A number of surprises awaited me when we arrived in Sofia in May 2002.
First, I learned that Marius’s visa situation was much more complicated than we had originally believed. It turned out that his J-1 visa was non-renewable, and he was required to spend two full years in Bulgaria before he could reapply for any kind of visa to enter the United States again, including a spousal visa. Second, Marius’s job teaching Tibetan at The University of Sofia paid about 250 leva per month, the equivalent of $125. And third, I was pregnant.
With these three pieces of information, the landscape of my visit to Bulgaria shifted. I had left home believing we would spend the summer in Eastern Europe, but it was now clear that we would be in Bulgaria for much longer than expected. He couldn’t leave for two years, minimum. Marius’s fears about being trapped in Bulgaria were realized. We were pinned.
Marius hadn’t known anything about the two-year home residency. He was shocked.
“But they must have told you about it when you got the visa,” I said. “It’s not something they would just skip over in the application process. It’s such a huge requirement.”
“They didn’t tell me any of this,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have accepted the visa if I’d known I was agreeing to a prison term in Bulgaria. There must be a mistake. I’m sure they’ll let me out of it if we go to the embassy and talk to them. You’re an American citizen, after all. They’ll take you seriously.”
Marius did some reading online and discovered that we could get around the J-1’s two-year requirement by asking for a waiver. “As an American citizen, you’ll have more pull with them than I will,”
he said, a strain of bitterness in his voice. “Especially now that you’re pregnant.”
He put together a dossier of information about his visa and we went down to the US embassy together, where we spoke to a visa counselor about my pregnancy and our impending marriage. Marius sat at my side, silent. He’d told me before we went in that it would look better if an American citizen did the talking.
“I’ve just found out that I’m pregnant,” I explained to the woman behind the desk. “And I’d like to have the baby in the States.”
She looked at my navy blue American passport. “But you’re free to go back,” she said. “You have no restrictions.”
Of course, I knew I could go home if I wanted, but the prospect of being pregnant and unemployed, with a two-year-old boy in my care, was daunting, to say the least. Yet equally daunting was the idea of staying in Sofia with Marius. I had no job. I had no money. I had a toddler and another child on the way. I couldn’t leave Marius. We were engaged. But, then, I didn’t know how I could stay, either.
“But the baby’s father is here,” I pointed out. “He has to stay in Bulgaria for two years. Am I supposed to go back alone?”
“You can always return here after the baby is born,” she said, sympathetically. “I’m afraid that is about all I can suggest.”
She went on to explain that the two-year homestay requirement was strict; Marius had agreed to it before he took the visa; and that we could apply for a waiver, but it was highly unlikely that it would work. “The only cases in which I’ve seen someone get past the J-1 home requirement is in cases of extreme illness, when there’s a verifiable need to be treated by doctors in the United States.”
We left the embassy, walked out past the concrete blockades and the armed guards, and sat on a bench.
“How could you be so wrong about this?” I asked him, still trying to get my mind around it all. One minute, we were going on vacation, the next we’re relocating to Bulgaria.
“But you know that this isn’t my fault, don’t you?” he asked. “If I’d known, I would have come to the States on a tourist visa, which would have let me travel for six months, or I would have applied for a DS-160 or a F-1 visa.”
How was it that Marius knew so much about visas? Suddenly, Marius was conversant in visa types and numbers and the requirements. He hadn’t known any of this back in Iowa City.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Marius, realizing that I was beginning to feel as trapped as he did.
“We’ll have to stay,” he said.
“Stay? How? Do you honestly believe we can survive on $125 a month from your teaching? And what about Adam? He needs to go to school in the fall. And I need to apply for jobs back home. I can’t spend two years here. This is totally crazy.”
“It’s fascist,” he said, growing petulant. “Your country pretends to be democratic, but look how they treat people? They shouldn’t be able to do this. It should be illegal.”
“But you did this,” I said. “You agreed to this requirement when you took your visa.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “They tricked me.”
I looked at him, afraid to say what I was thinking, afraid to acknowledge the feelings growing inside of me: suspicion, doubt, uncertainty. For the first time since we’d met, I weighed what he said against the reality of what I saw before my eyes. It did not match up.
“You believe me, don’t you?” he said, his eyes going puppy-dog soft.
“Of course,” I whispered, and maybe he understood that I didn’t quite believe him, because he took me by the shoulders, looked deep into my eyes and said. “Please don’t leave,” he pleaded. “Don’t go back without me. I hate it here. This is my worst nightmare. You’re the only thing that makes my life worth living. You’re my only connection to the future. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Seeing him in such distress was too much for me. “I’m not going to leave,” I said, pulling him close. “I came here for you. I’m not going to go when things get hard.”
