Our room really does feel like a Central European paradise, with its fake-Biedermeier furniture, fringed lampshades, heavy brocade curtains and two individual snowy-white comforters for the same bed. The large bathroom has a heated towel rack and a spacious tub, which Romulus takes advantage of immediately, after which I perversely forbid him to pull the plug, so that I can bathe in the same still-warm water.
Time stops in this world of constantly replayed porn videos coming from the cherry TV cabinet and sumptuous dinners delivered on rolling carts covered with stiff tablecloths, as Romulus smokes cigarette after cigarette, blinkingly staring at the posh atmosphere with sullen lips. We take fanciful pseudo-historical photos with my digital camera, fashioning togas from the brocade bedspread to impersonate Romania’s aboriginal Dacians, or Turkish turbans to represent its enslavers; or we lean, sometimes naked, from the balcony at night to peer at the unreal congestion of streetcars, cars and pedestrians below.
None of the videos has changed. The big-breasted German woman in her white concrete tropical paradise still gets fucked over and over by her thick-dicked, hairless German partner. To supplement this we construct elaborate scenarios of what we could do together if we brought a hooker back to the room from an area of town Romulus calls the “prostituteria.” It’s an idea I keep encouraging to keep up his interest in sex. The plan is for Romulus to take her from the back while I fuck her pussy. My concern, which he pooh-poohs, is the whore’s reaction when I suck his cock in front of her.
Our fantasies are sometimes fueled by the suitcase half full of books on Romania and the Balkans I’ve brought with me, perverse political fairy tales of Turkish kidnappings and homosexual harems in Panaït Istrati’s 1924 novel Kyra Kyralina, or stories of royal intrigue in Paul D. Quinlan’s exhaustive 1995 account of the life of Carol II, The Playboy King.
Carol II, whose mother was Queen Marie, is the figure who interests me most. Born in 1893, coming of age shortly before World War I, he was the first sovereign to be born on Romanian soil. And during the war, as the country saw itself hopelessly challenged by Germany, he was leading a dissolute, womanizing life. Later, his ten years of kingship, from 1930 to 1940, were years of capitulation to the Nazi threat; and his affair with the Jewess Lupescu during that period added a perverse complication to an already demoralized nation.
I’m becoming more and more astonished by Romania’s dizzying political scandals, its schizophrenic identity encompassing Occident and Orient, its sexual legends and its aesthetic cultures full of mysticism, rural romance and pantheism. Romulus, it turns out, is surprisingly informed about the history of his country. Despite his street origins, he grew up in a Communist era that demanded at least a solid high school education for every citizen. Unlike me, he’s always been aware of Romania’s Turkish, Greek, Slavic, German and French influences and its relatively short history as an independent nation.
It seems to me that Romania’s hundreds of years under Ottoman rule have left their traces in his sharp Oriental features and coal-black eyes; but when I suggest it, he’s adamant about his pure Romanian origins. No matter, since in fact, the tale of the Romanian royal family that’s gripped me to such an extent is really a Teutonic and British story. Romania’s only royal rulers came from the West and were all placed on the throne by Western powers.
Marie, a Western princess set adrift in a libidinous Oriental adventure. TOP PHOTOGRAPHS: KENT STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES
I page through the history books beneath the high, chandeliered ceiling of our room at the Gellért, my leg entwined with a yawning Romulus’s, who’s incredulous that I have the patience to spend so much time reading. When I come to the reign of Carol II, I realize that this playboy’s dissolute promiscuity was probably forged from early experiences that resemble mine. It’s becoming more and more apparent that this rebellious Casanovite was oedipally inspired by his lively, charismatic mother, Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Queen Marie, who is even memorialized in a humorous ditty by Dorothy Parker, reveals herself in her famous diaries, correspondence and autobiography as a headstrong, articulate woman with a high libido and a compulsion for political achievement. It is she, not her passive husband, King Ferdinand, who wins the acclaim of the peasants by venturing among them in traditional dress or puts herself and her son in mortal danger by suggesting they nurse cholera-stricken soldiers on the field during the Second Balkan War in 1913, the year before she becomes queen. It’s also she who journeys without her husband to Paris after World War I, presumably to visit her dressmakers and put her daughters in school, and seduces the ministers at Versailles into enlarging Romania rather than partitioning it.
