Trouble in Transylvania

by Barbara Wilson

  I realized I had been in the steam room too long and that I was feeling faint. I began to get up, but Cathy suddenly grabbed my arm.

  “I know you probably think this is totally strange… I just wondered, would you mind—I mean, I’d really appreciate it—if you could give me your phone number here in Budapest where I could reach you, just in case…”

  “In case what?” I prompted.

  “I don’t know.” She looked upset and embarrassed to be upset. “I’m sure I wouldn’t really call you. The phones probably don’t even work in Romania. But, at least I’d have one contact in case something really awful happened.”

  I hunted in my plastic bag for Jack’s business card. Over the years I’d given many anxious fellow travelers my phone number, secure in the knowledge that any attempt to make a call on a foreign telephone would inevitably prove more daunting than whatever crisis was at hand.

  “You could leave a message for me there,” I said. “But I only expect to be in Budapest a couple of weeks.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’re really nice, Cassandra. Are you really from Kalamazoo?”

  “A long time ago,” I said.

  The menu at the Gellért restaurant was full of paprika and goulash and intriguing items like “Roast stag à la Forester’s Daughter.”

  “Paprika, paprika! I’m not sure it’s healthy to eat so much orange food,” said Jack, settling for salad.

  Not being vegetarian, I had a wider choice, and ordered duck in plum sauce and some roast potatoes.

  Eva’s red suit was elegant enough for the dining room, and her loosely pinned-up blond hair was more sexy than disheveled, but Jack and I looked distinctly damp and casual. I was wearing jeans with my (extremely) crushed linen shirt, and Jack’s forties-style dress was looking every one of its decades.

  While we waited for Señor Martínez to join us I told Jack and Eva about my encounter with Cathy Snapp in the steam room.

  “The little girl is four and she doesn’t speak at all? Something terrible must have happened to her,” said Eva.

  “How old was she when they got her? Nine months?” asked Jack. “She must have been adopted right at the age when she would have started speaking. Maybe the change from Romanian to English was too confusing.”

  “If you believe Chomsky, that all languages are fundamentally alike, then it shouldn’t matter that Emma was born into a Romanian-speaking family and only heard Romanian in her very formative months. She should have been able to switch into English without any problem. What I wonder is if no one talked to Emma at all. Another school of thought from Chomsky says you have to learn your language from an adult with whom you have a strong relationship.”

  “That sounds like you and your Spanish teacher, Cassandra,” said Jack. “What was her name?”

  “Dede,” I sighed. “Miss Paulsen.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. She was twenty-five. She was from northern Michigan and had majored in Spanish and Education. She’d only been to Spain once, for a month. Her apartment was full of things like posters of bullfights and those leather wine bags. She left me with a very bad Spanish accent.”

  “I think your parents are very important,” Eva interrupted. It seemed to make her nervous when Jack and I talked so familiarly about old lovers. “My father was a teacher and he always read to me and talked to me. I pronounce many words just as he did.”

  “My mother talked to me,” said Jack. “Endlessly. But I managed to tune her out except for a few ladylike phrases that pop out from time to time in the most unexpected situations. I go for Chomsky. I know it’s why I never worry about speaking a foreign language. To me they’re all exactly the same.”

  “Chomsky,” I told them, “theorizes that language is innate; ‘an organ of the mind,’ he calls it. It’s in our genes, we don’t invent it. He says that children don’t learn language, they bring it with them when they’re born.”

  “If you bring language with you when you’re born,” asked Jack, “what language is it?”

  “It’s more of a template,” I said.

  “How do you know that the little girl wasn’t born to Hungarian-speaking people?” Eva wanted to know. “She comes from Transylvania, which used to belong to Hungary.”

  “No wonder then,” said Jack. “If she has a Hungarian language template on her brain, no wonder she’s confused. Probably she’s got a paprika deficiency, causing the root words to agglutinate in her poor little mind.”