“I love you,” he said. “As long as we’re together, we’ll be fine. Let me handle the money problem. I’ll take care of everything.”
I soon learned that, for Marius, this meant going to his parents for help. Yana, his beautiful, dark-haired mother, and Ivan, his brilliant father, were warm and generous people. I liked Marius’s family right away. They were all the things that my family wasn’t: Over-educated professionals who loved music and art and literature and travelling. They were cultured in a way that my family wasn’t, their dinner table conversations filled with highbrow references, passionate discussions of philosophy and art exhibits and books. Despite all of the hardships they’d experienced—they’d lived through communism and lost their entire savings during a bank crash in the nineties—they had a joy for living I admired.
Part of that joy revolved around taking care of their only son. He was the center of their universe, the thing that gave their lives meaning. When Marius was with his parents, I felt him glow with the same radiant confidence he had at the grand piano in Iowa City: He was the star performer putting on an excellent show, and his parents were always there, standing nearby, ready to applaud.
The night Marius told his mother that I was pregnant, her eyes filled with tears of anxiety. In her heavily accented but grammatically perfect English Yana said, “But think of how expensive this is going to be!”
Yana was right to worry. We didn’t have money for a child. My last check from the University of Iowa had gone to buying plane tickets to Bulgaria, and my savings was about to run out. Marius, it turned out, had nothing of his own. His parents had been supporting their only son for years, since he’d returned from India, giving him money to support his first wife and daughter, giving him an allowance and buying him a car. Through their love, money and time, they had helped Marius survive. Now, he was asking them to take care of his newest problem: me.
Marius and his parents had intense discussions about the pregnancy, hours of talking and talking about the situation in Bulgarian as I sat silently by his side. Marius seemed to be negotiating some kind of deal, although I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. In fact, I never understood any of their monster family conferences, with the screaming and tears and laughter, but throughout my time with Marius, I realized that this was how his family worked. When Marius had problems, they solved them together. They would rally around their son, take out their weapons, and fight whatever or whoever threatened his well-being. It was something I respected and admired even when, ten years later, the enemy was me.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Marius said, when the family conference was over. “My parents are going to help us.”
“They’re going to get us jobs?”
“No,” he said, his voice soft, as if he were talking to a child. “They understand that—with my visa and the baby coming—we’re stuck. They’re willing to help us through this.”
“Help us?”
“Financially.”
“And they’re okay with that?”
“They are now,” he said. “I just told them that we’re getting married.”
A few days later, Marius gave me a small black velvet box. Inside was a ring with an enormous stone glinting among folds of black velvet. I studied it, taking it in—the shape and cut of the stone, the setting, the band. I was no expert in antique rings, but I knew enough to see that this was not very old. It was too shiny, the metal too polished, the huge stone shining like a headlight.
“That’s your grandmother’s ring?”
“Hmm?” Marius said, raising an eyebrow, confused. “Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I asked my mom about it, and she reminded me that it had been stolen.
I’d completely forgotten. So my mom bought you this.”
I took the ring from the box and turned it, looking more closely. The fiery brilliance faded. The band was made of a gold-colored metal, perhaps gold-plated silver, and the stone was a large and sparkly cubic zirconia.
Two weeks later, we married in the basement of an immense concrete communist megalith in downtown Sofia, a windowless, lightless vault of the Justice of the Peace. Nobody was in attendance, nobody except his parents, who acted as witnesses, and, of course, the judge. There wasn’t money for a new dress, and so I wore a vintage purple shift from the sixties. I was six weeks pregnant, nauseous and homesick, but in the one picture I have from that day I am smiling, a bouquet of white lilies in my hands. I understood not one word of the ceremony. The sound of the language was harsh and chill and elegant, somehow cruel. I tried to catch the sounds, but it was all utterly incomprehensible. Indeed, when it was my turn to say, “I do” I stood silent, unaware that I was being asked a question at all. The judge asked again, and again I didn’t respond. Finally, I heard Marius whisper in my year: “Now you say Da.” I looked at him for a long moment, to capture the flush of happiness in his face, the brightness in his eyes. He loved me. I could see it. There was no reason to be so unsure. There was no reason to doubt him.
“Da,” I said, looking into Marius’s eyes as I spoke my first word of Bulgarian. “Da.”
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original art by Claire Stringer.
Rumpus original logo art by Max Winter.