The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  “Something goes wrong already, you see?”

  “No, I don’t see.” Something may have gone wrong, but then, there are certainly no signs that anything as disastrous as a rape at a wedding party has taken place. I doubt, as well, that rape is a common occurrence at Romanian weddings. I sense a lurid desire on his part to invite me to see his culture as shameful, to reject it. I study him incredulously, but his smile is opaque, self-satisfied. Whether rape has occurred or not, he wants me to think so.

  XIV

  HE SIMPLY HOWLS FOR HER,” wrote Queen Marie in her diary in 1918. Howls like the wild dogs in the Bucharest streets of today? A mother even more meddling than my own, Marie/Missy was referring to her son’s passion for a certain Zizi Lambrino, a commoner with “a shallow, cold, vulgar nature quite incapable of any better or nobler feelings.” Missy was convinced that she knew what was best for her son.

  Her words come to me in my study on Mihnea Vodă in June, where I’ve decided to sleep, minutes after finally being told by Romulus that he’s had it with living here with me, and seconds after a call from my mother, asking, When, oh, when are you coming home? Now, in a fit of grumpiness, he’s half dozing in a heat coma in our sealed-off bedroom across the way, waking to slap at a mosquito or glare at me if I come into the room, the TV booming an inane variety show and sheets of cigarette smoke layering the air.

  Zizi Lambrino, the woman to whom blonde Queen Marie so objected, was her physical opposite. Née Ioana Maria Valentine, she was dark and plump, a Romanian bourgeoise of Greek Phanariot descent. In the summer of 1913, she met Prince Carol, who was not quite twenty; and in the months that followed, her bedroom became papered with pictures of the prince, the way girls today paper theirs with pictures of rock stars.

  By 1918, at twenty-four, Prince Carol was head over heels for Zizi, despite the fact that members of royalty were prohibited from marrying native Romanians. He was so enthralled that he was willing to give up his future kingship, thumb his nose at the Romanian people and the hard-won legitimacy of the royal family. Or do I have it backward? Could he have so hated the vaunted legitimacy of the royal family that he wanted to thumb his nose at them by falling in love?

  I peel off a sheet stuck to my thigh by perspiration, mulling over my own bohemian gesture. Romulus, for whom I’ve given up my own country, has suddenly fallen into a foul, contemptuous frame of mind. I could say that it’s happening only for an evening, but I can tell the mood will return. This Eastern locale, which I thought I chose in a ballsy exertion of will, has turned into a stage set for failure.

  Even British-born Missy, in an uncharacteristic lapse into bigotry, would call her adopted country—where I now lie stuck to the sheet in anguished doubt—”incomprehensible” and “licentious,” an entity undecodable to Western eyes. “Being near the East, morality is lacking,” was her facile defense for the several lovers she took.

  Shortly after her marriage in 1893, she became addicted to the same drug of travel that has given me such an erotic charge. Eventually she filled the palace with one exotic “souvenir”—meaning lover—after another. Many of them, not incidentally, also furthered her brilliant political aims. This was a war against her own royal background.

  Carol and Zizi. His attachment to her had the contours of an addiction. FROM THE COLLECTION OF PRINCE PAUL OF ROMANIA

  Allegedly, Missy’s lovers ran the gamut, before she became queen and after: from the melancholy Russian Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, a first cousin trapped in a loveless marriage, to the sickly financier and publisher Waldorf Astor, who despite Missy’s passion may have never consummated their relationship.

  The most lasting and intriguing lover was a local, with all the traits we associate with the Byzantine and the Latin: the hypnotically soft-spoken Prince Barbu Ştirbey, a dark-browed Boyar full of expressive glances and suave gestures. So many state secrets had Missy told him that he had to shrug off an offer to write his memoirs by saying he simply knew too much.

  In Romania, everybody—from the ladies-in-waiting to the shoeshine boy on the street—talked about Missy’s affairs, whether they were real or not. In the way subjects admire a virile king, Missy’s powers of seduction and her sensual lifestyle only made her more popular with the people. She was, then, a phallic queen, a female sexual adventurer.