Inspired by some mesmerizing Internet photos of this blond, blue-eyed, regular-featured queen, we create havoc for the maids by using the duvets, curtain and brocade pillowcases to make fantasy costumes worthy of a Warholian send-up of Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress. One of the photos we discover on the computer in the lobby of the Gellért shows British Marie, called Missy by her family and friends, in a Pre-Raphaelite pose over a marble-potted plant, in a light-saturated conservatory, wearing a filmy, nymphlike peignoir with a train. In other photos, she lounges on the ledge of a Romanian countryside balcony in a Turkish warrior’s headdress and tight, metallic costume, or sports a peasant’s apron and kerchief, or leans seductively toward the viewer from her throne under a heavy crown and cowled dress that make her look like Nazimova in Salome. The enormous bedroom she designed for herself at the palace, part ecclesiastic study and part Turkish bath, so disturbed her mother-in-law, the poet queen Carmen Sylva, that the latter couldn’t sleep all night the first time she laid eyes on it.
Marie is, quite clearly, an innovative powerhouse and a fascinating maternal figure, rightly called the first “modern queen.” Beginning as a frightened seventeen-year-old English bride in a strange Eastern country, she blossoms into a figure synonymous with Romanian identity, nationalism and pride shortly before World War I. Abandoning her British past, she drinks in the culture of Romania in great draughts and graciously accomplishes more for it than does any other leader.
In the shadow of Marie is her thwarted son Carol II, originally adored as the firstborn, then later subjected to her Victorian prudery and lust for power. He rebels, of course; but like most whose autonomy has been stolen early in life by a strong-willed, magnetic person, his attempts at independence are perverse and sordid.
Oedipal vectors shoot from the pages of The Playboy King and Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair, revealing Marie as a doting, overinvolved mother at a loss when confronted with her grown son’s sulking bids for independence; and Carol, her son, as an obsessively womanizing “priapist,” destroyed by tortured love and hate for a mother who hopes to rule Romania through him.
I’M SO IMMERSED in the gossip about the allegedly enormous size of Carol’s member that I don’t even notice the sullen look my own charge has pasted on his face. Ever since he discouraged his girlfriend from annoying his “uncle” with constant calls, our relationship has settled into a narrow routine. We’ve even reached the point of talking about ways to be together permanently. Before me I can see an entire half-life forming around the dynamic of his boredom and whoredom and my money and desire. He’s declared his intention to abandon Budapest and hustling and, as if it were an afterthought, the girl. When I leave, he’ll take the money I give him and go back to Sibiu, where he’ll wait for our next opportunity to be together. The rules of the game are to allow heterosexual dabbling as long as the primary relationship remains us.
I agree to all of this enthusiastically, hiding a certain misgiving. No one has to explain to me that the forces we depleted bourgeois intellectuals sometimes borrow for our transgressive narratives never free themselves from their unstable sources. That entity of teeming street energy, that exotic sociological specimen or puzzle of your own past you think you’ve captured, even reformed, is continually being l
ured back into those landscapes of risk he came from. And so, after a week in the lap of luxury, after several sumptuous meals and several bottles of wine from our suddenly accommodating hotel restaurant, as well as countless sex acts in front of the piped-in porno until his nipples grow increasingly carmine from my deep-pressure kisses, Romulus gets bored. He begins yearning for a shady Romanian bar in the Pest section of the city.
One rare day we bother to leave our fantasy chamber on a long trip along the river and up the funicular to the castle district. His lips shrivel with contempt when he sees the refurbished luxury apartments, picturesque church and sterile-looking café in that exclusive neighborhood. Even so, he obliges me by stopping for a drink. When a bevy of black-clad bourgeois Hungarian girls, holding shopping bags from an expensive boutique, glance at us through the window of the café, he makes a remark about wanting to fuck one of them. Perhaps it’s with bitter pleasure that I explain to him that such a woman has to be courted more gradually, become convinced that you’re mirroring her self-worth before you can have her pussy. When I do, he snarls that such tactics make the conquest not worth the trouble at all. And that is the night he begins wanting to go to the Romanian bar.
