The Romanian (16 page)

Some have described the doina, that melancholy, lilting song of extended rhythms, as a psychic landscape of spiral meetings with fate. It's an artful arabesque around the inevitability of death that is also the myth of Mioriţa, about the shepherd who transfigures death as a wedding with Nature. For me, entering Romania is like being in touch with that sensibility, like entering a trance. Our walk is an undulating consciousness, hovering and circulating around defeat. It's as if we were out of historical time and in that other
eternal time
conceived by Mircea Eliade. No matter that the cosmic spirit of Romulus may be dulled by prostitution, corrupted by fantasies of fast cars and cool sound systems. His macho fatalism, which I finally understand for the first time, instills everything with elegance. He notices everything at its most abject and shakes his head or clucks his tongue like an ancient for whom it's already happened, as if each detail represented the story of humankind.

I'm addicted to his curiously soothing discontent. Others would see a sulky hustler, walking with an overweight, wide-eyed tourist, but I see an endlessly rolling carpet beckoning us and all life toward extinction—which is why we make a smooth twosome, even without a place to live, as we stroll through Strada Lipscani in what is left of the old city, idling at a Romani stall to examine a bottle of cologne purporting to be Issey Miyake, though I notice the top is different, and Romulus grabs the icy, translucent bottle, wants to buy it, but I make him put it down, promising a real bottle when I return from Paris.

To the swelling, hypnotic tune of our own personal doina, we amble through the ruined patchwork of the old city, always enchanted by its discrepancies. We stop at the ruins of the Curtea Veche, the Old Court, the remains of the fifteenth-century palace of Prince Vlad Å¢epeş, or Dracula; then, across the boulevard behind it, at an Internet café, which is plunged into darkness except for the glow of screens. White hands emerge from the shadows and pass me a card. Above them radiates the face of a small, excited woman, literally inebriated by the fact that I'm speaking English. “Call me,” she coos, pointing to the number on the card. Romulus gives me a cynical glance, iced with resignation.

Later, on Calea Victoriei, as he floats away in search of cigarettes, a teenaged boy in a T-shirt threadbare-thin from too many washings advances through an invisible gelatin in smiling slow motion, placidly wanting to know, he says, where I could be from with such blue eyes. In our banal conversation he makes dents of intimate possibilities, somewhere between erotic and paternal, boasting gently about another older American who pays him as a photographic model; then he gallantly runs to a nearby bakery with the money I give him to buy us sweet rolls.

On Bulevardul Aviatorilor, near a movie theater, is an outdoor Internet station where a crowd of boys gestures to us. Delighted by the free access, they cajole me into showing them how to use it. Gesticulations and arms thrown around shoulders, while I keep feeling for my wallet. The whole experience seems faintly rural. This magic-forest feeling of Bucharest comes, I think, from the innate pastoralism of Romanians, which has been described by the scholar Traian Herseni as pastoral loneliness. Add to this the fact that most Romanians were isolated during the reign of Ceauşescu, who prevented almost anyone from leaving the country, and you get a very singular sensibility.

This is only a walk in a modern city, but primeval fate seems to be curling its tendrils about us wherever we float; loss, extinction feel sweet to me, as they must have to the shepherd in the Mioriţa myth. I'm caught in this realization as Romulus and I stroll down Bulevardul Brătianu toward Piaţa Unirii, past the bullet holes from the Revolution in the walls of the underground street passage. Not far from our hotel we saw a sign advertising apartments to rent. It led us into a dingy courtyard bordered by buildings ornamented with fissured stucco. We went through a creaking door, up a cracked marble-and-wrought-iron staircase to a tiny real estate office, where a woman started as if she'd seen a ghost when we walked in. The fact of our wanting an apartment seemed to astonish her. As if in shock, she went through a faded roster of listings in a book with a broken spine, made a call and handed us a card.

