The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  One day I stand swooning before the mirror with an open jar of Gerovital cream, convinced in my opiate intoxication that it holds all the properties of restoration that Ana Aslan claimed, plus more. I need only apply it to the mysterious rash and my skin will change back to normal with the speed of time-lapse photography. This doesn’t happen, of course, but by the next morning, I swear that there’s a noticeable improvement. Application of the Gerovital becomes a daily ritual. In my mind, I’ve altered the concept of rejuvenation that was its claim into one of spiritual purification. The cream, I believe, is drawing my corruption from me and restoring me to a state before I was poisoned by passion. I can’t claim without a doubt that it helped. Still, over a period of about two weeks the rash begins to heal, then disappears. It persists only in the area where my upper thighs rub together when I walk.

  Miraculously, the translation never stopped progressing with great precision in my highly medicated state. It was as if I’d reduced all consciousness to that particular part of my brain. All the anguish, self-recrimination and loneliness caused by recent events were exiled from the world. There was only me and my work, followed by that delicious but brief hypnogogic period when I fell into bed each night and the codeine coaxed me into unconsciousness. However, near the end of the third week, a strange thing occurs. During the twilight period, instead of sensual blankness, images begin to creep into the sinking into sleep. They’re pictures of Romulus, shorn of the kinky urgency that drove me halfway around the world to be close to him, illuminated instead with a new kind of idealism. He appears like Dragomir in Kyra Kyralina, sweetly corrupted by a culture of enslavement, but simple and pastoral, adrift in a dangerous world of sensuality. Recriminations and disappointments slowly fall away from his name like an ear of corn being husked, leaving a tender and appealing innocuousness. Strange impulses of pity and tenderness float up to him from my heart. A joyful poignancy curtains the narrow horizons of his unlucky life. Bemused, I play with the images right into sleep, the way a child adjusts and readjusts a favorite toy that has been placed in his bed.

  In the morning, the innocent image of Romulus is still intact. As I spiral deeper into the work of the translation, he reappears as a mascot, which I’m grateful to have. I don’t know how the idea of wanting to see him again came to me, but each day it grew more urgent, until finally I called his cell phone.

  I wasn’t prepared for the fragile, uncertain voice that answered—the voice of a young, slightly disconcerted girl. It brought a picture of the insecure, nervous little blonde at Olimp into my mind, except that this voice seemed purer, sadder and more patient. At the sound of my voice, she was taken aback and lost a beat. Then gently she told me that Romulus was out. If I called again in an hour, I’d reach him. Perhaps because of my altered state of mind, the voice felt alchemical, even enchanting. It produced a hush around me, and I pricked up my ears.

  After the call, I stood with the phone in my hand as an extraordinary awareness flooded over me. It wasn’t at all that I was empathizing with the girl or even identifying with her. For the first time, I was seeing her, but in such a limpid light that it was almost like a vision. My position was unique, I realized with excitement, for experiencing what she was experiencing. I felt a young, frightened heart stirring with what she thought was love. I felt the heart skip when Romulus’s hand, with which I was so familiar, touched her. I felt the strange confusion of her lips when his mouth pressed against them. And then, an enormous sea of sadness engulfed me, warm, rushing and strangely savory. All of her frustrations, the feelings of abandonment in store for her, and yes, all her ecstasies as well swirled around me. And at that moment, I felt intensely grateful, not for anything Romulus might have given me, but for her.

  He and I spoke later that afternoon, and by then I was in a reasonable mood. He was polite on the phone, even a little cordial. What I was suggesting was that we meet in Budapest for a week before the summer was over and I went back to the States. As at the very beginning of our relationship, I cloaked the offer in business terms, not in a demeaning way, but with the preposterous hope that the cover of a financial arrangement would give him a sense of freedom and me a sense of detachment. He agreed fairly eagerly, even claiming that I didn’t have to give him money; but although I was in dire financial straits, I insisted. Then, as if it were a casual question, I asked who the girl who had answered the phone was. “Just a girl,” he said, and I let it go at that.

