The Romanian (35 page)

“She was pretty old, no one knew how old. And she'd been imprisoned during the War. She swore she'd never go into any institution again, but she fell. Her landlord called an ambulance. Against her will, they took her to a ward. I guess she almost lost her mind there. And when she got back, she refused to take her heart medication and died pretty soon after.”

“I hate the people who give up on life,” he said coldly. I knew I couldn't get anything else from him, so I left the room.

 

 

FOR ROMULUS'S BIRTHDAY, we planned a trip to the Black Sea. About twenty-five miles south of Constanţa is a small resort, called Olimp, which was still state-run, next to a privileged seaside community for the Romanian
nomenklatura,
known as Neptun. It was here that I'd booked us a five-day stay beginning July 29, when the final translation was due. To get there I'd bought very reasonably priced first-class train tickets.

As the translation dragged on and on, the deadline began to look impossible. I spent gruesome nights in the heat, often working until past dawn. Then I'd throw myself onto the small bed in the study for two or three hours and go to work again. I was boycotting our bedroom with the primary excuse that I feared the mosquito repellent in the air. Romulus at first made a show of jubilation at having such a large room all to himself. But beneath the crowing, he was truly distressed, confused by the enormous amount of time and energy required by a translation when he himself, orally at least, had so effortlessly mastered his several foreign languages. He was frightened, I now realize, by my withdrawal, not just because it threatened a future without easy money but because he'd covertly developed the habit of looking to me for his self-esteem. I was, it turns out, the only male who'd taken any interest in him, including fathers. He would refer to me as his only friend, ever. Without admitting it to either of us, he'd become intensely attached to me, secretly flattered by the unerring attention of someone whom he thought was superior to him in many ways. As he often put it playfully when we were joking: “You are too good for me.”

The question, then, I suppose, is why he didn't buckle down and show me some support when I needed it, get behind the task in spirit that was keeping us both with food and an apartment. The answer is that a whole segment of communication skills was missing. He had no vocabulary for gratitude and no way of comforting me. All of it threatened his machismo, opened the Pandora's box of his neediness and vulnerability. In some strange way, he felt he owed me so much that it couldn't be mentioned. There was no way to pay it back, so it was better to pretend it hadn't happened. Consequently, I was left on my own to wrestle with the translation, the heat and grief over the recent deaths of my Aunt Lil and my friend Ursule Molinaro.

However, something about how he was feeling would come out each night, around dawn, when I'd collapsed onto my bed with swollen eyes, behind whose lids annoyingly lingered the afterimage of the phrases over which I'd been poring. Then the door to our apartment would open as Romulus returned from his carousing. I'd hear him walk toward the bedroom and hesitate, whereupon he'd backtrack to the study door and enter on tiptoe. I'd see his pale, intoxicated face hovering in the dark above my bed, his body slightly stooped from the knowledge of the futility of trying to have a good time.

“You wish to come in bedroom?” he'd whisper in an abashed voice.

“No.”

He'd go back to his room and leave the door open, and soon I'd see the colored reflections of the television screen, without which he couldn't fall asleep.

Three days before our trip, he approached me meekly with the news that a good friend of his, Ursu, was having a big birthday bash in Sibiu. He was wondering whether he could go there by bus for the party if he promised to get back to Bucharest the night before we left. Drugged by exhaustion and pessimistic about the future of our relationship, I acquiesced coolly and handed him the money for his trip. If he didn't return in time to use our first-class tickets, I told myself in a fantasy of revenge, that was it.

Fate reacted cruelly to his departure. Hours after he left, the refrigerator stopped working. The milk rapidly curdled and meat warmed in the heat, so I had to throw them out. If there was any possibility of meeting my translation deadline, it meant working every moment until we left. There was no time to go to a restaurant. I had to be content with trying to live for the next two days on a few quarts of warm fruit juice and some yogurt that was rapidly acidifying in the heat.

