HAPPENSTANCE

I grew up somewhere in the deep south of Romania, in a house where the absence of books was as unremarkable as the smell of barbecued meat lingering in the air, or gossiping one’s neighbor for sport. My parents treated books with the same suspicion reserved for anything that stretched beyond their narrow understanding of the world–an indulgence best left unexplored.

Summers were spent at my grandmother’s house in the countryside, a sort of default arrangement since no one quite knew what to do with me. She worked as a librarian in the village’s only library, a job she took not out of passion, but because my grandfather, then the village mayor, had arranged it for her. The arrangement was simple: show up, pass the hours idly, go home, and collect the paycheck at the end of the month. Easy.

My memories of those summers are hazy, but I vividly recall the oppressive afternoon heat that made everything in front of me seem to melt. I spent my days with my grandmother in the library, a relic of a building overshadowed by an even older elm tree. Her desk stood in the center of the room, surrounded by towering bookshelves that lined every wall, crammed full of dusty, alphabetized covers. Occasionally, someone would wander in, exchange a few pleasantries with my grandmother, then leave. Hours passed in quiet monotony until it was time to go home. Throughout all this time, I never touched a single book.

During the first ten years of my life, my preoccupations revolved almost entirely around dancing, the color pink, and fiercely guarding my hard-earned popularity as a girl who had never vacationed beyond our local area or dined at a restaurant. I worked hard to make everyone like me, want to be near me, obsess over me, seeking the validation I never received at home. My parents had made it clear from the start that I was unwanted–partly because I wasn’t a boy, but mostly because raising me cost money, and hoarding money was their sole obsession.

One summer, after returning to the city following a long, tedious stretch in the countryside, I was outside playing with the only neighbor my age. The heat was unbearable, so I asked if he’d like to come over to our apartment where I had a bunch of pirated computer games. He stared at me as if I’d just insulted him, then corrected my Romanian, mocking the rural inflection I had picked up from the villagers whose education ended in primary school. I was embarrassed, visibly so, but couldn’t let him get off lightly. Whatever lecture I gave him that day is lost on me, but I do remember the walk home afterwards, alone and humiliated.

Later that night, I stood in front of the mirror repeating the same sentence over and over, each time adjusting my accent, trying to make it sound less provincial, more like I belonged there. The harder I tried, the more foreign it felt on my tongue.

Throughout primary school and well into high school, my formal education was virtually non-existent. My mother lived in constant fear that I would fail math and be forced to repeat the year–a scenario that would mean more financial strain and an unspeakable shame for our family. So, reluctantly, she signed me up for private lessons with my school’s math teacher. In our town, it was a well-known fact that if you were not naturally gifted in a subject and wanted to pass, you had to visit the teacher’s home and pay for extra instruction.

I loathed math lessons with a passion that consumed me whole. It wasn’t the subject I found abhorrent; it was my teacher. She was short and stout, with choppy hair and eyes of a green so lifeless they seemed to suck the warmth out of the room. During private lessons at her equally menacing home, instead of teaching, she had us memorize pre-solved problems until we could recite them like poems. The next day in class, she would give us the same problem to solve, which we pretended to decipher on the blackboard with rehearsed confidence while she showered us with fake praise. I got a perfect grade of ten that day, my first ever. My parents were thrilled.

Most of my teachers didn’t like me very much, and those who didn’t actively dislike me pretended I didn’t exist. Whether you were liked by your teachers or not was heavily influenced by your parents’ occupation. At the beginning of every school year, we were given a piece of paper on which we had to write: our names, our parents’ names, their occupations. They never explained what this information was for, and we never asked. I always felt a pang of shame whenever that paper was passed around before reaching me. I knew what my parents did more or less, but I did not know the proper names for it.

When the paper reached me, I took some time to read through my classmates’ parents' jobs: Teacher. Nurse. Business Owner. Words I was familiar with and wish I could use too. I pondered over what terms I could write. I knew my mother worked for the town’s factory, but I wasn’t sure what it was that she did there exactly. On the very good days, she would bring home stolen clothes and be euphoric that she hadn’t been caught. Other days, she would return from work with red eyes, swollen from crying, and wouldn’t speak to us until the next morning. My father worked with cars, but he never talked about it. Whenever he was in the mood to talk and the alcohol hadn’t fully taken hold, he did not want to speak about work. In the end, I wrote down ‘seamstress’ and ‘mechanic,’ content with my choices.

It was only later that I began to question whether there was any real connection between our parents’ jobs and the way we were treated in school. Teachers never took any interest in my parents as they did with the parents of my classmates who were doctors or educators. Those of us with parents in less respectable professions–like vendors at the market or other mothers who worked alongside mine at the factory–were clearly at a disadvantage, but what was there to do about it?

