Unsinkable Mister Brown (Cruise Confidential 3)

by Brian David Bruns

  Things turned amusing when Radu became wildly drunk. He began freaking out whenever anyone touched his face. It began with an act of kindness after he had messily devoured some food. Laura tried to wipe clean the excess mustard off his cheek in motherly fashion. Radu slapped her hand away with a ridiculous amount of bluster. Eyes glinting with mirth, she began playfully poking at his sunken cheeks. His knee-jerk reactions were comically excessive. He bellowed like a stuck pig, he flailed his hands before his face, and even hopped about the room.

  Adi was only too happy to get in on it. While talking to someone else, and even looking away, Adi would reach over and slap Radu across the face. The resulting explosion of profanity shook the heavy oaken tables far more than Radu’s wriggling and kicking like a five-year-old protesting bedtime.

  Indeed, the real delight of the evening was Adi. He got roaring drunk. His manner of play was endlessly entertaining, whether locking himself behind the iron bars in the tiny coatroom—which was no doubt originally designed to hold munitions—or unsuccessfully trying to climb the stones up to the ceiling. He fell three times in rapid succession, and the fourth time gripped the chains and iron sconces for additional purchase. Luckily I managed to haul him back to the ground before he did some damage. When no one else seemed concerned about breakage, I remembered sheepishly that the chains had been specifically designed to hold people—against their will!

  Eventually Cristina hauled him back to the dinner table, where he pouted and plucked at his long-cold food. The moment of forced calm was not to last. Like so many disasters, it began with ABBA.

  The upbeat piano of ‘Chiquitita’ brought Adi to his feet with a leap. He rushed to the corner, swaying and blearily regarding the table laden with candelabra. None of us could figure out what he was planning. Then with one grand sweep of his long arm, he cleared the table of all its many contents. Dozens of candles and intricate holders tumbled to the floor with a crash, candles spinning, hot wax splattering. Pools of wax congealed instantly on the cold stone, and smeared into the cloth of Adi’s pants. This did not stop him from grabbing the nearest chair and dragging it before the now-empty table. He plopped down heavily—nearly falling over into the pile of candles—and proceeded to play his new ‘piano’ to the song.

  While I tried to keep Cristina from fainting, the others began roaring with laughter. Bianca sidled up to the table to provide the accompaniment to Adi’s piano. She crooned into an empty beer bottle, slinking across the table-top in her most seductive lounge manner. She pouted and sulked during the lows, but the end of ‘Chiquitita’ was so upbeat she was compelled to rise and dance on the table.

  Regretfully, the song ended. Adi leapt to his feet and ran over to a shelf displaying an antique gramophone. He stuck his head into the huge flower-like horn and bellowed, “Repeat! Repeat!”

  His face got stuck.

  Adi flailed his arms and began rearing back. Gasps sounded about the room, but fortunately Radu was nearby. The gawky, pale man was amazingly fast enough to stop Adi from completing his motion. The century-old machine had nearly shared the fate of the candelabra! But the danger was not over, for Adi kept flailing his hands. He placed a hand roughly on the age-old spindle of the machine for leverage and began pushing.

  “Stop, idiot!” Radu shouted as he tried unsuccessfully to unhook a small clasp that had fallen and caught on the back of Adi’s shirt collar. They wrestled for several agonizing moments, then safely extricated Adi’s face from the horn. They kept slapping each other even as they fished for Adi’s glasses in the huge horn. While Radu carefully replaced the gramophone on the shelf, Adi grinned widely at us, proud of his adventure.

  “‘Thank You for the Music!’” he hollered in English, quoting another ABBA hit.

  “More like ’S.O.S.’!” Cristina muttered, burying her face in her hands in defeat.

  3

  Bianca and I walked home from the restaurant, holding hands through a lazy ballet of dancing flakes. I had thought Sighișoara was stunningly beautiful in summer, but it was utterly mesmerizing when frosted. Gaslight glowed on ancient stone, and the frozen streets of the old city, while empty, seemed not lonely, but patient.

