Trouble in Transylvania (11 page)

“Yes, a pity,” Dr. Gabor said, pulling out his stethoscope and listening to my heart.

“Had he been here long, at the spa, I mean? I know he invented Ionvital. Was he the director here?”

Margit had returned and with quick movements had the blood pressure cuff around my arm and was pumping it up. Her eyes looked everywhere but at my face. “Yes, but only in name. He had his own treatment center, in Bucharest, very famous. He just came here from time to time to check on us.”

Why was Margit perspiring? Beads of sweat gathered on her forehead.

“Do you speak English?” I asked her.

“Oh, no. No, no,” she stuttered, and took the cuff off.

“He was Romanian, wasn’t he? Not Hungarian?”

“He was the only Romanian here,” said Dr. Gabor, motioning me to sit down and starting to bend and tap various joints. “We are all Hungarian at the treatment center. Magyar.”

“That must have caused some problems then?” I heard a distinct creaking coming from one of my knees as Dr. Gabor manipulated it.

“It’s the beginnings of rheumatoid arthritis,” he said.

“What!”

“It’s normal as you age. You can dress now.” He sat back down at his desk, and Margit dashed out the door again. “Are you taking medication? Do you have other health problems?”

“No, really, I’m fine. I mean—I’m interested in this Ionvital treatment.”

“Yes, I can give you shots, or pills if you prefer. And you say you want to take the full course of treatment? Two weeks of baths and massage and mud, you will be a new woman. A recent widow?”

“Very recent.” I was suddenly inspired. “André’s parents were Hungarian émigrés, that’s why I feel a great kinship with the Hungarians, wherever they may be: in America, in Hungary, in Transylvania, in the Czech and Slovak Republics, a great and wonderful people.”

“Then you know, you know about Transylvania, our sad history,” he said. His handsome, sympathetic face lit up. “We are a different race, we are not of the Orient, we belong to Mitteleuropa. That is where we turn for civilization—to Vienna, to Prague, not to Bucharest or Sofia or Istanbul. You know the work of Václav Havel and Milan Kundera? Josef Škvorecký, Czeslaw Milosz?”

“Oh certainly…”

“Yes, of course you do. They are great men. And what they write is our culture too. Everything is translated into Hungarian, we know what is happening in Central Europe, the world.
That
is the civilization we belong to, we Transylvanian Magyars. The Romanians, they are ignorant of great literature and democratic ideals. Such authors are not translated into Romanian. The Romanians, the Serbs, the Slavs and the Greeks—they are all corrupt, all writing only lies. But the Germans, the Hungarians, the Czechs, they write the truth. The Romanians only write lies.”

“Why do they lie?”

“It’s the Orthodox church. From the beginning it was all symbols and icons, corruption and power and
spying.
Byzantine thinking. How else could a man like Ceauşescu come to power in Romania? The worst dictator in modern times after Stalin.” He suddenly shook his fist at the wall. “Are you listening? You are
liars
!”

“Securitate?” I asked. “Still, after the revolution?”

“Hah, the revolution,” he said. “We will have a revolution when the Magyars throw the Romanian communists out of Transylvania.” He looked pleased with himself. “I have a dossier this tall, every day a black mark.”

Margit had come back in with a thin piece of paper, the kind I’d seen other patients carrying around.

“So. Margit has put together your schedule. Every morning a warm saline bath, then you go to the mud packing and to the shower massage. You take the galvanic bath every other day, more often is not good.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to shriek that I wouldn’t touch the galvanic bath with a ten-foot (and certainly not a metal) pole, but I figured that I had to get to the scene of the crime somehow.

“It’s too late now,” he said, looking at his watch. “Treatment is over. But you can start tomorrow morning, eight-thirty. Now, you want to get the Ionvital shot every day?”

“Tell me again, what’s in it?”

“Procaine, you know, like Novocain, for your teeth? It affects the metabolism positively. You’re having your menopause? You’ve finished?”

“I’ve had a hot flash or two.”

“Ionvital will help you with your glandular upheaval. Here,” he added, seeing that I looked less than convinced. “I look for something in English for you to read. Margit,” he called. “Every time I turn around that girl is gone. She is so restless.” Margit came back in and Gabor said something in Hungarian that made her look even more vivaciously anxious. She rummaged around in a file cabinet and came up with a lurid orange pamphlet that said
GERIATRIC CURES IN ROMANIA
and another titled
IONVITAL: THE ANSWER TO AGING?

