“I know you’ll hate us,” Jack said, “but we found a sweet little outdoor restaurant by a stream, where they served us freshly grilled trout and a lovely bottle of white wine. I think the wine helped put me in the mood. When I came upstairs there was Bree in my room, just waiting …”
“Did Eva say anything about me?”
“She says she’s never met anyone like you before.”
“She really said that?”
“Yes. She said she thinks you’re a bad influence on me.”
Zsoska met me outside the Arcata Spa Hotel at nine-thirty, only half an hour later than she’d agreed. She was wearing a hot pink training suit of rustling-thin fabric, running shoes, and a great deal of small jewelry, a dozen little gold rings, bracelets and lockets. Also aviator-style sunglasses. Her long, layered, gold-striped black hair bounced as she hopped out of the car to attract my attention with a wave.
She invited me into her Dacia, which was red and newly washed and as sporty as an Eastern European model could be. Gold chains hung from the rear-view mirror. She had stretched a thin tee-shirt with the Playboy bunny logo over the back of the driver’s seat.
Zsoska said she wanted to practice her English with me rather than speak Romanian or use the Hungarian phrase book. This meant that I was going to have to find a way to reorganize Zsoska’s passionate but fragmented thoughts into more coherent linguistic units. In my travels I’ve met with all sorts of English speakers, from the brilliantly fluent, with accents straight from the BBC World Service, to those for whom English is a kind of game played with a ball, the object being only to keep things moving. Zsoska was a challenge, requiring intuition and patience, particularly in the matter of pronouns, with which she had a very loose way. I’d read in the Berlitz phrase book that ő in Hungarian could mean either he, she or it; in German, which, in her fashion, Zsoska also spoke, sie or Sie can mean she, they or you.
This gender-bending method of assigning pronouns was part of the reason that Zsoska’s sentences were frequently impenetrable. Although they were packed with feeling and assisted by eyebrows, frowns and the occasional charming smile, they tended to lack the logic so comforting to a listener.
“First needing petrol. Petrol very much money for me.”
She wore the stern expression that made Archie quail. I suspected that it was pride.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get the petrol,” I said.
She smiled happily. “We having nice day. Going far.”
Driving down through the villas and garden houses, we passed many people who stared at her (women) and many who waved (men).
“I suppose you’ve been living here a long time.”
“How that?”
I repeated it.
“I growing up in next village,” she said. “Two years, I working here hotel restaurant. Bad, very bad. No money in Romania. No one money.”
Her beautiful face wore its fierce expression again. “I wanting leaving. Deutschland. Deutsch man my friend. Not Deutsch, living Deutschland. Sass.”
“Sass? You mean Saxon?”
“Yes,” she answered. “She growing up Sighişoara, going Deutschland, but no liking Deutsch girls, liking Magyar. Me. They coming back seeing me soon. I wanting leave here, go back Deutschland with her. Living good there.”
“He?” I asked. “Him?”
“Yes, he, he, he. I knowing English! He-man. Rolf.”
We filled up the tank at a single-pump station just outside Arcata and set off. The sun glistened off the dew on the fields, and the foothills began to turn into mountains. Zsoska put a cassette of German pop music in her car stereo. I had no idea where we were going, or exactly how I should steer the conversation to find out what Archie wanted to know.
“Harghita mountains,” she said, waving out the window. “My family Székely, living here long time.”
Well, Archie was right about that then. And the Székelys were a romantic lot, who had in medieval times protected the border against the Mongols from Asia. I’d heard that the Székelys had never been serfs, that they’d always lived in these mountains and valleys, a law unto themselves. It was easy to imagine Zsoska, with her Tartar cheekbones and hawk-like nose, in an embroidered sheepskin vest, in boots, on horseback, looting and marauding … easier to imagine her on the range than in the restaurant.
Zsoska had been singing along to a peppy Bavarian pop tune, and it seemed to conjure up happy thoughts. She said, “They having Mercedes.”
“Who?”
