The Romanian (23 page)

The castle may be vampire-free, but it has a Byzantine feeling, or should I say “adapted Byzantine,” which is how the essayist Sacheverell Sitwell described it when he saw the way Marie had changed it into her concept of Transylvanian exoticism. Because there are no guides or guards, we've floated undisturbed from room to room as if we lived there. This has produced an unspoken intimacy between us, as if the implacable atmosphere were given us to play out our instincts. Finally we come to a white bedroom dominated by an eighteenth-century rosewood baldaquin bed in baroque style. It's enormous, with carved spiral posts. This is the very bed, I realize from my reading, where Marie sometimes slept on summer nights. The red rope surrounding it is easy enough to hop over. The bed creaks and groans as we land together on the mattress, and a dusty odor of frangipani reaches our nostrils. It puts me in an awed trance, as I wonder which of Marie's lovers was privileged enough to share this fragrance with her. Was it Ştirbey, her Russian cousin or someone unnamed? Even her severed heart, placed in a gold coffer, was once buried in a grotto near this castle, after it was moved from its original location in Balcic.

When we get back on the road, the sun is sparkling and the driving even more treacherous. Cars speed recklessly by as the lanes change from three to two and back. Wind howls through the trees, spitting loose leaves in gorgeous spirals against the windshield, as I grind into second, struggling up the steep, winding hills. “Turn here,” Romulus says suddenly, pointing the way up a narrow road.

“What for?”

“They got the best
mititei
in whole world. Like this”—he spans his wrist with his fingers.

The stand with
mititei
—those juicy, oblong meatballs made of pork, lamb and/or other meats—is part of a larger souk on a steep, leafy roadside, teeming with Roma with sun-baked faces in flowered skirts, roving dogs, exhausted bus drivers and families. Next to the
mititei
stand are shops selling handwoven baskets and thick wool blankets covered on one side with a mat of long sheep's tresses still containing fragments of hay from the fields. A teenage boy with a soft face and enormous eyes wanders from table to table, holding an open fan of long butcher knives for sale. “Halloo!” shouts Romulus at an unshaven man stooped over a beer at one of the tables. He motions for us to sit down.

“This is bus driver,” says Romulus, “when I come from Sibiu.” The man wearily shakes my hand, then mumbles a few sentences.

“He say he fucking sick with this goddamn job,” Romulus tells me with a flat respect in his voice. “You know his, what you call it, schedule? From Bucharest to Dej every day, six days a week, ten hours each way, sleep overnight in back of bus.”

I mime sympathetic gestures, offer the man some of the
mititei
we're ordering. The servers cooking the meat on a charcoal grill are incongruously chic young women with gleaming painted lips, long pearly fingernails and shiny moussed hair. Romulus brings several meatballs over on a paper plate with dabs of mustard. I break one open; it's ultra-rare inside.

“Aren't these made of pork? You can't eat pork rare.”

Romulus bites off the end of one. “Better this way.”

“You can get trichinosis, you know, a disease.”

Mouth full, Romulus shrugs me off with a wave of his hand. “Only in America. Meat is safe here.” So I bite into one of the meatballs, which is fragrant with spices and tangy with fresh meats.

 

 

IT'S LATE IN THE AFTERNOON when we reach nearby Braşov, a city founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 1200s. A calm elation has spread over us, created by the wild, trembling firs of the Carpathians and the crystal sharpness of the mountain air. Walking past the gothic Black Church, we survey the square, framed by buildings in cotton-candy colors like a Bavarian town's. While Romulus smokes, I gape at a dirty begging child holding a nearly comatose baby in a matted pink bunny suit. “Don't you know they rent those kids?” he says, hoping to nip some naive show of charity on my part. He makes a point of ignoring them and turns his head away, blows a few smoke rings toward the blue rim of mountains surrounding the city.

