The Prince's Boy (13 page)

My lover assured me of his faithfulness and I believed him. Our right hands were either happily or regretfully employed: his in rue de Dunkerque, mine in the ostentatiously elegant Carmen Sylva 4. We were united, in our special way, before the anticipated reunion that would see us entwined for ever, as we envisaged hopefully.

What had I to report to R
ã
zvan? I began with my Cousin Eduard’s return to Bucharest and his new-found contempt for Jewish bankers, politicians and businessmen. I recorded my dismay on hearing him express these thoughtless, hitherto uncharacteristic opinions, with which my father appeared to concur. In that first letter to my beloved after our tearful separation, I commented also on Cezar Grigorescu’s proud description of his son as a ‘confirmed bachelor’ intent on breaking women’s hearts. I did not say, yet, that I had made a confession to Cezar and Eduard of my love for R
ã
zvan Popescu.

I retrieved the photograph of the prince’s boy from its hiding place and put it on my bedside table. There was no cause for secrecy now.

‘You should be grateful to your wicked stepmother, Dinu.’

‘Why is that, Amalia?’

‘Where must I begin? When you were foolish enough or courageous enough – let’s say foolishly courageous – to tell the truth to Cezar and that oily man Eduard Vasiliu about your friendship with the notorious Popescu, your father was incensed. He was spitting his rage at me for an eternity-and-a-half before I contrived to calm him down.’

We were taking breakfast together, relishing the delicately bitter taste of Dundee marmalade which she had purchased at Dragomir, the city’s most fashionable grocery store. I was always reminded of Dragomir when I shopped, not too often, at Fauchon in Paris. In both culinary palaces you could buy smoked fish and caviar and teas from India and the Orient and game preserved in its own aspic. Dragomir disappeared when Romania displayed its talent for farcical brutality for a shameful decade or more, but Fauchon survives, in a liberated Paris.

‘It was your caring Amalia, my sweet, who chanced upon the “confirmed bachelor” cliché when Cezar’s anger was at its immoderate height. “Spread the news abroad,” I said to him, “that your beautiful son is intent on being a Don Juan, a philanderer – for the time being, anyway. Tell everyone that your precious only son is cast in the Byronic mould.” My darling boy, by rescuing you from Cezar’s wrath, I fear I have created greater havoc for you. You will be hunted and hounded by a thousand frustrated Dianas whose husbands bore them to near-extinction in the bedroom. Be warned, Dinu, of the sexual dangers ahead.’

Was it possible for me to love Elena, my devout mother, as well as this woman who was in every way her opposite? I was beginning to think it was. Even if I had hated Amalia, which I was tempted to when I was introduced to her with the terrible news that I was to be her stepson, I could still enjoy her worldly company. Unlike Elena, she did not expect goodness to be prevalent in human affairs. Amalia used the word ‘wicked’ almost as a term of endearment. Whenever she called me a ‘wicked boy’ I knew she was complimenting me on what she described as a ‘delicious misdemeanour’. My holiday in Eforie, the reason for which was at first a secret from my father, was a misdemeanour she found especially appetizing.

‘Break all the laws and commandments you can,’ she had advised me on the night before I set off for Constan
þ
a. ‘May you and the prince’s boy have the naughtiest of naughty holidays.’

Eduard’s remarks at the dining table that summer evening in 1932 offered a relatively mild foretaste of the talk that could be heard in restaurants and bars and in certain departments at the university for the remainder of the decade and beyond. It began in a muted, even embarrassed, fashion, with whispers and innuendo, before it prospered into open, unapologetic virulence. Its subject was the Jew and the nature of his Jewishness, which meant the amassing of vast sums of money and the destruction of the Christian faith.

