My mother had said, “You’re not going anywhere if you don’t start minding your mother and paying more attention in church. You’ll be going to hell before you go to Egypt.”
But my father, who was, after all, brother to the aunt who gave us the National Geographic subscription, had been encouraging.
“Someday we’ll take the whole family to Egypt. Why not?” he’d said.
He’d been drinking, of course, but even a drunkard can dream.
It set me dreaming, dreaming in cold Michigan, of heat, alluvial mud, palm trees and ruins submerged in the Nile. Of King Tut’s gold and precious metals, of slit-eyed stone cats and women with thin gauze dresses. Of asking the Sphinx some hard questions. About God, families and why things had to be the way they were.
Yes, this trip I’d go to China, but after that definitely Egypt. Egypt for months and months, and after that all of Africa, never to return to England, always to be on the move, she-who-does-not-stop, that was me, Cassandra, that was what made me different from my family working for the Upjohn Company and having children and buying pickup trucks and going to Mass and drinking and having heart attacks. I wasn’t only a dreamer but a traveler, heat and love were my elements and I would never stop never go back never be cold again…
Far away in the land of the twin crowns, under the hot African sun, it took me a few moments to become fully aware of a loud commotion somewhere at the other end of the room. A series of screams traveled down the row of cubicles like vocal dominos.
“What’s going on?” I asked in all the languages I was capable of. In vain. The woman on the table next to me in the cubicle was frantically wiggling out of her cocoon of sheets; she’d managed to get one arm out and was unwrapping herself.
“Rendőrség!” she said. Archie’s Hungarian phrase book could have helped me, but unfortunately I had no arms to reach for it. The muslin trapped me like a shroud around a mummy.
There must be a fire, I thought. The mineral smell of the mud would mask any scent of smoke. Or an earthquake. Hadn’t Ilona hinted at the fact that this place was falling down? I looked up at the ceiling and saw cracks. Big buildings like these shouldn’t be constructed on soft saprogenic mud. In a few minutes perhaps we’d be part of the element that we originally crawled out from.
These thoughts took milliseconds, as I writhed frantically inside my muddy winding sheet. A feeling of panic was palpable in the corridor. The screaming got louder, and the attendants ran back and forth shouting either warnings or instructions. A minute or two later the first black-bedaubed figures began to appear, in flight. Their white hands, faces, and feet made them look like pale root vegetables recently pulled from dark wet earth.
Finally, I squeezed my hand up to the top of the muslin sheets and looked for the start of the folding. The woman next to me was already unwrapped; she was just starting to help me unpeel my cocoon, when we heard men’s voices shouting above the female shrieks, and with that my companion was off, leaving me to unfold the last of my chrysalis myself. Feet pounded past; it was a stampede of turnips. I sat on the side of my narrow table, the blood rushing to my head and muddling my escape plan. Should I run too? Yes, if it were a fire; no, if an earthquake. Then I should get under a doorway.
“Oh no you don’t.” To my astonishment these words were shouted in English, and in a very peppery way too. A blackened Gladys appeared in the open space by the showers, with a bucket of mud in one hand and a wooden mop handle in the other. She seemed to be fending off someone or something. Or else she had just gone crazy, like everyone else around me.
I peered around the corner of my cubicle and saw that her antagonists were the two young Romanian policemen of the day before. One of them looked cowed and horrified, but the other was steadily advancing on Gladys with a pair of handcuffs.
I got up unsteadily and went to her aid.
“Gladys, what’s going on?”
“They’re trying to arrest me!” She feinted with the bucket of mud, and the two boys drew back. One of them looked as if he would never get his eyes back to their proper shape. I consoled myself by thinking that I wasn’t exactly naked. All the important bits were covered, so to speak.
I mustered up as much Romanian as I could, and where I didn’t know the Romanian, threw in a kind of Franco-Italian.
“You can’t come down here and arrest this American woman. You don’t have any proof. First of all, you don’t know that Pustulescu didn’t have a heart attack, and secondly, I think that Gladys was set up. But the main thing is timing, boys. This is a sacred place, this is women’s space.”
