The Romanian (18 page)

To shorten the walk, I try insisting we stop at another restaurant, at the edge of the parking lot. He wrinkles his nose and spits from the corner of his mouth: “Those Gypsies? In there you will take me? We will be poisoned.”

The restaurant across the square has an outdoor eating area with two televisions. We sit so that my back is to the screens and he can watch a repeat soccer broadcast over my shoulder. I'm wondering if this abrupt reversal—Romulus as caustic husband contemptuous of feminine foibles—is some kind of revenge for his housewifely luncheon duties. I'm certainly not the first spouse to sit in a restaurant with the aftertaste of her husband's genitals on her tongue, while he stares past her at a sports replay. Insipid house music booming from the restaurant speakers crowns his pleasure and augments my annoyance. I put one of his cigarettes in my mouth and light it to cover the acrid taste on my gums. The waitress delivers a mediocre red wine. Romulus takes a sip of it, then brings his cigarette to his lips and inhales deeply. His eyes shift away from the screen. “Bruce, I must ask to you something.”

“Yes.”

“Why me? I want to know. Why
me
?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to know why you choose me from all boys at Corso.”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because, Bruce. You are so much . . .
better
than me.” He savors the word. “So much higher up than me.”

“Romulus, there are a lot of things about you I feel are better than—”

I stop, fearfully. His features are so distorted with contempt that he looks like he's about to spit. “Do you think,” he says craftily, “that I did not notice when you hide key under bed? Such a stupid thing you do.”

“I didn't know you, Romulus. I had no idea who you were.”

“And do you know what I am thinking when you do that?”

“No.”

“How stupid. That is what I am thinking. All I must do is knock you out, then take key.”

“Why didn't you?”

He doesn't answer.

We're served various meats cooked in oil, and a salad that is mostly white cabbage. Eventually I realize that something else over my shoulder has caught his attention. Through the filmy windows of the banquet hall inside can be seen a wedding party. Raucous laughter seems to propel several guests out the door. In the arms of one man is a kicking bride, alternately laughing and screaming. According to Romulus, the man carrying her isn't the groom. A traditional Romanian wedding diversion has begun: the best man and other male members of the wedding party are kidnapping the bride as a joke and challenging the groom to find her, claiming he must pay a ransom. We watch. Hurriedly, the man carrying the struggling bride disappears with her into a black car, which drives away. Romulus rubs his hands together, lights another cigarette and explains: “This joke much loved in Romania can bring to bride and groom great heartache.” I stare with awe at the bitter pleasure that seems to have invaded his features. Intuitively I know that thoughts of the possibility of corruption have instilled him with sardonic confidence.

“You see, Bruce,” he exults, “the character of the bride-robbers, though they even be best friends, cannot always be trusted.” He winks leeringly and says, “Do you see where I am driving?”

“No. Which way?”

“More times than you are possible to imagining, the kidnapping turns into sour.”

“I don't follow.”

“I mean the bride gets raped.” His face cracks into a delighted grimace, a startling gesture for a person who's usually so poker-faced.

“You're kidding.”

“Kid you I not, Bruce.”

“But the best man, the wedding party. Aren't they usually relatives, brothers, best friends?”

He nods enthusiastically, savoring the idea.

“I don't believe—” I begin. Before I can finish, a worried-looking man in a tuxedo emerges from the restaurant, holding a cell phone. Then two other male guests come out, gaze around and hurry down the street in the direction where the struggling bride was driven.

“Something goes wrong already, you see?”

“No, I don't see.” Something may have gone wrong, but then, there are certainly no signs that anything as disastrous as a rape at a wedding party has taken place. I doubt, as well, that rape is a common occurrence at Romanian weddings. I sense a lurid desire on his part to invite me to see his culture as shameful, to reject it. I study him incredulously, but his smile is opaque, self-satisfied. Whether rape has occurred or not, he wants me to think so.

XIV

HE SIMPLY HOWLS FOR HER,” wrote Queen Marie in her diary in 1918. Howls like the wild dogs in the Bucharest streets of today? A mother even more meddling than my own, Marie/Missy was referring to her son's passion for a certain Zizi Lambrino, a commoner with “a shallow, cold, vulgar nature quite incapable of any better or nobler feelings.” Missy was convinced that she knew what was best for her son.

Her words come to me in my study on Mihnea Vodă in June, where I've decided to sleep, minutes after finally being told by Romulus that he's had it with living here with me, and seconds after a call from my mother, asking, When, oh, when are you coming home? Now, in a fit of grumpiness, he's half dozing in a heat coma in our sealed-off bedroom across the way, waking to slap at a mosquito or glare at me if I come into the room, the TV booming an inane variety show and sheets of cigarette smoke layering the air.

Zizi Lambrino, the woman to whom blonde Queen Marie so objected, was her physical opposite. Née Ioana Maria Valentine, she was dark and plump, a Romanian bourgeoise of Greek Phanariot descent. In the summer of 1913, she met Prince Carol, who was not quite twenty; and in the months that followed, her bedroom became papered with pictures of the prince, the way girls today paper theirs with pictures of rock stars.

By 1918, at twenty-four, Prince Carol was head over heels for Zizi, despite the fact that members of royalty were prohibited from marrying native Romanians. He was so enthralled that he was willing to give up his future kingship, thumb his nose at the Romanian people and the hard-won legitimacy of the royal family. Or do I have it backward? Could he have so hated the vaunted legitimacy of the royal family that he wanted to thumb his nose at them by falling in love?