As I sat plowing through Céline's ingenuous prose, sipping tepid juice, defeat hunched my shoulders. I kept wondering how I'd ended up in such a ridiculous situation. Those so-called grand flourishes of my obsessive passion had painted me into a petty corner, prey to all those practical exigencies that seemed so unimportant when I was in the throes. Love was nothing but that tubercular degeneration that left
La traviata
's heroine coughing up green spittle on her deathbed. I was a chump.

By the middle of the night before we were supposed to leave, I fell into a watery, deluded state of mind. Since I'd mastered the cloying tone of my text, work progressed mechanically; the fingers on my keyboard took on the identity of someone else. My mind numbed into a state more profound than any opioid high and began to offer a pleasant sense of detachment. Contexts were melting away. What city was I in? Did I care? With a sardonic giggle I realized that this exhaustion felt like falling in love, which isolates you in an inflamed anesthesia, exiling all worries and concerns.

Dawn found me in this state, with another twenty-five pages to go. I'd have to take the text with me and work on the train, then e-mail it from the hotel. Sweeping papers aside, I stood shakily. The best idea was to find somewhere selling breakfast, then come back and pack. But wait a minute!—Romulus hadn't yet returned as agreed. He was supposed to come back the night before, and just as I'd suspected, or hoped, he hadn't kept his promise.

A shudder of release, almost ecstatic, went through my body. Like a too quickly accomplished reverse zoom in a home video camera, everything telescoped away. Then the trip was off, and so were we! I was slipping out of a cocoon, new skin exposed to air for the first time. I looked out the window at the empty pavement, baked by the previous day's heat. In the dawn light, there was complete silence; no one and nothing were in the street. I grabbed the key and went into the hall. Steadying myself with the wall, I clambered down the stairs, aware that my coordination was severely compromised by fatigue. This wasn't the time to fall, not at the very moment of my freedom!

The streets of Bucharest were almost empty at dawn. There was no sign of the miserable dogs; it felt as if the beggar kids from the park, Razvan and his desperate gang of Pinocchio bad-boys—in fact, all of the suffering that had hedged me in—had disappeared. Unirii was still and limpid, a huge, vaultless fissure that had opened just for me. The only disruption in the film of dawn was a garish spot of red and yellow on the other side of the square, announcing a twenty-four-hour McDonald's. There was so little traffic I could walk diagonally toward the McDonald's rather than approach it by those exhausting right-angle crossings usually needed to get through the square.

Because I felt as if I were teetering, I started to watch my feet to make sure I wouldn't stumble. That's why I didn't notice the apparition that sneaked into the square from Bibescu Vodă Street. Rearing on its hind legs, mouth gaping in a furious neigh, as if mocking my assumption that pain was gone, was a tortured horse, whose owner was beating it for shitting in the street. Attached to the horse was a wagon full of scrap metal that threatened to overturn as pieces of the metal clattered to the pavement, some landing in the horseshit. While I gaped in disorientation at the scene, the driver took my look as tasteless curiosity and directed some of his obscene oaths at me. The horse grew even more frantic, shattering the stillness with its neighs.

The scene sliced through me like a razor through paper, mutilating my previous feeling of release and freedom. There was pain and disorder everywhere, it seemed, and passion was just a momentary way of denying it. I'd seen horses like this several times around the city. They belonged to peasants and Gypsies who traded in scrap metal, and were known to cause traffic jams. This one, though, had appeared from nowhere like a ferocious omen, clattering through new resolutions and throwing me into confusion.

I hurried out of the horse's path and into McDonald's, where I gulped down breakfast. By the time I approached Mihnea Vodă, the dogs were awake, and their barking interwove with my footsteps when I crossed the parking lot. I needed to sleep, then get up and finish the translation. Obviously, the Black Sea was off, the tickets wasted; but I was hoping that this also meant the end of my pathological attachment to Romulus.

He was sitting on the couch with a packed gym bag and a boom box when I arrived. “Why you not ready to go?” he asked, studying my glazed eyes with alarm. “I had to get middle-of-night bus. Other was too packed. Train is leaving in less than an hour.”

Obediently I went to our bedroom and threw some clothes into a bag. I shoved the printed-out drafts from the translation on top of them. Then, after putting the computer in its case, I went into the bathroom and began to splash cold water on my face, over and over.

