for the solo, and upset still simmers, thick and hot, under his conscience.
“But it still worked out, didn’t it?” Alexandru’s eyes shine treacle, illuminated by the naked lightbulb that buzzes yellow at the center of the room. “It all works itself out in the end. We’ll get through it. Three days from now, we’ll fly from here to New York and be free. We can find other people like us, and we won’t have to be scared anymore. I’ll get proper treatment, and we can be who we are without always having to watch over our shoulders. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.
“Here.” Alexandru reaches over to his wallet, separating a bent plane ticket from its partner, where they were hidden behind green lei. “I forgot to give this to you yesterday. You should keep yours, in case something happens to me.”
“Don’t say that,” Vasile says sharply. “Don’t say it. It’ll always be you and me.”
“Just in case. I don’t want to be the one making you stay if I lose them. It’s only a precaution, Valy,” he promises. He touches Vasile’s jaw lightly, his gaze so hopeful it makes Vasile ache. “I can’t wait to start a new life with you.”
He hesitates. Alexandru always speaks of America with such reverence, hope lighting up his face, while Vasile clings to terror every time the subject comes up. How could he leave Transylvania and never come back, even if his home has never treated the two of them with anything but indifference bordering on cruelty? The tickets have been tucked away in Alexandru’s wallet since last night, when Alexandru came back from meeting an acquaintance’s friend’s cousin, who’s a travel agent. With their departure now imminent, Vasile has been trying in vain to memorize the red-roofed and pale-walled houses of Cluj-Napoca; the chatter of families eating outside on restaurant decks fenced with wrought iron; the smell of petrichor when Alexandru convinces him to take walks along the edge of the Pădurea Hoia after it rains, despite Vasile feeling eyes on the back of his neck every time they go out together. He never tells Alexandru, who’s always busy scattering seeds for the red squirrels to curry favor with Muma Pădurii.
“I don’t know if I’m ready,” he whispers. Something flickers across Alexandru’s face—frustration, worry, disappointment—before it vanishes so quickly Vasile knows he’s imagined it.
“Of course you are,” Alexandru says assuredly. He presses one of the plane tickets into Vasile’s palm.
Closing his eyes, Vasile brings their hands up to kiss Alexandru’s wrist, then his thumb, then his fingers, which smell of ink and salt and faint flowery soap.
Alexandru’s answering smile could have enchanted concert halls and concert halls full of people to love him.
“Okay, Sandru,” Vasile whispers.
***
“I have to get something today,” Alexandru says the next afternoon while they’re still in bed. “Before we leave Donath.”
Vasile lies curled around him comfortably. Like this, he can revel in what they’d never had while living apart, before everyone had found out who they were. All this, because Alexandru had rapped on the door to Vasile’s apartment four evenings ago, terrified of the men who’d been following him for several days. They’d packed up and fled for somewhere more clandestine, not really caring where they ended up—it isn’t as if they have to worry about a commute to their jobs anymore.
“Okay,” Vasile says sleepily, nosing into Alexandru’s hair and reaching for his hand, twining their fingers together—Alexandru’s shorter than his own but just as strong.
“It’s a little outside the city, so I’ll go alone. I know you’re sick and tired of this dump, so if you take the bus to Old Town, I’ll meet you there. We can eat at Vărzărie and book a hotel. I’ll even go by my old name, so we can share the room.”
“Okay,” Vasile agrees.
“And before we leave for America, we can go busking and play a feciorească duet together. As a farewell to Romania,” Alexandru adds slyly.
“Absolutely not.”
Alexandru reaches back to smack Vasile’s chest. “Măgar! Why?”
“I do not busk,” Vasile says stiffly. “Nor do I play folk music.”
“I am Vasile Nicolescu, former second chair of the Transylvania State Philharmonic Orchestra, and I do not busk or play folk music,” Alexandru mocks in a sing-song voice. “I spend my weekends perfecting my page-turning technique for the concertmaster—”
“And you’re so obsessed with folk, why did you even accept that position as assistant concertmaster?” Vasile catches Alexandru in a headlock, scrubbing the top of his head with hard knuckles until he squawks.
Alexandru is breathing hard by the time he manages to thrash free, his hair sticking wildly in every direction. “Just to convert you.” He shoots a smirk over his shoulder as he swings his feet over the edge of the bed, which creaks dangerously. “Don’t act like you’re too good for it. I saw you looking in that bush along the Pădurea Hoia after I saw an iele there.”
“I did not,” Vasile sniffs, watching Alexandru stand and stretch, then reach for his folded clothes draped over the footboard and begin to dress. “You don’t want me to come with you?”
“No,” Alexandru says. “I’m just getting something back from Wadim. It won’t take long.”
Vasile scowls, the blanket bunching around his waist as he sits up. “You said you stopped talking to him after he called you mentally ill and tried to beat you when you told him about…”
Alexandru’s smile is too beatific to be anything but a mask of reassurance. “I did,” he says.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, Vasile. Take the bus to Old Town. If he finds out I’m seeing someone new, he’ll be angry. I’ll be okay alone.”
“What do you need him for?” Vasile asks sharply. Maybe, yes, he’s jealous—the ugly feeling slipping over his shoulders like sunset, casting darkness over his eyes.
“I’m getting back the violin from my tataie that he took from me when we broke up.”
“You have one already.”
“Yes, from Hora Violins. I know. You paid for it, even though I didn’t want you to.”
“It’s not good enough?”
“It is. I love that violin. It’s wonderful. It’s just not the same,” Alexandru says gently, coming around the bed. He puts a knee on the sagging mattress, taking Vasile’s face in his hands. “You know that.”
“Am I not good enough?”
Alexandru’s face softens, a sad smile curving his lips. “You are, Valy. I’ll tell you that every day. You’re so good to me. I just want this one thing, that’s all.” He leans forward, pressing a light kiss to Vasile’s lips.
“That’s a lie,” Vasile mumbles. “You want a lot of things.”
Alexandru laughs quietly, leaning forward to rest their foreheads together, the tips of their noses brushing. “That’s true, isn’t it? But look what happiness it got me.”
Vasile presses his head harder against Alexandru’s, winding his hand behind Alexandru’s neck and fingering the soft hairs there, feeling Alexandru shiver. “Fine,” he allows. “Fine. But if you’re not at Vărzărie by sunset, I’m going to come looking for you.”
“I expect nothing less, motănelul meu.”
Though it’s past time for them to be getting up, Vasile yanks him closer so that they tumble into bed together again.
