The Romanian (22 page)

I was halfway home from the dinner when the same youth leaning against the same building approached me again, tried to strike up a conversation, but as I remember, I got past him without letting him touch me. A block later, I felt for the lump of money under my shirt, and it was gone. I went back to Şerban and Chirilov's, and we turned the bed, and then the rest of the apartment, upside down, but it wasn't to be found. We emptied the wastebasket in the bathroom, where I'd gone to pee, on the chance that it had dropped into it. They were getting more and more disturbed, anguished. For them, $800 was a major fortune, its loss a tragedy. Finally Chirilov took a flashlight and we retraced my path on the street, searching minutely for the lost purse, looking in gutters and garbage cans. His sensitivity to my loss felt caring, mournful. He even ran to our apartment while I waited, to ask Romulus to see if the purse was there.

When I got home without the purse, Romulus's face was about to glow with dark irony. “I can't believe it,” I said. “Alex and Mihai think the Gypsy took it.”

“What Gypsy?”

“The one I passed on the way to their house. I swear he only touched my shoulder for a second. I didn't feel a thing. Alex and Mihai said that's how they do it. They have a very sharp knife or straight razor. They distract you for a second by touching you, then cut the elastic band and it's gone.”

Romulus's angular face had a look of depressed fatalism. Was it pity or vengefulness? He lit up a cigarette and glanced away.

“Don't you know who take it? They.”

“Romulus, that's ridiculous.”

“I am sure,” he said in a monotone. “They did not steal it. Probably it fell from your body at some time when you are there.”

“That's what we thought. We looked all over for it!”

“Yes. Afterward. But first when you leave, they see it lying there. Sticking from under pillow on couch maybe. Inside they look, see how much money, cannot resist, make a decision.”

“That isn't what happened!”

“You come back, they pretend to look all over. I have seen such thing before.”

“Romulus, Mihai even went into the street with a flashlight to help me look for it.”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Shame is what they are feeling then. You must not suspect that they cannot resist.”

His face looked funereal, nearly tragic.

For a split second, I became part of his reality, believed it. Then sadness overwhelmed me, similar to the sadness I'd felt when I'd imagined the girl, sweet and bewildered, and her love for him, at the soccer field.

I knew what he was saying wasn't true, but understanding why he believed it was almost more than I could bear. Şerban and Chirilov were true gentlemen, anything but thieves, yet Romulus couldn't imagine a different mentality and stayed imprisoned in his past. Affection spread hopelessly through my chest like nausea. We were in bed, and I rolled toward him, held his face close to mine.

 

 

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE WE LEFT for Transylvania, Romania played soccer against England in the European championships. I was still struggling with Céline, in cahoots with her, manufacturing a stilted, contradictory persona that pretended proof of her good nature and simplicity in the face of her monstrous ambition, her relentless need for attention.

I could hear uncharacteristic yelps and shouts coming from the bedroom all through the match. Romania's athletic triumph was awakening Romulus from depression. The television was roaring, I knocked but he refused to turn it down. Around midnight, the door to my study burst open. Romulus's eyes were ablaze. “We won,” he said. Then he strode over to my desk, hooked an arm under mine, lifting me from the chair.

“Come with me!”

“Where?”

“Out on the street. With everybody in Bucharest.”

Through the open window I heard the noise of cheering and horns honking. The sweltering air was saturated with it.

“I haven't finished!”

“Can't you do for me this once? This, finally, is my thing.” His eyes were imploring, needy. So I followed him down the stairs, but my heart was pounding with fear. I was imagining stampedes, riots and violence, that aggressive hysteria that can push the citizens of the smallest countries into displays of reckless power, making them feel invulnerable. And as soon as we were out the door, we were swept into the throngs—practically the entire city was outside.

I was ready for the worst, but it wasn't the chaotic rowdiness I'd imagined. Instead it was a sort of procession, thousands walking as one in a heightened, ecstatic hypnosis. This wasn't any Flacăra, either, one of those frenzied youth festivals during the Ceauşescu years in which light, smoke, music and patriotic poetry were staged to drive young crowds into frenzies of patriotism. Instead it was a nearly solemn celebration that felt almost mystical.

