He hands my American passport back to me immediately. Then he takes his time with Romulus’s. The alleged problem is that Romulus’s passport looks too trampled, rain-streaked. He’d put it in his shoe during one of his flights across Macedonia. The officer thumbs through it again and again, pretending to gauge the thickness of the paper between thumb and forefinger, making a show of focusing on the ink where the rain has made it run, folding the bent corners back and forth and looking meaningfully into Romulus’s eyes. He clearly has little expertise in identifying counterfeit documents, but he’s casually hoping his act of suspicion will make Romulus edgy and break him if he’s concealing anything. He even locks the passport in a drawer while he does a lazy search on his computer. His movements are impudently slow. Then he looks up from the computer screen and asks Romulus to explain what he’s been doing in Hungary for such a long time.
Working at a travel agency, Romulus answers. And where is he living? With his girlfriend. And why is he crossing the border with this . . . person? The officer gestures at me as if at an object. Romulus tells him that I’m a writer and that he’s come along to translate for me.
The officer takes the passport out of the locked drawer and begins the ritual of thumbing through it again, peering periodically at Romulus with a crafty look. He does a poor imitation of someone studying the official stamps on each page. And why have you come back and forth so many times?
Isn’t it obvious? I want to shout. He needs to renew his visa once a month to stay in Hungary.
I keep coming back to visit my family, says Romulus. My mother’s sick.
Finally, the officer hands him back the passport, staring rudely in another direction at the same time. We drive through. I’m in Romania.
ACCORDING TO ALICE-LEONE MOATS, one of several 1950s journalists with a gossipy appetite for the scandal of King Carol II and his Jewish mistress Lupescu, the Hohenzollern side of Carol’s family were squeamish about sending their German blood to Romania. They feared its Oriental and Byzantine elements and were shocked by its Latin sensualities. The country had been free from Turkish rule and Greek exploitation for not even fifty years when Carol’s father Ferdinand came to the throne, and they literally thought it was contaminating their royal family.
“I feel safe here,” Romulus says, as the road becomes narrower and pitch black. Other cars shoot past at eighty miles per hour. Their style of passing is to do it whenever, especially on curves. It’s up to me and the car coming from the other direction to slow down, or even drive off to the shoulder of the road until they’re safely by. After the last car passes, all around me is dark, empty. The small, callused hand caresses the back of my neck. Elation and fear peak through me in jagged cardiogram bumps. My hands tingle.
King Carol’s mother, Marie, called Missy, came to this country with her heart in her mouth at the tender age of seventeen, from a sheltered, rural English childhood. Her first experiences of the family into which she’d married felt unreal, when, in 1893, shortly before her marriage, she was taken to meet her mother-in-law-to-be, the poet queen Elisabeth, also called Carmen Sylva. On a bed to which she had taken in a fit of hysterical paralysis, Carmen Sylva lay all in white, beneath an enormous skylight, which had been cut into the ceiling to allow her to paint. Missy was clasped into her arms, and a feeling came over her:
“. . . A curtain was being lifted, giving me a glimpse into a world unknown to me, where all things had other names, other meanings. . . .”
I feel the same way. It seems impossible to trace my path back to my first sight of Romulus, some three months ago. How have I gotten this far? As our car speeds deeper into the country, on a route paralleling that of the Orient Express that brought Missy to Romania in 1893, the shadows of branches make fleeting, eerie patterns on Romulus’s face. All familiar contexts are peeling away. The air is coated with bizarre possibility. New York, my mother and the other benchmarks of my life are being drained of color. All I can feel is this funnel of desire through which I’m speeding.
A little past the border, in the city of Arad, a gang of street children pound on our car. All we have is Hungarian money, but I open the window to hand some of the coins to the youngest, who throws them back as hard as he can at my face, bruising my temple. Shakily, I pull the car over to rub it. Romulus is pale with embarrassment, but not with fear. As more children run to the car, he shouts coldly at them in Romanian and they retreat, but only a bit. They hang at the edge of the road and offer a passion play of misery, chanting and whining in an imitation of pitiful piety. “Ignore them,” Romulus says in a clipped voice.
To our left is the municipal building, outlined in white Christmas lights. A taxi is parked in front. “Ask him for the best hotel.”
