Actually, I observed, as I tramped about the streets, the town was very far from being a modern conglomeration of skyscrapers – and none of them, incidentally, as enormous as at first they had seemed. The new monsters had sprung up in a city of many styles: 1900s stucco and plaster, rather like an Eastern European equivalent of the same formula in Paris; mid-Victorian, Second Empire, ornate Moldowallachian, neo-Byzantine, with here and there a few charming pillared houses and – as soon as one got away from the central streets – an entertaining disorder of all these interlocking strains juxtaposing each other in a showy, vigorous and tumbledown synthesis. There were lifted eyebrows and murmured invitations in discreet side-streets and everywhere, in squares or under the trees, or clip-clopping nimbly over the tarmac and the cobbles with cracking whips and falsetto cries, were these hooded fiacres with their high-bracketed carriage-lamps and their kaftaned and fur-hatted drivers.
I was inevitably drawn back to the Calea Victoriei. Sentries in blue tunics and tall black fur caps mounted guard outside the gates of the Royal Palace, and further down – or was it in a street branching off to the right? – I gazed in astonishment at a vast stucco palace with many lights poised on brackets, and in mid-air on either side of an ornate gateway two enormous, puissant lions with lights flashing fiercely from their eye-sockets. I think it was a ministry of some kind, but it had originally been built, I learnt later, by that Prince Cantacuzene, one of many, who had been known, for his colossal wealth, as the Nabob. He had been conservative Prime Minister for many years, and the other members of his august and talented dynasty had never forgiven him for this amazing perpetration. I rather liked it.
Cafés succeeded each other. I tried several on one of those solitary urban pilgrimages, in which one enters, looks round, and leaves, like inserting and withdrawing a thermometer before moving to a fresh patient – and settled in the grandest. It was packed. All was splendour, and the customers too interesting for my kiosk-bought newspapers to compete. The place had the impact of a fascinating nightmare. The first thing that struck me was the great beauty of the women – those enormous eyes! – and then the intricacy of their get-up. Surely nowhere east of Paris was there such a jungle of hats or taller heels or such a complication of pleating and cut and elaboration of detail? And the Tyrian thickness of make-up and the heavy and swooning scents that warred in the air . . . Was it all ludicrously overdone, or was it merely my jaundiced bumpkin’s eye? My muddy boots shifted uneasily on the unaccustomed carpet underfoot. The men emerged even worse from this biased scrutiny: those tremendous padded shoulders and vast lapels, the flash of rings and tiepins, the patent-leather reflection in those solid, blue-black helmets of hair, the Pierrot-like pallor of the faces; a lupine predatoriness of expression, a cynical croupier glint in every eye seemed to announce that everything and everyone had its price, including the owner. The older faces looked like allegorical masks of the Seven Deadly Sins. Was it this urban, talcum paleness and softness, the bistred[1] eyes, a sort of indoor stagey self-satisfaction, after the weather-beaten rustic faces which for months had been the only ones I had seen, that I found so disturbing? They looked shiny and commercial despite their rice-paper cheeks. I had the illusion that the talk of this gleaming and over-upholstered Babylon consisted entirely of sneers. Not at me. (Only, I thought, the white-coated and gold-spangled waiter as he plonked my glass down on the brass round table – or was this an illusion too?) Everyone, in the scores of companies, seemed to be competing on a sneering marathon, leaning back with a shoulder and an eyebrow raised, lip curled, waving an upturned palm over what sounded like He! He! He!, an unmelodious and jarring note. I hated them. What the hell was all the fuss and the noise about anyway? It was like a ghastly hallucination. Could I have got drunk without realizing it, on my exploration? I felt, even then, as I sat in scowling isolation, that there was something exaggerated in my priggish response to the ambient phenomena. How very surprised and incredulous I would have been, could I have foreseen how attached to Rumania, admittedly not to this one, I would later become.
