The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  I was ready for the worst, but it wasn’t the chaotic rowdiness I’d imagined. Instead it was a sort of procession, thousands walking as one in a heightened, ecstatic hypnosis. This wasn’t any Flacăra, either, one of those frenzied youth festivals during the Ceauşescu years in which light, smoke, music and patriotic poetry were staged to drive young crowds into frenzies of patriotism. Instead it was a nearly solemn celebration that felt almost mystical.

  Chants that seemed a cross between hymn and anthem echoed through the air. Small children rode on the shoulders of adults. Hastily decorated cars cleaved the crowd as if it were butter, sliding through to shouts of elation. I turned to Romulus to ask for a translation, but he cautioned me, “Don’t speak English. They will think you are, and God knows what they will do.”

  At Piaţa Universităţii, the crowd congealed into a trembling mass. Crowds coming from other directions choked the street. High above me, a small boy began climbing a telephone pole. Now he was hanging from the wires, fifty feet above the heads of the crowd, swinging slowly to and fro. Policemen parked in their cars at the curb watched him imperturbably. “They are afraid to act,” Romulus explained in my ear excitedly. “The crowd will not tolerate them tonight.”

  What struck me, yet again, was a feeling of timelessness in the celebration, a primeval dignity I’d never associated with sports. I thought of those aimless people on the street, who’d always moved as if through a medium of gelatin. Now they’d been pulled toward a joyous focal point and infused with its optimism. A static, charged bliss reigned. There wasn’t much movement in the enormous crowd, over which the boy swung from the wire like a pendulum. Everything had stopped at this high point of pleasure.

  I turned to look at Romulus. A kind of justification had colored his face, and the muscles of his body bristled with dignity. He looked at me knowingly, as if to say, “You see?” But he was a sad warrior, with nowhere to go from here, a knight standing still in the face of doom.

  XVII

  I LURCH OUT of the parking lot of the Bucharest Marriott, my feet struggling with the clutch pedal of our Dacia, the Romanian national car. A map is spread across the knees of Romulus, who has no license ever since that terrible accident that led to the operation on his neck vertebrae—the one that caused the scar I first noticed at our hotel in Budapest.

  Since the night of the soccer game, we’ve settled into an easy, joyous intimacy. Romulus feels like a winner, or is it that he thinks I’ve finally found a way into his culture?

  The entire city is in the midst of a road-renovation project as part of Romania’s bid to join the European Union; potholes and frustrated drivers are everywhere. Romulus tunes in to some Romanian rap. Its thudding, polka-like beat and Turkish flourishes hammer at my temples, augmenting the jolts in the road, as history scuds by my window. We fly past the gorgeous villas of Bucharest with their Turkish-style gables, the monuments to defamed heroes, and the depressed pedestrians detoured from their fantasies. At his recommendation I’m going very, very fast. “Slow driving is so dangerous,” he claims. “They go nuts and try to pass.” Nimbly he inches his foot toward mine and bears down on it, gunning the engine. As if on cue, a white Toyota draws up to our fender, then squeezes in front of us just in time to miss an oncoming car.

  “Wild dogs keep darting into the road!” I plead as an excuse to go slower.

  “Just go, go!” he barks laughingly, slapping the dashboard in rhythm to the music, as the buildings blur past.

  Once I hit the periphery of the city, cars are careening past us even more recklessly, especially on curves, the drivers expecting us to swerve onto the shoulder if a car is coming the other way. Romulus chortles at a near miss. Everybody is in a frantic hurry, probably hoping to catch a flying fragment of the new market. But unlike the others, we have no idea exactly where we’re going, except north toward the Carpathians and his hometown of Sibiu. “Just go!” he keeps chanting like a joyous incantation.

  Outside the city limits, buildings fade away into fields of thick-bladed grass, then slowly into soothing hills. The road meanders into sweet curves. We’re driving through the Wallachian plain. Amputated oak trees line the road like driving casualties. Beyond them, fields of sheep stretch toward the hills; then suddenly there’s the apparition of a barren landscape, the fat, grimy smokestacks of a chemical plant.

  In many cases, these industrial messes stand where centuries-old villages used to be, before they were razed by Ceauşescu and the entire populations sent to work in factories. At the edge of cities are the dreary “blocks” like the one Romulus grew up in—ramshackle housing projects to which the displaced villagers were sent. To me they look destitute and lunar, but Romulus’s eyes glisten with contentment, even security, when we drive past them.