  Though tired and more than a little drunk, we both felt a bit sobered by the time we reached the end of Strada Crișan. Bianca unlocked the gate and we shuffled into the courtyard, luminous with new-fallen snow—then stopped dead in our tracks.

  Fresh footprints in the snow. Leading to the house.

  A rustle, and movement, in the shadows of the three-season porch.

  “Son of a bitch!” I whispered harshly, starting a rush for the porch. But Bianca latched onto my arm and tried to haul me back.

  “Wait!” she whispered. “Stop!”

  “You’re being robbed!”

  “No,” she whispered. “I don’t think so. Just wait a minute, please?”

  “But your parents are in there sleeping!”

  “No, that’s my father.”

  I stared at her, incredulous. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. You don’t mean he’s been...”

  My eyes followed the tracks back from Bianca’s house to the neighbor’s yard.

  “He’s been with the neighbor lady?”

  Bianca led me to the porch swing in the courtyard. Mechanically pushing off the shroud of snow, we sat, we rocked. She explained.

  “It saddens me,” she said, watching the snow increase the density and speed of its flurry. “It saddens me how it hurts my mother, but he always comes back.”

  I was shocked. Piti was cheating on Lucky? They looked like the happiest, most loving couple I could imagine.

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked quietly.

  “A long time,” Bianca answered. “All along. My mother cannot provide him what he needs. She knows he loves her more than anything else in the world. She knows he always comes back.”

  “Until he doesn’t,” I muttered, unimpressed.

  Bianca was silent for a moment. Eyes blinded by the rush of snowflakes, her voice shifted to a far-away place.

  “Only one thing ever kept him from coming back,” she intoned. “The revolution.”

  She squeezed my hand. I listened, enthralled amid revelations and snow.

  “We were living in Brașov when it happened. We were having breakfast when my godfather called. He was a colonel in the military and my father a sergeant, of course. I remember hearing his voice through the phone. He sounded serious. A lot more serious than the Brașov revolt two years before. My father was out the door in two minutes flat. Before he left, he insisted that we stay inside. Don’t go out for food, water—nothing!—until he called. Don’t even answer the door unless it’s Colonel Miere. Not even the neighbors, he emphasized. As he ran down the stairs, he shouted that he would come back for us no matter what happened.

  “We didn’t hear from him for three days. No calls, no messages, nothing. That whole first day we thought it would just be another attempt halted before it got started. That had happened a few times before, but they never got very far. Father said he knew those would fail because they were isolated, far from the capital. This time the television didn’t mention much, of course, other than a small riot in Timișoara, far to the west. My mother and I were glued to the contraband radio my father smuggled in from relatives in Hungary. It was a bloodbath in Timișoara.

  “On the second day, I remember the fuzzy announcement that changed everything. This one was different. This revolution started outside Romania. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia: all the Eastern bloc, it seemed. We couldn’t hear any more because the signal was so faint, and outside became so noisy. When I looked out the window and saw the line of tanks roaring down the street, I knew. We were so scared. We cried every time we heard the machine guns outside. We heard them a lot.

  “By day three, we were so hungry. We had nothing in the kitchen because the rationing had been getting worse and worse. We didn’t even have cooking oil. But we knew there was no food in the s
tores, nobody in the piațas. We were too scared to even talk to the neighbors, because the secret police were everywhere, everyone. I remember once my godfather saw the securitate file for my father. He couldn’t show it to him, of course, but told him about it. Father was a good soldier, but even his file had over one hundred pages.”

  Bianca sniffled, blinked back tears and melting snowflakes.

  Suddenly I remembered my first visit to the capital city Bucharest. I had asked our driver to show me Ceaușescu’s huge Parliamentary Palace—the largest building in the world after the Pentagon—but he instead passed right by it and parked in the middle of traffic across the street. Next to a cemetery. He crossed himself and whispered thanks to those buried there. These were the men who stormed the Parliamentary Palace and Intercontinental Hotel—students, salesmen, normal people like me. Ceaușescu, the twenty-two year communist dictator, ordered his soldiers to shoot into the crowd with automatic weapons. Soldiers who did not obey would be shot.

