Trouble in Transylvania

by Barbara Wilson

  An hour later the three of us were stuffed into the Polski Fiat, me in the front with my legs jammed up to my chin and Jack in the back seat amidst a hastily purchased basketful of sausages, fruit, biscuits and wine.

  Like most Hungarians Eva believed that Romania was the Devil’s own country, filled with backward, starving serfs, ruled by vicious, Magyar-bashing communists. She reminded me of the Hungarian proverb: “Outside of Hungary there is no life, and if there is life, it is not the same.”

  “Of course, if we go to Transylvania, it is not like we are going to Romania,” she consoled herself, as we headed out of the city and found our way to the highway that would take us across the Hungarian plain to the border.

  “How’s that again?” inquired Jack, trying to get settled so her elbow was not in my ear, nor her dress above her waist.

  “Transylvania was part of Hungary for a thousand years,” Eva said. “And then, after the First World War—which Hungary was forced to join, because it had been forced to be part of the Habsburg Empire—we lost two-thirds of our land. Some went to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, but most of it went to Romania. Because the Romanians and the French,” Eva held up two crossed fingers, “they were like this.”

  “The Treaty of Trianon,” I nodded. “It carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a way that satisfied no one. But then, how could they satisfy everyone? In this part of Europe, political borders have never coincided with the ethnic boundaries.”

  “But Cassandra, you must admit that there are two and a half million Hungarians trapped inside Romania, trapped for seventy years now.”

  “Seventy years and they’re still arguing?” said Jack.

  “How long have the Arabs and Jews been at it? What about the Hindus and Moslems, or the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland? I won’t even mention ex-Yugoslavia. In the Balkans, seventy years is nothing.” I said. “Part of the problem is that Transylvania doesn’t actually border the current state of Hungary anymore. It’s two hundred miles to the east. And there are several million Romanians living in Transylvania now—what would happen to them? I know that Ceauşescu encouraged them to move there—but there’s some evidence to suggest that the Romanians have been in Transylvania for centuries. They believe that anyway, that they’re descended from the Roman colonists of ancient Dacia…”

  “The Romanians just are liars, if they told you that,” interrupted Eva.

  “You can read it in any history book,” I said.

  “Not in Hungarian history books!”

  From the back seat we heard the rustle of cellophane and cardboard as Jack unwrapped the first box of biscuits. “I don’t know,” she said through a mouthful of chocolate biscuit, “I was never great at history, but I’ve never understood all this ethnic squabbling in Europe. Back and forth, and forth and back, across the same boring old territory. First one group is in power and oppresses the other, then the other group is in power and oppresses the first. But way before the Hungarians and the Romanians, way before the Romans and the Huns this was Old Europe, home of one of the Great Goddess civilizations. There are paleolithic and neolithic sites all through this area of the Balkans.”

  “I thought you weren’t great at history,” I said, impressed. I wasn’t sure I knew the difference between paleo and neo.

  “It’s prehistory I’m interested in, not patriarchal bullshit like kings, wars and empires. Charis Freespirit told us all about the work of Riane Eisler and Marija Gimbutas this winter on our tour. Gimbutas is an archeologist and Eisler based some of her new theories about dominator and partnership societies on Gimbutas’s research. The Great Goddess cultures weren’t dominator societies, they were partnership communities. None of the ruins that have been excavated show fortresses or anything that would suggest they fought with each other. Most of the statues are fertility figures.”

  I thought of the little statue in Vienna. “So, did the Venus of Willendorf come from around here?”

  “Yeah, but she’s no Venus. That was just something that the male archeologists said, because they couldn’t imagine a powerful figure without sexualizing her. But in the old agrarian Goddess societies, she was a fertility figure—back in the days when fertility belonged to women and wasn’t controlled by men.”

  “Still, Cassandra,” interrupted Eva. “You must admit that the Hungarians were treated very badly in Transylvania by Ceauşescu.”