Exhausted from only a few hours of driving, I suggest we hire a taxi to see the town. Romulus signals a rust-encrusted Toyota and spends a few minutes bargaining with the unshaven driver, who's been hunched in the front seat over a scandal sheet. Thrilled at his catch, he gives us a royal tour, pointing out the remnants of the city walls and the oldest original portal, known as Caterina's Gate. Then his broken-down car putt-putts up a steep hill to the remains of the sixteenth-century citadel. Bad as my Romanian is, I realize that not everybody we encounter is speaking it. “Are they speaking a dialect of German?” I ask. Romulus and the taxi driver exchange a sly, cynical look. “Hungarian,” spits Romulus, as if it were a curse word. They're part of the 1.7 million Hungarian ethnics who live in Romania, mostly here in Transylvania, who don't call this city Braşov, but Brassó; and tension between them and ethnic Romanians is legendary. Things are quiet now, but in the past there was constant struggle for ascendancy, climaxing during the last days of Carol II, when Hungary, at the behest of the Nazis, again took Transylvania for itself. Romulus, a Transylvanian, has an innate resentment of these Hungarians, aggravated by his difficult days in Budapest.

At my request, the driver takes us to a Roma settlement, built against a quarry. No one but them has claimed this site, because of the danger of falling rocks. According to the driver, the mayor wants to demolish their shantytown anyway, now that it's started to grow.

It's a bare-dirt encampment with shacks made out of anything at hand: corrugated fiberglass sheeting and car fenders, hastily sawed boards. As soon as we enter, in a cloud of whitish dust, a glowering man rushes toward the car, followed by three raggedy children holding sticks. Nonchalantly the driver swerves away from them and heads for a small incline to show us the outhouses: five tiny shacks, like miniature cottages in a fairy tale, with ramshackle doors and roofs painted bright pinks, greens and yellows.

On the way out, the same man tries running toward us again, a look of outraged dignity on his face. I'll understand his expression only too well when I read about Gypsy encampments set ablaze by town vigilantes in Isabel Fonseca's book
Bury Me Standing.
But thanks to Panaït Istrati, I already have a very noble image of the Gypsies, personified by his magnificent character Trăsnilă in
The Bandits,
a boldly heroic giant whose arms swing “like dangling posts” and crush the bones of the Boyar tyrants, and who is willing to die to preserve his identity.

The next morning we start out for a nearby ski resort, Poiana Braşov, which is not far from the city. Just outside town, bucolic Romania unveils abruptly. An adolescent farm boy stands with whittled staff in hand, herding goats against a background of all of Braşov on the next hill. We leave him behind and struggle up tortuously steep roads. Deep gorges spill away from the wheels of the car, and narrow curves clog with traffic. “Faster,” Romulus keeps chanting, his hand caressing the back of my neck. Every nerve of my body feels open to sensation, and my eyes drink in the lush mountain landscape.

We pile into an aerial cable car, which begins its long ascent to the mountaintop. Gusts of wind send it gently swinging on the single cable from which it hangs. Below us are the ribbons of ski trails, snaking gracefully to the top. We get out near the summit, where the thin air mixes with my elation of being there. A much more agile, exhilarated Romulus scrambles upward and holds out a hand to hoist me to him. I struggle breathlessly up the steep incline until we reach the top. The view below sends my head spinning, but Romulus unzips his fly and takes a whiz, the stream arcing high into the sharp, cold air.

An hour later, we're still at the cable station, waiting to get down, eyes fixed on the car, which is suspended stock still halfway up the mountain. My pulse is racing. I'm shaking with panic. “It's broken. We'll be here until tomorrow morning. They're stuck.”

“Always you worry. Probably turned off power for a while, to save money.”

Forty-five minutes later the gears groan and the car jerks forward, swinging crazily as it advances toward us. Inside the car, there are paper cups and an empty wine bottle. Our driver is drunk. “You see,” says Romulus, “they were just having party.”

 

 

BY NOW WE KNOW where we're going. I've bought Romulus a card for his cell phone and he's used it to call his mother, who's expecting to meet us at his apartment for dinner. But the route to Sibiu is roundabout and full of bumps as we try to cross westward in the Carpathians. Since we were considering going to Sibiu, we should have taken a more northwesterly route, instead of driving to Braşov. Not only that, but we've gone right past places I would have been thrilled to see, such as the castle district of Sinaia, where so many royal family dramas took place. We begin a zigzagging backtrack toward Sibiu, full of wrong turns and surprises. At first the road squeezes between steep mountains littered with loose boulders, which only makes the other drivers more frantic. They shoot past me on the curves, then screech back into their lane just in time to avoid a barreling truck. The dense firs block out the light, creating a greenish nighttime. My eyes are glued to the road unblinkingly, and so are Romulus's. His hand strays again to the back of my neck. “For a gay you are good driver.” Then suddenly the line of cars in front of us comes to a halt.