“My friend, Rolf, from Deutschland.”
“Oh, right, Rolf.”
“You? Car?”
“Me? No.”
She looked puzzled. “I car, you no car. Why? You American, yes?”
I tried to explain that I didn’t live in America, didn’t live anywhere, traveled frequently, and had very few possessions at all. She listened to me disbelievingly. “I car, Romania,” she said several times, pointing at her gold-locketed chest. “You, no car, America, no understanding.”
“What if we speak in Romanian?” I said.
“No. Practice English!” She looked affronted. “I wanting tell you my life.”
Well, this was good news, that she was going to volunteer information. Perhaps I would find a way to prepare her for Emma.
I said, “So you’re hoping to move to Germany soon? Deutschland?”
“I wanting marry Rolf, but with her I having problem, many problem. They jealous.” Zsoska turned angrily to me. “Why, why? I having no life. I going not out at night. I staying home. No jealous, no jealous me. She coming visit, bringing friend, that friend liking me. I do nothing. You jealous.”
“No, I’m not jealous. You mean, ‘he is jealous.’ ”
“How that?”
“Never mind. I understanding, I mean, I understand.”
Then a long story followed, punctuated by the sounds of accordions, slapping heels and the occasional yodel from the car stereo. As far as I could make out, this Saxon Rolf was one of the many thousands of German-speaking Romanians who had left the country as soon as Romanians were issued passports after 1989. There was a German law that anyone—no matter if their family had left Germany five centuries ago—who was ethnically German could return to Germany. Zsoska’s boyfriend was one of these.
I began to space out on the lengthy story, in which half a dozen people, without names and with a variety of pronouns to describe them, seemed to be distrusting Zsoska. For no good reason. After a while, instead of listening, I only watched the landscape. We had passed through forested mountains into a wide valley, with farms stretching green in every direction. There were no tractors or other farm machinery, though this was probably due more to the poor economy than to a desire to keep to the old ways. From time to time we passed a horse-drawn cart, heavy and creaking, piled with people going to or from the fields. This region must be one of the last places in Europe where you could still get a sense of how life had rolled on for centuries.
“I already having one baby, I no wanting more now,” Zsoska was saying, and I suddenly paid attention.
“You have a child?”
“No.”
“But did you have a baby?”
“I married only age seven, no, seventeen,” she said sullenly. “Bad man, man drinking. We living Tîrgu Mureş, he working, me working. I wanting divorce, he hitting me. I coming back to parents, divorce.”
“But did you have a baby?”
“Why asking you?” she demanded, suddenly furious. Without warning she did an abrupt U-turn in the middle of all that green lushness, under a bright blue sky wheeling with birds. “We going no more. We going back my village. Yes.” She was calming down, perhaps fearful that I wouldn’t think this was enough of an excursion. “There nothing here, boring country, farms, horses, nothing. You going my house, Lupea, seeing dog.” She gave me her radiant smile, and turned up the stereo so that the day was pierced by the nasal voice of a woman singing “Baby, baby, Ich liebe dich!”
“R
olf giving me cassettes,” she said. “We are liking music!”
Zsoska’s village was about five kilometers from Arcata. There was a stream overhung with willows and birches, and fields stretching out on either side of the road. Many of the houses were robin’s-egg blue, trimmed with kelly green. These were simpler homes than those in Arcata, but many had the traditional gate surmounted by a long birdhouse. Most had vegetable gardens, edged with tulips and pansies. Off the main square was a Catholic church, but not an Orthodox one; this was a Székely village and many people probably didn’t even speak much Romanian. There was no restaurant, but a small shop where Zsoska took me inside. The shelves were practically bare, with only plastic bottles of Pepsi, some chocolate, a great deal of plum brandy, or ţuicǎ, and a few glass jars of unidentifiable fruits and vegetables.
“What wanting you?” Zsoska asked. “You see we having nothing.”
“How about some Pepsi?” I bought two bottles of it and some chocolate. Zsoska approved of my spending money and said something to the middle-aged shopkeeper that made him look at me with respect.
