The Romanian (21 page)

The night I invited Romulus, Şerban and Şerban's writer friend Mihai Chirilov to a restaurant, I learned about a new side of Romulus. He smelled and looked stunning in the Issey Miyake cologne I'd bought him at the airport and the iridescent shirt he'd so hated to put on for the French embassy. His gleaming hair and suave, decorous gestures seemed so elegant, impressing my new friends and filling me with yet a new ardor. I realized that I had little understanding of the manners of this until recently classless society, and that probably because everyone in Communist Romania had been given at least a high school education, there was somewhat less of a difference in culture among Romanians than among most Americans. Or maybe I wasn't equipped to perceive it.

Old World charm suddenly oozing from Romulus rekindled fantasies of a successful life with him in France; and when he got up to go to the rest room, Şerban leaned toward me and said, “I see why you like him.”

I was all the more astounded when we got home and I asked Romulus what he thought of my new friends. “I do not like them at all,” he said quite soberly. Then he launched into a complicated explanation of “that kind of person,” which to my ears sounded distinctly paranoid. According to Romulus—who, it must be remembered, had gotten nowhere past a one-time failed chance to play professional soccer—anyone in Romania with a privileged journalism career who was allowed to travel regularly outside the country must have gotten where he was by unholy alliances. In a country that he felt functioned on corruption and bribes, the successful were the criminals. What compromises had Şerban made, he asked with cynical vulgarity, to have such a cushy life? As for the other fellow, Romulus accused him of being a hanger-on.

I consider myself a savvy judge of character and felt that Romulus was dead wrong. Şerban and his friend lacked the veiled glances and the false platitudes of climbers and opportunists. I'd liked them both immediately, found them candid and generous. In the future I would know I was right. They are intelligent, principled people.

Romulus opened the closet door to hang up the iridescent shirt, and my eyes fell on the underclass trappings of the rest of his wardrobe, which he'd chosen. Now I doubted the gracious worldliness I'd just been startled by. Despite the obvious failure of the former Communist system, he still had the classic Communist's distrust of individual accomplishment, the worker's resentment of hierarchy.

ROMULUS HAD a very different reaction to my only other intellectual contact in Bucharest, the renowned jazz pianist Johnny Răducanu, a dark graybeard in a Kangol hat, with devilishly ironic eyes. We met when a Romanian jazz singer I'd encountered in New York invited me to go out with her in Bucharest, then unceremoniously dumped me on him. What followed was a crazy ride through the city in sixty-eight-year-old Johnny's beat-up car, while he kept up a perpetual dialogue with the other cars in broken English: “Here I'm gonna turn left,” he'd mumble at the windshield, “though we [meaning he and the other driver] know I'm not supposed to.” Then he'd swerve in front of the car, which would miss him by a hair. “Wrong way,” he'd say with a chuckle at the oncoming traffic, “so excuse my U-turn,” which he'd grind right into as I covered my eyes with my hands.

At a private restaurant for artists run by the poet Iolanda Malamen, Johnny treated me to several Jack Daniel's and ordered some food for himself. First, though, he opened what looked like a pen but revealed a hypodermic needle. He unbuttoned his shirt near the navel and plunged it into his stomach with a comic leer. “It's insulin,” he explained, “not dope.”

A slew of details followed, stories of lost loves that entailed superhuman sacrifices. He couldn't have been more comfortable with me or about the idea of Romulus and me, and by the end of dinner, he claimed that he and I were locked for life in friendship. “Special connection I'm feeling,” he said grinning, and gave me an awkward full-body hug. Tears rimmed his soft brown eyes. “Like you I'm a Jew.”

But Johnny isn't a Jew. He's a Romani, or Gypsy, and the claim brought crinkles of smiles to his Romanian colleagues in the art world whom I later met in New York. It was then I learned from his autobiography that he was born Creţu Răducan, in Brăila, a cosmopolitan port city on the Danube with an Oriental feel. In Brăila's
mahalaua,
or slum, Johnny received an international education of the streets, hanging out with stevedores, sailors, gamblers, Greek barbers, Italians, Armenians and Gypsies. Or he'd go to Komnorofka, a ghastly suburb that teemed with destitute Russians and treacherous jailbirds; or to the borough of Brăiliţa, where upper-crust crooks sported spats and walking canes and drove fancy cars.