It is, as he describes it, a picaresque cellar in the Pest section of the city, where pickpockets, passport forgers, counterfeiters and smugglers meet to the tune of house mixes of horas, illicit traffic in boosted electronic equipment, frequent fistfights and occasional knifings. I tell him that I want to go to the place, too, but he answers that he’s afraid to take me. He fears blowing his cover and compromising his machismo, and we may run into violence. So I hatch a defiant plan. I’ll enter the bar alone twenty minutes before he does and take my chances. It’s my choice, isn’t it? Then he can enter and, only if it feels right, casually greet me, probably not even sit that near.
At the Romanian bar, those few liverish-colored patrons, who look like Andre the Giant hulks in black silk shirts and black suits, seem too simmered in depression to offer more than an apathetic glance. I’ve seen those expressions before in more appealing form in Hamburg, at the train station and in the bars of the St. Pauli district, where I first encountered teenaged Romanian hustlers. Now I’m learning that most of the more unfortunate Romanian males of the diaspora are masters of this melancholic pose. Here in this hole-in-the-wall in Budapest, all the men have a version of it.
The music is deafening. It sounds part Hungarian, part Roma, part Turk, full of accordions and synthesizers and reedy things. There are rousing folk elements that sound shrill in their electronic form, frantic and hysterically Byzantine. The hyper-detailed, obsessively repetitive melodies spill into space, swirling into a kind of epilepsy. Thus I sit trying not to look at the large, black-suited men frozen in tango-inspired seizures of depression, as the music discombobulates my nervous system. But each twitch I make is greeted with a stony lack of reaction on their part.
Romulus arrives as promised, greets me in an exaggeratedly offhand manner. He takes a seat close enough for us to talk and whispers a few explanations. Across from us, the handsome, moonfaced, sloe-eyed but acne-pitted adolescent with the pompadour; the stocky man in black; and the skinny dark-haired girl, whose prominently veined hands stick like spiders from a black parka, are work partners. On late-night subways, the two younger people will begin to kiss, his hand will slip inside the girl’s parka, moving toward her breast; and as people gape at this distraction, the older man will go about his job of pickpocketing. Then there is the tall, drawn man, also with a wolfish haircut, and sad, ringed intellectual’s eyes. He’s a master passport forger. An American passport, Romulus informs me, can be sold quite quickly for several thousand dollars, after being doctored by the forger genius with a new photo. Mine, however, is next to valueless because of my birth date. The people who buy these hot passports have a future.
Just a few doors from the Romanian bar is the Old Man Club, which has one of the most eclectic young crowds in Budapest. Romulus credits himself with opening it to Romanians. It’s a new club in a post-Communist New World, crowded and bursting with energy and noise. Americans and Africans, Poles, Germans and Romanians gulp whiskey and beer along with the Hungarians, dance alone or in groups. Romulus is sure that the waitress is overcharging us. Each time she brings a drink, he quizzes her about the prices of comparable brands. House music and ’80s New Wave pump through the smoke-filled air.
Slightly heady with my risk-free visit to the Romanian bar, I careen through this new place, losing sight of Romulus. The two young men he shows up with a few minutes later have the hangdog look of people adrift; there’s something greenhorn about them; maybe it’s their clumsy, stale clothing or their eyes projecting a desensitized stubbornness that expects little. One is swarthy and slender, mute and shiny-lashed. The other is fair and meaty and Slavic-looking, with the oval, dull face of a butcher. Between them is Romulus, who now seems different. His grim, determined look borders on cockiness, or sadism. He shoos all of us to the same table, and I buy everyone a drink. Then he begins to speak as if he were holding forth at a board meeting:
“These are Marius,” he says, pointing at the butcher boy, “and Francisc,” pointing at the dark, slim one. “One of them will sleep with you.”
I keep a steady tone, with a touch of haughtiness. “Excuse me, but I think it’s up to me who I sleep with.”
