It could have been a crime of passion, but it was more likely to have been one of money. Dr. Pustulescu’s wife probably had the most to gain from his death. She would have been left a rich widow. How could I find out that information? Perhaps Nadia could help.
But first it seemed worthwhile to interview Margit.
“Margit seems kind of unstable to me,” I said to Eva, after we’d dressed and were back outside in the corridor. “At first I thought she was having an affair with Dr. Gabor, but then I decided not.”
“Is he married?”
“He’s a widower.”
“Oh, like you?” Eva had heard the rumor, but obviously she didn’t believe it. She laughed. “You probably haven’t ever even been with a man.”
“Please don’t cast aspersions on my deceased husband. André may not have been a man in the fullest sense of the word, but he served his purpose.”
We went upstairs to Dr. Gabor’s office, where we found Margit filing. “Can I … help you?”
Eva took over in Hungarian, much to Margit’s surprise. She jumped up from behind the doctor’s desk and grabbed her stethoscope. I thought she was going to make one of her fast escapes, so I reached out a hand to stop her. Her arm was wiry but emaciated, and the skin had a dry electric feel.
I burst out, “We need to know about Dr. Pustulescu.”
Eva repeated it in Hungarian, and listened to Margit’s shrugging answer.
“She says she doesn’t know anything. She never had anything to do with him.”
“That’s impossible. Margit works with Dr. Gabor and together they work with all the foreign patients getting Ionvital treatment. Of anyone at the clinic she must know more about what was going on around here than she’s saying. We’ll shock her. Tell her we know that she was having an affair with the old guy.” Eva looked dubious but spoke anyway.
Margit looked at me with furious and hurt eyes. “Lying!” she said in English, followed by a whole torrent of Hungarian, none of it flattering to judge by Eva’s pained expression.
At this juncture Dr. Gabor appeared, and Margit took the opportunity to rush past him into the corridor.
“That girl,” he said. “What’s the hurry? I am always asking her. Hallo, Mrs. Really, you have a friend?”
I introduced him to Eva. “A friend from Budapest. We’ve just heard some troubling things about Dr. Pustulescu,” I began.
“But you are Hungarian,” Gabor said to Eva. “That is wonderful. You come from Budapest! Budapest, the most magical city in the world! Tell me, how you find this country?”
Eva stammered, “I like it very much.”
“No, it is a terrible country,” Dr. Gabor laughed. “How much suffering we go through, you can not imagine. But we do not give up. We are working for freedom, someday to be not united back with Hungary, but to be on equal terms. Free borders, Magyar literature taught in the schools, a reconnection with Central Europe, which is our true home…” He launched into Hungarian and Eva responded eagerly. I thought I heard the words Milan Kundera.
I had a suspicion that Margit knew more than she pretended about a number of things. It was time to see where she went when she vanished from Gabor’s office.
Aside from my strenuous treatments the day before I had not really investigated the full extent of the clinic’s resources. I started right outside Gabor’s office, asking everyone in white I met if they had seen Margit. No, no. No Margit. The bath attendants bustled past me with arms full of towels and with baskets of plastic sandals. Some accompanied elderly patients, some slid by me with blank looks, uncomprehending. Then a nurse pointed down a corridor where I hadn’t been yet, and I pushed through double doors into a steamy realm of whirlpools and saunas.
“Margit?” I kept asking, and someone pointed me on again. The atmosphere here was as close and muggy as a hothouse. The corridor had a greenish hue, and patients staggered past, all face and ghostly body, like lilies or orchids, white with invisible stems. The water here didn’t drip but hissed, like serpents roiling at the bottom of a ravine.
I heard the sound of retching and then bitter crying from behind a ladies’ restroom door, and without thinking I went in.
Someone was in one of the stalls, throwing up into the toilet. I had heard that sound in our family bathroom back when Maureen was giving up on the idea of being a nun.
When she came out, Margit’s face was pallid and her lipstick was smeared and garish. The superficial impression of vivacity she usually gave was gone and she looked older, and more tired.