“America, very good,” he said in English. “Clint Eastwood very good. Bang! Bang!”
The main street was the only paved road in the village. Zsoska parked down a dirt street in front of a small blue house, and we went inside. The furniture was sparse and rather low to the ground. There was a kind of divan covered in red shag material and a coffee table with a television set on it. In the kitchen were a table and four chairs, a stove and no refrigerator, and some empty-looking cupboards.
We sat at the kitchen table and poured ourselves some warm Pepsi. A little puppy ran inside and Zsoska swept it up, hugging it tightly.
“This Zizi,” she said. “Only one who is understanding me.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“My mother…” She searched for the right word. “Building, milk?”
“A dairy?”
“My father, no working. Pension—600 lei month.” That was just over a dollar, barely a pound.
I was trying to imagine Emma here. Who would have taken care of her? Zsoska and her mother had to work; her father was probably sitting around with his friends drinking ţuicǎ most of the day. The house had four rooms: a kitchen, a small living room, and two bedrooms. There was indoor plumbing, but not much of it.
I tried again. “Zsoska, did you give up your baby for adoption?”
“How that?”
“The baby you had, with your husband, what happened to her?”
“If I keeping baby, husband making me stay. I telling nobody. Baby sick, no food, going hospital. In hospital, Tîrgu Mureş, they saying no problem with baby, we finding parents, rich people from America, from France, from Deutschland. You signing paper.” Zsoska mimed signing. “I getting money and buying car, helping parents. Leaving husband. Now I am having Sass friend from Deutschland, but they jealous. I am twenty-two. I no wanting more baby, no wanting make Rolf jealous. Now no more baby.”
She gestured to her flat stomach and held Zizi closer.
I understood suddenly that Zsoska had just had an abortion, because Rolf thought that she might have been fooling around with one of his friends and she didn’t think she could persuade him otherwise.
“Zsoska,” I said carefully. “What would you say if your baby, the baby you had in Tîrgu Mureş… if you saw her again? How would you feel?”
She stared at me, uncomprehending. “That baby going away. I never seeing that baby. That not baby I am talking about now.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “But she was a real baby. The nurses at the hospital must have kept the baby for a while and then … and then someone adopted her, a couple from America took her back to America.”
“How you knowing? How you knowing baby is she-baby?”
“Well … because I met the father and sister and…”
Zsoska’s black eyes were wide with alarm. She pounded the table. “Snapps!” she said. “Now I knowing why they always trying talking me!”
“Yes, and that little girl, Emma, is…”
“Emoke,” she said. “Her name Emoke.”
Zsoska jumped up, and the little dog fell away from her with a thump, forgotten. “No milk for that baby, cold cold winter. No food anywhere, fighting in the streets, revolution. Baby so sick, I think that baby die. Mother, father never seeing Emoke.”
Zsoska paced the kitchen. Suddenly she stopped and looked anguished. “Rolf finding out I having child, no, no, no. I telling her no married before!”
“There’s no reason he needs to find out about Emma—Emoke. After all, he lives in Germany.”
“He coming soon visit. No, no!”
She stopped and glared at me. “What wrong that child? She no speaking.”
“Well… you see… the Snapps were hoping to find out if there was anything in your family, anything that…”
“My family, we speaking!” She hadn’t sat back down, she was so agitated, and now she grabbed her purse and keys. “Come.”
In the red Dacia her child had bought for her, Zsoska drove me back to the hotel. She did not say another word, in any of her languages.
Outside the treatment center we found an alarming scene in progress. Gladys, in a red flannel bathrobe and felt slippers, her white hair damp and disheveled, and without her glasses, was standing in the entryway behind Dr. Gabor, who held out both arms as if to protect her. Two men looking young and unhappy were there in full police regalia: brushed blue uniforms, black boots, guns and tricorn hats. They were gesturing at Gladys and trying to get her to come with them into the open back door of their police car.
