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.
The elevator door screeches open just as the elevator comes to a jolting stop, which almost catapults us out of it. Before Romulus can use his key, the door to his apartment opens, revealing an adolescent blonde, shockingly similar to those I’ve concocted in my most paranoid fantasies.
“I thought you were never coming back,” she says to him in a quiet, wounded voice, before fixing me with cold, guarded eyes that betray a hint of fear and translating the sentence into English. “I thought he was never coming back, mister.”
In an abashed but somehow sadistic gesture, Romulus pushes her toward me. “My girlfriend, Elena.” But she turns away and rushes to him, squashing her lips and body against his. I stand watching, taking in her oatmeal complexion and steel-blue eyes. Only the slightly bulbous nose I’d imagined is missing, but she’s wearing the skin-tight jeans. She holds out a damp, limp hand to mine, her eyes dull and contemptuously suspicious, then picks up my bag and disappears with it into a bedroom, while Romulus, in a shaky voice tempered with bravado, whispers, “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m thinking things going too well, you know. I’m going to tell you on Marie’s bed at Bran. But something about your eyes.”
“Take me to a hotel.”
“As you wish, but now, please, tonight must be my guest. Whole family coming to meet you and . . .” His nerve fades and a real sign of fear creeps into his stance. “You are mad? But you saying you don’t care about me and girls.”
Mad isn’t the word for it. A giant scimitar has crashed from heaven, severing me from the last few hours. Marie’s alpine bedroom and the Gypsy huts, Poiana Braşov and the thrilling gorges are dissolving into nothingness, having never existed because everything I was feeling—elation, intimacy, fascination—was connected to my faith in our relationship and now seems like nothing more than my projection.
A coffin of steel compresses my throat in a feeling akin to withdrawal as I struggle to reply; but Elena reenters, sniffing at the bad vibes in the air. She studies me the way a person with animal phobias studies the details of an unknown dog, then shoots an accusatory glance at Romulus as her eyes narrow cynically.
“Come, come,” he says, sweeping past her, forced joviality yet true hospitality in his voice. “I show to you the room. Is big but television don’t work. If you prefer, you take my room.”
Elena trails morosely behind as he leads me into a large unpainted bedroom, similar to one in a New York project, with a sagging couch bed and an enormous TV. Someone has turned the broken TV into an objet d’art, adding a symmetrical display of spotlessly clean empty liquor bottles and polished beer cans, plus a few giveaways, such as a button with Jim Carrey on it.
“I said, Take me to a hotel.”
Romulus runs a nail-bitten hand through his hair as the girl studies him; he rubs one eye in anguish and shakes his head. “Please, please, Bruce, just a couple days, then we leave and everything forgotten.” The word “forgotten” brings a flash of panic to the girl’s eyes.
“You don’t like it here?” she sneers, and marches out of the room again.
“You love her, don’t you.”
He fakes a short, supercilious laugh. “Hah. Me? No.”
“And she knows about me?”
“Of course not, only one who knows something, that’s Bogdan, ’cause he do similar in the past.”
“I’ll find the hotel myself.” I pick up my bag.
“Please, please, Bruce. One night.”
Elena has come in with a quart of beer and is pouring him a glass. He glowers at her until she extends the bottle toward me from a distance. “Want a drink?” she mumbles disingenuously as I shake my head.
A hollow bang rea
ches us from the hallway as the apartment door is pushed open and slammed against the wall. A powerful bass voice booms, “Romulus?” Then a man comes toward us grinning. He’s massive and barrel-chested with generous features, a nearly shaven head and one earring, like a kind of friendly Bluto from Popeye. “Bruce!” he thunders, crushing my hand in his. “Ha, famous Bruce, I finally meet! This is famous Bruce? Bruce Willis, Bruce Springsteen or Bruce Lee?”
He’s Bogdan, Romulus’s bouncer-and-boxer brother, evident from the emblematic bandage over one brow, covering stitches. “So Bruce, Romania you like?”
“Sure, sure,” I answer a little nervously. Then he’s silent, having spoken all the words in English he knows.