XXVI

YOUR EYES,” said Romulus, “they look like a crazy person's.”

I was standing at the mirror in a coma, water running down my face onto my shirt collar. In my hand was an open jar of Gerovital face cream. I was bringing a dab of it to my eye.

“Are you crazy!” he said, grabbing my wrist and wrenching the jar from my hand. “This cream is not for eye!”

He was right. I'd fallen into such a stupor that I'd mistaken the jar of Gerovital for a Visine bottle. Romulus grabbed a towel and wiped my fingers as if they were a child's. “Let's go!” he said. “We are late.” I slung my computer case over one shoulder and my bag over the other, then followed him down the stairs.

Preposterously, in my state I was still planning to use the three hours in the train to push onward with Céline. At the station, which was thronged with some of the poorest people in the city, Romulus set me in a corner like a retarded relative, cautioning me not to move while he went to retrieve our tickets. A parade of Roma families, hoboes, grimy teenagers and peasants with enormous bundles wrapped in twine went by, some of them eyeing my glassy stare with a predatory expression. Soon Romulus came running with the tickets and hurried me along to the train, which started up as soon as we leapt on. A dull realization came to me that I was seeing a new facet of him, as caretaker. Well, I chuckled blearily to myself, if this ever lasts, he'll come in handy when I'm an old codger.

About what happened next I can't be certain. I remember taking the notebook computer out of its case and placing it on my lap, then opening it. Then I must have blacked out for an hour or so, because my next memory is of the computer back in its case and sitting securely on Romulus's lap. The train was already about eighty miles east of Bucharest near the city of Feteşti, right before crossing the first arm of the Danube.

What had woken me was a blast of humid air coming into our air-conditioned first-class compartment as the door of the train opened to let out some passengers. We were already entering a different zone, leaving the arid continental climate of Bucharest and the Wallachian plain. We were closer to the Danube delta, which farther northeast becomes a land of rich watery plains full of dense reeds, bamboo and birds.

I looked at my companion across from me, the only other passenger in the compartment. Completely disoriented, I began to rehearse my identity in my mind like an amnesiac trying to regain his memory. I was in a train with someone I'd considered my lover. But events had occurred that had disillusioned me. What exactly were they? At the moment, I couldn't quite recall. Instead, my mind floated to memories of other people in trains. I saw Lupescu sitting alone in her first-class car, opening her bag to look for something she'd hidden inside. But what was it? I just couldn't remember. I looked at Romulus again, sitting impatiently on the edge of his seat, fingers drumming against the window ledge, watching the passing landscape with bored eyes. His body produced a dim flash of its previous allure. Somehow the little man with the large beak of a nose and the hollow cheeks had been surrounded by a ring of magnetic energy. Intense pleasure was hidden somewhere within his inconsequential body. But how had it all come about? Where had the power come from? I stared at him in confusion.

After a brief delay, the train started again and crossed the Danube, then moved through marshlands and fertile-looking fields. Peasants with faces and pants stained by the dark mud, standing next to exhausted donkeys attached to carts, watched the train go by with doubtful, narrowed eyes. I stared down at the river, sluggish and clay-colored in the blinding light. A memory of standing beside it in winter, staring at two men cutting a hole in the ice, came to me and vanished; and I thought of Johnny Răducanu's tumultuous childhood on the banks of the Danube, somewhere north of here, when he rubbed elbows with smugglers and gamblers. I remembered that my literary hero Panaït Istrati, the self-taught street boy who became a famous French raconteur, came from the same place.

About ten minutes later, over an endlessly long bridge, we again crossed the Danube, at Cernavodă. The city is the site of Ceauşescu's ill-fated nuclear power station, which never succeeded in making all of its reactors functional. We moved along a canal and passed through Medgidia, not far from the vineyards that produce a large portion of Romania's delicious wines. Romulus said we were just a half-hour from Constanţa on the Black Sea. Still studying my drawn face with alarm, he began to hang all our bags as well as the computer from his shoulders. Then he grabbed the boom box. Obviously, he doubted that I'd be able to carry anything.