by W. E. Gutman
*
My grandmother's “soirées” drew the cream of Bucharest society. Actors, artists, poets, architects, lawyers came together for an evening of fine cuisine and very small talk. Sometimes they split up into groups of four and played Bridge, a game that transforms the very best of friends into raving maniacs. High on strong, aromatic Turkish coffee, munching on halvah, pistachios and rahat lukhum, a sickeningly sweet marshmallow-like comfit sprinkled with scented powdered sugar, the players would often stay through the early morning hours. Tables had been set up in each of the bedrooms, effectively preventing reluctant kibitzers -- my mother, my father and me -- from going to bed. My mother was livid; she enjoyed company, up to a point, and on own her terms, but she favored a good book, her crossword puzzles, a game or two of solitaire and a good night’s sleep to pouring coffee and emptying ashtrays. She would yawn and make frequent trips to the bathroom. Deterred by a game in which partners call each other “imbecile and schmuck,” and bored with idle chatter, my father would retire to the terrace or go out for long walks. I would invariably be put to sleep on the settee in the smoke-filled parlor, only to be awakened when company parted amid interminable good-byes, obsequious praise for the cuisine and wordy pledges to do it again real soon.
Some of the regulars sported a stately bearing but seemed to have no clear means of support. Nobility titles, bought, granted or finagled, and friendly ties with King Michael’s father, Carol of Hohenzollern, had earned them a very special ranking in Romania’s class-conscious society. Status, useless unless it can be flaunted several degrees beneath one’s own, compelled these people to circulate among commoners -- intellectuals, people in the liberal trades and big merchants. Despite the decorum, this was an incestuous commerce that cleared the way for endless solicitations, deals and favors. A decadent vestige of Ottoman customs suitably corrupted by Western artifice and cunning, wheeling and dealing permeated these get-togethers, as they did all strata of Romanian society.
The best deal? Buy men at their face value and resell them at the inflated price they think they’re worth.
The fundamental premise of the social contract, my uncle often declared with a pragmatism that suffused all of his relationships, “is to create mutual indebtedness. A gift is an investment. The more obligations one discharges, the more tribute one can exact.” It is no wonder that his law practice, dedicated to the proposition that clients who cannot be turned into long-term assets are not worth defending, thrived as it did. He also carried these principles into his love life -- but with considerably less success. He had married a ravishing but headstrong and unschooled young woman who would neither be tamed nor educated, and who, in appreciation for his efforts to civilize her, engaged in brazen affairs whenever his back was turned. The marriage lasted about a year. He never remarried, arguing that women are by nature intractable and despotic.
Incurably romantic, my uncle returned to bachelorhood, this time for good. He forgave his ex-wife’s indiscretions. They remained good friends. “To love an unfaithful woman,” he would assert, “is to perversely love the competition.” One must suppose that infidelity absolved is the echo of an exhausted relationship.
One ties the knot with an infusion of courage. One remains a bachelor by scaring oneself silly. Once contracted, bachelorhood is a malady one rarely wishes to treat.
Women are fond of romantic men but marry realists -- whom they proceed to cuckold with romantics.
Sharing the same likes is not enough to ensure harmony in a marriage. Couples must especially hate the same things. Some eventually discover that they hate each other.
Every marriage reaches a point when partners ask themselves: Should I stay or leave? Should I suffer or pack my bags?
*
Twenty years later or so, I would emulate my uncle. I married a beautiful, stubborn and uncultured woman who resisted acculturation the way a dog recoils from perfume.
Every man is a Pygmalion but not all marble will produce a Galatea.
Culminating in contentious divorce, this relationship would evoke increasingly uncharitable commentaries on love, women and matrimony.
There is only one thing worse than a stupid and mean woman: A stupid, mean and sexy woman.
Romantic love is a perfume lacking a fixative.
So long as love is aflame one can’t feel the burns.
Men are unfaithful not to “find better,” but to know something else or to confirm that they can still get an erection.