“You’re pregnant,” I said in English, and saw by her expression that she understood me. “Aren’t you? Is it Pustulescu’s child?”
“Why do you care?” she said bitterly, and her English was clear and unhesitating, as good as Gabor’s or better. “You’re an American. You don’t have to live here. The old man is dead and no one misses him. Why do you keep asking questions?”
“Because of Gladys,” I said, but at the moment I didn’t quite convince even myself. “Can I do anything to help?”
Margit steadied herself against the sink, facing the mirror. “Help?”
“Why would you sleep with him, Margit?”
“He would have made me lose my job. That was the first reason. Afterwards he said he would tell Gabor. I knew Gabor would despise me if he found out. I was trapped.”
“How long did it go on?” I asked.
“Five years, six years. My husband never knew. He would say, Why can’t we have children, Margit? But when I became pregnant it might have been the doctor’s. I had four abortions in two years; the doctor always arranged for them in Bucharest.
“After that I was more careful; I was able to get birth control after the revolution. I kept thinking, He must die soon. Now he is dead, and I am glad he is dead, but I am pregnant again, and must abort again. I don’t want anyone to know. They knew in the clinic about Pustulescu, that I was his mistress. They hate me, everyone except Nadia. Nadia is a kind woman. The others hate me. I hate myself.” Margit stared into the mirror. Perspiration had come out on her forehead.
“Did you hate Pustulescu enough to kill him?”
“I hated him more than that. But I didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack, that’s all.”
“Who gave him his Ionvital shot every day? Did Gabor? Did you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that maybe it wasn’t a heart attack, either spontaneous or the result of a shock from a problem with the voltage meter. Maybe Pustulescu’s death had nothing to do with electricity. It would have been easy enough to substitute something for the Ionvital, something poisonous.”
“No one gave the doctor his shot besides himself. He was like his hero Ceauşescu. He trusted no one.”
But Margit’s eyes didn’t meet mine. Suddenly she bolted again for the toilet stall, though she had nothing left to vomit, except bile.
Back in Gabor’s office I found that he and Eva had been joined by the tenacious editor of The Washtenaw Weekly Gleaner.
“Hi Cass! I heard you talking about Dr. Gabor being a real Magyar patriot and I decided to get the background for my piece straight from the horse’s mouth. No more dull history. Real stories from real people.” Archie turned on his tape recorder. “I’ll start right in, Doctor. For most American readers, all the countries behind the old Iron Curtain seem pretty much the same. Can you tell me some differences?”
Gabor laughed. “What a big question, Mr. Snapp! I must refer you to Mrs. Kálvin about Hungary, which as you know has already in the last ten years shown many good changes in freedom and economy. In Poland of course you have the strong trade unions, you have since long time Solidarnosć and Lech Walesa. In the old Deutsche Demokratische Republik, East Germany, there was a coalition of Greens and other liberalizing tendencies—now they are together with the West and everyone is suffering. And then the Czechs! The Czech Republic (not the Slovaks, they are like Romanians, very corrupt and backward) is a country I admire very much. Th
ey had a very strong dissident movement for years before their revolution. Not like Romania, where most intellectuals and writers collaborated with the government. In Czechoslovakia they went to jail or took hard manual labor, like Havel in the brewery. There the intellectuals were part of the masses. Here in Romania there was almost no samizdat movement. Typewriters had to be turned in. We did not communicate among ourselves for fear of speaking to an informer.”
“So, Dr. Gabor, you’re saying that Romania had no opposition movement?”
“Hah! It had no opposition movement then. It has almost no opposition movement now. Because Romanians are used since Turkish times to bow down their necks to rulers. Only in Transylvania did the Magyars organize. But in secret.”
“But Ceauşescu’s regime didn’t just fade away, it was overthrown,” said Archie. “It was the bloodiest of all the uprisings.”
