The Romanian (44 page)

Boldly the overaged male prostitute approached. As his face got closer, I took it all in. Obviously, he'd once been incredibly handsome. He had a Hungarian face, with a wide forehead, high cheekbones and tapered, delicate jaw. But the years had flattened and mauled it. The eyes protruded permanently, as if in fright. The cheeks had sunk into the shadows, among which undoubtedly lingered memories of poverty and drug abuse. The strong, aquiline nose had been smashed at least once, as evidenced by a bump halfway up its graceful bridge. The shoulders were burly from prison exercise or violence, and the neck parched by sun. Despite all this, the features kept their mask of boyish susceptibility, which was supported by a weak, affable voice.

“I was watching your kind and intelligent face,” he said. “And I know you are the one for me.”

EPILOGUE

MANY THINGS HAVE CHANGED since the events covered by the last pages of this memoir, which took place at the end of August 2000. Some have seemed to follow their natural course, but others turned out impossible to predict. Romulus went back to Sibiu, and I to New York, where slowly, I dug myself out with journalism and translation assignments from the financial mess into which I'd sunk. I tried to put the previous nine months out of mind, and succeeded to a surprising degree, except during moments when I would see a news item or watch a television show whose theme touched on male or brotherly friendship. Then suddenly, I'd burst briefly into tears.

Occasionally, I blamed myself for the end of my relationship with Romulus, supposing that it would have endured if I'd been more flexible and more understanding. My friends, as well as my mother, tried to be supportive by defaming him, claiming that I'd been duped by a cold and exploitative person and that it was a blessing that I'd finally come to my senses. Meanwhile, I continued to experiment with turning the experience into a book, a project that lasted four years.

About eight months from the last time Romulus and I saw each other, the phone rang. He was calling—not even collect—and wanting to know, he said, how I was doing. The conversation led to a reestablishment of our friendship and later to the routine relationship that I'd suggested to him on that last day in Budapest. In April 2001, I went to Romania for a two-week stay. We revisited Maramureş together, a visit that eventually became the subject of an article for
nest
magazine. Very quickly we fell into a more restrained friendship and discovered that we truly enjoyed each other's company. This developed into a routine of visits to see him once or twice a year. Soon, out of a nonchalant acknowledgment of my needs, Romulus again began to allow sex. Because I was able to keep the experience defined as a mundane concession to pleasure rather than the sign of a great romantic passion, our relationship continues happily along those lines to this day. He's not the same Romulus who appears in these pages, but a more mature man, bulkier and with thinning hair. His success with the ladies continues, and he's rarely without a long-term, though casual, involvement.

About a year after struggling to survive in Sibiu, he started working as a bouncer at the club that I'd visited, where his brother Bogdan had become the manager. This offered moonlighting opportunities for introducing willing young women to businessmen who visited the club. It's a fairly lucrative setup, which I suppose can be defined as pimping. But it's not in his nature to boss, manage or punish, and his relationship with the women from whom he profits often takes on the dimensions of a friendship or love affair. I'll admit that I encouraged it, because he's never had any way of supporting himself before. Today he makes an average of about $250 a month, which puts him on the economic level of a middle-class Romanian.

In 2002, the Schengen countries lifted their travel ban on Romanians. Romulus seized the opportunity by starting with a vacation in the Canary Islands. Then, with very little money left, he foolishly decided to continue to Paris. His hoped-for final destination was London, where an underground network of illegal Romanian immigrants, including his friend Ursu, were getting work in the construction industry. He planned to get there by the Channel Tunnel train, already the scene of the deaths of several immigrants who sneaked into spaces near the train engines. Perhaps fortunately, Romulus's plan was foiled shortly after he arrived in Paris. At the Gare du Nord, a hostile Turk, who felt that too many illegal Romanians were spoiling his turf, slashed Romulus's face with a knife, sending him to a Paris hospital and leaving him with a dramatic scar from the end of his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. I was awoken in the middle of the night in New York by an emergency call from the hospital and ended up having to pay not only Romulus's but also his brother's and brother's girlfriend's fares back to Romania. The scar is still visible but has faded somewhat, and for me it adds a jaunty touch to his already dangerous good looks. He detests it and hopes it will fade altogether.

