The Romanian (33 page)

“Is that why everybody was staring at me like that?”

“Hmm, hmm. You think all the time they have no heart. But they cannot help the children and they must make themselves into steel. And for this they feel sick inside, you know? They feel ashamed when they look at what you doing. So they say fuck him, he stupid, a stupid, rich American. And maybe if there is way to get your money, like call you a child molester, then why not.”

“But the boys wouldn't do that. They'd say it wasn't true.”

“Tsk, tsk, and who listen to them? They are slave of parents or whoever they work for. You want to count on them?”

I had no answer, of course. My bubble had been pricked. And with its deflation, the world and its narrow, predictable parameters rushed back in. “When are you coming?” I asked, sinking back to where I'd started, greeting all my frustrations with a weary, defeated embrace.

“Soon, soon. Tomorrow.”

“Whenever, Romulus. I'm here.”

 

 

AND THERE I WAS, half filling a glass with the bootleg scotch I'd picked up at a nearby kiosk, watching a TV comedy in a language I didn't understand, then sitting alone on the terrace to watch the gathering of the dogs at dusk, as a small group of neighbors—who according to Romulus were part of the vast group of inhabitants who had nothing to give—handed out their treats. Among the pack of dogs I saw the bitch, whose teats looked smaller than they had a month ago, but whose eyes still welled with misery. To my amazement, she stopped still in her tracks and sniffed the air, then jerked her head in the direction of my terrace and barked.

That evening, already drunk, I toured the clubs of the old city around the Curtea Veche, wandering from one disco to another. The majority were filled with students, but one of them, Cireaşăul, had a more traditional feel. It was here that the svelte painted ladies with their minuscule miniskirts danced for their pasha-like black-suited boyfriends, who sat on bar stools watching them gyrate. And it was here that I met a group of rapscallions whom I'd regret knowing.

Their alpha, Răzvan, was a spindly half-Roma of nineteen with lips set in a perpetual slur and nervous, twitchy fingers. There was something unmistakably rentboy about him. What I didn't know at the time was that young Romanian males rarely hustle in their own country. Maybe he'd developed the manner while traveling the last few years, and maybe, at least unconsciously, he found something familiar and johnlike in me. But that night and four others when I hooked up with him and his posse, a ragtag bunch of undereducated, sluggish hangers-on, sex never came up, only alcohol and money. On my dollar we staggered drunkenly from club to club or met up with contacts selling bootleg CDs. I don't know why I hung out with them, except to blot out a feeling of aimlessness; but in no time at all, I was one of their homeys, privy to their cruising plans and vagrant money-making schemes, owner of a growing CD collection that had all the current pop Romanian hits. I suppose I'd been debased by my loneliness. I was getting my revenge against Romulus by parodying his idea of a “good time,” the kind I suspected he was having as he lingered in Sibiu and didn't come back.

That's how he found me, drunken, idle and playing Romanian disco, in an unkempt apartment filled with six adolescent street boys. As usual, his reaction was poker-faced and mildly sardonic, as he tossed his gym bag on the bed and popped open a beer for himself. How idiotic I'd been in thinking I could show him I could misbehave. He felt right at home with the atmosphere I'd concocted; and on that very first night, the boys invited him to the clubs. Stunned at the stupidity of my own maneuvers, I demurred when they told me to come along. Because I didn't have the heart to watch Romulus cruise, I made up a weak excuse about work I had to finish. I spent Romulus's first night home all alone, with only the white pills to comfort me.

Céline Dion came back into my life the next morning, while Romulus slept off his night out. Despite the extensive revisions, she was no less saccharine than a month ago. With the Hachette French-English dictionary on my hard drive, the
Petit Robert
CD in my disk drive and some websites about Québécois expressions, I began to tool along. However, the platitudes were endless, and I began to run out of fresh synonyms. I felt as if I'd been plunged into a swamp of banality whose shores would never be sighted. When, oh, when will it end, was all I could think, as I swam with Céline through the waters of her pregnancy or pumped up her schoolgirl astonishment at the worship of the crowds. To his credit, Romulus continued with the hot lunches, dragging himself out of bed at noon to start his kitchen duties, then lumbering back to bed for another serving of afternoon television. There was little else to do. As for his other “spousal” duties, they were diminishing. When it came to our sex life, the heat was winning.

By late afternoon, when I'd laid twenty or so pages of Céline to rest, I was a poached trout in the ninety-plus degrees, rivulets of sweat running down my temples and feet swollen from sitting. Sometimes I'd be wearing the bizarre personal-air-conditioner collar you can buy at Sharper Image, and with my glazed eyes and furrowed forehead I must have looked to Romulus like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I'd find him sprawled on the unmade bed in his bikini underpants, limbs limp in the airless atmosphere, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Only a sadist would have tried to make him have sex in these conditions, so I usually contented myself with lying by his side, using the tip of a finger to trace sweat-filled hollows in the indentation of a muscle.

At times I wondered whether I'd put the fatuous, self-deceiving, publicity-hungry Céline between us on purpose. After all, she would have been more than half finished if I'd worked during his absence. Whether this was the case I still don't know. But ever since Romulus had set me straight about the street boys, I'd begun to see him in a different, disillusioned light.

The feeling bled from Dion's hollow hypocrisy and pooled into the story of King Carol II, polluting Romulus almost as if incidentally. But then again, it seemed to come from Romulus himself. His body had lost its cathectic charge.

