Crossing Over

by Diana Renner

Runner-up in the 2023 Ada Cambridge Biographical Prose Prize.

I grew up at the edge of the world. On the map, Romania was bordered to the West by

‘the West’. That’s what everyone called it. Not the wild, wild West, although it could

have well been that, for all that we knew. A Terra Incognita for most Romanians, a

foreign, tempting land of forbidden riches, the subject of endless fascination, for most

people never to be seen, discovered or experienced, except for in smuggled movies

and books.

The draw of the West was strong, although the love often felt unrequited, as if we were

out of sight, forgotten. In Romania, we were caught in purgatory, in no-man’s land,

simultaneously excluded and entrapped. Constantly squinting, one eye was drawn to

the West, while the other assessed the dangers posed by the spectre of the Soviet

Union to the East. Across the border, distancing us from the West, stood Hungary,

Poland and Czechoslovakia. But, in my mind’s eye, these countries were

inconsequential. They were small obstacles to skip over on paper, my fingers able to

trace a short line across to Vienna. In reality, though, they presented an almost

insurmountable barrier.

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. We hid behind it like naughty kids. Often scolded by

President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena – the self-styled father and mother of

the people – we were warned of the dangers surrounding us on all sides. No, you can’t

go outside. You can’t play with the next-door neighbour’s kids. You can’t talk to them.

Or receive messages. Our nation was closed, and we were locked in its prison, inside

the tragedy of totalitarian Communism, disconnected from both our roots and our

dreams. In exile already. Forever.

The border surrounding the country seemed to keep going. I learned to trace it and

retrace it from memory, an exercise of Communist patriotic indoctrination for primary

school kids. I would practice drawing it over and over again, careful not to go over the line,

more interested in the white space on the page outside, than what lay inside. The

rest of the world started just beyond.

I grew up in a world made of cracks and edges.

The ground shook when I was six years old. Safe in my dad’s arms, taking shelter in my

bedroom’s doorway, I rocked with the house back and forth, up and down, riding the

wave of an earthquake that measured 7.7 on the Richter scale. I was terrified the house

would collapse, but it stood, and we survived. From then on, I started seeing cracks

everywhere. A broken plate, weeds growing out of crevices in the garden rocks,

potholes in the road, the big gap in the neighbour’s unrepaired wall, the long fissure

along the corridor at school, furrows in a field. Everything was cracked or in a crack.

Fractures in the Earth’s crust. Maybe we were going to fall through? Or hot magma

would surge upwards and fill the gaps? I kept a vigilant eye.

Later, in my teens, different cracks became visible. There were social and political

fractures in the dominant, oppressive paradigm. Openings of resistance, revealing

hidden stories and possibilities. The cracks became bigger over time, until the

foundations crumbled and the whole system collapsed.

But it all ended before then.

***

It was a night like any other night, except for being my last at home. I lay awake until it

was time to get up. We dressed quietly in the dark, then locked the house and got into

the car. This had been packed in secret in the garage. Dad started the engine and

pulled out, only turning on the lights once we had rounded the corner. We drove in

silence through the night. Just before we reached the border crossing with Hungary on

the Romanian side, we agreed that my brother and I would pretend to be asleep in the

back of the car, so that we could not be interrogated. We lay down next to each other

and closed our eyes. The engine stopped and my parents got out.

Muffled voices, then steps approaching. I held my breath as torchlight briefly illuminated

our still bodies, anxious that the guards would see my panicked breathing. The boot

opened and they searched our bags. It seemed to take forever.

Finally, the bags were returned to the boot, the engine started and we were rolling

again. We remained supine as we passed the border post and the barrier lifted, then I

knew that we were safe when my parents let out an almost inaudible sigh of relief. We’d

made it! Then, a familiar sensation of heat going up my neck, mixed with a hollow sense

of dread in my stomach, quickly took over. You’ve gone over the line! You’re outside!

Outside! I could almost hear the admonishing voice of my geography teacher. We were

not supposed to be here, we were trespassing. Anything could have happened at that

moment. The border could have come alive, the line turning into a lasso to grab us and

throw us back to the other side. Nothing would have surprised me.

The car stopped by the side of the road. We were enveloped in darkness, the faint lights

of the border checkpoint still visible in the rear window. My father turned to us and in a

solemn voice declared: We’re not going back. My brother burst into tears. We are

luckier than others, who risked their lives swimming across the Danube. Many have

drowned, my mother explained, trying to sound reassuring.

I felt a strange mixture of relief and sadness, my secret disintegrating. My-self

disintegrating.

***

We started moving again, further and further away from the world we used to belong to.

I leant my head against the foggy window, looking out to the landscape gradually

emerging in the morning haze. The sense of trespass lingered, but it was a different

kind of sensation now. The border had trespassed against us, rendering us refugees at

the moment of crossing. Once crossed, there was no return.