  Sex can slay. Smarting from Romulus’s cold, sadistic behavior, which culminated in his kicking me hard in bed when I tried to put my arms around him, my mind still insists on playing with the image of his sullen body. I torture myself with visceral snapshots of lips parted in a half-doze, a two-day growth of soft beard that he’s too lazy to shave in the heat. Unable to sleep, I fantasize running a hand over the warm, indifferent body, or pass the time trying to reconstruct Missy around forty during World War I, a few years after becoming queen, when she entertained Ştirbey in her newly decorated Bizance bedroom, with its sham ecclesiastical fixtures and Turkish tapestries. I envy her plans to use her rebellious, frustrated son Carol, the future king, as her mouthpiece. And it occurs to me that History, and my history, are part porn novels.

  THE HOHENZOLLERNS CAME to the throne in the 1860s, after the Crimean War, as the result of a deal cut between Ion Brătianu, the powerful Romanian Boyar responsible for Romania’s formation of two principalities into a nation, and Napoleon III. It was Brătianu who spirited the Prussian Carol I—whom Missy called “der Onkel”—into the country, even though Austria, Russia and Turkey threatened to occupy it if a foreign prince made a claim. Obviously, Brătianu was no psychologist. It never occurred to him that there was any danger in introducing the iron-willed Hohenzollerns to a world of fabled Oriental pleasures and Byzantine strategies. Did he really want to make Romania the place where West struggles against East, or where the will battles desire?

  On the wall across from me in the dark, I can just make out Missy’s picture. I printed it from the Internet as part of my own project of adapting to life here. It shows her in late 1893, at eighteen, in a gown choked in tulle and lace, blissfully clasping her firstborn, who’s wearing a dress, to her bosom. The infant is Carol II, the first member of the royal family to be born in Romania and their first native speaker of its language. What a perfect excuse for blaming the dissolute habits he later developed on nearness to the Orient.

  It’s true, however, that something implacable about this Eastern place batters away at your defenses. I suppose I’ll end up loving it if I can stick it out. Even hyper-British Missy ultimately became a fierce defender of her strange new culture. Gradually, she grew more and more at home in this Eastern place. Unblemished as her hands were by outdoor work, she had herself photographed in Romanian peasant drag. She and her visiting sister made bold visits on horseback to Gypsy camps. She took refuge in her affair with the Boyar Ştirbey and in an intimate bond with her first Romanian son, Carol. Ecstatically, she began to envision the future with him on the throne and herself as the power behind it.

  Marie’s relationship with Carol titillates me partly for its perversity. Always headstrong about her own sexual experiments, she saw no harm in meddling with his. Behind my closed lids explodes a bright bucolic image of Arnold Mohrlen, the Swiss teacher whom Missy chose to educate her son. I can see Mohrlen and his pupil at the secluded pond they discovered in the woods near Cotroceni Palace, around 1909, when Carol was, say, fifteen and had become a long-limbed teenager, with a high, thick mop of blond hair and a sensuous, serious mouth. It might also be relevant to mention here the Eiffel Tower dimensions of his equipment, luridly referred to by Alice-Leone Moats in her shocker about the Prince’s most notorious affair.

  As Carol climbs naked from the pond, the tense, hazel-eyed professor gazes fixedly. Without Marie’s seeming to take the slightest objection, tutor and student have become surprisingly intimate. The first consuming relationship outside family in the prince’s young life has begun. Missy jokingly refers to them as “two old maids.”

  But it’s less Mohrlen’s homosexuality that disturbs the
royal family than the discovery that he’s a fervent democrat with socialist leanings. He’s convinced that the era of kingships is coming to an end and sees in Carol a chance to fashion the first royal anti-monarchist. Only three years later, Marie will blame her son’s carousing in bars and cabarets on Mohrlen, never once guessing that Carol is the pouting production of her own philandering and overinvolvement.

  A CRACK OF LIGHT pierces the room, and the door opens tentatively. A disheveled Romulus glares down at me, panicked, probably, at the sudden thought of losing his meal ticket. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Me? I’m thinking,” I manage to croak out in a testy voice. I can’t explain that I’ve been traveling into the past to get away from him, from the way he kicked me in bed, which is why my face must look so ghostly and blank.

  Worry shrivels his. “Are you again taking those white pills?”

  “No, draga.”2

  “You will sleep here?”

  “I’m not sleeping, Romulus, I’m thinking.”

