The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  I was on my way, at the suggestion of my uncle, to a village called Mașloc. It is located in the historically, if not presently, polyglot and multicultural western Banat (named for the Persian word for a Turkish military governor) region of Transylvania and was the ancestral homeland of my maternal great-grandmother and her sisters. I’d known one of the sisters, Sophie, as a feisty ninety-year-old living in a Jersey City walkup. Their father had been a tobacco farmer in what was then, in the pre–World War I twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a farming village with the German name of Blumenthal. The young girls helped smuggle tobacco across the border and snuck out of the house to party in the provincial capitals of Timișoara (then known by the Hungarian name Temesh) and Arad. They were, I believe, part of that German diaspora known to West as the Swabians3 or Banat Deutscher, “which is to say,” to quote West, “a German belonging to one of those families which were settled by Maria Theresa on the lands round the Danube between Budapest and Belgrade, because they had gone out of cultivation during the Turkish occupation and had to be recolonized.”

  Swabia is a region in southwestern Germany. Since many of the German migrants to Eastern Europe were from that area, the term was used to refer to Germans in general.

  There are several stories about the scattered German communities in the east. Some German colonists were resettled in former church lands after the dissolution of Catholic monasteries by the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II. Some moved to lands left vacant after Tatar raids. Kaplan tells a different, and older, story of the larger “Saxon” community in western Transylvania. He says it was the twelfth-century Hungarian king Géza II who “recruited the Saxons to settle in what was then medieval Hungary’s eastern flank against the Byzantine Empire. There, the Saxons founded seven fortified cities . . . [and] entrusted themselves to nobody, building tight and efficient communities behind their fortress walls. . . . They became, in historian Lukacs’s view, ‘the grimmest Lutherans in all of Christendom.’” It was this isolated community of Saxons, claims Kaplan, that gave rise to the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (a town in lower Saxony), who enchants and steals German children, as gypsies—long associated with Romania—were reputed to do, away to his homeland in these Transylvanian mountains. What better way to explain a community of Germans, isolated both from the larger Germanic world and from their Romanian neighbors, speaking an archaic dialect, tucked away in a European backwater?

  My great-grandmother and her family emigrated to the United States in the years before World War I. In retrospect this might be considered “getting out while the getting was good.” In the wake of the war, the region was quickly annexed by Romania, which made the Saxon community first a target of Volksdeutsch reabsorption by Hitler, and then a target for expulsion by and retribution from Romanian Communists and their Soviet allies. The bulk of the community, Kaplan wrote, was exiled to coal mines in eastern Ukraine and Siberia or “sold . . . for hard currency, as visa hostages to West Germany” by Ceaușescu. Most of the few “Germans” remaining by the time of the fall of the regime in 1989 wasted no time self-deporting (to borrow a phrase) to Germany.4

  Yet some did remain. In November 2014, Romania elected as their president Klaus Iohannis, a Transylvanian German Saxon and the first member of one of Romania’s ethic minorities to attain the presidency.

  When imagining the home of this line of my family, I pictured the kind of bucolic villages I passed during the bulk of the day’s drive: pastel-washed cottages, tin-roofed churches, and donkey carts, hidden in the foggy Chinese-tapestry mountains and little round turtle hills along the Mures River, by the castle ruins of Lipova.

  But once I passed another husk of a nuclear plant, the foothills melted back into the familiar tedium of the Hungarian plain and the serpentine alpine byways turned into new highway laid over dull fields. The rich purple and loamy brown landscape gave way to dusty tan. Without the slopes to confine them, the villages became indifferent sprawl, like used cardboard thrown in a ditch. I left the highway for a series of unnamed asphalt roads ridden with potholes, sometimes stripped to their cobblestones, then down to what West called “a casual assembly of ruts.” Squat concrete mile markers, like miniature postboxes, counted off the distance between the passing towns and the regional centers of Timișoara and Arad. It was flat, soggy, uninspired land. One farm complex looked abandoned, until a barking dog alerted me that at least one of the buildings was still occupied. Demonic black chickens picked over its yard of mud.

