Trouble in Transylvania (16 page)

The girl noticed me, all right. One day as I was walking by with the two youngest in my family, she opened up the door to the fairy-tale house, ran out to the porch and screamed, “Go away! I see you all the time, looking at our house. I’m sick of seeing you out here on the sidewalk. Go away!”

I stared at her only a few seconds before hurrying my little brother and sister away. I saw us all as the blond girl must have seen us, poor Irish, badly dressed in hand-me-downs and St. Vincent de Paul specials, our wild curly hair in our eyes, forbidden longing on our faces.

I didn’t walk down South Street again for a long time.

But I could live here! Here in this beautiful house in Arcata. It couldn’t cost that much in Romanian lei. This could be my South Street, my fairy-tale house.

The stone porch was getting cold and darkness was falling. I got up and walked down the pebbled path and through the gate. But where did the second gate lead? A high, trimmed hedge rather than a fence separated the yard from the street, but there was no path once you opened the gate, only a meadow of wildflowers—buttercups, daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace. There was something still and peaceful here, here where there was no house, but only overgrown grass and flowers. Had it been a park once? There were two wooden benches with curved, slatted backs. I sat down on one of them, and let the mood of the place enter my spirit. I felt in the presence of something lost and long ago. In the presence of loss, but also of enchantment.

I had first run away from Kalamazoo the summer I was seventeen, following Dede Paulsen, who had not exactly said she loved me back, much less that she wanted me to come with her to her new home in Los Angeles. I had a little money that took me on the Greyhound down to Wichita. From there I hitchhiked across Kansas and Colorado, down through New Mexico and Arizona. I was picked up by the state patrol outside of Tucson and held in jail three days there for possessing no identification and for refusing to give my name. Finally I broke down, and my mother, who had never been farther from home than Grand Rapids, flew down to free me and bring me back.

Neither of us had ever flown before. She had had to borrow money from relatives to manage it.

I had been gone over a month when she saw me. She burst out crying and hugged me; then she gave me a good wallop on the butt, though I was taller than she was. After I’d left home one of my sisters had spilled the beans about my infatuation with Miss Paulsen. My mother couldn’t decide which was worse: being in love with a woman or running away.

“If anything like this ever happens again,” she threatened, “I won’t be coming to collect you. You’ll be on your own with your sinful ways. I won’t be following you down the highway to hell.”

Needless to say, it did happen again, and again, and the last time I left home, just after my high-school graduation, was the last time I saw my mother.

Women and the road thus became irrevocably merged in my mind. I never told my mother this, or any of my girlfriends back at school—because I wanted them to think me a hopeless romantic who’d do anything for love—but somewhere down about Santa Fe I had forgotten about Dede Paulsen. I had fallen in love with travel itself, with movement and change, and I didn’t care if I ever reached my destination.

It was completely dark by the time I came back down the cobbled road to the hotel. I stood outside looking up at the building. Most of the windows were dark; only a few glimmered with lamplight. In one of the lit windows, two women stood embracing. The shadow of the smaller one seemed to dwarf the taller, who leaned back to be kissed on the neck.

In another window a small figure held a violin up to her chin. The strains of a simple Bach melody floated out into the Arcadian night.

I remembered once complaining to my bassoonist friend Nicola that, however much I loved classical music, I could never understand it.

“What don’t you understand?”

“When I listen to classical music, I often have feelings, but I don’t know what the feelings are. It’s not like listening to a ballad or the blues.”

“Yes. And?”

“I mean, I can’t describe the feelings, I can’t really say if they’re happy or sad or whatever.”

“Yes. And?”

“I
mean,
Nicola, that no
words
come to me to describe the feelings.”

“Words,” she said. “Why on earth would you want words when you can have music?”

But I never heard music without words when I was growing up, and it was the words that gave the music its meaning.

My father had a beautiful tenor and he often sang around the house. He loved jigs and reels, but more he loved sad ballads like “Kathleen Mavourneen.”

The refrain that Jack had yesterday forbidden me to sing came back to me now.

Oh hast thou forgotten how soon we must sever?

Oh hast thou forgotten this day we must part?

