The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (31 page)

Once a cautionary tale, the palace was now simply a fact. An auto show filled its plaza with pounding dance music. The complex, with its facing buildings topped with faux-Roman arches, couldn't be more removed from the picturesque and colorful clutter of Romanian village life. They looked like nothing so much as pretentious, tacky, and cheap shopping malls. There was no sign of pedestrian traffic: the area, as befitted its inhuman aura, was neither secured nor populated.

V.

Don't Bring Your Beer in Church
(Bucharest to Vienna)

M
y impression of a country's economic development is heavily influenced by whether they have divided highways (and whether the town dumps are located on the hillsides facing the roads that they do have). By that metric, Bulgaria (highways, if unevenly maintained) trumps Romania (few highways, all heavily potholed). That said, Poland, widely considered the most cosmopolitan of the Eastern European region and having “played the game well” vis-à-vis EU funding (“Well, they are right next to Germany,” said one Bulgarian), didn't have highways until the rush to prepare for the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.

I had hours of driving to get to the western Romania city of Timișoara, through baking farmland, rust-roofed villages, and painted gates. The village houses in this stretch of southern Romania
were one-story instead of the Bulgarian standard two. In the center of one village was mounted an army-green fighter plane with a bull's-eye painted on the tail in the Romanian tricolor. Outside another, Dolj, were parked a handful of decommissioned biplanes. A scooped horse cart sat on car wheels, next to a pair of dead dogs and a string of fish hung to dry.

I saw a church with its frescoes on the outside walls, facing the cluttered graveyard, and brash with the national blues, reds, and yellows. The “painted monastery” was a style native to the medieval Moldavian state, which comprised a region covering what is now Bucovina and eastern Romania, Moldova, and southwestern Ukraine. Robert Kaplan wrote that the fifteenth-century Moldavian king Stephen the Great had churches decorated with paintings of didactic and moral fables, saints and prophets, clad and painted in the local styles, to teach religion to the illiterate locals.

In a town called Balș, I passed two overloaded gypsy carts, and then in Craiova a nuclear plant that was actually open and functioning. A woman knelt to light a candle in a roadside shrine in front of an acres-wide abandoned industrial site, across from a mile of rusting railway cars.

I entered a wide, flooded valley where the Motru River was dammed, and drove past a small field of blue and white oil derricks and through a village with triple-gabled pagoda roofs and pink and aqua gates. Old couples sat and watched traffic while a young boy filled plastic bottles of drinking water at the town pump. Passing through Orșova, on the eastern Serbian border, I followed the Danube for a few last miles, where a small bay was clogged with barges loaded with scrap iron.

I turned north, back into the hills and the Timiș region. Any
central authority was represented alternately by omnipresent speed traps and the ambulances that necessarily roam the roads in anticipation of frequent car accidents.

Somehow, I was not surprised to find Timișoara also claims the title “Little Vienna.” It once adjoined, and was named for, the Timiș River (the name means “fortress of Timiș), which runs south from the Banat region to meet the Danube in Serbia. Due to various engineering projects over the centuries, though, the river now runs some miles away from the city. The urban center of western Romania, it has a legitimate reputation as the country's original revolutionary town, the place where, in the wake of the internal exile of an antigovernment Hungarian preacher named László Tőkés, protests led quickly and bloodily to the end of the Ceaușescu regime.

The city's name became a watchword and chant during the eight days between the beginning of the protests and the execution of Ceaușescu and his wife. It is also, deservedly, considered the capital of Romanian punk—they claim the first Romanian punk band, Chaos.

“I know those guys,” said Casian. “But the singer, he has a kid now, and they don't have a drummer, so you know . . .”

Casian had a seven- and a four-year-old himself and was winding down his career as a promoter (with a special passion for psychobilly). A dark-featured, heavy-browed man, he worked for the local waste-treatment company, a public-private partnership that I'm now not surprised to learn involved a German investor. “I used to be at the sorting plant, but now I'm in the office doing contracts. It's a boring job.”