  Past a filthy hamlet with the telltale German name of Neudorf, the road improved a little as I crossed the Timiș county line. The mile markers at least had a fresh coat of blue and white paint, but the concrete pillar that once read “Timiș” had been stripped of the letters. Someone had spray-painted a red heart around the scar where the “ș” had been ripped out.

  Mașloc, when it finally appeared, had a long, low central street of cracked asphalt and a few dirt side lanes where chickens pricked mud puddles. A general store sold a Romanian pilsner called Neumarkt. Two churches faced off across the main street: one, beige on tan, bore the inscription “Bete! Rette Deine Seele! Arbeite!” (“Pray! Save Your Soul! Work!”) carved in old German script over the lintel. A fuchsia primary school that looked like a barracks faced a crumbling, white-plaster monument to five local Germans who had died in World War I. A banner over the playground urged the case of two regional politicians.

  The bourgeois main drag, smelling of wood smoke, belied the muddy farm life in evidence off the side streets. Barbed wire strung between trees passed for fencing. A man in dirty purple track pants whipping a horse with a stick gave me a dirty look. Someone was building a small, round chapel out of brick, but the rest of the houses and barns were gray and weathered wood. There weren’t many people in evidence, but I had the distinct sense I was arousing suspicion in the few that were, as I circled this town of horse carts in a new rental car with German plates. I was looking for the cemetery; I thought perhaps I could find a familiar name or two. It took a good fifteen minutes of driving up and down this not-large town before I found it, tucked in a back corner and fenced with barbed wire and bramble. I realized that the entrance was through some private backyards, and while pondering my next move I was approached by a toothless shepherd in a conical black fur cap. He shook my hand, grinned—I’d been unfair, he did have one yellow incisor—said something, and gestured toward the cemetery fence. Following his hand, I noticed the fresh corpse of a vulpine feral dog, sodden from the day’s rain, hanging upside down from the barbed wire. I decided I’d seen as much as I needed to of this godforsaken hole. I mentally thanked my great-aunt Sophie and her sisters for leaving a century ago and headed back to the relative comfort of Hungary.

  It was still a holiday when I got to Szeged: Easter Monday, when, according to promoter Peter, “You water the girls. All the guys go to all the girls they know and—it used to be they would dump water on them, with a bucket, but now it’s eau de cologne, perfume. Sometimes they get chocolates or cash too, but it’s mostly about the watering with perfume.”

  “Mostly it’s fun when you’re younger,” his friend says.

  “I don’t know—I watered my girlfriend today!” says Peter. “It’s like a fertility ritual, and the coming of spring. And it’s like a popularity contest for the girls—who has the most guys watering them. And the guys get drinks and food when they go around, so you can get pretty wasted. So that’s why the cops are out today.”

  “That’s a crazy tradition,” I said.

  “I think only three countries are doing it—Hungary, Slovakia, and maybe Czech Republic.” Anyway, he said, I shouldn’t have any drinks if I’m driving to his house after the show, lest I get caught in the girl-watering dragnet.

  Southbound the length of Serbia toward Bulgaria, I am traveling all week the route of a major Roman and Ottoman military road: Istanbul to Belgrade, and on to Buda, via Plovdiv, Sofia, and Niš. This stretch more or less follows the Velika Morava River, whose Wiki
pedia entry deems it “a textbook example of a meandering river.” The river carried barges of gravel past colorful riverside fishing cottages. The highway developed that phantom third lane you find in countries with lax policing and indiscriminate passing standards. South of Belgrade alleviated the tedium of the flat farmland and industrial trucking infrastructure of the north. The land blistered into low, green mountains reminiscent of Ireland, and the road slung viaducts over paved ditches, railroad tracks, and valleys of trash. It was wine country, though some of the vineyards had gone to seed and were grazed by storks. The graveyards had unfenced black tombstones, not the manicured and colorful plots of Croatia, and the mountain tunnels were eerily lightless. Once through, I was almost the only vehicle on the road to Niš in the rain.

