Reviews
Synopsis
It is Bucharest, 1950. The recent communist takeover and the vestiges of WWII make life difficult. In love since high school and now married, KOSTEA and CLARA BARDU await the birth of their child. They are both doctors. To bolster his career, Kostea joins the Communist Party. Patient, gentle and dedicated to her new family, Clara takes a job with regular hours in a medical lab. Despite her tense relationship with Kostea, Clara’s mother moves in to care for baby TODDY. Kostea’s Party affiliation and hard work pay off. He teaches at the School of Medicine, does advanced medical research, and represents the hospital at conferences in the Soviet Union. The greatest obstacle to his advancement is his unbridled temper. When a lover from his past seeks him out, he is tempted, but does not transgress.
Fifteen years later, dictator Ceaușescu has replaced the austerity of the fifties with a relative and temporary ease. Kostea buys his first car and attends prestigious medical conferences in Western Europe. Defecting is a constant temptation—especially when a French hospital offers him a position in their new urology department—but he can’t bring himself to leave his family behind the Iron Curtain. At the pinnacle of his career, adept at using his position and relationships, Kostea thinks there is nothing he cannot achieve in Romania. MAYA, a smart and beautiful graduate student attracts his attention and they begin an affair.
Kostea’s father dies at home under his care. At the hospital, a younger colleague is promoted to Chief Surgeon ahead of Kostea. Maya ends their relationship, and Kostea wrecks his car in a drunken rage. Clara discovers the affair. She stays in the marriage for Toddy’s sake, even as she questions her feelings for Kostea. Toddy finishes high school and falls in love with LYDIA, a young Jewish woman who emigrates with her family to Israel. After college, Toddy marries Lydia and decides to leave the country. Kostea is devastated. During a heated argument, he calls Toddy a coward and a liar, and accuses Lydia of manipulating and stealing his son. But the love for his son is stronger than his anger and he apologizes. He promises Toddy that together with Clara he will emigrate as well and settle wherever Toddy and Lydia find a home.
We are in the 1980s, and Kostea and Clara have defected to the United States. True to Kostea’s word, they live near Toddy and his family in Maryland—but, after failing the medical equivalency test three times, Kostea cannot practice medicine. Despondent, he feels like a failure. In America he is no longer the famous doctor, the man who can open all doors. Clara is diagnosed with bladder cancer, and Kostea, constantly second-guessing her doctors, cares for her through her operation and recovery. Once the cancer is in remission, and after the Romanian regime change of late 1989, they travel back to Bucharest to see their old friends. But in Romania they feel alienated and out of place and on the flight home Kostea tells Clara they are truly at home only in each other’s arms.
Clara’s cancer returns. For the first time in his life, Kostea does laundry, cleans and cooks. Clara declines quickly. The novel closes with Kostea, the doctor unable to help, sitting by her bedside and reading to her from a book of poetry, while she, his last patient, the love of his life, slips away from the rich and tumultuous life they led together.