  During the next ten days my mind again entered the tunnel of perfect concentration on the translation. And each night before sleep, the codeine brought the gentle blossoming of pristine images, like blips on a horizon. Only this time, I saw the girl again, always alone, waiting for Romulus, perhaps. She appeared like an idol in a clearing, in the preternatural light of a new discovery, around which I tiptoed with held breath.

  Slowly, I diminished the codeine, a little perplexed that I wasn’t going into withdrawal. And each day I performed the superstitious ritual of the Gerovital. Even though the rash was all but gone, I began to think of it as a preventive. However, it still hadn’t vanquished the more stubborn eruption on my upper thighs.

  As more energy returned during evenings, I took up some of my old interests again, finding more books about Istrati in French bookstores than were available in English. I commiserated with his sad fate on the road to brotherly love. It seems he was in store for a terrific disappointment when he witnessed the long-term results of the Russian Revolution, which should have been a full-scale realization of his principles. Instead, upon going to Russia, he saw a new kind of tyranny and exploitation. Being an outspoken man and thinking he had little to lose, he wrote a book expressing his disillusionment with the Communist ideal. It alienated the entire French left, which had previously acclaimed him, and even cost him the friendship of his mentor Romain Rolland. Then he returned to his own country, and in the new atmosphere of Fascism under the reign of Carol II, his pastoral, sensual Oriental fantasies all but dried up. Communists in that country considered him a traitor at the same time that Fascists attacked him for what they termed his decadence. He died discredited in Bucharest in 1935, at the age of fifty.

  On the last Friday in August 2000, almost nine months after first meeting Romulus in Budapest, I got on a plane. My reasons for the reunion were largely unknown to me, cryptic and buried in nighttime visions. But my heart was beating with anticipation.

  XXX

  BUDAPEST IS A DARK WORLD suddenly burst into color. My two previous visits were in winter, characterized by early nights that came even sooner because of the late hours Romulus and I kept. Budapest was just as I’d imagined, defined by my American Cold War childhood, which obscured the day-to-day life of Eastern Europeans with the sinister shadow of the Iron Curtain. From the first night I met Romulus on the Corso, Budapest was a blurred, intuitive space, buried in the depths of the id.

  Now it’s a city of salmon, pale gray, taupe, yellow and mustard, exploding before me in astonishing clarity. All of it is richly gilded by the light of late summer, which itself holds a note of ending. It’s hot as well, and my upper thighs smart with irritation as I walk into the blinding light outside Ferihegy Airport. Romulus, who promised to meet me, is nowhere to be found. Now I’m walking along the Corso toward the spot where we first met, steps away from the Inter-Continental. My computer and heavy bags—containing everything I brought from New York and have been living on for the past four months—are at the four-star Mercure Korona, in the Pest side of the city, within easy walking distance of the spiky nest of the Parliament and the Danube waterfront.

  I tried the Gellért first, but prices there have tripled because of several conventions in the city. Hordes have arrived to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of Budapest’s founding. As if to mark the inane level to which civilization has sunk, an enormous balloon, a dorky inflated bottle of Unicom, one of the national beverages, bounces on its edge on the opposite shore of the river not far from the Gellért.

 
; Summer has vastly increased the stock of hustlers on the Corso, most of whom look Romanian. They lounge in the tiny parks, legs outstretched and arms slung over the backs of benches. For the first time since my rash, old desires stir at the sight of flat stomachs, dulled, predatory eyes in a young face or a hand scabbed in a brawl; but then a censor reminds me that these don’t represent new adventures. They’re just old stimuli, whose roots have been severed from the unconscious.

  Suddenly I see Romulus in conversation with a battered teenager, but I’m disconcerted by the feeling that it’s not really him. Holding his gym bag, he walks toward me with a sheepish smile, looking pale, unhealthy and older. His hair, which has been thinning since I’ve met him, now looks dyed, opaque and dead black in the bright summer light. It isn’t dyed, I realize. The effect is just part of a strange new projection on my part, the opposite side of the coin of the former. Gradually, as we walk toward the hotel, the alien feeling recedes, and he begins to seem more familiar.