It may be for years and it may be forever,

Oh why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?

It may be for years and it may be forever,

Then why art thou silent, Kathleen Mavourneen?

I
SAW JACK AT
breakfast the next morning. Bundled in a Nepalese sweater over a sarong, tights and hiking boots, she was alone at a table eating bread and butter. Her skin was paler than usual, with soft violet shadows under her gray eyes, and she had an unusually languid air about her.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m bleeding.”

“What?”

She looked at me in surprise. “I mean, I’m having my period. And—I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Jack, she’s far too young for you. She’s hardly twenty. What would Gladys say?”

“Actually, Gladys did say something. She said she was glad we’d turned up, because she’d been worried about Bree getting bored with just Cathy to talk to.”

“If you were just talking, it would be fine.”

“I don’t believe in being ageist,” she said. “It’s nice, it makes me feel young too.”

“Well, you don’t look young. You look awful.”

“You had your chance, Widow Reilly. Is it my fault you prefer to suffer over the charming Eva? Or are you still suffering?”

“Eva would adore me if I were a car mechanic. Anyway, you were the one who had dinner with her last night, you tell me.”

“I know you’ll hate us,” Jack said, “but we found a sweet little outdoor restaurant by a stream, where they served us freshly grilled trout and a lovely bottle of white wine. I think the wine helped put me in the mood. When I came upstairs there was Bree in my room, just waiting …”

“Did Eva say anything about me?”

“She says she’s never met anyone like you before.”

“She really said that?”

“Yes. She said she thinks you’re a bad influence on me.”

Zsoska met me outside the Arcata Spa Hotel at nine-thirty, only half an hour later than she’d agreed. She was wearing a hot pink training suit of rustling-thin fabric, running shoes, and a great deal of small jewelry, a dozen little gold rings, bracelets and lockets. Also aviator-style sunglasses. Her long, layered, gold-striped black hair bounced as she hopped out of the car to attract my attention with a wave.

She invited me into her Dacia, which was red and newly washed and as sporty as an Eastern European model could be. Gold chains hung from the rear-view mirror. She had stretched a thin tee-shirt with the Playboy bunny logo over the back of the driver’s seat.

Zsoska said she wanted to practice her English with me rather than speak Romanian or use the Hungarian phrase book. This meant that I was going to have to find a way to reorganize Zsoska’s passionate but fragmented thoughts into more coherent linguistic units. In my travels I’ve met with all sorts of English speakers, from the brilliantly fluent, with accents straight from the BBC World Service, to those for whom English is a kind of game played with a ball, the object being only to keep things moving. Zsoska was a challenge, requiring intuition and patience, particularly in the matter of pronouns, with which she had a very loose way. I’d read in the Berlitz phrase book that ő in Hungarian could mean either he, she or it; in German, which, in her fashion, Zsoska also spoke,
sie
or
Sie
can mean she, they or you.

This gender-bending method of assigning pronouns was part of the reason that Zsoska’s sentences were frequently impenetrable. Although they were packed with feeling and assisted by eyebrows, frowns and the occasional charming smile, they tended to lack the logic so comforting to a listener.

“First needing petrol. Petrol very much money for me.”

She wore the stern expression that made Archie quail. I suspected that it was pride.

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get the petrol,” I said.

She smiled happily. “We having nice day. Going far.”

Driving down through the villas and garden houses, we passed many people who stared at her (women) and many who waved (men).

“I suppose you’ve been living here a long time.”

“How that?”

I repeated it.

“I growing up in next village,” she said. “Two years, I working here hotel restaurant. Bad, very bad. No money in Romania. No one money.”

Her beautiful face wore its fierce expression again. “I wanting leaving. Deutschland. Deutsch man my friend. Not Deutsch, living Deutschland.
Sass.”

“Sass?
You mean Saxon?”

“Yes,” she answered. “She growing up Sighişoara, going Deutschland, but no liking Deutsch girls, liking Magyar. Me. They coming back seeing me soon. I wanting leave here, go back Deutschland with her. Living good there.”

“He?” I asked. “Him?”