The walk to the apartment, which is located near Piaţa Unirii, feels effortless, like standing on a moving sidewalk, gliding easily toward fate. Until I come smack against the wide, wall-like body of a Romani woman with back and buttocks of brick, who has stopped stock still in the middle of the street. As I slam against this wall, I feel spidery hands fluttering against my pants and realize that I'm in the middle of a Gypsy pick-pocketing scam. The movie in gelatin is shattered by my piercing scream. Everyone stops to look, the three Roma involved in the scam hightail it up the avenue.

Romulus's face isn't sympathetic, but stony with disapproval, embarrassed. Of course, he knew what was happening. I'm such a target with my bulging pockets. But why did I have to shriek like a woman? In fact, he's been meaning to tell me I walk funny, too much on the balls of my feet.

In a split second, I've slid out of the magic forest, been changed back into a possibly effeminate fag in a sector closed to me. I'll never get in again, either, beyond brief moments. When one of Romania's greatest pessimists, Emil Cioran, came to France, his first impression of Western intellectuals was that they thought only of money. He claimed that any of his people's shepherds was a more profound philosopher. Now I feel like one of those overembellished Westerners he scorned, a victim of Romanian feudal clannishness.

 

 

OUR APARTMENT-TO-BE is in a spectacular Teutonic-looking turn-of-the-century house in a middle-class neighborhood, on Mihnea Vodă, a dead-end street behind PiaÅ£a Unirii. I'm drawn to the glass-and-wrought-iron door, the gabled roof, the garden of sweet peas. The staircase is creaky and dark, with a musty smell I associate with books about spells. On the first landing, a door creaks open, and the sweet, bewildered face of an old woman with soft, disheveled hair peeks out at us. She looks thrilled, relieved at seeing our faces, as if she'd been waiting for a hundred years. Eagerly she ushers us into her living room, which is dark and nearly empty, with a worn-out couch and a gleaming black-tile floor; and I realize that she really has been living in a kind of prison, guarded by the pitiless and unstoppable passage of time. On shelves lining the room are crinkled mementoes: roses, faded colorless, wrapped in yellowed cellophane; a wedding picture whose tones have sunk into muddy reds and browns; a plastic-framed photo of a blond pixielike child who must be in his fifties by now. She pauses in front of a dust-laden samovar and makes thrilled, nervous shrugging gestures at me while explaining in Romanian to Romulus that there's nothing to offer us for tea. She ate a last small cake for lunch an hour ago. She's humiliated by her inability to provide hospitality, she explains, accompanying her words with apologetic, cultured quiverings of her wrinkled hands and obsequious little bows, while her soft eyes transfix me ecstatically. The apartment above her has stood empty for more than a year, and here we've come to remedy it, she assumes. She apologizes for the fact that she speaks no English, but some instinct makes me try to address her in French. She's probably old enough to have lived the tail end of that time when Romania looked toward France as a sister nation—not so long ago as when Princess Bibesco socialized with Proust, but possibly when Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew, lived in Paris and translated Cocteau and Rimbaud. And after a few words in French, her eyes do light up and she begins to recite Baudelaire's “L'invitation au voyage” with a heavy Romanian accent:

 

But then she stops, confused. It's the only fragment she can remember. She explains to Romulus, who translates for me, that she's going to call her son, who'll arrange our renting the upstairs apartment. We spend the rest of the time in a nervous ritual of courtesy: the old woman, who has forgotten her French, bowing and shrugging apologetically, and me trying to keep a stiff, affectionate smile on my lips.

Her son, a middle-aged man in shorts, probably the child in the faded photograph, looks as if he'd been released from a long sentence on death row—his eyes staringly fish-angry, like pieces of dull green glass in milk. He has a hunched, alcoholic manner and wet tentacles, frustration and defeat pouring out of him like sweat. He wants the twelve hundred dollars for three months' rent of the big apartment upstairs in cash, and he wants it in dollars, right away. When I protest, saying I'm not going to change lei back into dollars, he spends thirty minutes studying the newspaper for the exchange rates. Finally he writes the exact amount up to the fourth decimal on a scrap of paper. Then Romulus and I go with a large paper bag to one of the city's few cash machines. Since the highest Romanian currency offered by the machine equals about eight dollars, and it's impossible to get more than five of these bills at a time from the machine, I spend almost an hour removing money and stuffing the bag, while Romulus stands guard. It won't be the end of the drama. Our landlord will call us almost daily asking for electricity and telephone money in advance or maintaining that the exchange was figured out wrong.