“Yes, we can be proud we were the only Eastern European country to overthrow such a tyrant. But we are also the only country, except Bulgaria and then later Lithuania, to have voted in another Communist government. The National Salvation Front, coming into existence in the hours after Ceausescu tried to flee the country, is the Romanian Communist Party. It has another name, but the same faces. They pursue many exact same policies, including opposition to Magyar autonomy in Transylvania.”
“Romania’s leaders always blame Hungary when there is any violence between Romanians and Hungarians,” Eva interjected.
“Exactly,” said Gabor. “But it is always Romanian nationalists who start the violence. There is a group now called Vatra Româneascǎ, something like Romanian Hearth, very right-wing, with many members now from Securitate, Ceausescu’s old secret police. In 1990, in Tîrgu Mureş, 2,000 Romanian fascists attacked a peaceful demonstration of Hungarians.”
Eva said, “I remember that. Many thousands of us gathered in Budapest in solidarity with the Hungarians in Tîrgu Mureş.”
“What do you think, Cassandra?” Archie asked me.
“What?”
“About this whole question of nationalism. Isn’t it dangerous to revive these sentiments?”
Truth to tell, I had not been paying full attention. I was still preoccupied with Margit. Was it really possible that Gabor knew nothing of what Margit had gone through? Was he trying to protect her? Was he using her to protect himself? Or had the two conspired to kill Pustulescu together? What had Pustulescu and Gabor been quarreling about? If they’d been arguing in Gabor’s bugged office the police would have overheard them. Why didn’t they arrest Gabor then? Why were they so fixated on Gladys?
“Cassandra is an internationalist,” Eva answered for me. “She doesn’t believe in patriotism.”
“You have brought up a complicated subject, Mr. Snapp!” said Dr. Gabor. “Let us ask ourselves, What is nationalism? Is it the same as ethnic identity? Here in Transylvania we Magyars still have few rights. We ask for cultural rights—to have Hungarian on public signs in streets, to have classes taught in Hungarian at all levels, to have Hungarian radio and television. Not just to speak our language, but to have our Magyar identity respected.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Archie said. “I support Hungarian cultural rights. Minority rights must always be respected. What I think you all have to be worried about, over here in this neck of the woods, is anything that smacks of ethnic cleansing.”
“The Serbs are beasts,” Eva said. “And the Croats are not much better. It’s the truth to say that, not nationalism. It’s the truth to say that Romanians are corrupt and that Magyar culture is superior.”
“Come now, Eva,” Archie remonstrated. “Isn’t that the kind of ethnic stereotyping that starts wars in the first place?”
“I believe that some cultures are morally diseased, and that they must be uprooted and destroyed if they’re not to infect the rest of us,” she said. “You Americans are far too naive with your talk of tolerance. It’s not just that some societies are better than others, or some groups of people contribute more to the world, it’s that some cultures actually are so horrible that they can damage the rest of us. If you had lived through Hitler or Stalin or Ceauşescu you would know this. You would not be so optimistic and sure that everyone is equal.”
“I agree,” I said, surprising Eva with my enthusiasm. “I personally have been horribly damaged by Catholicism. And just by male culture in general. So when do we start uprooting?”
Dr. Gabor looked puzzled, and Archie laughed nervously. “Cassandra’s such a joker,” he said.
There was a knock at the door and Jack came in.
“I was wondering where all of you hang out. If I didn’t have my own ways of restoring youth I might be tempted to have some treatments myself. Cassandra’s looking younger every day… But I didn’t come to tell you that, only,” she turned to Archie, “I thought you might like to know, Cathy and Emma seem to have gone off.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean, gone off?”
“I saw them getting into Zsoska’s car; Cathy said they were going to Zsoska’s house. At first I didn’t think anything of it. But then I remembered the story and…”
Archie was already out the door, and I followed him.
Chapter Fourteen
SINCE THE POLSKI Fiat was still in pieces in front of the tourist office, that left only Nadia’s vehicle to take us to Lupea, unless we wanted to wait for the bus. But Nadia was at first not to be found. The tourist office was closed, with a padlock and chain on the door, and we had no idea where she lived. Archie and I searched the hotel lobby and half the town before we ran into her coming out of the police station in the lower quarter.