  “The trouble is,” I went on, “all theories about language are quite difficult to test. Almost no children grow up without language, so it’s hard to have a pure research subject. To really test out Chomsky’s theories, you’d have to let a child grow up on an isolated island and see if the child developed a language or not, and whether it was like the languages we know. But of course, morally, you can’t do an experiment like that.”

  “Of course you can,” countered Jack. “We call it speaking Strine. That’s Australian English to you, Eva.”

  Señor Martínez was a rotund man of fifty, with a damp enthusiastic handshake and what the Japanese have taken to calling a “bar-code head”—in which long strands of what hair remains on a man’s head are pasted in straight lines across a pale round expanse of skull. The face under the black and white design was eager and even lusty. As he told us, he was from Bilbao but he’d had an Andalucían mother and this had given him a great zest for life, a zest that became more apparent as the glasses of red “Bull’s Blood” wine disappeared.

  Señor Martínez fell into my Spanish as passionately as into a beloved’s arms. Not that he’d previously been parsimonious (according to Jack) with his ungrammatical English, but his Spanish was a force of nature that now gushed out of his mouth like water from a blocked pipe.

  In this case the metaphor was particularly appropriate. Señor Martínez was a salesman for a large Spanish bathroom fixture factory and he was here to sell well-designed toilets, bidets, sinks and tubs to the Hungarians. He happened to have his portfolio with him and was not at all shy about immediately showing me glossy color photographs. I felt almost as if we were looking at pornography, particularly the way his stubby, ringed hand lingered over the curved porcelain smoothness of the bidets.

  “And you’re the one who will be my translator?” he said to me in Spanish. “Then please tell Señora Eva that her eyes are as blue as the Mediterranean.”

  “Señor Martínez says he’s dying to try some paprika chicken,” I said. “But I suggested the stuffed carp.”

  Eva handed him her menu. “Please.”

  “I speak of love, not food.” He pushed it away and fixed her with a tender look.

  “I can’t persuade him,” I said. “It’s gotta be the chicken.”

  The Gypsy musicians had appeared and, without preliminaries, launched into a wild csárdás, startling a party of elderly British tourists who had been quietly whingeing about the prices on the menu (“I thought you said Eastern Europe was a bargain, Colin.”). There were four musicians, dressed in blousy white embroidered shirts and tight black trousers. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking, but on the surface they were as shiny as copper pennies. The lead violinist had spotted Eva as both Hungarian and gorgeous, and our soup had hardly been set in front of us before he and his violin were leaning over her shoulder. His bowing was so intense it was more like archery.

  Eva toasted the violinist with her wine and asked for a special song, not another wild tune, but something haunting and strange.

  “Tell Señor Martínez this is a real Gypsy tune, not for tourists.”

  I translated and Señor Martínez sighed eloquently, his hand at his heart, “The Spanish and the Hungarians are very much alike. We have the wildness and also the sadness, what we call duende. We have both been conquered peoples, we have the souls of Gypsies and the heads for business. That is why I think I can sell our beautiful bathroom fixtures here. I believe they will be understood. And now yo
u have democracy. Hungary, I salute you!” He raised his glass. “Down with fascism!”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Eva.

  “He says he wishes that paprika chicken would hurry up. He’s starving!”

  But Señor Martínez was a single-minded man when it came to the similarities between Hungary and Spain, and the possibility of a spectacular union, plumbing and otherwise, between them.

  While the Gypsies made wild music over our shoulders, Señor Martínez outlined a theory of history. “Both Christian Spain and Christian Hungary fought against the infidel Arabs,” he said. “We stopped the Mohammedans from overrunning Europe.”

  “But surely you must admit, Señor Martínez,” I corrected him, “that the Moors in Spain created a brilliant civilization of poetry, philosophy, gardens. Not only did they have the first lighted, paved streets in Europe, they had the first sewage system in the world. Plumbing, Señor, they had plumbing.”