I remember the evening I strayed into the bedroom just as a Romanian show resembling
Hard Copy
was starting on TV. It was a low-budget show, shot mostly with a handheld camera, and two of the sequences struck me as particularly tasteless. The question presented for our consideration was: What do crazy people think? To answer it, the inquiring reporters went to a state-run mental institution and interviewed some schizophrenics. Their nearly empty, locked rooms were disturbing enough, but soon it was clear that the sequence was being presented as comedy. One of the punch lines entailed a middle-aged psychotic's telling the reporter, “The government is in the trees over there,” while the camera panned to the trees with their leaves blowing in the wind. Given Romania's recent history of bugged telephones and state-registered typewriters, I considered the possibility of its being historical satire. But no, Romulus's chuckle revealed the setup as purely
Laugh-In.

The second sequence was about a provincial man the reporter called a “hermaphrodite.” He was nothing more than a lonely, effeminate middle-aged homosexual who had become something of a small-town mascot. The camera tracked him trying on a dress in a shop and camping it up à la Dolores Del Rio to some scratchy cha-cha music. He shared some fantasies about the romantic benefits of being a woman, but there was absolutely nothing transsexual about him. He was simply a poverty-stricken gay guy who'd never been able to leave his hometown. Obviously, the archaic mentality of the ridicule repulsed me, and I tried to chalk it up to some naive ideas about homosexuality in Romania; but Romulus was truly entertained, and when I tried to interpret the sequence from a Western gay rights perspective, he silenced me with a few caustic remarks.

I had an anguished identification with those outsiders. As Romulus lay there in the sweltering, shuttered room, swatting mosquitoes, lighting up cigarette after cigarette to the inane blare of the television, I was struck more and more by his “collaboration” with corruption. He was “morally bankrupt,” I decided melodramatically, without wondering why I'd never thought so before. Like any newcomer to a culture who suddenly meets with disappointment, I rationalized it into universal qualities. In the oppressive heat, as if under a new spell, I reconstructed Romulus within the context of Romania's dark past, reminding myself of all the underhanded and debased situations to which he could have been subjected in his youth. I thought again of those Flacăra (Flame) festivals I'd read about, organized by Ceauşescu's court poet, Adrian Păunescu, in which cheap special effects drove the young into patriotic frenzies; or of the Falcons—children aged five to seven—tools of Ceauşescu who were encouraged to renounce their parents. Suddenly all the possible cheats and betrayals liable to happen to someone who bonds with a hustler became apparent. Ironically, they were the same risks and dangers I'd found so delicious and looked to for meaning just a few months earlier.

 

 

MY DISCOMFORT came to a head one evening at a favorite traditional restaurant specializing in game and known as Burebista Vânătoresc. It's a faux-Tudor place with hunting tools and peasant crafts on the walls. As soon as we entered that evening, I became oversensitive to the brutal, baronial atmosphere. The antlers and boar heads on the walls felt menacing, and I shunned walking over the bearskin rug on the way to our table. Boar, deer and even bear were on the menu, as well as pheasant, partridge and other small game, but I stuck to beef, except for an appetizer of
salami de Sibiu,
which, traditionally, is made from horse meat. Romulus ordered venison, and as he sat shredding it, the odor of singed flesh filled me with a foolish foreboding. We were playing a game with a folksong coming from nearby speakers. He would give me a literal translation, and I'd try to make it rhyme, sticking as close to the original meaning as I could:

 

Romulus nonchalantly tapped along to the song about a maiden selling out her suitor's favors, and laughed good-naturedly at my split-second rhymes—as a feeling crept over me. What was it? Something that was a metaphor for drug withdrawal, endorphins detaching from a previously rosy focus. It wasn't withdrawal from codeine, which I'd swallowed less than an hour earlier, but it reminded me of something Cocteau had said during an opium cure. He'd compared opium to winter, with its crystalline perfection, and the cure he was undergoing to the disruptive advent of spring.

I could feel an analogous breaking up of structures inside me, as if the frozen lock of my obsessions were thawing, unfastening. My positioning blurred and slowly melted, forming a new composition. And in this swirling, Romulus, Lupescu, my mother slowly rotated into a lack of relationship. I was falling out of love.

Once again it was the end of inspiration, and for that very reason, it couldn't be borne. By the time we were walking back to Mihnea Vodă, I was regluing the pieces together. But such an obsession can't be reconstructed perfectly. Now there were cracks that hadn't been there before.

Home we trudged, a faulty couple. It could be that most relationships follow a similar course. The thought didn't keep me from feeling that the world had come apart. I walked beside Romulus in silence.

“Are you thinking again,
draga
?” Callous as he sometimes seemed, Romulus was always hypersensitive to these withdrawals. “Are you thinking about your Lupescu and your Queen Marie?”

“Hmm, hmm,” I lied.

Intellectual flights away from him made him just as nervous, so he said, “Why are you so interested in them?”

“The subject,” I said in a dead voice. “I'm interested in betrayal.”

Romulus expelled air from his pursed lips, the way French-men, as well as Romanians, do when they find a matter trivial. That seemed to be the end of the subject; yet later that night in bed, he got spooked again by my silence.

“Tell me about Lupescu,” he said. “The Jew.”

“Well, what do you know about her?”

“Not so much,
draga
,” he answered in that abashed, almost feminine tone of sweetness he would lapse into when he found me distant. “I know that whole country fell apart when she fucking the king. But why, why you are so interested in these things?”

“It just amazes me,” I answered, “the fucked-up things some people will do for love.”

XXIV

LUPESCU'S RELATIONSHIP with King Carol did, in truth, throw a moral pall over Romania. From the beginning it depended on a web of deceit. Its contours resembled those of a state crime, in the sense that each falsehood led to problems of national proportion. It stretched from Lupescu and Carol to Queen Marie and Ştirbey, as well as to other heads of government; but no one has ever been able to unravel everything that happened.