The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  One evening, Princess Helen made the mistake of bringing up his nighttime outings. Carol retorted by claiming they were the only recourse for a man wedded to frigid flesh. This time the dinner was shaken by imprecations. The breath of accusations disturbed the clean outline of the candle flames. The table was pounded so hard that the crystal trembled. When a plate was broken and the child started to howl, Helen decided to take matters into her own hands. With stilted calm she summoned the bewildered servants and had Prince Carol locked inside his room.

  An impatient hand appeared at the second-story casement, pushing it open in one thrust. Carol climbed out onto the terrace and, without a moment’s thought, leapt off to the ground. With one ankle fractured, he hopped cursing toward the Bugatti. Moments later the handful of pebbles rattled against the window of the chalet again. Lupescu must have been confused by the sound of the desperate struggle up the stairs, the curses muttered under breath. But the twisted ankle was just another boon for her as she fell to playing dismayed lover and over-concerned nurse.

  The ravings of lovers fill pages and pages, but the beloved, the focus of all this energy and power, has almost no voice and never explains what it is to be loved in this way. Passion swirls around her, illuminating her flesh, but does she ever feel that she’s just its tool, at its mercy? Are, then, the deceits and strategies of the beloved something that can be judged? Or are they merely the pitiful attempts at self-determination of a molecule caught in an atomic blast?

  Nobody will know what Lupescu was thinking as she packed for a trip to Paris late that fall. It will never be discovered whether her mind was racked with scruples and fears or dulled by opportunism and cold with strategy. As she carefully folded a sheer black nightgown embroidered with pearls into its black silk case, her face was little more than a heavily powdered mask. She spoke to no one as she walked with her luggage to the nearby station, kohled eyes hidden by a large black picture hat. She picked up a first-class ticket reserved for her under a false name.

  The day before, in an effort to wrench Carol from Lupescu’s grasp, his mother and father had sent him as the Romanian emissary to the funeral of Queen Alexandra in London. The Liberals were also behind the plan, hoping that it would lead to a situation in which Carol would have to give up his right to the throne. But the day after Carol left was the day Lupescu boarded car L17 on the Orient Express for Paris. In the first-class compartment that had been reserved for her alone, she removed the picture hat and placed it on the overhead rack. Only X-ray eyes could have seen what might or might not have been in the chamois bag balanced on her knee, beneath the layers of lingerie, the silk stockings, the Poiret gown and the bottle of Mitsouko. Was there really an envelope holding a letter with instructions from Brătianu, the leader of the Liberals? Did it contain a fat roll of new bills from him as well?

  London was the first sign that the world was crumbling around the future king of Romania. Paparazzi followed Carol everywhere, exaggerating the details of his affair with the Titian-haired Jewess. Each drink he took was said to be proof of his decadent lifestyle. Each woman he looked at confirmed his reputation as an orgiast willing to jump off balconies for a taste of female flesh. But barely any of it penetrated his cocoon of desire. In his mind, this protected him like a ring of fire, repelling those who approached. Even the British royal family, to whom he was related by blood, made a wide detour around him, shocked by the stories that the tabloids carried and squeamish about his life of lust.

  After the funeral, Romanian ministers were waiting for Carol in Paris; but as they greeted him at the train station, he shoved them aside. Standing at a distance was a veiled woman in black, a perfect symbol for doom. She was, I must emphasize, a symbol, barely a person. In a sense, she didn’t exist. She was merely a geometric focal point, a target in a whirling vortex. All very well, you may say, for the story, but what was going on inside the mind of the actual person of flesh and blood? No matter that a thousand shrewd considerations may have caused Lupescu to decide to have this affair. Once she’d entered it, the narrative became unintelligible. You can call her scheming or innocent. All of the terms reveal their inadequacy, like profane words used to describe a supernal event. Plans for the future, hates and dislikes, even intellectual preferences are sucked away in its maelstrom. If Lupescu was a woman of qualities before she began her affair with the prince, she was shorn of everything but his desire as soon as she fell into his arms. And at the station in Paris, she was little more than a black thundercloud, enveloping a man and the entire future of Romania.