“Read these,” Gabor said, “and we discuss more tomorrow.”

“Is everyone here getting shots?” I asked.

“You mean the foreigners? Oh yes, the foreigners are my specialty. The Vanderbergs, very regular patients. And Frau Ackermann, she comes here for ten years for the shots. They have a mild euphoric effect,” he added thoughtfully.

“Do you take them?”

“Me!” He seemed surprised. “Oh, no. Not yet. Dr. Pustulescu, he took them. He was eighty-nine.”

There was a knock on the door. It was Bree. “Are you all right in there?”

Clutching my pamphlets and the schedule of treatments, I stood up and shook Dr. Gabor’s hand. Margit had vanished again.

“Rheumatoid arthritis,” I told Bree, in my best elderly widow voice.

Around five o’clock Nadia and Eva rolled up in Nadia’s Dacia. Jack and I were sitting on a bench in front of the Arcata Spa Hotel, enjoying the sparkling pine-scented air and the late afternoon sun on the lake. We had already made several acquaintances: a woman who had a cousin in Miami, her daughter, who taught English at an elementary school, and a small boy with whom we shared a bar of Hungarian chocolate. I hadn’t seen anything of Bree since my recent widowhood, but Gladys was to be intermittently glimpsed around the perimeter of the lake with her dogs. There were now seven, each blacker and larger than the next.

The Dacia halted with a shudder and Eva and Nadia got out, both carrying greasy chunks of metal. Nadia was covered in oil and had a happy, satisfied smile on her round face while Eva, usually so neat, looked as if Nadia had driven over her a couple of times. She had streaks of grease across one cheek and in her blond hair.

“Did you fix it?” Jack asked.

In English Nadia crowed, “It’s simple problem, easy solved.” She held up a blackened little metal tube. “I get sister husband to find this one for us.”

Eva said, “My car is ruined, it’s completely ruined. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She just unscrewed and took apart everything. She was going to leave these parts on the side of the road. I don’t know what they are, but I know they were in the engine. They must be there for a reason.”

“No, no, Eva,” Nadia said, unruffled. “It is
this,
this part that is problem. It is
nothing
! I fix plenty cars. You got to in Romania. Now I go in my office, call sister husband, he finds new one.” She remembered our other problem. “Gladys okay? No more police come today?”

“I’ve been to see Dr. Gabor,” I said. “He thought it would be a good idea for me to take some treatments. I start tomorrow. He’s quite the Magyar patriot, isn’t he?”

“You take the treatments, good!” said Nadia. “You stay here.
C’est bon,
very good. Then we take some sightseeing trips in the afternoons. To Bicaz Gorge. Sighişoara to see birthplace Dracula. Only ten dollars, hard currency, per day.”

She vanished with the metal tube into her office, in high good humor.

Eva decided to leave too. She went off muttering, “How are we going to get back to Budapest? I can’t just leave my car in Transylvania. The Romanians will vandalize it.”

I’d been wondering when we would see the Snapps. The next thing I knew Archie was taking a photo of me and Jack.

“Surprise!”

“Surprise,” Jack said, with a cautious glance at me, as if to say, He
looks
familiar but…

“Jack, you remember Archie, from the Gellért.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “During the attack of the Gypsy violinists.”

“Jack, that’s right! The Australian!” Archie said enthusiastically, sitting down beside us with his Nikon, tape recorder and steno pad. “Great to see you again, Jack. I’m the editor of
The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner,
back in Michigan. I’d love to interview you about Oz—isn’t that what you folks call it? And Cassandra—I never got a chance to tape you on the train…”

“I hope that’s not why you got me to Arcata,” I said.

Archie looked briefly troubled. “No, it’s this Pustulescu mess. Of course it was some kind of accident; he was probably a heart attack waiting to happen, but what bad luck for Gladys to pull the trigger, so to speak, him being the Drug Czar of the spa and all. He’s the inventor of this longevity stuff called Ionvital, you know. Gladys swears by her shots, but I’ll reserve judgment. It’s the way you live that keeps you young—like you Cassandra, always on the move, that’s the ticket. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m sure not tempted to try the galvanic bath
now.
And we’re going to stick by Gladys, make sure nothing happens. I’ve got a few connections in Bucharest, got to know the consul there and of course our lawyer Eugen, they can help set things straight. If worst comes to worst, I’ll get in touch with a wire service, make sure the news gets out.”

