Before a crowd of mostly Romanian listeners, Firan sauntered to the front of the room to announce the evening’s program. She’d pulled together a dissonant variety of American and Romanian writers. I would have to go first.
No one was expecting to hear what poured forth: the story of a Romanian rentboy, abject passion and problematic sex. I could feel the silence in the room, which I interpreted as a kind of rapt repulsion. Later, two Romanian men approached me to compliment me on the story. Incredibly, both had reworked it in their minds as being about a female prostitute. One of them told me he understood my interest in Romanian women but cautioned me to be careful with the hookers. Then he told an urban myth, about a client who wakes up with a kidney missing. Only Nina Cassian, the lauded Romanian poetess in exile, who had also come to read, seemed to have heard my story for what it was and enjoyed it. Later, though, she would flinch when I mentioned it, asking with a curious patriotism why everyone who writes about Romania always writes about prostitutes.
Cassian’s reading, which came directly after mine, produced a bizarre reaction. Hardly had she started when a woman with tired eyes, dressed in a stretched-out, faded sweatshirt, began to protest. “I denounce you,” she told Cassian before the whole audience, explaining it was for the patriotic poems Cassian had written during the Ceauşescu regime. The outburst led to a comic scene, in which supporters of Cassian stood to denounce the denouncing woman. After Cassian had finally managed to read her lyrical, linguistically rich poem, Firan glided to the front of the room to restore order and introduce the next reader, whom, she told the disruptive woman, she was presenting “with your permission,” all the while shooting daggers at her with her eyes.
Cassian herself seems never to have forgiven me for my salty story. She granted me only one rendezvous with her afterward, when she was ill. It was then that she told me that Johnny Răducanu isn’t really Jewish. It was also then that she expressed her disappointment about my subject matter, and we’ve not had a conversation since.
Not only did the tantalizing Carmen Firan show enthusiasm for my story, she became bit by bit my source for literary and topical information about Romania. Today I’m still intrigued by her intelligence, clear wit and sensuality. They seem part of the dream, or trance, connected with Nature that I experienced in her country—in such contradiction to the historical agonies Romanians have endured.
THE FLIGHT BACK to Romania by way of Frankfurt on Lufthansa exposed me to other American exiles with whom I could compare myself. The plane was three-quarters full of African-Americans, who approached one another like members of a cult, all obsessed with the culture of Germany. In their eyes I saw a perverse audacity in favoring a country once known for its racism. Yet I realized that spending time there was also an escape from American stereotypes about them, a new and intriguing freedom. I saw similar features in my own exile. Very few tourists from the United States choose Romania. In being there, I was unconsciously deriving a feeling of a unique status.
Before leaving Bucharest this time, I’d made sure both Romulus and I had keys. Traumatized by his eleventh-hour stand-out when I’d been in Paris, I now wanted him to come back on his own terms. I tried to tell myself he’d return when he was ready, and if not, that was the way it was supposed to be. But behind this bravado were very real fears. I hadn’t gotten to the point of projecting assurance in the streets of Bucharest; my body movements were still unmistakably American, and on almost every expedition without Romulus I’d run into some small problem, such as being charged triple for a purchase. New Yorker though I was, I was still intimidated by this city full of want, disappointment and trauma.
Just as I’d feared, the taxi driver from the airport vastly overcharged me. And once he’d dropped me off at Piaţa Unirii, I had to face the same poor bitch who guarded the territory around the apartment on Mihnea Vodă. It was the middle of July and the city was still baking in one of the worst heat waves of the century. Romulus, naturally, was nowhere to be found.
This time, as planned, I took a different strategy. When I called him on his cell phone I found him at the soccer field in Sibiu, just as before. I told him about the death of my aunt, to whom I’d been very close as a child. The news produced a kind of embarrassment, evidenced by a dull “Oh” on the other end of the line. I wasn’t surprised. Having learned to silence himself about his own sufferings, he was distinctly inarticulate about others’. Implicit also in the silence was his reluctance to take the role of comforter. So I told him he could come whenever he wanted. “Tomorrow,” he promised. Knowing his imprecision regarding time, I readied myself for a few days on my own. During them I would be isolated. My only friends here were Alex Leo Şerban, who was away for the rest of the summer, covering some film festivals in Western Europe, and Johnny Răducanu, who was on tour.