*
My maternal grandparents had both purveyed and been the recipients of favors and accommodations in their day. My grandfather (he died the day I was born) was a veteran engineer with Siemens. But he was better known as a jurist, a poet and a newspaper columnist who had killed another journalist in a duel following a protracted war of words waged on the front pages of their respective publications. The incident caused a sensation. My grandfather had never owned a weapon, let alone fired one; his challenger was a marksman and a seasoned duelist. Reluctantly heard by a sympathetic magistrate (his rival was unpopular) the case earned my grandfather a six-month jail sentence. He spent thirty days in a comfortable studio, next to the warden’s office, where he continued to write, entertained family and friends, and ate catered gourmet meals. The remainder of his sentence was reduced to time served and he was released for good behavior. In his day, as in this, men of means and distinction, however reprehensible their offenses, rarely faced long prison terms.
Milked for months by the press, the affair had piqued King Carol’s interest and earned my grandparents entry to the court. This privilege would provide an inexhaustible supply of anecdotal material with which my grandmother, a witty storyteller, regaled her audiences. Her renderings, astute and caustic, offered a glimpse of court life and keen insights into Romanian society at the turn of the century.
King Carol’s life and reign were riddled with scandal. He divorced his first wife to marry Princess Helen of Greece. He stepped down in favor of his son, Michael, in 1940. He then maintained an open liaison with Magda Lupescu, whom he eventually married in 1947. He died in Spain in 1953, the year I graduated from high school.
*
“I was pleasantly surprised to discover that their majesties were human,” my grandmother remarked many years later. “Were it not for heredity and dynastic fortunes, they would have passed for the most ordinary of commoners. It’s amazing how lineage, blue eyes and a crown enhance a person’s stature. Mind you, I caught Carol picking his nose once or twice with a great insouciance that was as sickening as it was regal. I also remember him laughing heartily as high-ranking Prussian officers gathered around him after dinner and took turns farting with an effrontery bordering on premeditation. I coughed and cleared my throat and raised my voice in vain hopes of drowning out the contemptible cannonade. For all I know, his majesty himself may have taken part in this odious contest. You have no idea how embarrassed I was.” The story goes that when the king apologized on behalf of his guests by saying, “what can you do, they’re only men,” my grandmother retorted, “What can you do, God created woman; she must have fashioned man with the scraps.”
One of the officers, “Baron-von-something-or-other, a red-faced, sweaty little man wearing a uniform three sizes too small, liked young boys” -- a vice also imputed to the king but which, to my grandmother’s knowledge, was never established. Anyway, the baron’s tastes were an open secret, and it was widely rumored that country youths were habitually smuggled into the palace, to be enjoyed by courtiers of both sexes, with “Baron-von-something-or-other” presiding over the saturnalia.
It was also alleged that one of Queen Helen’s attendants, a highly educated woman with an otherwise flawless pedigree, regularly free-lanced in one of Bucharest’s vilest whorehouses. A latter-day Messalina, she would sneak out of the palace late at night, hail a carriage and drive to Crucea de Piatrá [the Stone Cross] a neighborhood on the outskirts of Bucharest known for its bordellos, and take on a dozen men -- the mo
re lowbred and repulsive, the better. She would sneak back into the palace just before dawn and tend to the queen as if nothing had happened. Some said that Helen herself was being romanced during her attendant’s nocturnal escapades by the court’s spiritual advisor, a young, handsome, Rasputin-like Orthodox priest with a florid black beard, drooping eyelids and an enigmatic smile.
Gossip was rife at the court; but so was calumny. Jealousy, resentment, envy, mistrust -- all fed a rumor mill of vilification. In this Machiavellian setting, it was difficult to tell truth from innuendo, hearsay from malicious lie. But King Carol was no Borgia. He was weak, tainted by scandal and surrounded by sycophants whose presence he tolerated, depending on their rank and title, with a mixture of condescension and forbearance.
“It was quite a performance,” my grandmother would quip.
*
Another spectacle would soon unfold. At first, in deference to the Red Army now occupying Romania, communists were included in -- but did not yet dominate -- the two immediate post-1944 regimes. In 1945, however, the communists engineered a ministerial crisis. The Soviets forced King Michael to agree to a government led by wealthy bourgeois Petru Groza and dominated by the Marxists. Traditional parties were then disbanded. Humiliation turned to desecration when the young monarch was ordered to abdicate, forcibly removed from the palace by thugs freshly converted to communism, and exiled. With the war out of the way, the “Securitate,” a rag-tag collection of misfits, street toughs and outlaws who had terrorized Romania under the Germans, were now paid to terrorize Romanians in the name of communism. The more things change....
