The Romanian (9 page)

We're entering the country the way Queen Marie entered it, from Budapest. The asphalt looks darker than I'm used to—liquid and black like oil. So do the tree trunks, smudges in the failing light. The grass of the fields looks greasy, coarse and swollen, a species I've never seen. There are big blotches of black in front of my eyes, and the feeling of being in a black-and-white movie.

Inside this movie, he's changed. Friendly and familial, he studies the map, patiently encouraging me when I grind the gears of our standard shift or, astonishingly, gently clasping the back of my neck or shoulder while I drive, as if we're a real couple. He's grateful that I've decided to take him to Romania to renew his visa. He keeps repeating it.

The buses crowded with the poor, their gigantic cloth-wrapped bundles and rolled rugs clot the entrance to the border crossing. We inch forward. The Romanian immigration officer in his gray uniform, in his glass cabin above the car, bends forward to study us. His glance is deadened yet full of queer complexities. It's obvious that his boredom has achieved an imperturbable contempt, but I can tell that he's proud of his imagined Byzantine cleverness, whether or not this really exists.

It's not that he has any respect for law or order. He merely wants to protect his position, project an identity. If we're drug dealers or holders of false passports, it might behoove him to unveil us; yet the possibility of his having to account for it even if we are seems unlikely, so he's filled with an unbudging laziness, civil-servant style. He's made up a game for himself with at least a minimum of amusement, supposedly in the name of doing his duty. It involves harassing those who look used to being interrogated.

He hands my American passport back to me immediately. Then he takes his time with Romulus's. The alleged problem is that Romulus's passport looks too trampled, rain-streaked. He'd put it in his shoe during one of his flights across Macedonia. The officer thumbs through it again and again, pretending to gauge the thickness of the paper between thumb and forefinger, making a show of focusing on the ink where the rain has made it run, folding the bent corners back and forth and looking meaningfully into Romulus's eyes. He clearly has little expertise in identifying counterfeit documents, but he's casually hoping his act of suspicion will make Romulus edgy and break him if he's concealing anything. He even locks the passport in a drawer while he does a lazy search on his computer. His movements are impudently slow. Then he looks up from the computer screen and asks Romulus to explain what he's been doing in Hungary for such a long time.

Working at a travel agency, Romulus answers. And where is he living? With his girlfriend. And why is he crossing the border with this . . . person? The officer gestures at me as if at an object. Romulus tells him that I'm a writer and that he's come along to translate for me.

The officer takes the passport out of the locked drawer and begins the ritual of thumbing through it again, peering periodically at Romulus with a crafty look. He does a poor imitation of someone studying the official stamps on each page. And why have you come back and forth so many times?

Isn't it obvious? I want to shout. He needs to renew his visa once a month to stay in Hungary.

I keep coming back to visit my family, says Romulus. My mother's sick.

Finally, the officer hands him back the passport, staring rudely in another direction at the same time. We drive through. I'm in Romania.

ACCORDING TO ALICE-LEONE MOATS, one of several 1950s journalists with a gossipy appetite for the scandal of King Carol II and his Jewish mistress Lupescu, the Hohenzollern side of Carol's family were squeamish about sending their German blood to Romania. They feared its Oriental and Byzantine elements and were shocked by its Latin sensualities. The country had been free from Turkish rule and Greek exploitation for not even fifty years when Carol's father Ferdinand came to the throne, and they literally thought it was contaminating their royal family.

“I feel safe here,” Romulus says, as the road becomes narrower and pitch black. Other cars shoot past at eighty miles per hour. Their style of passing is to do it whenever, especially on curves. It's up to me and the car coming from the other direction to slow down, or even drive off to the shoulder of the road until they're safely by. After the last car passes, all around me is dark, empty. The small, callused hand caresses the back of my neck. Elation and fear peak through me in jagged cardiogram bumps. My hands tingle.

King Carol's mother, Marie, called Missy, came to this country with her heart in her mouth at the tender age of seventeen, from a sheltered, rural English childhood. Her first experiences of the family into which she'd married felt unreal, when, in 1893, shortly before her marriage, she was taken to meet her mother-in-law-to-be, the poet queen Elisabeth, also called Carmen Sylva. On a bed to which she had taken in a fit of hysterical paralysis, Carmen Sylva lay all in white, beneath an enormous skylight, which had been cut into the ceiling to allow her to paint. Missy was clasped into her arms, and a feeling came over her:

“. . . A curtain was being lifted, giving me a glimpse into a world unknown to me, where all things had other names, other meanings. . . .”