Off to the side, in her leather jacket, Bree was videotaping the whole thing.
Zsoska pulled up beside the police car and I jumped out.
“What’s going on?”
“Mrs. Really, Mrs. Really,” said Dr. Gabor. “You are a witness, these men are trying to abduct Mrs. Bentwhistle. I say to them, Have you an arrest warrant? I say to them, This is not Ceauşescu times any longer, my friends. You can not just come and take off innocent people to your torture chambers. Securitate! No more!” He began to shout at the thoroughly cowed-looking policemen again. The crowd of bath attendants, doctors and nurses assembling behind him got into the spirit and all began shouting in Hungarian, probably something along the lines of Ceauşescu was a murderer and all Romanians were murderers. The black dogs that always collected around Gladys howled in unison.
I turned to Gladys. Someone had brought her glasses and she attached them firmly to her straight nose.
“Gladys, are you all right?”
“Sure thing, hon. They’ll never take me alive!”
“What happened?”
“I’d just come out of that shower-massage room—you know, twenty minutes of that wakes you right up!—and was going for my next appointment at the mud baths, when these two bozos come up behind me and take me by the elbows. Well, I learned how to deal with muggers in my self-defense class, so I gave one a jab in the stomach and the other a kick in the knee cap, and hightailed it for Gabor’s office. They caught up with us right here. Bree was walking by with her video camera, so I told her, Get this on tape. We’re suing!”
Someone had alerted Nadia and she came rushing up from her office, out of breath. Her bun had come undone and strands of dark hair fell across her round face.
When the two policemen saw Nadia they burst into explanations, and these I could partly understand: All they had wanted was to ask the American lady a few more questions; they had wanted to take her down to their office to get a statement; whether or not Gladys was a murderer, she had been a witness, and their superiors in Bucharest were demanding that some action be taken.
“Yes, yes,” Nadia said. “Gladys, they are not arresting you. Not to worry. They have questions only.”
“We know the kind of questions the Securitate ask!” Dr. Gabor shouted. “They turn you into informers, they torture you if you don’t answer.”
“Where did the Securitate go then?” Dr. Gabor countered. “After the so-called revolution that keeps the same men in power, you think the Securitate just disappear? No! They are still living all around the country. They are used to torture and intimidation. They are Romanian.” For the benefit of the police he repeated the same thing in Romanian.
The two policemen, angry now, burst into justifications and counter-accusations. They had dealt with Dr. Gabor in the past. He was trying to protect his clinic as usual. But they were well aware that he and Dr. Pustulescu had had a quarrel, and that Dr. Pustulescu had demoted him the day before the murder. He shouldn’t think he himself was not under suspicion.
“I have been under suspicion my whole life in this godforsaken country,” Dr. Gabor said scornfully. “Are you telling me something new?”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere without a lawyer,” said Gladys. “The idea I’d kill some aging Lothario is a load of bull. They already questioned me and I told them I was innocent. I know my rights. I stand with the Hungarians on this one. Hell no, don’t you know. The Romanians have got to go!” she chanted, and a few enthusiastic bath attendants took it up. The black dogs, who now numbered six, barked wildly. Bree moved in for a close-up of her grand- mother. It was like watching a made-for-nightly-news demonstration.
Nadia stood helpless, hands up in the patty-cake way, saying, “Please, no Yugoslavia. No Yugoslavia.”
Finally, the Romanian cops got back in their car, without Gladys, and drove off. A cheer went up from the clinic staff, and Dr. Gabor said to me, “We begin now to make a stand against the tyranny of the Romanians.”
Nadia said to him in English, “You just make more trouble for Gladys. They only want her to sign paper. You watch, they come back and arrest her next. And it is your fault!”
But Dr. Gabor, flushed with the success of the impromptu revolt, had turned away. “Now, now, Mrs. Bentwhistle,” he was saying, “you see, nothing to worry about. We Magyars will protect you.”
Trouble in Transylvania Page 13