The Romanian (17 page)

Yet loss in this city is not a question of tangible artifacts. It's the very atmosphere of displacement, a hollowness of setting like a de Chirico dream. On the faces of some of the older people you can see the wizened traces of trauma, accentuated by current problems of poverty. Their eyes have a faraway look. Their body language is dominated by vivid memories, lives lost, which makes them seem only half here. Even the very young, who wouldn't be old enough to remember Communist repression or revolutionary violence, have a somnambulist manner, a pure stare as they walk through the streets. I think I see a numbed, almost blissful look on their faces that I associated before with the pastoral. It could be their isolation that gives them this expression of Edenic muteness. Few were allowed to leave the country during Ceauşescu's reign; and at this time, it's still next to impossible for them to visit Western Europe or America. They don't have the money, and it's very hard to get a tourist visa to any richer countries. What might be depression on their faces strikes me as the innocence of those who've never traveled, a life lacking the complications about which we more privileged complain. These may be the faces of people living in poverty, but they're as yet uncontaminated by the vacuousness of global capitalism.

The days in this city have begun to extend the heady displacement of my frequently codeine-filled nights. A few pills before bed prolong the REM period of my sleep, often producing the illusion that my eyes are open when they're closed. I see the room we're in just as it is, but peopled by characters and objects from my past and imagined future. Hopes and fears produce shadowy specters that waft through the air like dreams, toes barely grazing the floor. They're a symptom of the queer sense of rootlessness I feel here. This doesn't appear to be a city where Romulus and I can establish bearings. But maybe that's the point. Not only the unplanned clusters of buildings of several centuries contribute to the disorientation; it's also the people on the street, probably unemployed, who come across as floating in a kind of clear, viscous medium.

Within this world of fits and starts we gradually make our way to a gym in a run-down neighborhood south of Piaţa Unirii. Since Romulus has nothing to do, and since I'll be busy making money for us through translation, we thought that a gym might come in handy. After a labyrinthine walk through a half-deteriorated athletic center, we find the weight room, which is crowded with young men lifting impossibly heavy barbells. They ignore us totally, a nonchalance that borders on hostility and that only accentuates my feeling of living in a hallucination. When Romulus asks for an explanation of the hours and facilities, I can see him being drawn into their secretive mentality. Delicately but pointedly they pay no attention to my increasingly visible presence. I'm obviously such an enigma that they fear even to ask questions. Oddly enough, this pleases me. How many places have I been where people don't reveal their curiosity or other feelings about an American?

I can sense Romulus's brain being torn between our connection and the stringent codes of his fellow weightlifters. When they take us to the pool, the suspicious glares of the swimmers create an even greater tension. This time it feels as if they fear we're going to take their women. I find myself staring demurely at the tile floor rather than looking at a girl in a bathing suit. We pay the required twelve dollars each for a one-month membership, but by the time we're two blocks away, Romulus has decided not to exercise there.

As we walk through Piaţa Unirii, I say that the two shirts Romulus alternates weekly and doesn't wash nearly enough won't do, and offer to buy him another one. Inside the large, shabby galleries of the Unirea department store, merchandise is scanty. Salesgirls in black skirts and white blouses lounge against glass counters in such dreamy boredom they wouldn't notice a fly crawling across their faces. We take the escalator from floor to floor, encountering one nearly empty cave after another. I suggest we try Calea Victoriei instead. Its days of sumptuous, fashionable shops are over, but at least there are a few stores with Hungarian and Italian imports, even a Benetton. Romulus vehemently refuses. The high prices and the entitlement they presume fill him with a fury of insecurity. So for hours we thumb through the paltry acrylic merchandise at Unirea, while he seeks a shirt that will maintain his image as a street dandy. Nothing is right. Either he doesn't like the price, or the style isn't restrained enough for the particular pimp effect he wants.