“It’s no use, Cassie,” said Gladys. “They don’t want to talk about it. Better grab some mud.”
It was a scene from of one of the First People’s creation myths. Out of the chaos of darkness and water, out of the pulsating mysteries of the fecund earth, out of the loins of the Great Mother herself, two almost indeterminately-sexed figures had emerged—me and Gladys. We had metamorphosed from chaos, from a fertile soil that contained within it every sort of potency and possibility. Primal beings, we stood alone, confused and yet alert. Then, as if realizing a vital impulse to dive into the goo whence we’d come and to create other beings like ourselves, we looked around until we saw one of the hot-mud-bucket carts behind some curtains. Quickly I filled a bucket of my own with steaming globs of black silt and, rushing back to Gladys’s side, tossed it directly at the stiffly pressed blue uniform of one of the policemen.
“Okay, now we’re talking,” said Gladys, letting fly her own bucket of mud and coating the other cop in oozy black earth. “Now we’re going to town.”
The mud-drenched Romanians, furious now instead of just aggressively doing their duty, came towards us with renewed determination. The younger one held out the handcuffs, but the bigger and older one took out his gun and pointed it first at Gladys and then at me. He didn’t speak, judging that actions spoke louder than words.
“Holy Moly,” said Gladys, slopping him with another bucket. “You’ve got to disarm him, Cassie.”
“Me! What if it’s loaded?”
“Oh heck, the big chump isn’t going to shoot us. Probably. Jump him.”
I made a flying leap and the two of us came down hard in a fertile puddle of hot mud, the big chump somewhat harder than me because I was sitting on him. The gun went flying. “Now what, Gladys? He’s squirming uncomfortably.”
Gladys gave me and my hostage another good slopping. The other policeman, the younger one, who was not quite so bespattered, seemed to be thinking twice about this whole adventure. He didn’t take his gun out from his holster. “Ladies, ladies,” he said plaintively. “It’s my job.”
“Sit tight, honey,” Gladys instructed me. “Don’t let the big guy get away. I’ll deal with this other babe in the woods. He’s going to be putty in my hands.”
But already the big guy under me was rolling towards his gun. We grappled. In some respects, I had the advantage. Naked, I was like an oiled seal, squeezing through his grasp.
Sweet Jesus, this was probably my mother’s worst fantasy about the kind of thing I’d been up to since leaving Kalamazoo.
“Gladys, I’m losing him. Do something or he’ll get the gun again.”
“Sorry Cassie, I’ve got my hands full with the young’un.” She combined a karate kick to his knee with a bucket of mud over his head. The bucket stayed there a moment, giving the boy the look of a robot.
I couldn’t help laughing and the big guy chose that moment to heave me off him so that I went sliding stomach-first through a big black puddle.
He was reaching for the gun…
And then, from an unexpected direction, a huge slurp of mud came flying. It hit my hostage squarely in the face and momentarily blinded him.
I turned to look: a battalion of women, coming in twos and threes, was massing behind us with buckets. None had showered or gotten dressed: they were all wonderfully barbaric with streaks on their faces as well as their thighs and shoulders, w
ith their torsos caked with black as if they wore breastplates. Their bedaubed faces were set in expressions of resolution. For most of them this was probably the first time they had stood up to authority of any sort, much less Romanian police authority, much less stood up en masse, in solidarity.
As if to an unheard clarion call to arms, they began to plunge their hands into the hot mud and to fling handfuls at the cops. One of the women grabbed the gun and buried it in a bucket of silt; another helped me to my feet, while the others barraged my hostage with a steady rain of mud.
And as they fought and threw and tossed, the women began to talk, and then to shout and then to laugh and then to scream. I could only imagine what they were saying, since most of it was in Hungarian, and all of it was at a very high volume.