  “The Reconquista was Spain’s finest moment,” he disagreed.

  “What’s he saying?” Eva demanded.

  “He thinks the Turks have gotten a bad rap,” I said. “He says, Really, what’s so bad about a culture that drinks coffee and sits around in bathtubs all day?”

  “The Turkish infidels?” said Eva, shocked.

  “What does Eva say?” he asked.

  “She says she wishes these Gypsy musicians would take a hike. They’re starting to remind her of a Luftwaffe raid, except there are no bomb shelters.”

  Señor Martínez stared at me a moment and then spoke in laborious English, with a pleading glance at Eva, “I am think Señora Reilly is have fun with me.”

  “Oh no, Señor Martínez, you’re wrong about that. Believe me, I’m not having much fun at all.”

  Eva whispered, “Cassandra, don’t tease the poor man so much. He’s paying for our meal.”

  “Cassandra, you are being just the slightest bit rude, dear.” Jack smiled wickedly. “See? There’s my mother speaking.”

  I opened my mouth for another jibe, but put in a bite of duck in plum sauce instead. I’d just caught, from the corner of my eye, the entrance of the Snapp family into the restaurant. Cathy saw me first and waved, and then Archie dragged them all over to say hello. I wondered why Emma was staring so hard. But then I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all. Her attention was completely absorbed by the frenzied musician between me and Eva and, of course, by his violin.

  “Don’t let us disturb you,” said Archie, as he crowded his children almost on top of us.

  “Not at all, not at all, sit down here with us,” I said, with a heartiness that astounded Jack. “Let me introduce you all around. This is Eva Kálvin, and Jacqueline Opal, and I’m especially delighted for you to meet Señor Martínez from Spain. Señor Martínez is in the bathroom fixture business. I think he’d make a great interview for your newspaper. He grew up in the Franco period, so of course he sympathizes with the Hungarians getting their first taste of freedom, with all the excitement and pitfalls that go along with a market economy…”

  “Just the kind of information I’ve been wanting to get,” said Archie happily. “Cómo está usted, Señor? I forgot to tell you in the train, Cassandra, that I speak a little Spanish myself.”

  “All the better,” I said. “All the better.”

  Chapter Five

  A WEEK HAD PASSED since my arrival in Budapest, and already I’d established my little routines, although they were not the routines I’d imagined for myself on the train from Vienna. No, I’d envisioned a leisurely spring experience in the heart of Central Europe: reading newspapers in cafés, strolling along the Corso above the Danube, queuing for tickets outside the Opera House. And if I’d also hoped for a wild, though brief, romance, who could blame me?

  But instead, the days had slipped into a dispiriting sameness. Yes, I was awakened every morning with a kiss on the cheek and a cup of coffee from blond, red-suited Eva. But the sweet nothings she whispered to me were only invitations to join her in the office at nine o’clock sharp. And even if I’d had an inclination to lie in bed all morning, the sight of Mrs. Nagy, lurking in the winter garden with her crazed hair and tightly buttoned cardigan, was enough to get me on my feet.

  Señor Martínez was still hanging around Budapest, attempting to sell his line of bathroom fixtures to hotels and office buildings. I accompanied him on several sales trips. He poured his heart out to me about Eva, and I told him that underneath her flirtatious exterior she was a hard-hearted businesswoman and a raging feminist, but this put him off somewhat less than I had hoped.

  Of course, I could have moved out of Mrs. Nagy’s flat and found myself a nice room in a hotel and lived just the way I wanted while waiting for my ticket to China to be confirmed. Call it curiosity, call it infatuation… or call it a simple case of inflation. Prices had jumped since I’d last been to Hungary. In spite of my constant travels, which hint at trust funds or other fabulous resources, I live on a slim budget provided by my work as a translator. The money to travel to China had come mainly from six months in the SAB office. I hated to admit it, but the forints from O.K. Temporary Secretarial Services were coming in handy.

