Trouble in Transylvania

by Barbara Wilson

  Hungary was moving more quickly than I’d guessed, if feminism and capitalism could already be combined in such an unabashedly exuberant manner. It had taken Western feminists almost two decades to get through the anti-hierarchical, anti-financial-success stage. Though I suppose you could say the Hungarians had already done the collectivity thing.

  “And of course they all love Jacqueline. They wish she was always available. But I save her for the top clients.”

  “But Jack doesn’t speak any languages!” I said.

  My friend looked disdainfully at me. “Well, I’ve never studied them, like you have,” she said. “I speak them—sympathetically.”

  “She’s even picked up Hungarian, in only two months,” said Eva.

  “Hungarian’s impossible,” I said. “It’s like Finnish. It doesn’t look like anything else.”

  “The secret is not to look,” said Jack. “Not to use your left brain.”

  I thought back to various travels with Jack; she always had been adept at getting herself from place to place and making herself understood. I also recalled an impressive intervention on her part in Java when I seemed to be on the verge of purchasing a very large live tortoise rather than a colorful sarong.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” I allowed. “Hungarian is based on root words. It’s an agglutinating language.”

  “My point exactly,” said Jack.

  “I’ve heard that you’re a translator, Cassandra,” said Eva. “What languages do you speak?”

  “The Romance languages.” I smiled at her.

  Jack agreed. “Romance is her specialty.”

  “Spanish, French, Italian,” I said. “A smattering of Icelandic, Arabic and Tagalog. Serviceable German, some Mandarin, and Russian.”

  “We all had to learn Russian at school,” said Eva. “I can’t bear to speak it now. German I don’t mind—we look forward to working with more German clients. But I would never speak it for pleasure.”

  “In that case, I suggest we stick to English.” I looked inquiringly at Jack. “Unless you’d rather go on with your Hungarian, my dear?”

  The Polski Fiat took us across the Danube from Pest to Buda. The two cities weren’t connected by bridges across the river until the last century. Buda was much older, a medieval fortress on a hill that during the Turkish occupation had turned into a city of minarets and domes. Although that skyline was gone, the Hotel Gellért and its adjoining baths, nestled at the foot of Gellért Hill, echoed the Turkish past. The buildings were constructed in the early part of the century in an art nouveau Ottoman style that reminded me of glorious silent science fiction films. Mad scientists and space voyagers could have easily been at home in the mosque-like, round-roofed towers of the baths, which looked as if they would slide open at any moment to launch a homemade rocket to another planet.

  The main entrance to the baths led to more Mozarabic elegance: a vaulted ceiling with skylights, a tiled floor, marble pilasters and patterned mosaic walls, potted palms and white marble copies of Greco-Roman statues, all women in uplifted poses. We bought our tickets to the thermal baths and swimming pool and went into the women’s dressing room, where we were each given a cubicle, a white muslin wrap and a plastic cap.

  The air here had a secret mineral smell, like dirt, like metal. After disrobing, Jack, Eva and I met up in a mosaic and marble room with two sunken thermal pools. The arched ceiling had a skylight of amber glass, the tiled walls were aqua blue. Naked, we dropped into the warm, buoyant water that came bubbling up from the interior of the earth.

  The Romans were the first to tap into the waters of Gellért Hill, but it was the Turks with their languorous notions of the hammam who brought the bath to its steamy perfection. I could never be in an establishment like this without thinking of Ingres’s The Turkish Bath, which I had first seen, printed in black on a clear-plastic shower curtain, at the apartment of my high-school Spanish teacher, Dede Paulsen, the first woman I was ever in love with. Such was my cultural background that I never realized the image was taken from a famous painting (when I saw it years later in the Louvre I had to stop myself from exclaiming, “Dede’s shower curtain!”). But such are also the wonderful powers of the adolescent erotic imagination that from this bathroom artifact I constructed an entire fantasy of gorgeously plump nude women lounging around a tiled sunken bath in various attitudes of sloe-eyed indolence. Ignorant of Ingres’s orientalizing male voyeurism I could happily conjure up a Turkish bath cum harem where naked women soaped and steamed in close proximity.

