The Romanian (31 page)

She listens with rapt curiosity to my tale of driving through the storm and encountering the dead body on the road, and marvels at my courage in facing the slippery peaks of the Carpathians. It's no use reminding her that she's just subjected our two-mile suburban drive to minuscule, fearful scrutiny. Between us, the tale of Maramureş takes on heroic proportions and puts me in a time warp. Mom and I travel back to those preadolescent days when she delighted at my high marks or gave a sympathetic ear to childish anecdotes. Near the end of the story, we're sitting on the couch with my arm clasping her close enough for me to smell the 1920s perfume she discreetly put on in my honor. Mitsouko, by Guerlain.

Our relationship seems to function on weirdly autonomous levels. Mom's love floats out of reach repeatedly, replaced by resentment and criticism. Or is it fear of the intimacy and the physical feelings it inspires? But when her love returns, it has an overwhelming sweetness. If only I could find the place where she stores this raptness; with a snap of my fingers I'd make it manifest always.

Magic substances seem to accomplish something similar after dinner as I wash dishes. Stimulating my endorphins, the codeine accompanies a review of how far I've come with Romulus. During our first times together in Budapest, he'd leave his passport near the bed whenever he went out, assuming I needed proof he was coming back. But at least friendship and familiarity between us have long ago stopped that behavior. I wonder if he leaves his passport on the table for Elena when he goes out, say, to buy a liter of beer. Maybe not. Then she'd know what day I returned. He'd excuse himself to buy a pack of cigarettes and take the passport with him.

I also wonder what Romulus would make of the other Elena—Lupescu—given what he confessed to me one day near the end of our second stay at the Gellért in Budapest. I'd asked him somewhat fearfully whether he was having a good time. He answered that no amount of luxury could erase the fact that he had no future in Hungary. He could never be happy in such a hostile country. Then how did Lupescu carve out such a sparkling future in a country that resented and held back her people? Could it be that he lacks Lupescu's relentless drive? Or perhaps he's too genuine a person and would find her creative subterfuges distasteful.

 

 

IN 1925, under the flickering projection of the silent film
Die Nibelungen,
Lupescu's face in its layers of powder and paint looked like a Kabuki mask. It was positioned directly across from Crown Prince Carol, who'd attended the film with his family. The event was a fund-raiser for the Carol I Foundation, meant to support Romania's college students. Apparently, that overly made-up face stoked his heart to the point that he decided to meet her.

The chance for the two actually to speak seems to have been arranged by a notorious womanizer named Tăutu, who lived in a leopardskin-strewn house in Bucharest and may have been an ardent admirer of Lupescu's Austrian, possibly promiscuous mother. When Carol asked to be hooked up with the hot red-head Lupescu, Tăutu threw a party to which both were invited. Yet when Tăutu realized that the prince was seriously interested, he freaked out. He knew Lupescu was playing for keeps when the enamored Carol offered to drive her home and she simpered, “But what would the neighbors think?” So at the next party, Tăutu tried to soil her reputation by faking an affair with her, calling her a slut and throwing a nightgown in her face. The plan backfired when the quick-thinking Lupescu innocently asked if there might be any gentleman in the room who could protect a lady's honor. Carol stepped forward, and the two were never separated again.

Accomplishing a real defamation of Lupescu required greater leaps of the imagination. At the beginning of the affair, she and Carol never appeared in public together. Even afterward, she kept in the background and lived a life of near isolation. The legitimate members of the nobility had abandoned the court to avoid her, and she feared the public because of several threats to her life. She spent most of her time during Carol's reign traveling from her small house on Aleea Vulpache to the palace late at night, where she may have entered through an underground passageway and never got the chance to meet Queen Marie.

