The Compass
Page 6
We shook hands and I clutched the envelope with the address for the hosteria Pete had arranged for me in the small town of Brasov.
“Are you sure you can make it on your own?” I asked.
“No problem from here, son. I’ve got help waiting on the other side. How about you? Are you sure you can make it on your own?” he asked, smiling.
Nodding, I walked with him outside to where a hired car was waiting to take him to the Gara de Nord station in Bucharest. It would cost a bit more than 48 euros for the journey, and the attorney managing the estate in Italy had agreed to send a car to meet Pete on the other end, when he arrived at the train station in Rome.
I joked with him about the irony of his situation. Here he was, inheriting money in a will, when he already had more money than most people could imagine.
Pete stood by the hired car, a newer model black Lincoln.
“Only the rich get richer,” I said. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s all about trade-offs,” he replied.
“Such as?”
“I’ve been given financial prosperity, but not love. You were given a marriage and love, but maybe not other things. Some people are blessed with great intellect, others great physical or athletic ability.”
I pondered what he had said, thought about what I’d been given in life, and what had been taken away. While I was doing so, Pete ducked into the car and waved at me through the window as it drove off.
With that I stood at the curb of the Otopeni airport terminal with my backpack, surrounded by the sights and sounds of a bustling day and a crowd of people speaking languages that were foreign to me. I was immediately approached by a small man who waved frantically toward his car, a silver box with a dented passenger door. The side window had been blown out and was covered with plastic that had been secured with electrical tape. He flung open the door and said something I didn’t understand.
“American? American? We go.”
I shrugged, slid into the car, and looked down at the paper Pete had given me.
“Brasov?” I said. The man nodded excitedly, got in, gunned the engine, and sped away.
“Da! Da! Brasov.” He repeated the same thing several times and pulled out into traffic, negotiating a roundabout aggressively. He cut off several cars and pulled onto a rustic two-lane highway that was straight for miles, swerving once to miss a small horse-drawn cart loaded with cages of chickens.
My driver laid on the horn as we passed and shouted something to the farmer driving the cart. I braced myself in the back by gripping the door handle as he zipped into the next lane to pass the cars in front of us, one by one. My heart raced as I watched a large truck approach head on, barely missing us at the last moment. He did this several more times, swerving one way and then the other, often directly into the lane with oncoming vehicles. Each time he and the other driver pressed on their horns, shouting, speeding recklessly past.
We passed a large white factory and desolate open fields, and, ahead in the distance, I could view the dark shadows of a mountain region, which I knew to be the Carpathians. Pete had described the history of the mountains and the lore of Transylvania, saying that now its castle was somewhat of a tourist destination, despite the scarcity in the region.
It was a complex country, with rugged terrain and deep rivers, and a thriving ski area where the Italians came to vacation. The town of Brasov itself was a medieval village with gothic churches, surrounded by mountains on all sides.
The driver turned off the main road and drove for a while down cobblestone streets, pulling over abruptly at a curb in front of some old buildings.
“Basilica Negro,” he announced, pointing to a tall cathedral with remnants of bullet holes in the side. The structure was carved with ornate sculptures and a magnificent spire jutting into the sky.
“Unde mergi?”
I shook my head. I did not understand.
The man waved his hands in the air and motioned toward one building, and then down another street in a completely different direction.
“Unde mergi?”
I pointed to the address on the slip of paper. The man took it from my hand.
“Ah, yes, da! Da!” He put the car back into gear and sped around a corner up a narrow cobblestone street, parking in front of a white concrete townhouse. Then he jumped out and grabbed for my backpack.
“No, thanks,” I said, hanging on.
“Da! Da! I carry you,” he insisted, trying English.
Finally I let the shoulder strap slide down my arm, and he hoisted it over his back and scurried up a set of stairs. A small girl wearing a tattered dress played on the steps, and up and down the street women in long dresses passed by, their heads covered with scarves. Following the driver, I stopped at the top stair and waited as he banged on the door.
It flung open, and a small black boy ushered us into a parlor where he took the bag and motioned us to follow him down the hall. Long and lanky, with limbs like a praying mantis, he moved silently and led us to a small bedroom, placing my backpack on the wood floor just inside. When I turned around, he was gone.
The taxi driver remained in the doorway, and I fished several bills of the local currency, the ron, from my pocket and handed them over. The man bowed in thanks and left.
Chapter 7
THE GARDEN
I closed the door and surveyed the small space. The room was stark, but the bed linens offered a brilliant white coverlet with the whitest sheets beneath. There was a solitary armoire and a window that overlooked a courtyard below.