  “Just like where I live,” he says with self-satisfied defeatism.

  “Where are the trees?”

  “Hmph, trees he wants! We got clubs.”

  Glancing at him from the corner of my eye, I try to imagine his Blade Runner life, picture him at night strolling through a squalid street illuminated by salmon-colored riot lamps, on the way to a club. “You like living there?”

  “Was better before, during Communists. Now you got to find rent.”

  The car goes faster and faster at his urging, and the slide show of our trip speeds up. Sixteenth-century bucolic Romania keeps alternating with the scarred industrial present, as if the two were giving birth to each other. In their isolation the bloated chemical refineries and grimy steel mills look gothic, or like futuristic castles in a decadent science fiction film. Getting within a few feet of them fills me with a kind of daring. They’ve become the grim decor of my love affair.

  I pull over and photograph a rusting factory, zigzagged with catwalks like a spiny juggernaut. It hovers in the haze of pollution it expels, a diabolical mirage. Among the other consequences of Ceauşescu’s hysterical push toward total industrialization was an incident that occurred earlier in the year, when a hundred metric tons of cyanide leaked from a gold mine into the Lăpuş River, then flowed through Hungary and Yugoslavia before returning to Romania.

  Among the blur of fences, trees and passing cars I feel my heart thumping: anything is possible. All that lies ahead is the future, new sights and new sensations.

  My eye fastens on a sign that says “Bran Castle,” in English, so I follow it by swerving onto a side road. At the end of the road looms a rocky hill topped by a colossal white castle with red-tiled roofs and four towers.

  “Dracula!” Romulus gasps with bared teeth, diving toward my neck. I fend him off with my elbow, but he’s right in a way. Billed as Dracula’s Castle by the Romanian Tourist Office, from 1395 to 1427 it belonged to Mircea the Wise, who was Dracula’s, or Vlad Ţepeş’s, grandfather. Vlad himself may have hidden there from the Turks in 1462, but he spent only a short period. Staying much longer were other historical Romanians, including Queen Marie, into whose hands the castle had passed.

  We trudge up the long, narrow path to the entrance, and a cloud obscures the summer sun. Because of the elevation it’s much cooler here than in Bucharest. Wind erupts like a whip, and goose bumps pop out all over our exposed arms. Above us towers the castle, so high that we have to tilt our heads back to see its parapets. Sprouting from a bulbous rock formation, it has a convex, faceless look, clandestine and aggressive; it hides, in a sense, Romulus’s larger historical past. Behind his own convex shutters, those hooded eyes, lie secrets of his culture, part of the mystery of my obsession.

  We head immediately for a table selling hand-knit sweaters, buy one each for about seven dollars and pull the coarse wool over our shivering bodies. Then we climb an almost vertical staircase set into the rocks, at the top of which sits a homeless, bewildered parody of a guard dog with dirt-caked fur and cloudy, dismal eyes.

  It’s a gorgeous, gloomy castle, originally in the gothic style, to which architects over time have added harmonious Renaissance and Romantic elements. Inside the courtyard,
paved with flagstones, I photograph Romulus standing at the fountain from which Dracula must have drunk and beside which Marie must have spent summers avoiding the heat of the city. With his slicked-back hair and dim, depressed eyes, he has a medieval look, that “ancient face” my friend Ursule Molinaro identified.

  We edge up a narrow, curving staircase leading out of the courtyard, our nostrils stung by mildew. Romulus pries open a squat door in the wall. Before I can bat an eyelash, he’s disappeared inside. I follow down a narrower stone staircase flanked by curving stone walls, which is so dark and steep I need to light a match. At the bottom are damp, windowless catacombs through which I creep nervously. Then I come to a dead end, a high, tiny window covered by a grating, and a gray stone room containing only a draped wooden coffin. Its top rattles and raises just a hair. Suddenly it opens, revealing Romulus sitting up in slow motion, looking more than apt for the role. I don’t know it at the time, but later I’ll find out why the prop is there. In the 1970s, Ceauşescu tried to make Bran Castle a principal attraction for tourists. Capitalizing on the Dracula myth, he hired actors to hide in cupboards and coffins, then scare tourists as they walked by. The plan was scuttled after an American woman was surprised by a stagy Dracula and succumbed to a stroke.

  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.