The Romanian (36 page)

After we stepped onto the platform at Constanţa among a swirling crowd of Gypsies, workers and tourists, Romulus discovered that a bus had just left for Olimp-Neptun, our destination down the coast. He decided that lunch might be the best idea before we figured out another way to get there. So he lugged our bags through the center of the port town, and I followed, still feeling like a ghost, glancing periodically at the strong shoulders and tensed forearms, glad they were there to help, and gaping at the Greco-Roman remains, modern city streets and Turkish mosques, which made me think of Istrati's Turkish tales. I was happy that I'd stuck his first novel,
Kyra Kyralina,
into the case with the computer. It was supposed to be his best, and I hadn't read it yet. Then my mind must have gone blank again, because I have no memory of the way to Piaţa Ovidiu, where a statue of Ovid brooded, apparently ignoring the energetic scene around him. In the heat and bustle, it seemed hard to give credence to his famous complaints about being exiled here in the cold by Emperor Augustus in A.D. 8. With the voice of an effete elitist, he'd bitterly railed against the harsh winters and lambasted the table manners of the natives, before dying in frustration nine years later.

We gulped sandwiches at a café, and I felt a little energy returning. My zombie state withdrew somewhat, and Romulus began to look more familiar. I insisted we stop for a few moments at the museum across the square; but I should have remembered that if anyone had Stendhal's syndrome—that overwhelming sense of nausea and dizziness that strikes the visitor to a museum—Romulus did. He detests museums, not only for their official atmosphere, which reminds him of all the totalitarian pressures he's had to endure, but also for the vast array of knowledge on display that he feels he lacks. So he stayed outside with our bags, smoking and ogling the local girls, while I dipped in, blearily planning to look at the statue of an earth goddess I'd read was there. In my fatigued state I missed her, and fell instead upon the Nemeses, goddesses of retribution and equilibrium—twins, like Romulus and Remus. I lost track of the time contemplating their double nature, and thinking that revenge, with all its bitterness and aggression, had once been a valid cosmic force for keeping the world in balance. What had monotheism done but drive the impulse back into the subconscious, distorting it into a puritanical sense of self-righteousness? But the Nemeses would see to that. They stared at me like a foreboding, threatening to surge up from my subconscious and set things straight.

When I came out, stricken by vertigo in the change of light, Romulus seemed to be dying of boredom. He returned my bags, then pulled me past the square toward the shipyards, which stretched out before us like a menacing chessboard, filled with a thicket of squat tankers, masts and docks. On the shore was the casino that had once served as a pavilion for Queen Marie and company to welcome a visit from the Russian imperial family, in hopes, later dashed, of marrying a young Prince Carol to Russian Grand Duchess Olga.

Romulus pointed to the scene and chuckled gloomily. “Forty-three days I lived on one of those ships. What is word for that I would become? Merchant sailor. Then, when I go to Western European country or maybe America, who knows, I going to jump from ship.”

“What happened?”

“I give up before training is over. Too harsh.”

He walked over to a taxi and fell into a discussion with the driver that seemed like a dispute. Both of them were waving their hands aggressively in each other's faces, and Romulus even slapped the hood of the car with the palm of his hand. Then he signaled me over. “He going to drive us to Neptun,” he said under his breath. “Good price.”

We sped away with me in the backseat, and the road soon bordered cliffs, with dense foliage concealing the sea below. In the front seat, Romulus and the driver had fallen into a jocular camaraderie. They had the radio booming and were regaling each other with jokes and tales of the transient's life, while I sat ignored in the back, gripping the top of the front seat as we swerved around curves. Finally we came down the long gravel road to our hotel, the Panoramic, on the sea at Olimp-Neptun. The lobby had an institutional feel because the hotel had been built in 1960 to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Romanian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian and East German workers who went there for their summer vacation, forbidden to visit other venues. The desk clerks seemed at a loss about how to deal with the new, capitalist system. They demanded to see reservation slips, passports, local addresses and even train tickets, and they scrutinized my exhausted eyes as if I were a spy. Romulus and I paid two different rates, his for tax-paying Romanians, and mine, at thirty dollars more a day, for foreigners.