But these days alone—which stretched to about eight—were rather astonishing, especially when I was altering my endorphins late at night with codeine. On those nights, I gave in to obsessive thoughts, using the codeine again as a sacrament to produce visions of where Romulus might be or what he might be doing. Like Saint Ignatius doing his spiritual exercises, I tried to picture, smell, taste every detail of my meditation: the blurred movement of a leg on a soccer field, an apartment in the block and an unmade bed, hair falling limp over the tops of the cheekbones of a sleeping face in the heat. And then, of course, Elena. Telepathy took over again on those nights. I stayed in bed immersed in the images on the inside of my eyelids until way past noon. Then, rising with a codeine hangover mixed with the fear that Elena was gaining ground, I would tell myself that it was too late to start work on the second half of the Céline Dion translation, and set out to wander the city.
Each afternoon, I strolled along the bridge over the Dîmboviţa, still reduced to mud and dead fish in the heat, then across the massive canyon of Piaţa Unirii, where, like other pedestrians, I shrunk to a molecule against this crossroads the size of Times Square. And like everyone else, I would let my sight be pulled along by the perspective straight to the façade of Ceauşescu’s monstrous palace, the House of the People, a building as large as a village.
On some days, I’d make a stop at the delicatessen that fills the bottom triangular space of the Bulevard Hotel, where you stand in line to order meat or cheese, then stand in line to pay for it, then stand in line a third time with your receipt to pick up your purchase. Or I’d stop to visit the gloomy interior of the Church of Saint Ioan Botezătorul and stare at the silver icons and hanging Oriental lamps, which sent pallid shafts of light through dusty air. I’d watch the robed, bearded priest behind the altar hearing the confession of a woman kneeling before him, her head draped in a black cloth. I’d be amazed by the posture of old, impoverished Orthodox Christian women, staring as if in a trance, their bodies as still and stiff as anesthetized subjects, tilted obliquely in some ancient attitude of piety, as pain welled from their rapt, frozen faces. Spooked, I’d hurry outside through the ornately carved wooden doors, to the curses of a beggar that seemed to devour the air, and stare dumbly at the little girl selling stockings and listen to her monotonous chant.
I was in a mystical country full of people who believed they were in direct contact with the sacrament—unlike Roman Catholics, who experience it only vicariously, through the great bureaucracy of the Church. And I’d wonder if that expression of endurance and resignation I saw so often on the face of Romulus had its roots in the religion of his people. This was a mentality with which I was completely unfamiliar. I’d sense it as I climbed Mitropoliei Hill to the seventeenth-century Patriarchal Cathedral, the headquarters of the entire Romanian Orthodox Church. The beggars along that hill had all perfected stances of aesthetic agony, sad performances that seemed a kind of art. The entrance to the church was decorated with a fresco depicting the blessed ascending to heaven as the evil fall to torment. But inside is where I always lingered to stare at the little cadaver of Saint Dumitru under glass, the body concealed by a brocade cloth with a
carefully hemmed hole revealing one wrist.
But of all the churches where I passed my afternoons, fleeing visceral visions of Romulus from the night before, Stavropoleos, not far from Strada Lipscani, was my favorite. It was built in 1724 by Greek monks, designed by Constantin Brăncoveanu; and its ornate columns, Moorish archways and gold-leaf icons give it an occult, anachronistic feel, especially since a gleaming, glass-walled skyscraper has been erected not far from it. Visiting it was like a drug experience with the power to take me beyond my life’s context, in the sense of where I was and who I am. There I always had the pleasurable feeling of doing something arcane and not allowed.
