“Aaaah!” said Piti excitedly, pouring another for me and himself. The ladies quietly demurred a repeat.
We settled in, and immediately began connecting. Though neither Piti nor Lucky were educated, both spoke three languages: Romanian, Hungarian, and Russian. I, being American, of course only spoke one. Bianca took her role as translator smoothly and with relish. In just my first five minutes squeegeed into that tiny kitchen, I learned a powerful lesson about humanity. Communication is different—and more important—than language. Goodwill needs no words. There was more laughter than talk, anyway.
And smoking. Oh, was there smoking.
I had been around smoking, of course. As a child, both my parents smoked until it was discovered to be unhealthy. Mom quit cold turkey, which in hindsight perhaps explains why my father began smoking more than ever. There is no lobbyist more passionate than one reformed. Eventually I found my way into smoke-filled bars when I became of age—or thereabouts, as far as my mother is concerned. But I had never encountered anything like this.
Bianca and Piti both puffed aggressively through a pack of green-tipped menthol cigarettes. While Lucky did not join them, she appeared completely unaffected by the thick haze that muscled out all the oxygen from the small room. Father and daughter shared a shallow ashtray no larger than a petri dish, which quickly overflowed with smashed and smoldering butts. Bianca must have contorted out of her chair to empty it half a dozen times in the first hour, yet when I suggested she get a larger ashtray she just called me American. I was beginning to truly marvel at how everything in this country was ridiculously small. It had not yet occurred to me that in America everything was ridiculously large.
Barely able to breathe, but not wanting to admit as much to my hosts, I excused myself. I claimed to need the restroom, but it was my lungs that needed a rest.
“I should warn you there’s no hot water,” Bianca said as I rose.
“Oh, OK,” I said, trying not to look as surprised as I was.
“We’re moving to the new house in a few weeks,” she explained. “So we cancelled the contract with the private company rather than pre-pay for another year. We on city supply now, and they only get us hot water for about an hour in the afternoon. They deny that, of course, but you know: Romanian-style.”
I did not know what Bianca meant by Romanian-style, but was beginning to learn. It was not a comfortable process.
The bathroom somehow managed to be smaller than even the kitchen. Beneath the window was a short bathtub, with a shorter hose and sprayer on a hook. So it was a quasi-shower. Or was it? There was no shower curtain. I guess if I wanted to skip a full bath I would have to squat in the tub and spray myself.
One thing was universal, however: a stack of magazines by the toilet. I flipped through them curiously, delighted to see the photographs featured only topless women. But this was not pornography, as it was obviously some sort of glorified TV Guide, printed on the worst kind of pulp paper, channel listings predominating. I doubted Romania featured a dozen-plus porn channels, but what did I know? Maybe Romania was cooler than I thought.
Then I encountered the toilet paper.
Now, I am no wuss. I am a man’s man, not only content to squat in the woods and use leaves for sanitation, but prefer to do so, dammit. I had no time for quadruple-ply ultra-soft bathroom tissue featuring pictures of babies and angels at five bucks a roll. But this tissue was transparent-thin and rougher than a Brillo pad. It was so thin that I would have used half a roll, had it not been so painful.
When I returned, Bianca observed my haunted expression.
“Everything OK?”
“I’ll have to answer that later, I think,” I replied, shaken. “The... uh... paper, is somethin’ else. I knew communists disregarded human comfort and dignity on every level, but I didn’t realize just how dehumanizing it is to wipe your butt with sandpaper.”
She scrunched her face and said, “Oh, we all hate that soft, buttery toilet paper introduced from the West after the revolution. How do you know it’s even working?”
I thought it best to drop the subject.
Happily, the windows had been opened in my absence. The air was far from clear, but was less foul. It was also colder. Lucky herself replaced Bianca’s chair by the stove, having lit two burners with a wooden match. Upon one burner sat a battered percolator, while the other blazed away in blue flame—apparently intended to warm the kitchen. It didn’t work. Neither did Piti’s clinging sweater vest. I shivered in the cold, even as the fuzzy flag slippers made my feet sweat. Alas, coffee induced more smoking than even the alcohol, so soon steam and smoke tangoed above us.