  That could have been Bianca’s godfather. That could have been Piti.

  Most of the soldiers did not obey. Yet many did. The securitate sure did. Protesters were massacred: shot from various buildings and even crushed by tanks driven into the crowd. More than enough to fill that cemetery across the street. Perhaps it was his barbarity even until the end that made his execution so hasty. Ceaușescu and his wife were convicted of genocide and immediately shot—the very second they stood against the wall. Three soldiers did it. Hundreds had volunteered.

  “At the end of the third day,” Bianca continued, “Piti came home. He said it was over. He never said another word about it. He never told us about even a single minute of those three days.”

  “So you don’t know if he stayed in Brașov, or was sent to the capital,” I mused gently.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bianca said. Then she added defiantly, “He always comes back!”

  And Catalin didn’t, I thought.

  Bianca froze.

  “What did you say?” she asked sharply. She dropped my hand, leaving me holding cold night air.

  Horrified, I realized that I must have said my thoughts aloud. I felt like the biggest asshole on the planet. I tried backpedaling, because the last thing I wanted to do was bring up our current mess after Bianca’s heart-wrenching memory.

  “I didn’t mean to say that,” I said gently. “I’m sorry. It’s just that maybe only now do I understand why you obsess so much over ‘coming back’. I thought maybe—”

  “No, no, you got it all wrong,” she huffed. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to—”

  “I’ve been talking to your parents, honey,” I said gently.

  “Me not ready to talk about Catalin,” Bianca dismissed crisply. “Is not what you think. Just leave it at that.”

  “But how can I now that it’s out there?” I said. “Piti said something about him being your husband!”

  Bianca stared at me with huge eyes.

  “He said that?” she screeched. It echoed through the night.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I explained, taken aback by her reaction. But suddenly overwhelmed by years of secrets, I blundered forward. “We were trying to communicate while you were busy recovering from the slave labor I’m trying to save you from.”

  “I don’t need saving from you or anybody,” Bianca said flatly. “Nu, we were never married. Obviously you misunderstood.”

  Snow fell. Chill crept in.

  “I will tell you about it,” she promised quietly. “Nu now, OK? Is late. Me tired.”

  She was right. It was late. We prepared for bed in silence, minus a squawk when slipping between the cold sheets. Bianca’s body pressed into mine for warmth, and soon her measured breath indicated sleep. It was not so easy for me. The chilly pillow swallowed my head, but I didn’t feel like closing my eyes. I was disturbed by the revelations of the evening, and angry that I made her bad memory worse.

  I would never truly comprehend what Bianca and her family had endured before and during the revolution. Nor could I forgive the machismo that let men justify so freely trouncing on loved one’s feelings. But I did understand the audacity of being judged by people completely ignorant of the reality one lived in.

  Above all, I understood that these people were deeply wounded and needed time to heal. They deserved patience. The least I could do was give it without conditions.

  4

  The next afternoon, Bianca and I took a walk through wintry old town. The snow still fell, but was clearly tired of doing so. The flakes were fat and hesitant, taking their time to reach us. Our large umbrella blocked their lethargic attempt. Bianca snuggled onto my arm as we made our way to our kissing spot below the citadel.

  “You’re shivering,” Bianca commented after an icy-lipped smooch. “Why you no zip up your coat?”

  “Can’t,” I grunted, wrapping myself a bit deeper into my coat. “I broke the zipper this morning.”

  “First shoelaces and now zippers!” she chirped.

  “I am a man of enormous power,” I intoned, lifting my chin and gazing to the horizon.

  Unbidden, Bianca removed her gloves to better loosen my scarf and clasp the buttons beneath. I knew better than to protest. Suddenly she snapped her hand away and winced.

  “Ow!” she said, shaking her hand to ease the pain. “These damn hands.”

