Trouble in Transylvania
Read Trouble in Transylvania Online
Authors: Barbara Wilson
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths
A Cassandra Reilly Mystery
Barbara Wilson
Preview:
The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Székelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting.
—from Jonathan Harker’s Journal
(Dracula by Bram Stoker)
I
WAS ON
my way to China, by way of Vienna and Budapest, when I first met Gladys Bentwhistle, her granddaughter Bree, and most of the Snapp family. Not everyone knows this, but an open-ended roundtrip ticket from Hungary to China on the Trans-Mongolian Express is one of the least expensive ways to visit Beijing. The only drawback is that you must first go to Budapest and reserve your ticket via Moscow, and then apply for the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian visas at their embassies—all this before suffering nine days of bumping across steppe, taiga and desert. Still, it’s cheap if you have the time, and this trip I had particular reasons for not minding a possible stay of several weeks in Budapest. My old friend Jacqueline Opal, whom I had seen in London only two or three months before, had dropped me a postcard at my Hampstead mailing address, a postcard of the Danube which announced, in breathless capitals, that she was now co-owner of a secretarial agency in Budapest. This was so manifestly unlike Jack, a high-spirited Australian drifter who had held nothing more taxing than a series of temp jobs in London, and those only in order to finance a series of low-budget, maximum-risk world adventures, that I felt I had to see what she was up to.
It was an April evening, darkly green and rainy. I’d arrived in Vienna from London, via jet-foil and a high-speed train that had propelled me through dozens of European cities so quickly that I’d hardly had time to read the station signs, much less distinguish enduring national characteristics, and had gotten off for a few hours to stretch and catch up with myself.
It had never been sunny during any of my brief visits to Vienna; I’d never seen its icing sparkle, had never gotten the least hint of its waltzing and prancing, its operettas and operatics. Grandeur was there, you couldn’t really avoid it, in the enormous Habsburg palaces and Imperial museums and theaters all around the Ringstrasse, but it always seemed magnificence of a particularly pointless kind. Vienna had once been the capital of an empire of fifty million, a large family estate (some said a prison) composed of a dozen nationalities, all struggling to assert their historical identities. After defeat in the First World War the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, and Vienna was left, with all its pomp, head of nothing more than a rather small country called Austria.
But my Vienna wasn’t the Imperial city of the Habsburgs, nor was it fin de siècle, decadent and glittery. Much of what I liked about the city came from the uncertain but lively period sometime after the First World War, after the elegance had begun to thin, but before the political chaos of the thirties. My Vienna was intellectual, melancholy and neurotic, well-suited to damp days, to walking through small squares with trees coming into leaf, which is what I did that particular afternoon, after I had made one important stop.
In every city I find an anchor. Sometimes it’s a café, sometimes a street, sometimes a painting in a museum. It’s what I claim as mine, what I visit when I pass through, what makes me feel at home. In Amsterdam it’s a pub on the corner of two canals, where the sun strikes a worn walnut tabletop in an elegiac way on late afternoons in autumn. In Mexico City it’s Frida Kahlo’s blue house. In Bangkok it’s the Chao Phraya River with its network of brackish canals and spicy floating markets.
In Vienna, my anchor is very small. She’s a reddish-brown statue less than five inches tall, though photographs make her look enormous and overwhelming, with her pendulous breasts and ample belly. She lives in a glass case in a room next to gigantic dinosaur skeletons in the Museum of Natural History. I’m not sure why I like her so much, or why I find her so powerful. The Venus of Willendorf is thirty thousand years old, the oldest thing, besides the dinosaur bones, that I have ever seen.
It satisfied something in me to visit her again, and afterwards I stayed in a good mood for a long time, drifting around the wet streets of the inner city. Eventually I rediscovered the Café Museum, with its marble-topped tables and sills of potted plants, its lace-draped windows against which the rain streamed down. I ordered soup with liver dumplings and began to read Elias Canetti’s memoir of the twenties. From time to time I looked up and saw myself in a large mirror with a Jugendstil frame: a tall, restless woman, middle-aged, in a black beret and a leather bomber jacket, a scarf muffling her neck and chin, freckles that had never quite faded, hazel-green eyes and a nose that seemed to grow ever more prominent.
I began to relax, to feel my mind and my senses wake up. I was on the road, moving again, traveling light, ripe for adventure. And just in time. Since the past November, I’d been cooped up in London, translating from Spanish a series of research papers for an environmental group, Save the Amazon Basin. Publishers weren’t taking many chances on the literary work that had previously been my bread and butter. The luxuriously overdone magic realism of Gloria de los Angeles continued to sell, of course, but other authors of mine—the recondite, manic-depressive Uruguayan Luisa Montiflores, for instance—were out of favor and out of print.