Romulus climbs out of the car, resorting again to his efficient swagger. There is much discussion and pointing. Returning, he tells me, “The most expensive is the Intercontinental, about a hundred meters down this street.”
We pull up at a dilapidated high-rise. Across its top, in letters that are askew, is the word “Intercontinental.” We’ve been driving for four hours. I’m not at all used to standard shift, and I’m exhausted. “Go in and get a room. I’ll get our stuff.” When I come in, dragging all the bags, Romulus informs me, “It’s about thirty dollars.”
“Okay.”
Something clicks in the head of the tall, thin desk clerk, dressed in a funereal black suit. “He says now,” Romulus tells me, “that the fee for foreigners is different. Now the price is seventy-eight dollars.” Rage simmers through me, but I take out my credit card. We change some money for Romanian lei.
Our room is large enough, with two small beds, thin mattresses and some wood paneling. Mildew fringes the red-flocked wallpaper. “It’s a nice hotel,” says Romulus.
The enormous restaurant is red as well, with those narrow, high-backed upholstered chairs I’ll eventually see all over Romania. Stiff, spotlessly white tablecloths are set with heavy plates and silverware, thick linen napkins. Above our heads hangs a baronial wood-and-iron chandelier, a sort of Roger Vadim version of something rural and aristocratic. Our food is incredibly delicious, and Romulus shows a new confidence in handling the waitresses, never exhibited in any of the Hungarian restaurants we went to. We taste ciorba de burta, a velvety tripe soup with cream and butter; mamaliga, a spongy polenta plastered with fragrant sheep cheese; and a mixed grill that tastes fresh enough to be the booty of that afternoon’s hunting party. My reactions are exaggeratedly ecstatic, with all the naiveté of the gung-ho greenhorn, and Romulus puts up with them with princely gloating. I choose to take this infantilizing of me as a triumphant sign of intimacy, start feeling happy about my “wifely” role.
As Romulus’s bubbly American wife, I suggest we see downtown Arad before we go to bed, so we head along the main street past shuttered shops until we come to a courtyard with a place that looks like a tavern. All that are left on the street are children and a pack of insistent money changers and fences, offering cut rates for dollars, marks and forints or trying to sell battered tape players, an old flashlight, a torn plastic agenda. Romulus seems more and more tense about my bright-eyed, overly appreciative rubbernecking. When street kids ask us for money, tugging my sleeve and even pushing their faces against my belly, I take my camera out, intending to give them some money in exchange for a photo, but Romulus grabs it from my hand. “Do not take a picture of them,” he warns. “People could think you being a child molester.” I defy him and do it anyway. They pose, gloatingly holding up the bill I gave them the way Marius held up the scotch bottle. But it’s obvious that crossing the border has brought about a change in Romulus’s attitude about appearing with me in public. He’s struggling, I realize, to find a legitimate image for our pairing. Delighted wifey just won’t do. In fact, nothing will. Our intimacy as imagined by me starts to dissolve, and in its place is his uneasiness, which makes our dyad grotesque, awkward, illegitimate. The dissonance creates an alienated zoom view of myself. Suddenly I c
an see us standing in the street, this blatantly underclass hustler with sharp, cheap clothes, and this pudgy bourgeois American, twice his age yet so much less hardened, and I know the open book we must present. My only alternative is proud defiance, a false show of independence in this unknown, possibly hostile environment. “I’m going in here,” I tell him, pointing at the tavern. “Are you coming?” He nods, and as he follows me I can see that he’s reverted into a nervous bodyguard with an unmanageable charge, whom he sticks with out of a sense of honor, but who he wishes had never come here with him in the first place.