  The ancient town of Niš, birthplace of Constantine the Great and the site where the Roman emperors Valentinian and Valens met to split the empire, was a low city spread like a quilt over a gently sloping valley. As I approached it, the traffic coalesced into a dual stream of speeding BMWs and Audis on one side and putt-putt Yugos and Zastavas on the other. A hitchhiker with a birthmark covering half his face waited by a tollbooth.

  I passed through the city as quickly and fluidly as through a one-crossroads village. Its southern end, through the suburb of Prosek, was a slim fortress of a mountain pass flanked by hundred-foot gas tanks painted to look like huge vodka labels. The lumpy and irregular mountainside villages became increasingly ramshackle, their shack walls stripped of plaster exposing wooden slats, and then petered out into forest.

  IV.

  You Are an Asshole Big Time (Bulgaria)

  It felt like a literal gateway, this pass. The road is ancient: it was the Roman Via Militaris and the medieval Constantinople Road, the route from the fantastical Illyria to the truly eerie, tribal, ineffable Thrace. And the country opens wide on the far side, from the claustrophobic Serbian mélange of huddled village and heavy industry to wide, fertile vistas, forested, not cultivated, with pine and even a little birch. There was wood smoke from beyond a dry, umber-and-sienna hill, some Turkish flags, and the white peak of Vitosha, the snowy sentry of Sofia, in the distance. The skeletons of a couple of factories, which looked like they had been shelled, simply served as the contrast underlining the Montanan beauty. In fact, the visual resonance with the American West is well known: the Italian directors of the 1960s filmed their spaghetti Westerns here as an inexpensive stand-in for cowboy country.

  I had a pocketful of Serbian dinars and, worried about highway tolls up until the moment I crossed the border, hadn’t changed them while still in Serbia. On the far side, to my dismay, the usual string of low-rent money-changing shacks was deserted, except for one manned by a teenage girl who proved unable to do the simple conversion math. When I took the calculator and showed her the figures, she shrugged and showed me that she had only the equivalent of a little under thirty euros worth of Bulgarian leva. I’d have to figure it out in Sofia. Luckily, I found, this was a nation of petty hustlers and ad hoc dealers.

  The approach to the capital was like the outskirts of a Chinese or African city, with corrugated tin shacks overseeing construction supplies and auto parts, though far less populated and hectic. Stray dogs barked at hobos with shopping carts. The city itself was in the shadow of a tall, snowy ridge, the Srednogorie. With the wide boulevards of a planned city and the odd neon-lit casino storefront, it gave the impression of a frontier center—Salt Lake City or Bozeman—gone to seed.

  The city center was a different animal altogether. The “crossroads of culture” trope is hackneyed, but in the moment it was hard to resist: the cobblestoned streets and monumental parliaments of a European capital around the corner from the rotting public housing of the postcommunist East, a shockingly colorful onion-dome cathedral, Turkish music from a cab window, an alley market of corrugated tin booths.

  I picked Cvetan up from his job at the national radio station, and he snorted a pinch of snuff off the back of his hand. “I haven’t been sleeping much,” he explained. He had been on the road for four days with a former Bad Seeds guitarist and up late the night before on a strange errand. “This is going to sound especially weird to an American, but it is time to register kids for school. They are required to go, but in some neighborhoods there is not enough room in the good schools for all the kids.” So parents began lining up outside the schools at one a.m. and formed informal cartels to register one another’s kids until the classes were full. “They are calling names at one a.m., two a.m., until six thirty in the morning, like it’s a concentration camp.” He was a serious fellow, baby-faced, with a soul patch and wide-set, catlike but earnest eyes, cuffed jeans and Doc Marten boots. His passion was the avant-jazz of the original Knitting Factory and the scene associated with John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne (whom he’d recently booked), and the avant-garde accordionist Guy Klucevsek.