“What were you doing there?” I demanded.
“Autopsy finished. Heart of Dr. Pustulescu stopped.”
“But that’s good news,” I said. “Now they’ll believe he had a heart attack and stop bothering Gladys.”
“Heart can stop by too much electricity,” she said. “Gladys still in trouble. That is why I talk to police,” she said, averting her eyes. “Explain they must be careful with American citizen or big trouble with foreign aid. I say we call American Embassy now. Gladys must go to Bucharest before police arrest her. I must take her, but where is she? Always with those dirty dogs, I can not understand. People starving in Romania, she feeds dogs.”
“But Nadia, you know that Gladys didn’t do it.”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Tell that to judge, as you say.”
I had wanted to talk to her about Margit, and about the possibility that the doctor’s Ionvital shot had contained something to shorten life, not prolong it. But if the autopsy had proved it was the heart, who was I to suspect anything else? There was also something about the way Nadia had seemed to sneak out of the police station that made me hesitate. Instead I said, “What about the wife, the wife of Dr. Pustulescu?”
“What about wife?”
“I know that Pustulescu must have been a wealthy man from all his drugs, and that he had a young wife who would inherit.”
“Not true! Pustulescu too smart for that. He divorced and married three times. Wives no power.”
Archie broke in, “I know Gladys is in a tough situation, but Nadia, you’ve got to help us, you’ve got to drive us to Lupea.”
“Lupea? What Lupea?”
“Zsoska has kidnapped my children, Cathy and Emma.”
No averted eyes now. Nadia was all indignation. “No! I do not believe! We go, we go right now!”
“I never like that Zsoska anyway,” said Nadia in the car.
“Why not?”
“Always bad mood,” Nadia said. “Why she worry? She is beautiful.”
“Even beautiful women have their problems,” I said. “I know I do.”
Nadia stared at me for a minute, then gave a delighted laugh. “You are joking, yes?”
“What I want to know is, why would Cathy let her take Emma,” Archie was worrying. “Why would Cathy go herself?”
I privately wondered if Cathy saw Zsoska as an
answer to her prayers. Maybe she was thinking that they could just leave Emma in Romania, where they’d found her.
“I don’t know what Lynn is going to say,” said Archie. “I told her that everything would be just fine. I hate to worry her about this; she’s in the middle of a big project.”
“What kind of physics does she do?”
“Quantum mechanics,” said Archie humbly. “I don’t understand much about it. We met in English 101.”
The idea of having a physicist for a mother was practically beyond the realm of imagination for me. When I think of Rosemary Reilly, I see an Irish Kali: one hand stirring a pot of chicken stew on the stove, another arm holding a baby for bottle-feeding, while a third long arm snakes out to catch me a smack as I run by. She has seen me out the kitchen window, hanging by my knees from a tree limb, with my none-too-clean underpants showing.
“Catherine Frances, I’ll thank you not to set an example of degradation to your younger sisters and the neighborhood. And you twelve years old.”
My mother had a lovely rolling vocabulary; she never used a simple word when a more inventive one would do. Sometimes I think it was she who taught me how to be a translator, how to assess the precise meaning of a word, never with a definition, but with a synonym.
“What’s degradation?”
“Filth and perversity, young lady.”
“Don’t you mean perversion?”
“You shouldn’t even know a word like that. The idea!” She gives me another smack, as with a miraculous fourth arm she reaches out to catch a softball one of my brothers has lobbed through the open window.
In Lupea I wasn’t able to remember the way to Zsoska’s, and we spent ten minutes driving up and down dirt streets, looking for the robin’s-egg-blue house.
“This is it, I think,” I finally said. But it was more sound than sight that made me sure. For from inside the little house came the sound of the violin. It wasn’t Mozart, but a folk dance tune, measured and merry. And if I weren’t mistaken, there were two violins playing it.
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