  All bathhouses had a homoerotic element; for men it was overtly sexualized, for women subtly. In the Turkish harems the odalisques spent hours soaking and scrubbing, being massaged and pumiced. They hennaed the hair on their heads and removed every strand of it elsewhere with harsh depilatories. The enforced interiority of their lives, the sumptuous idleness bred sensuous addictions to opium, to rich food and to each other. The women in the harems were slaves and concubines; they fought for position, they intrigued, they poisoned, smothered and drowned each other.

  Of course I had to admit, as I looked at the women in and out of the two thermal pools, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by nubile Circassian slaves or indolent pampered sultanas. Except for the three of us, and none of us were in our youth, the average age here was about seventy. These were women whose lives you could see on their bodies, from their humped shoulders to their swollen ankles. Some were stiff and withered, almost fleshless, as they let themselves down ever so slowly into the healing waters. Others had the big collapsed bellies and elongated breasts of many pregnancies, or the elephantine legs of gout. Hard work and gravity had pressed them almost into the earth; their spines were twisted, their arms were heavy and their legs barely moved. Yet once in the water they floated like lilies, the tentative, halting land movements became luxurious and sure, their cracked, shriveled skin plumped up like raisins and the sparse hair below their bellies streamed like underwater plants.

  Submerged in this warm mineral sea of menopausal crones, I relaxed my own thin, freckled limbs, and thought of purification and renewal. Water washed the soul clean, it baptized, it was sacred and holy. But it was also profane; heated, water relaxed the muscles and opened the pores. It brought back memories of the womb, of being lightly held in a pool of fluid. Warm water was erotic; it loosened inhibition, encouraged nudity. Cloudy with steam or mist, yet transparent, it allowed the bather to half hide, half reveal; it allowed the voyeur to see yet pretend to be blind.

  Jack found a spot under a small waterfall and, raising herself slightly, let a stream of water come down on her neck and shoulders. I saw for the first time that she had a scar on her lower abdomen and that it had healed jaggedly.

  “Had my appendix out in Nepal last year,” she said following my gaze. “I don’t recommend it. I was laid up for weeks.”

  And there it was again, that faint rhythmic drumbeat of age that I had begun to hear in the clacking of the train on the Northern Line coming down to Tottenham Court Road, and that was still beating, however much I tried to distance myself. I saw my own loosening, wrinkling, scarred flesh on my friend’s body, saw myself old and crippled and getting ready to die, not like my father whose heart attack killed him quickly, but like my Aunt Maeve, trapped in an old people’s home with a wasting disease.

  “Eva’s got her eye on you,” Jack whispered. “Go for it.”

  I felt the warm water slip like silk between my legs and flutter teasingly in and out of my hidden places, and suddenly I was alive again. The only thing that prevented me from totally giving into lust was the knowledge that I had a rather battered shower cap on my head.

  On Eva the shower cap looked cute, as if she were in a bubblebath in a movie from the fifties. She floated peacefully, her breasts bobbing. Just before she’d stepped into the pool I’d seen how athletic her body was still: the hard tight calves and strong thigh muscles, the broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.

  I wanted to talk about romance. Eva
wanted to talk about business.

  “If you wanted to work for us, Cassandra,” she said, “I’m sure, with your languages and background as a translator, I could get you many jobs.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t have a head for business. It’s a great weakness.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that is only modesty.”

  “I wish I could be modest,” I said. “All too often I’m given to bragging about the things I do well.”

  “And those things are?”

  “Reading train timetables, bargaining, writing postcards. Crossing borders. Transgressing boundaries. And of course translation.”

  “But your Spanish would come in so handy at O.K. I have a businessman from Madrid in town right now whose English is rather poor… Of course!”

  Eva lifted herself out of the pool and reached for the bag she’d brought into the thermal baths with her. She took out the cellular phone. Moisture ran down her nose from her piled-up blond hair as she dialed.

  “Señor Martínez, do you have dinner plans?” she said smoothly, and then laughed, “No, no, but I have someone I’d like you to meet, one of our newest secretaries… She speaks excellent Spanish. Ms. Reilly is her name. We’re in the baths at the Gellért Hotel. Why don’t you meet us at eight o’clock in the restaurant upstairs? Jack too. Yes, yes,” Eva’s laugh glittered. “My bodyguards.”