So well did he learn their swindles and pranks that he was well on the way to becoming a
golan,
or hooligan, according to his distraught mother. One of his more lucrative gigs was as a shill for a notorious con artist known as Nea Gicu', who'd perfected a three-card monte game similar to those that used to be seen often on the streets of New York. When onlookers saw the little boy winning an Omega watch, they'd rush to play the game, but a few blocks away, Johnny would be handing over the watch to his accomplice for five lei.

Johnny's stories fascinated me because they were proof of the world of Panaït Istrati, that illegitimate son of a Greek smuggler and a Romanian peasant, who was born in Brăila, too. Istrati's books about shepherds turned bandits, about vagabonds, and evil Greek Phanariots in fur-trimmed robes, caused a sensation in France in the 1920s because of their subversive political intent, which gleefully opposed rebellious underclass rip-off artists—bandits of the people—to the Turks and their avaricious Boyar puppets. Johnny was well aware of the legend of one of these figures, a Robin Hood icon called Terente, who hid in the moors near the Danube and once forced a Boyar to dance barefoot on hot embers while a Gypsy accompanied him on violin. Terente would sneak underwater across the Brăila port, breathing through a long reed, and one day Johnny watched the police fire cannons into the water in an attempt to catch him. He actually saw Terente in Bucharest, but only his head. It was on display in a morgue on a quay of the Dîmboviţa, brought there by surgeons who wanted to figure out how its superb criminal brain functioned.

It was music that lured Johnny from the streets, after he sat down at an old piano in his house and started picking at the keys. Some time after, his impoverished family fled Brăila for Cămpulung, in Moldavia. The educated Germans and Jews he met there widened his cultural perspectives, and before long he was studying piano and then double bass in various academies. If he'd tried to convince me that he, too, was a Jew, he was probably thinking of this period in his life when he first had contact with cultured people who happened to be Jewish, and got it into his head that he could be like them.

There were setbacks, of course. Johnny's education at a music academy in Iaşi was interrupted when the Communists reformed the system, but he continued his studies at Cluj, in Transylvania, where he had to deal with some very civilized but very frigid Hungarians. After Cluj, the former street boy managed to get into the prestigious Ciprian Porumbescu music academy in Bucharest, where he studied double bass. He showed me a picture of himself at the time, when he was twenty-one, which I playfully told him stimulated my baser instincts. More chocolate than he is now, Johnny resembled a mulatto Elvis, with a shiny crown of brilliantined hair combed just like Elvis's, sultry eyes and cushiony, almost feminine lips made for landing.

At La Zisu, the best jazz club in Bucharest during the 1950s, Johnny would hang outside or behind stage, until he got his big break, when a pianist couldn't perform. From then on, his career skyrocketed. One of the first American jazz artists to visit Romania during the Communist era was Louis Armstrong, whose performance made Johnny burst into tears of awe. Later, Duke Ellington came and heard Johnny play. He dubbed him “Mr. Romanian Jazz.”

During the Communist regime and after, Johnny performed throughout Western Europe and America, sharing the stage with jazz greats like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The poet Nina Cassian taught him how to compose, and he created his own pieces. When he received an honorary diploma from the U.S. embassy in Bucharest that proclaimed him ambassador of American music in Eastern Europe, he had to translate the wording for the Securitate, who needed to make sure the content was approved by the regime.

Johnny had numerous opportunities to defect, but he kept coming back, believing that his success belonged to his people. Yet it almost seems that he was immune to the devastating setbacks others suffered under Communism. It's true that the most famous artists in Romania had special privileges. But his constant evasion of oppression and his steady nerves came more from what he'd learned on the streets of Brăila. Communism itself had quickly decayed into a con, and Johnny, a con artist from way back, knew how to outsmart it. Like Istrati, whose work is heavily influenced by Gypsy lore, he knew that rule-breaking and crime are a kind of revolution when the law itself is repressive and corrupt. His jokes and his driving, as well as his playful lies, are indications of the blissful and prankish psychosis in which he lives; he has long ago convinced himself that the world around him is of his own making. True, his impish eyes may now be deeply circled by years of struggle and show his conflicted emotions about the tragedies he escaped while others didn't, but they're still proof that subversion can triumph—as long as nobody takes you seriously.

