The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  There is a second scar on his neck, which I hadn’t noticed. It was from the stroke of a scalpel, he explained, the surgical aftermath of a drunken car accident and an attempt by doctors to repair a broken neck by cutting in from the front. It happened in Romania. He was drunk, but the other driver, who came to the hospital weeping and begging him not to press charges, was at fault. Romulus couldn’t lift the head attached to his broken neck and remembers only the trembling top of the kneeling man’s hat. He identified so strongly with his desperation that he let him off.

  Then he rebelled against the doctors, threatening to walk out of the hospital, demanding a beer. He removed the brace to make it easier to get at a pack of cigarettes, swore there was nothing wrong with him, tried to leave—right up to the moment when the anesthesiologist held a dripping needle in the air, told him he was the most difficult patient the hospital had ever had, and gave the injection that plunged him into unconsciousness, and, against the odds, let him wake up repaired rather than paralyzed.

  The scars on his legs are from attempts to cross into Greece through a Macedonian wood where he’d been lurking for a day and a night; he was shot at six times by border guards as he ran through brambles until he made it past the frontier into Greece, a lacework of blood pouring from his ripped shins.

  Berries hastily nibbled in more woods until, two weeks later, he sneaks into the hull of a container ship at Patras on its way to Italy. There’s nothing to eat or drink during a roundabout, sweltering voyage but a crate of melons. Weak and disoriented, he creeps into the blinding sun of Bari and steals food on his journey by foot and by hitchhiking to Rome, where, supposedly, fate smiles on him for six golden months.

  The highlight of the Roman period comes with a rustyfendered Fiat spitting diesel and making the late-afternoon rounds of viale delle Belle Arti, opposite the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna. The driver shoots glances at him. Why? He’s only one of several unremarkable hustlers leaning roguishly against the sun-dappled tree trunks. Astonishingly, the driver is a paragon of Italian beauty—or is it Sicilian? There’s a touch of the African in her prominent lips rouged in luscious purple or the pale-sienna dome of her forehead above half-circle eyebrows, trimmed and penciled to the thinnest of lines. The car putters to a halt, and the young woman leans out the driver’s window. He can’t believe she’s pointing at him with an arm sleeved in crisp linen, the cuff clasped by a pearl button. He floats to the car window, from which waft clouds of a jasmine-and-rose perfume. Joy! he exultantly thinks, having once made a mental note of the expensive scent when a trick took him shopping on via Veneto.

  He sleepwalks into the front seat, the perfume overwhelming him, and stares in disbelief at her crisp pleated linen skirt creeping above the knee of her cinnabar leg. She shifts into first, her soft hand with its polished beige nails grazing the side of his thigh. She speaks in a thick, hoarse whisper, never quite looking him in the eye, and suggests they stop for a drink. Then there is that sumptuous dinner all paid by her, and afterward that club he considers the best in Rome, with the house music so booming that it makes the air between your pant leg and shin vibrate, although there are hustlers in the crowd who recognize him, but he ignores them all. Never has he felt this mesmerized by a woman’s power as she leads him into the ladies’ room and locks the door. After covering his mouth, neck and chest with her purple mouth, she bends and raises her skirt and puts her back to him, then guides him inside her effortlessly, her head thrown back to enjoy his hungry, gasping kisses and controlling bites.

  But ever so quickly after: coolness takes over, a strange restlessness. It turns him into a cheap hustler again, something she picked up for an evening’s pleasure. In her puttering Fiat, neither of them says a word when she drives him back to viale delle Belle Arti. All the next day, leaning against the same tree, discussing prices with potential tricks, he spends hours imagining their second encounter, how he’ll show her that he’s something more than she thought, maybe even reject her until she begs. The fact of this bounty fallen out of nowhere fills him with vertigo, panic. He must discover before she returns exactly how he’ll win, since the chance won’t come again. He’s willing to spend some of the money on her that he’s saved from hustling, and wonders, Could she really love him, will he end up leaving this life for her?