The winter dragged on; I grew gloomier. My love life was non-existent, and my friends were in sour moods, talking of emigrating, of suicide, of getting jobs in Brussels. The flu season came on and I felt wearier and older every day. I reminded myself often that I didn’t live in London—it was only one of my bases, just as Oakland was another—nevertheless, I kept having terrible fantasies of ending up in some lonely little bed-sit in Wood Green, not having gotten out in time.
As March came whistling through and the days grew longer, I became restive and longed to be off somewhere. The travel section at Foyle’s beckoned every time I got off the tube at Tottenham Court Road to walk to the SAB office in Soho. I found myself spending long half-hours staring at maps of Madagascar and atlases of Antarctica. I needed to go somewhere, anywhere, but preferably somewhere vast and strange and as far away from Charing Cross Road as possible.
The crisis came when SAB offered me a permanent part-time position. My dear friend Nicola, the prominent bassoonist, whose hospitality I had availed myself of pretty much continuously for the last twenty-five years, said sternly, “Well, now perhaps you’ll settle down and make a contribution to the world.”
Two days later, I was on the train to China, by way of Budapest.
At seven I went to the Wien-Süd train station and continued my journey into the heart of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was the only one in my compartment of time-softened maroon corduroy seats and slightly dusty drapes. What luxury to sit alone and gaze out at the darkening, rain-soaked landscape, reading Canetti’s account of Vienna in the twenties, when anguished, voluble, oversexed poets and painters sat around talking psychoanalysis and avant-garde art. If I had lived then, my companion certainly would have been a woman called Anna, her father an architect of the International School, her mother a concert pianist with tuberculosis. Anna herself designed one-of-a-kind books; she wore men’s clothing and used a cigarette holder. We would have lived in a modern flat with nothing comfortable to sit on, analyzed ourselves relentlessly and drunk only champagne, in spite of being ardent socialists.
“Evening,” a voice boomed. “Mind if we join you?”
I looked up from my book as the glass door to the compartment slid heavily open. An American woman in her seventies, wearing twill slacks, an appliquéd Western shirt, and a bolo tie in the shape of two raspberry-colored dice, hoisted a backpack onto the overhead rack. Her white hair was cut severely; she had a sharp, fine nose, reading glasses slung around her neck and, I thought, dentures.
“My pleasure,” I said, steeling myself for company.
“This way, Bree,” she called down the corridor.
She dragged another bag inside, so it almost blocked the door, and began to distribute a variety of possessions around the compartment. Soon, all I had for myself was my seat by the window.
She settled herself across from me and leaned forward with an outstretched hand. “Gladys Bentwhistle. Coyote’s Pet-n-Wash. Tucson, Arizona.”
I shook her hand. “Cassandra Reilly. Romance Translator. No Fixed Address.”
“On your way to Budapest, hon? Me too. It’ll be my ninth or tenth country this trip. I’ve been traveling alone for two months now, but my granddaughter just caught up with me. We’re going to Romania, going to stay in a spa. I’ll tell you, I’m going to be ready for a spa by then!”
“Gram, I
wish
you wouldn’t rush off like that!” A young woman, not yet twenty, slipped into the compartment. She was wearing a full, flowered skirt over leggings, red Doc Marten boots, and a Queer Nation tee-shirt under a black leather jacket. Her hair was dyed black and fell tangled to her shoulders. She had a nose ring and pale freckles, the color of weak chocolate milk, scattered over her soft, pretty face. She was carrying a camcorder and a state-of-the-art backpack, suitable for climbing Mount Everest.
The train whistle sounded its haunting farewell and we slid smoothly off into the twilight. More latecomers were bumping and pushing and staggering their way through the corridor, but they kept passing our door.
“I learned this from a gal in Spain,” said Gladys. “You don’t lie. If someone opens the door and asks
frei
or
libre
or something, you say
ja
or
oui,
but if you spread enough stuff out, they won’t bother to ask.”
“I can see you’re a seasoned traveler,” I said.
“It’s my first trip to Europe,” Gladys said. “I always planned to come sooner, with my friend Evelyn, but we never got around to it. Evelyn was in bad health for a couple of years and last year she passed away.” Gladys paused. “Well, you get old. I’m working on a way around it, but so far, no luck.”
