The Romanian (6 page)

When my mind was so choked with resentment that I couldn't read the words on the page, I took a bus to the Corso, that board-walk along the Danube where we'd met, and sat glaring at the windswept waves. Then I began to walk, as if through gelatin and surreal loss. There was the occasional wizened hustler sitting in one of the small parks, face scoured by months of cold wind, hands cracking with vitamin deficiencies. . . . Until finally, I found myself sitting in a cab again, taking the useless trip back to the empty hotel room. It's really an annoying trip. I had no idea the hotel was so isolated, would cost so much to get to.

At the hotel a strange presence lurked about a hundred feet from the entrance, like an animal crouched in the bushes. And then slowly, abashedly, it appeared, like something that had no right to be there, creeping toward me with head bowed, and a timid, self-punishing smile that gave me a secret twinge of pleasure. . . . He was a bona fide guest at this four-star hotel, but I'd forgotten, again, to consider his amazing sense of disentitlement, the effort he must have been expending to walk in and out of the lobby past the concierge. So when he'd returned and found me gone, instead of asking for another key, he'd loitered in front of the hotel and even hid in the bushes so as not to be shooed away. The animal he incarnated, skulking from the bushes when he saw me getting out of the taxi, wasn't a dog, despite the hangdog look, but a fox . . . a sly fox only temporarily cowed by my stony glance, my barking admonition, “If you don't want the
job,
then okay!”

“I disappeared on purpose,” retorted the shy fox craftily, “just to see what you do. I was testing you.”

That was ten minutes ago. Now I'm sliding my mouth up his thigh, licking at the scent of her arousal in the toilet of the movie theater with the thought of
her
fear and despair at losing him. “Always bring me your cock when it smells of pussy,” I advise, as I slowly gulp it to the root.

IV

ROMANIAN HISTORY HAS CREPT back into my story like an enticement; or is it a warning? King Carol II, of the enormous sexual stamina. And his Jewish mistress Lupescu, of the pursed Cupid's-bow lips and sashaying loins. In a landscape like my current life, it's natural to expect, or at least long for, the spectacular.

From the books I've been reading here in the Margitsziget while Romulus watches round after round of TV soccer, I can piece together life in Romania during Carol's early manhood, around 1915, when the new nation bristled with excitement, looking eagerly toward Western Europe for acceptance. I can picture the future king, Prince Carol, as a cocky, moody, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old, with an extravagant mop of wavy blond hair and a weak Hohenzollern chin, pulled in even further by Hohenzollern propriety. I've also learned that Romania's capital, Bucharest, where young Carol accumulated his sexual conquests (including one, called The Crow, slender and witchlike with cocaine-dilated pupils), was already known as Little Paris at the time. It was a bustling nexus between East and West, built up by Romania's rich reserves of oil and wheat and its access to the Danube. The fashionable main streets overflowed with natty young gentlemen smoking oval-shaped Turkish cigarettes and often available seraglio-eyed women, their shiny black hair framing Eastern-kohled eyes, their undulating hips sheathed in Turkish silks or filmy French organdy.

These images of Romania's past animate the isolation of that hotel on Margitsziget Island, but it's still becoming a bad place for Romulus and me. There's an air of family groups and bird-watchers, and there's no sex at all on TV. Motivated by the stories of Carol's amorous exploits, I spice up our sex sessions by inventing turn-of-the-last-century scenarios, whispering into Romulus's ear minutely detailed descriptions of moist labia beneath frilly corset edges and rippling breasts.

One day I come back to our room after a short sightseeing trip to the Dohány Street Synagogue and find Romulus lying stiffly on the bed, a shade lighter than his usual pallor, with no television playing. Boredom had driven him outside, where he was astonished to see someone entering the hotel as he was leaving.

Who?

Well, just a person . . .

Eventually, I'm able to pry out the story of a choreographer, an obsessed john whom Romulus dropped as a customer a little while ago, after which an assistant was set on Romulus's tail, as in some spy movie. He was afraid to leave his room for a week, kept getting hang-ups on his cellular. And now . . . there the man was, entering the hotel.

The next day we switch to the Gellért, our original trysting place. A spectacular room awaits us there, since this is the off-season. It has a balcony overlooking the noisy square and the green-metal Szabadság Bridge spanning the Danube. The anti-Romanian clerk who seized Romulus's passport is the same to check us in, but he doesn't bat a contemptuous eyelash. In fact, now that we occupy one of the luxury rooms, his previous suspicion has transformed into a robotic Old World servility. Henceforth he'll delicately refer to the vagrant I arrived with on the last trip in the middle of the night and whose passport he snatched as my “nephew from Italy,” a role that Italian-speaking Romulus laps up.

Our room really does feel like a Central European paradise, with its fake-Biedermeier furniture, fringed lampshades, heavy brocade curtains and two individual snowy-white comforters for the same bed. The large bathroom has a heated towel rack and a spacious tub, which Romulus takes advantage of immediately, after which I perversely forbid him to pull the plug, so that I can bathe in the same still-warm water.

Time stops in this world of constantly replayed porn videos coming from the cherry TV cabinet and sumptuous dinners delivered on rolling carts covered with stiff tablecloths, as Romulus smokes cigarette after cigarette, blinkingly staring at the posh atmosphere with sullen lips. We take fanciful pseudo-historical photos with my digital camera, fashioning togas from the brocade bedspread to impersonate Romania's aboriginal Dacians, or Turkish turbans to represent its enslavers; or we lean, sometimes naked, from the balcony at night to peer at the unreal congestion of streetcars, cars and pedestrians below.