Archie Snapp reminded me of someone’s kid brother, of the boy at school who wasn’t as smart or as talented as his older siblings, and so made up for it by being overly eager and agreeable. His brown-gold eyes were like polished agates under his thinning but still shiny shock of brown hair. You looked at him and thought: Norman Rockwell, 1932. Today, in the warm afternoon, he wasn’t wearing his soft felt hat, but he had on a handknit sweater-vest over a white long-sleeved shirt with cufflinks. I hadn’t seen cufflinks since my Irish grandfather died in 1956.

Cathy Snapp had seen us and came quickly over, pulling Emma by the hand. Her dark blond hair hid most of her face, which had developed a bad case of acne, probably due to all the French fries at the restaurant. Her sweatshirt pictured a haggard Dostoyevsky. Emma wore jeans and a sweatshirt too—I hadn’t known that Mozart sweatshirts came that small. As usual Emma was silent, and carrying her violin case close to her heart. She didn’t appear to recognize me, but with Emma it was hard to tell.

“I’ve been looking for Bree,” said Cathy. “We were supposed to play cards.”

“She’s around,” said Jack. I looked at her suspiciously.

“It’s a good thing I gave her your phone number, isn’t it, Cassandra?” Cathy asked. “With everything going on.”

“I hope I can help. I don’t think Gladys is in big trouble.”

“But did Dad tell you about the other stuff, about Zsoska? That’s how we wound up to Arcata in the first place.”

“Zsoska?”

“Kit-Kat, Emma is looking tired to me,” Archie broke in. “And so do you.” He turned to me and Jack. “We went for an excursion on the bus today to a wonderful little village where they make pottery and sell it. I love folk art and crafts! Anyway, Kit-Kat, I think you’d both better lie down for a little nap before dinner.”

“A nap! But Dad…”

“You can read to Emma. Don’t let her practice.”

“Dad!” But she was still of an age and nature to be obedient, though resentful, and she turned in a huff, pulling Emma after her.

As soon as the girls had left us, Archie said to me, “You know, Cassandra, what say we do our interview right here and right now? I know my readers would love to hear about your life. The life of someone who’s never settled down. From Kalamazoo to Timbuktu. And you’re not a spring chicken anymore, how do you do it?”

He turned his tape recorder on and looked at me, boyishly expectant.

Jack howled with laughter.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who is Zsoska, and what does she have to do with Gladys and Pustulescu?”

“Zsoska doesn’t have anything to do with Gladys,” Archie said. “She works here in Arcata.”

“So?”

Archie paused. The merest hint of worry darkened his agate eyes. “She’s also Emma’s birth mother.”

“Here? In Arcata?”

“She just works here. She lives in a small village called Lupea. We’re hoping to visit it on one of our bus trips.”

“But how did you track this Zsoska down?”

“Well, first we went to Tîrgu Mureş. That’s the city where Lynn and I adopted Emma in the first place. We didn’t get her from an orphanage, but from a hospital. They still had all the records. Apparently the mother had moved back to her parents’ home in Lupea.”

Archie looked at his tape recorder. Like most journalists he was more comfortable asking questions than answering them. “We’re going to introduce ourselves pretty soon. We’ll figure something out… make everybody happy… Emma will start talking, you’ll see, it’ll be fine… But what I’m really interested in, Cassandra—or can I call you Cass?—is whether or not you make a living as a translator. Is it lucrative? And if you translate from Spanish to English, why are you in Eastern Europe, on your way to China? Is travel just a way of life for you? Are you running away from something? Or are you just interested in geography and culture? Do you still feel American?”

“She’s traveling to forget,” Jack said with a solemn look. “She’s a widow.”

Damn that Bree! Why had she told Jack what I’d said to Dr. Gabor? Now I’d never live it down.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Archie, and there was a sincerity in his face that made me even more embarrassed.

“Well, he wasn’t a very nice man,” I said, with a vicious look at Jack. “We often thought of divorcing before his… fatal accident. Now about this Zsoska…” I was imagining a baby-faced girl who’d made a mistake a few years ago, one of the bath attendants perhaps, a slight, dark girl with big eyes and bangs. “You’ll have to be careful how you tell her, don’t you think? It might be a terrible shock.”

“Perhaps you could help us, Cass,” he said. “Or you,” he included Jack.