  With a resigned shrug he leaves, closing the door. And in the ensuing darkness I admit how at home I am with the perplexed heart of a teenaged Carol cornered by a seductive, overinvolved mother, who was herself like a teenager, seeking to escape a prison of Germanic discipline. Disturbed by her affairs, spoiled rotten by her indulgences, young Carol would have had to be full of seething resentments and perverse impulses, flying into increasing rages at his mother’s narcissistic pretensions.

  At nineteen, he left the palace to get a taste of the streets his mother had yearned for when she was just his age. On Bulevardul Kiseleff he gaped at the women in tight-waisted dresses and enormous hats choked with feathers and flowers, as young, sometimes corseted, officers with waxed moustaches made X-rated comments about their private parts.

  One day an expensive carriage whizzed by, showing just the hem of a skirt. “I had her last night,” snickered a young dandy. It was only afterward that the fancy carriage was identified as that of the Patriarch of the Church. The young man was mistakenly whistling at his robe.

  Carol was by now already a “deadbeat dad.” An early affair with a high school student had led to a child, who was immediately placed in an orphanage by the embarrassed royal family. But the end of this early affair only pushed him more emphatically into bohemian circles, until he fell madly for the headstrong, deliciously plump Zizi Lambrino.

  He couldn’t have chosen a worse time. World War I was raging. The royal court was facing extinction at the hands of the Germans, and Russian-inspired Bolsheviks were threatening the political system. The Germans were hoping the whole mess would unseat the king and queen.

  Wearily, I rise and tiptoe into the other bedroom, the only way to get to the bathroom. Sprawled naked on the bed, hair glued to his forehead, is my obsession, my reason for abandoning a worried mother and friends in New York. One naked leg is curled over a crumpled sheet, a pillow has fallen to the floor. I scan the room, littered with underwear and socks, the television now a fuzzy screen of static. What a perfectly pretty picture for the end result of passion. But as I think I’ve already indicated, passion is an emotion that rarely respects its own aftermath.

  I suppose Prince Carol’s was no exception to the rule. When strong-willed Zizi Lambrino with her maternal breasts held out arms in an invitation to ecstasy, he leapt. How could he help being attracted to her? In order to love, he must be sure his family would consider it an abomination. At the palace, his eyes must have shot cruel rays of irony as his mother railed against his lover. He was already planning a stupendously rebellious gesture that would result in his desertion from the army, a crime sometimes punishable by death.

  In 1918, amid the chaos of World War I, Carol abandoned command of his regiment at Tîrgu Neamţ to don civilian clothes and carry out a dangerous elopement into enemy territory. In Odessa, with the help of officers from the German army—enemies of Romania—he and Zizi were married. His father, Ferdinand, who’d become king in 1914 after the death of der Onkel, thought of a love of his own given up in youth for his country and was lenient. For the crime of desertion, he sentenced his son to only seventy-five days at the Horaiţa monastery near Bicaz. Pouting Zizi was sent home to Iaşi and put under a palace guard.

  On the way to Carol’s confinement comes that train I’ve often thought about, whose monotonous rhythms, even without codeine, lulled him into desperate imaginings of Zizi’s distant body. By the time he met his distraught mother, who’d come to intervene, his eyes were glazed, as if drugged. To his brain inebriated by rebellion and passion, his mother seemed to have shrunk. Her judgments didn’t matter at all.

  Confined at Horaiţa, Carol fell into a manic depression characterized by suicidal feelings and flights of exhilaration. In other words, he was in love. In the meantime, the royal family concocted bizarre strategies worthy of the best Byzantine schemers to break up the romance for good. Zizi was detained by police and besieged with legal documents. Headstrong and determined, she held out. She knew that Carol’s attachment to her had the contours of an addiction. It soared into and crashed out of worlds impregnable to the practical.

  WHAT, EXACTLY, IS IT that sets the dogs to howling? What appetite? I stretch toward the window again and survey the empty street. Is it the wind or the moon that creates these unpredictable changes in activity? My eyes search the shadows outside with raw nerves, damaged by too much passion. It has pulled me into the firmament of an unknown future, drained me of all free will.

  Unexpectedly the wind and the howling stop. In the stillness glows the future of an expanded Romania, thanks to Missy’s behind-the-scenes efforts at Versailles after the armistice. Also thanks to her, Carol’s right to succession is preserved; he’s brought out of confinement and leads his regiment in a victory parade in Bucharest. Surrounded by policemen to keep her from rushing to him, Zizi watches the parade at the curb. She knows that in return for signing the papers agreeing to an annulment, she’ll be granted permission to see him one more time.