  Shortly afterward, under pressure, Carol renounced his right to royal succession in favor of his mistress. The affair banned him from Romania and his family. But in 1930, three years after his father’s death, he would return to seize the kingship in a coup, with Lupescu in tow.

  Meanwhile, he had spent several years in exile and had taken a commoner’s name. He and his paramour went to Italy, then Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes. Then on to Biarritz and back to Paris—anywhere that would sustain the fantasy. The affair carried on, outside time, with no reference to anything else. It was a glorious escape from the strictures of the palace. But everything was waiting, like a world in suspension. Soon it would rematerialize, and Carol would be trapped.

  XXV

  I’M NOT A JEW-HATER,” Romulus told me. “Only when they think they’re better than us.” It was after I’d finished recounting the story of Lupescu and Carol, and we lay staring at each other as dawn light seeped into the room. Both of us knew that the story had produced the unexpected: an implicit comment about him and the difficulty of being the object of an obsession. Suddenly we found ourselves bumped into another phase, one that allowed us to question where we thought this irrational eight months were leading. Now it wasn’t any secret that no future remained for him in this sealed-off room or that abandoning my culture, friends and literary connections in New York was having a negative effect on mine.

  These feelings went unspoken, however, on both our parts. I decided to look at them as a passing phase. Romulus, in addition, must have been subject to great inertia. Having stumbled into this relationship without ever having set the terms, he approached it the way a hunter-gatherer exploits a meadow. This uniform landscape without any shade, which he’d come upon just by chance, was getting depleted. Still, there were fruits to collect.

  Lacking better plans, we went back to our routine, with me under even greater pressure to get Céline done. Meanwhile she continued to send last-minute additions to harried editors. The absolute deadline for the text was July 29, three days before Romulus’s twenty-fifth birthday, which was five days before mine. Holding up the fantasy of a rapprochement with the celebration of our birthdays, I fixed my eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel. Romulus went back to his abject lounging. Thanks to my wanderings before his return, he now had some buddies for carousing. Nearly every night Razvan and his dim-witted clique would come calling for him, chug a few of my beers and sweep him away, after I declined their invitations to come along.

  My translating schedule had increased to sixteen-hour days. It turned me into a zombie with a fixed stare. Romulus grew gradually more repulsed at my preoccupied face, my puffy eyes with their frozen focus and my lack of conversation. It was the first time he’d seen anyone involved in intellectual toil. It confirmed his suspicions that a life of the mind was boring and unattractive.

  Incredibly, the heat wave had not abated. It had hit 104 degrees for the past two days, and the television was full of more accounts of people collapsing on the streets. Romulus was tortured less by the heat than by the mosquitoes that found their way into our bedroom. As I sat peering at the computer screen in my study, my Sharper Image personal air conditioner looped over the back of my neck, I’d hear regular explosions of Romanian curses as he slapped at the insects. For some reason, the mosquitoes avoided my meatier body, concentrating on multiple assaults directed at his spare physique.

  One day he came into my study with a
triumphant smile, displaying a clear-plastic object filled with some viscous liquid and attached to an electric plug. It was, he told me, a fantastic invention. All you had to do was plug it in, and it released an invisible, odorless mist that killed the little buggers. I watched him plug it into the bedroom outlet, which produced a very low hissing sound. The noise aroused my American paranoia, making me wonder what the FDA would think of the device. Twenty years before, I’d had the same reaction as an underpaid English teacher in Paris, after a summer diet made up almost exclusively of red-colored Moroccan merguez, which looked fresher to me than the brown-colored sausages. When I later found out that the red merguez was colored with Red Dye #2, which the FDA had recently outlawed in the United States as carcinogenic, I spent the next few months morbidly wondering whether I was going to get the big C. As Romulus lay back on the bed with a self-satisfied yawn, I pulled the mosquito-killer from the outlet to see if it had a label with the list of ingredients.