All this was happening as Fascism took flower in Romania and as Lupescu's lover, now the king, began making more and more concessions to it. It's no wonder that such a mystery figure as Lupescu became a canvas for projections of Fascistic fear. If she'd been more visible, demonizing her might have proved more difficult. But for the Romanian public of the time, she was the living embodiment of Jewishness, sexuality and government intrigue. It was a common rumor that she influenced the king not only in his personal life but in affairs of state as well. No matter how indirect this interference might have been, people were eager to see it as conspiratorial and manipulative, adjectives that the people of one of the most plot-ridden countries in the world associated with Jews. She was hated not just by the Gentiles of Romania, but also by the Jews of the country, most of whom thought of her as an embarrassingly bad example. Politicians tiptoed around her or schemed against her, and the aristocracy snubbed her as an arriviste. The Iron Guard, Romania's Fascists, tried to convince the world she was a supernatural Jewish demon. But no critic has come up with any hard proof of her being an éminence grise. The historian Paul D. Quinlan doesn't think she even really was. According to him, Lupescu's most important role consisted in providing home-cooked
mamaliga
, telling dirty jokes she'd learned from the barracks in Iaşi, playing cards, entertaining commoners and offering regular nooky.

Even so, most later historians were no kinder to the sensual Jewess than her contemporaries were; under a more objective guise, they perpetrated, in my opinion, myths forged by the Fascists. Alice-Leone Moats, her supposed intimate friend, went so far as to accuse her of single-handedly keeping Romania “in a constant state of turmoil for nearly fifteen years.” Though her lover the king has recently been forgiven for his capitulation to the Nazis, Lupescu remains a stain of ill repute in almost every history book, and her remains were recently removed from the tomb she once shared with the king and reburied in a commoner's grave.

 

 

MOM GETS READY TO READ about Lupescu in bed, and I spread out at the foot to keep her company, unwilling to let go while she's in such a loving mood. Off go the shoes from her swollen, once hardworking feet, and on goes the pale turquoise budget nightgown I've seen her put on for close to twenty-five years. With a hand knobby from arthritis she sweetly pats my back. Love, I've decided, flows unpredictably, ignoring arguments and the lessons of historians.

What fascinates me most about the tales of Lupescu is their marriage of evil and love. What were the feelings of the Jewess behind the king in the 1930s, as her lover issued one anti-Semitic edict after another? My own experience has shown me the possibility, if not the thrill, in loving someone whose actions should be condemned. After all, my mother and most of my friends consider Romulus dangerous, a destructive leech; and I can't come up with convincing opposing arguments.

It's not merely a question of love going on at the same time as contradictory resentment and disapproval, but it has something to do with the different levels our emotions inhabit, our efficiency at quarantining our sense of morality from passions that release our endorphins. The schizoid, unexplainable switches between Mom and me are proof, I suppose. It's as if everything has its separate chamber: outrage, desire, tenderness and fear. But in Lupescu's obsessive alliance, I see an even more fascinating feature: the notion that even in the most repugnant conditions, love is the sought-after paradise; it just has to be right.

XXIII

THAT NIGHT SOMETHING about my current situation came out in a nightmare. I dreamed that my face fell off, right at the jaw hinges beneath my sideburns. It was only for a moment, and I pushed it back up. I wasn't aware it had happened, but my mother and others in the room noticed. It was supposed to be an allergic reaction to eating something like “cassava” seeds, an echo of the way Romulus crunches into one sunflower seed after another.

The next morning, Aunt Lil, my mother's sister, died. After a short, simple funeral, I headed for New York, where, in ironic counterpoint to the dream I'd just had about the loss of my face and lower jaw, I was supposed to give a reading at the Romanian Cultural Center. My friend Leonard Schwartz, the poet, had arranged it, and I was planning to read an excerpt of this book.

At the Center, I was met by a cultural attaché, Carmen Firan, who intrigued me on sight. Not only was she multilingual and highly educated like Ursule Molinaro, but whole facets of her intellect seemed dedicated to sensuality. Almost undulating in chic linen pants and a silk top, she graciously invited me into her office for a drink. When I asked if I could smoke, her beautiful face with its elfin nose crinkled into a smile. She nodded eagerly, making a sassy quip about Americans' fear of pleasure. Her cultured femininity was something with which I am completely unfamiliar, except perhaps from one or two Italian movies. It was coupled with a breezy lack of artifice and a subtle elegance, that union of allure and intelligence that some American feminists once claimed was impossible. Later I would discover that she's also a very gifted writer, and would collaborate with her and her husband on some of their texts. But that night I felt like an awed country bumpkin, recognizing that my absorption in the underclass life of Romulus had deprived me of contact with educated Romanians.

