Trouble in Transylvania (12 page)

“Do you need a translator?” I asked. “Eva could help. Or Nadia. What language does she speak?”

“It’s not just the language problem,” Archie said nervously. “Truth to tell, we hadn’t quite thought through some of this. I’m afraid the Kit-Kat is a little upset…”

“Get to the point, man,” said Jack. “Where does she work here? Do you have a plan to try to talk with her?”

“Well, I thought, at one of the meals, one of the dinners, I might… She’s usually there at dinner. She’s one of the waitresses.”

“Well,” I said, looking at my watch. “I guess we’ll all have the chance to meet her soon.”

Dinner was better attended than lunch, but only slightly. Frau Sophie occupied her usual place and had been joined at the next table by the elderly Dutch couple, the Vanderbergs, who immediately ordered and drank several small glasses of gin. The Snapps had a table to themselves next to Gladys and Bree. Eva, Jack and I made up the fifth table in the huge dining hall. We were all close enough to talk.

The slender male waiter was there again, scrupulously attending to the needs of the Vanderbergs and Frau Sophie. He carried the usual napkin over one arm and moved swiftly on the balls of his feet. I hoped they tipped him well.

“Grüss Gott
!” Frau Sophie called over to us and pointed at her dish. “
Grauslich
!”

“She always says that,” said Bree. “Do you really think she likes it?”

“It means disgusting or horrible in German,” Cathy explained.

“Well, excuse me,” said Bree and turned away pointedly.

Bree was tarted up tonight in a leather vest over a torn Marlene Dietrich tee-shirt, and multiple chains and bracelets, while Cathy had exchanged Dostoyevsky for Willa Cather, albeit Willa with a small, experimental rip over her left brow. I suspected that Bree, having had no one her age to talk to, had turned to Cathy and now regretted it, especially since older and more interesting women had appeared. But I felt sorry for Cathy, suffering from adolescent skin eruptions, and now obviously hurt and unsure whether to act miffed or indifferent, or to redouble her efforts to please.

“I just meant…” said Cathy.

“Different cultures, different foods,” said Gladys. “They are a little heavy on the meat side of things though. You wouldn’t think, for such a poor country, they’d have so much pork. They could grow a nice crop of soybeans here. Tofu would be much more nutritious.”

Suddenly the swinging doors to the kitchen burst open and a big tigress of a woman stormed forth, plates in hand. In her early twenties, she was tall and strapping, with wide shoulders and aggressive hips. She had a mane of black hair frosted so that it looked striped with gold. With her high cheekbones, aquiline nose and contemptuous full lips, she wouldn’t have been out of place in a French restaurant in Manhattan, where her impoliteness would have been admired as hauteur. She clanked the plates down in front of the Snapps. Cathy glared at her, and Emma stared wordlessly at the omelette and fries on the table. “Thank you, Zsoska,” murmured Archie. “
Köszönöm
.”

She came over to our table and Eva spoke to her in Hungarian, perhaps asking for a menu. Zsoska shrugged and pointed at the other diners. All of them, except Emma and Bree, were eating pork chops. Bree was eating bread and cheese and Emma had her omelette.

Eva ordered a pork chop; Jack and I went for the omelette.

“Zsoska,” I could hear Archie call in a friendly voice. “Could you come over here a minute…?”

Zsoska ignored him and went banging back into the kitchen. She was as ferociously regal as a Tartar princess, and if she acted like this when she thought the Snapps were hotel guests, what was she going to be like when she found out they had adopted her daughter?

I
WOKE EARLY
the next morning from a deep sleep. The sun shimmered across the hills and valleys below, a long, unbroken stretch of light and dark green. I went downstairs to the bar, brought up a cup of coffee and settled down to read the material that Dr. Gabor had given me on the discovery and use of Ionvital.