On the first of February 1934 I attended the belated Romanian premiere of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
. We sat in splendour in one of the larger boxes at the opera house – my father and stepmother, Elisabeta and the poet George V
ã
duva, with whom she was demonstrably infatuated, and Eduard Vasiliu and his new wife, Anca. The performance commenced at eight, I recall, and as I listened to the Prelude I realized that this was a work I might be enamoured of for ever. It was sung in Romanian, so there were occasions when the words and the music sounded almost estranged from each other. Tristan was sung by the divinely named Nicu Apostolescu and Isolde by Mimi Nestorescu, who shrieked on the highest notes. I was transported, even so.

We drank champagne throughout the evening, served by the sommelier from the restaurant Cap
º
a. In the first interval, my father commented on the stupidity of the plot, while Amalia complained about the drabness of the costumes.

‘There really are no clothes to speak of in Wagner. Those shifts may conceal an excess of flesh but they are not, definitely not, a pleasure to look at for hours on end. And why should the men be dressed in grey?’

‘I cannot answer that question, Amalia. Perhaps it is a tradition.’

‘We never have this problem with Mozart and Puccini. They are both so colourful. And so is the enchanting Franz Lehár,’ she added, winking at me. ‘I have a soft spot for Lehár.’

I knew why. For three happy months in 1931, Amalia had been the mistress of Rudolf Peterson, who was born Rudi Petrescu, the great tenor who specialized in operetta. She would have left Cezar for him, but he was the confirmed bachelor I was merely pretending to be.

In the second interval, when Eduard and Anca had woken up, Amalia – studying the distinguished audience with the aid of her lorgnette – remarked suddenly that there were two strange men at the back of the dress circle.

‘They are not wearing black ties like everyone else. They have come in green shirts. Why were they allowed to enter the auditorium?’

Perhaps that was the first appearance in public of the green-shirted men who would blight our nation. In retrospect, their choice of music was prescient, since it was revealed some years later that
Tristan und Isolde
held a high place in Adolf Hitler’s musical pantheon.

It was while I was listening to Nestorescu struggling with the
Liebestod
that the thought came to me that R
ã
zvan and I, without the encouragement of a love potion, were in some way doomed. I shrugged it off as a romantic fantasy, this idea of our being united in fervent sex and even more fervent dying. Such extremes of feeling were unnatural, I reasoned, and morbid. It was as absurd as it was repellent, yet it stayed with me, like a mental leech, for days.

Those green shirts, so incongruous in that dinner-jacketed, black-tied throng, were to become familiar in our unhappy country a year later. They signalled membership of the Iron Guard, a political party led by a fanatic named Codreanu, who had been inspired by St Michael, no less, to protect and preserve the purity of the Romanian people. Purity? What purity? The Romans conquered and occupied Dacia, and then the Greeks, the Turks, the Slavs, the Hungarians and the Germans occupied our land, planting their semen wherever they desired. Such was, and is, our purity.

One evening, in April, I came home from the university to be greeted in the hallway by Denisa, who informed me that a French gentleman by the name of Honoré had telephoned.

‘Did he leave a message?’

‘Only that he would try calling you again.’

I lifted the receiver three times and heard the voices of the family doctor, saying that he would visit Doamna Grigorescu on Friday at noon when his surgery was closed; the poet V
ã
duva, who wished to speak to Elisabeta; and the apprentice lawyer who had witnessed my reluctant parting from R
ã
zvan. He had news for my father, in the form of fresh evidence, concerning the case they were involved in at present. I passed the cringing Judas on to his master.

The fourth, and last, call came at around midnight, when I began to wonder if Honoré had abandoned the idea of phoning me.

It was he. It was Honoré. He was coming to Bucharest. He had booked a room in a modest hotel on a quiet street where we would be safe from prying gossips. The pretend father was more desperate than ever to embrace his pretend son. We would be together very, very soon.

The Hotel Minerva was unprepossessing. You could walk past it, thinking it was just another house on a street where all the houses looked identical. The room R
ã
zvan had been allotted was so small as to be minute. The walls were thin. We conducted our loving navigations with a Trappist monk’s disdain for noise. Our every sigh had to be measured. We didn’t cry out in ecstasy. We didn’t even speak.