Chants that seemed a cross between hymn and anthem echoed through the air. Small children rode on the shoulders of adults. Hastily decorated cars cleaved the crowd as if it were butter, sliding through to shouts of elation. I turned to Romulus to ask for a translation, but he cautioned me, “Don't speak English. They will think you are, and God knows what they will do.”

At PiaÅ£a Universităţii, the crowd congealed into a trembling mass. Crowds coming from other directions choked the street. High above me, a small boy began climbing a telephone pole. Now he was hanging from the wires, fifty feet above the heads of the crowd, swinging slowly to and fro. Policemen parked in their cars at the curb watched him imperturbably. “They are afraid to act,” Romulus explained in my ear excitedly. “The crowd will not tolerate them tonight.”

What struck me, yet again, was a feeling of timelessness in the celebration, a primeval dignity I'd never associated with sports. I thought of those aimless people on the street, who'd always moved as if through a medium of gelatin. Now they'd been pulled toward a joyous focal point and infused with its optimism. A static, charged bliss reigned. There wasn't much movement in the enormous crowd, over which the boy swung from the wire like a pendulum. Everything had stopped at this high point of pleasure.

I turned to look at Romulus. A kind of justification had colored his face, and the muscles of his body bristled with dignity. He looked at me knowingly, as if to say, “You see?” But he was a sad warrior, with nowhere to go from here, a knight standing still in the face of doom.

XVII

I LURCH OUT of the parking lot of the Bucharest Marriott, my feet struggling with the clutch pedal of our Dacia, the Romanian national car. A map is spread across the knees of Romulus, who has no license ever since that terrible accident that led to the operation on his neck vertebrae—the one that caused the scar I first noticed at our hotel in Budapest.

Since the night of the soccer game, we've settled into an easy, joyous intimacy. Romulus feels like a winner, or is it that he thinks I've finally found a way into his culture?

The entire city is in the midst of a road-renovation project as part of Romania's bid to join the European Union; potholes and frustrated drivers are everywhere. Romulus tunes in to some Romanian rap. Its thudding, polka-like beat and Turkish flourishes hammer at my temples, augmenting the jolts in the road, as history scuds by my window. We fly past the gorgeous villas of Bucharest with their Turkish-style gables, the monuments to defamed heroes, and the depressed pedestrians detoured from their fantasies. At his recommendation I'm going very, very fast. “Slow driving is so dangerous,” he claims. “They go nuts and try to pass.” Nimbly he inches his foot toward mine and bears down on it, gunning the engine. As if on cue, a white Toyota draws up to our fender, then squeezes in front of us just in time to miss an oncoming car.

“Wild dogs keep darting into the road!” I plead as an excuse to go slower.

“Just go, go!” he barks laughingly, slapping the dashboard in rhythm to the music, as the buildings blur past.

Once I hit the periphery of the city, cars are careening past us even more recklessly, especially on curves, the drivers expecting us to swerve onto the shoulder if a car is coming the other way. Romulus chortles at a near miss. Everybody is in a frantic hurry, probably hoping to catch a flying fragment of the new market. But unlike the others, we have no idea exactly where we're going, except north toward the Carpathians and his hometown of Sibiu. “Just go!” he keeps chanting like a joyous incantation.

Outside the city limits, buildings fade away into fields of thick-bladed grass, then slowly into soothing hills. The road meanders into sweet curves. We're driving through the Wallachian plain. Amputated oak trees line the road like driving casualties. Beyond them, fields of sheep stretch toward the hills; then suddenly there's the apparition of a barren landscape, the fat, grimy smokestacks of a chemical plant.

In many cases, these industrial messes stand where centuries-old villages used to be, before they were razed by Ceauşescu and the entire populations sent to work in factories. At the edge of cities are the dreary “blocks” like the one Romulus grew up in—ramshackle housing projects to which the displaced villagers were sent. To me they look destitute and lunar, but Romulus's eyes glisten with contentment, even security, when we drive past them.

“Just like where I live,” he says with self-satisfied defeatism.

“Where are the trees?”