  I’m in a cranky mood, scolding him for not appearing at the airport. It turns out he was there and on time. My plane arrived fifteen minutes early without my realizing it, and I must have left just before he came. We dip into a workers’ bar farther down the Corso. It’s full of weatherbeaten men barking wisecracks at one another with the raw vocal cords of the alcoholic or falling into exhausted depressions before huge beer mugs on wet tables. It’s not far from the Szabadság Bridge, where I went for my first walk when I arrived in Budapest for my journalism assignment.

  By this time, the heat has aggravated what’s left of the rash between my thighs. I keep wincing and readjusting my position on the bar stool. Romulus notices, but makes no remark. He’s telling the story of his arrival here early this morning; and as he does, images flare up in my mind.

  Stepping off the red-eye bus all the way from Bucharest, and before that, Sibiu, into the already stifling heat of morning. Going to a locker in the station to park his bag with its paltry contents. Wandering aimlessly on foot past Budapest’s huge and brazen examples of state architecture, as memories pour in. Everything reminds him of the affair he had, which he represents as reaching furthest from convenience or exploitation and closest to love. No, not the affair with me. Not Elena, either, who he says was the one who called incessantly during my second trip to Budapest, the one he took to the movies and fucked in the toilets. This was the girl before, for whom he asked me to wire money from New York after our first encounter, the one he saw change from an innocent high school girl into a prostitute at the house for Asian clients. The one who got stabbed.

  She and Elena overlapped. And she visited him in Sibiu several times after he and I met, before Elena came to live there. I was paying for it, I see now, making a quick calculation of dates. In fact, during our entire relationship, he’s always had a girl. Or should I say we have? Now, with nothing to lose, he lets all his heterosexual affect out, as if I were a friend, a confidant. He believes, he admits, that for the first time in his life he was truly in love with that girl who ended up in the Chinese brothel. It was ruined, he thinks, by jealousy and possessiveness. Neither was willing to trust the other.

  What’s more, the relationship ended just as ours began. The dark, secretive eyes, swimming with mysterious suffering, that had attracted me so much, were really little more than mirrors of this secret of love and hurt, something I never considered. I was in love, it turns out, with his loss of love. Budapest, he makes clear, is excruciating now, just an empty stage set for an irreclaimable drama. He knows he’s a permanent exile from love, and these buildings have become an unbearable representation of his loss.

  Against my will, my mind accompanies this tale in narcissistic counterpoint. So, as I worked in New York to earn money for us, to get him a visa, to plan a life in Costa Rica, similar energies were radiating from him toward a girl whose life had been ruined by prostitution. And when I twisted and turned with codeine intoxication in the low-ceilinged bedroom in Syracuse, he, too, was twisting and turning in that Austrian jail cell, thinking and thinking of her. And when I called his cell phone from my mother’s house, thinking I was reaching him in Bucharest, where I assumed he’d gone to apply for a tourist visa for the United States, he may have not been there at all. He may have still been in Sibiu, in bed with a soon-to-be lost love. She could have been lying right next to him as we spoke, listening to my voice coming over the phone.

  As he speaks, my mind embellishes every episode from the past with paranoid flourishes. It sets up a scene with him and Bogdan in some club, laughing together at my naiveté as I come home from my job at the financial printing house in New York, eyes glazed from staring at the computer screen and mind in thrall to passion. It watches him in a lazy last embrace with a tearful young lover as I sit in a plane bound for Bucharest, trying to control the delicious shivers of anticipation. But does it matter anymore?