I presented the gifts which Bianca had suggested I bring: a bottle of good cognac for her mother and a cowboy hat for her father. Oh, did Piti love his hat! He wore it all night, unsuccessfully fighting the urge to draw pretend pistols at every opportunity. Considering his background and mine, he made me flinch a bit too often. When Bianca explained to him that I bought it at a real Old West ghost town, where she and I had met, he was even more excited.
Eventually the older folks retired to the living room, where the couch unfolded into a bed. Bianca and I stayed up longer in the bedroom, sitting upon another couch that would eventually unfold for me. We listened to some quiet music and browsed through photographs of her fascinating time working on cruise ships. She ate copious amounts of M&Ms. We began quietly, speaking in hushed voices barely above the clicking of fingernails on candy, but as our enthusiasm over each other swelled, so did our volume. Soon we rekindled the playfulness and joy we had so surprisingly found in each other at our first meeting.
“It’s 3 a.m.,” Bianca finally said, pushing herself up from the couch. “Time for bed.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “We’ve been in here for five hours! I’m sorry to keep you up so late. I guess I’m still on Nevada time.”
“Don’t worry, me night bird.”
The bed was unfolded, Bianca taking great care to set it up nicely for me, and then she slipped off to somehow fit into bed with her parents. Sleep began elusively, though less because of my internal clock than from the street lamps that were level with the windows—which filled out one entire wall from waist-high to the ceiling. The room was bright enough to read in. In the distance I saw the bloc in which my friend Mihaela had grown up. She had been on the ninth floor, Bianca informed me, and they had communicated via flashlights when they were supposed to be in bed. Kids are kids everywhere.
Just a few short hours ago I had no idea whatsoever of what to expect from this visit-on-a-whim. I had been excited, of course, but it was so far out of the ordinary that it didn’t seem real. Even as late as driving to the airport, it didn’t really feel like I was about to fly to Romania—where I would be completely helpless and utterly reliant upon a stranger. But now I was here, and it was all right. I slept soundly.
2
I was awakened by a bizarre sound. The noise of traffic was dominant—a little vehicular and a lot pedestrian—obscuring the odd call that had awakened me. The noise was singularly strange, like that of a broken awhooga-style car horn from long before even Albişoara’s time. But it wasn’t a car horn, because it came from the living room.
I rubbed my eyes and rose, when suddenly the door burst open and Bianca stuck her head into the room. Her black hair was a mass of jutting angles, and her eyes were pronounced by dark circles. “Why you not answer chicken?”
“What?” I asked blearily.
“The chicken!” she repeated. “You didn’t hear Piti calling cucurigu?’’
“Chickens go cucurigu?”
“The male ones do. Don’t you know anything?”
“So that was Piti imitating a rooster? I thought it was Albişoara’s last gasp for breath in a cruel world. Or perhaps an asthmatic duck.”
Bianca entered and began removing the blankets from the folding bed. “Don’t be silly. Ducks say mac.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my li
fe,” I replied indignantly. “Ducks do not say mac.”
“And why not?”
“Because ducks don’t have lips. How’s a duck going to make an ‘m’ sound? No ducks macking on chicks, thank you. What’s wrong with you people?”
“Oh, by all means, dazzle me with your onomatopoeia.”
“Roosters go cock-a-doodle-do,” I declared with great solemnity. “I’ll grant you that cucurigu sounds more accurate. But ducks quack. Chicks peep. Chickens cluck. Satisfied?”
“Chickens cluck?” she asked, frowning. “Chickens cotcodac.”
“See?” I mocked. “This is why America is superior. Our onomatopoeia is the best.”
“It’s not even your language, bamboclat,” Bianca retorted. “And gooses?”
“Geese honk.”