Perhaps it was something like: “You stinking Ceauşescu agents, you worked for a man who took the wealth of this country and spent it on a goddamned palace, a man who turned off the electricity and heat all over the country and let the people starve while he dined on caviar and strawberries in winter. You stood by while he destroyed our traditional villages and moved us into apartment blocks so that people like you could spy on us. You made us inform on each other.”
Maybe they were saying something like this: “You tried to control our bodies for twenty years, denied us birth control and watched us to see if we got pregnant. You wouldn’t let us have abortions, and let us die when we did it ourselves. You made us put our children in orphanages because we couldn’t feed them, you gave them AIDS because you refused to sterilize the needles or to import rubber gloves. You did all this to us and now you deserve everything, every grain of mud we’re heaping on you. May you rot in hell!”
Or maybe they were just shouting, “Nyah-nyah-nyah!”
The men had descended into our netherworld, into the realm of women, into the domain of the primal womb; they were two pathetic mortals surrounded by powerful creator hags who were rapidly reducing them to slimy slugs of ooze. They were emissaries of the sky gods being driven back by the earth goddesses. They were marauding Kurgans with weapons of death who had been met by the handmaidens of the Old Religion, by votaries of the Great Goddess who weren’t going to put up with any shit. By Inanna, by Artemis, by Durga and Afrekete, we should have done this a long time ago.
“Say Gladys,” I said. “Do you really think you should be holding his head under the mud like that? After all, we don’t want to kill him.”
“Sorry, Cassie. You’re right. I’m getting a little carried away here.” When she released her victim, he bolted sideways, scrabbled to his feet and began to run, slipping and wobbling, away from us, all the while emitting a low wheeze that sounded like a squashed rubber duck.
“Get moving, toad-face!” Gladys shouted. “And don’t forget your pal.”
The two policemen, almost unrecognizable in their coats of black, staggered and slipped past us into the hallway, while the women shouted their triumph and crowded around me and Gladys, touching our faces and shaking our hands.
What a moment! What a victory! Jack was right. If history had recorded more events like this in the books, it would have been a lot more fun to study in school.
“Now how the heck,” said Gladys, “are we going to get this fool stuff out of our hair?”
It took us a long while to clean the mud off the walls and the floor, and then off ourselves. I felt, even more than the first time I’d had the mud-bath experience, like a wet spaghetti noodle. At this rate, I was going to need a rest cure after I left Arcata.
When Gladys and I finally got ourselves clothed and out of the basement, we encountered Dr. Gabor and his new friend Eva Kálvin strolling the corridor.
“Oh Cassandra,” Eva said nervously. “Zoltán, that is, Dr. Gabor, suggested I teach some medical gymnastics while I’m here.”
“Were you practicing last night?”
She had the grace to blush. “I knocked on your door after dinner, but you didn’t seem to be in. I didn’t find you this morning either.”
“That’s because I was celebrating Beltane out in the woods.”
“Doc,” Gladys broke in. “We’ve had another incident, have you heard? We headed them off at the pass though. I don’t think they’ll be bothering us any time soon.”
“I agree,” said Gabor. “I think we will not see the police again. I saw them running out of the treatment center. They looked very bad, very muddy.”
“We had ’em on the run, Doc. You should have seen Cassie. She was my right hand through the whole battle, she stuck with me, and I mean stuck through the whole bust-up. We were firing rounds at them like we were defending the Alamo. Pow! They never knew what hit ’em.”
I left Gladys giving Gabor and Eva a blow-by-blow account of the recent attempted arrest and Alamo defense, and went out into the square in front of the hotel. I intended to find Nadia; I found, instead, a small crowd of familiar faces gathered around a big Volvo station wagon with German plates that had apparently just pulled up.
A tall woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, with taffy-colored short hair and glasses, was standing quietly listening to Archie as he waved his arms about and pointed at the hotel and then in the direction of Lupea. Cathy Snapp was shrugging in a kind of counterpoint rhythm to her father’s gesticulations, while Jack and Bree looked on.
What next? I thought, and went to investigate.