When I peered down, I saw the boy standing there, working in a garden. It was dirt, mainly, and he used a rough hand trowel to shift it back and forth, turning the soil. Every once in a while he kneeled down, and I watched as he used his hands to spread it evenly and then back again over small green plants. It was hard to tell what they were.
I decided to change clothes and venture out. I pulled on a pair of Levi’s and a fresh shirt and headed down the stairwell into the main house, where a large woman waited. I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She was about sixty, with a traditional headscarf and a skirt that fell below her knees over clunky black shoes. She nodded slowly as I passed, then went back to sweeping the wood floor.
“Hello,” I said, and she mumbled something I couldn’t understand in response.
I stepped outside into the fresh air, and the boy approached from nowhere, his fingernails layered in mud.
“Mr. America!” he said, smiling.
“You know English!” I said, taken aback.
The old woman came out and stood at the top of the stairs. Her face was frozen in a scowl, and she yelled something at the boy, who replied back in what seemed to be Romanian.
“Noapta Buna. It’s okay Mrs. B.,” he said, going back and forth from English to Romanian for my benefit, which only seemed to anger her more. But before long the old woman disappeared back inside.
“What’s she mad about?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want me to come in with dirty hands,” the boy said. “She always worries about things before they happen.” I thought about that for a moment, then just nodded.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Solomon,” he said. “Like the king.”
“The king?”
“Yes. Solomon was a great king, one of the greatest of all time.” The boy wiped his hands on his pants, and the dirt came crumbling off.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Zece.”
I looked at him curiously.
“Sorry,” he said. “I am ten. How old are you, Mr. America?”
“You know where I can get a cup of coffee?” I asked, dodging the question. “Maybe a bakery or a café?”
The boy pointed.
“Down the street, Mr. America. We go together. I show you.” He put down the garden tool and walked me down the street in silence. I breathed in the fresh air and followed him to a bakery where I ducked inside and manage
d to order a muffin and the blackest coffee I’d seen.
After that we walked down narrow cobblestone streets with our faces to the sun, the world around us easy and intimate. Solomon led me up streets lined with terraces, where the locals gathered outdoor at the cafés and in the square talking, and gesturing animatedly. The houses were tall and narrow, some decorated with bright flowers in window pots, and I imagined the way Marilyn would have photographed the place if she could have seen it.
“You like football?” he asked abruptly.
I looked at him.
“I’m not good at it, no. I like watching it on television I suppose . . . ” It had been a long time since I’d seen any football, but my thoughts went back to the last game I had watched, with the Giants against the Cowboys.
“We go now,” he said, suddenly excited. “We go! Follow me!”
I followed him down the street, and we walked for what seemed like a couple of miles until we turned into an open-air stadium that was jammed with people. A soccer match was in full play, and I handed some bills over to a ticket taker before I realized that Solomon had led me into a scheme by asking me to take him to a game. But his attitude was so engaging that I couldn’t bring myself to be angry.
“You thought it was football, Mr. America. In our country futbol is soccer.”
The stadium was lively, filled with more people than I’d been with in a long time. Men lined the field, wearing camouflage army uniforms like the ones our soldiers wore in the States. Only these uniforms were all blue camouflage instead of green, a dark navy mixed with a lighter shade of sky blue. They had machine guns across their backs, and each one wore a thick black belt with a pistol secured to it.
At first their presence unsettled me, but I soon relaxed and found myself enjoying the game.
The next day Victorita—the old woman the boy called Mrs. B.—made an elaborate breakfast at the table of hard-boiled eggs, bread, and Coca-Cola.
I quickly learned that the Coca-Cola was considered the ultimate in luxury for an American guest, since the Romanians viewed it as a symbol of what we liked. In every household I visited in the days to follow, friends of Victorita and her husband Cornell would offer me Coca-Cola and hard-boiled eggs, or sometimes if it was a special occasion, meat with carrots. The meat was boiled in water like a stew over the stove, and the carrots were tender, mixed in.
Each night when I went to bed, the pipes sang loudly, the sounds of water cranking through them.
When I needed to wash my hair, I did so in the spigot that came out from the bottom of the tub because there was no shower, and I took hand baths with a small cloth I found in my room. The house shared one bathroom, so at times I would find it occupied and go back to my room and wait.
In the mornings, I took to the habit of waking up and observing Solomon from my window, which looked out into the courtyard where he worked in the garden.
I tried to figure the boy out because each day he was up hours earlier than anyone else, just to water the garden and till the soil. It seemed like a passion or a hobby for him, and he worked with a small broken hand plow to till the dirt, over and over again.