We passed fields of clover, some sheep, a dam, a paddock of horses... From the

outside, the road looked just like any other road, and we looked just like any other family

on holiday. The story unfolding on the inside was a different one, yet to be discovered.

***

29 June 1987. Austria, Traiskirchen. A processing centre for refugees from Eastern

Europe. Formerly an old imperial officers’ school, Hitler’s Youth camp, and Soviet

barracks. Another threshold to cross.

We are being processed with other displaced, unwanted, subversive and potentially

dangerous refugees from Eastern Europe, selecting those elements deserving of

asylum and repatriating the others.

We’ve made it to the West, but freedom is not yet available. No way out, no way back,

no way forward. It is ironic that imprisonment is our only path to freedom, the only way

to be recognised as political refugees and granted asylum.

The guards show us to a waiting room, locking the doors behind us. They take our

passports, bags, then fingerprints. A Romanian interpreter delivers a tired set of

instructions in a monotonous tone. Who knows how many times he’s had to convey the

same message? As we are seeking asylum in Austria, he explains, we will be held here,

in detention, until our identities are checked, statements taken, and application

processed. Do not ask how long it will take, he quickly adds.

Our room is on the second floor, at the end of a long corridor, just enough space for four

bunk beds and a small table. At dinner, we join the queue twisting down the stairs to the

canteen on the ground floor. We follow whatever everyone is doing, in a daze.

Hundreds of people share four bathrooms. I shower with dad keeping watch at the door.

The water is lukewarm. Four others in our bedroom. I can’t sleep. A woman is crying.

***

We wait. Our sense of personal rhythm is gone, our days entirely regulated, passing

mainly in performing simple, repetitive functions: eat, sleep, wash, sit on the bed, talk,

look out the window, eat, sleep, wash, sit on the bed, talk...

I know this waiting, this feeling of being suspended in time and space. Minutes feel like

hours and hours become months in a warped flow of time and heightened attention.

When you’re waiting in a queue which doesn’t seem to move, you need to forget about

yourself, let go of expectations, put away your anxious thoughts. Step outside of time to

be fully present to the unfolding now.

We are never alone, there is no privacy. The corridor becomes our social and recreation

place, a space bound by stories of loss, hopes, dreams and fears. We mix with others,

young, old, tired, talkative, strangers drawn together into a kind of tacit understanding of

what it means to be here.

The medical examination is thorough. We all have blood tests. Body weight and height,

check; X-rays, check; blood pressure, check; eyesight, check. Can I see the small

letters? Yes. I can see things that are far away but struggle to see things close up. I

hate to see my parents suffering. Their vulnerability makes me dizzy, like looking

through someone’s prescription glasses.

We start each day expectantly waiting for news of our status and end each day

shattered by disappointment when it doesn’t come. Days and nights, an eternity to live

through. We have no idea if our application is even being processed, let alone the

likelihood of success. A heavy feeling descends on us with the realisation that our lives,

our futures, are at the disposal of others.

Time is no longer our own.

***

7 July 1987. Our last day. Squeezed out like Blutwurst meat at the other end of a

harrowing process of interviews, fingerprinting, police checking, more interviews, form

filling and more waiting, we emerge in the sun filled courtyard, blinking at our freedom.

Our bags miraculously reappear. We wait with the others for the bus to pick us up and

take us somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. Out, but still in. Inside-out.

We are moving. Freeway, trees, lots of trees. One town, no, we are not stopping. Next

town, the next and the next. A lake framed by mountains. Winding streets. A small

hostel. We get out and put our bags down.

***

Over the next thirteen months, there are times when tectonic plates come into contact,

grinding side by side, sometimes violently against each other. Huge amounts of energy

are released. I live the pressures and stresses to my core.

German every day, on the street, at school, on TV. I have to s t r a i n r e a l l y

h a r d t o h e a r.

We hang the washing in our bedroom. There is not much room to move around.

Cabbage and sausages feature regularly on the menu. It’s either that or baby

food.

Miami Vice on Mondays. The show makes the start of the week more bearable.

At night, we hear shouting and screaming from the Hungarian couple next door.

Her eye is black in the morning.

Other times, the continental plates diverge and pull apart, developing low valleys for

rivers to flow into and create long lakes. I am flowing in a narrow rift.

I run obsessively, every night. I love running in the snow.

Sundays, we walk around town. There is something reassuring about being

tourists for a day.

I borrow a pair of ice skates. I hold my balance, just, as I glide, awkwardly, on the

ice. The rink looks like it’s come straight out of a fairy tale.