I peel off a sheet stuck to my thigh by perspiration, mulling over my own bohemian gesture. Romulus, for whom I've given up my own country, has suddenly fallen into a foul, contemptuous frame of mind. I could say that it's happening only for an evening, but I can tell the mood will return. This Eastern locale, which I thought I chose in a ballsy exertion of will, has turned into a stage set for failure.

Even British-born Missy, in an uncharacteristic lapse into bigotry, would call her adopted country—where I now lie stuck to the sheet in anguished doubt—”incomprehensible” and “licentious,” an entity undecodable to Western eyes. “Being near the East, morality is lacking,” was her facile defense for the several lovers she took.

Shortly after her marriage in 1893, she became addicted to the same drug of travel that has given me such an erotic charge. Eventually she filled the palace with one exotic “souvenir”—meaning lover—after another. Many of them, not incidentally, also furthered her brilliant political aims. This was a war against her own royal background.

Carol and Zizi. His attachment to her had the contours of an addiction.
FROM THE COLLECTION OF PRINCE PAUL OF ROMANIA

Allegedly, Missy's lovers ran the gamut, before she became queen and after: from the melancholy Russian Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, a first cousin trapped in a loveless marriage, to the sickly financier and publisher Waldorf Astor, who despite Missy's passion may have never consummated their relationship.

The most lasting and intriguing lover was a local, with all the traits we associate with the Byzantine and the Latin: the hypnotically soft-spoken Prince Barbu Ştirbey, a dark-browed Boyar full of expressive glances and suave gestures. So many state secrets had Missy told him that he had to shrug off an offer to write his memoirs by saying he simply knew too much.

In Romania, everybody—from the ladies-in-waiting to the shoeshine boy on the street—talked about Missy's affairs, whether they were real or not. In the way subjects admire a virile king, Missy's powers of seduction and her sensual lifestyle only made her more popular with the people. She was, then, a phallic queen, a female sexual adventurer.

Sex can slay. Smarting from Romulus's cold, sadistic behavior, which culminated in his kicking me hard in bed when I tried to put my arms around him, my mind still insists on playing with the image of his sullen body. I torture myself with visceral snapshots of lips parted in a half-doze, a two-day growth of soft beard that he's too lazy to shave in the heat. Unable to sleep, I fantasize running a hand over the warm, indifferent body, or pass the time trying to reconstruct Missy around forty during World War I, a few years after becoming queen, when she entertained Ştirbey in her newly decorated Bizance bedroom, with its sham ecclesiastical fixtures and Turkish tapestries. I envy her plans to use her rebellious, frustrated son Carol, the future king, as her mouthpiece. And it occurs to me that History, and my history, are part porn novels.

 

 

THE HOHENZOLLERNS CAME to the throne in the 1860s, after the Crimean War, as the result of a deal cut between Ion Brătianu, the powerful Romanian Boyar responsible for Romania's formation of two principalities into a nation, and Napoleon III. It was Brătianu who spirited the Prussian Carol I—whom Missy called
“der Onkel”
—into the country, even though Austria, Russia and Turkey threatened to occupy it if a foreign prince made a claim. Obviously, Brătianu was no psychologist. It never occurred to him that there was any danger in introducing the iron-willed Hohenzollerns to a world of fabled Oriental pleasures and Byzantine strategies. Did he really want to make Romania the place where West struggles against East, or where the will battles desire?

On the wall across from me in the dark, I can just make out Missy's picture. I printed it from the Internet as part of my own project of adapting to life here. It shows her in late 1893, at eighteen, in a gown choked in tulle and lace, blissfully clasping her firstborn, who's wearing a dress, to her bosom. The infant is Carol II, the first member of the royal family to be born in Romania and their first native speaker of its language. What a perfect excuse for blaming the dissolute habits he later developed on nearness to the Orient.

It's true, however, that something implacable about this Eastern place batters away at your defenses. I suppose I'll end up loving it if I can stick it out. Even hyper-British Missy ultimately became a fierce defender of her strange new culture. Gradually, she grew more and more at home in this Eastern place. Unblemished as her hands were by outdoor work, she had herself photographed in Romanian peasant drag. She and her visiting sister made bold visits on horseback to Gypsy camps. She took refuge in her affair with the Boyar Ştirbey and in an intimate bond with her first Romanian son, Carol. Ecstatically, she began to envision the future with him on the throne and herself as the power behind it.

Marie's relationship with Carol titillates me partly for its perversity. Always headstrong about her own sexual experiments, she saw no harm in meddling with his. Behind my closed lids explodes a bright bucolic image of Arnold Mohrlen, the Swiss teacher whom Missy chose to educate her son. I can see Mohrlen and his pupil at the secluded pond they discovered in the woods near Cotroceni Palace, around 1909, when Carol was, say, fifteen and had become a long-limbed teenager, with a high, thick mop of blond hair and a sensuous, serious mouth. It might also be relevant to mention here the Eiffel Tower dimensions of his equipment, luridly referred to by Alice-Leone Moats in her shocker about the Prince's most notorious affair.

As Carol climbs naked from the pond, the tense, hazel-eyed professor gazes fixedly. Without Marie's seeming to take the slightest objection, tutor and student have become surprisingly intimate. The first consuming relationship outside family in the prince's young life has begun. Missy jokingly refers to them as “two old maids.”

But it's less Mohrlen's homosexuality that disturbs the royal family than the discovery that he's a fervent democrat with socialist leanings. He's convinced that the era of kingships is coming to an end and sees in Carol a chance to fashion the first royal anti-monarchist. Only three years later, Marie will blame her son's carousing in bars and cabarets on Mohrlen, never once guessing that Carol is the pouting production of her own philandering and overinvolvement.