Before a crowd of mostly Romanian listeners, Firan sauntered to the front of the room to announce the evening's program. She'd pulled together a dissonant variety of American and Romanian writers. I would have to go first.

No one was expecting to hear what poured forth: the story of a Romanian rentboy, abject passion and problematic sex. I could feel the silence in the room, which I interpreted as a kind of rapt repulsion. Later, two Romanian men approached me to compliment me on the story. Incredibly, both had reworked it in their minds as being about a female prostitute. One of them told me he understood my interest in Romanian women but cautioned me to be careful with the hookers. Then he told an urban myth, about a client who wakes up with a kidney missing. Only Nina Cassian, the lauded Romanian poetess in exile, who had also come to read, seemed to have heard my story for what it was and enjoyed it. Later, though, she would flinch when I mentioned it, asking with a curious patriotism why everyone who writes about Romania always writes about prostitutes.

Cassian's reading, which came directly after mine, produced a bizarre reaction. Hardly had she started when a woman with tired eyes, dressed in a stretched-out, faded sweatshirt, began to protest. “I denounce you,” she told Cassian before the whole audience, explaining it was for the patriotic poems Cassian had written during the Ceauşescu regime. The outburst led to a comic scene, in which supporters of Cassian stood to denounce the denouncing woman. After Cassian had finally managed to read her lyrical, linguistically rich poem, Firan glided to the front of the room to restore order and introduce the next reader, whom, she told the disruptive woman, she was presenting “with your permission,” all the while shooting daggers at her with her eyes.

Cassian herself seems never to have forgiven me for my salty story. She granted me only one rendezvous with her afterward, when she was ill. It was then that she told me that Johnny Răducanu isn't really Jewish. It was also then that she expressed her disappointment about my subject matter, and we've not had a conversation since.

Not only did the tantalizing Carmen Firan show enthusiasm for my story, she became bit by bit my source for literary and topical information about Romania. Today I'm still intrigued by her intelligence, clear wit and sensuality. They seem part of the dream, or trance, connected with Nature that I experienced in her country—in such contradiction to the historical agonies Romanians have endured.

THE FLIGHT BACK to Romania by way of Frankfurt on Lufthansa exposed me to other American exiles with whom I could compare myself. The plane was three-quarters full of African-Americans, who approached one another like members of a cult, all obsessed with the culture of Germany. In their eyes I saw a perverse audacity in favoring a country once known for its racism. Yet I realized that spending time there was also an escape from American stereotypes about them, a new and intriguing freedom. I saw similar features in my own exile. Very few tourists from the United States choose Romania. In being there, I was unconsciously deriving a feeling of a unique status.

Before leaving Bucharest this time, I'd made sure both Romulus and I had keys. Traumatized by his eleventh-hour stand-out when I'd been in Paris, I now wanted him to come back on his own terms. I tried to tell myself he'd return when he was ready, and if not, that was the way it was supposed to be. But behind this bravado were very real fears. I hadn't gotten to the point of projecting assurance in the streets of Bucharest; my body movements were still unmistakably American, and on almost every expedition without Romulus I'd run into some small problem, such as being charged triple for a purchase. New Yorker though I was, I was still intimidated by this city full of want, disappointment and trauma.

Just as I'd feared, the taxi driver from the airport vastly overcharged me. And once he'd dropped me off at Piaţa Unirii, I had to face the same poor bitch who guarded the territory around the apartment on Mihnea Vodă. It was the middle of July and the city was still baking in one of the worst heat waves of the century. Romulus, naturally, was nowhere to be found.

This time, as planned, I took a different strategy. When I called him on his cell phone I found him at the soccer field in Sibiu, just as before. I told him about the death of my aunt, to whom I'd been very close as a child. The news produced a kind of embarrassment, evidenced by a dull “Oh” on the other end of the line. I wasn't surprised. Having learned to silence himself about his own sufferings, he was distinctly inarticulate about others'. Implicit also in the silence was his reluctance to take the role of comforter. So I told him he could come whenever he wanted. “Tomorrow,” he promised. Knowing his imprecision regarding time, I readied myself for a few days on my own. During them I would be isolated. My only friends here were Alex Leo Şerban, who was away for the rest of the summer, covering some film festivals in Western Europe, and Johnny Răducanu, who was on tour.