I feel the same way. It seems impossible to trace my path back to my first sight of Romulus, some three months ago. How have I gotten this far? As our car speeds deeper into the country, on a route paralleling that of the Orient Express that brought Missy to Romania in 1893, the shadows of branches make fleeting, eerie patterns on Romulus's face. All familiar contexts are peeling away. The air is coated with bizarre possibility. New York, my mother and the other benchmarks of my life are being drained of color. All I can feel is this funnel of desire through which I'm speeding.

A little past the border, in the city of Arad, a gang of street children pound on our car. All we have is Hungarian money, but I open the window to hand some of the coins to the youngest, who throws them back as hard as he can at my face, bruising my temple. Shakily, I pull the car over to rub it. Romulus is pale with embarrassment, but not with fear. As more children run to the car, he shouts coldly at them in Romanian and they retreat, but only a bit. They hang at the edge of the road and offer a passion play of misery, chanting and whining in an imitation of pitiful piety. “Ignore them,” Romulus says in a clipped voice.

To our left is the municipal building, outlined in white Christmas lights. A taxi is parked in front. “Ask him for the best hotel.”

Romulus climbs out of the car, resorting again to his efficient swagger. There is much discussion and pointing. Returning, he tells me, “The most expensive is the Intercontinental, about a hundred meters down this street.”

We pull up at a dilapidated high-rise. Across its top, in letters that are askew, is the word “Intercontinental.” We've been driving for four hours. I'm not at all used to standard shift, and I'm exhausted. “Go in and get a room. I'll get our stuff.” When I come in, dragging all the bags, Romulus informs me, “It's about thirty dollars.”

“Okay.”

Something clicks in the head of the tall, thin desk clerk, dressed in a funereal black suit. “He says now,” Romulus tells me, “that the fee for foreigners is different. Now the price is seventy-eight dollars.” Rage simmers through me, but I take out my credit card. We change some money for Romanian lei.

Our room is large enough, with two small beds, thin mattresses and some wood paneling. Mildew fringes the red-flocked wallpaper. “It's a nice hotel,” says Romulus.

The enormous restaurant is red as well, with those narrow, high-backed upholstered chairs I'll eventually see all over Romania. Stiff, spotlessly white tablecloths are set with heavy plates and silverware, thick linen napkins. Above our heads hangs a baronial wood-and-iron chandelier, a sort of Roger Vadim version of something rural and aristocratic. Our food is incredibly delicious, and Romulus shows a new confidence in handling the waitresses, never exhibited in any of the Hungarian restaurants we went to. We taste
ciorba de burta,
a velvety tripe soup with cream and butter; mamaliga, a spongy polenta plastered with fragrant sheep cheese; and a mixed grill that tastes fresh enough to be the booty of that afternoon's hunting party. My reactions are exaggeratedly ecstatic, with all the naiveté of the gung-ho greenhorn, and Romulus puts up with them with princely gloating. I choose to take this infantilizing of me as a triumphant sign of intimacy, start feeling happy about my “wifely” role.

As Romulus's bubbly American wife, I suggest we see downtown Arad before we go to bed, so we head along the main street past shuttered shops until we come to a courtyard with a place that looks like a tavern. All that are left on the street are children and a pack of insistent money changers and fences, offering cut rates for dollars, marks and forints or trying to sell battered tape players, an old flashlight, a torn plastic agenda. Romulus seems more and more tense about my bright-eyed, overly appreciative rubbernecking. When street kids ask us for money, tugging my sleeve and even pushing their faces against my belly, I take my camera out, intending to give them some money in exchange for a photo, but Romulus grabs it from my hand. “Do not take a picture of them,” he warns. “People could think you being a child molester.” I defy him and do it anyway. They pose, gloatingly holding up the bill I gave them the way Marius held up the scotch bottle. But it's obvious that crossing the border has brought about a change in Romulus's attitude about appearing with me in public. He's struggling, I realize, to find a legitimate image for our pairing. Delighted wifey just won't do. In fact, nothing will. Our intimacy as imagined by me starts to dissolve, and in its place is his uneasiness, which makes our dyad grotesque, awkward, illegitimate. The dissonance creates an alienated zoom view of myself. Suddenly I can see us standing in the street, this blatantly underclass hustler with sharp, cheap clothes, and this pudgy bourgeois American, twice his age yet so much less hardened, and I know the open book we must present. My only alternative is proud defiance, a false show of independence in this unknown, possibly hostile environment. “I'm going in here,” I tell him, pointing at the tavern. “Are you coming?” He nods, and as he follows me I can see that he's reverted into a nervous bodyguard with an unmanageable charge, whom he sticks with out of a sense of honor, but who he wishes had never come here with him in the first place.