Our room was at basement level, looking out on the pool. It was pleasant but not air-conditioned. The air in it was humid and still. As I fought dizziness and unpacked the computer, intending to hook it up to the phone outlet so that I could e-mail all but the last twenty-five pages of Céline and beg for an extra day's extension, Romulus slipped quickly into the brief blue bikini I'd bought him in a Budapest that seemed so long ago. “You're coming?” he asked, without bothering to notice what I was doing.

“Of course not. You know I have to finish this.”

He wasn't deflated in the least; possibly he was relieved. He grabbed a towel and peeled off his socks. “I love the fucking beach,” he crowed.

I couldn't really argue with him. This was his Côte d'Azur. He'd been locked in a small country all his life, except when he could sneak out illegally. When it came to sun and sea, this was it for him. Still, I felt a sick shiver of envy as he pranced out of the room, looking marvelously lithe and slender in his briefs, with soft pink skin as smooth as a girl's.

I e-mailed what I could of the translation with a note and collapsed onto the bed. About two hours later, I got up and looked around the room. So this was where I was. Slowly it came into focus. I sat down to finish off Céline. Little did I know that her last simpering chapter was in a sense my death knell. Later, after it all became clear, I found the sound of her music intolerable. It would make me stop my ears.

 

 

THAT EVENING Romulus came in only briefly, to change out of his bathing suit and see how I was doing. He'd gotten a slight, healthy burn, and his face was shining with pleasure in a way I'd never seen. His eyes sparkled merrily, and he had the excited, quick gestures of a boy. Only then did it dawn on me how many young girls there must be on the beach, and I thought again of the figure he cut in the bathing suit I'd bought him.

I was asleep before he came back that night, and I rose at six the next morning to work, finally finishing and e-mailing the rest of the translation by about three in the afternoon. Romulus had been gone since he woke up at eleven, so I slipped into bathing trunks and headed for the water alone. It was a pleasant beach, a cove bordered by huge rocks on which large concrete structures in the shape of anchors had been placed to hold back the advance of the sea.

Weird thoughts about the sea filled my mind, coming from unknown impulses. I felt as if I'd come to the end of the sea as a signifier, in all the modern/romantic ways I was dependent on: the cradling sea, the sea of bottomless potential, the sea of adventure. The only metaphor about the sea that hadn't been deflated was “back to the sea”—a backward evolution, the sea as a kind of death—not only of the body, but also of development, the sea as a kind of degeneration. Moreover, I was just like any other traveler or tourist who goes to the sea looking for an escapist experience. I was trying to recapture some sense of myth in a world rapidly becoming uniform. All I would meet, however, was a simulacrum of what I'd left behind.

For years I'd believed I could escape that equation by seeking out sexual excitement and exoticism, taking risks and convincing myself that established monotony was about to be overturned. But now, what was there about my story that seemed so deflated? Was it just this horrible fatigue? Or was it that my imagination had finally been vanquished too many times by the facts?

I zigzagged along the beach, curious about the people who came here. Milling everywhere was every sort of human being, from enormous Slavic-looking women with big bellies and breasts in loud-patterned one-piece bathing suits to trim teenaged boys and their girlfriends lying bare-breasted on towels. I walked along the edge of the water until I came to a wire fence that separated the hordes from an empty expanse of beach. On the fence was a sign that I later found out announced in Romanian: “Danger! Deep Water.” It was the beginning of Neptun, the satellite colony that contained the mansions of the
nomenklatura,
including a palace that had belonged to Ceauşescu. The sign was a duplicitous warning to hoi polloi to keep away, so that the beach could be enjoyed by the privileged. Beyond the trees on the hillside I could see a gleaming Rolls-Royce, and next to it a man dressed like a guard, holding a machine gun.