“Hmph, trees he wants! We got clubs.”

Glancing at him from the corner of my eye, I try to imagine his
Blade Runner
life, picture him at night strolling through a squalid street illuminated by salmon-colored riot lamps, on the way to a club. “You like living there?”

“Was better before, during Communists. Now you got to find rent.”

The car goes faster and faster at his urging, and the slide show of our trip speeds up. Sixteenth-century bucolic Romania keeps alternating with the scarred industrial present, as if the two were giving birth to each other. In their isolation the bloated chemical refineries and grimy steel mills look gothic, or like futuristic castles in a decadent science fiction film. Getting within a few feet of them fills me with a kind of daring. They've become the grim decor of my love affair.

I pull over and photograph a rusting factory, zigzagged with catwalks like a spiny juggernaut. It hovers in the haze of pollution it expels, a diabolical mirage. Among the other consequences of Ceauşescu's hysterical push toward total industrialization was an incident that occurred earlier in the year, when a hundred metric tons of cyanide leaked from a gold mine into the Lăpuş River, then flowed through Hungary and Yugoslavia before returning to Romania.

Among the blur of fences, trees and passing cars I feel my heart thumping: anything is possible. All that lies ahead is the future, new sights and new sensations.

My eye fastens on a sign that says “Bran Castle,” in English, so I follow it by swerving onto a side road. At the end of the road looms a rocky hill topped by a colossal white castle with red-tiled roofs and four towers.

“Dracula!” Romulus gasps with bared teeth, diving toward my neck. I fend him off with my elbow, but he's right in a way. Billed as Dracula's Castle by the Romanian Tourist Office, from 1395 to 1427 it belonged to Mircea the Wise, who was Dracula's, or Vlad Å¢epeş's, grandfather. Vlad himself may have hidden there from the Turks in 1462, but he spent only a short period. Staying much longer were other historical Romanians, including Queen Marie, into whose hands the castle had passed.

We trudge up the long, narrow path to the entrance, and a cloud obscures the summer sun. Because of the elevation it's much cooler here than in Bucharest. Wind erupts like a whip, and goose bumps pop out all over our exposed arms. Above us towers the castle, so high that we have to tilt our heads back to see its parapets. Sprouting from a bulbous rock formation, it has a convex, faceless look, clandestine and aggressive; it hides, in a sense, Romulus's larger historical past. Behind his own convex shutters, those hooded eyes, lie secrets of his culture, part of the mystery of my obsession.

We head immediately for a table selling hand-knit sweaters, buy one each for about seven dollars and pull the coarse wool over our shivering bodies. Then we climb an almost vertical staircase set into the rocks, at the top of which sits a homeless, bewildered parody of a guard dog with dirt-caked fur and cloudy, dismal eyes.

It's a gorgeous, gloomy castle, originally in the gothic style, to which architects over time have added harmonious Renaissance and Romantic elements. Inside the courtyard, paved with flagstones, I photograph Romulus standing at the fountain from which Dracula must have drunk and beside which Marie must have spent summers avoiding the heat of the city. With his slicked-back hair and dim, depressed eyes, he has a medieval look, that “ancient face” my friend Ursule Molinaro identified.

We edge up a narrow, curving staircase leading out of the courtyard, our nostrils stung by mildew. Romulus pries open a squat door in the wall. Before I can bat an eyelash, he's disappeared inside. I follow down a narrower stone staircase flanked by curving stone walls, which is so dark and steep I need to light a match. At the bottom are damp, windowless catacombs through which I creep nervously. Then I come to a dead end, a high, tiny window covered by a grating, and a gray stone room containing only a draped wooden coffin. Its top rattles and raises just a hair. Suddenly it opens, revealing Romulus sitting up in slow motion, looking more than apt for the role. I don't know it at the time, but later I'll find out why the prop is there. In the 1970s, Ceauşescu tried to make Bran Castle a principal attraction for tourists. Capitalizing on the Dracula myth, he hired actors to hide in cupboards and coffins, then scare tourists as they walked by. The plan was scuttled after an American woman was surprised by a stagy Dracula and succumbed to a stroke.