I was twelve when I was first elected class president, although my grades were among the worst in our cohort. To counterbalance my academic shortcomings, I taught myself Spanish by obsessively watching telenovelas and spent countless hours perfecting dance routines to their soundtracks. I made my parents throw birthday parties just so I could perform in front of everyone, twirling around in whatever glittery dress my mother had sewn for me. I was relentless in my pursuit for attention, and well liked by my peers. Things were working out in my favor, for once.

The beatings started around that time, too. My parents, uneasy with the way I’d begun to draw attention, convinced themselves that I had fallen in with the wrong crowd. My mother became more watchful, always looking for the smallest infractions, seizing any excuse to lash out at me. Once, she slapped my face red after noticing my freshly plucked eyebrows, although she did not bother to tell me why something so trivial enraged her so much.

Whenever I did something she decided was unacceptable–a standard that constantly changed–she’d hit me as hard as she could, then lock me in my room for up to two weeks, depending on her disposition. I tried to make the best of it, and used the isolation as an opportunity to practice my Spanish, reenacting entire dialogues from TV in the mirror–tears and all. In a fit of melodramatic desperation but also because I’d had enough of the same four walls, I wrote a letter asking for my mother’s forgiveness for whatever I had done to wrong her–again–and left it on her nightstand while she slept. The next morning I found the letter in the trash, ripped into tiny pieces.

The sense of hostility that permeated my life during that period extended well beyond our home. A few older women in the neighborhood–either inspired by my mother’s animosity towards me or simply jealous of my youth, as old women in our town often were–started calling me a whore whenever they saw me. You’re a whore. W-H-O-R-E, they would enunciate, their voice dripping with disgust as I walked by. Being labeled a ‘whore’ was no surprise for any girl past the age of ten where I come from, especially once her body began to change. So I wasn’t particularly fazed by their words.

I put up with it for a while, but by the time high school started, the constant effort to camouflage my way through this environment had become exhausting. I grew weary of maintaining superficial relationships that took up so much of my time and led nowhere, and stopped pretending that what I was facing outside of school—where no one could see—didn’t matter. Between my mother’s increasingly harsh punishments and the neighborhood consensus that I was indeed a whore, I no longer felt worthy of the popularity I’d amassed among my peers. I began to question why I ever thought I deserved more in the first place.

Hear an insult often enough, and you start to believe it too.

The first time I picked up a book was purely by happenstance. I was unwell but had to drag myself to school, where the only available seat was next to a girl I had never spoken to and had no desire to. While my classmates erupted in chaos–shouting, hurling objects around, and pushing the teacher on the brink of madness–she remained in serene isolation, her eyes fixed on the pages of whatever book she was reading. During breaks, when everyone else spilled into the schoolyard or scrambled over last-minute homework, she stood alone, reading. She consumed books with a peculiar speed, and talked to no one, ever. She was essentially the sheer incarnation of everything I was determined not to be.

She asked if I’d ever read Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, the book she had just finished that day. I shook my head no. You should, she smiled genuinely. I think you’ll like it, here, and pushed the book onto me gently. I wasn’t sure what drove her to do that, given that she’d obviously never seen me read. It seemed to be her way of engaging in conversation, so I took the book and thanked her with a politeness that barely masked my indifference, hoping that would be the end of it. I went home and, in a fit of sullen but mild rebelion, tossed the book into a corner of my room, willing myself to forget its existence.

Later, as the evening dragged on into an inevitable boredom, curiosity got the better of me. Alone in my room, I retrieved the book, allowing my eyes to wander over the first few sentences. The font was large and the page airy; inviting in a way that seemed almost suspicious. I didn’t trust the ease of it, and I didn’t trust myself with the book at all, as if simply holding it contradicted everything I had come to know about myself. So I read on slowly, cautiously, ready to abandon it at the first sign of disinterest.

Reading felt strange, disorienting, but not necessarily in a bad way. The room was quiet, but my thoughts started picking up speed, racing alongside the narrative, and it was exciting. The book told of a couple of Iranian women who met weekly at the author’s house to discuss works of Western literature that meant something to them in ways I couldn’t yet understand. There were long, dense passages on the role of literature, freedom, and the possibility of escaping, living differently. It hadn’t occurred to me by that point that I, too, might need escaping, or that there was anything to escape towards.

I don’t remember if I slept that night. By morning, my eyes were raw, my vision blurred. But somewhere in that haze, there was something new; a kind of alertness I hadn’t felt before. The world outside felt the same as it had the night before–stagnant, unchanging. But something inside me had shifted, just enough to notice. Maybe nothing would change. Or maybe everything already had.

Iulia Ivana is a writer based in the Netherlands. She works in academic publishing by day and spends whatever time she has left trying to write. Her work has appeared in The Adirondack Review and RevUU magazine.