Near the end of the afternoon I found Romulus sunbathing on the sand, watching three teenaged girls apply lotion to one another's backs. His skimpy trunks revealed an obvious hard-on. I looked down on it with a contemptuous sneer and he chuckled rakishly. “I'm finished,” I said. “I finished the translation.” He barely reacted, and once more his detachment irked me, almost to the point of making me shout, “I finished the translation so
we
can have money!” But I repressed the impulse, and he said, “You know, day after tomorrow is my birthday.”

“Yes, Romulus, I know. We're going to celebrate our birthdays together.”

He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up at me tentatively. “Bruce, you know, you are educated man. But for me, birthday is day to say fuck you to whole world. I must get drunk, go to clubs, have good time. You will do this with me?”

“Um, sure, but I got to admit it doesn't sound that appealing.”

Romulus sprang to a sitting position. “Aha! Just what I am thinking. So maybe, you and I will spend day together. And in the evening, Bogdan—”

“Bogdan?!”

“Yes, you mind so much if he coming here for my birthday?”

“Wait a minute, Romulus. Where's he going to stay?”

“With us, of course. I sleep on floor.”

“Romulus, that reception desk was like the police blotter. They're not gonna let him just come and crash with us.”

“Ugh, worry always is only thing you do. I know how to take care of people at desk.”

“How's he getting here?”

“Hitchhike, of course.”

If I'd had a shred of hope about a romantic moment on our birthdays, it had left in a flash. Anger rose uncontrollably in me as I contemplated what I considered the injustice of the last few weeks, my slaving away at tasteless work so that Romulus could enjoy his birthday by the sea with his brother. Every cell in my body slammed shut steel shutters of protection. An icy haughtiness took over me. “You and your brother can stay in another room, Romulus. I don't want to share that room with two other people. We'll speak to the desk clerk and I'll pay for a second.”

I suppose I was half expecting him to say he didn't want to spend his birthday night without me, but instead he said, “Thank you, Bruce. You know, the way we celebrate. This is not your cup of milk.”

“Tea, Romulus! Tea!”

“Okay, okay, tea,” he said defensively.

 

 

OUR DINNER THAT EVENING was hasty, and conversation clipped. It may have been an act, but Romulus seemed totally unaware of, even mystified by, what was bugging me. The seaside glow remained on his newly tanned face, and he wolfed down his food with relish. We were sitting in one of the mediocre restaurants with a terrace overlooking the sea, surrounded by affluent Romanians, the first I'd seen close up. They reminded me of Argentines or other members of the South American ruling class, with the men's too-tasteful Armani T-shirts in beige and black and the women's bleached, stiffly coiffed hair.

Romulus was a little frightened by my bitchy withdrawal, but he let it sail past him and still exulted at the luxury of this resort experience. Afterward, as we walked toward the sea to catch the breeze, we saw four beautiful girls dressed in the same blue-and-white outfits handing out safe-sex information for Durex condoms. Spying Romulus, whose body looked limber and feline in his tight T-shirt and jeans, they galloped over to us and held out their brochures. They had no actual condoms, the Romanian economy being what it was. When they learned that I spoke English, they began confiding in me in good-natured giggles about Romulus. He was such a hunk, they said, he must have a frequent need for the kind of protection they were offering. Strangely, he kept himself from picking up on their flirtatious provocations. It was at that moment I began to suspect that he had something much more interesting on his mind.

I think there was a rock concert on the beach that night, and when we separated by accident, I didn't bother looking for him. Instead, I chose to wander among the young Romanians yelping, clapping and dancing in the sand, until around midnight, when latent exhaustion from the last few days suddenly filled me with vertigo. I stumbled back to the room and fell asleep immediately. When I awoke at eleven the next morning, Romulus was gone again. Hiding sulking eyes behind sunglasses, I went to the terrace for breakfast, and brought along Panaït Istrati's
Kyra Kyralina.
At sundown I was still immersed in it and had even brought it to the beach, then later to lunch and cocktails. I was so enchanted by the book, which was written in the pseudo-archaic style of a fable, that I kept reading—I couldn't put it down. Gradually the novel's playful tale began whispering quirky alternatives to the maudlin state I was in. It was as if the story were meant just for me.