  That one time is enough, for some months later, Zizi announces to the world that she’s pregnant; and Carol decides to renege on the annulment, recognize the child and marry her again. The decision drags the royal family into baser strategies, to the point that they attempt to bribe an old lover of his to reentice him. But only Zizi herself can release the prince from his obsession; and she does it unwittingly, by publishing a love letter in which he admits to being the father of her child. The indiscretion sways Carol to Missy’s opinion of the commoner. Zizi is just too vulgar. He never sees her again.

  COULD IT BE MORNING ALREADY? The story of the “royal rapscallion” is dissolving into dawn light, which seems to have quieted the dogs again. To the screech of a garbage truck outside my window, Carol’s hell-raising takes on clarity. It was just an unconscious parody of his mother’s power with the means at hand: sexual conquest. It’s part and parcel of his other revolts, all meant to mock the tenets of her royalty. So vicious is their oedipal drama that it rivals that of the incestuous Krupp-inspired characters in Visconti’s The Damned. Not one phase of the “family romance” is repressed, not even Carol’s obvious jealousy of his mother’s lover Ştirbey. Later, as Romanian politics sink into chaos, Missy will plot with Carol’s younger brother to dethrone him. Carol will squelch her completely in the political arena, but even then, his promiscuity will remain his most powerful weapon. In the end, a perhaps sordid victory is his: rumors about his sexual indiscretions overshadow the legends of his mother’s accomplishments and goodwill. Even Barbara Cartland will eventually write a book about Carol’s notorious love entanglements.

  By mid-morning, as I walk with a chastened Romulus up Bulevardul Brătianu in search of breakfast, I can’t help thinking that myths about flesh and the East have become my talismans. Carol was part of the process of Romania’s Westernization; and Missy, the phallic queen, was, as Hannah Pakula reveals in her biography The Last Romantic, a Western queen set adrift in a libidinous Oriental adventure. Perhaps
because of Missy, I can’t keep from noticing the overt sensuality of this place, the marked sashay of its assuredly feminine and sloe-eyed women, often taller and always more slender than their male companions. Their long, lissome legs and elongated flat abdomens are like magnets to Romulus’s eyes.

  We stroll into a supermarket to buy cascaval and eggs. With a hint of last night’s worry on his face, Romulus asks me what I’m thinking. I can’t tell him that I’m still mulling over my own relationship to history and the temptations of the Hohenzollerns. Their struggle between duty and sensuality—which happened at a time when democracy in Europe was rising and the monarchy was getting drab.

  For the first time since yesterday, I take a good look at my lover. He seems slight and depressed and rather inconsequential, but still encased in the shiny ectoplasm of my desire. I know our bedroom melodrama isn’t over, just beginning its rebellious second act.

  XV

  THE BITCH with swinging black teats is trailing me. I’m sure she’s about to bite. It’s barely past seven in the morning, yet the heat is so intense my shirt is plastered against my back. I’m wheeling a gigantic Samsonite packed with books, shoes, manuscripts and gifts across the parking lot between our street and Piaţa Unirii, on my way to the plane to Paris.

  The thundering sound of the wheels on the brick pavement is what frightened her. I remember seeing her looking depleted and nearly delirious under a parked car, nursing four pups that were fighting for the most swollen teat. As the noise of the suitcase ricocheted off the bricks, she decided to banish me from the lot. Now she’s at my heels, the hanging tits stretching skin, fur missing in places from some skin infection, her eyes welling with bewildered misery, as her canines jut from a clenched, growling jaw.

  I shake the suitcase to make more noise, hoping that will discourage her. She backs off, then lunges forward even more enraged. What a miserable biography this poor bitch must have. Obviously she’s passed a horrible night in the unrelenting heat, her pups chomping hungrily at her belly. She herself was probably born under another parked car and from that time has known nothing but eating out of garbage cans or catching rats. Her posturing is just as useless and doomed to failure as that of Romulus, who’s spent four nights refusing my sexual advances, after which I tried to sleep under the layers of smoke and the sound of TV action films, as he lit cigarette after cigarette, until I was driven again to the bed in my study. I’ve barely slept a wink all that time. Now he’s dozing peacefully as long as he wants, while I drag my suitcase across this parking lot and am inches from being bitten by a sick, ferocious dog.