Trouble in Transylvania (18 page)

“So you definitely think it was murder then. Not an accident? Not just a heart attack?”

“But of course,” she said.

“Surely you can’t believe that Gladys did it though.”

“I think the murderer is Dr. Gabor himself.”

“I know that Dr. Gabor is an intensely nationalistic Magyar, but he strikes me as a very honorable man. He admires Václav Havel and…”

“I offer no accusations against the honor of Dr. Gabor. He makes my life miserable but I do not accuse him of being a cruel and spiteful man. Still, he is the one who had the most reason to see Dr. Pustulescu die.”

“Because he and Pustulescu quarreled?”

“Exactly.”

“But that’s too obvious. Gabor gets the sack and the next day Pustulescu is electrocuted? That’s the stuff of bad mystery novels.”

“Real people are not as clever as good mystery writers,” Nadia shrugged.

“What did you mean by saying that Gabor makes your life miserable?”

“Did I come to Arcata to be made a fool of?” she said passionately. “No! I came because I love people, because my job is tourism and making people happy. I like solving problems, not making problems.”

“But…”

“Gabor fights me for the souls of the tourists. I do everything to make the foreigners happy here. I arrange their hotel stays and treatments. I pick them up at the airport or train station and return them. I drive them anywhere they want to go and tell them the history of Romania—in French, in English, in German. Romania has a difficult reputation at the moment, with bad associations for some tourists. It’s very important that people enjoy themselves in Romania and see that it is not as they had heard, but that it is a friendly, beautiful, peace-loving country. Yes,” she pounded the table, “I do everything to make them happy, and then Gabor fills their heads with lies. How badly the Hungarians are treated. How awful the Romanians are. I Nadia Pop, I am Romanian. Does he care? No! Does he care that everyone coming to Arcata learns to sympathize with the Hungarians and despise the Romanians? No, that makes him happy.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to attack you personally.”

“Pah. From the moment I came he has said to me, Why can’t the government send a Magyar tourist agent? Why did they send
you?
”

“How well did you know Dr. Pustulescu?” I asked, trying to get back on the subject. “Did you work closely with him?”

For the first time Nadia looked evasive. “I do my job, and that job is to make people happy. They come here to Arcata to relax, to take the waters and the treatment, many come for the special effects of Ionvital. They have heard about Dr. Pustulescu and his work and they almost worship him. But I, personally, did not know him well.”

“How long have you been working here?”

“Only about three years, since after the revolution. Before that I was in Bucharest, but I wasn’t happy. Tourism under Ceauşescu at the end of the eighties was pathetic. He needed tourists for the hard currency, but he would not put the money into tourist accommodations. All this,” she gestured to the hotel complex above and behind us, “was built in the seventies before Ceauşescu’s mania for industrialization completely ruined the country. At that time the hotels were full. People from all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would come to Romania for conferences and relaxation, as well as for medical treatment.

“You know that up until the end of the Second World War Romania was a prosperous country? My parents told me about the food they had, food to spare! But the Soviets stole so much of what we had, our food, our oil, our minerals. Then Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceauşescu made it worse and worse. All the agriculture was converted to industrial crops for export. There began to be more and more food shortages in the eighties. We couldn’t feed ourselves, we! Once the breadbasket of Europe.

“By the middle of the eighties Ceauşescu was insane with power and greed. He was tearing down Bucharest, he was tearing down the villages. All his money had to go into his palace in Bucharest. He was sending all our food abroad to pay the foreign debt. While he ate caviar and lit chandeliers in his palace, the country ate bread and potatoes and sat in the dark.

“I grew up in Bucharest,” she said. “Once it was a beautiful city. They called it the Paris of the Balkans. I remember cafés on hot summer nights. Wine. Laughter. Poetry. I went to the university, I studied French, I wanted to be a teacher. But no, there was little work, I was sent to this school and that school, always in the provinces. I wanted to emigrate, I wanted to go back to Paris, but I couldn’t leave my parents. That was my life. Finally I stopped teaching, I lived in Bucharest. After my parents died, I went to work for Carpaţi, the national tourist agency. They sent me here to Arcata, where I am surrounded by beauty, but also by Hungarian fanatics.”

