SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Lia is an 8-year-old girl who sees and craves bright, vibrant colors, even in the grim landscape of Romania in 1989, during the rule of the communist autocrat Nicolae Ceausescu. There's a drawing contest at her school, the promise of a new red bicycle. And so Lia takes up her chalk.
OANA ARISTIDE: (Reading) She's going to draw a city, a dream city, bright and colorful with cheerful little houses and a smiling sun. The city has parrots instead of pigeons and a big circus tent. Mother kept telling her to put the circus tent in the background, not right at the front, but Mother doesn't understand it's meant to be a paradise. Lia doesn't even know when the time passes. She just hears the loud whistle again and realizes she has to put down the chalk. She stands up and looks at the drawing. It's like magic happened somehow, and the city that only lived inside her head is now here on the ground. Everyone can see it. She turns around, look, look, but all the children are too busy looking at their own drawings. She wants to lie down and hug her cement square.
SIMON: "Astronaut!" - with an exclamation point - is the title of Oana Aristide's new novel, which is all at once a family drama, a who-done-it, a workplace comedy and a-coming-of-age story as the Iron Curtain begins to crumble all over Eastern Europe. Oana Aristide spent her childhood in Transylvania and now lives in Sweden. She joins us from Stockholm. Thanks so much for being with us.
ARISTIDE: Thank you very much for having me, Scott.
SIMON: What does Lia's love of color mean in her life?
ARISTIDE: She loves colors, but her world is so drained of it. And she observes that there is color in the world, but there seems to be a conspiracy against it. She sees that some of her classmates, who have relatives in West Germany, they receive gifts that are very colorful, but there's nothing like that in her shops, in her city, in her house, and she rebels against it.
SIMON: She opens the book by getting into trouble, doesn't she?
ARISTIDE: She does, yes. She wants to buy a present for her mother. Without asking her parents, she uses foreign currency that they have hidden away. And, yeah, that turns into a very serious situation for her parents.
SIMON: Yeah. Foreign currency banned under Ceausescu. A series of murders is going on, and that's how we meet Detective Constantin. Is it difficult to be an honest police officer in Romania, 1989?
ARISTIDE: I'm sure it was. If a totalitarian regime would only try to oppress you to make you - to obey to obtain the fruits of your labor or to turn people into soldiers, it would just be frightening. But they also want people to pretend. Ceausescu wanted us to pretend that we are well fed, that we are happy, when, in fact, we were hungry. We were freezing in winter, and we were sick of the sight of him. And this demand that you pretend that the regime is OK, that the things they're demanding of you are acceptable, this is what makes it impossible to be honest. You have to constantly simulate.
SIMON: That was your childhood?
ARISTIDE: As a child, I didn't have the same problems that an adult would run into, but I saw how the adults behaved, and it was strange to observe. I compared it to - you know, to watching grownups doing some kind of crazy dance that you can't make sense of. And for a child, it can appear funny. But if you're a grownup who has to lie in order to survive and not to end up in prison, then it's not a crazy dance. It's a necessity.
SIMON: Constantin tells fabulous stories to his son. Are they for his enjoyment too?
ARISTIDE: I think what Constantin is trying to do is these stories, these fables, they're like a different language between him and his son, so he can speak to him about power, about courage, dictatorship, without using any words that might get his child in trouble. There was always this danger that a child would go to school and repeat his father's opinions, and then he would have informed on the whole family. If he repeats a fable, then he's just repeated a fable. So, you know, it's an old technology. If truth is illegal, it goes undercover as a story.
SIMON: To get back to the murder, how does a bear come under suspicion?
ARISTIDE: Well, one of the lies that the regime liked to spread was that there's no crime in Romania. All the citizens are good citizen. No one has any reason to commit crimes, so they cannot accept that they have a serial killer on their hands. And they come up with this ingenious way of still warning the population that something dangerous is going on, but without actually admitting that they have a criminal.
SIMON: So they say watch out for a bear?
ARISTIDE: They say watch out for a bear, yes.
SIMON: An American bear, in fact, right?
ARISTIDE: We don't know. It's possible that it's a grizzly. Yes.
SIMON: You know, in the United States, we would refer to coworkers who joke with each other all the time in a book or a movie or TV show - we'd call that a workplace comedy. And I love the jokes and the byplay between Constantin and his coworkers, including Titus, the coroner, and Vasile, his assistant. How did they make jokes in that world?
ARISTIDE: There was so much absurdity in the system itself, and I think it was like a release valve for people. They couldn't engage in politics, so they told jokes. Have you come across communist jokes?
SIMON: Well, I mean, there's the famous one about, you know, the man who was sent to the gulag because he came into the Kremlin and shouted Brezhnev as a fool, and he was sent to the gulag for 10 years - two for insulting Brezhnev, and eight for revealing a government secret.
ARISTIDE: OK (laughter). Yeah. Yes. There were lots of jokes, like there were jokes about accused. There were jokes about all the shortages we had about the power cuts. It was something that helped people make it through the day, and they probably felt that it is a form of resistance, even if they're only making jokes within the family or with close friends.
SIMON: Why does Lia insist on calling people in space astronauts and not cosmonauts?
ARISTIDE: Yes. There's a scene in the book in which Lia gets punished for writing astronaut, the capitalist spaceman, instead of cosmonaut, the Soviet spaceman. I think for her, it's a small gesture of defiance. She can probably feel that policing language and thought is worse. It's more humiliating than policing actions. She - she's a child. She doesn't have a political program, but she's saying in her 8-year-old's way, I'm not going to live inside this cage that you built for me.
SIMON: I don't want to give away the last line of your novel, but it stays with me. It is momentous.
ARISTIDE: Let me check it. The last line.
SIMON: It just get...
ARISTIDE: Ah, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
SIMON: You had to check it? It stays with me, but you had to check it (laughter)?
ARISTIDE: It's scary to read your own work once it's published because I can no longer do anything about it, so I have not looked at the book since it came out.
SIMON: Well, if this reader might say, don't change a thing.
ARISTIDE: Well, thank you very much. You're a very generous reader.
SIMON: Oana Aristide's new novel is "Astronaut!" Let's emphasize the exclamation point. Thank you so much for being with us.
ARISTIDE: Thank you very, very much. I'm really grateful that American readers want to visit this time and part of the world with me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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