Trouble in Transylvania (22 page)

“So, we got communists. Gheorghiu-Dej, big Stalinist. Soviets tell us to collectivize farms, make big industry. Then Ceauşescu comes in 1965. First there is some freedoms, but soon bad times. More he get, more he want. Bad to worst. Real craziness starts. Total insanity. No talking to foreigners. No passports. Taxes for not enough children. Women dying abortions. Ceauşescu big man in world politics. He stand up to Soviets, support Czechs in 1968. Americans love him, Nixon visits. Soviets say, Fine, Romania, no more good friends with you! Hah! Ceauşescu says, okay, we do everything ourselves. We pay foreign debt through export, thank you very much. We don’t need food here. We don’t need electricity. We don’t need petrol for cars. We are miracle people, we live on air.”

“I’ve just been talking to Dr. Gabor about the rights of the Hungarian minority,” Archie interrupted. “He says all the Romanians suffered under Ceauşescu, but the Hungarians suffered the most.”

“That man, he got one idea, one idea only,” Nadia said, her voice rising. “And that to make tourists hate Romania. Do we treat him bad here in Arcata? No! We Romanians are the ones to suffer. He is king of Arcata, that man.”

Archie continued scribbling. “So you’re not in favor of Hungarian nationalism, Nadia?”

“I am in favor peace and quiet! We have been through plenty. Let’s just shut up now and be friends.”

“Romania has sure been through the wringer, all right,” Archie agreed. “But wouldn’t you say that things are getting better, Nadia? Ceauşescu’s gone, the Soviet Union has disintegrated. You’ve held democratic elections. Maybe not everybody is happy with Ilescu, but he’s not as bad as Ceauşescu. Abortion is legal again. People are free to travel.”

“Yes, yes,” Nadia said, her habitual optimism reasserting itself. “All this is true. We are dreaming of freedom for years and years. Now we have it and we must be grateful. Romania has many problems still, but when things are bad here, I always say to myself, thank you, God, at least we are not Yugoslavia.”

In the back seat I remembered what I had been doing before the commotion with Emma had started.

“So, Cathy,” I asked. “Do you know anything about electricity?”

“Like what?” She was slumped in a corner of the car, worrying her split ends and about two-thirds of the way through
The Magic Mountain.

“Well, like, what is it? How does it work?”

“Didn’t you ever take any science classes?”

“Science wasn’t invented when I was growing up. We just had miracles. And anyway, I never went to class. I was a juvenile delinquent.”

“Huh,” she said, clearly not believing me. “So what do you want to know?”

“When we get back to Arcata, I’d like you to come with me.

It was late in the afternoon, and all the patients had left the clinic. A few attendants were mopping the floors, but no one asked us what we were doing down in the corridor that led to the galvanic baths. I didn’t know if they were always so lax, or if they recognized us as peculiar foreigners who wouldn’t understand the regulations anyway.

“So this is the galvanic bath?” Cathy said. “Wow. You know that guy Galvani, the one with the frog legs? It must be named after him.”

“Frog legs?”

“Sure. Back in the eighteenth century. He found out that he could make dead frogs twitch their legs by touching nerve points with metal. It was one of the first electrical experiments. But he got it kind of wrong. He thought the convulsion came from the frog tissue, that there was some electrical life force inside. The electrical charge really came from contact between the two different metals. The guy who came after him, Volta, proved that. Volta figured out that different metals have positive and negative charges, and they produced a current. If he stacked up a bunch of negative and positive metals he could make a battery. Before he did that, Galvani’s nephew used to go around demonstrating this animal electricity on the cut-off heads of cows and sheep. He could make their eyes roll and nostrils twitch. Sometimes he got hold of a corpse and gave it an electric jolt and the arms and legs moved. Mark did some experiments like that once.”

“Not with corpses, I hope.”

“Frog legs,” said Cathy. She looked happier than I’d even seen her. “Just like old Galvani.”

I quieted my squeamish stomach, and pointed out the voltage meter. “As I understand it,” I said, “the meter is set to a very low voltage, and the current runs through these wires into the tubs of water. You get a slight shock, but not much. I tried it, it’s more like a tingling.”