One day, as I sat reading Panaït Istrati’s The Bandits in the park in front of the Atheneum, a boy of about eleven started yanking at my sleeve. He’d been watching me pop one mint after another into my mouth and was pointing imperially at the bulge the candy box made in my pants pocket.
“Candy!” he commanded, tipping the ash from the cigarette he was smoking into my lap, his face close enough to mine to spray it with a few droplets of saliva.
“Why?” I answered teasingly. “Why should I?”
“’Cause you good man is all,” he answered imperturbably, stroking the outline of the candy box through my pants in a gesture that could have been misinterpreted. He was barefoot. One toe was missing a nail, and both feet were covered in grime.
I took the box out and opened it, not noticing the three other boys lined up next to me on the park bench. Two jumped quickly into a line to be served, and with exaggerated yelps of joy, each popped two or three mints into his mouth, then shot out his hand for more.
Only half a minute later, when the box was empty, did I notice the fourth boy, in a tattered T-shirt, still sitting patiently on the bench. He must have been about thirteen, but he had the calm, resigned look of someone much older.
“You’re not fast enough,” I joked, and with that, he slid off the bench until he was just a head above my knees. I thought he’d been sitting with his legs tucked under him. I hadn’t realized he had none.
“No more candy,” I said apologetically, coloring with embarrassment, as he eyed me gently from a shrewd, weathered face and answered, “Money.”
All four pairs of eyes were glued to my hand as I reached into my pocket for my wallet. And when I opened it and held it high above their heads, the first child, who’d tugged my sleeve so insistently, leapt into the air to get a glimpse of what was inside. I held it higher and plucked out a 10,000-lei note, worth about thirty cents, then swooped it into the outstretched hand of the boy without legs, who snatched it away as if it were priceless.
“Money, money, money,” chanted the others in a chorus I’d swear was harmonized and on pitch. Other people in the park had begun to stare. The curiosity on their faces was colored with squeamishness.
One by one I plucked out three more 10,000-lei notes, handing them to the others. Their streetwise stances melted into boyish gawkiness; they scrambled onto the bench and my lap, pushing and pulling at one another for the closest place.
“What you reading, mister?”
“Panaït Istrati.” Three pairs of eyes went blank, but those of the boy without legs, to my amazement, lit up with recognition.
“Good,” he said.
“Why you read?” asked the ringleader, the one who’d pulled my sleeve.
“Reading’s good,” I answered. “And besides, I write some books.”
The boy’s eyes clouded with confusion. “What you do?”
I pantomimed the act of typing, then pointed at the book.
“You make much money!” announced the smallest boy, who was about eight.
“Not really.” His eyes dulled with disappointment.
“Bad.” The three other boys echoed him. “Bad, bad,” they chanted. But the legless boy, who I now noticed was sitting on a single skate, was studying my hands with absorption, as if they held the secret of what I did for a living.
“Mister,” said the ringleader, yanking the smallest from my lap, “you buy us groceries now.”
I gave him a doubtful look, and all of them lapsed into a mawkish whine. The ringleader had forced tears into his eyes, not the spontaneous tears of a child but a willful, stagy look. “Mister,” he repeated, “you buy us groceries.”
“Oh, all right, why the hell not.”
The four boys sprang off the bench, the legless one landing with a splat on his skate. With an enormous push of his thin arms, he zoomed forward, the bottom of his body scraping and scattering leaves on the ground. The others ran joyously behind him as I struggled to catch up, suddenly elated by their yelps, while other people in the park gaped, their faces shrinking in repulsion. Every look showed disgust mixed with fear, but behind these I thought I glimpsed envy, even guilt.
