Stoker's Manuscript (6 page)

I thought it wise to keep silent my gratitude for growing up where I did, and not here.

Outside was another casualty of prolonged communism—street people. They dotted the sidewalks in all ages and both genders with cupped hands and distant stares, eyebrows down. Surely many of my fellow orphans resided among them. My emotional descent continued. An orphanage is not someplace you leave or graduate from; it is something you try to wash off yourself and hope no one notices the stain. I looked down a shopping street and saw the chief American influence, golden arches on a red background. And in a place where Christian Orthodoxy dominates, the electronic billboard landscape featured plenty of scantily clad women selling improved lifestyles to the conservatively dressed walking the streets. I thought it better to look down.

After I checked in at the hotel, Luc continued his tour guide duties as we took early dinner before a show at the Romanian Athenaeum Concert Hall, and I ended the night with a leisurely stroll through the tree-lined sidewalks in
Park. The time change, plus my natural nocturnal routine, found me looking out the hotel window at a church older than America—the Kretzulescu Church—when its bells chimed three
A.M.

Jet-lagged, I was not my sharpest when Luc met me for breakfast and took me to the train station. Leaving Bucharest from Gara de Nord train station, the Rapid train did not live up to its name. It was roughly the same speed as the Northwestern commuter line out of Chicago, stopping in each town.

Unlike in most major American cities, where leaving the city limits means entering the suburbs, here in Bucharest you left civilization behind, one block urban, the next rural. Agricultural land sits beside unspoiled, untilled land, and both rise and fall over gentle hillocks patched with random clumps of trees, mostly oaks. The rail line cut its own path, as golden and green hills grew taller with travel northbound.

There is a color pattern to Eastern Europe that the American eye will find different. Faded blue- and red-plastered buildings stand topped with faded red-tiled roofs. Gray wooden fences loosely mark territories around tiny farms, some wrapped in the old-world basket-weave pattern. Hay stands not stacked in bundles, but twisted into steeple shapes the size of outhouses. Tiny barns with witch’s-hat thatched roofs serve as storage sheds. Everywhere horse-drawn carts are piled with every transportable good, including families. Roads are really just paths loosely covered, no need for overdrive, and vehicles in four-wheel drive or low gear vie for space with horse-drawn carts.

Two hours north, the landscape on either side of the train deepened to wide verdant valleys, framed with forest-covered hills and rock outcroppings. I had reached the Carpathian foothills. None of this end of the range rises above the alpine tree line, the oaks and beech and sycamores crowding the hilltops, much like the American Blue Ridge Mountains. I was not ready for such beauty, as my youth had cast a pall over what little recollection remained of childhood. None of it felt like the home I remembered. To my adult mind, Michigan Avenue was home, the smell of Garrett’s Popcorn on a cold night the ultimate sensual memory.

Three and a half hours north perched the glorious old fortified city of
in a mountain pass saddle, our point of disembarkation. This was the common placement of fortresses and castles in Europe, with river-fed valleys on either side of the pass. In a typical layout, the medieval town had large churches at its zero intersections, plus a fortified monastery where citizens retreated while under attack. These great buildings had function first, fashion second. It was only after the Crusades that royal families made castles their stylish residences.

Luc guided me through the city’s arched entryway into the town square, centered on a huge old Lutheran church with its four-sided clock tower supporting a tall steeple, fortified walls protecting the city entrance, the monastery in walking distance.

The square
looked
ancient, most places needing paint or stucco work, usually both, and it appeared that vinyl windows had not penetrated the local weathered-wood market. All around swirled the clomping of foot and hoof traffic, people talking, the sounds of commerce, and the smell of inviting food. Underfoot lay cobblestone and brick, grouted with dirt.

This place was old long before our Constitution was conceived, I realized. What’s another century or two between paint jobs? We stopped at one of the many outdoor cafés and rested under an umbrella. I enjoyed the dark coffee and Luc’s silence. He seemed to understand that I was there for more than just the commerce.

Romania is the true cauldron of European bloodlines. From around the Mediterranean, people migrated over the centuries, along with visitors from India and the Middle East. From the Hungarian west the round-headed Magyars arrived, and from the Germanic north the light-featured Saxons, my relatives. There are the pointed features of Russian descent, the heavy beards from Asia Minor, and the dark skin of the Mediterraneans, usually seen in the Gypsies, or Roma. Women of all ages wore head scarves in this remote part of the country, usually not coordinated with the rest of their clothing, and unlike in Bucharest, here the attire suggested work over stylish leisure.

It was common to hear conversation held at unacceptably high volume. Patrons sat gesturing heatedly at the café tables, and though I expected a row, none followed. The round heads tended to sit in quietude and disregard their neighbors, and Luc took to flirting with our waitress, a young lady who looked to be his age. While I tried to look disinterested, they exchanged numbers. In the States, a young couple might point cell phones at each other and punch in numbers; here they still exchanged handwritten notes.