  “The Hungarians have no great claims as defenders of human rights. You want to talk about what happened to the Jews who were shipped off to Auschwitz the last year of the war? You want to talk about how the Hungarians treat their own population of Gypsies?”

  “The Romanians treat the Gypsies worse! All the Romanian Gypsies have run away to Germany and now Germany is selling them back to Romania.”

  “In a partnership society,” said Jack, “we wouldn’t know how to talk like this about other people. The words wouldn’t even begin to make sense.”

  “In a partnership society, wouldn’t we be sharing the biscuits?” I said, taking the package away from her before she could devour them all.

  “You’ll see when we get to Romania,” said Eva, who was determined to get the last word in. “That’s the real Stone Age there. And they don’t have chocolate biscuits, either!”

  It had been dark when we set out, but away from the city it was darker still. We were crossing the puszta, once a thick forest, then, after the trees were chopped down, a bog. Still later, by some peculiar twist of geography and climate, the puszta turned into grasslands like the American prairies or the Argentinian pampas. Years before I’d been to a great livestock fair in Debrecen. It had been like some version of America’s Wild West, with cowboys and hundreds of head of steer.

  We were in marchland, borderland, a buffer zone, where the frontiers had shifted dozens of times over the centuries and the maps had been drawn and redrawn. But where maps showed lines, the landscape rarely did. Sometimes there was a river or a mountain chain, sometimes there was nothing but a fence through a pasture, and sometimes there was nothing at all. Sometimes when you passed from one country to the next, there was a sharp and immediate change. Sometimes the barbed wire, armed sentries and floodlights spoke of enmity and tragedy. Sometimes there was only a softening, a gentle blurring, people speaking two languages, eating similar foods, sharing relatives, customs and memories.

  The real borders now were economic. Fortress Europe had pulled up the drawbridge on the former Soviet bloc countries, all begging to be part of the European Community. Hungary might manage it in the years to come; Romania would not. Traveling into Romania from the West was like leaving the wealthy drawing room upstairs for the downstairs servants’ quarters. Hungary might be a butler, able to mix in both worlds; Romania was the scullery cook.

  Near the border Eva stopped and filled the tank with petrol. She opened the hood and peered inside.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so… Sometimes I think I hear a kind of thumping noise. I’m probably just imagining it.”

  “Good,” I said. Car maintenance was never my, nor Jack’s, strong point.

  The night was eerily lit here, greenish-white, and the roar of heavy trucks filled the air and then departed, leaving thick silence. The wind came cold and hard across the plain, but there were stars overhead, and the sky was clear.

  “Did you know, there were great witch-hunts around here, two, three hundred years ago?” said Eva, as we inserted ourselves back into the tiny car.

  “Witches!” said Jack, perking right up.

  “Yes. The Calvinists were strong here, but the Hungarian state was Catholic. There were many struggles during the Counter-Reformation. Many trials, not against the village wise men, but against the midwives and the boszorkány, the women whose beliefs went back to pagan times.”

  “You see,” said Jack. “I knew this was an area with a lot of energy. The witches were directly connected with the Great Goddess cultures.”

  “
I don’t know if you can really call them witches,” I objected. “Most of them were peasant women accused of killing their neighbor’s cow. They were caught up in a general hysteria of hatred directed towards women.”

  “Towards women’s sexuality,” said Jack. “Most of the crimes they were accused of had to do with sex. In the old Goddess religions women’s sexuality was celebrated, but the Catholic church condemned all pleasure in sexuality, and said it came from the Devil.”

  “I hate to remind you,” I said, “but when I took First Communion in the fifties, that was still the general gist of church teaching.”

  “They also accused the women of giving contraceptive aid and performing abortions,” said Eva. “The authorities did not like that the midwives had knowledge of healing and herbs.”

  “I’m telling you,” said Jack, “it’s a sex thing. Men hate and fear women’s sexuality. They use women for sex and then they blame them. The bedrock of male authority is the control of women’s bodies.”

  “You don’t need to convince me,” I said. “I had my revelation thirty years ago when my sister Maureen got pregnant and had to get married.”