“Honk? Albişoara honks. You confuse foots with hands and gooses with cars. America sounds very strange.”
Fortunately, breakfast stopped any debate, for we agreed to call it breakfast even if it was after twelve noon. We entered the kitchen and Piti rose from his steaming—and small—cup of coffee, doffed his new cowboy hat, and gave Bianca a big kiss on the forehead. Lucky leaned back from the stove to do the same. The sheer love and joy they exchanged was palpable, as if every single morning was cause for tremendous celebration. They all trilled like happy birds in spring. I have always been a morning person and a cheery soul, but they made me look like a surly Monday morning.
I, too, received a kiss from Lucky, while Piti aggressively shook my hand and bid me good morning in enthusiastic, if halting, English. To Bianca he then gave an exaggerated look of acute misery. His pronounced, white brows drooped like those of a sorrowful hound, while he rubbed his belly to indicate it was past time for repast.
The table was pulled from the wall and ready for action. Oh, was it ready! The table was so loaded with food that the plates were forced to compete for space. True to all-things-little form, every food item was on a small plate—like tapas—each devoted to its own offering. All were served cold: a dish of thinly-sliced sausages, another of smoked, fatty ribs, three bowls devoted to different cheeses, one of pickles, a jar of pickled hot peppers, a dish of fresh red peppers and one of them roasted in olive oil. The only large plate was loaded with gargantuan tomatoes. A round loaf of rustic bread waited—fresh from the farmer’s market that morning, as was everything perishable.
I sat and was immediately presented with a steaming cup of both coffee and tea. Lucky pulled from the stove a pan loaded with slender sausages, cropped to about three inches, which had been cooking in oil. They glistened with welcome heat, the edges nicely browned and puffed into little Xs where she had cut them. She gave me four, then portioned two each for everyone else. Piti turned his puppy-dog eyes on her until she sacrificed one of her own sausages to his plate. Any attempt from me to more evenly apportion the food was scoffed at.
Piti was ready for the meal to begin, which meant he had the țuica handy. Unlike the bottle he had last night, this morning the supply came from a funny little brown-glazed container in the shape of a barrel with a gnome-like, drunken man draped over the top. It was mounted on a wooden rocking chair with a series of hooks for the thimble-sized țuica glasses. Lucky and Bianca preferred the cognac I had brought, but I was a good sport and joined Piti for țuica. I even more sportingly took a refill to ease the pain of the first. We toasted each other with each shot, grimacing all the while. On the third shot Piti turned towards the wall and instead toasted to something painted on the tiles.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” I cried. “That really is a capitalist pig-dog!”
“What?” Bianca asked, frowning.
“Right there, painted on the wall!”
I indicated the odd illustration of a brown dog playing a cello that someone had painted directly onto the wall. It had the long, floppy ears of a dog, but the tail was decidedly cork-screwed like a pig’s. Bianca laughed, having forgotten all about the decoration over years of familiarity. She didn’t bother to translate, as Piti was already helping himself to the food with a satisfied, ‘aaaah.’
Perhaps it was my Germanic ancestry—though more likely my much-closer Midwest American—but I immediately went for the sausages and cheese. The cheese was unlike anything I had ever encountered, and simply wonderful. My favorite tasted like parmesan, but instead of being hard it was semi-soft and a bit chalky. I was told this was sheep cheese. I decided not to admit that I didn’t even know sheep made milk.
I began to feel guilty. The Pops were making a profound effort to be the best hosts possible, and had created a massive feast. The least I could do was accept with honest gratitude, for this was a moment where I was expected to indulge. Further, compared to them I was simply huge—a good seventy pounds heavier than Piti and obviously double Lucky. My issue was not with how much I ate, but what I selected. I was picking only the apparent luxuries.
Thus, I grudgingly took a tomato. I hated tomatoes. They were usually flavorless and always watery, insides like they were stuck in the larval stage. But these tomatoes were something of a completely different order. Even the very best homegrown garden tomatoes in the fertile soil of Iowa paled in comparison to the texture and robust flavor of these Romanian gems. Just one of these first-sized monsters weighed over a pound and was a meal in itself. It was a solid, meaty beast all the way through. I was so astounded I actually ate more of them than anything else!