  Late that afternoon around the same time, just as he’d hoped, the car reappears. He bounces toward it with an eager, cocky smile, his heart bursting through his chest. She’s grinning, too; but with a hint of resignation creasing the corners of her mouth? Almost proudly—is it even with a touch of sadism?—she tells him there’s something she must ask, but first she must know, did he enjoy fucking her in the ass last night as much as he seemed to? In the ass? He thought that they were . . . You were very, very drunk, my dear, but wasn’t it delicious? It embarrasses him to talk about it like this, leaning into a car window, with all the other hustlers staring at his butt. Then you’ll be patient? Patient about what? he wants to know. Until I get my pussy. I’m almost ready for my sex change.

  A new kind of vertigo, like acid leaking into brain cells, makes him lose his balance. He can feel the other hustlers are staring . . . staring . . . maybe they knew the punch line all along. If it weren’t for those heels, those stockings, he says under his breath, I’d teach you a lesson man to man. But honey, she says, we were so good together. His hand moves back to strike her, and as the Fiat putters off, forced, brittle laughter cackles from it.

  EVEN SO, this was a year of great accomplishments, rare pleasures. His Italian, a language with many similarities to Romanian, got so good that people couldn’t tell he wasn’t native. A trick even got him a one-time job posing for a perfume ad. They wanted a highly romantic Latin look—his black hair gleaming with gel, his thin eyebrows arched in sinister seduction; he can still remember the feeling of his Adam’s apple rubbing against that crisp white collar. And then the red car, the convertible in which he’s shown sitting, actually almost belonged to him. Another trick, an executive with the Hilton chain, leased it for him, along with a suite of rooms to live in.

  In another picture, which the Hilton guy took, and which he thinks is at his mother’s, there he is, on the beach, so tanned he almost changed races; and he was lifting weights at the hotel, gaining weight from eating so much pasta. But the worst thing about that Hilton guy was the sex. He wanted him to do all kinds of disgusting stuff; after a few weeks he just couldn’t deal with it anymore.

  That was a salad year, all the same, he claims, exhaling self-satisfied smoke rings. The money he made! He sent most of it home, over four thousand, which paid his parents’ rent for four years when he got back. And not all of it came from hustling. He was an ace wire-crosser, a car thief. A Romanian network takes the car right off your hands. It’s not such a big deal in Italy like it is here in Hungary. A lot of times they let you go, just make you give the car back.

  Then, finally, he met Angelita, a real Italian and a real woman. And not far from a tin shantytown in a dusty Roman suburb, there they are dancing on the terrace of a club. The strings of colored lights leave glints on her satiny forehead, her wet lips and shiny brown hair, under a heavy, starless black sky impregnated by metallic music. The air feels humid, oppressive, especially since he’s drunk too much; and the alcohol’s moving through him like shifting quicksand. Each dance step he takes seems so perfect, in that minimal way he’s learned to move, as if it’s a gesture rather than a dance; but there’s also that leaden feeling.

  Out on the street, the polished fender of a Ferrari. He realizes he’s yanking Angelita toward it. No, no, she’s giggling under her breath, as he makes her go over to it, caress the shiny hood and ornament with the palm of her hand. Who in this lousy neighborhood could have such a car? Then he remembers the gold bracelet on the wrist of the silver-haired, bag-eyed businessman in the severely tailored suit and polished shoes, and the two scrawny African girls in bright blue dresses, needle marks on their arms, the hookers who were dancing
with him. He thinks of the man’s stiff expression of entitlement . . . which to his surprise makes him think of the tiniest newborn, the cutest imaginable, in a flowery crib, it’s the businessman’s child, and here’s the father carousing in this sleazy neighborhood until dawn, fooling with skanky prostitutes.

  He’s suddenly so furious at this . . . this father . . . that in seconds he’s accomplished the trick of prying down the Ferrari’s window by twisting his knife between the rubber and the glass; and as Angelita keeps giggling nervously, he unlatches the door and pushes her into the car. And while her voice, now shaky, obviously drunken, is breathing, No, no, no . . . he shows her how he can break a lever to silence the shrieking alarm and cross the wires of the engine, which starts with a roar. . . .

  “But I crash it a couple blocks later, I was so drunk, and get arrested,” he says with a grim chuckle. “And it seems asshole who owns car is what-do-you-call-it, government official. So police taking me to border of Slovenia and saying to me, you can never coming back to this country, buddy, you stealing a car, get out of here. And then the Slovenians having to ship me back to Romania.”