  Still, I was restless, and when I got my train reservations and found out I couldn’t leave for another two weeks, I chafed. Jack was restless too. Every afternoon, if we could manage it, we met at four for tea and pastries somewhere, at either a small espresso bar near the O.K. office or at one of the deliciously expensive cafés, Ruszwurm’s on Castle Hill or Gerbeaud’s in Pest. There we’d briefly commiserate about our current, if temporary, fate as secretaries in Budapest, and then spend the rest of the time arguing about how serious Jack had really been about converting to Hinduism in Java, if it had really rained the entire month we were in Chile and whether I still owed Jack money for the train fare to Recife from São Paulo.

  Late one afternoon, as we were on our second strudel at the espresso bar, the door opened and in came Eva, clutching her cellular phone in some agitation. Jack and I both started guiltily—such was the effect this hard-working Hungarian entrepreneur had on us. My first thought was that Señor Martínez had come to grief somewhere in Szeged, where he’d gone to introduce his fixtures and where I’d refused to accompany him. But that was incorrect.

  “It’s a murder,” Eva said, pointing at the phone as if the terrible news were still flowing out of it.

  It was some time before we could get all the details.

  “But I don’t know how this Bree—is she a cheese?—has got my phone number,” repeated Eva irritably. “I only know I’m in a taxi after my meeting and the phone rings. It’s a girl asking for Cassandra. She says she’s calling from a place in Romania and something bad has happened to her grandmother. A murder.”

  “But you’re sure she didn’t say that Gladys had been killed?”

  “No, I told you! She said that her grandmother has done the murder. No, I mean, the police think she has done the murder, but of course she hasn’t.”

  “Of course not,” I said warmly. It was completely impossible to imagine Gladys Bentwhistle with her raspberry dice bolo tie killing anyone, especially in Romania. “And where was she calling from, did you say?”

  “The Arcata Spa Hotel, in the village of Arcata. It’s in Transylvania, in the Carpathian Mountains.”

  “But how did she know how to reach me in Budapest?” I asked again.

  “For the hundredth time, Cassandra, I don’t know! But I do know she wants you to go there because you speak Romanian. She was very upset.”

  Jack had been eating our second strudels through most of this. Now she said calmly, “Well, of course you have to go, Cassandra. It’s your duty to help them. And I’ll have to go with you to make sure nothing happens to you, in case it’s a dangerous situation. And Eva will have to drive us there because she knows where the hell the Carpathians are and because she speaks Hungarian.”

  Jack looked more lively than she had since I’d arrived.

  “I’v
e never been to Romania. I suppose we’ll have to take lots of supplies.”

  Eva was staring at her. “But we can’t just drop the business, Jack. It’s not … professional.”

  Jack glanced at her watch. “It’s only five o’clock. How long would it take to drive there?”

  Eva shook her head. “I don’t know. Four or five hours to the border at Oradea and then perhaps another six, depending on the roads, to Arcata.”

  “There you have it. It’s Friday night. Ten hours and we’re at the scene of the crime. You and Cassandra help sort this thing out and we’re in the car and headed back to Budapest. Maybe we’ll even have time for some sightseeing in Transylvania.”

  I had been about to protest that I was on my way to China and didn’t need a side trip to Romania, whatever the reason, but Jack caught me up in her desire to be away and quickly. Eva had not seen this side of her partner yet, but I certainly had. Any sort of jaunt always brightened Jack’s face; she was pining away for a change of scene after two months in Budapest.

  I had to admit too, I was curious—and worried—about Gladys. Romania wasn’t technically a police state anymore, but I wasn’t completely confident in their legal system. If Gladys was in any kind of trouble, she would definitely need help.

  “But we have dinner arranged with Señor Martínez tonight!” said Eva.

  That settled it.

  Jack and I stood up at the same time. “If you’re not going with us, we’re renting a car and driving there ourselves,” Jack announced. “And who knows if we’ll ever come back?”