Our new, spacious two-bedroom apartment is full of Romanian books—the literature that the landlord's daughter studied before moving to America. One of the bedrooms, which has a desk, will be my own separate study, and there's even a terrace. I'm a bit baffled by the fact that the kitchen is kitty-corner across the outside hall. Its ancient spice cabinet, which has herbs and remedies more than sixty years old, fascinates me. We settle onto the king-sized bed in our large bedroom, trying not to focus on the fact that the landlord's mother has a key to the back entrance and has claimed the right to mount when she pleases to use the washing machine in the bathroom, just outside our bedroom door. We can't, however, keep from noticing that our windows look onto the vine-covered windows of the adjoining building, so Romulus closes the shades and pulls the heavy curtains over them to muffle our noise. Both of us are aware that a revised version of Article 200, the law against “public scandal,” is still in effect. Technically, we could be arrested just for being seen making homosexual gestures. This obsesses me for a while, I talk incessantly about it, until Romulus harshly silences me by saying, “Don't you know sex is dangerous?”

A few days later, we'll go back to Strada Lipscani in search of a VCR for playing porn. In a secondhand shop, we'll bargain with the grim owner, who seems to be threatening us, predicting all kinds of disasters, rather than negotiating a sale. Romulus assures me that if the VCR doesn't work when we get home, he'll quickly return it to the shop by throwing it through the plate-glass window. Finding porn on the street is easy; there are tables every few corners with pirated tapes, some Romanian but mostly German—none, of course, homosexual, but Romulus wouldn't want that. And I can't compromise myself in front of him by watching them.

Sex in our new home begins when the temperature has reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit. A terrible heat wave has started to hit Romania. There's no air-conditioning, and we fear opening the shades or curtains in the bedroom. Romulus watches one of the porn tapes, an artless German costume drama in a harem, as he slaps at mosquitoes, while I lie belly-down across the sweat-drenched sheets and put my head between his baking thighs.

We're just a few hundred feet from the DîmboviÅ£a River, which has dried up in the heat, leaving ankle-high mud and rotting fish. I can smell it penetrating the curtains. After you get across the bridge over the river, the odor grabs you by the throat, you want to get away from it as soon as possible, but sometimes the stoplight hasn't changed. This seems to be the inevitable moment when the small boy at the intersection, pushing a wooden wheelchair carrying a legless grandfather, comes toward you begging for money, the grandfather's outstretched bony hand shaking a metal cup. If you give, the boy says, “God bless you,” in English. Much later, in Budapest, a Romanian hustler will tell me that when some of his fellow hustlers need more money from a “benefactor,” they tell him that their father works for the railroad and that his legs have just been cut off by a train. Yes, in the case of the boy at the intersection, the grandfather's legs really were missing, but then, the very idea of the imagination exploiting amputation . . .

XIII

DURING SOME of our white nights in Bucharest, I think of my friend Ursule Molinaro, whose blessing of my relationship with Romulus came as her health was failing. I remember how she claimed to have once visited a canyon in Maui, Hawaii, where a particularly horrible military slaughter had taken place. Although this strife was more than two hundred years past, its anguish and horror were as palpable to her as if it were happening at that moment. Through eyes swimming in vertigo, she saw a welter of dislocated limbs, smelled blood covering the canyon.

If you think about it, there isn't a place we can walk where someone wasn't probably murdered, where a bloody battle or some painful death hasn't taken place. Bucharest is just a decade away from the violent uprising that ended Communism, where members of the militia shot indiscriminately into the angry crowd gathered before Party headquarters. A little more than ten years ago, the streets on which we're walking were full of snipers, or students squeezing a blood-soaked shirtsleeve at the point where a bullet had entered. It's true that most of the bullet holes in the old Communist headquarters have been repaired, but near the university there are plaques commemorating revolutionary martyrs, a balustrade still dented by gunfire.