The first pamphlet,
IONVITAL: THE ANSWER TO AGING?
, told me that the discovery of this miracle drug had been made in the early fifties, when Dr. Ion Pustulescu realized that a common anesthetic used in dentistry, that is to say Novocain, or in the world pharmacopoeia “procaine,” had other uses. Injected intramuscularly, the procaine solution, now known as Ionvital, had a “vitaminic-type effect” (this term was not defined) on the organism. Acting on the central nervous system and, as a result, on the activity of the entire body, the drug was capable of great regenerative powers. Diseases and processes connected with aging were all positively affected. These included degenerative rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, angina pectoris, arthritis, gastric ulcers, neuralgia and Parkinson’s disease. Improvement was also achieved with Alzheimer’s disease, senile dementia and multiple sclerosis.

Many years of administering Ionvital had shown that patients who took regular treatments suffered less from depression, improved their memories, and increased their physical and intellectual capacities. Hearing was improved, as well as the sense of smell. The skin’s elasticity and general appearance improved, the hair began to grow again, and brittleness in the bones was reduced while muscular strength increased. Wounds, burns and fractures healed more rapidly.

In the late fifties Dr. Pustulescu established a clinic outside of Bucharest, but eventually the treatment spread to other hotels and spas around the country. In spite of the great success of Ionvital in Romania, the treatment was subject to mixed reviews in the worldwide scientific community. Although Dr. Pustulescu traveled to conferences to present his findings, some journals were not impressed. In stuffy old England, for instance, it was impossible to make headway against the entrenched medical hierarchy represented by the
British Medical Journal.
But the
Daily Mail
published a series of illustrated reports on the medical successes of Dr. Pustulescu’s clinic. An unnamed Nobel Prize winner, when asked about the drug’s regenerative effects, was quoted as saying, “Anything’s possible.” And the secretary of a major German pharmaceutical company who visited the clinic several times exclaimed “
Donnerwetter
!” or “Thunderation!”

The rest of the brochure consisted of testimonials and excerpts from patients’ letters. A typical one read:

Dear Dr. Pustulescu,

Last October I celebrated my ninety-fourth birthday. I am in perfect health after sixteen nonstop years of treatment with Ionvital. My eyesight is still good, my hair is still abundant and black, and I walk perfectly straight. I do kung-fu every morning and have written a novel a year since beginning treatment. In my youth I was sickly and unable to hold down a job for long. Ionvital has restored to me my faith in humanity. Thank you for your years of unselfish work dedicated to helping the debilitated, the senile and the victims of old age. The world is very lucky to have you.

The pamphlet ended with these stirring words:

There used to be an old Romanian saying: “Old age is a fatal process and nothing can be done about it.”

Today, no one can say that. Ionvital has made the difference.

The second brochure,
GERIATRIC CURES IN ROMANIA
, also printed by rotogravure on thin slippery stock, gave a few more pseudo-scientific reasons for the curative powers of Ionvital: “Ionvital balances the neurovegetative discordance as well as glandular troubles provoked by old age; it is especially recommended in generalized distortions (the general phenomena of aging).”

There were photos of various clinics in Romania, mostly in and around Bucharest, where you could undertake the cure. I could hardly recognize the photo of the Arcata Spa Hotel, which must have been taken shortly after the place was constructed, twenty years before. The brochure rhapsodized about the setting and climate here in Arcata:

The natural surroundings in which the clinic is set as well as its comfort create a general atmosphere of relaxation, high mood and relief. Thanks to the stability of the weather, the action of the natural factors on the body is slightly exciting, favouring a rapid adjustment.

There was also a color photograph of Dr. Pustulescu in this brochure, and I scrutinized it closely. He was in a white lab coat, sitting behind an impressive desk. Although his lower face was sagging, his hair was still dark and his posture was alert and erect. It was impossible to guess his age in the photo or to know when it was taken. He could have been sixty or eighty or even, if he’d been taking his own medicine long enough, over a hundred.

It was eight-thirty and time for my first treatment. I still hadn’t decided whether to go for the Ionvital injections or not. Was it better to become a “victim of old age,” a passenger on a steadily moving train to the final destination? Or to turn into a living mummy with black hair and eyes that had seen too much? To see your entire generation wither and die around you while you became an ossified curiosity, kept alive by Ionvital shots? It sounded more lonely than anything. On the other hand, an extra twenty or thirty years were tempting, if only because the alternative was so final, and sometimes felt so close.