“You must be one of the few Romanians here then?”

“More are coming. But yes, my sister and my brother-in-law and their children, the police, a few at the hotel. We are isolated. Never mind,” she said. “I have great hopes. Ceauşescu is gone, the tourists will come back.”

Outside the window I saw Archie with his tape recorder following Jack and Bree. Seeing him made me remember the real purpose of my talk with Nadia.

“Listen Nadia, we have another problem.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said. “My brother-in-law is working as fast as he can on Eva’s car. Tell Eva that I will take her anywhere she wants to go. If she wants to go back to Budapest I’ll take her to Budapest. I would like to see Budapest. I would like to see her secretarial office. I will offer to drive her to Budapest. Yes, I will. I don’t hold a grudge.”

“Let’s wait on that,” I said nervously. “I think Eva would probably like to take her car back with her. But that’s not the problem I meant.”

Briefly I explained the Snapp family’s presence in Arcata, and Zsoska’s relation to Emma.

“So I told Zsoska,” I was saying, “and now I’m worried that it’s going to cause trouble.”

The effect of this story on Nadia was quite compelling. Her face grew pink with fury.

“So she gave up her baby! Of course! What choice did she have? She couldn’t have decided not to have the baby in the first place. It was the law. It was genocide,” she said. “Oh, men like Gabor talk about Ceauşescu as a murderer, but what do they know? It was the
women
who had to bear the brunt of his cruelty and madness. Thousands and thousands of women died from abortions—does the world know that? The foreign journalists and television stations came to Romania and photographed the orphanages and everyone said, How could people put their children into orphanages? What choice did we have? There was no birth control, there was no abortion, there was no food. Ceauşescu was worried about the population for his new industrialized country, he said all married women must have five children. They had to undergo monthly exams; they were watched, they were controlled. Many women gave themselves abortions, sometimes badly. If you were bleeding and went to the hospital, before they would treat you you had to sign a paper that said you had given yourself an abortion. Afterwards, if you survived, they would put you in jail. Many women did not sign; they died of septicemia. I have heard that 25,000 women died of septicemia this way. Half a million others were permanently damaged.

“I had a friend, a girl I cared for very much. She was pregnant, she had no money. She tried to abort and was bleeding. We called the ambulance and waited twelve hours for it to arrive. I remember how she bled and bled and we couldn’t stop it, and how she got weaker and weaker. When they took her to the hospital they said, Tell us who performed the abortion. She refused. Her kidneys collapsed and she died two days later.

“But if you have the baby, you can’t take care of it. You must work, there is no food. You put the baby in an orphanage, the baby gets AIDS, the baby dies. And you too, you die inside.”

Nadia bowed her head a minute. I wondered if she were talking about herself. “And then people like the Snapps come from other countries, shopping for babies. They bought our children and walked away with them; they took them away to homes in Scandinavia, Germany, England, America. What could we do? We are not a Third World country. We are not a backward people—economically backward perhaps, but not spiritually backward. But Ceauşescu destroyed us and the women most of all. We could not even protect our own children.”

Nadia stared at me. “What does Monsieur Snapp want now with Zsoska? Can’t he just leave her alone?”

“It’s that Emma doesn’t speak. He wants to find out about her family. But you know Zsoska—she’s…”

“Yes! I know Zsoska, she’s always a problem with the guests. Once she hit a man. Another woman, a French woman—can you imagine?—Zsoska spat on. They would like to fire her at the restaurant, but they are afraid of her.

“Yes,” she said. “This is a problem.” She gazed out the window for a minute or two, and then turned back with a smile, as if she’d found something in the blue sky that was invisible to me. “But don’t worry, we will fix it, we will make everybody happy.”

I went out to the square, just in time to hear Archie finishing up his interview with Jack.

“Cass, your friend Jack has just been telling me some fascinating things about this part of the world. I had no idea that its history went back so far. What I always learned in school is that civilization started in the Fertile Crescent. Not so! Apparently this whole area was called Old Europe. There are Neolithic sites all over Transylvania. Now let’s run over those dates again, Jack. What B.C. are we talking?”