Exhausted, I tell him I'll meet him at the cosmetics counter, where I cajole a sleepy yet guarded salesgirl into showing me the entire line of Gerovital. There are face creams and toners, face masks, eye creams, hand creams, body creams and foot creams. Some contain a magic substance said to slow or even reverse the aging process. It's called H3—later I find out it's buffered procaine. The Romanian gerontologist Ana Aslan, who developed the substance, is still a controversial figure, with some scientists claiming her work was a hoax and others—mostly in Romania—carrying on her studies. At any rate, I've already verified that the cream can produce surface miracles—it's the best moisturizer I've ever tried—so I buy three jars.

Lunch with Romulus at home fits into that strange time warp at which I've been hinting. It's only part of the chemically induced dream I extend from night to day. It's also like a trip into the past, as I haven't experienced anything like it since the late fifties, when I came home from school at noon for a hot meal. This anachronism only pushes me further into my shadow world of desire. It's nearly a hundred degrees, but that doesn't stop Romulus from frying lamb-and-pork
mititei
or spreading soft sheep cheese over mamaliga. Under the cabinet and its sixty-year-old spices, we sit at a fifties kitchen table like any working-class couple scarfing down a high-fat meal. After a glass of wine, an eerie domesticity settles over us. Fairy-tale as our world seems, it's getting narrower. Given the circumstances, Romulus as housewife is perfectly natural, as well as a discomfiting thought for us both.

Occasionally it strikes me that he must feel confined. But used to keeping his feelings to himself, he rarely expresses it. Nonetheless, at certain times of the day, grumpiness seems to take over. I try to tell myself that it's just a facet of his naturally reticent personality, despite the fact that every once in a while I sense an argument between us brewing, for no particular reason. I tiptoe around it, warmly coax him back into a good mood. What frightens me most is my own sense of not being able to tolerate an outburst. The idea of its happening seems unbearable.

Using hearsay and fantasy, I've been piecing together his nonprostitutional sex life, which fills me with fear and compulsion. I savor each story and add it to my repertoire. His body has become the number of women he seduced, their pubic hair, what their nipples were like, their buttocks, assholes and odors. Later this afternoon, they lightly envelop us in our hellishly hot bedroom as he lies naked on the bed in a near faint, puffing cigarette after cigarette and fiddling with the remote, while I explore his body with my hands and mouth.

His lassitude and muteness are so fascinating that I begin to snap pictures at close range. The flash exploding in the dark room produces surfaces that appear flawless and reveals his armpits, which are now cleanly shaven as a measure against the heat. Flat sheets of smoke hover above us as if issuing from his pores. His smoking seems to have lowered his body temperature, and so total is his repose in the heat that his skin actually feels cool. Still, the oil in his body has been extracted by the heat and coats his nose and chest with a sheer glaze. Eyes open even when the flash goes off, he stares obliquely at the camera past an outstretched arm, or lets his head hang from the edge of the bed as I cover his body with a hungry mouth.

Slowly but surely the female specters intermingle with our play. I sense their young limbs enlacing ours and scenting his cock with their juices, interposing their lips between his flesh and mine. Obviously he's thinking of them. As long as they're nameless while their silky hair dangles ghostlike above us, they send us both into a perfect world of sensation and belonging. But when a name or my idea of a face creeps into my mind, I'm frozen with jealousy. Still I know that, for the time being, Romulus belongs to me. His corpselike placidity doesn't speak of his leaving anytime soon.

 

 

THE GIRLS SEEM to linger while we dress for dinner at a restaurant across the square. As soon as our front door clicks shut, ghostly barks and howls reverberate down the street. These are some of the voices of the several hundred thousand homeless dogs of Bucharest. Possibly because my lips are smarting with the salts of his groin, I associate the howls with sex, the trailing presence of our phantom women. At any rate, the story of the dogs seems unreal, dovetails with my trancelike feeling of being here. They're the result of the displacement of thousands of families when Ceauşescu bulldozed a fifth of Bucharest to build an enormous new palace, not far from where Romulus and I are living. When the residents of these neighborhoods became homeless, some committed suicide; many abandoned their pets to the street. The multiplying animals divided neighborhoods into territories. Inhabitants tolerated and even encouraged these metaphors for their disenfranchisement and displacement during and after the Communist years. The animals also act as xenophobic watchdogs, keeping Roma and other strangers off the block, and they decrease rat infestations.