  “What’s wrong with your hands?” I asked, holding them up to look.

  Her fingertips looked shredded, with deep splits in the skin revealing raw, angry skin beneath. I had noticed her taking great care with her hands, but had assumed it was from the dry, winter air. There was no doubt she had been hiding something far worse.

  “Just from the bleaching,” she dismissed, trying to pull her hands free.

  “Bleaching the damn ship all day!” I exclaimed, “This is really bad, Bianca. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “And have you as worried as my parents?” she retorted. She tugged her gloves back on with a wince, and said soothingly, “I’m getting a special cream after you leave. Best doctor in Brașov.”

  “That’s hardly a confidence booster.”

  “Like your confidence needs a boost!” she teased, breaking free. She rewound my scarf with an affectionate pat, snatched the umbrella and quipped, “Keep your hands off the umbrella. He’s twenty-five years old and I don’t want you breaking him, too.”

  We continued our walk, conversing hesitantly. I wanted to talk about heavy stuff. She did not.

  Eventually we found ourselves strolling through a piața. Dozens of tents had been set up and peasants and vendors were selling everything imaginable. We stuffed ourselves on samples of cheeses from all sorts of animals’ milk, and samples of sausages from all sorts of animals themselves. Of course, a Romanian piața was not limited to edibles by any means: there were clothing vendors, tool makers, black market CDs, DVDs, you name it. I wondered if I tried hard enough if I could find an AK-47.

  “I can’t imagine selling outside all day in the winter,” I commented. “I think I could handle physical work, but to stand there all day? I would freeze!”

  Bianca said nothing.

  “Bianca?” I asked, sensing that something was wrong.

  We stood before a makeshift tent cobbled together from several tarps of different colors and materials. Three six-foot folding tables, arranged in a U-shape, offered up dirty plastic bins half-full of scratched CD cases. Bianca stared at the writing scrawled in marker across the recordable disks.

  “What? You want a movie or something?”

  Now it was Bianca’s turn to shiver.

  “It is freezing,” she muttered in a far-away voice. “Freezing standing there all day. Everyday. For nothing.”

  “You worked in a piața like this?” I asked, surprised. “Like when you were younger or something?”

  I was imagining a first job, such as I had done during high school for extra money. I had no idea how ethnocentric the idea was. Bianca soon educated me.
/>   “After the revolution,” Bianca answered in tight snippets. “I worked in a piața. I sold dubbed cassette tapes.”

  “My black market girl,” I teased. As usual, I was very slow to realize how inconsiderate I was being.

  “I set up before sunrise every day,” Bianca continued in a drone. “And worked until after dark. Twelve hours, thirteen, I don’t know. Similar ships. But when I got home I had to make the tapes—all night. Every forty-five minutes I had to wake up to flip the tapes and record the other side. All night long. Every night. Every day. Every forty-five minutes. I was so tired. I was so cold.

  “You see, before we had to leave Belgium, my ex used all of our remaining money to buy recording equipment and the latest cassettes from western musicians. He thought maybe they would sell OK in Romania, now that the doors were open and everyone was looking west. But after the revolution nobody had any money. Nobody had any money, not even for cheap illegal copies. We were starving.”

  “What was he doing during all this?” I asked.

  She shrugged lightly and said, “What he could. We didn’t know anybody in Timișoara. He didn’t get anything done.”

  “Why didn’t you move back to Brașov, where you had family?”

  She didn’t answer. The haunted look in her eyes hardened into something very different.

  “I vowed in that fucking stall that if I ever get out of this, I will never be poor again.”

  5

  So much for the easy ‘Romanian recalibration’.

  The night before I left for America, we could no longer delay talking about our future. We had enjoyed a month of long days of brisk walks, long evenings of dinner and drinks, and long nights of play. There had been revelations. It was time for resolutions.

  Bianca and I rocked gently on the chilled porch swing. The night sky was supremely black, the stars crystalline, the air crisp.

  “So,” I said.

  “So,” Bianca agreed, star-gazing.