It’s a nightclub with a traditional orchestra and a very good singer wailing a doina, while the audience sits at long picnic tables sopping up huge quantities of beer. Romulus is absolutely appalled by the way I march clumsily past the dozens of seated locals to an empty space and make a show of casually signaling the waiter. Everyone is staring at me, tense, startled, and although I now understand that every detail—my shoes, my bouncy walk, my comically assured look—is under scrutiny, I’m simmering with anger at his lack of solidarity. So I ostentatiously order us whiskey in booming English and make a show of avoiding his glance, of enjoying the music and the crowd with big, bold eyes and a smug smile. All the while, I’m becoming aware of the special compartmentalization of his life as a hustler in Hungary, which has to clash with his identity as a normal Romanian man on the home turf—a realization that opens a trapdoor in my stomach and sends me into a nauseating slide of cognitive dissonance. Valiantly trying to collect himself, my prince makes conversation. Do I like the music, he wants to know. I grunt a noncommittal answer. Finally, he looks at me wearily and says, “Do you know what are saying those people next to us?”
“ ‘ Look at the ridiculous fat American’?” I venture.
“No, they are talking an argument. The woman says, ‘And why not I go to Greece and work as prostitute if I have chance for more money you’ll see ever in your life?’ And he, her boy-friend, is saying he kill her on the spot if she is saying she will do. Until finally he says, ‘I don’t care what you do.’ That’s what they say.”
The urgency of the story puts a dent in my bravado. But all I answer is, “Thanks for the translation.”
Out on the street, Romulus suggests that we return to the hotel, but I’m fueled by four whiskeys and have no intention of admitting my naiveté yet. “Look at that place over there,” I say, pointing at what seems to be a respectable-looking bar. As soon as we sit down at a table, a girl who looks fourteen signals me to her table, while two middle-aged hulks scrutinize me. “What does she want?” I ask Romulus. “She wants to talk to you,” he answers with a weary, vengeful passivity. When I sit down next to her, her hand shoots out, grabbing my member through the cloth of my pants. I can’t pry it loose. Meanwhile, one of the bulky men in black suits towers nearby, watching with stern approval, irony. “Tell her to let go,” I say to Romulus through clenched teeth. He does, she releases me, we leave. “She was hoping getting you outside and then the guys in black to jump you,” says my friend, with grim, nearly pleasurable resignation. “I know because something this I used to do,” he adds slyly. I glance at him with disgust, and now, for the first time, he glows with pleasure, the pleasure of my disapproval.
By the time we get back to the mildewed room, I’ve really had it. I want my satisfaction. I move the night table into a corner and shove the beds together. “Is it all right in this country?” I ask acidly.
“Of course. Just push them apart in the morning.”
Lying on the bed, I watch the overlarge black turtleneck and the pants bagged at the knees and worn at the seat sliding off to reveal the body of reptilian economy, nearly hairless and terrifyingly compact. He leaps noiselessly into our tiny beds, and then the silky skin is gliding against mine; his legs, wiry and threatening as springs, are interlacing mine; his hard, dry, dirty hands sliding over my back. For me it’s as if all the aggression and fear of the last couple of hours, all the longing, are about to be settled by one experience. I plunge my face into his neck, his armpit, savoring that tart, frustrated power transmitted by his odor. Is it loss, melancholy, steely resentment? I pull off his shirt and he dangles an arm backward in surrender. With tongue and teeth I begin slowly working on his nipples.
“You love me, don’t you,” he sneers.
And I do. Or is it that I’m in love with his culture, hoping for a chance to go native?
How ironic that Carol II, the blueblood German-English son of a queen who sought to rehabilitate Romania in the eyes of the West, ended up acting out all the clichés of Latinity and Orientalism. For more than thirty years, from 1916 until the 1950s, journalists reported every exploit of the Eastern monarch who spoke a Latin tongue, clucking over his “orgiastic” interest in his harem of women. Thus did weak-chinned Carol, the product of a stuffy Hohenzollern upbringing, become a locus of libido, a titillating hybrid of the Oriental, the Slav and the Latin.
Now that Romulus is asleep, I open one of the books I’ve brought along to a photo of a kind of zaftig Garbo, with a wistful Flora-Dora smile. Her Pollyanna simper of a voice reaches me from a 1908 childhood in the Carpathian resort of Sinaia, where she and her mother were allegedly invited to high tea with Carmen Sylva.
On the same terrace of the royal mansion stood a brooding fourteen-year-old Prince Carol, so mesmerized by the girl’s sunburst of strawberry hair that he offered her a box of Belgian chocolates. At his request, she ate one, but when she refused another, he tried to place it in her mouth.