Victorita and Cornell, whom Solomon called Mr. A., earned extra money from guests like me who periodically found the hostel, and although I’d never once seen her smile, Victorita worked tirelessly to make sure every need of the household was taken care of.
Solomon came and went as he pleased and seemed to have no schedule for school. He’d said he worked in the streets earning money, and, as I watched him one day in the town square, I realized that his chosen profession was that of a beggar or more aptly, a con artist who approached tourists and worked them over with his gift of words. He convinced them to give him the money, which he brought back to his Romanian family.
Solomon told me that the couple had taken him in a few years earlier and put a roof over his head. He had been a street gypsy, and he’d agreed to work in exchange for a room. He said it had taken him three days to convince Victorita not to report him to an orphanage instead. First he had worked sweeping her halls and stairs in the mornings, then tilling the garden, and then he brought home money from his work on the street until he was too valuable for her to let him go.
He wore cloth shoes two sizes too small, with holes in the toes to give him more room. In the garden he went barefoot, which I suspected was because he valued his only pair of shoes, which he rinsed out sometimes in the evenings and let them air dry on the balcony.
The family money was scarce, and I learned that the average factory worker’s household was taking in what amounted to one hundred US dollars each month, so Solomon’s contributions provided bread most weeks, and sometimes milk. Despite this, he seemed to have no real connection with the couple, no comfort or conversation. Cornell left in the mornings for the factory and arrived home after dusk. He and Victorita had late dinners at the small wooden table in the kitchen, and they retired early.
The house was always quiet.
On some mornings I’d find a breadbasket outside my door. By the third or fourth day, I realized that I’d lost track of Pete’s timing for his arrival in Brasov, but without a way to contact him, all I could do was wait.
I traveled the town on foot during the days, sometimes ventured off into the hillside and just sat there in solitude with a sandwich or croissant from the market. I found a small currency exchange shop and exchanged more of my American dollars for ron, the new currency of the country. It was beautiful to look at, unlike the money we held in the States, and it fascinated me how nearly all other countries produced art as their currency, often in varying colors.
It seemed appropriate to me that the foundation of a country, the currency of a nation, would be beautifully constructed. It represented the very thing most people spent their lives working for, the one thing each day’s work revolved around. The U.S. currency, in comparison, seemed plain and drab with no specific care given to its appearance.
The Romanian notes were romantic, and one paper bill contained images in a soft green and sky blue depicting a beautiful monastery, Gentian flowers, a coat of arms, and a Prince.
One day I decided to take advantage of being a foreigner in a new world, and I resolved to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the cafés around town. I walked for miles, touring cobblestone streets, and explored the Basilica Negro, the “Black Church” that had stood since 1834.
I dined on linguini in a thick red sauce at a sidewalk restaurant, finishing off the experience by ordering a glass of dessert wine.
When I returned to the townhouse, I found Solomon in his garden, whistling, and, instead of taking the stairs, I just sat there and watched him. He was a meticulous gardener, and he paid attention to the details of the water and the earth. He bent down to reposition a green sprout that had leaned and tied it to a popsicle stick in the dirt.
Noticing that I was sitting nearby on the wet grass, he stood and grinned.
“You want to work in the soil, Mr. America?”
I grinned back.
“Nu,” I said, shaking my head. I had picked up a few terms from observing the family and could occasionally reply in Romanian now.
Solomon was a black boy in a white country, and I wondered how he got there. I had seen no other person of color except the gypsies on the street, and their color was lighter, more of an Indian nationality than anything else.
His sole focus was the garden, and it seemed like something he had wanted to do, as opposed to something he had to do. It seemed like an internal drive, a passion he was destined for, as if to turn the soil and work the land was his only path to connectedness.
“Mrs. B. is making dinner,” he said casually.
“Her name is Victorita,” I observed. “Why do you call her Mrs. B.?”
Solomon shrugged.
“What work did you do in America?” he asked.
“I sold drugs.”
Solomon stood straight, eyes wide.
“Mr. America!”
I saw his blank expression and knew he didn’t understand.
“Legal drugs like medicine,” I explained. “Drugs for adults or teenagers, mainly. To make them better.”
Solomon stared at me.
“To make them better? From what?”
“Well, one of the drugs we sold was a psychotropic drug for ADD, attention deficit disorder, mainly prescribed to teens to help regulate the brain.” I found myself slipping into the routine explanation of my work, as if I were on autopilot at a cocktail party back in California. But I could see that he was confused and shifted gears.