“Yes, he, he, he. I knowing English! He-man. Rolf.”

We filled up the tank at a single-pump station just outside Arcata and set off. The sun glistened off the dew on the fields, and the foothills began to turn into mountains. Zsoska put a cassette of German pop music in her car stereo. I had no idea where we were going, or exactly how I should steer the conversation to find out what Archie wanted to know.

“Harghita mountains,” she said, waving out the window. “My family Székely, living here long time.”

Well, Archie was right about that then. And the Székelys
were
a romantic lot, who had in medieval times protected the border against the Mongols from Asia. I’d heard that the Székelys had never been serfs, that they’d always lived in these mountains and valleys, a law unto themselves. It was easy to imagine Zsoska, with her Tartar cheekbones and hawk-like nose, in an embroidered sheepskin vest, in boots, on horseback, looting and marauding … easier to imagine her on the range than in the restaurant.

Zsoska had been singing along to a peppy Bavarian pop tune, and it seemed to conjure up happy thoughts. She said, “They having Mercedes.”

“Who?”

“My
friend,
Rolf, from Deutschland.”

“Oh, right, Rolf.”

“You? Car?”

“Me? No.”

She looked puzzled. “I car, you
no
car. Why? You American, yes?”

I tried to explain that I didn’t live in America, didn’t live anywhere, traveled frequently, and had very few possessions at all. She listened to me disbelievingly. “I car, Romania,” she said several times, pointing at her gold-locketed chest. “You,
no
car, America, no understanding.”

“What if we speak in Romanian?” I said.

“No. Practice English!” She looked affronted. “I wanting tell you my life.”

Well, this was good news, that she was going to volunteer information. Perhaps I would find a way to prepare her for Emma.

I said, “So you’re hoping to move to Germany soon? Deutschland?”

“I wanting marry Rolf, but with her I having problem, many problem. They jealous.” Zsoska turned angrily to me. “Why, why? I having
no
life. I going
not
out at night. I staying home. No jealous, no jealous
me.
She coming visit, bringing friend, that friend liking me. I do
nothing.
You
jealous
.”

“No, I’m not jealous. You mean,
‘he
is jealous.’ ”

“How that?”

“Never mind. I understanding, I mean, I understand.”

Then a long story followed, punctuated by the sounds of accordions, slapping heels and the occasional yodel from the car stereo. As far as I could make out, this Saxon Rolf was one of the many thousands of German-speaking Romanians who had left the country as soon as Romanians were issued passports after 1989. There was a German law that anyone—no matter if their family had left Germany five centuries ago—who was ethnically German could return to Germany. Zsoska’s boyfriend was one of these.

I began to space out on the lengthy story, in which half a dozen people, without names and with a variety of pronouns to describe them, seemed to be distrusting Zsoska. For no good reason. After a while, instead of listening, I only watched the landscape. We had passed through forested mountains into a wide valley, with farms stretching green in every direction. There were no tractors or other farm machinery, though this was probably due more to the poor economy than to a desire to keep to the old ways. From time to time we passed a horse-drawn cart, heavy and creaking, piled with people going to or from the fields. This region must be one of the last places in Europe where you could still get a sense of how life had rolled on for centuries.

“I already having one baby, I no wanting more now,” Zsoska was saying, and I suddenly paid attention.

“You have a child?”

“No.”

“But did you have a baby?”

“I married only age seven, no, seventeen,” she said sullenly. “Bad man, man drinking. We living Tîrgu Mureş, he working, me working. I wanting divorce, he hitting me. I coming back to parents, divorce.”

“But did you have a baby?”

“Why asking you?” she demanded, suddenly furious. Without warning she did an abrupt U-turn in the middle of all that green lushness, under a bright blue sky wheeling with birds. “We going no more. We going back my village. Yes.” She was calming down, perhaps fearful that I wouldn’t think this was enough of an excursion. “There nothing here, boring country, farms, horses, nothing. You going my house, Lupea, seeing dog.” She gave me her radiant smile, and turned up the stereo so that the day was pierced by the nasal voice of a woman singing “Baby, baby,
Ich liebe dich!
”