One of the other promoters on this swing had mentioned that he knew Casian—Paul from Cluj, maybe?

“Well—we are like enemies, or competitors,” Casian corrected me. No country is too big or too small to avoid the dreaded “scene beef.” “He wanted to have a monopoly of promoting in Romania, and I was doing these psychobilly shows. He was yelling at me—well, not yelling, on the Internet. Anyway, it's his problem, not me.”

Atelier DIY was in an industrial park, on the second floor of a warehouse, above a front-end loader and pallets of what felt like cat litter. The room looked and smelled like a basement rehearsal space. The walls were covered with 4″ × 6″ snapshots of hardcore shows and old posters for the same. I'd played a similar venue in Caen, France, but in place of that show's arty hipsters, the scene tonight was a small crew of middle-aged rockabilly fanatics. The opening band was called Graves for Sale, billed as “Romania's first surf band.” (As it turned out, they were the Joe Meeks of space-age surf, with a guy twiddling electronics and cueing sound effects and clips of film dialogue.)

I shared a dirty couch with a hyperactive and hyperverbal man, tall and broad. He had a soul patch and a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between his teeth. His name was Marco: “Like Marco Polo! Half Serb, half Hungarian.” He asked after my own roots, and when I told him I had family from the region, he exclaimed and threw an arm around me. “Ah! You are Banatian! Not American! You are one of us!”

His bandmate offered me a clear liquid in a plastic water bottle. “
Belenka
!” he said, with enthusiasm. “It is plum brandy, or apricot, or cherry. But always
belenka
!”

“I love ska, I love psychobilly, I love stoner rock,” said Marco. “The cat has nine lives, but I do not have enough lives to listen to all the music I love!” His legs fell asleep under him while we
talked. “Aah! I feel the termites!” He shook his legs. “It's like Tom and Jerry. You remember Tom and Jerry? Not like cartoons now. They are trying to imbecile our kids! Not like the Road Runner and the Willy the Coyote! I have a disk of fifty episodes of Willy Coyote. Not this Bob the Sponge, Bob the Fuck, Bob the blah blah blah.”

They were another crowd of friendly hecklers: when I sang the line in the coda of my song “The Hearts of Boston” that quotes Cole Porter—“Which is the right life, the quiet life or the night life?”—someone yelled, “How about a quiet nightlife?”

“You must stay and drink!” said a five-foot lady with a red streak in her hair. “Romanians become more affectionate when we drink.”

The after-party was a jam session that featured the knob-twiddler from the surf band freestyling in English. I was staying with Noemi, the lady with the red streak, and her partner Tibi, the drummer from Graves for Sale. Noemi had a classic Romanian face—high, soft cheekbones and jet-black hair—and sported a classic goth-punk style: a Cobra Skulls T-shirt, skull earrings, a hoodie, and a motorcycle jacket. Tibi had a gray pompadour and a coffin belt buckle. They, like their friends, were crazy about psychobilly, and we sat up in their kitchen drinking and watching YouTube videos. I showed them Speed Crazy and Bob Log III. They showed me a laughable redneck named Bob Wayne, whom they'd befriended at a festival in the Czech Republic. Noemi's thirteen-year-old son from an earlier marriage was asleep in the next room. Tibi was also divorced—he had a fourteen-year-old daughter who lived with her mother—and there was a carefree hedonism to their relationship. Tibi started the next morning by pouring
belenka
shots for both
of us, and then, as I drove us to the center for some sightseeing, offered me one of the beers he'd brought.

“Here is multicultural square,” he said. “Here is Catholic Church, service in German; there is Serbian; and on the other square is Romanian cathedral.”

“Don't bring your beer in church!” Noemi scolded him, and he left the can on the steps as we peeked in the door.