  THE TREES OUTSIDE MELTED into the dark sky hours ago. Our first evening together is half over. We’re still in bed in front of the television. His leg is still hooked over mine. Though the late-February weather is mild, all at once the room is chilly. Outside, the leaf buds look weirdly hardened, molded from some dark metal, their branches like black bundles of cable.

  Shiveringly, we climb into a cab to ride to dinner. His peppery rankness fills the air inside. It’s a perfume part rebellion and part musk of depression. Some of it still stings my tongue from the sex we had, plunging me deeper into his dislocated thoughts. Years of failed exiles have turned him into a language machine. I can feel his mind jigsawing through multiple lexicons—Romanian, Italian, English, Hungarian, Greek, German. Language for him is the cubism of survival. He’ll speak a word and, under his breath, quiz himself for versions of it in the other languages he knows—in case he’ll need them. Later a friend, the Romanian writer Carmen Firan, will describe this to me as a “Gypsy tongue.”

  In the restaurant, Romulus’s ears are pricked like a spy’s and his eyes blank. He’s evaluating that couple across the room. A Pole speaking accented German sprinkled with bad English to a woman speaking good German and English who must be Czech, he decides. His foxlike face screws up in shrewd satisfaction.

  Always next to his hip is the cell phone the ex-girlfriend bought him when she was in business at the brothel, so she’d be able to keep track of his whereabouts. I fix my eyes on it, ask about it. Now it can only receive calls, he says, not make them, the card’s been used up. But just as my mind moves elsewhere, the phone jangles.

  He holds it to his ear, speaks in Romanian. Who, who is it, I desperately want to know. His hooded eyes only grow more opaque, his pallor more pronounced. There is, he admits, after hanging up, another girl here in Budapest. He says the word “girl” the way you would say “job,” dispassionately, with an air of bored utilitarianism. I told her, he goes on, that my American uncle was coming to visit. (He rewards the word “uncle” with more status than “girl,” a tie of blood.) “And I told her that while my uncle was here for ten days, I could not be with her at all.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “‘ Why?’” he says. “She say, ‘Why?’”

  “You can see her once or twice,” I say, my eyes becoming more hooded than his. “Your job with me isn’t all twenty-four hours a day.” And of course, the word “job” cuts through him, my revenge for the word “uncle.”

  “Is not necessary,” he says, getting stonier.

  TWO DAYS LATER his very pungent cock dangles over my face as I sit on the floor between his legs and nip at the foreskin. It smells strongly of pussy. He’d disappeared for six hours with some of the money I’d given him to get a haircut, hooking up with his pleading girlfriend, I later found out. Supposedly, he took her to the movies, but then, he added casually, with a kind of masochistic pride in his vulgarity, fucked her in the toilets. While I lay in bed waiting and waiting and growing progressively more anguished, angrier, killing time by reading about King Carol’s enormous sexual prowess in the disappointing and clichéd Balkan Ghosts, until everything seen through the haze of the many codeine tablets I took somehow faded into this girl I’d imagined: the watery hair, the easily bruisable skin . . . And now I didn’t identify with her at all, or feel I was becoming her in that abject sense I’d felt before—and she became the enemy.

  Insolently coaxing the girl into the bathroom as she murmured over and over, “But why can’t I meet your uncle?” Sliding the latch of the toilet door shut. Covering her neck with kisses forceful enough to leave bruises. Taking her hair in one hand like a horse’s tail and pulling her face against him, then lowering it slowly down his chest toward his open fly . . .

  When my mind was so choked with resentment that I couldn’t read the words on the page, I took a bus to the Corso, that board-walk along the Danube where we’d met, and sat glaring at the windswept waves. Then I began to walk, as if through gelatin and surreal loss. There was the occasional wizened hustler sitting in one of the small parks, face scoured by months of cold wind, hands cracking with vitamin deficiencies. . . . Until finally, I found myself sitting in a cab again, taking the useless trip back to the empty hotel room. It’s really an annoying trip. I had no idea the hotel was so isolated, would cost so much to get to.

