Romulus says that the doctors have diagnosed it as a panic disorder. But Floritchica can’t afford the antidepressants that were prescribed, and after a month, Renei stopped taking them. I try to gather my wits, wonder whether I should offer money for antidepressants; but when I whisperingly suggest it to Romulus, he counsels me not to by saying, “This is too much bigger for you to take on, Bruce. Better to do nothing.”
I study Romulus’s face with a sad sense of astonishment, realizing that one of his greatest talents is his ability to project composure. During our months together, while I believed intimacy was developing, he never mentioned this problem with his brother. How much is he hiding beneath those hooded eyes and laconic, coarse replies? Have I, all along, been totally unaware of the endurances of the person I’ve claimed to love? All at once, I catch a glimpse in him of the same neurasthenic sensitivity that flowed torturously from his brother. It makes me shudder.
Eyes moist, Mama pulls herself together and tiptoes into the kitchen to get the whistling teakettle. She brings it out and serves us tea with tiny anise cookies. She’s like Renei, in that there’s a vulnerability to her soft gestures; but as her ringed, alert eyes testify, there’s also a kind of cunning.
“Vous savez, Bruce,” she tells me in French, “je mène une vie de chien.” I lead a dog’s life.
“Pourquoi?” I ask, putting a sympathetic look into my eyes.
It seems she’s just had a terrible argument with her husband, who refused to turn the thirty dollars I gave him—half a month’s salary—over to her for housekeeping expenses. Instead, he’d disappeared for the entire night, didn’t show up for his job as a security guard and came home at seven in the morning stewed and defeated, his clothing reeking of vomit. Then he left again. An image of his weary, accusing mouth, his lax, disillusioned stoop, flashes into my brain, filling me, for some reason I can’t quite grasp, with anguish. But Floritchica has already mutated into a girlish, slightly flirtatious manner, shamelessly complimenting my blue-green eyes and my hands, which she says look like a writer’s. Do I, she asks coyly, ever intend to write a book about them, believing, like almost every impoverished person I’ve met, that the story of her life would make a bestseller.
The conversation drifts to other matters, and by asking where her children are, I realize that none of them holds a regular job. Bogdan’s occasional boxing and bouncing are now supplemented by his girlfriend’s windfall, though no one as much as says so. Renei went to mechanic’s school for a month but was thrown out when he hurled a wrench at a car window during a panic attack and now shares his father’s sixty-dollar check, seldom leaving the house because of his bouts of agoraphobia. Vlad seems to pick up a buck as a runner for some substance, although whether this means he’s a gofer for a local pharmacy or delivers illicit drugs never becomes clear.
As Romulus slips into a doze, I’m startled to find Floritchica hissing conspiratorially at me and signaling me to follow. She stands, and I find myself praying that we’re not heading for the adjoining bedroom. But she leads me to the tiny kitchen, where I’m aghast to see her shaking exhausted Renei awake. In a severe whisper she commands him to do something, and I can make out that he’s crossly refusing. Finally he sits up on the paltry kitchen cot with a sigh and reluctantly says, “My mother want me to say to you that she got something she going to tell you. She got a note in English that neighbor who studied in America helping her to write. Okay, Bruce?” and he falls back on the cot to stare at the ceiling, exhausted eyes pouring out misery.
With a sigh of satisfaction Floritchica sits on the edge of the cot and takes out a folded piece of paper. She begins to recite what is written on it in a singsong voice that betrays little knowledge of the meaning of each word:
“ ‘ Dear Bruce, I ask to you from bottom of heart please help me. Romulus he give me nothing. I will lose apartment in two months. Renei is so sick mentally. I don’t know what do. I need seven thousand dollars to buy new apartment. Please, please, you must help me. Do not tell to Romulus I ask to you this.’”
Like a schoolgirl satisfied with a difficult recitation, she looks up from the note with a soft, foolish smile, her eyes sparkling with naive anticipation.
My heart thumps with embarrassment, and I try to avoid her gaze; but the room is so small, I manage only to fix my eyes on the handle of the refrigerator door, right below my waist.