He’s followed moments later by a very incongruous girlfriend, an attractive, savvy-looking woman dressed much too chicly for the environment in a tight pricey silver blouse. Her makeup is Kabuki-thick, highlighted by a strange sharp brown outline of pencil around a heavily lipsticked mouth.
“I am Iris Dumitriu,” she says suavely, in nearly perfect English. “How was the driving?”
Frantic for some connection, I latch on to her as we walk to the kitchen. She keeps her eyes, which seem metallic because of the fluorescent-green eye shadow, assiduously away from mine and reacts noncommittally to all my remarks. Is it because she knows something? Flatly she explains that she just got back from Japan two days ago, where she was working as a “dancer and hostess”—a term she pronounces in a precise, detached voice. The money was good, but she detested it and got tired of serving those “midgets” steamed towels and bowing to them. Now she and Bogdan plan to do nothing for the next couple of years. The $40,000 she brought back is quite a lot of money to have in Romania. A sense of satisfied anticipation flows coolly from her about her wealthy future, and it’s evident that Bogdan, who couldn’t be a more improbable partner for her, is excited about it, too.
The next to pound on the door is Floritchica, Romulus’s grinning, portly forty-something mother. Her face is brown and shaped like an apple, her features sweet, elfin and sensual. “Bruce,” she says, almost seductively, “speak no English I am sorry.” With her is her youngest son, Renei, seventeen, lost and intense, dark like her. A quiet fascination shoots from his sloe eyes at the sight of me, and when he presses his hand to mine he is trembling with excitement. With a twinge of guilt I find myself wishing I’d met him instead of the jaded Romulus. Romulus catches the feeling in my eyes.
Whiskey and beer are flowing when Romulus’s stepfather, Silviu, a stocky blond with an exhausted, disillusioned look, arrives with the middle brother, Vlad, a handsome, grinning adolescent with clumsy, abrupt gestures. They’ve all gathered around me as if I were some exotic animal. Floritchica musters her spare command of English. “Tell me, Bruce, why you come to Romania?”
Uneasily, I launch into an explanation about an assignment in Budapest, but Romulus stops me right away by saying, “Bruce, in this place they will want to hear something short.”
“To be with Romulus,” I say, testing the limits. Everybody grins at the response except Elena, who sneaks her hand into Romulus’s. Floritchica makes a remark to Romulus in Romanian and beams at me.
“She say you look like politician,” he says. My eyes cloud as I think of Romania’s long problem with corruption, but Romulus adds, “Is a compliment.”
Floritchica has her youngest son translate to me that she’d like to make me dinner but has no money for it, so I slip the equivalent of twenty-five dollars into her hand. “Bruce, you speak franceza?” she asks. I nod.
“Merchi beaucoup, voush e formidable,” she tells me, kissing me a little too lingeringly on the cheek.
When I walk down the hall to the bathroom, I see Romulus making up my bed, so I slip quickly into the bedroom and close the door. My eyes are stinging with resentment. It catches in my throat, making me cough, as if I were having an allergic reaction.
“Does she live here?”
He looks frightened, as if I were about to hit him. But then there’s something else, like a curious erotic anticipation of punishment, which he deserves and desires. He nods almost ritualistically in an admission of guilt.
“How long?”
“Bruce, is nothing. One of girls I work with.”
“You mean she’s a whore?”
Relieved at the categorization, he nods again, almost eagerly. “You know, when I go to club, maybe there is foreigner looking for girl. So her I send.” He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, as if he were shooing away a fly.
“But she’s your girlfriend, too.”
Reluctantly he nods again. And suddenly, based on her obvious hostility to me, I have an insight. “She’s the same one who was in Budapest, isn’t she.”
Again a reluctant nod. And as he sees my jaw stiffen, the color flood from my face at the thought of all the times I was probably paying for her, too, he adds quickly, “But really, Bruce, is nothing. She say she love me, but I do not love her. You say you don’t care about the girls, now, suddenly, is something. I don’t see why—”
Before he can finish, Elena has popped urgently into the room. Romulus is bending to tuck in a sheet in a futile effort to pretend business as usual. She enlaces his waist and yanks him toward her stubbornly, all the while looking at me in an invitation to take close note of the gesture. “I thought he was never coming back,” she says to me accusingly.
