Catalina Croitoru

Cătălina "Cat" Croitoru
Born April 20, 1974, in Ploiești, Romania. Seamstress.

Vâlcănești (1974–1989)

Cătălina Croitoru was born in a maternity ward in Ploiești and carried home to Vâlcănești, a hill village on the Cosmina River, an hour north by bus. Her family had been in the tailoring business since before they could remember, and her own life would be no different.

Her father Gheorghe rode the bus to refineries in Ploiești and came home smelling of crude oil and ţuică (plum liquor/brandy, popular in Romania). Her mother, Ioana, worked the collective farm by day and sewed for half the village on a pre-war 'Singer' treadle machine. It had belonged to Cat's grandmother, 'Mamaie Lidia' (Mamaie means grandma) or 'Bunica Lidia', who had it hidden with the rest of what little they had since 1944.

Cat grew up in the worst years of Ceaușescu's Romania, when the dictator was paying off foreign debt by selling everything the country made. Bread, oil and sugar came by ration card. The power was cut every evening. Cat learned to sew, read and cross the house by candlelight, or not at all. She stood in line before dawn for whatever the shops had, and once came home proud with a bag of chicken feet, which everyone called "adidași" (sneakers) because the rest of the chicken had been exported. She grew up small and underfed and ate whatever there was, developing an iron gut capable of digesting expired wartime rations.

Real coffee and Kent cigarettes were worth more than money. Television ran two hours a night, most of it about the Ceaușescus, and America existed only on bootleg videotapes and 'The Voice of America', an illegal radio station in the Party.

With her mother in the fields, Cat ran the house from the age of nine. She fed the hens and the pig, weeded the garden, and cooked for three generations out of almost nothing... polenta, sour soups, and cabbage rolls at Christmas. In winter, Mamaie told stories of 'strigoi', the "dead who would not stay in the ground", and what the village women did to keep them there. Every December, on Ignat, Cat held the bowl while her mother killed the pig; by fourteen she was butchering it herself. She knew what was inside a body, and she was not afraid of it, though Mamaie's stories put some fear into her heart.

At 13, Cat was sent with her class to attend "practică" at the state clothing factory in Ploiești. It was unpaid labor the Party called education. Ioana had taught Cat to sew before she could read, and the forewoman kept her. By fifteen she was splitting her time between the factory's high school and its production floor (mostly the floor) sewing export shirts she would never wear in unheated halls where the women worked in coats and fingerless gloves. The quota was read aloud every morning. Girls who panicked ruined seams, so Cat learned to keep her hands steady while the forewoman screamed. She never missed a shift and grew into a resilient, if not tired, woman.

In 1988, a neighbor whose children's school uniforms Cat had mended for years reported a joke Gheorghe told about Ceaușescu. The Securitate (state police) held him for three days. He never said what happened, and afterward he never talked about anything important unless the radio was turned up. Cat learned to listen for footsteps on the stairs and cars stopping outside. A week later, a man in a leather jacket sat across from her in the factory's personnel office and kindly asked what the women on her line talked about. Cat was fourteen. She pretended to be too stupid and awkward until he gave up. Why would any of these women speak with such a dull child? It was the most important lesson of her life. In front of the state, be small, be slow, and say nothing. Gheorghe drank harder after that, and Cat learned to cross the house without a sound when he was home.

In December 1989, at the age of 16 she watched the revolution on the neighbors' television. On Christmas Day the Ceaușescus were shot against a barracks wall. Ioana cried and crossed herself. Cat could not tell whether it was joy or fear.

After the Christmas Revolution (1990–2000)

Freedom did not feed anyone. The factory was sold, and the new owners sewed for Italian labels. They locked the doors during shifts and docked pay for trips to the toilet. The men in leather jackets came back in suits and bought what was left of the country. Uneducated villagers sold their shares to former state police and officers who knew their true worth. They were usually exchanged for booze or food. Firewood became rare in the densest cities.

In 1991, the new land law returned two hectares of collective farmland they'd taken from the family. There were potatoes, beans, plum trees, a cow, a pig, and forty hens. Cat worked the land before and after her shifts, taking care of farm animals and her drunken father. Eventually, Gheorghe put the family savings into 'Caritas', a pyramid scheme that promised to multiply their money eightfold. For a while it did. In 1994 it collapsed, and Gheorghe drank until he died in 1998.

Cat's fiancé went to Italy to pick tomatoes and stopped writing after the first winter. Everyone was leaving. Every year she mailed an entry to the American diversity visa lottery, and in 2000 a letter came from Williamsburg, Kentucky. It was the first time she'd read anything in English addressed to her. She was 26.

Ioana sewed $300 into the hem of her coat, packed her suitcase, and avoided tears until the bus pulled away for the airport.