“Yes, as you wish. It’s only that I must see the girl tomorrow night. When you go in the Romanian bar, and I am waiting to go in, you see, I see her. I did not plan this. Because she needs me so, I say yes.”
“Go ahead.”
“But you see,” he explains, “if I think of you alone, I will not be able to enjoy.”
I glance at Marius and Francisc, trying to determine how much English they understand. It’s obvious that the details of this transaction are beyond them, but they get the gist of it.
“That’s your problem,” I spit, “just don’t ever tell me who to sleep with. Would you,” I say to the two boys, a note of impudence and superiority in my voice, “be my guests for dinner tomorrow night? Romulus, I assume your date will be after dinner. So the four of us will eat at the hotel. The Gellért at seven.” Marius, the dulled butcher, nods eagerly and winks. The darker one agrees resignedly, letting his eyes go blank, looking at the hands in his lap. Probably my strategy is blatant: the invitation is meant to make Romulus seem cheap for offering fresh meat and also to make him worry that I may be taking the offer seriously.
“Bruce,” says Romulus, with cold irony. “Is not necessary. You just have to give to them a little money after sex. A very little.”
“I don’t remember anyone mentioning money, Romulus, or sex, except you.”
Slightly humiliated by the remark, he savors its motive: his decision to see the girl has obviously wounded me. “As you wish,” he says conceitedly.
I’M SWITCHING from the porn channel to the French-language channel with one hand, while the other wipes my come off with a towel. Romulus is staring at the television with weary though glinting eyes, the hint of a rictus smile creasing his lips.
“You know, Romulus, I kind of regret inviting those Romanian guys to dinner. I think I’d rather be on my own tomorrow night, go to a bar. You never know who I’ll meet. I want to be free.”
“Oh, then you don’t want Marius?”
“No, if I had to pick, which I’m not saying I would, I’d pick the dark guy, Francisc.”
“The Gypsy?” His nose crinkles with distaste.
“Is that what he is? It’s more respectful to call them Roma.”
“We get rid of Marius.”
“Wait a minute, I didn’t say I wanted either of them.”
He blows a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “Then we get rid of both.”
“And how will we do that? They’re coming to the hotel.”
“Easy as a pie. We just don’t go downstairs at seven.”
I realize then that, of course, just like Romulus, neither Romanian boy would dare
enter the hotel on his own and approach the desk and ask them to call our room.
“We can’t just leave them there waiting.”
“Fine. I go downstairs and tell them go away.”
“No. I mean, they don’t have any money or anything. Aren’t they counting on it? Won’t they be hungry?”
“All right, I go down and give four dollars and say go away.”
“Four dollars, for both?”
“Is that too much?”
“I just can’t do that to them.”
“As you wish.” He crushes out the cigarette, amused. Takes the remote out of my hand and searches for a sports channel.
By four in the morning he’s asleep and I, despite the codeine I’ve been taking, am wide awake. Night cradles us like black cotton wool. The air is lazy with cigarette smoke nudged by gusts of river wind rattling the French windows at the balcony. This is not the vibrating black of that room in Syracuse, but something stiller and more perfect. Certainly things are tinged with doom, even if night makes a false promise of permanence. His leg on mine feels light as a wing, but when he moves away just an inch, it’s like watching his body through the wrong end of a telescope. Slowly the vulgarity of our twin states of desperation dissolves, and temporary security washes over me. We’re nothing but statues in some utopian tableau. Once again we’ve escaped the premises of our respective cultures, for the time being. I plunge into unconsciousness: that sweet prelude to betrayal.
V
BUDAPEST’S NEWLY TOLERANT atmosphere makes Romulus cringe. We’ve decided to hit the baths in the basement of the Gellért, famous in Budapest and populous, but like several other ancient baths in this old city, frequented by homosexuals. They’re looking at him and can’t help it, despite the fact that he’s relatively clothed. Though most—me included—wear only the muslin loincloth provided by the management and made translucent by hot water, Romulus is wearing his blue bikini, which I’ve just bought for him.
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