“Please, Bruce.”
I clear my throat several times, and in a strained, alien voice say, “Umm, I haven’t really got that much money.”
Floritchica gives me a doubtful look, like a motherly reprimand. “Is so much money for you?”
“I’m, uh, just a writer.”
“A writer? So much money they make!”
“Look, Floritchica, I don’t have much money. But I’ll make a deal with you. I’m thinking maybe I’ll write a book about us, I mean about me and Romulus and all of this. Now if I do that and I make, say, more than thirty thousand dollars, I’ll give you your seven.”
I can’t believe what’s just popped out of my mouth. But it seems to satisfy Floritchica. She stands up from the cot with a new energy, her eyes mirroring her imagined future. “Come,” she says, “we have more tea.” But first she shakes Renei to attention again and gives him another sentence to translate for me. “She say she need money for her own medicine, Bruce. Twenty dollars.” I hand her the equivalent in Romanian money and she beams at me. As I walk back to the other room, Renei’s voice reaches me in a ghostly moan. “Bruce, I am sorry!”
Romulus is sitting on the couch, playing with the settings on his sports watch. For a moment I think that he’s set this up, but when his eyes narrow with suspicion at his mother, who avoids his glance nervously, I know he hasn’t. “Hey, I’ve gotta go,” I tell him in an abrupt, impatient voice. The urgency in my tone startles him into a standing position. Mama, on the other hand, seems weirdly trouble-free. She enlaces me again with her plump arms and pulls me to her breast for a warm, tear-stained good-bye.
As we walk toward a phone booth to call a taxi, I say, “Your old lady asked me for money.”
Romulus takes a drag from his cigarette and exhales callously into the air. “My old lady,” he says. “Well, I am not surprise, she can be real bitch. You not going to give her any, are you?”
THAT EVENING, Romulus insists on assembling a more civil Elena, a temporarily recovered Renei and me for a trip to a local club. We walk across the square to a squat, pistachio-colored medieval building and down a narrow, winding staircase in near darkness. Here in the cellar, to my amazement, is a goth disco. In windowless rooms, beneath vaulted brick ceilings, gyrate young Romanians with long, vampirish dyed-black hair, wrists sporting studded black leather bracelets and eyes circled in mascara. The techno goth music shrieks through the cavernous rooms as one young dancer, who seems caught in a trance, stands alone in the center of the floor, moving his upper body in big, careening circles. The others look on soberly as if they were participants in an occult rite. We drink huge steins of German beer until all of us are having trouble keeping our balance and I suggest it’s time for me to go back to the hotel.
From my walnut bed, the high ceiling of the room looks mobile, hovering threateningly above me like the broad black expanse of a prehistoric bird. In the sweltering heat, an unenthusiastic breeze swells the heavy curtains. I half dream about swimming helplessly in some unfathomable night, a black ocean, distressed because my identity has floated away from me like a life preserver; I reach out for it, grabbing only handfuls of black. A sharp, precise knock on the door startles me fully awake.
Romulus has appeared, to spend the night in the hotel with me. When I grill him about what Elena may be thinking or whether or not they’ve had a fight, he shrugs off my questions. “This is of no importance.”
In the darkness, he strips to his bikini underwear, crawls into bed and rolls toward me. The sensation of his body spirals me away from all resolve, and realizations and vows of the last thirty-s
ix hours slip through my hands like wriggling fish. Sensation returns, a drug taking hold of my entire brain; but when I begin to caress his hard body, it feels dead, and a phrase from the novel Là-bas by J.-K. Huysmans spills into my mind: “He clasped a corpse, a body so cold that it froze him. . . .” Although my hands keep moving down his lean, velvety chest to the coils of his abdomen, the refrigerator feeling is overwhelming, and I can’t help asking what the matter is.
“Just go, go,” he says, pushing my hand farther downward to his crotch, though his body keeps its rigidity with the arms straight at the side, like the victim of a ritual sacrifice.