“It must be really low,” Cathy observed, “because if your hair dryer falls in the tub, that’s only 110 volts and that’s enough to do you in. What’s this?” She looked at the meter. “Looks like it doesn’t go up very high. Whatever the voltage is in this place it’s probably transformed down pretty low.”

Cathy went over to the tub contraption, and stuck her finger in the water and then up to her lips. “Distilled, I bet. Okay, you can see here how they’ve worked it out. With all four limbs in the water you’re all set. They’ve got your pathway going in a circuit, I see,” she muttered.

“What do you mean, your pathway?”

“Well, you know when people get electrocuted by a high-voltage wire or by lightning? The current enters at one point, like the head or the hand, and exits through the feet, for instance. It’s more dangerous when the current traverses the heart. So how was Dr. Pustulescu doing it?”

“He put both arms in.”

“That shouldn’t have knocked him off, unless there was a different amount of voltage in each tub. I’m not sure if you could get that to happen through a single source, though.” Cathy went back to the voltage meter and fiddled with it. In a couple of minutes she had the back of it off and was peering inside.

“Is there a way you could increase the voltage?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “The electricity is coming from the usual source, you know, through wires, on an alternating current. You wouldn’t be able to increase the voltage past the transformed supply. This isn’t the transformer, only the meter. The transformer’s somewhere else in the building, I guess. If you put in a new transformer or just removed the old one, a lot more voltage would get through. When Mark and I used to make transformers we would put the coils of wire side by side. The more coils, the more voltage you’d get.”

“So there’s something besides this meter, a transformer, that someone could have fiddled with? Where would that be?” Cathy shook her head. “We could go look for it,” she offered. “But even if somebody fooled around with the transformer, they must have fixed it back by now. They would have had to have fixed it back right away if they weren’t going to get caught.”

We both stared thoughtfully at Dr. Pustulescu’s Nightmare Bathing Machine.

“What I don’t get,” said Cathy, “is how you’d make sure that the right person was electrocuted.”

“That,” I said, “continues to be the great problem.”

As we left the basement of the clinic, I noticed Cathy’s shoulders begin to droop again.

“Thanks for the help,” I told her. “You’re way ahead of me on the scientific front. Weren’t all those hours making dead frogs jump worth it?”

Cathy sighed. “My dad says, if I ever want to be a writer like him, I’ll be glad I had an interesting childhood.”

“Do you want to be a writer?”

“I’d rather be a doctor,” she said. “But mostly I just want to be a normal person.” She sighed again. “Did you have an interesting childhood, Cassandra?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was crowded and eventful though.”

“My dad says he wants to make up for everything he didn’t have when he was growing up. Is your dad like that?”

“My dad died when I was fourteen.”

“That’s sad,” she said. “I’ve never known anybody who died. Anybody close to me, I mean.”

I looked at her with her adolescent acne, strong nose and floppy hair. My name had once been Cathy too, and before my father’s heart attack I could have said the same.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a bottle of orange soda in the lounge. You can tell me the plot of
The Magic Mountain.
I can’t remember—does anything really happen in that book?”

“Not too much,” she said. “They talk a lot.”

It was porkchops and omelettes again for dinner that night. Eva was missing. Someone said she was supervising Nadia’s brother-in-law while he repaired the Polski Fiat; more likely she was making sure that he didn’t steal any car parts. Everyone else, except for Emma—and Zsoska, who wasn’t working—was there.

While Gladys filled everyone in on her brush with Romanian authority in the morning, I went over to Frau Sophie’s table. “May I join you, Frau Ackermann?”

“Aber ja,”
she said heartily, and ordered me a glass of vodka. With a conspiratorial wink she opened up her handbag and brought out a jar of pickled herring.
“Bitte,”
she said.

“Frau Ackermann,” I said. “You have been coming to Arcata for ten years, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I hope to retire here.”

She leaned closer and her reddish face beamed like a geranium over her green dotted dress. “I have a plan. I have been thinking of this many years and next year I will do it. The negotiations are now complete.”

I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. “Negotiations?”

