THESE THOUGHTS RECUR in fragmented form in a low-ceilinged suburban bedroom in Syracuse, New York, in the house in which I grew up. I’ve come back here to visit my ancient mother—another exile from Eastern-bloc turmoil. A Jew, she came to the States from Russia at the age of two, almost a century ago, with her family, so that her father could avoid being drafted into the czar’s army.
Now, as I gaze out the bedroom window at the carpet of snow, drugs lick my nervous cells into bolder imaginings. Is this the eighth or ninth tablet of codeine I’ve taken—ostensibly for a toothache? I really should watch it, stop raiding friends’ medicine cabinets to supplement my stash, popping them at the slightest sense of isolation.
It must be past two a.m. Like a mask of latex sealing off the head of a fetishist, the drug encases my brain, and my whole body disintegrates into a low-resolution image. Visions are pulsing, full of that energy that was killed off in New York with the last peep show. Periodically, the glowing silver shovel of Romulus’s face leaps out, as in an old-fashioned photographic instant when the flash powder goes off. Then the image melts away, and the dark bedroom in Syracuse pops back into hard focus.
I open my eyes, feel the drops of fantasy evaporating from neurons, the bright emulsion fading, and I remember my stubborn, endlessly resilient but finally failing mom lying in the next boxy room. Our doors have been left ajar all night because she’s awoken so many times by her bad heart. With a twinge of guilt, I rise unsteadily and tiptoe into her bedroom to check on her again, a glimpse of the bundled body I’ve known all my life, so still now and surrounded by foreboding; and then I come closer, bend with held breath until my face is nearly touching hers, to be sure she’s still breathing. . . .
Before we went to bed, we talked about my time in Budapest, which is—it comes to mind—only a few hundred miles from Shedrin, in White Russia, where she was born. I had to shout because her hearing is going. But despite her advanced age of ninety-six, her strong will and sharp intelligence are completely intact. I can picture her so clearly right now, frail but enlivened by the favorite topic of me—leaning forward on the very edge of her seat at the kitchen table so as not to miss a word, scrutinizing me with attentive, worried eyes, asking probing questions and desperately hoping for all the false answers; hoping I’ll materialize by some magic into the prudent, cautious traveler I wasn’t.
FASCINATION CAME EARLY to me because of her. In a way, the stage was set early for the hypnotic hold of this new obsession. I’ve been told that I was a receptive baby, used to being gathered abruptly into the arms of this delighted, full-breasted woman whose china-blue eyes sparkled with joy as her charismatic, booming voice imprinted me with its linguistic mastery. From several family pictures, I can reconstruct her habit of holding me under my arms and hoisting me to my toes as if I were standing, then bouncing me up and down on her soft lap as the pleasure began to ripple.
If my senses mesmerize me, it must be because of her: those arrivals in rouge, perfume and a ’50s veiled hat: moments of epic excitement. But I also remember her departures, which occurred more and more frequently as she became a community activist. Then absence stretched to infinity.
White-limbed and smooth-skinned as my mom seemed, she was already a woman in her mid-forties. I was a child of her old age, an unusual occurrence for that era. Almost from the beginning I could feel the morbid threat of her increasing years and impending death, and I suppose this intensified the romance.
I still remember the spell of her bedroom, which seemed like a palace of sensuality. From the large mahogany dresser emerged shiny costume jewelry, filmy stockings and bright snaking scarves, which she’d let me touch. After cinching her waist in a white clasp girdle, she’d smooth a nutmeg stocking up an ivory leg and clip it to the hanging garters. My fascination and anxiety—based on the fact that she was getting ready to leave—built as I watched her apply the dense powder and bright rouge that would turn her face into an abstract treasure under a veil. Over her shiny blouse she’d button the pearl-gray jacket that clung to her hips. Then she’d pin on the enigmatic hat and slip into the haughty navy blue heels. The spell caused by all this had the same quality as that excitement the moment I saw Romulus’s hollow-cheeked face, cut from the black. For me, I suppose, he was some imago emerging from the dark past, like the fleeting figure of my mother turning off the light at night, then horribly vanishing into blackness.