  At the hotel a strange presence lurked about a hundred feet from the entrance, like an animal crouched in the bushes. And then slowly, abashedly, it appeared, like something that had no right to be there, creeping toward me with head bowed, and a timid, self-punishing smile that gave me a secret twinge of pleasure. . . . He was a bona fide guest at this four-star hotel, but I’d forgotten, again, to consider his amazing sense of disentitlement, the effort he must have been expending to walk in and out of the lobby past the concierge. So when he’d returned and found me gone, instead of asking for another key, he’d loitered in front of the hotel and even hid in the bushes so as not to be shooed away. The animal he incarnated, skulking from the bushes when he saw me getting out of the taxi, wasn’t a dog, despite the hangdog look, but a fox . . . a sly fox only temporarily cowed by my stony glance, my barking admonition, “If you don’t want the job, then okay!”

  “I disappeared on purpose,” retorted the shy fox craftily, “just to see what you do. I was testing you.”

  That was ten minutes ago. Now I’m sliding my mouth up his thigh, licking at the scent of her arousal in the toilet of the movie theater with the thought of her fear and despair at losing him. “Always bring me your cock when it smells of pussy,” I advise, as I slowly gulp it to the root.

  IV

  ROMANIAN HISTORY HAS CREPT back into my story like an enticement; or is it a warning? King Carol II, of the enormous sexual stamina. And his Jewish mistress Lupescu, of the pursed Cupid’s-bow lips and sashaying loins. In a landscape like my current life, it’s natural to expect, or at least long for, the spectacular.

  From the books I’ve been reading here in the Margitsziget while Romulus watches round after round of TV soccer, I can piece together life in Romania during Carol’s early manhood, around 1915, when the new nation bristled with excitement, looking eagerly toward Western Europe for acceptance. I can picture the future king, Prince Carol, as a cocky, moody, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old, with an extravagant mop of wavy blond hair and a weak Hohenzollern chin, pulled in even further by Hohenzollern propriety. I’ve also learned that Romania’s capital, Bucharest, where young Carol accumulated his sexual conquests (including one, called The Crow, slender and witchlike with cocaine-dilated pupils), was already known as Little Paris at the time. It was a bustling nexus between East and West, built up by Romania’s rich reserves of oil and wheat and its access to the Danube. The fashionable main streets overflowed with natty young gentlemen smoking oval-shaped Turkish cigarettes and often availab
le seraglio-eyed women, their shiny black hair framing Eastern-kohled eyes, their undulating hips sheathed in Turkish silks or filmy French organdy.

  A full-lipped Carol in early manhood—soon to become Europe’s most sensual monarch.

  These images of Romania’s past animate the isolation of that hotel on Margitsziget Island, but it’s still becoming a bad place for Romulus and me. There’s an air of family groups and bird-watchers, and there’s no sex at all on TV. Motivated by the stories of Carol’s amorous exploits, I spice up our sex sessions by inventing turn-of-the-last-century scenarios, whispering into Romulus’s ear minutely detailed descriptions of moist labia beneath frilly corset edges and rippling breasts.

  One day I come back to our room after a short sightseeing trip to the Dohány Street Synagogue and find Romulus lying stiffly on the bed, a shade lighter than his usual pallor, with no television playing. Boredom had driven him outside, where he was astonished to see someone entering the hotel as he was leaving.

  Who?

  Well, just a person . . .

  Eventually, I’m able to pry out the story of a choreographer, an obsessed john whom Romulus dropped as a customer a little while ago, after which an assistant was set on Romulus’s tail, as in some spy movie. He was afraid to leave his room for a week, kept getting hang-ups on his cellular. And now . . . there the man was, entering the hotel.

  The next day we switch to the Gellért, our original trysting place. A spectacular room awaits us there, since this is the off-season. It has a balcony overlooking the noisy square and the green-metal Szabadság Bridge spanning the Danube. The anti-Romanian clerk who seized Romulus’s passport is the same to check us in, but he doesn’t bat a contemptuous eyelash. In fact, now that we occupy one of the luxury rooms, his previous suspicion has transformed into a robotic Old World servility. Henceforth he’ll delicately refer to the vagrant I arrived with on the last trip in the middle of the night and whose passport he snatched as my “nephew from Italy,” a role that Italian-speaking Romulus laps up.