Some seventeen years later, the now grown-up strawberry blonde is crossing a military parade ground near Bucharest. Sunlight ignites the ringlets around her face into another burst of fire, reflected in the eyes of a mesmerized grown-up Carol, now a libertine of a prince. Who could the stunning woman be?
Lupescu, they tell him. But she’s a Jewess.
VII
BRONCHITIS MEANS OPIATES AGAIN. In New York, I ask the doctor for something stronger, hydrocodone syrup instead of codeine tablets. He gives me antibiotics, too.
I’m back on the job at the financial printing house, in the white room with the keyboard-tapping immigrants. Nobody noticed that I was gone. No one seems to be noticing what I’m doing. No one pays any attention to my eyelids falling shut, my head bobbing and jerking up again.
I talk to the doctor about it, without telling him how much hydrocodone I’m taking. He thinks it’s a symptom of sleep apnea.
The plan is that Romulus and I will meet again for two or three weeks in Bucharest, in about a month and a half. Meanwhile I’m to research options for being together longer—his coming to New York or some other place that lets in Romanians.
Romania may be a figment, a fantasy, to me, but for Romulus, New York has the aura of an amusement park. To him the advantages of life in America seem so disproportionate, so unreal, that it’s almost like another planet. He can’t imagine the humdrum steps of making a life here, only the thrill of the pavement beneath his feet.
Maybe his attitude isn’t all that unrealistic. Calls to a couple of immigration lawyers make it just too clear that Romanians applying for tourist visas, like people from other poor nations, are assumed to be intending to emigrate—are guilty unless proven otherwise. Romulus would probably need a large bank account, property, a business and family as proof of ties to Romania to get even a one-week tourist visa.
Sunday night, the tingling of hydrocodone, sparkly globules coursing through my muscles and nerve cells, instills me with infinite patience. My body feels like a phony hologram of murmuring dots. I begin an Internet search. There are, it appears, a few countries that don’t require visas from Romanians. Turkey and, unexpectedly, Costa Rica, are on the list. The latter conjures New Age fantasies of Romulus confined in a house on the beach, cheap prices. Indolent as he seems, he could be the perfect candidate for beach pet. How much competition could the impoverished local girls be, in the long run? This infantile Tarzan fantasy, idiotically fueled by images of him in s
wim-wear, hardens into a scenario wrapped in red tape when I begin researching the voyage from Bucharest to San José, Costa Rica. Martinair, with stopovers in Amsterdam and Miami, looks like the cheapest, but even its fares start at $2,500.
The following morning, a searing migraine slices through my brain vacated by opiates. I call in sick to work, then spend hours on phone trees, gathering information from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It turns out there’s such a thing as a transit visa, needed by some travelers from high-risk countries who want to pass through a U.S. airport on the way to somewhere else. I wonder whether he’d be able to get one.
That afternoon, after lubricating another two teaspoons of hydrocodone with a glass of scotch, I call him. Over the connection fading in and out, his purring voice sounds amoral, charged with ill-intentioned excitement at the idea of setting foot in Miami, even in a cordoned airport lounge. For months afterward, I’ll see the airports I freely use for changeovers in a different way, my eyes obsessively searching the doors and windows I pass as possible escape routes. I’ll imagine his foolhardy dashes into parking lots where I’m waiting with a rented car.
I bring my crusade to my vague job at the financial printing company. One wearing afternoon, I become fixated on a doubtful Internet site that claims to be in the business of selling information leading to passports. According to this site, a certain Caribbean country will issue passports to those willing to stay for more than forty-eight hours. This citizenship changes an individual’s immigration status radically, allowing, for example (and this in all caps), TRAVEL TO CANADA WITHOUT A VISA. For a mere $30,000, the identity of this amazingly welcoming country will be revealed, and all arrangements for passport application taken care of.
Since no one is watching, I lapse into a deep fantasy about importing Romulus to the passport-granting country, where we’re surrounded for forty-eight hours by soldiers of fortune and corporate criminals on the run, as tongues are stung by rum or slaked with bottled water without ice cubes, in scorching heat where dust encrusts ceiling fans—all followed by a trip to a chilly Toronto in autumn.
The Romanian Page 7