  The booking process for all the Balkan shows had been haphazard: I’d get a few e-mail addresses from someone in Romania who knew someone in Serbia who might know someone in Bulgaria, who couldn’t do it himself but here were his friends in Sofia. I’d first talked to a Nikolai who directed me to Kostya, who worked with Cvetan.

  There had been some unpleasantness before I’d left the United States. Kostya had passed me off to Cvetan with an exchange in the morning of February 18:

  “Hi Franz, my colleague Cvetan shall be in contact with you regarding the sofia(and probably ruse) booking. see u in sofia. cheers”

  “Cool,” I replied, “I’ve been talking to Cvetan already. Thanks!”

  “ok, no probs, we work together so everything is fine. cheers”

  Then, time-stamped 4:37 a.m., this:

  “Franz,

  you are an asshole big time.

  The reason I think so is that when Nikolay asked me to help with promotion I said OK. While I was waiting for your promo material (you never send me one) I have booked you for a venue in Sofia for the 6th april.

  Yesterday I understood that you are booking yourself with my colleague Cvetan, who has your contact from ME. I was the person to let him know about you and show him your website. So while I am working on your dates I understood you have been already dealing with someone else. So the result is that there is a double booking for the same date in Sofia in two different venues.

  And you owe us (Nikolay and ME) 100 euros for that booking you have done through our contacts. And if you don’t pay us I will bring the finance police to your gigs and you have to spend at least 10 hours in the police station explaining in writing why are you working in Bulgaria and not paying taxes on your earnings. Then you will be charge with tax fraud, not only in Bulgaria, but in the states.

  I am serious.”

  “I think there has been a big misunderstanding,” I replied. “You said yesterday you and Cvetan are colleagues, right? So what is the problem?”

  9:46 a.m.:

  “Franz,

  Don’t worry. I like you. I work together with Cvetan. No problems. He will organize everything. I apologize for my email, but I was pissed because we (me and nikolay) to promote you on Nikolay’s condition. Nikolay made me problems last night that we (me and Cvetan) are booking the same artists for the same date in two different venues. So, please don’t worry. Cvetan will take care of everything regarding your gigs.

  cheers”

  “Drunk,” I said to Maria, relieved.

  “You’re gonna stay with my friend,” said Cvetan. “Normally you could stay with me, but I’m having a divorce. I just finally found a new place, but it’s pretty dirty now. . . . I was living the last six months at the radio station; I had a couch there.”

  We arrived at a bar and approached a slight, dark, bearded hustler with thin eyes and a permanently raised brow. He was chain-smoking slim Russian cigarettes.

  “This is Kostya,” Cvetan said. “He’s the best unsuccessful promoter in Bulgaria.”

  (“You are an asshole big time,” I flashed.)

  “It’s true!
” Kostya grinned. “I was the first to bring American wrestling to Bulgaria” (professional wrestling, that is). “And the last. Then I did a tour of thirty-five tango dancers from Argentina. But they wouldn’t pay me presales, so I had to cancel. Do you know Fucking Hell beer? Here, have one. What do you think?”

  In addition to being Bulgaria’s best unsuccessful concert promoter, Kostya Todorov—“like told-her-off,” he said—had recently purchased the exclusive rights to distribute an undistinguished pilsner associated, for marketing purposes, with the Austrian town of Fucking.

  “First my friend and I rented a warehouse. We were going to make [it into] a venue, and rehearsal spaces, and so on. But I walked away.” He bought a truckload of Fucking Hell and stashed it in the empty warehouse, hawking it case by case to local bars and party promoters.

  “The problem is, Bulgarians don’t have any taste. They don’t know about brands. The bar owners, they say, ‘I can get Corona for seventy euro cents,’ trying to [bring] me down. Well, OK, then kids are going to the corner store and buying Corona even cheaper and drink them at your place. I have a warehouse full of this beer, I’d rather just go and drink it myself for the next ten years than give you that price, I tell them. Bulgaria is entering the Schengen zone, free-trade zone, and then all the prices are going to double. Heineken price is going to double. This price I will lock in now, then in two years it’ll be cheap” by comparison.