How else to describe the transformation of a boxlike suburban room in Syracuse into one of high ceilings with peeling plaster walls and nicked, ornate molding, the shoddy splendor of an old room in Budapest with warped floorboards that creak if one dare change position? It’s the room I imagine he rents in Budapest, where he probably sleeps with his head just a few feet from the triple-socked feet of the pickpocket from the train station.
Images of him come now just as they are said to do before dying, when each nanosecond delivers a lengthy plot. The memory of clasping that hard, smooth waist and bending to tongue the nipples of that pallid chest. Or his mean rosebud mouth tightening with suspicion around a cigarette. Then another dissolve, murky and shimmering like water, into his silhouette getting smaller as he walked away from the hotel.
This afternoon, I could hear my old mother’s voice crack when she made an effort to take my answers about my trip to Budapest casually. Like some puritanical bloodhound, she sniffed out my elation, which stimulated her fantasy life, composed primarily of worries about me. “You didn’t meet anybody when you were there?” she interrogated. “In such a desperate place, I’d imagine.” And, “Why do you go on taking such difficult assignments?”
Because she’d failed miserably in her attempts to fashion me into her aspirations, the sum of which created a cartoon dream, I was a constant source of anxiety—the type of writing I did, the fact that I’d swerved into bohemia early and never returned, after being such a model, adoring child. . . . Even so, she’s one stalwart soldier—I mean, general. Unerringly she tracks the path of her obsession step by step through its most exotic transgressions, always demanding to know everything. I can sense her on the road with me perpetually, pleading with me to give up “the Life.” To this day I haven’t been able to escape the persistence of her radarlike surveillance, wheedling for a return to common sense, mourning my transformation into something alien, unmanageable and male. Like an organism with no cell wall and thus no intact inner life, I’ve been forced again and again to vomit out my fantasies and desires for her approval that was never forthcoming, even as the loss of privacy deteriorated my ego. Over the years we developed a confession ritual. No matter how hard I tried to protect her and myself from the details of my private life, she always got them out of me.
“Well, yeah, I did meet one person.”
Mom’s eyes turned to steel and a chill crept into her voice. “Was it a man?”
My bowdlerized description of meeting Romulus—a preposterous subject to have mentioned at all—didn’t seem to fool her a bit. She zeroed in with questions about how I’d been able to make a “friend” in a strange country in so short a time, and why he’d left home. And what had I said he “did for a living”? Somehow, she sensed the whole picture, despite my guarded answers and evasions, because deep down I wanted her to.
YET NEVER in a million years could she enter my world, which explodes in another burst of opiates . . . then ripples away again into the blackness. . . . I can glimpse him once more, pale and slumped against the wall of that freezing Austrian holding cell, after being arrested on the train. And here I lie in this clean powder-blue room, with a full stomach.
Like comets, my charged neurons fly through space, swirl about the Austrian-Hungarian border and penetrate that prison, perhaps by smothering it with ugly American dollars. In the middle of the night there’s the clank of the cell door opening. The silver spade of a face buried in a grimy sleeve jerks up in surprise, then floods with wonder and relief at the sight of me. He’s being let out because of me.
Or perha
ps I pull the limp, exhausted body up into my arms to feel the pleasure of it slumping against me like a life-sized rag doll, as the sharp, wet features and oily, straight hair press against my neck. For isn’t such time-and-space travel what codeine and passion are for?
I WONDER WHETHER Romulus ever thought of me while he was in jail. At any rate, he couldn’t possibly picture me here, on this absurd four-poster in suburbia. I know for certain he has fantasies about America. Only the feel of its pavement under his feet would be enough, he told me on that first night in Budapest. Maybe, as he sat in his cell, he imagined me in a New York gleaned from old movies, with spider-black skyscrapers and tarnished-silver sky, gangsters and amber liquor . . . while he crouched there, angry and depleted like a rat in a cage. And earlier . . . on that clanging train from the Communist period—not headed east to Romania, as he’d promised before I sent the money, but west to Vienna—was he thinking of me then?