Tibi was in the army during the revolution, doing mandatory service “just guarding a building.” He and Casian go to the Czech Republic for festivals. “They are the most relaxed country in Eastern Europe. Everyone is smoking marijuana. The laws there now are more relaxed than the Netherlands.” And, he added, it's less hassle than going to Western Europe. “Romanians have a problem in Europe: the gypsies go there, and they murder and steal, and they have Romanian passports, not because they are Romanian, but then the news says ‘Romanians are criminals.'”

We met up with Casian and headed to the local brewery for eggs and beers. “A lot of Italians are coming here,” Tibi added. “Because the language is similar, and because the women are beautiful, and Italian men are”—he mimicked a Tex Avery tongue hanging out—“about women. I think the biggest centers in the world for beautiful women are Romania-Hungary-Ukraine region. Maybe Brazil-Venezuela-Colombia.”

The young Hungarian border guards had some civilian friends in sweat suits hanging out with them at the border station.

“You were in Bulgaria?” a guard asked me, studying my sweat-wrinkled temporary passport. “Why?”

“Playing concerts.”

“You are musician? What kind? . . . You have a CD we can have?”

I keep one in the door pocket for situations just like this and handed it through the window.

“
Do the Struggle
, what does it mean?”

I tried to explain.

“It's the kind of music you can listen to in the gym?”

It took hours to wash the sour, stale cigarette smoke out of my clothes after I left the Balkans. The smell had permeated my suitcase, and the washing proved to be in vain. I spent the night with my friend Thomas, a graphic designer and indie publisher, who has always lived in the same neighborhood on the outskirts of Vienna (he inherited his apartment from his mother). He even met his wife, then a student from Bucharest, across the street. Hungover on a Friday morning, he went to the supermarket and she complimented his T-shirt, a homemade Black Flag parody that read “Black Coffee.” He replied (“and I never do anything like this”), “‘I have black coffee in my apartment across the street.' And she stayed until Monday.”

I entered the German-speaking world feeling relief at the smoke-free bars and the wide, fast, unutterably dull, robotically policed highways but chafing at the merciless enforcement, flashing speed cameras, and iron parking regime. Today Europe is divided not on the east–west axis internalized by those of us raised in the twentieth century, but on an older north–south divide: on one side, the prosperous and legalistic Scandinavian, German, Lowlands, and Polish social democracies, with their high culture and ostentatious self-control; on the other, the South Slavs, Romanians, and Bulgars, but also the Mediterraneans, Spanish, and maybe the French—heterogeneous, anarchic, troubled, and vital.

“'Til recently,” George Orwell once wrote, “it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behavior differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.” The idea of a national personality has become unfashionable, and the idea that one might prefer one national personality to another archaic, even taboo. (So too, writers like West and philosophical historians like Gibbon comfortable with offering their opinions and judgment have come to seem outdated.) Yet somehow I prefer, when traveling, the company of the Slavs and their neighbors, their pessimistic humor and their tribal pride and defensiveness, their preference for the possible over the permitted: that it is only natural and rational to cross the street if it's empty, to park on the sidewalk or median, to have a drink if having one will not adversely affect your neighbor, to pull the car into a river for a bath instead of wasting water from a hose or an artificial car wash, to free domestic animals to graze and fornicate and excrete in the commons, all of us being children of nature, and nature famously harder to tame than to indulge. (I won't get too romantic about it: poverty and necessity, of course, play the major role in these attitudes.) Perhaps Americans, committed in theory to an ideology of reinvention—Americans have no shortage of myths about themselves—reject the idea that a sensibility can be inherent, that you can't just pack off to the city or to another country and become a fundamentally different human. Perhaps some Americans raised with this ideology, believing in the essential disposability of things like family ties, religious tradition, and shared community experience, nonetheless feel the lack of a deep-rooted identity—unable or unwilling
to register the inescapable hegemony of their actual American culture because of its sheer ubiquity. They may, West suggested, adopt a pet or favorite in the Old World, regardless of sense or genetic attachment or moral worth but out of an emotional and irrational reaction. I can't help but choose the places where I'm vulnerable, responsible, and engaged over the ones where I'm corralled and protected.