  “What you do?!” he shouted in outrage. “I am meat for every mosquito! You want they eat me to the bone?”

  “It’s a poison, Romulus, and the room’s all closed up.”

  “Ah, Mr. Cleaning”—he meant Mr. Clean—“who devours half of pharmacies in Bucharest. Suddenly you are worried about your body?” He leapt from the bed and wrested the object from my hand; and at that moment, our ancient model of a phone jangled. I left Romulus to replug the mosquito killer and ran to answer it. It was a call about Ursule Molinaro, one of my closest friends and my closest literary colleague. I found out she had died.

  I came back to our bedroom, which was a cauldron of cigarette smoke, and listened to the hissing of the mosquito killer. Romulus was back in position on the bed, looking at me with a defensive, triumphant smile. In the dimness of the closed room, his face looked sinister. The light got lost in the hollows of his cheeks, giving him a spectral air. “My friend Ursule died,” I said in a monotone. He blinked once, and his face, with its long beak, took on the rigidity of a bird’s. “How this happen?” he responded, for lack of anything better to say.

  “She was pretty old, no one knew how old. And she’d been imprisoned during the War. She swore she’d never go into any institution again, but she fell. Her landlord called an ambulance. Against her will, they took her to a ward. I guess she almost lost her mind there. And when she got back, she refused to take her heart medication and died pretty soon after.”

  “I hate the people who give up on life,” he said coldly. I knew I couldn’t get anything else from him, so I left the room.

  FOR ROMULUS’S BIRTHDAY, we planned a trip to the Black Sea. About twenty-five miles south of Constanţa is a small resort, called Olimp, which was still state-run, next to a privileged seaside community for the Romanian nomenklatura, known as Neptun. It was here that I’d booked us a five-day stay beginning July 29, when the final translation was due. To get there I’d bought very reasonably priced first-class train tickets.

  As the translation dragged on and on, the deadline began to look impossible. I spent gruesome nights in the heat, often working until past dawn. Then I’d throw myself onto the small bed in the study for two or three hours and go to work again. I was boycotting our bedroom with the primary excuse that I feared the mosquito repellent in the air. Romulus at first made a show of jubilation at having such a large room all to himself. But beneath the crowing, he was truly distressed, confused by the enormous amount of time and energy required by a translation when he himself, orally at least, had so effortlessly mastered his several foreign languages. He was frightened, I now realize, by my withdrawal, not just because it threatened a future without easy money but because he’d covertly developed the habit of looking to me for his self-esteem. I was, it turns out, the only male who’d taken any interest in him, including fathers. He would refer to me as his only friend, ever. Without admitting it to either of us, he’d become intensely attached to me, secretly flattered by the unerring attention of someone whom he thought was superior to him in many ways. As he often put it playfully when we were joking: “You are too good for me.”

  The question, then, I suppose, is why he didn’t buckle down and show me some support when I needed it, get behind the task in spirit that was keeping us both with food and an apartment. The answer is that a whole segment of communication skills was missing. He had no vocabulary for gratitude and no way of comforting me. All of it threatened his machismo, opened the Pandora’s box of his neediness and vulnerability. In some strange way, he felt he owed me so much that it couldn’t be mentioned. There was no way to pay it back, so it was better to pretend it hadn’t happened. Consequently, I was left on my own to wrestle with the translation, the heat and grief over the recent deaths of my Aunt Lil and my friend Ursule Molinaro.

  However, something about how he was feeling would come out each night, around dawn, when I’d collapsed onto my bed with swollen eyes, behind whose lids annoyingly lingered the afterimage of the phrases over which I’d been poring. Then the door to our apartment would open as Romulus returned from his carousing. I’d hear him walk toward the bedroom and hesitate, whereupon he’d backtrack to the study door and enter on tiptoe. I’d see his pale, intoxicated face hovering in the dark above my bed, his body slightly stooped from the knowledge of the futility of trying to have a good time.

  “You wish to come in bedroom?” he’d whisper in an abashed voice.

  “No.”

