The Romanian (3 page)

II

I'M LYING IN MY BED in Manhattan's East Village, surrounded by books on Central Europe and Romania, thinking about last week's trip to Budapest, so repulsive and enthralling. In this year 1999, the context of my life is changing. The trip has marked a new start. Strangely, I'm full of all kinds of new imaginings and philosophies. The silly idea has even crossed my mind that sex in the dark must have been invented by northerners like these chilly Hungarians, whose weak-lashed eyes would have found the sunlight too clinical.

I put down the book on the Magyar tribes, and my head falls back as if hypnotized. Lust for flesh under the smell of pelts must not have been very different from hunger for meat, I imagine, and I myself am in a swoon, famished for Romulus.

I roll the melodramatic name across my tongue. He's called twice already, each time in need of money. Charity needs images. When he asked for a hundred dollars to bribe the doctor of his stabbed, probably watery-haired girlfriend to get better treatment, I had to picture the white walls of the hospital, him perched yawningly, casually, by the bed.

His second call was to announce that he was leaving Budapest and the penniless mess into which he'd sunk. When he got to the train station, I wired a little more money, after which he disappeared. He never showed up for Christmas at his mother's home in Sibiu, Romania, as he'd promised. I called there four times that day, to the perplexed reactions of mother and brothers and cousins.

A week later, he did show up in Sibiu and immediately called collect. With weary, casual poise he detailed his attempt to get to Italy by way of Vienna—and my money. It was, he claimed, a spur-of-the-moment decision. He bought the ticket and hid in the train toilet when they got to the Austrian border but was caught anyway, and spent a depressing Christmas in jail that he didn't want to talk about. Still, I tried to picture him lean and inebriated from depression, squatting in a corner of the cell, waiting for the long unraveling of red tape that would ship him home on some hard train seat.

Home—Romania—is a shadow-desire for me; a few blurry TV images of a monster dictator and his wife assassinated—two crumpled bodies in black-and-white. It was the only violent anti-Communist revolution in Eastern Europe. And then there was that time, in 1991, I think, when I went to Hamburg to work on a film script. At the train station and in the St. Pauli district there were clusters of teenaged refugees working as hustlers who I found out were Romanian. I remember their brooding young faces, with similarly wolfish haircuts and that identical expression—what would you call it? Seductively depressed. A stylized, toreador-Elvis look, full of bruised machismo and oversensitivity, bewildered surrender.

Other images of his country, perhaps no less obscure, emerge from a book I choose from those scattered on the bed. They're morbid and fantastic like German fairy tales, full of romanticism and guilt. In a palace in Bucharest, across the room from a throne, a balcony veiled by gauze curtains; food on gold platters and champagne in a crystal flute are being carried to it by a servant in black livery. From time to time, a king in a white silk cloak imprinted with a crimson cross looks up at the curtains to raise his glass in a toast. He is Carol II (1893-1953), prince of the German house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the last king of non-Fascist Romania. The woman hidden in the balcony to whom the king raises his toast is his mistress—Elena, née Lupescu, from the Romanian word
lup
for “wolf.” She's at least half Jewish, and her life is in danger. The country is turning Fascist and is against her. They've accused her of being a “voluptuous parasite,” the king's Semitic manipulator, whose wiliness is degenerating the nation. . . .

What kind of country can produce such risky melodrama? I actually know very little about it. According to these books on my bed, Romania has always been a land of necessary suspicion, hemmed in by larger powers greedily eyeing its riches. A manipulative Austro-Hungarian Empire lurking in the west, swallowing and regurgitating its western territories; to the northeast, the heavy fist of Russia clamoring for influence; to the south, an implacable, exploitative Ottoman Empire and an envious Bulgaria.