The boys led me across the park and several blocks into a neighborhood I’d never explored. The legless one on the skate sped on and off the sidewalk, swooping in great arcs past cars. The reactions of pedestrians and motorists were always the same, a defensive annoyance at the sight of the boys, then amazement at seeing me hurry along beside them, which quickly mutated into a look of shame. As we ran, I got a good look at the boys. The ringleader really did look like a miniature adult, pants rolled halfway up his shins over bare feet, a cigarette spewing ashes from one hand, brown shiny hair and a little lemon of a face. His mouth was screwed up in determination and his eyes shot boastful aggression. The two smallest ones must have been brothers about a year apart. The eight-year-old’s pipe-cleaner arms stuck out from a grimy tank top safety-pinned to baggy pants in lieu of a belt. He had dirty ears and a full, gleamingly wet mouth. His older brother was wearing shorts, out of which poked two heavily scabbed knees, and laceless sneakers whose toes had been painted Day-Glo lime. He was holding a stick that he loved rattling on garbage cans and car hoods, causing irate explosions on every block as car owners, shopkeepers and stoop-sitters cursed, sometimes darting out into the street after him, until they saw me and retreated in confusion.
The legless skater was dark, with piercing, all-comprehending black eyes, a face that seemed immune to suffering—or so familiar with it that it poured off in rivulets and was never absorbed. Behind this ruthless manner I sensed unusual intelligence, private and unreachable.
As we hurried through the streets, all my preoccupations melted away. I knew what I was doing was ridiculous, that I was caught in a sentimental fantasy, but the boys’ rowdy mood sailed me along, and waves of pleasure welled up. We rattled into a supermarket, and the cashiers, produce man and manager snapped back their heads in perplexed indignation. But the nine-year-old had already grabbed a cart and sent it wheeling toward me, so I took it and we started down the first aisle.
The legless skater zigzagged ahead of us from one side of the aisle to the other, pitching anything he could reach toward the ringleader, who tossed it into the cart. When we were halfway through the store, and the cart contained a hodgepodge of steaks, bananas, half-gallon Cokes, ice cream, potato chips and chicken wings, the manager marched over and began shouting down at the legless boy, pointing one insistent finger toward the door. The boys all looked pleadingly toward me, so I tapped the manager on the shoulder.
“Excuse me, but these boys are with me. We’re shopping. Is that allowed?”
Having obviously understood my English, the man retreated grumbling, while the produce man snatched a melon from the arms of the smallest boy. We headed for the checkout and I paid, about forty dollars in all.
Outside on the street, the boys were exultant. The ringleader had opened the half-gallon of Coke and was chugging it in big gulps, while the two smallest leapt toward it, trying to wrest it from his hands. The legless boy, unruffled, sat at the curb, grocery bags looped around his shoulders, watching me with gentle eyes. Then the ringleader passed the Coke to the youngest, who almost dropped it on the street.
“Mister. Taxi?”
Before I could answer, the boys had waylaid one at a red lig
ht, and as the driver tried to lock all his doors, they piled inside. I handed the driver a large bill and he sped away cursing, while the boys pressed their faces to the windows and waved good-bye.
Fantasies pulsed through my mind, a hundred times more romantic than any I’d ever felt for Romulus. Love suddenly seemed so easy in the context of the four black holes I’d just encountered. Receiving such an unguarded response to giving was a new experience. I was planning to come back to the park every day at the same time. The boys would become my adopted charges. They’d learn reading, English, responsibility. By the time I got back to the apartment, I’d constructed our farmhouse in Maramureş, big feather beds with sheep’s-hair blankets, piled with exuberant little bodies at bedtime before a blazing fire, honest work with the peasants starting at dawn.
Excitedly, I called Romulus to tell him about the experience. He answered his cell phone sounding guilty, his breath almost erotic, as he savored the inevitability of a lecture about not having come back yet. Instead I told him my story, which poured out ingenuously, full of high-blown resolutions, inspiration, thrill.
Incredibly, he listened quietly, then sighed and said, “You are crazy.”
“You’re just like all the others,” I spat. “They were all staring at me like I was nuts. No wonder why those kids—”
“Hmm, hmm.” He clucked. “Where do you think boys go in taxi?”
“Home, I guess.”
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