The train pulls in at the border. . . . He’s probably crouching in a crawl space over the toilet ceiling. His half-bent knees, so long in that position, are starting to shoot pains. A wooden baton is banging on the slightly open partition in the ceiling. When it won’t budge, the guard calls a colleague to lean on so that he can climb onto the toilet seat and bang harder. Romulus’s head is jammed against an iron beam.
When a foot finally dangles from the crawl space, I bet they grab for it and yank down roughly. Romulus lands on the small of his back on the toilet seat and slides to the floor.
The whiz of the tires of the Syracuse city plow on wet snow loosens the luminous grip of these ideas. The ray of a headlight brings me back to the American suburbs, illuminating the insipid blue of the bedroom curtains. Restless, I think about getting up to check on Mom again, but merely recover the image of her chest rising and falling, her small form bundled in blankets.
Then the curtains are swallowed back up by the darkness, the half-dreams begin their rippling again, coaxed into larger and larger waves by the trails of codeine. Against my will, I’m thinking of that hypothetical watery-haired girlfriend of his, a little bloated from her late nights and beers, in a cheaply furnished room of the brothel located in a concrete high-rise. She is struggling against the drunken hand of a Chinese client whose pants are open at the fly. His arm is fumbling with her shoulder in an attempt to pin it against the hollow-sounding plaster-board, which makes an idiotically thudding echo, and all because he wants to fuck her without a condom. When she finally bites the hand that’s trying to muffle her screams, he lets go of her; but as she’s straightening her ripped black décolleté dress, a glitter of steel driven by an irrational flash of anger plunges between her ribs, after which protectors come running, the client is ejected and the girl taken to the hospital.
I don’t know it yet, but soon I’ll arrive in her psychic space. Black is leaking in from the hallway like tar. In the four-poster, my hand slides across my hip. A white hiss travels up my legs; it’s as if my confused body were dissolving into these sharp flashes of pleasure, pulverized into black-and-white dots by my pumping heart.
Afterward, I stumble to the bathroom to wipe the come off with a paper towel. When I return, I stare out the shoulder-high window. The storm has let up, revealing the huge evergreen across the road. Then once again the air—and my mind—become a prison of swarming white, obscuring everything, scorching my brain cells with hunger—like those famished northern hunters—for the flesh of Romulus.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, after my return to New York, I flee to an old friend, the writer Ursule Molinaro, who, at her advanced age—after the turmoil of war and Europe and rebellious love affairs and a bilingual career as a fiction writer—is a fellow connoisseur and victim of risk. She’s been bedridden for more than two weeks, but she disdains help from the medical establishment. After being imprisoned during World War II in France, she swore off all association with institutions, preferring instead to develop an open attitude to the meaning of death.
Molinaro’s tired yet crisp, marquesa-like voice expresses contentment about the energy I’m bringing near her. We’ve known each other for years, and during that time refined our anti-Protestant, pro-Latin aesthetic ideology; our penchant for surfaces and ceremonies, bodies, discretions and perversions; our choice of drama over security. She’s also a lover of languages, five of which she speaks without any accent.
Propping herself up in bed with several pillows, she professes herself delighted by my new entanglement, its connection to Latin culture and the Latin language, its displacement in the Balkan world, and Romulus’s ominous allure. When I show her a picture of his balletically long neck and spectral cheekbones, it sends her fantasizing as a way of supporting me. How eager she is to approve what the Other can offer! Together we immerse ourselves in this new obsession, this palpable symbol of our alienation, feeling all the more content that he spells danger, risk, which is sometimes the messenger of death.
“You must get him on the stage, in theater!” she announces archly, gleefully, with the photo pinched between her pallid bony fingers. Her eyes, clouded by illness, gleam with approval, delight for my adventure into another linguistic reality, a sexual labyrinth.
“It’s an ancient face,” she decrees.
“Yes, it could almost come from the Roman period,” I agree.