Born of dissent, revolution feeds on discord, which it then hastens to suppress.
*
Across a narrow hallway lit by pink art deco wall lamps, lived Peter, a boy about my age. I was not allowed in his apartment -- I would later learn why -- so we often played in my room after school. With memories of the war still vivid, it was natural for young, impressionable minds to turn back the clock and recreate, with equal doses of innocence and imagination, the very epoch we had both lived through. We’d play at soldiering and Peter invariably insisted on being a German storm trooper or a Luftwaffe pilot, choices I did not begin to question until much later. I would take on the role of a French Résistance fighter, or that of a British Tommy, or I’d waddle like a cigar-chomping, gum-chewing Yank slashing his way through some dense Pacific island jungle. With much less enthusiasm, I’d gallop like a Cossack cavalryman caught in a snowstorm in the steppes of Central Asia. (I was already fond of composer Borodin’s sensual exoticism). I hated winter even as a child and had inherited from my mother a fear and sensitivity to cold so intense that I’d get chills just pretending. With uncommon cunning in one so young, Peter would exploit this debility and capture me or, if unwilling to take prisoners -- as was often the case – finish me off. I’d pretend that the bullet had pierced my heart. I’d clutch my left breast and look over my shoulder as I spun around and fell, first on one knee, then an elbow, just to make sure that dying didn’t hurt too much.
“We win!” Peter would intone jubilantly as he placed his boot on my chest. “We,” meant the Germans.
Bored with ground warfare, we’d move to aerial combat, Peter piloting a Stuka or a Messerschmitt. I flew Spitfires, Corsairs and flying fortresses. We assembled our fighting machines by turning chairs upside down, with the four legs forming the struts of a snug open cockpit. A seat cushion served as the roof. Fleece caps with earflaps were converted into helmets, old wire-rimmed glasses into goggles. Once strapped into our seats -- my mother had donated a couple of old belts to the war effort -- we would rev up our engines, taxi onto the active runway, ram the throttle and take off in an ear-splitting roar of engines simulated by radio static at maximum volume. Dogfights, high-altitude bombardments, strafing runs were fierce and exacted commensurate losses. Peter, who seemed to be clueless about actual events -- or pretended not to know -- made up battles and granted the Germans imaginary victories. I went along, out of friendship. My claims that Dresden and Frankfurt had been razed to the ground, that Hitler was dead, that Mussolini had been executed then hanged upside down and bled like a porker at a village feast, that Japan’s rising sun had set in an atomic twilight, all that fell on deaf ears. Peter neither admitted nor accepted the reality of Germany’s defeat. He seemed so grieved, so bewildered by my assertions that the Third Reich had been crushed, that I granted him his own version of history. It didn’t matter. Children can be made to believe in fairies and ogres, in God, the devil and Santa Claus. I believed in none but found Peter’s convictions no impediment to our camaraderie. In retrospect, his defiant rejections of verifiable events should have aroused suspicion, but I ignored them. We shared other interests and engaged in other pastimes, one of them so intimate, that I readily indulged his chimeras once initiation turned to habit.
I’d long known the magic, felt the joyous conceit brought on by an erection -- my own -- but had no basis for comparison other than the awe-inspiring sight of my father’s organ as he urinated, legs spread wide apart, in a public pissoir or at home in the toilet. It was both a relief and an inspiration to discover that Peter’s pecker was no bigger than my own, though his sported an ugly cowl of wrinkled skin at its tip, whereas the head of my penis had the more esthetic bearing of a smooth mushroom cap.
It was during one of our war games -- the Battle of Britain, the assault on the Rhine, or the taking of Guadalcanal -- I can’t quite remember -- that I felt the first stirrings of an oncoming erection. Buoyed by tight-fitting pants, the tumescence caused such discomfort that I pulled my pants down and liberated a hard, throbbing little cock.
“Heil Hitler,” I exclaimed, snapping at attention. Peter was not amused but he accepted the challenge.