XX
Cînta cucul langa noi
Si ne iubeam pe zvoi
Sa fi murit amandoi
Nearby the cuckoo cried
As we loved by the riverside
It’s there we should have died
—FOLKSONG OFTEN SUNG BY BRANCUSI
THE HEAT WAVE, like an episode of shock, is over, too intense to be remembered exactly. Here in the mountains, a mild chill pings the air with promise and cures the past like a tonic. The girl Elena and Mama’s request for a new apartment seem like a lost chapter, an interruption of fantasy—the kind felt by a junkie suddenly shaken awake, before he sinks once more into a fainting, timeless rush. Romulus and I are back together, approaching our seventh month together.
He is sitting next to me in the Dacia as we head north, sighing with relief at this new escape, glad to leave Elena and his problem-ridden family far behind. She’d been shrill and hysterical all morning, bursting into tears when he returned from the hotel, then begging and threatening when he announced his intention to continue with the trip. It dawned on him that my demands were far less difficult than hers to satisfy. His good-bye to her was cold.
Now, slowly, he’s working to reestablish our complicity, sneaking a hand out from time to time to slap me playfully on the thigh. For him, being with me is like bachelorhood, since he has no template for considering himself gay. He’s convinced himself that we share an ideal camaraderie that just happens to involve some inconvenient requests for sex—no big deal.
“You know, you are only friend I have in whole life?” he says to me as we drive past the fantastic homes of a wealthy Roma enclave, their pagoda-like aluminum gables glinting in the sun. The word “friend” lacerates me only slightly, like a paper cut that I try to medicate by answering, “You’re my friend, too, and more.”
For the last twenty minutes we’ve been caught behind an open truck of chestnut-colored horses, a situation I can’t get used to. Seven of them are crowded on a flatbed protected only by a four-foot-high railing, phosphorescent diesel smoke spewing around them. As the truck careens around curves, they struggle for balance, falling one against the other, their dark eyes bulging with fright. Finally, the truck turns off and I barrel up the mountain road, even passing the white van ahead of us. At Romulus’s insistence, I’ve learned some new skills of navigation, closer to those of the other drivers.
We zoom along for about twenty minutes until another open flatbed appears before us—it, too, carrying some live cargo. As we near it, I realize what it is: a peasant funeral. Dressed in their Sunday best, a family is crouching on the open platform, around a black coffin that has been draped with a black cloth. About twenty miles farther on, the cortege mercifully turns off; I press the pedal to the floor again.
We’d planned to leave this morning, but a late rising, complications from Elena and the decision to have lunch in Sibiu delayed our trip to four p.m. Our destination, which we hope to reach shortly after nightfall, is the region of Maramureş, near the Ukrainian border, one of the last untouched places on the continent of Europe. It’s an area where farmers still toil the land with oxen and where some villagers still observe pre-Christian rites.
About sixty miles outside Sibiu, we’re caught in the town of Alba Iulia in the midst of an animal fair. In a field, peasants are examining oxen, horses, goats and donkeys for sale. A long line of animals in pairs, reminiscent of those brought onto Noah’s Ark, have clogged the highway. Three hours later, in an urban traffic jam, my throat is strangled by an acrid odor. We’re nearing Turda, the glass-making town with the lead-ridden air. Surrounded by palpable, bluish-gray wisps of pollution, poorly fed factory workers line the road, waving glass vases and tumblers in the air at us as we pass, hoping to sell them for a few dollars. Within minutes, my head is pounding from—I assume—the toxic chemicals. Although no one has ever said Elena is from Turda, I remember my fantasy of a blonde being from that locale. Forever after, I’ll associate my memory of Elena with this polluted town and its vaporized-metal odor.
After Turda, the air freshens and the houses become more suburban. Large storks’ nests sit atop some of the telephone poles. Romulus has regressed into full bachelorhood rather annoyingly, pointing out anything on the road that looks female and making macho, predatory comments. I’m getting worried. Night’s arriving, and the sky has darkened threateningly. Then, slowly, a few fat drops spatter the windshield.