Though Piti was first to begin filling his plate, he was last to eat anything. He arranged his food with military precision. He sliced his red peppers into short slivers and arranged them to formation around the entire rim of his plate. Bianca answered my querying look.
“Those are daddy’s little soldiers,” she explained. “Thirty years as a sergeant dies hard. Nothing begins until everyone is presented properly at attention.”
Eventually Piti dipped the slices in a small dish of salt from a cruet set. A handle neatly held two bowls, clearly marked S and P, but both were brimming with salt. In fact, before anything was consumed by any of my three hosts, it was first dipped in salt.
“Salt!” I cried, flabbergast. “The forbidden seasoning! Mom would not allow it in our house.”
“Why not?” Bianca asked, surprised.
“Oh, you know. Too much salt in our diets and high blood pressure and all that.”
“How is this possible?” she asked. Then her eyes got wide in understanding. “Oh, check me! I forgot: you guys eat all that nonstop food with chemicals and artificiality. Ugh. Getting food out of a box is the same as getting wine out of a box. I did that once, and don’t tell me that had anything to do with the wine experience!”
I nodded deeply, thinking her comparison particularly apt.
“Not here, papa,” Bianca continued happily. “We have real food, and if we no salt it, we get no salt at all.”
While no doubt the subtleties of our dialogue were not understood by Piti, he was well aware of the crux of it. His fourth shot of țuica was ‘toasted’ by clinking it against the salt bowl.
“Mai vrei cafea?” Bianca asked, holding up the coffee pot. It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. Sometimes while translating she would accidentally say something English to her parents, or Romanian to me. But she was looking right at me, waiting for a reply.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “You were speaking Romanian.”
“I know, babaloo, we’re in Romania. I noticed you tune out everything unless it is English. If you begin to listen, you begin to learn.”
I looked up at her sheepishly. She was absolutely right.
She continued, “So in Romanian coffee is a feminine word: ‘cafea’.”
I gratefully held out my espresso-sized cup. “Thank you so much! I’m used to big mugs about half the size of that pot.”
We continued our meal, but after a moment I spoke up again.
“You know,” I commented. “It makes sense that coffee is a woman. It’s hot and stimulating and you can’t live wit
hout it, but is actually bad for you.”
Bianca gave me a smug grin and retorted, “Not when you only have one.”
3
After breakfast, Lucky and Bianca cleared the table while Piti and I did nothing. I was uncomfortable with the stereotypical male/female roles, but any efforts to assist in cleaning were roundly rejected. This, I was informed, was when the men enjoyed cigarettes and conversation. So I enjoyed more of Lucky’s fantastic tea. To my astonishment, she made it herself from flowers and plants she picked while out walking in the forested hills surrounding their new house in Sighișoara.
Walking was in order for Bianca and I, too. She finally enjoyed her own cigarette, but then we readied ourselves for a tour of Brașov. Her parents joined us for the first block of our rainy walk, intent upon the nearby market to gather food for dinner. Even though they had already been to the market once already that day, it was only a block away so there was no need to buy in bulk. Besides, they had no room to store anything anyway!
“At first I thought the shops on the ground floor of the blocs would be annoying,” I commented. “In America we value privacy and personal space over all; I guess that’s where the suburbs came from. But living there is so far from everything: if I run out of milk for my coffee, it’s eight miles round trip to get it. But here you get fresh everything every day.”
“Oh, yes,” Bianca agreed heartily. “Mihaela told me your bread is designed to stay alive for weeks. How can weeks-old bread compare to fresh-baked? And why you eat dead cheese?”
“I do not eat dead cheese,” I retorted.
“Yes you do. You pasteurize away all the living cultures. That’s where the health is, and the flavor, too. No dead cheese for me, papa!”
Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3) Page 3