“With my savings I have bought a house here in Arcata. A villa that I will turn into a small hotel, a
Gasthaus.
The Germans and Austrians will come back to Arcata if there is good food for them here. I will serve delicious food! Bratwurst and Bürenwurst and true Wienerschnitzel and Schweinbraten, with Knödeln and Kraut. There will be Spätzle, little liver dumplings, and lamb and mutton. We will make our own good rye bread and Kaisersemmel, and dozens of kinds of tortes and strudels. I will have pigs and sheep and a cow especially for cream, and a vegetable garden and an orchard. I will do some of the cooking, and I will hire others to help. Perhaps I will buy other villas. Once again, people will come to Arcata for the good air, the healthy walks and swims, the Ionvital treatments with Dr. Gabor. And for the good Austrian food.”

At that moment the Arcata Spa Hotel version of Wienerschnitzel appeared in front of both of us, its battered coat pale and soggy rather than golden yellow. It lay like a corpse on a funeral pyre of oil-soaked French fries.

“Grauslich,”
said Frau Sophie with a shake of her head. “When I open my
Gasthaus
we will have roasted potatoes, and the Wienerschnitzel will be crisp on the outside, tender on the inside…”

“There was just one thing I wanted to ask you, Frau Ackermann,” I said. “Did you go ahead with your galvanic bath treatment the morning of Dr. Pustulescu’s death?”

“Of course,” she said, through a mouthful of schnitzel. “But my treatment was delayed. They had to find another voltage meter.”

“So you’ve never experienced any problem with the galvanic bath?”

Frau Sophie had reached for the salt shaker and was dousing her fries. “Oh no,” she said. “I love how it makes me tingle.”

W
HEN WE CAME
out of the dining hall, it was clear that something in the weather had changed and a storm was building. Archie went off with Gladys to feed her dogs some table scraps, while I settled down with Jack, Bree and Cathy in the lounge.

There was still no sign of Eva, but I wasn’t worried, yet. After all, she’d said we would get together “later” and it was not even eight o’clock.

The lounge had a floor of linoleum and seats of orange embossed plastic. It had the feel of an American bowling alley coffee shop, circa 1950. At the counter there was always a handful of men drinking coffee and
ţuicǎ,
and in the booths were a few young people with Cokes or sometimes a man and a woman, she with her orange drink, he with his beer.

There was a sign outside the lounge that recommended proper attire in several languages. The English version said, “They require obligatory dress.” No one had said anything about some of us but we definitely did not fit in, especially Bree with her torn tee-shirts, nose ring and chain necklaces, and a tattoo on her shoulder that was occasionally visible. They had heard of such things in the West, perhaps, but not on the streets of Arcata. Jack, of course, was appearing in public in all sorts of interesting combinations. This evening she had on a type of Moroccan djellaba that made her look like a high priestess.

“Tonight is Beltane,” Jack said. “Too bad it’s going to rain.” She looked out the window, where dark clouds had intensified the twilight and where the trees in the park in front of the hotel were swaying like the first dancers in a long festival procession.

“Isn’t that some Irish celebration?” I asked.

“Celtic. It’s one of the four quarter festivals of the old Goddess-based year: Lammas in early August to mark the first loaves made from the first harvested grain; Hallowmas, which is the time when the crops die and the Goddess goes underground; Candlemas in February to signal the reawakening of the earth and the return of the Goddess; and Beltane, May Eve, to celebrate the flowering of the land.”

“I saw a program on public television about that,” said Cathy shyly. “It was about Avebury in England.”

“That’s right,” said Jack. “We went to Avebury on this tour I just did. I can’t believe I lived in England all those years and never knew about the sacred sites. Avebury was the center of megalithic culture in Britain. They acted out the seasons of the year in rituals at Silbury Hill and the Long Barrow and inside the henge at Avebury itself. The festivals correspond to the Goddess’s life story, to the seasons in a woman’s life: childhood, youth, maturity, old age.”

Jack glanced around at the four of us. “Look at us, we’re living illustrations of the festivals. Cathy is Candlemas, the time of initiation, when puberty rites are celebrated; Bree is Beltane, when the Goddess of Love reigns over symbolic weddings; I’m Lammas, symbolizing the lush ripening of nature, the Harvest Goddess, and…” She looked over at me and paused, “… and Gladys is Samhain, Mother-into-Hag, the Winter Goddess, the Lady of the Tombs.”

“What about me?” I complained.