My fiftieth birthday was coming up in a few years. My father had died when he was fifty. I hadn’t been to half the places I’d wanted to visit, done half the things I’d imagined I would when I stared out my bedroom window as a rebellious teenager and vowed I’d get away, I’d
do
something with my life. What had I, after all, accomplished? My head was an encyclopedia of train and ferry schedules to places all over the globe; my name appeared on the copyright pages of the books I translated and occasionally on the title page or back cover. Compañeras I had plenty of, and lovers more than my share. But I had no real home, no country in spite of two passports, no pension, no savings, no security. I did have about a hundred and fifty close relatives, but they were all Catholic and they were sure I was going to hell.

Maybe I’d feel better if I had a bath.

My first treatment, the saline bath, was the one I enjoyed most, in part because it required nothing of me. The water came from the lake, and had been warmed to a toasty forty degrees centigrade. It had a slippery, salty feel; I felt my muscles relax, my joints unstiffen, my bones float restfully inside the whole elongated package of my body. Ilona, the Mistress of the Waters, had the sympathetic face of a Crimean nurse ministering to a young British soldier who had lost a leg on the battlefield. Plump and sweet, she spoke a bit of English and a bit of German in a lovely musical voice.

“Are you ill or only to rest?” she asked me.

“Just a little tired,” I said. “I’m thinking about taking the Ionvital shots… I was just reading about them… about Dr. Pustulescu… isn’t it a tragedy that he died? I would have liked to meet him.”

“No, you would not like,” she said decisively.

“But he was such a fine man, he did so much for humanity with his discovery.”

“No! He bad man, chase the girls.” She put on a lecherous expression that reminded me of Harpo Marx getting ready to speed after some unwary female.

“Chasing women at his age! How old was he, anyway?”

“Almost ninety! That too old for love!
And
if you say no, you lose job.”

“So some women actually said yes?”

“I never say yes. I am married. But other girls here, they got no choice. These baths the only work in Arcata except the dairy factory… Excuse…” She went off down the corridor to answer a call from someone in another bath.

I luxuriated uneasily. If Pustulescu had a reputation as a lecher and if almost all the workers at the spa were women, any or all of them could have planned the crime. It was a neat revenge fantasy: instead of an orgasm give him a jolt he’d never forget (or remember). A joint effort among his victims might explain why there was nobody but Gladys and Pustulescu in the galvanic bath room. But it didn’t explain how anyone knew he was going to be there that morning unless he’d told someone besides Gladys. And what
about
poor Gladys, on the verge of being charged with his death? Would the real culprit(s) come forward? Not likely.

Ilona came back and helped me out of the bath and gave me a thin sheet to dry myself with. “You don’t stay too long in bath. You faint,” she said. “Now you go to mud, yes?”

To mud, yes. The brochure had said the mud came from nearby, that it was “saprogenic” which, though I had no dictionary with me, I vaguely recalled as having something to do with putrefaction. “The mud is prehistoric,” Dr. Gabor had told me. “Like the Dead Sea. It has minerals. It is like estrogen.
Not
estrogen. But hormones. Good for women with problems in fertility.”

I descended to the underworld of the clinic, to the basement where, in subterranean shadow light, the mud wrapping took place.

This treatment was done on the assembly line: all the nine-thirty appointments—about a dozen women—entered at one time, and were each given a threadbare muslin sheet and a pair of plastic slippers. Two to a small cubicle, we undressed and lay down on our stomachs on tables draped in more soft, yellowed sheets. None of the attendants here spoke anything but Hungarian, which presented a problem in terms of cross-examination. Not that there was much time to chat. I hadn’t been on my table more than a few minutes when two women in heavy rubber aprons and thick rubber gloves came into the cubicle, wheeling a cart with big buckets of steaming black mud on it. Very rapidly they piled heaps of the mud on my back and legs and smeared it all over me. It smelled intensely like fertilizer, and I had to bite my lip so as not to cry out at the heat. Then they helped me turn over, and just as quickly slopped and smeared the mud up and down the front of my body. With practiced movements they wrapped me up tightly in half a dozen sheets. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than three minutes, and then they started on the woman next to me.