A small bus arrived. In its window, a sign read
BRAN PLATFORM
. Luc, after a final exchange with his newfound friend, motioned that it was time to go. We boarded and shared a bench seat behind the driver while the bus filled its twelve seats. Leaving
, we traveled a narrow path of a road and bounced and swayed for more than an hour. This took us twenty miles west to the town of Bran, where we dismounted into the old market on the valley floor.

Market
is a generous term for the wood slat structures in an outdoor bazaar that gave scant cover to all things agrarian. The language sounded familiar, and there were several words and phrases that I understood. The pace seemed lugubrious, and the average face was grim.

But no matter one’s placement in the Bran valley, your eyes always drew upward to the huge medieval structure sculpted directly out of stone, Castel Bran, otherwise known as Dracula’s Castle and the setting of the original
Dracula
novel. It looks as if a great solid rock disrobed under chisel, revealing a high-walled Gothic edifice beneath, its complicated roofline of red tile, and four uneven steepled corners. This all stood two hundred feet up on a spiral path that wrapped the mountain until reaching the bottommost of the castle’s six stories. Turrets and flanking towers gave relief to the long-sided curtain walls, with rounded corner towers gracing the four endpoints. A centered watchtower stood another five stories above the roof.

Prior to major renovation, any tourist could approach up the path to the front door and knock, a privilege since revoked and replaced with a guarded entrance gate at the mountain’s base. Luc was received by the guard, who closed the gate and showed us to a horse-drawn carriage, an open-top wagon with rubber-tired wheels and red side-mounted lanterns. A lone horse pulled us up the path. As the path spiraled up the mountain and rose above the trees, I looked out at the valley and wished our ride never to end. But end it did and deposited us at the entrance, a couple of dozen stone steps below the front door.

Of solid oak and a mere six feet tall, the door surprised me with its stunted size, allowing only a single entrant at a time. I knocked on the door . . . simply because I wanted to. Seconds later, the loud locking mechanism freed the door and a man stood back away from the light.

“Do come in, sir.” I recognized Arthur Ardelean’s voice.

“Mr. Ardelean.” I held out my hand and we exchanged greetings.

“Kindly leave your bags to the staff, Mr. Barkeley.”

If one could look like his voice, Arthur did, his face long with the jowls of an elder, eyes that turned down at the corners, hair black and retreating from a widow’s peak. He was tall and thin, with long arms and legs, and wore an ascot, much like the one I had expected to see in his envelope. He wore the shoes of a working man—blucher oxfords with a heavy leather welt. His hands were large, and his handshake grip belied his apparent age.

Arthur showed me inside, and I was taken by the entrance room’s smell, a mixture of old wood, fabric, smoke, and the cool breeze generated by stone walls. It looked to be a large gathering room with fifteen-foot ceilings and tall, narrow windows, sparse of furnishings but decorated with frescos and dark-colored tapestries. Underfoot a dense patterned rug led to a perimeter of wide, dark oak plank flooring. We traversed the room, a good forty feet in length, and stepped into an elevator while a young man tended to my bags. Luc took his leave and bid to rejoin us for dinner.

The elevator’s accordion doors closed before us, and I faced the stone texture of the shaft as we climbed. Judging height is challenging inside a slow-moving box, but I guessed we had reached the fourth story when the doors opened to a receiving room. I signed a guest book that rested on an old board table and, while tempted to peruse the pages, followed Arthur through arched doors into a hallway.

“Allow me to show you to your room first, Mr. Barkeley, so you can freshen for dinner.” He pointed me through large double doors at the end of the hallway to a corner suite, where three sides of picture window offered a startling view three hundred feet above the valley floor. Cool afternoon mountain breezes swept across the room.

Staring at the vista, I suddenly realized that Arthur had spoken.

“I’m sorry, pardon me?”

“I trust your accommodations meet with your expectations, sir,” he said.

I nodded, unable to find a worthy superlative.

“Dinner will be served in an hour, sir, and you need only to pick up the telephone should you need something.” He pointed to a black cradle telephone on a nightstand; it had no keypad.

After Arthur left, I noticed my bags had already been placed on the stands awaiting my arrival. Odd; it felt like we had taken the most direct route possible. A change of clothes followed a shower, and as much as I wished to explore the castle, I waited out the hour seated on the windowsill instead, looking all directions over the valley. I thought of the street people I had seen that day and, but for a fateful television documentary and the gracious hands of the avowed, how likely my fate would have followed the same path. Both stunned and humbled standing in that castle window, I finally understood how far I had risen from the stone cold floors of
’s rubble.