  He’d go back to his room and leave the door open, and soon I’d see the colored reflections of the television screen, without which he couldn’t fall asleep.

  Three days before our trip, he approached me meekly with the news that a good friend of his, Ursu, was having a big birthday bash in Sibiu. He was wondering whether he could go there by bus for the party if he promised to get back to Bucharest the night before we left. Drugged by exhaustion and pessimistic about the future of our relationship, I acquiesced coolly and handed him the money for his trip. If he didn’t return in time to use our first-class tickets, I told myself in a fantasy of revenge, that was it.

  Fate reacted cruelly to his departure. Hours after he left, the refrigerator stopped working. The milk rapidly curdled and meat warmed in the heat, so I had to throw them out. If there was any possibility of meeting my translation deadline, it meant working every moment until we left. There was no time to go to a restaurant. I had to be content with trying to live for the next two days on a few quarts of warm fruit juice and some yogurt that was rapidly acidifying in the heat.

  As I sat plowing through Céline’s ingenuous prose, sipping tepid juice, defeat hunched my shoulders. I kept wondering how I’d ended up in such a ridiculous situation. Those so-called grand flourishes of my obsessive passion had painted me into a petty corner, prey to all those practical exigencies that seemed so unimportant when I was in the throes. Love was nothing but that tubercular degeneration that left La traviata’s heroine coughing up green spittle on her deathbed. I was a chump.

  By the middle of the night before we were supposed to leave, I fell into a watery, deluded state of mind. Since I’d mastered the cloying tone of my text, work progressed mechanically; the fingers on my keyboard took on the identity of someone else. My mind numbed into a state more profound than any opioid high and began to offer a pleasant sense of detachment. Contexts were melting away. What city was I in? Did I care? With a sardonic giggle I realized that this exhaustion felt like falling in love, which isolates you in an inflamed anesthesia, exiling all worries and concerns.

  Dawn found me in this state, with another twenty-five pages to go. I’d have to take the text with me and work on the train, then e-mail it from the hotel. Sweeping papers aside, I stood shakily. The best idea was to find somewhere selling breakfast, then come back and pack. But wait a minute!—Romulus hadn’t yet returned as agreed. He was supposed to come back the night before, and just as I’d suspected, or hoped, he hadn’t kept his promise.

  A shudder of release, almost ecstatic, went through my body. Like
a too quickly accomplished reverse zoom in a home video camera, everything telescoped away. Then the trip was off, and so were we! I was slipping out of a cocoon, new skin exposed to air for the first time. I looked out the window at the empty pavement, baked by the previous day’s heat. In the dawn light, there was complete silence; no one and nothing were in the street. I grabbed the key and went into the hall. Steadying myself with the wall, I clambered down the stairs, aware that my coordination was severely compromised by fatigue. This wasn’t the time to fall, not at the very moment of my freedom!

  The streets of Bucharest were almost empty at dawn. There was no sign of the miserable dogs; it felt as if the beggar kids from the park, Razvan and his desperate gang of Pinocchio bad-boys—in fact, all of the suffering that had hedged me in—had disappeared. Unirii was still and limpid, a huge, vaultless fissure that had opened just for me. The only disruption in the film of dawn was a garish spot of red and yellow on the other side of the square, announcing a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s. There was so little traffic I could walk diagonally toward the McDonald’s rather than approach it by those exhausting right-angle crossings usually needed to get through the square.

  Because I felt as if I were teetering, I started to watch my feet to make sure I wouldn’t stumble. That’s why I didn’t notice the apparition that sneaked into the square from Bibescu Vodă Street. Rearing on its hind legs, mouth gaping in a furious neigh, as if mocking my assumption that pain was gone, was a tortured horse, whose owner was beating it for shitting in the street. Attached to the horse was a wagon full of scrap metal that threatened to overturn as pieces of the metal clattered to the pavement, some landing in the horseshit. While I gaped in disorientation at the scene, the driver took my look as tasteless curiosity and directed some of his obscene oaths at me. The horse grew even more frantic, shattering the stillness with its neighs.