I gun the engine, hoping that we’re driving out of the storm. When I reach eighty miles per hour, I have to come to a screeching stop in front of an enormous flock of sheep, which are claiming the entire highway. With curly tresses reaching almost to the pavement like astrakhans and led by a donkey saddled with one of their pelts, they’re ambling down the road, oblivious of the cars in front of and behind them. Each of their beady eyes above pointed snouts is fixed and still, in an expression that reminds me of our hitchhiker’s cryptic calm.
It’s almost ten p.m. as we drive across the edge of the city of Cluj-Napoca. Then a stagy thunderstorm begins to follow us up and down the steep curves, strewing the road with slippery leaves and coating our windshield like vibrating gelatin. Forks of lightning burst through the sky, some so close I’m afraid they’ll hit the car. We pass an old peasant woman who’s already drenched to the bone, rivulets of water spilling from the folds of her kerchief onto her face. I try to slow down, to give her a ride, but the car behind me honks threateningly, signaling that it can’t stop so suddenly on the slippery road. Going is rough. I’ve slowed down to about fifteen miles per hour.
It takes about three more hours to reach the town of Gherla, only thirty miles away. At a crossroads stands a frail girl, her body like a bowed sail against the oncoming rain. “It’s a whore,” says Romulus.
“You mean she’s so desperate for a trick she’s willing to stay out in this storm?”
“Hmm, hmm. Or maybe her people don’t come to pick her up. Now she caught.”
I shudder at the girl’s situation, but Romulus adds, “Her pussy must be so wet now, because of rain.”
“How can you think of such a thing when she’s suffering like that?”
Romulus shoots me a contemptuous sneer. “Is normal. You think has not happened to me?”
After one a.m., between Dej and Baia Mare, as we descend a chain of mountains, the situation worsens. Bolts of lightning seem to land right on the pavement, illuminating the car in blinding explosions. Great gusts of wind try to nudge us off the road. Our leaf-coated tires begin to slide down hills, sending us across the road sideways. We make wide U’s around fallen branches. From time to time, I pull over to the side of the road, wait to get back my nerve. Because we can see almost nothing, an endorphin-filled calm has invaded the car. Both of us stare without blinking through the spiraling sheets of rain caught in our headlights. This is a state of total alertness, the calm that strikes people faced with dire danger. Strangely, it forges a complicity between Romulus and me, emphasized by the touch of his rough hand on my neck.
As we ascend a narrow slope about thirty miles from Baia Mare, we come upon a dead body in the road. It’s lying nose-down on the pavement in the rain, and no one has even bothered to cover it up. A few feet ahead we squeeze by a police van and the car of the driver who probably hit it. The sight comes as a shock to me, which I’m able to put out of my mind almost immediately; but from the
corner of my eye, I can see that Romulus is quietly sulking. An hour later, all my senses are fixed on the red taillights in front of us, the only clue to the location of the road. “I cannot get feeling of dead body out of mind,” Romulus blurts out, then launches into a potential scenario of peasant children waiting anxiously by the fire, only to discover that their father has been killed on the highway.
The story shames me, reveals my ruthless ability to forget traumatic images that stand in the way of my goals. I haven’t been thinking about the dead body at all, just about getting to the end of the trip. Romulus is, I realize, more faceted than I’ve been conveniently supposing. He has to be hiding some delicate, even humanist, quality.
The minutes roll on excruciatingly slowly, ticked away by the successive bolts of lightning. Our vehicle, dark and isolated on the brink of danger, transports us beyond time and context into some rippling, associative sea. My mind lapses into reflections and revises my opinion of remarks he’s made. “Her pussy must be so wet now, because of rain. . . .” The words came from some close identification with the girl, her abject isolation. His words are predatory, yet they intimately share the vocabulary of the prey. Imperceptibly, his secret allegiances, which make up what one might call character, are surfacing. For the first time I can really see him in his context of poverty and urban want. As the car is illuminated by another bolt of lightning, I glance at him with a flash of understanding; telepathically he returns the look, as if sealing a new pact. An image of him as vulnerable, even sentimental, begins to gel, and a kind of anguish spreads through me—panic about dumping those assumptions to which I’d been so attached.
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