Its people date back to the year 101, when tribes known as Dacians are conquered by the Roman Empire, whose soldiers intermarry with their women. By the end of the thirteenth century, it has become two fertile principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, which hug the Danube River. Centuries of occupation from nearby Turkey follow, aided by Greek governors called Phanariots, who bleed the country dry. The Romanian landed gentry, the Boyars, are in thrall to these foreign leaders; and to compensate for it, they in turn suck the wealth of the land to its marrow, leaving the peasants impoverished and bitter. To make matters worse, Russian and Austro-Hungarian neighbors are hungering for mineral-rich Romanian territory, playing for it against the Turks in a brutal game of Monopoly. But during all this—for some unexplainable reason—the people keep their ancient identity: they believe they are the only true surviving
Latins,
adrift in a hostile Slavic wilderness.

It's only in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1854 -1856) that Romania finally emerges as a nation. In 1866, a foreigner comes to claim the kingship, hoping to put an end to power squabbles. The outsider is the German Carol I, a prince of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, who governs Romania with the Teutonic discipline and iron hand of his royal forebears. In 1893, Carol I's weak nephew and future successor, Ferdinand, marries the stunning Marie, Princess of Edinburgh, the eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

It is charismatic Marie, the queen beginning in 1914, who brings Romania to the attention of the West. During the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, she works seductively behind the scenes to acquire Transylvania for Romania and enlarge the country along the lines of its present dimensions. But soon she will be forcibly put on the shelf by her profligate son, Carol II; and under his rule, Romania slips irresistibly toward Fascism and Nazi control. When World War II ends, the country becomes a member of the Communist bloc.

 

 

A SHUDDER, swallowed by a pit of longing. Is it any wonder that my new obsession comes from an amputated country with a fractured identity, a country that is like an abused child from a broken home? How much of this traumatic history is hidden in his dark, suspicious eyes? All I know is: I have to find out.

Such thoughts rattle through my mind as I call my editor to report on the assignment. His voice skips only a beat when I announce that the piece I'm going to write for him will be called “The Romanian.”

“What happened to the brothel-in-Budapest assignment we paid for?”

“Trust me, this will slay you,” I shoot back with the conviction of an addict. Then I launch into a breathless, rambling monologue. Heterosexual though he may be, my editor is a connoisseur of any form of sexual energy, and I can hear him savor each nugget. But when I try to explain who Romulus is, I'm at a loss for words.

“He's a . . .” I don't say “vampire.” Romulus comes from the land of Dracula, and it would be too much of a cliché to resort to those kinds of metaphors.

“He's . . .”

I falter. Because he's no one, I suddenly realize, a person with no identity moving illegally and aimlessly from country to country. A vacuum sucking my lost life forward.

Then who am I?

I am, it occurs to me as I put down the phone and page obsessively through the books on Romania, a cultural leftover. An old-fashioned, pre-Stonewall homosexual. As recently as six years ago, I still spent white nights in the company of Midtown Manhattan hustlers, ex-cons and junkies, sponging up their speech and vampirizing their emotions to write about. This was, of course, before Manhattan became an entertainment complex for singles of a single class and gay life began turning into just another assimilation story. Now that gay life has grown blander and duller, it seems more and more identical to the world of family values I thought I was escaping. The field of my libido has shrunk; and since writing is desire, my texts have grown shorter. I long for new voices and accents, new worlds to mirror my loneliness and isolation.

To get back to the new world of Budapest and its offer of pure social disconnection, I've taken a job as a technical writer in a financial printing company going digital. It's the dullest job of my life. Five days a week I spend seven hours in a stifling, windowless room packed to bursting with Indians, Pakistanis and Russians, whose skills have bought them entrance to the United States on temporary visas. The room is white and silent, except for the tic-tac-tic of keyboards, endlessly producing 0's and 1's and 0's and 1's, for hours, days, weeks, months, without any programmer's looking up or stopping or speaking, for fear of being sent away from the West and back to poverty.

I gaze at my own dazed reflection in the poisonous cathode-ray screen, adding a tac to their tic every once in a while, checking
expedia.com
every twenty minutes or so to type the words “new york . . . budapest” or dropping my head to read the book in my lap about King Carol II's Jewish mistress,
Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair.