  Abruptly the conversation changes to Olimp-Neptun. He still claims complete amnesia about our vicious argument. I describe my flight from the blackmailer in a taxi. It would have made a magnificent montage if only I’d known what was happening to him at nearly the same time. On the first day of our arrival in Olimp-Neptun, shortly after he left for the beach in the revealing blue bathing suit, he met a girl, just as I’d suspected. It wasn’t the little blonde with whom he’d been sitting at a café table, whom he never met again, but another, whom I never saw. But he’d spent most of his time with her during the days he was there. She was a prostitute of seventeen, on her very first travel assignment, and every night her pimps from Bucharest would come to her room to put her to work, moments after Romulus had left her for the evening.

  In fact, I’d had a glance of them, late that last night at the disco on the beach. One of them was wearing dark glasses even though it was night. They observed Romulus dancing alone for a while. After he came to me for money, they pounced, one of them sticking a raised index finger in his face, warning him to stay away from their property if he valued his life.

  “You mean those weren’t just two guys you’d borrowed money from?”

  “No, money is so I can get away from them, go someplace else to drink.”

  It was twenty-four hours after my flight to Bucharest, almost to the minute, that he began a similar flight to Sibiu with the fledgling prostitute. And just as I’d crept out of our hotel room toward the edge of the pool and traced my way around it to the beach, then up the long driveway to the highway, he and the girl had done the same. They made an early-morning escape in defiance of her brutal pimps. He was saving her. Even though the plan was to return to Sibiu, where she would continue life as a prostitute, but now managed by Romulus.

  The girl and her bewildered voice on the phone reappear. The eerie tenderness surges up, becoming more and more poignant. Romulus sees it in my eyes.

  “What?” he says, startled.

  There’s no way to express the strange transformation that’s occurring: my eyes becoming mysterious pools hiding dark excitements and inarticulate losses, just as his once were; and Romulus studying them in tantalized confusion.

  THE HOTEL ROOM IS LARGER than we’re used to sharing, but it feels claustrophobic. It’s as if the rhythm of our cohabitation has become lost. Romulus is expecting to perform the duties he imagines I’m paying for. But first he stakes out the twin bed nearer the television and sets up his measly corner in that way that the kept try to establish something of their own—despite the impossibility of fortifying its boundaries.

  As he moves the ashtray closer to his side of the table and bunches up the pillow, my mind locks to a lost little girl waiting in Sibiu. Maybe sitting at the dinner table at his mother’s house. Or alone, in front of the television, in the bed she shares with him—suffering small bursts of resentment that well up in her mind over his sudden departure. Fretting over who this uncle or friend or trick is—whatever he told her. Calming herself with a stalwart acknowledgment of the reality of survival. I wish I could be there to touch her shoulder gently and
say, See, there’s really nothing to worry about, from me anyway.

  Like an unwilling actor drafted into a play whose script is too well known to improvise, I undress. So does Romulus. And as the T-shirt rises from the lean waist past the dorsal flare, there’s a shock. His skin is covered with the same rash.

  “Your back!”

  “Is nothing.”

  I lower my pants and show him my upper thighs.

  “Ah, you too.” He shrugs.

  “What is it?”

  He expels the air through pursed lips. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  I describe how the rash looked at its worst, tell about my visits to the doctor and her theory that it was caused by the mosquito repellent. He listens to the tale with cynicism, and his reaction perfectly complements the Western European doctor’s. “Always they thinking trouble comes from us,” he snorts. “Is not the cause. This I am sure.”

  “But what are you doing about it?”

  He frowns, as if to indicate that there are problems thousands of times more serious. I, however, have been wondering whether the disease is contagious throughout its entire course. I spent a fortune dry-cleaning Victoire’s mother’s bedspread before I left Paris. I’d even planned to keep the area of the rash away from Romulus when we had sex.

  “Put all your clothes in that plastic bag over there.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Do it!” A fearful hysteria has seized me, but even more vividly, a sense of poetic justice, the notion that both of us are contaminated by the deadliest disease of all. It doesn’t matter who the carrier was; as Codreanu was proof, it’s a germ that spreads uncontrollably.