  Before I could protest, Eva silenced me with her finger on my lips. “You would be doing us an enormous favor. Señor Martínez is only here for a short time. Surely you could spare an hour or two a day from your busy schedule.”

  She knew, of course, that I had nothing more compelling going on than to wait for my visas and tickets to China.

  “I would really quite enjoy getting to know you better too, Cassandra,” Eva said. “I think you and Jacqueline are rather remarkable. I’ve never met any women like you before.”

  The buoyant breasts came maddeningly near and then bobbed off again. Some women would find this frustrating. As an ex-Catholic girl, however, I’m used to ambiguous desire and prolonged courtship.

  If Eva had the interest, I had the time.

  “Count me out,” Jack said, when Eva told her that our evening date included her. “I’m not spending another evening chatting up men I don’t like.”

  “But Jack,” said Eva reasonably and firmly. “In a business like ours networking is frightfully important. We want to make a good impression on Señor Martínez so that he will keep doing business with us.”

  “All Señor Martínez wants is to get into your knickers,” Jack said.

  “That’s why I need both of you with me,” Eva said. “Do you think I like the idea of these men pawing me and making suggestive remarks just because I’m little and have blond hair? Well, I don’t. But I’m not going to spend my life living with my aunt in a small flat. I’m going to make something of myself and I’m going to make a difference in Hungarian women’s lives!”

  The intensity of this ringing declaration was slightly muffled by Eva swallowing some water and sputtering. Jack pulled her up and pounded her on the back a few times.

  “Dinner and that’s it,” she said firmly.

  Eva beamed at her. “We’re meeting him at eight upstairs in the restaurant,” she said.

  “I hope you like violins,” said Jack cryptically to me before swimming off like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland.

  Chapter Four

  THE GELLÉRT BATHS were connected to deep underground hot springs. Leaving Eva to answer her cellular phone in the thermal pools, Jack and I got out to explore further. Everywhere the steady drip and gurgle of condensed and flowing water drew us onward through echoing corridors and arched rooms carved from the hillside. It was like the vast subterranean palace of a Minoan priestess, a labyrinth of moistness, where the female figures that passed us were terry-clothed votaries of sacred watery rites. We found a huge colonnaded pool surrounded by shiny green palms in clay pots and by white cast-iron benches, with a bronze lion spouting water at one end, and a glass and iron ceiling reminiscent of the hothouses at Kew Gardens. Here we swam back and forth in blue luxury for a long time, recalling pristine sand beaches in the South Pacific and the aqua waters of the Caribbean. Afterwards, we came to a series of sauna rooms, each hotter than the next, and sat in blazing African radiance, ignoring the women around us whose makeup ran with sweat, and inciting each other with stories of summers in Bengal, Alice Springs and Arizona.

  It was almost a fault with me and Jack that one memory led to another, and another, and another, until geography was thrown out the window and seas ran into seas and mountain ranges gave way to deserts and deserts turned into jungles in a glorious and enervating abundance of travel stories. Jack was the first to give out. She said she thought her heart might be failing, and she returned to the changing rooms.

  But I went on and pried open a heavy door with a foggy glass window. A hot white cloud gushed out to envelop me and pull me inside. I could see nothing at first, and then very slowly I realized there were tiers of slatted wooden shelves and, perched upon them, the shadowy shapes of women’s bodies, all lined up in rows like saints in an early Renaissance church fresco, or (as Jack would probably have it) goddesses lounging in the swirling clouds of heaven. With cautious steps I made my way over to the wall and clambered up to a middle shelf to take my place in the steam bath’s frieze of celestial beings. The heat wrapped me close as a lover and turned my lungs to twin thermoses full of hot tea. I felt my internal temperature gauge resignedly revving itself up, like a refrigerator after the door has been left open too long, and wondered if I, too, may have overdone it, but just as I was about to leave, I heard, from the tier above, the sibilant interrogative of my own name.