This sombre mood was interrupted by a small, hairy, hornrimmed-spectacled man eating sandwiches hurriedly at the next table: could he have a look at my newspapers? When he had glanced through them, he began talking in English, then in very rapid French – a jerky gesticulating, friendly man. He was a journalist on the Dimineaţa, and had travelled widely: Turkey, Egypt, Persia, India, Ceylon, where he had been given a lucky charm, the tusk of a stillborn baby elephant, that he had worn round his neck ever since. Look! He unbuttoned his purple and yellow silk shirt, and there it was, about four inches long on a gold chain, embedded in a curly hirsute mass. What was I doing? Ah! Globetrotting! Magnifique! Did I like Opera? I said yes. (I had been to exactly four in my life.) Good, good. It was the first night of La Bohème tomorrow, and a party for the cast afterwards. Should we meet here? He had to rush back to the paper. After friendly farewells, he put on a green Tyrolean hat and dashed jerkily out.
Outside, a bit later, I had clean forgotten the name of my faraway street; but a lucky fluke revealed, for the third time that night, the same cab driver. He dropped me where he had picked me up, but, as the light over the nameplate was out, I passed the Savoy-Ritz three times before locating it. The hawk-nosed woman opened the door a little, said ‘Ah, c’est vous monsieur!’ and let me in. They were shut, she said, it was two o’clock, but come and have a glass of wine or a tea before going to bed; everyone was having supper. I realized (which I had already half suspected) that I had performed the hackneyed act of comic literature, especially in France, of landing by mistake in a maison de passe, several important rungs higher than the rough and ready establishments down the road, but by no means grand. Madame Tania, who looked amused, had realized it too, and explained the form. But I was not to be concerned about it; they did very occasionally have bona fide travellers. There was a sound of cheerful talk. Four rather pretty girls in dressing-gowns or kimonos were sitting round a table in a cosy kitchen with an ikon in the corner and a chicken and potatoes in a dish, and we shook hands formally all round. The good looks of Rumanian women, which had struck me so strongly tonight, were a thing that had dawned on me earlier in nearly every village of Transylvania and the Banat. I was given a chair and a glass of wine, and the girls on either side cut off bits of chicken breast and offered them on their forks with friendly solicitude. There was a sound of the front door shutting, and a fifth girl clattered down the steps on wooden pattens, shook hands, sat down, flung her dark shock of hair back, crossed herself and set to. A light-hearted atmosphere of relaxation after the day’s work prevailed.
Tania’s account of my error, coupled with very good imitations of our preliminary conversation, provoked peals of bell-like laughter. One girl laughed so much I thought she was going to lay her head in her chicken and carrots. How much nicer it sounded than the eerie machinations of the café. They were simple souls. Tania told me where they all came from: one from Bukovina, a Moldavian, a Transylvanian, and a fair-haired and blue-eyed one from Sibie, or Hermanstadt, one of those mediaeval, fortified Saxon towns in the Carpathian passes, whose German nationality and speech have been romantically attributed to their descent from the children led away from Hamelin by the Pied Piper. (Swallowed up by the hillside, they miraculously emerged in this leafy principality.) Safta, the fifth, who was the youngest and rather wild and unusual-looking, was the object of a mixture of teasing and spoiling by the other four, and obviously rather enjoyed it. The teasing was prompted, Tania told me, by funny mistakes in her Rumanian. She was a Gagauz from the Dobrudja: one of that fascinating minority of descendants of the Cuman invaders, mixed with Tartar stock, who laid waste the lower Danube in the Dark Ages and, according to Byzantine chronicles, drank their victims’ blood out of their skulls. Turkish in speech now, but Christian in faith. I gazed at her with the reverence of an ornithologist at the glimpse of an Auckland Island merganser. So, with Tania herself from Bessarabia, as she pointed out, the househ