Eventually Brigitte Bardot, that fervent animal rightist, came to Romania to pressure the mayor, Traian Băsescu, into choosing sterilization over euthanasia and donated money to modernize the city's veterinary clinic. Băsescu had planned to murder the dogs as quickly as possible, an essential step in gentrification. Bardot's crusade had already made papers around the world when she adopted two strays, who urinated copiously on the carpets in her expensive Bucharest hotel suite. Băsescu finally gave in to most of her demands and started a campaign to sterilize and inoculate the dogs without killing those that were healthy. Months later, according to Bardot, he reneged on that promise.

Dogcatchers sent by the city government are regularly met with a volley of potatoes, flower pots and even rocks. As a people with a pastoral history, comfortable with animal metaphors like the myth of MioriÅ£a, that cosmic sheep who announced a shepherd's coming extinction, Romanians see the dogs as symbols of their amputation from culture, of the myriads lost to Communist repression who still seem to circulate like ghosts around imaginary homes long since torn down. To me the dogs' nighttime howling sometimes sounds like wolves', suggesting kitsch notions of “children of the night” made famous by Bela Lugosi. But the bewilderment felt by many residents of Bucharest is painfully concrete, after having seen a fifth of their city, including landmark buildings and centuries-old churches, sacrificed to one of the most absurd vanity projects in history.

For the last several evenings Romulus and I have been watching from our terrace the motley pack of mongrels that haunts our street. At sundown, residents gather at the circle beneath us to hand out treats. Their relationship to the dogs seems familial and affectionate, but sympathy for the creatures doesn't always stop these dogs from attacking, mostly at night. Pedestrians in the less central neighborhoods—especially if they're strangers—have the habit of walking in the middle of the street to stay away from parked cars, from under which lurking dogs might lunge. Many people regularly carry dried bread or biscuits in hopes of discouraging aggression.

Such precautions haven't prevented about fifty reported dog bites a day in the city; and because Romanian hospitals lack the modern version of the anti-rabies serum, victims have had to submit to the old-fashioned method of inoculation: a series of twelve painful injections in the abdomen. There seem not to have been any actual cases of rabies yet, but the disease has been found in foxes hiding in forests just outside the city. And recently there have been a few isolated cases of gruesome attacks. In Cornetu, a village near Bucharest, an entire pack mauled a sixty-two-year-old man and ripped the flesh off his legs until he bled to death.

Like most people in Bucharest, Romulus and I have made personal symbols of the canines. We're walking across a dark parking lot toward Piaţa Unirii when growls accompanied by perhaps imagined hot breath seem inches from my ankle. Romulus eyes me with an animal contempt that suggests the dog's hostility is being caused by my embarrassing walk. Ever since the Gypsy pick-pocketing incident he's been harping on it. He's right that my gait is slightly peculiar; at the age of sixteen I was stricken with aseptic meningitis, and my legs never recovered one hundred percent. Before, I'd always walked a bit on the balls of my feet, and since then, mild cramps occasionally put the tiniest of jerks in my walk, which doesn't make macho posturing easy.

My friend Ursule Molinaro wrote a story that begins with a pack of wolves chasing a debilitated member to its death. She presented the scene as a contrast to the death-phobic sensibility of high-tech medical values. The snarl in Romulus's voice, which really covers a sense of embarrassment, plunges us into the reality of these homeless creatures. Metaphors of sick animals transform the floating female limbs and their perfumes into those of competitive bitches. I imagine that Romulus is preparing to eliminate me brutally because of my deformity. One of the dogs actually is barking at my heels now, as I force myself not to speed up. It rushes at us in fits, stops, then lunges forward again. From the corner of my eye I can make out black gums and yellowish incisors. To my walk that stiffens further, Romulus reacts with a sadistic smile showing his fangs. His cruelty makes me furious, but the anger comes out as effeminate hysteria. This makes him chuckle all the more derisively.