None of the videos has changed. The big-breasted German woman in her white concrete tropical paradise still gets fucked over and over by her thick-dicked, hairless German partner. To supplement this we construct elaborate scenarios of what we could do together if we brought a hooker back to the room from an area of town Romulus calls the “prostituteria.” It's an idea I keep encouraging to keep up his interest in sex. The plan is for Romulus to take her from the back while I fuck her pussy. My concern, which he pooh-poohs, is the whore's reaction when I suck his cock in front of her.

Our fantasies are sometimes fueled by the suitcase half full of books on Romania and the Balkans I've brought with me, perverse political fairy tales of Turkish kidnappings and homosexual harems in Panaït Istrati's 1924 novel
Kyra Kyralina,
or stories of royal intrigue in Paul D. Quinlan's exhaustive 1995 account of the life of Carol II,
The Playboy King.

Carol II, whose mother was Queen Marie, is the figure who interests me most. Born in 1893, coming of age shortly before World War I, he was the first sovereign to be born on Romanian soil. And during the war, as the country saw itself hopelessly challenged by Germany, he was leading a dissolute, womanizing life. Later, his ten years of kingship, from 1930 to 1940, were years of capitulation to the Nazi threat; and his affair with the Jewess Lupescu during that period added a perverse complication to an already demoralized nation.

I'm becoming more and more astonished by Romania's dizzying political scandals, its schizophrenic identity encompassing Occident and Orient, its sexual legends and its aesthetic cultures full of mysticism, rural romance and pantheism. Romulus, it turns out, is surprisingly informed about the history of his country. Despite his street origins, he grew up in a Communist era that demanded at least a solid high school education for every citizen. Unlike me, he's always been aware of Romania's Turkish, Greek, Slavic, German and French influences and its relatively short history as an independent nation.

It seems to me that Romania's hundreds of years under Ottoman rule have left their traces in his sharp Oriental features and coal-black eyes; but when I suggest it, he's adamant about his pure Romanian origins. No matter, since in fact, the tale of the Romanian royal family that's gripped me to such an extent is really a Teutonic and British story. Romania's only royal rulers came from the West and were all placed on the throne by Western powers.

Marie, a Western princess set adrift in a libidinous Oriental adventure.
TOP PHOTOGRAPHS: KENT STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES. DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES

I page through the history books beneath the high, chandeliered ceiling of our room at the Gellért, my leg entwined with a yawning Romulus's, who's incredulous that I have the patience to spend so much time reading. When I come to the reign of Carol II, I realize that this playboy's dissolute promiscuity was probably forged from early experiences that resemble mine. It's becoming more and more apparent that this rebellious Casanovite was oedipally inspired by his lively, charismatic mother, Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Queen Marie, who is even memorialized in a humorous ditty by Dorothy Parker, reveals herself in her famous diaries, correspondence and autobiography as a headstrong, articulate woman with a high libido and a compulsion for political achievement. It is she, not her passive husband, King Ferdinand, who wins the acclaim of the peasants by venturing among them in traditional dress or puts herself and her son in mortal danger by suggesting they nurse cholera-stricken soldiers on the field during the Second Balkan War in 1913, the year before she becomes queen. It's also she who journeys without her husband to Paris after World War I, presumably to visit her dressmakers and put her daughters in school, and seduces the ministers at Versailles into enlarging Romania rather than partitioning it.

Inspired by some mesmerizing Internet photos of this blond, blue-eyed, regular-featured queen, we create havoc for the maids by using the duvets, curtain and brocade pillowcases to make fantasy costumes worthy of a Warholian send-up of Sternberg's
The Scarlet Empress.
One of the photos we discover on the computer in the lobby of the Gellért shows British Marie, called Missy by her family and friends, in a Pre-Raphaelite pose over a marble-potted plant, in a light-saturated conservatory, wearing a filmy, nymphlike peignoir with a train. In other photos, she lounges on the ledge of a Romanian countryside balcony in a Turkish warrior's headdress and tight, metallic costume, or sports a peasant's apron and kerchief, or leans seductively toward the viewer from her throne under a heavy crown and cowled dress that make her look like Nazimova in
Salome.
The enormous bedroom she designed for herself at the palace, part ecclesiastic study and part Turkish bath, so disturbed her mother-in-law, the poet queen Carmen Sylva, that the latter couldn't sleep all night the first time she laid eyes on it.

Marie is, quite clearly, an innovative powerhouse and a fascinating maternal figure, rightly called the first “modern queen.” Beginning as a frightened seventeen-year-old English bride in a strange Eastern country, she blossoms into a figure synonymous with Romanian identity, nationalism and pride shortly before World War I. Abandoning her British past, she drinks in the culture of Romania in great draughts and graciously accomplishes more for it than does any other leader.

In the shadow of Marie is her thwarted son Carol II, originally adored as the firstborn, then later subjected to her Victorian prudery and lust for power. He rebels, of course; but like most whose autonomy has been stolen early in life by a strong-willed, magnetic person, his attempts at independence are perverse and sordid.