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A Mother and Son's Journey
A story inspired by real events and places of a Romanian boy who takes his mother's hand and follows her on a journey from the ruins of their home in 1970s Romania to the dream of a new life in Barcelona.
Alex is ten years old when the Vrancea earthquake reduces his home to rubble, taking with it his father and his best friend. Suddenly, it is only him and his mother, Eva, left in the ruins.
With Ceaușescu tightening his grip on a fearful nation, they take refuge at his grandparents' home in the countryside. Alex struggles to adapt to rural life, while Eva, in the midst of uncertainty about their future, is secretly plotting their escape.
I remember my first night abroad.
Before you begin to feel like home in a new country, if you ever happen to encounter that trajectory, one goes through a whole process of uncertainties and discoveries.
As an immigrant myself, I remember the first night I slept in a different country, in a different room, in a different bed. My friend and I arrived late to her one-bedroom apartment in London. We ate and went to bed. As I put my head on the pillow, a hard and thick pillow with multicoloured sheets, I looked around the room reminiscing the events of the day. My friend’s laundry had a strong flowery scent that made my head spin. Even though the heat in the small room apartment was blasting due to an issue with her radiators, I pulled the cover over my body all the way to my nose, as if a danger was waiting outside in the hallway, ready to burst in. The scent of flowers became even stronger. I turned to the left, sat for a minute, and then to the right, trying not to move the old mattress too much and disturb my friend.
I thought of how I said goodbye to my father and the last look of my room back home and quietly started to cry.
“What have I done?” I said to myself. “Why did I leave the comfort of my own bed, my father?” I tightened my grip on the covers so hard I could feel the pain of my fingers on my palm.
Quietly, I brushed my tears away so my friend didn't notice and tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. Like a dark cloud over my head, I was overcome by the feeling of fatigue, heartbreak, and discomfort. In the end, I did fall asleep. But that cloud followed me for days on, and twenty years later, I still can’t find a cure for it.
How was your first night in a different country? What did you experience?
As my first novel “Everything Worth Counting” is about the journey of a mother and a son, Eva and Alex, I thought I’d share a small glimpse from the third part, when Alex wakes up not in the refugee camp in Italy but in Barcelona.
"I went to the balcony door, but there was nothing to see other than branches of a tree on the verge of flowering, concealing the view of the next house’s courtyard. My stomach rumbled with hunger, or perhaps uncertainty. I thought of waking my mother so she could go and ask for some food from the kitchen, but the image of the woman who had opened the door for us the previous night came to my mind…"
And this is another paragraph from a book you may know – “Brooklyn” by Colm Tóibín, about an Irish girl migrating to America.
"All this came to her like a terrible weight and she felt for a second that she was going to cry. It was as though an ache in her chest was trying to force tears down her cheeks despite her enormous effort to keep them back. …She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family;"