old was a miniature of post-war Rumania. They were, she said, marvellous girls, and serious (though, I thought, looking round the table, they didn’t look it); they had behaved like angels when she had been ill a month ago. If only she could find a house somewhere nearer the middle of the town; above all, away from this terrible quartier! Le quartier est terriblement mal famé. It was called the Crucea de Piatra, named after an old stone cross that the expansion of the town had engulfed; just mention the Cross of Stone, she went on, and see what people say! She closed her heavy lids in disapproval. She told Moldavian Viorica to pour the boy out some more wine. I had a delightful feeling of being behind the scenes – a green-room sensation – and a dash of the emotions of Clodius at the feast of Roma Dea: but a Clodius secretly in league with the Priestess, an Actaeon intact. I had always wondered what backstage in such a place might be like; surely not all as cheerful as this? There was not a hint of professional wooing in all this extra-curricular relaxation. I was treated with a welcoming friendliness and also, thanks to my guileless entry, as the best joke for months. Much of the girls’ conversation among themselves consisted of imitations of the pompous or pretentious manners and speech of the day’s visitors; though many of them were referred to as ‘un veritabil domn’ – true gents. Officers were highly thought of, but not all: but lawyers seemed to score highest marks for general bearing. There was a certain amount of competitiveness here, perhaps some boasting. It was fun to be on the other side.
Tania, in her youth, had practised a mixture of singing in cabarets and the same calling as her household. ‘You’d never think it with a beak like this’, she said, comically touching the bridge of her nose with a bony index-finger, ‘but I used to be a great favourite. I used to make them laugh.’ Her pre-war travels had taken her far beyond Kishinev, all over the Ukraine and southern Russia: Taganrog, Akkerman, Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Yalta in the Crimea, and, for a glorious two years before the revolution, to St Petersburg and Moscow and the almost mythical pleasure resort of Yar. It all sounded wonderful. When her active days were over, she was second in command of an establishment in Odessa that really was a splendour: more like a palace. Of course there was the whole grain trade of the Ukraine, prosperous merchants from Greece, from all over the world, and a glittering clientele, really first class: dragoon officers, uhlans, hussars, chevaliers, gardes – but St Petersburg was the place for them – counts, barons, princes, even governors. Gypsy music . . . vodka . . . caviar . . . champagne. She dropped her knitting in her lap and her hands lifted in a gesture that seemed to hold all the departed glory of the Czars. And the girls! Beauties from all over Russia, real beauties, especially from the Caucasus and Georgia. Tiflis, that was the place. At this point, I remembered coming across the word vengerka, while reading The Brothers Karamazov (meaning, in Russian, literally, a Hungarian woman, but colloquially, a streetwalker or other professional). Had there been many Hungarians on the game in Russia? Lots, Tania said, all over the place, but more in the north, in cabarets particularly; the word was still in use. Curva, she told me, lowering her voice a bit, was the ordinary Rumanian word. (Years later, a rich Rumanian friend, freshly returned from a motor tour in Italy, told me that the huge inscriptions across twisting mountain roads, serie di curve, would mean a row of whores in Rumanian, and had so doubled up her Rumanian chauffeur with hilarity that they had nearly come to grief many times.)
When, enlarging on the glories of Odessa, Tania told me that there were three opera houses in the city, I told her that I had been invited to the Opera next day. The Opera? She glanced at my mud-caked puttees, worn breeches and hobnailed boots; what would I wear? I mentioned the more respectable clothes in my rucksack: not perfect, but better. We’ll get the girls to iron them, she said, as she had to go shopping. Apropos of Russia, I asked her: who on earth were these peculiarly dressed, high-voiced Muscovites who drove all the carriages? She began to laugh, and interrupted the general conversation to relay the question in Rumanian. Laughter broke out all round: the Muscali! The Skapetz! Viorica clicked her tongue twice, making a brisk scissoring gesture with her forefinger and its neighbour in mid-air twice. Tania explained. They belonged to a religious sect widespread in Bessarabia and southern Russia, and their Rumanian headquarters were in Galatz, in the Danube delta. After marriage and producing one or two children, she wasn’t quite sure, the men castrated themselves, hence the beardlessness, the high voice and the expanse, and the general eunuch-like style. Their wives were said to submit to some similar ambiguous ceremony, I learnt. Some said the women began to grow beards. (This extraordinary news – at least about male emasculation – was quite true. I visited a whole street of them later on in Galatz. They were coachmen all over the Regat. In Galatz they were assiduous beekeepers. One of their tenets, I was told, was the belief that Czar Paul, the murdered son of Catherine the Great, would one day return again as the Messiah.)