  The Stygian crossing took longer than we expected. There were visas to buy and Eva’s car was inspected thoroughly—for contraband, unfortunately, not for engine trouble. Eva didn’t make it any easier with her haughty attitude towards the Romanian guards, and it was not until after eleven that we were back on the road. I offered to drive and Eva got into the back seat and said she’d try to sleep a little.

  “Let’s play a game,” said Jack to me.

  Jack and I, when we’d traveled together and had needed to pass long stretches of time in as lively a manner as possible, had had a number of games. Some of the geographical ones were easy—to recite all the countries in South America and their major cities—and some were more difficult: “If you were traveling from Gambia to Bolivia, which way would you go and how?” or “Say you had to get from Bergen, Norway, to Bombay. Which railways would you use and how long would it take you?” One of our favorite amusements, however, was to name a country and then ask, “If you were going to Brazil and could only take ten things with you, what would they be?”

  Since there were no size or weight limits, we usually started out with quite fantastic objects, for instance an airplane or a gorgeous Portuguese-speaking guide or a portable schoolhouse. Once I’d said, “The British Museum library,” and we’d had a quarrel about whether that included the books. But gradually we’d reduce the number of things we could take with us. “If you could only take five things,” and “If you could only take two things.”

  By the time we were down to the essentials I usually opted for either a Swiss Army knife or a large supply of insect repellent, while Jack almost always chose ear plugs or a foam pad. “Because if I don’t get my sleep, I really can’t cope.”

  “Say you’re going to Romania,” said Jack. “What’s on your ten list?”

  “A good French bistro, a vegetable shop, a petrol station …” I ended up with: “and a garlic necklace of course.”

  “Just in case…”

  We drove through Romania’s Western Marches and passed through Cluj. Like all the Transylvanian cities it had three names. It was once Klausenburg, founded by Germans from Saxony seven hundred years ago. The Hungarian name was Koloszvár. I had not been much in this part of Romania, but I thought of Cluj as one of the most Habsburg of the northern Transylvanian cities, with butter-yellow baroque buildings, and a number of cafés. It was a university city, and very old. The great Hungarian king Mátyás Korvinus had been born here during the Renaissance.

  At least that was what I remembered about the place. Jack, who was turning out to be an authority on such subjects, said that right near Cluj the oldest script in the world had been discovered. It had been created by one of those old Goddess cultures (why did such information not surprise me anymore?) and predated the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer by a couple of thousand years. Further, unlike the Sumerian script, which often dealt with economic and administrative functions (men were so linear), the Vinca script had a sacred purpose. At least Gimbutas thought so. Nobody could actually read it yet; the scratchings might only say something like “Pick up some more berries for dessert tonight.”

  After Cluj the highway got worse and so did my tiredness. Eva was curled up asleep in the back seat. We came to Tîrgu Mureş, and I turned off for what Jack, peering at the map with her flashlight (fortunately on her list of ten real things to bring to Romania), said was a shortcut to Arcata. It was about two in the morning, and no cars had passed us for a very long time.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Jack said after we had gone a few kilometers, “but that thumping noise seems to have got worse.”

  I’d heard it too, but had been trying to ignore it. “I suppose something’s just a little loose,” I said. “In the engine. You know these Eastern European cars. They sound awful, but they last forever.” With that airy generalization I speeded up. The road was empty and the sign had said it was only another 25km to Arcata.

  If I thought I could outrun the thumping, the car had other ideas. The noise grew louder and louder; the car bucked under us like a bronco. I slowed down to a crawl.

  “I don’t think we can continue like this,” said Jack. “Shall I wake Eva?”

  “I’ll pull off the road,” I said as, with a last shudder, the Polski Fiat lost its will to go on and stopped dead.

  We were alone in the Transylvanian night, in an ancient forest of wolves, foxes, elk and wild boars. Because our entire journey had taken place in the dark, through sleeping villages and deserted cities, on roads where there were few or no cars, it felt as if we had come to the middle of this ancient land by a sinister magic.