It's a nightclub with a traditional orchestra and a very good singer wailing a doina, while the audience sits at long picnic tables sopping up huge quantities of beer. Romulus is absolutely appalled by the way I march clumsily past the dozens of seated locals to an empty space and make a show of casually signaling the waiter. Everyone is staring at me, tense, startled, and although I now understand that every detail—my shoes, my bouncy walk, my comically assured look—is under scrutiny, I'm simmering with anger at his lack of solidarity. So I ostentatiously order us whiskey in booming English and make a show of avoiding his glance, of enjoying the music and the crowd with big, bold eyes and a smug smile. All the while, I'm becoming aware of the special compartmentalization of his life as a hustler in Hungary, which has to clash with his identity as a normal Romanian man on the home turf—a realization that opens a trapdoor in my stomach and sends me into a nauseating slide of cognitive dissonance. Valiantly trying to collect himself, my prince makes conversation. Do I like the music, he wants to know. I grunt a noncommittal answer. Finally, he looks at me wearily and says, “Do you know what are saying those people next to us?”

“ ‘ Look at the ridiculous fat American'?” I venture.

“No, they are talking an argument. The woman says, ‘And why not I go to Greece and work as prostitute if I have chance for more money you'll see ever in your life?' And he, her boy-friend, is saying he kill her on the spot if she is saying she will do. Until finally he says, ‘I don't care what you do.' That's what they say.”

The urgency of the story puts a dent in my bravado. But all I answer is, “Thanks for the translation.”

Out on the street, Romulus suggests that we return to the hotel, but I'm fueled by four whiskeys and have no intention of admitting my naiveté yet. “Look at that place over there,” I say, pointing at what seems to be a respectable-looking bar. As soon as we sit down at a table, a girl who looks fourteen signals me to her table, while two middle-aged hulks scrutinize me. “What does she want?” I ask Romulus. “She wants to talk to you,” he answers with a weary, vengeful passivity. When I sit down next to her, her hand shoots out, grabbing my member through the cloth of my pants. I can't pry it loose. Meanwhile, one of the bulky men in black suits towers nearby, watching with stern approval, irony. “Tell her to let go,” I say to Romulus through clenched teeth. He does, she releases me, we leave. “She was hoping getting you outside and then the guys in black to jump you,” says my friend, with grim, nearly pleasurable resignation. “I know because something this I used to do,” he adds slyly. I glance at him with disgust, and now, for the first time, he glows with pleasure, the pleasure of my disapproval.

By the time we get back to the mildewed room, I've really had it. I want my satisfaction. I move the night table into a corner and shove the beds together. “Is it all right in this country?” I ask acidly.

“Of course. Just push them apart in the morning.”

Lying on the bed, I watch the overlarge black turtleneck and the pants bagged at the knees and worn at the seat sliding off to reveal the body of reptilian economy, nearly hairless and terrifyingly compact. He leaps noiselessly into our tiny beds, and then the silky skin is gliding against mine; his legs, wiry and threatening as springs, are interlacing mine; his hard, dry, dirty hands sliding over my back. For me it's as if all the aggression and fear of the last couple of hours, all the longing, are about to be settled by one experience. I plunge my face into his neck, his armpit, savoring that tart, frustrated power transmitted by his odor. Is it loss, melancholy, steely resentment? I pull off his shirt and he dangles an arm backward in surrender. With tongue and teeth I begin slowly working on his nipples.