‘They are bad-tempered men,’ Tania was saying, ‘always cross. I’m not surprised.’ A smile hovered on her face. ‘Of course, we don’t see much of them here . . .’
• • •
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Fred and Adele Astaire and a few Central European vedettes – Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, Anny Ondra, Brigitte Helm, Conrad Veidt – covered the walls opposite the bed with their shiny photos. I gazed up at them next morning through a shaft of brilliant autumn sunlight. There were one or two Rumanian actresses who made good in Paris: Elvira Popesco, Alice Cocea – Madame de la Rochefoucauld – and very good-looking politicians cut out of a newspaper, including Grigore Gafencu, who was to become Minister of Foreign Affairs the next year. My room belonged to a sixth lodger called Niculina who had gone home for a few days to Ploești (that curious region of oil wells with flame-tipped iron isosceles) for a niece’s christening. Below the window the Bukovinian girl was scattering maize to the chickens with coaxing noises. Beyond, the battered neighbourhood sprawled in the light and lemon-coloured radiance. A large billboard opposite advertised Dorobanti’s cigarettes, another, Prince Stirbey’s Choice Table Wines. I watched a shrill and hectoring argument between two housewives akimbo on their thresholds and swaying from side to side under the violence of their rhetoric. The devil – which is the same word here as ‘dragon’ – and the dragon’s dam were seldom off their lips in many disobliging contexts. It was a very pure example of what was known as the mahalajoica tone of voice, a fearsome note peculiar to the outskirts of towns, the mahala or margine de oraș, all through Rumania. How different from the soft voices stirring under the roof that sheltered me.
Safta had been sent up to collect my clothes for ironing, and I could hear talk about charcoal for the flat iron, and how the creases should go on the coat and trousers of Petrica, a neo-Dacian form of my first name. There was some question of who was to wield the iron. Viorica seized it in the end, pointing out the danger of too many cooks with a proverb Tania translated later: the child with too many midwives remains with its natal string uncut. ‘Copilul cu mai multe moase ramana cu buricul netaiat.’
How agreeable and exciting were these daily wakings on this journey; in odd surroundings, the proud owner – as one sent the smoke of an early cigarette spiralling across the room – of that unique and utterly unforeseeable object: the day ahead, facet on facet, layer on layer. Not so early today, though. It was nearly noon, and clearly a favourite time of yawning resurrections and leisure for my fellow lodgers, with several hours before they need arm for the afternoon’s fray. Viorica and the Saxon girl were playing cards on a sunny landing, speckled with the shadows of a bead curtain that flickered over them like a fall of confetti; the Bukovinian girl was sewing; and sitting on the stairs, the Moldavian was reading aloud from an illustrated magazine to Safta, who was not only weak in Rumanian but could neither read nor write; her high Tartar cheekbones were propped attentively on her fists. They immediately left their various pursuits, picked up the beautifully ironed clothes. ‘Ah,’ said Tania, arriving back wi
th a heavy shopping basket, ‘let’s have a look at you!’ Straightening my tie with an experienced twitch, she said I would do splendidly; nobody would notice the shoes. She told me to try and get back in time for supper. They were going to have bigger and better versions of the pasta I had said I had liked so much. With my morale steamed up by this approval and by waves and farewells as though I were the luck of the house setting forth, I emerged into the sunlit slum.
The Broken Road Page 18