Chapter Eighteen
LYNN SNAPP HAD LEFT Munich the moment Archie had called her yesterday afternoon and had driven all night to get here. She didn’t look like the sort of woman to be fazed by much of anything.
“This is Cassandra Reilly,” Archie introduced us. “Cassandra’s a world traveler and translator and she’s been a lot of help.”
“It may look problematic at the moment,” I said. “But at least you don’t have to worry about Emma missing any violin lessons.”
“I brought all the food from the house with me,” Lynn said. “And a bag of fresh rolls and bread. Is anybody hungry?
Is anybody hungry? Frau Sophie would go crazy if she could see the bags with salami and bread sticking out, the boxes full of fresh fruits and vegetables. We stood around the car like ravenous beasts and for at least ten minutes no one said anything but “Oh my god, a banana” and “Tomatoes, I’m dreaming.”
If Archie was an exploding sun, radiating good will and curiosity in every direction, Lynn was an imploding sort of celestial object; she absorbed energy like a black hole and never grew any larger or brighter. Information went in her direction and somehow vanished without obviously being heard. She gave only infrequent signs of reacting to what anyone said. In a peculiar way, she reminded me of Emma.
“Mom,” Cathy said with her mouth full. “I am so glad you came.”
“There’s really nothing to worry about, honey,” said Archie.
“This has been a totally weird experience,” said Cathy.
“I think that Emma has probably been having a ball,” said Archie.
“Mom, I can’t believe you actually came here in the first place to get a kid.”
“Honey, this time we’ve seen so much more of the countryside than you and I did three years ago. I don’t think you and I realized how ethnically diverse it was. You’re going to love hearing about the Székelys. I didn’t realize that this part of Romania had so much history. The Székelys were warrior tribes that were encouraged to settle here in the Eastern Carpathians as border guards in the twelfth century. Well, can you imagine, it turns out that Emma is a Székely, not a Romanian. Now isn’t that going to be something to be proud of when she gets to school and wants to tell people about her ethnic background? You know, I’d like to do a piece for the Gleaner on the Székelys and their customs and traditions, I think our readers…”
“Cathy,” said her mother. “I’m a little worried about Willa Cather. She seems to have lost the top of her head. Was it a brainstorm, or did you have a fight with someone?”
“Uh, no … it’s just the way you wea
r it these days. Mom, I’ve been thinking—how would you feel if I went someplace else besides Harvard? Like Stanford or even… Berkeley?”
“I think right now we’ll all concentrate on going to Lupea.”
A decision was made to leave immediately and somehow Jack and Bree were invited along. The three of us sat in the back seat, while up in front Archie and Cathy competed for Lynn’s attention (how could poor Emma have gotten a word in edgewise, even if she’d been able to speak?) and occasionally brought us into it.
“What’s this about Berkeley?” Archie said at some point. “Isn’t that where Bree goes? Have you been talking to her?”
“No,” said Bree firmly.
“Where did you go, Cassandra?” he asked. “Western Michigan? Ann Arbor?”
“Neither.”
“A little farther afield, eh?”
“You could say that.”
“Even if I went to Berkeley,” interrupted Cathy, stung by Bree’s indifference, “I wouldn’t do anything stupid like Film Studies. I’m thinking of pre-med. I’d like to help people with incurable diseases.”
“That’s my girl,” said Archie.
“Are you still reading The Magic Mountain?” asked her mother.
“I’ll find the cure for AIDS,” said Cathy, somewhat wildly. “Then you’ll be sorry.”
“Well, you might as well go somewhere else,” said Bree. “You wouldn’t fit in at Berkeley.”
“Why not?” Cathy turned all the way around and fixed Bree with a look compounded of equal parts hopeless attraction and fierce antagonism. “Because I’m not bisexual? How do you know I’m not?”
Bree laughed contemptuously. “In your dreams.”
“Did you go East to school?” Archie asked me, in some desperation to change the subject.
“No.”
“West then?”
“People know they’re gay when they’re my age,” said Cathy. “Don’t they, Mom?”
Trouble in Transylvania Page 20