In exchange for an impossible fantasy about a hustler, I've convinced myself that this temporary situation doesn't matter. My mind is full of strategies for fleeing the city into the next touch of his hard-rubber body. In this stuffy white room, excitement courses through me like sap. I imagine great bursts of inspiration. Books about Eastern Europe and love and risk and class dissonance. Sexual desire, I'm convinced, is merely the interplay of social inequities—or should I say dreams about the libidinal possibilities of the Other. But now that gentrification has increasingly separated us from a clash with those who are different, libidinal energies are becoming blocked and denatured. If we want to, we can go our whole lives without seeing someone from another background. The Other has been banished from our reach. Am I foolish enough to think that I've found a way out?

Earlier I claimed that arousal is just an unconscious sense of discrepancy, a feeling of imbalance. Then desire, or love, must be the servant of that same impression of injustice—a perverse urge to settle the balance.

 

 

THESE THOUGHTS RECUR in fragmented form in a low-ceilinged suburban bedroom in Syracuse, New York, in the house in which I grew up. I've come back here to visit my ancient mother—another exile from Eastern-bloc turmoil. A Jew, she came to the States from Russia at the age of two, almost a century ago, with her family, so that her father could avoid being drafted into the czar's army.

Now, as I gaze out the bedroom window at the carpet of snow, drugs lick my nervous cells into bolder imaginings. Is this the eighth or ninth tablet of codeine I've taken—ostensibly for a toothache? I really should watch it, stop raiding friends' medicine cabinets to supplement my stash, popping them at the slightest sense of isolation.

It must be past two a.m. Like a mask of latex sealing off the head of a fetishist, the drug encases my brain, and my whole body disintegrates into a low-resolution image. Visions are pulsing, full of that energy that was killed off in New York with the last peep show. Periodically, the glowing silver shovel of Romulus's face leaps out, as in an old-fashioned photographic instant when the flash powder goes off. Then the image melts away, and the dark bedroom in Syracuse pops back into hard focus.

I open my eyes, feel the drops of fantasy evaporating from neurons, the bright emulsion fading, and I remember my stubborn, endlessly resilient but finally failing mom lying in the next boxy room. Our doors have been left ajar all night because she's awoken so many times by her bad heart. With a twinge of guilt, I rise unsteadily and tiptoe into her bedroom to check on her again, a glimpse of the bundled body I've known all my life, so still now and surrounded by foreboding; and then I come closer, bend with held breath until my face is nearly touching hers, to be sure she's still breathing. . . .

Before we went to bed, we talked about my time in Budapest, which is—it comes to mind—only a few hundred miles from Shedrin, in White Russia, where she was born. I had to shout because her hearing is going. But despite her advanced age of ninety-six, her strong will and sharp intelligence are completely intact. I can picture her so clearly right now, frail but enlivened by the favorite topic of me—leaning forward on the very edge of her seat at the kitchen table so as not to miss a word, scrutinizing me with attentive, worried eyes, asking probing questions and desperately hoping for all the false answers; hoping I'll materialize by some magic into the prudent, cautious traveler I wasn't.

 

 

FASCINATION CAME EARLY to me because of her. In a way, the stage was set early for the hypnotic hold of this new obsession. I've been told that I was a receptive baby, used to being gathered abruptly into the arms of this delighted, full-breasted woman whose china-blue eyes sparkled with joy as her charismatic, booming voice imprinted me with its linguistic mastery. From several family pictures, I can reconstruct her habit of holding me under my arms and hoisting me to my toes as if I were standing, then bouncing me up and down on her soft lap as the pleasure began to ripple.

If my senses mesmerize me, it must be because of her: those arrivals in rouge, perfume and a '50s veiled hat: moments of epic excitement. But I also remember her departures, which occurred more and more frequently as she became a community activist. Then absence stretched to infinity.

White-limbed and smooth-skinned as my mom seemed, she was already a woman in her mid-forties. I was a child of her old age, an unusual occurrence for that era. Almost from the beginning I could feel the morbid threat of her increasing years and impending death, and I suppose this intensified the romance.