Romania has changed immensely since my first visit there in early 2000. In Bucharest, the illegal kiosks with their bootleg liquor were almost all torn down by the center-right mayor, Traian Băsescu, who was impatient for gentrification. He also eliminated about three-quarters of the wild dogs, and probably not according to Brigitte Bardot's specifications. Băsescu became president of Romania in late 2004, and his orientation is decidedly Western, with a view of getting the country into the European Union.

Whereas cash machines were rare, they now proliferate, and stores are filled with a wealth of new merchandise. The folkloric appearance of horses pulling carts of scrap metal in downtown Bucharest is a thing of the past, outlawed by a new ordinance. However, the economy continues to lag, and the distressingly low average income prevails. Romania is still among the last of the Eastern European nations to be invited into the Union and will have to wait at least until 2007.

Eager for a tool to use in the conflict with France and Germany before the war in Iraq, George W. Bush speeded the entrance of Eastern European nations into NATO, and Romania now holds a place in that organization. Yet it remains, in my opinion, a conundrum in the equation of Western globalization, with one foot still in the East and the past—which could turn out to be the very thing that saves the new global uniformity from potential colorlessness. Meanwhile the country's businesses continue to be privatized; and the dreaded Article 200, which prohibited homosexual contact in public and could have put me in danger for importuning Tristan, has finally been rescinded.

In January 2002, my mother died of heart failure at the age of ninety-eight. She died, essentially, in my arms and during an argument as I was walking her to her bed. For better or for worse, our relationship continued on its terms right until the end. The night before she died, and even the day of her death, we were still trading recriminations and tendernesses. One of her last statements to me was, “You eat too much.” For the first time ever, the criticism must have stuck, because in the year since her death I've slimmed down considerably.

In Bucharest, my friend Alex Leo Şerban continues his journalism career and travels to film festivals, always returning faithfully to his native land and gracing it with his talents of criticism. Despite heart-bypass surgery, Johnny Răducanu, seventy-four at the time of this writing, leads a vibrant life as a jazz pianist, touring occasionally and entertaining his fellow Romanians frequently at clubs, universities and concert halls. One highlight of my visits to Romania is dinner with Johnny and Romulus in Bucharest. Carmen Firan, the cultural attaché who so graciously received me at the Romanian Cultural Center in New York, writes poetry as before, but has branched out into fiction and playwriting as well. She's happily married to a Romanian gynecologist, Adrian Sangeorzan, who is also a poet, and they live in Queens.

Queen Marie, beloved by her people, and admired by other royalty, died in Romania in 1938 at the age of sixty-two, after being pushed to the sidelines by her son Carol. It was just two years before his flight from Romania, and nine before the eventual end of the monarchy. She succumbed to a bizarre cirrhosis, whose cause could not be determined. According to the May 29, 1937, issue of
Life,
the “Iron Guard's work was the guess of Rumanian observers March 12 when it became known that Dowager Queen Marie . . . was paralyzed by poison or ‘gastric disturbance.' Marie, born an Englishwoman, is strongly anti-German.” In addition, although there was no proof, certain people who took into account the tensions between her and her son, and the various cabals at court, surmised she had been poisoned. Marie's dream of greater influence over Romania through her son was never realized, and the quarrels that broke out between her and Carol, which affected the entire family, rendered her later years tragic.