***

I have come to the limits of who I am, of what I know and what I imagine myself capable

of. I have lost all my perceptions of what it’s like to be a student. Wie bitte? I have to ask

repeatedly what’s going on. I become embarrassed. I pretend not to notice the

unanswered questions, side glances, rolled eyes and awkward pauses. In my attempt at

understanding and being understood, I bump into cold, sharp edges everywhere. I

bruise easily. Over time, the wounds form a scab, like a crust that gradually hardens

around me, protecting me. Imprisoning me.

I am a nobody in class. Then, one day, proud of myself, I pluck up the courage to

approach my history teacher. It’s the first time I’ve addressed her. “Entschuldigung, ich

habe eine frage...” I pause for a moment, before I ask my question, waiting for her to

acknowledge me. She turns around, looks straight through me, then walks away.

I have been erased. I do not exist.

***

On my seventeenth birthday, I take shelter in my small room. I plan to watch TV alone

and feel sorry for myself. Until a well-meaning friend of my parents knocks excitedly on

my door, insisting that she takes me out. I have no choice but to change out of my

pyjamas and celebrate with pizza. Making small talk with a forty-something, pretending I

am having fun, only exacerbates my loneliness. I am touched by her warmth and

generosity and hate myself even more.

“Do you have any hobbies? What movies do you like? Are you reading any good

books?”

She is running out of questions. I am running out. It’s easier to describe myself in terms

of who I’m not, what I’m not. I’m clearer on what lies outside the walls, less on what’s

inside. It’s time for my gift. A framed old map of Gmunden. We’ve already mapped the

streets with our feet over the past ten months on our weekly walks, so I recognise the

lines in the etching.

“This will remind you of your stay here. When you get to Australia,” she adds. If we get

to Australia, I think.

Every day we wait for the mail to arrive. I hold my breath as I run out to the mailbox.

Another day crossed in the calendar, another eternity to live through. I get used to

holding my breath. I get really good at it. Until I forget what it’s like to feel light and

spacious and free. The pressure in my chest becomes a constant reminder of our

homelessness.

Did you know that Italy’s border is changing and moving, as the glaciers along it melt?

Borders move. We move too, even if it feels like we are frozen in place.

***

A hut in a dusty valley. It hasn’t rained for months. Maybe years. The old

woman’s face is cracked, her skin dry. She sighs and adjusts the scarf on her

head. The air is still and heavy with waiting.

A drop falls in slow motion from the sky through a hole in the roof. She looks up

and opens her palm gracefully, capturing the next drop, and the next. Until a

small puddle fills the cupped hand.

She dips the first three fingers of the right hand into the water and slowly makes

the Sign of the Cross on herself.

From the well of Romanian folklore, the dream comes for me. It comes from memories

long forgotten and stories I can barely find words for.

There is a whoosh and a flutter, and a gentle breeze sweeps through the room. Then I

see her. The angel at the foot of my bed, flowing robes with wide, loose sleeves and all.

No halo or wings, but an angel, nonetheless. She looks straight at me, as if her

presence is the most natural thing in the world. I suddenly become aware of the ceiling

and the sky above. I hold my breath until I can no longer. I lay still until the morning light

breaks through the curtains and a pigeon sings from the tree across the road.

She is still there, immobile, peaceful. The initial terror of her presence leaves my body

until there is nothing but empty space. Something within me is being pulled under...

“Look into my eyes,” she says.

Crumbling tombstones, carved altar screens and wooden crosses covered in

inscriptions.

Large wooden buckets full of water placed before the threshold.

Early crocuses rising through the melting snow.

Oxen-drawn carts on narrow, winding roads.

Shepherds leaning on their staffs, both hands under the chin, claiming the

mountaintop.

Women sitting around spinning silver yarn, weaving, gossiping.

Monastery walls covered in frescoes; the colours almost unspoilt.

Solemn saints in silver-framed icons.

Girls walking with overflowing pitchers on their heads, drops splashing on their

faces.

“I don’t know where the edges are and how much space I have to fill,” I say.

“Keep going,” she says.

The dream leaves the faintest of trails, like the whiff of burning fir resin in the Orthodox

liturgy, lingering long after the censing had been done.

***

Miraculously, that morning, a letter arrives. The sender’s address, the Australian

Embassy in Vienna, gives it away. Our fate, inside. We gather in my parents’ tiny

bedroom, surrounded by washing hanging out to dry. The windows are wide open and

the curtains flutter in the fresh spring breeze.

It all unfolds silently, in slow motion.

Mum sits on the bed.

My brother closes the door.

Dad picks up a sharp knife he uses to cut cheese and apples and slices the envelope

carefully at the top.

He pulls out a single sheet of paper folded in three.

He opens it and hands it to me.

I lean against the windowsill.

My eyes take time to focus on the words.

I read and re-read the three paragraphs written in English.

My brother groans exasperatedly.

I look up then collapse on the bed, my legs liquid.

“Yes!”

This time, we are ready for the crossing.