From the beginning, Johnny and I had an instant rapport, unless, of course, I as well was the butt of a playful con. It amazed me that he claimed not only to be a Jew but to have the same musical tastes as I did, for outdated vocalists like the Hi-Lo's and Chris Connor. At his subsidized-for-artists apartment, we sang some of their songs while he played the piano; then we drove to the concert he was giving at a posh hotel, only to lose a headlight in a minor head-on after he made a wrong turn at that terrifying intersection where Bulevardul Kiseleff meets the Romanian Arc de Triomphe. He came back to the car grinning, of course, claiming that the other driver and the cop had recognized him and had let him off scot-free.

A few nights later, Johnny, Romulus and I dined at Bistro Athenee, in the same hotel where the writer Countess Waldeck spent several months in 1940 as an eyewitness of the Fascist takeover. In the 1970s the restaurant was a small knot of anti-Communist resistance in the hypersurveilled hotel, with a jazz club hidden in the cellar. The men's room was the only place that wasn't bugged. It was here, according to the painter Sorin Dumitrescu, that Johnny gave a jazz concert while perplexed tourists tiptoed in to relieve themselves and then didn't dare flush the toilet for fear of interrupting the music.

Romulus was at first awed by Johnny, then charmed and relaxed, but he was never resentful of the Gypsy who became a famous jazz musician. And Johnny laconically suggested that my relationship with him couldn't be compared to the heartbreaks he'd suffered because, after all, Romulus and I were just two men. He launched into a tale about the recent red tape he's had to endure in this country, where nothing seems to function and every hand is held out for a take. When he noticed my expression of fascination, his once plush lips, now thinned with age, curled in contempt. “For you is fun, a dream and an adventure,” he spit. “But see how you like the party when you stay forever!”

 

 

BY THE TIME Céline Dion's autobiography was almost half translated, I needed a vacation. Work on a new first chapter had delayed the second half for a couple of weeks. Aside from the fact that I was exhausted, I was worried about Romulus, whose television marathons seemed symptomatic of a severe depression. When I suggested a car trip to Transylvania, which might include a visit to his family in Sibiu, he acted interested. But about a week before our trip, we were invited to dinner at the tiny apartment of Şerban and Chirilov, who wanted to thank me for taking them out to eat. Romulus refused, so I went alone, rather nervously. The directions were confusing, and I'd gotten lost before in the labyrinthine streets of Bucharest. Overreacting to Romulus's moodiness, I'd decided at the last minute to bring along with me the $800 I was saving. It was a bad-faith gesture, a giving in to a neurotic fantasy of Romulus's taking it and taking off because I was fraternizing with people he'd dubbed his social enemies. I folded the bills into a small chamois purse that was held to my waist under my shirt by an elastic belt.

Just as I'd expected, I got miserably lost on the way to their apartment, which is in a romantic, dilapidated neighborhood behind Bulevardul Bălcescu. At some point, a youth leaning against a building, who may have been a Roma, dashed toward me in response to my lost look and, lightly touching my shoulder, asked if I needed directions. Seeing that he'd been standing with a rowdy bunch, I coldly declined, said that I knew where I was going.

The fish dinner at Şerban and Chirilov's was delicious, and the wine plentiful. The conversation was relaxed and witty. I sprawled on the bed that served as a couch and regaled them with tales of my adventures with Romulus, how we'd met that night by the Danube in Budapest and my machinations in an attempt to get him to France or America. I spilled out comic stories of other sexual adventures as well. They seemed somewhat taken aback by my exhibitionism, slightly repelled by my obsessive sexuality and perverse, sloppy approach to living, but like the gentlemen they were, took the stories in stride. Somehow the myth of Mioriţa came into the conversation, and Şerban denied that it mythologized the character of the Romanian. He felt that the implied passivity and morbidity were clichés, which hid the resourcefulness, energy and ambition of his people.