  And all those scary passages from the opening of Dracula, when Jonathan Harker’s carriage is rattling through a gorge of “great frowning rocks” and the rising wind is barely drowning out the baying of the wolves, on the road to the Count’s castle in the Borgo Pass, seemed to spring vividly to mind.

  “Why does the idea of Mrs. Nagy and her flat have a certain appeal at the moment?” I wondered aloud.

  Jack and I didn’t have the nerve to wake Eva, who had managed to sleep through the entire self-destruction of her little vehicle. We got out and pushed the car to the side of the road and then quickly and breathlessly hopped back inside and locked all the doors.

  “If you were going to Romania, what would you bring?”

  “An auto mechanic,” I said. “And some parts.”

  But eventually, even though we were surrounded by werewolves and vampires and the ghostly victims of bloodthirsty counts, we, like Eva, slept soundly.

  “And don’t start with any of your travel stories,” I woke to hear Eva telling Jack. “I don’t want to listen to you and Cassandra talking about how this is nothing compared to the time you were stranded in the Andes without food or water.”

  “But it’s good to remember when times were worse.”

  “At least you’ve learned something from experience,” brooded Eva. “We’ve got plenty of food.”

  I opened my eyes. “But this is beautiful,” I said.

  We were not in dark deep woods at all, but in a narrow valley between rounded, low-lying emerald hills, scattered with copses of newly leafed birch. The sky was light, but the sun hadn’t yet come over the hills; a soft white mist clung here and there. I got out of the car and stretched. The air was pure and fresh. There were birds singing all around us.

  “It’s like Ireland,” I said. “It’s just as green.”

  “Any place you like reminds you of Ireland,” said Jack. “I’ve noticed that.”

  She and Eva had the hood up and Eva was looking doubtfully at the jungle of blackened metal within. “When the thumping got so bad, why didn’t you pull off at Tîrgu Mureş? Now we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  I was still walking around, breathing deeply. Transylvania means “the land beyond t
he forest” and it did feel as if we had emerged on the other side of the woods, the other side of night and fear. In about fifteen minutes my body would begin screaming for caffeine, so I might as well enjoy this blessed state as long as I could.

  “We’ll have to walk,” said Jack. “The question is, should we walk back to Tîrgu Mureş and find a garage, or on to Arcata? I think we’re closer to Tîrgu Mureş, but I don’t know how much closer.”

  Eva thought Tîrgu Mureş, too.

  “What about Gladys?” I said. “She might be in a Romanian jail. We can’t backtrack now.”

  Before a serious disagreement could develop however, a woman driving a horse and cart appeared over the hill behind us. She was going in the direction of Arcata, and she offered us a lift.

  Two hours later, having been picked up by two carts and finally by a Dacia, the Romanian-made car, the three of us came to the small town of Arcata, in the foothills of the Carpathians. We had traveled through a valley of forests and small farms, of villages of blue- and green-painted houses very neatly kept. Some of the houses had elaborately carved wooden gates in front, wide as the length of the house. Words we couldn’t read formed patterns with vines and flowers on the gates, sometimes freshly painted, sometimes splintered and worn. Most of the gates had long birdhouses like dormitories built along the top.

  Large, ungainly stork nests balanced on roofs and on electrical poles by the side of the roads. Occasionally a long-beaked head poked out to look at us. We passed farmers in the fields ploughing furrows for planting; sometimes they worked the land with horses, more often by hand. The men wore fedoras and the women kerchiefs. Here and there were Gypsy families too, in brighter colors, hoeing poorer land.

  Arcata was a real town, not a village. The Dacia dropped us off on the main street and we started up a steep hill, along a road fringed with pine and fir, in the direction of a sign that said Arcata Spa Hotel. Up here the sun angled through the dark needles of the trees and dappled the gardens of houses that grew larger and more ornate the higher we climbed. There was a holiday feeling to the place, and the evergreen air was deliciously cool and intoxicating.