“Long, long before,” she insists.
And so we sit in her tiny bedroom on East Second Street, celebrating my new adventure, which, unknown to us, is fated to overlap with her death.
III
MY EYES ARE TWIN SNAILS inching down a statue, past the hostile wings of the hunched shoulders, past the nipple red and erect and slightly askew from my nibbling, to the hyperlean stomach muscles, which tell the story of his multiple starvations. All caused by the accident of being born Romanian and leaving for countries where no Romanians are wanted—which means most.
I’ve flown back. I came as soon as he called me and mentioned that his relationship with the girl in the brothel was over. We’re in Budapest, and we’ve had our first bout of sex. Things are settling in; they were at loose ends before. Before the plane left the runway, fear about flying to a Romanian vagrant whose features I could now hardly picture gripped me, until an image of him—lithe and sinister—sizzled in my brain like a branding. I buckled myself to the seat, and his spell took complete control of me again, put me back in that blank, teetering moment like the one before orgasm, just as the plane’s takeoff flattened my body against the seat. For the rest of the trip I held on to the picture of his gaunt, big-nosed face, the ferocious irony in his deadened eyes.
My fantasy, however, was deflated when I saw that pale, chain-smoking kid, a little less than half my age, waiting for me with a crinkled smile, at Ferihegy Airport. Somehow he seemed too diminutive, inexperienced, to have sent me running for a plane, my wallet stuffed with cash-machine money. Our taxi ride to the Margitsziget Hotel in near silence seemed unreal and synthetic. Confused, I fell down next to him on the queen-sized bed and plunged into a deep, jet-lagged sleep.
When I woke up, he was in his underwear, settled patiently next to me, the way a cat waits for the next event over which it has no control. On TV was a soccer match, which he followed through heavy lids, shrouded by the clouds of smoke he exhaled. Instinctively, I burrowed my face in the crotch of his briefs while he kept smoking, getting more and more aroused, never looking down until I slid off the briefs and gulped him to the root, as he clasped my head and shoulders, and I finally pulled away as he ejaculated, but not fast enough to avoid the dribble that clung to my eyelash.
I rushed in a panic to wash it off, and he snarled an acidic observation about my lack of trust in his seronegativity. Then he chuckled fatalistically. He lit another cigarette and switched the channel.
When I came back, I put my face very close to his and let the trance that had been my reason for coming swallow me. Soon I was entirely inside what I’d longed for. What was it, exactly? Not just the thud of his coiled muscles against my body,
nor even the roller coaster of genital contact; something else. Nothing short, in fact, of a generous portion of his inner life, which I imagined I could read, or hallucinate, in the hyper-close-up of his dark, Oriental face. From any distance it worked a harsh schematic on the eyes—it’s a face that can look cruel, if cruel can be lazy—but very close up, just before my eyes began to blur, I thought it began to release a bizarre humanity—if, indeed, humanity can be thought of as a mismatch of parts, the poignancy of things not fitting together. His face was a cluster of cruelty, laziness, sweetness and vulnerability—built from the spotty patchwork of a life.
By this time the room was full of smoke, which cut it off from the sunny world outside. When I’d booked our hotel, I hadn’t realized it was on an island in the Danube, a nature preserve protected from the hubbub of the city. I could immediately feel that for him it was a kind of cage. He saw no privilege in this isolation, in having nature served up to him, and glued himself to the television as if it were a lifeline. But I could feel that his body was tensed with expectation. His face was glowing, excited. I knew he was ready for a new chapter in his life.
I’d never noticed the roundish, quarter-sized scar near his jugular vein—though I’d been curious about another scar encircling the end of his large nose as if someone had tried to lop it off. Draping a soccer-defined thigh over mine, he languidly confirmed the violent cause of both scars, pantomimed with a jocular arm the stroke of the blade that opened both places on the skin in one curved swipe. Between exhales of smoke, he described the brawl in front of a bar that left him lying in a parking lot as blood gushed from his jugular vein and sliced nose through splayed fingers.
The Romanian Page 3