“I can do that,” he rallied, vexation giving way to bravado. “Watch this!” Peter pulled his pants down, flicked his dick and twiddled his balls. I watched in wonder as the foreskin slowly rolled down the shaft like a turtleneck, revealing a slender, pinkish knob that rose and came to rest against his belly.
“En garde!” I grabbed my penis and hurled myself at my friend. Peter parried, clutched his weapon and lunged at me. Our penises collided and we dueled in a flesh-to-flesh contest that soon turned from sham hostility to gentle mutual indulgence. We continued to spar lustily for a moment or two, then, overcome by sensations that were as strange as they were intense, we disengaged. We stared at each other briefly, eyed our defiant little tools in mute reverence, pulled our pants up, and went back to war.
However modest or fleeting, pleasure tasted is pleasure remembered; pleasure anticipated is pleasure pursued. We would often “joust” after that, with variations on the theme -- I would take control of his penis and he would manipulate mine or, dealing a double death blow we would thrust our penises between each-other’s thighs and tarry for a while, our hearts thumping through our chests, unuttered emotions coursing through our minds. The enjoyment I felt was intense. But I could not imagine the indescribable rapture I would experience five years later when, to my amazement and horror, I ejaculated for the first time and nearly fainted.
Once, as we prepared to rattle our sabers, Peter pulled down his pants. His underwear was soiled. Worse, he smelled of shit. I lost my erection instantly and was so overcome with disgust that I made up some excuse and sent him home. I remember being troubled by this act of cruelty. The snub put an end to our former intimacies. Once or twice after that, assailed by remorse -- or lust -- I made half-hearted attempts to resurrect the sex play. Peter blithely went along, but it was no use. His stench lingered in my mind’s nostrils. I was cursed with an unforgiving nose, an aversion toward bodily odors, including my own, and an acute olfactory memory. Peter and I kept our pants up from that day forward.
*
One day, I heard a great commotion next door. New people had moved into Peter’s apartment: a big, burly Russian colonel and his wife, a pretty major with a round face, almond-shaped eyes, red cheeks,
a lively rump and a healthy pair of calves peering out of fur-lined military boots.
“Where is Peter,” I asked my uncle.
“He left,” he replied, looking elsewhere.
“What do you mean?”
“He and his parents went away.”
“Where to?”
“Far.”
“Where is far?”
“Far, far.”
“Why?”
My uncle was a talkative man by nature. He had a reputation for tying up the courts, bamboozling judges, stunning juries into submission, reducing to stupor captive audiences with lengthy and convoluted narratives. He could also be close-mouthed when he wanted to be, and equally exasperating.
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me.”
“Not now.”
“When?”
He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders.
“Some other time. Now run along.”
It took thirty years to learn the story. Even so, evading direct and probing questions, my uncle fed me an eyedropper account so lacking in specifics as to make little or no sense. The pieces just didn’t fit. Upon closer scrutiny, adding my own insights and drawing inferences from the scant few details my uncle granted me later under pressure, I was able to reconstruct an extraordinary scenario.
Peter’s parents were first-generation Romanians, born in the German-speaking province of Bukovina. Unwavering disciples of the Führer, they’d been recruited by Germany’s vast and spreading spy network. Their mission: To assess Romania’s loyalty to the Axis, and to identify and monitor insurgents. (Germany had nothing to fear. Partially landlocked, politically fickle and timid, Romania had a long tradition of flip-flopping and fealty to various itinerant bullies – Romans, Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs, Tatars, Turks, Greeks, Germans, Magyars and Russians. Romanians served them all with equal fervor). They’d also been charged with analyzing socio-economic indicators in large urban centers such as Bucharest, aiding the war effort by reporting their findings and conducting carefully scripted disinformation campaigns. This was done through official German diplomatic channels in the early days of the war and later, as the war began to unravel and Romania joined the Allies, by radio. The radio transmitter was located in their apartment -- across from ours. This might explain why I was never allowed to set foot in Peter’s apartment and why attempts to invite myself over were invariably thwarted. It is likely that while Peter and I fondled each other’s cocks, his father was sending coded dispatches to Berlin. I always found an amusing irony in the juxtaposition of these two goings-on.