“Marija Gimbutas estimates at least 30,000 years of cultures that worshipped the Great Mother. Then, around the year 3,000 B.C. came the warrior invaders from the North, the Kurgans. Their hallmarks were rigid hierarchy, weaponry and enslavement, the ownership of women’s sexuality and fertility. It didn’t happen all at once though. There were millennia of conflict and adaptation. At first the Great Goddess was still worshipped; then she became the consort of a male god, and finally she was reduced to only being the mother of God. The Minoans on Crete kept the old ways alive longest, but by 1500 B.C. patriarchy was well-established. The only places the Goddess survived were Africa, Central America and in the old Celtic religions.”

“Fascinating, fascinating,” said Archie, scribbling a few notes. “So do you think this is a new trend, this rediscovery of the Goddess cultures?”

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Jack loftily, “patriarchy is a mere blip on the radar of human consciousness. I mean, what, we’re talking a few thousand years, compared with tens of thousands. And the rule of the fathers has obviously been a total failure.”

“So you’d like to go back to those matriarchal societies, where women have power over men?” Archie looked a little nervous.

“But they weren’t matriarchal,” said Jack. “Gynocentric, perhaps. Matrilineal. But they weren’t about power
over.
That’s a male invention. They were partnership societies, not dominator societies.”

“Hmmm,” said Archie. “Well, I just hope when the war crimes tribunals start, you ladies will all remember that I was a house husband.”

“Yes,” said Jack. “I think we can put in a good word for you.”

“Listen, Archie,” I interrupted. “I’ve got to talk to you about Zsoska.”

I pulled him over to the railing above the lake. I could see Bree, from the corner of my eye, putting her arm through Jack’s and drawing her down to one of the benches. Jack was dressed in the same sarong as this morning, but with a silk Pakistani jacket over it, while Bree was wearing several torn tee-shirts and a flowered skirt. A couple of Gypsy women, also dressed in bright colors, looked at them approvingly and touched the fabric of their clothes and Bree’s nose ring. Jack began to have a conversation with them, apparently in the Gypsy tongue.

“I spent the morning with Zsoska,” I began. “I didn’t find out much about her family though. They’re poor, but Zsoska has a car. Her father’s on a pension and her mother works in a dairy. And she’s got a boyfriend, one of the Saxons who left to live in Germany. She told me a little about her circumstances when she gave up Emma. She calls her Emma Kay, which is actually Emoke in Hungarian …”

Archie stopped me. “So you told her then? That we were the people who adopted her?”

“She figured it out from my questions. She’s not stupid.”

“How’d she take it?”

“I don’t know … I guess she’s thinking it over.”

“I hope she’s not too upset,” Archie said. He looked at me, but I dropped my eyes. We both knew Zsoska’s hot temperament.

“I’m curious,” I said. “Why didn’t you meet Zsoska when you adopted Emma?”

“It wasn’t illegal or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Archie said. He was staring out at the lake, which winked and sparkled in the spring sunshine. “But sometimes I’ve wondered about the whole thing, the morality of it. It was so easy to get caught up in the craziness of the situation. One minute we were at home remodeling the kitchen and the next minute we were at this Bucharest hotel, with our contact Eugen driving us around from one orphanage to the next.”

“Were the orphanages as bad as they sounded in the newspapers?”

“Cass—you couldn’t believe them unless you’d seen them. The smell of urine would hit you as soon as you stepped out of the car, before you even got to the door. You’d go inside and see babies in wire mesh cages, just lying there motionless in their own urine and feces. There weren’t enough nurses, not enough supplies, and here were Western couples being brought here to look, as if it was a supermarket.”

Archie kept facing the lake, and his habitually cheerful voice sounded flattened and distant. “I can’t really describe what I saw, it really hurts too much—the disabled kids, the kids who stood in their cribs and rocked back and forth just to get some kind of stimulus. It was a nightmare. People like Eugen took advantage of us and the others, and he wasn’t even one of the bad guys. He didn’t try to cheat us, he just kept our hopes up, driving us around to these orphanages where the healthy babies had all been adopted and then to hospitals. We found three kids at different times that seemed suitable. One of them, little Iulia, we just fell in love with. But she was HIV-positive. Another little boy—we heard he was available and we drove to his village to speak with his parents. They said yes, but changed their minds as we were going to sign the papers.