We ate, drank and talked in a nearby taverna. A trust fund Prince E had set up for him when he was still taking lessons from Alin D
ã
nescu had recently matured and he was now a little bit richer.

‘Come and live with me, Dinicu, before I have to walk with the aid of a stick.’

‘That day is in the distant future.’

‘Is it? I shall be fifty in 1939. The years are running away from us. I want to spend at least some of them with you. Come back with me, dearest.’

‘I wish I could,’ I said, feebly. ‘I will come to you, R
ã
zv
ã
nel, I promise, as soon as I can.’

‘And when, precisely, is that?’

‘It is impossible to be precise. In a few months. Yes, in a few months. I have commitments at the university to honour. I will come to you. I will make sure that our bed linen smells again of lavender.’

He did not believe me and, at that exact moment, I did not believe myself either. I think I detected hatred in his eyes.

‘I have enough money for both of us to live well.’

‘I have to work, R
ã
zv
ã
nel. It is a compulsion. My dream of being a poet or novelist was abandoned, cast aside, when I returned to Bucharest after our wonderful summer. I am a serious scholar, with students dependent upon my hard-earned knowledge. Oh, I am sounding so pompous.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Then I apologize.’

‘So you should.’

Seeing him there, so overcome with what I knew to be sorrow, I was suddenly reckless.

‘I will come to Paris next year. I will clear my desk, as the Americans say. I promise you. I really and truly and most sincerely promise you.’

‘You had better.’

‘I should like to go back with you to your cell. I feel a strong need for silent communion.’

I left Bucharest, and Romania, for ever in October 1935. I have to thank history for reuniting me with R
ã
zvan – the principal irony in this narrative – because the city of my birth had become insufferable to me. I felt that I was being invited to perform in a deadly farce, in which decent citizens, the very pillars of society, were transformed into apologists for bigotry and mindless venom. My father was one such citizen, as was my devious, and deviously charming, Cousin Eduard. Cezar Grigorescu, I came to understand, was an astute practitioner of the art of grovelling to those in power, regardless of their ideals and beliefs. Their squalid views were his, too. It suddenly seemed as if the resolutely frivolous Amalia was one of the few sane people in Bucharest society.

I had been contributing articles and reviews to the moderately liberal magazine
Cuvântul
for three years. I was a respected name in literary circles because of the long essays I had written on Proust (which contained a glancing reference to Albert Le Cuziat) and Balzac and Dostoevsky (in French translation) and many Romanian writers, including the young George V
ã
duva, whose imagist poetry, uncontaminated by politics, excited and moved me.

But now, in the autumn of 1935,
Cuvântul
had forsaken whatever liberal convictions it had once possessed. Its most distinguished reviewer, the essayist, playwright and novelist Mihail Sebastian, whose real name was Iosif Hechter, suffered the humiliation of having his pieces rejected or censored to the point of travesty. He had been made aware that he was Jewish, when hitherto he had regarded himself – if he had ever regarded himself – as a member of the human race. The editor of
Cuvântul
no longer wanted his thoughts on books by Jewish writers, paintings by Jewish artists, music by Jewish composers.

I had made friends with a brilliant professor at the university, whose passion for Shakespeare and the English poets of the sixteenth century is expressed in two books now regarded as classics:
The Man Who Was Iago
and
Brightness Falling from the Air
. He was a gentle, modest soul, unconcerned with his physical appearance, whose love for the masterpieces of the Elizabethan age was manifested in his unexpectedly sonorous voice, which struck everyone who heard it as too deep and powerful for his skinny frame. He was the first academic to be insulted by the men sporting green shirts, who had painted, in red ink, the two words Dirty Jew on the door of his office. Ion refused to be disheartened. He had, at the age of fifty-eight, a ‘ripeness is all’ philosophy. He knew from diligent study of the dramatist he revered above all others, that men and women are unfathomable victims and slaves to circumstance. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s tyrant. He was, he reasoned, a dirty Jew to those who were drawn to the idea of dirtiness being an essential element of Jewishness, and if that was their opinion, considered or not, then so be it.