The government of her son was pressured irresistibly toward Hitler, and it fell under the sway of the Axis powers soon after her death. When Carol and Elena Lupescu fled Romania in 1940, their train was attacked by members of the Iron Guard in Timişoara, near the border with Yugoslavia. According to Alice-Leone Moats, Lupescu hid in a bathtub on the train and Carol threw himself on her to protect her from a hail of bullets. The two made it across the border, then moved to a series of havens, including southern France and finally Spain, a neutral country; they lived off a stupendous amount of currencies, jewelry and national treasures that they'd stuffed into suitcases and trunks, but they were wanted by the Iron Guard to stand trial, and reviled by the United States government as Nazi sympathizers. Once known as the hope of a new Romania, Carol was now branded by Romanian newspapers as a “degenerate alcoholic and epileptic” who'd fallen into the hands of a satanic Jewess. Lupescu's residence on Aleea Vulpache was opened to the public and presented as a hellish fun house of decadence, despite the lack of evidence. In 1941, Carol and Lupescu reached Portugal; he crossed the border by hiding in the trunk of a car. They settled there, in Estoril, and set up their own faux court, although they were snubbed by a majority of the local and expatriate aristocracy.

Carol died in Portugal in 1953 and was buried there; Elena lived until 1977, in Portugal and France. Eventually, under the incorrect first name Magda, she became the subject of the following bit of doggerel:

 

In 2003, in a conciliatory gesture, Carol's body was returned to Romania. With it were the remains of Lupescu, who was buried separately, thirty feet away in a commoner's grave.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK COVERS an intense nine-month period of willful exile. The story of Romulus and me is, in a sense, a tale of personal alienation, not only because of the time I spent away from my country but also for my attempt, unsuccessful as it was, to distance myself from an identity I no longer desired. Anyone who is aware of the intense isolation of the literary process will understand that writing this book extended my period of alienation, even more so because its story takes place primarily in a faraway country, which cut me off from the environment in which I was writing. The effect was exacerbated by my decision to finish most of the book in Florida, where I know few people. I think of Ovid exiled to Romania's Black Sea coast: my calls and e-mails to friends were full of complaints. There were, however, people who made some effort to lighten the load, and I would like to thank them.

First of all, of course, is Romulus, whose family name shall remain unmentioned, and who became distressed after I read him the chapter about my visit to Sibiu, saying he'd never understood I was so unhappy there, but who now takes great pride in this book, occasionally fantasizing that it could make him rich. Second, Ursule Molinaro, who died without seeing much of the current text but whose enthusiasm for the subject and for my writing in general encouraged me, even after her death. Third, Jack Murnighan, who sent me to Budapest to write the article for
nerve.com
that led to my first encounter with Romulus.

I have deep gratitude for my American editor, Ken Siman, whose decision to buy this book and shepherd it through the editorial process eased some of the disenchantment I felt about my own country and increased my hopes for a better intellectual future here. I also thank Anna Jardine, the most understanding and informed copy editor I've ever encountered.

I'm very grateful to my publisher, Payot & Rivages in Paris, which published this book first, in French, in 2004; to my generous French publicist, Agnès Guéry-Plazy, whose exhaustive efforts helped me win the Prix de Flore that same year; and to my French editors, François Guérif and Catherine Argand.

I thank Carmen Firan for her interest in this book and the information about Romania she supplied, and Leonard Schwartz for introducing me to her. And Doris Sangeorzan, who rapidly and expertly prepared a synopsis of Johnny Răducanu's Romanian-language autobiography. Thanks also to Toby Dammit, who wrote an electronic symphony around an excerpt of my text, which he performed with me in Paris and which sharpened my focus on the book.

I'm grateful to friends who volunteered to read the entire manuscript before publication: David Wax, Emily Blumberg, Mack Friedman, Eliot Michaelson, Catherine Texier, Walt Curtis, Michael Murphy, Tsipi Keller, John Evans, Susan Jill Levine and James Derek Dwyer; as well as those who read or listened to sections while it was being written: George Agudow, Peter Upton, Thierry Marignac, Japhet Weeks, Robert Houghton, Diane Clemente, Scott Neary and Carol Olicker.

I was also heartened by those editors who published early versions of parts of the manuscript, or spin-offs from it, including Jack Murnighan, Matthew Stadler, Joseph Holtzman, Ariana Speyer, Andrew Gallix, Jordan Heller, Bob Nickas, Nathan Deuel and Kelly McEvers.