  “Cassandra…? Aren’t you the lady from the train?”

  I looked up and recognized through the mist the big-boned teenager Cathy Snapp.

  “We’re staying here for a few days,” she said. “At the hotel.”

  There was a slight pause, during which the sound of my heart sinking must have been audible.

  “If you’d rather just sit and be quiet, I understand,” she said with aggrieved patience.

  “Oh no,” I said immediately. “Hi. How’re you doing?”

  “Terrible,” she said, and stopped whispering. “My dad is driving me crazy,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s taking us to Romania. He’s completely out of control.”

  “He looks pretty normal to me.”

  “He’s not. You don’t know him. He’s always on some kick, ever since I can remember. He has causes. He has manias. He’s interested in everything. He was into recycling before anybody else. He subscribes to a magazine called Garbage. And we always had to compost everything with worms and he would buy furniture out of catalogs and put it together and we’re, like, sleeping in these beds that always fall down, and have lamps around made of teakettles that suddenly blow up and start fires. And he’s always writing about us in his stupid column, in between interviewing crackpots who’ve been fasting for peace for two months and people who run their cars on gas from chicken droppings. My brother Mark is always Mark the Mathematician and I’m always daughter Cathy the Voracious Reader or Scrabble Champion or some idiotic thing. Now I’m Cathy, Eldest Daughter. I used to be just Cathy, now I’m Eldest Daughter.”

  This was said with great bitterness.

  “What about your mother?” I said.

  “My mom is almost as bad. My mom is totally in another world. She’s so out of it that she doesn’t think anything my dad does is weird. Like, she comes home and all there is to eat is some seaweed casserole, and she just goes, Oh this is interesting. Or maybe she doesn’t even notice, I can’t tell. She has this weird sense of humor, like she’s laughing at things that aren’t even funny. She thinks my dad is funny, she likes him. Well, she doesn’t have to spend time with him is all I have to say. The whole time we were growing up she was working and my dad took care of us, that’s the problem! And it’s not bad en
ough that Mark and me are total social misfits, but now we have Emma on our hands. I mean, children are supposed to start talking before they’re a year old. Emma is four and she’s never said one word!”

  “She’s not deaf, is she?”

  “Deaf? She’s a musical genius. She loves to have the radio on and she was playing the xylophone from the minute she saw it. Mom started her on the Suzuki method about three months ago and now it’s Mozart day and night. It drives you nuts.”

  “How old was Emma when they adopted her?”

  “She was nine months. That’s another thing. My parents were gone for two months! They just left Mark and me at a neighbor’s house, saying they were going to Romania for two weeks to get an orphan baby, and they don’t come back for two months. I know they had a horrible time, even though they didn’t want to talk about it much. My dad never talks like anything bad happens in the world. He just writes about how lucky they were to finally get Emma. Some luck! What’s she going to do in school if she can’t talk?”

  “Send her to Catholic school,” I suggested. “They’ll like her.”

  The heat had gone to my head. When I was growing up I never would have thought to confide in an adult about family secrets the way Cathy was confiding in me. Secrets were for the priest in the confessional, and even then you knew enough not to confide your really big secrets to unseen, low-voiced men in dark churches. The best secrets––like crushes—you reserved for your friends. The worst secrets—like not always having money for a movie or even for lunch—you didn’t tell anyone.

  Cathy was raging on. “Romania. Why did they have to get a kid from Transylvania? Most people don’t even know Transylvania is a real place. I have to watch stupid kids drawing back their lips and making vampire eyes and sucking noises.”

  “So is your dad taking you to visit Romania for any special reason?”

  “He says it’s because we’re here in Europe and should take advantage of the culture all around. My brother Mark is at Harvard, but I had to come along and my dad is supposedly teaching me in Munich. I have to read all German writers, that’s why I’m reading Thomas Mann, I don’t even understand it in English. We’ve already been to Paris and Amsterdam and Berlin, and now it’s supposed to be two weeks in Eastern Europe. He says he wants to write some article about Hungary and Romania. But I think he’s got some plan to find some of Emma’s relatives and see if there’s a reason Emma doesn’t talk. It would be just like him.”