Cincinnati (2000–2010)

Her plane landed in Kentucky since Cincinnati's airport was across the Ohio River. A second cousin, Roman, in Price Hill gave her a couch. Within a week she was hemming trousers in the back of a dry cleaners on Glenway Avenue, paid under the table at a rate no American would take. She learned English from customers and daytime television, and still reads it slowly when she has the time. She learned not to explain the intricacies of Dracula, nor the difference between Transylvania and Wallachia. The Americans only seemed to care for myth, not history. When people heard her name "Cătălina" with an accent, she quickly became "Cat".

She worked six days a week, rented a room with a hot plate, and sent money home every month. In 2004 Ioana died and Cat could not afford the flight to bury her. She wore black for forty days and lit candles at a Greek-Orthodox church across town. On Easter she dyed eggs red and had no one to crack them against. She refuses to sew or work on Ignat, though she lacked any pigs for the rituals. When the recession closed the dry cleaner's in 2009, she was cleaning houses in the suburbs for women who checked their jewelry after she left. 36, tired, and alone.

Judgement Day (2010)

When the news broke on August 25, Cat did what she had done as a child. She stood in line, bought rice, oil, salt, candles, and went home. Two nights later, on Monument Day, the power died, the phones went silent, half of Glenway Avenue burned, and the dead got up in the street. The National Guard turned Paul Brown Stadium into a safe zone, and Cat had no choice but to be forcefully evacuated.

They put her to work mending uniforms and stitching shrouds out of bedsheets. Every few days soldiers in masks walked the bleachers with thermometers, and the people with fevers went to a medical tent, never to return. A young guardsman named Pruitt brought her coffee and spent a week trying to say "mulțumesc" (thanks).

On September 9, the soldiers packed light and stopped looking anyone in the eye. Cat had grown up sensitive to noticing what the authorities refused to admit. When Pruitt brought her coffee that morning, he told her not to be there in the evening. An hour later she walked out past the loading docks with her coat and her mother's remaining tools. As far as she knows, no one saw her leave except Pruitt, the guard who let her out.

From atop Price Hill after sundown, she watched the stadium light up with gunfire. Then the planes came. Downtown went up in sheets of flame, and one by one the bridges fell into the river. In the morning the Marines came up the hill, clearing house by house. Cat lay in the crawlspace under her old building, the way Mamaie had hidden the Singer from the Russians, and heard them find the family next door. She disassociated as best she could, losing whatever faith in humanity she had left. Cat did not move until after midnight.

With the bridges down and the roads choked with 'strigoi', the river was the only option left. She went down the hill to a dock off River Road, where an armed man sat beside the only boat left. Cat waited in the brush for three hours, listening to his breathing slow, then untied the boat and drifted away without starting the motor.

For 9 days the Ohio carried her west. She siphoned gasoline from abandoned boats, slept tied to debris behind cover, and moved at night without a light, trusting eyes that had grown up in blackouts. She drifted past Louisville between fires on both shores. People waved to her. Some of them were alive, though Cat knew better than to stop. Below Paducah, a houseboat family told her a ship was coming up the Mississippi, still taking survivors. She waited on the levee at Cairo until the Path to Zenith appeared.

Cat was among the last refugees pulled aboard before Captain Erickson closed the ship. The hands that lifted her over the rail wore the same uniform as the men at the stadium. She still does not know whether Pruitt was one of them.

Now...

Cat is five foot one, thin, and greying early. Her skin is weathered by outdoor work, fingertips calloused by needles. Without her old glasses, everything past arm's length is a blur. She sleeps in a corridor on the Zenith with her shears inside her coat and mends for anyone with something to trade. A bowl of soup still lasts her the day, as it did at 'practică'. Being small means she doesn't need much to survive.

Around the guardsmen, Cat goes quiet and agreeable, the way she was around authorities in the old country. She's'never hit anyone in her life and doesn't mean to start now. Anyone she decides is family, she stands beside. She will cook, carry, keep watch and steady a shaking hand, and she will not leave them, likely needing them more than they need her.

She crosses herself three times before going on deck, calls the dead "strigoi", and swears in Romanian when she thinks no one understands. Superstitions and religion inform most of her choices. She is not afraid of hunger, cold, or the dark, having lived through all three. What frightens her is dying the way the babushkas in Vâlcănești feared most: far from home, without anyone to light a candle for her.

The Zenith carries Cat back up the river toward "Kentucky", the first American word she ever read. If the soldiers are right about Knox County, she hopes to find what Mamaie once left her. A garden, a few hens, a stove, and a door that locks from the inside. And a strong man couldn't hurt to keep around .. if he can be trusted.

Mamaie used to say, "Ce-i rupt, se coase." What is torn can be sewn. The world is torn, but Cat still has her needle.