The wait is endless and unfathomable, and I try to pattern myself after Romulus, who uncomplainingly fills the time with yawns and channel-switching on the radio, then lights a cigarette or unwraps a stick of gum. When a horse-drawn wagon lopes toward our front window, the Roma driver holding out an array of pencils and combs, he ignores him, not even bothering to tell him to go away.

At my urging we study the map again and find a series of rural roads leading back south and then to Sibiu, with fewer trucks and less traffic. We drive through a kaleidoscope of tiny, wistfully bucolic towns, each with its own way of slowing our progress to a near stop. In one, geese waddle forever across the road at each farmhouse. In another, we're halted by a procession of sheep; still another has lines of farmers carting hay, who nonchalantly hog half the road.

To my left outside one village stretches a vast field of alfalfa being plowed by a middle-aged peasant couple and a single ox. The dirty, sunburned face of the woman is framed by a blue kerchief. She's wearing a flowered skirt and a soiled red apron over thick woolen leggings. Unable to resist, I pull the car over to study her and her husband, who's wearing mud-caked blue overalls and high rubber boots. Placid focus ripples from their sunlit faces. They stop for a moment to stare unabashedly at us, then go back to work, unruffled by the attention. In their imperturbable eyes, I sense an equilibrium where the world of dreams and the imagination of myths are one with the world of waking and working. It's a mystical integrity rooted in the flow of life's energies, the very same state I futilely search for in love. What I don't understand yet is that this sense of wholeness flows into loss—and death as well.

Closer to Sibiu, the road is filled with anxious hitchhikers: couples and teenagers; businesswomen in high heels; old peasant grandmothers in boots, kerchiefs and aprons; an occasional nun. The rubber boots, leather vest and conical suede hat of a shepherd fascinate me, so I stop to pick him up. He overwhelms the car with a smell of lanolin, coming from his body like a thick cloud around his softly smiling face. He's nearly mute, and even Romulus makes no attempt to communicate with him. When Romulus's cell phone goes off and he seems to be discussing some off-color business involving pimping with a friend, our quiet passenger—who seems separated from us by several centuries—doesn't even flinch.

We let him out several miles down the road. He tries to press the equivalent of twelve cents into my hand to pay for the ride, but I refuse. The man gets red in the face, dismayed, Romulus explains, that I take him for a freeloader. He calms down only when I offer to take a picture of him as payment instead. He roots both rubber-booted feet on the road, cocks his conical-hatted head and lapses into that same expression I saw on the faces of the plowing peasants. It's simple but opaque, as if he were stubbornly present in an unconflicted way. I'll be thinking about it for the remainder of the trip, because now it has hit me: That attitude is still present in Romulus, if half lost.

We drive through Sibiu in early evening, and I'm fascinated by the caved-in beauty of some of the neighborhoods, collapsing elegantly under the weight of five hundred years. Like Braşov, this is a German town full of pastel buildings, stone-paved streets, crumbling walls and gothic and Renaissance churches. Preserved within it is the real presence of the late medieval, not a replica of it found in some of the restored towns of Western Europe. We're only passing through, however, headed for the edge of the city, to his apartment in the block, toward which my money has gone and which I've imagined so many times in fantasy.

It's almost just as I've imagined: smog-stained gray concrete buildings sprouting satellite dishes, children's voices echoing from the terraces, and near the parking lot, several steel rectangles used for hanging and beating rugs. Romulus's neurasthenic sensitivity, which I realize reminds me of a small-boned, intelligent dog's, has heightened. I can see his Adam's apple bob as he swallows nervously, and I assume he's wondering how I'll react to the place he calls home. His hard brown eyes, shiny as seeds, are opaque to my questioning glances. He leads me into a dirty lobby and then a very narrow elevator, so small that we're pressed against each other. It makes a terrifying racket, and we ascend to the ninth floor in pitch blackness; either the light's broken or there isn't any.