In a kind of helpless schizophrenia, Romulus blocks out my presence and turns to take her in his arms. “Well, I back now,” he tells her, and caresses her hair, “so shut up already.” They kiss.
Surprised by the acidic nausea welling up in my throat, I leave the room, holding back angry tears by telling myself that the whole thing is ridiculous anyway. Strangely, the hurt is less uncomfortable than the enormous task of revision, like the deleting and reformatting of a hard drive. There is one benefit from this experience. None of these people, except perhaps Romulus, seems capable of carrying out the blackmail I’ve fantasized.
More guests have come to meet “the American.” A sturdy, starkly handsome twenty-year-old named Mircea, with olive skin and pale green eyes framed by delicate eyebrows, holds out a gentlemanly hand and crushes mine. I notice fresh scabs over each knuckle. “This is bouncer at club, like me,” explains Bogdan. The two sit back on the couch in a pose that couldn’t exist in the States without the wrong interpretation. Bogdan has his arm around the junior bouncer, who has rested his head on Bogdan’s shoulder. The image unleashes fantasies in me, part vengeful but mostly just horny. Meanwhile handsome Mircea is staring at me with eager urgency, curious about every gesture or emotion on my face, as I struggle to hide my suffering and keep my eyes away from his crotch.
Behind me, Iris, who is standing with Elena, holds out a camera. “Would you, Bruce?” It’s a high-priced Nikon with an enormous lens, obviously one of the spoils of her stay in Japan.
The two girls—two whores, it occurs to me—laughingly pose in an erotic parody, clasping each other by the neck and touching tongues. Focusing the shot gives me a chance to study Elena’s skin. Beneath the makeup, it’s flawed by acne scars; also, her forehead is too convex, its bulge overshadowing otherwise regular features. I’m ashamed to admit to myself how much this pleases me.
The appearance of the camera leads to a round of picture-taking. Everybody wants to be photographed with Bruce. Mama encircles me with her short arms and pulls me against her body. She’s soft and fragrant, having splashed on perfume for the occasion. For one picture, young Renei strikes a karate pose and gazes straight at me, as I stand with arms at my sides, grinning stiffly, at a loss as to what complementary gesture to make. In fact, I’m overcome by his large liquid eyes, upon which seem to float all his fears and dark imaginings. At my most mesmerized point the flash goes off, catching me in embarrassing sensual fascination. But Renei’s hypersensitive glance isn’t really directed at me; it’s a limpid, swirling pond ready to suck in anything. His vulnerable face is starting to unsettle m
e; it takes all my strength not to keep staring.
During all this, only Romulus’s stepfather Silviu sulks, in the background, sucking at his beer, refusing to be in any of the pictures. It’s then that I remember the small gifts from America I packed for the possibility of meeting his family: Renei gets a black T-shirt from New York’s East Village with the word “FUCK” repeated all over it, which he seems to adore; my “mother-in-law,” a scented soap and a scarf; and for Bogdan, Vlad and Silviu, small light-intensive flashlights. But Silviu shakes his head when I hand him his gift.
“What’s the problem?” I ask Romulus, who stays mute, looking embarrassed.
“Give to me American money,” says Silviu with a sardonic grimace.
Affronted, I answer, “First give me the flashlight back.”
He hands it to me, and I hand him thirty American dollars from my wallet, then pass ten each to the other members of the family.
Pocketing the money, Silviu says, “Ceauşescu good.”
Renei tries to explain. “My father don’t like capitalism, Bruce. He old-fashioned. Saying under Ceauşescu he not worry, everything paid for. Now, he only make maybe sixty dollar a month as construction worker. And during summer, even less because construction stop and he need to work as security guard. He don’t like capitalism, he don’t like America.”
The Romanian Page 18
