Trouble in Transylvania (25 page)

W
HEN I AWOKE
the next morning, Nadia was gone and sun poured through the windows of the villa. My sweater and socks lay in a neat heap and the nightgown was gone. If it hadn’t been for that evidence I would have been tempted to believe that the night had been just a dream, and Nadia a visitor from the spirit world.

I walked out into a world transformed. A brilliant morning sky stretched above me, blue as a bright birthday ribbon tying up a splendid and dazzling universe. Water droplets everywhere sparkled like tiny globes of light, and wildflowers—rose, canary yellow, ivory and sapphire—were more abundant than only yesterday. Yesterday was April. Today was May. The air was soft in the sun and crisp under the firs. You could drink air like this. You could swim it.

“O saisons! O châteaux!”
I shouted. Then I remembered the rest.
“Quelle âme est sans défauts?”
What soul is guiltless? Had Nadia been trying to tell me something? Oh well, I’d worry about that later.

The porch gave a friendly creak as I stepped off onto the pebbled walkway. I looked at my watch. If I hurried, I’d be in time for my saline bath, followed by a nice hot packing of mud. At the moment, nothing sounded better.

While soaking in the tub I took the opportunity to question Ilona about Nadia. Did people in Arcata like her even though she was Romanian? Did she come often to the treatment center? Was she friends with anyone in particular? I was afraid that after last night I might not be as objective about her as I should.

“Nadia very nice woman,” said Ilona. “No husband, no children, just like you. But not widow, never married. Sad.” Ilona shook her head. “A woman not married, not happy. Alone. No… sexual relations … sad.”

“She seems happy enough to me,” I said. From a few hints last night I had a suspicion that Nadia might have had some previous practice. “So you don’t mind her being Romanian?”

“Hungarian, Romanian—if you woman you suffer under all government. Important thing, Nadia try to help Arcata. She help everybody. Is good.”

On the way to the basement I ran into Gladys, who was also due for an hour of hot mud. She’d just had her shot of Ionvital from Dr. Gabor, and was manifesting the energy and euphoria I’d heard about. In her red flannel bathrobe she looked like a firecracker about to ignite.

“Cassandra, I can’t tell you how great I’m feeling. Twenty years younger,” she said exuberantly. “Thirty or more. Heck, I didn’t feel this great when I was in my twenties! And to think that before I left the States I was thinking of selling my business and moving to a retirement home! No way, José! The only thing that makes me sad is that Evelyn couldn’t be here with me.”

“So is it Margit or Dr. Gabor who gives you the shots?”

“Dr. Gabor, of course. Between you and me, I’m a little worried about Margit.” Gladys tapped her forehead. “She’s covering something up. You think she did it?”

“If she did, he probably deserved it. He’d sexually abused her for years. But having a motive doesn’t automatically mean you’re guilty. It takes someone who’s willing to cross a moral line, or who doesn’t see that the line is there. Who’s capable of that? I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this: I’m not going to be driven out of Arcata by those Romanian bully-boys. Nadia’s been trying to convince me to go to Bucharest and take refuge in the American Embassy, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to hound me out of here before I’ve finished my treatments!”

Optimism in Archie’s case often seemed more like denial, but Gladys’s positive outlook was the real thing. She didn’t think she was in any danger of being arrested or jailed, but if she were she’d put up a fight. She probably didn’t need my help at all.

But I had gotten curious about the incident at the galvanic baths. Whether or not it was murder, there was some mystery surrounding Pustulescu’s death, and I wanted to know what it was.

I was getting with the program on the mud packing. Lie still and turn obediently and, most important, don’t shriek when the hot black mud hits your pubic zone. My medical diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis of the knee, but I guessed the mud-packing ladies were so used to fertility problems that they just glopped it on in the area of my dormant reproductive organs anyway.

Mummified in my little mud-and-cotton cocoon and listening to the soothing swoosh and drip of water, as the thick silty heat squeezed between my thighs, I thought of Egypt. Yes, I’d been there, but it was long ago. Perhaps the second half of my life would be about retracing my steps. Egypt was one of the first countries I’d dreamed of going to, one of the first places, with its pharaohs and pyramids, that had caught my imagination as a child. I remembered a
National Geographic
I’d seen in fifth grade about Queen Nefertiti, and how it had not been enough just to read about her, but necessary to vow to go to where she’d lived.

My mother had said, “You’re not going anywhere if you don’t start minding your mother and paying more attention in church. You’ll be going to hell before you go to Egypt.”

But my father, who was, after all, brother to the aunt who gave us the
National Geographic
subscription, had been encouraging.

“Someday we’ll take the whole family to Egypt. Why not?” he’d said.

He’d been drinking, of course, but even a drunkard can dream.

It set
me
dreaming, dreaming in cold Michigan, of heat, alluvial mud, palm trees and ruins submerged in the Nile. Of King Tut’s gold and precious metals, of slit-eyed stone cats and women with thin gauze dresses. Of asking the Sphinx some hard questions. About God, families and why things had to be the way they were.

Yes, this trip I’d go to China, but after that definitely Egypt. Egypt for months and months, and after that all of Africa, never to return to England, always to be on the move, she-who-does-not-stop, that was me, Cassandra, that was what made me different from my family working for the Upjohn Company and having children and buying pickup trucks and going to Mass and drinking and having heart attacks. I wasn’t only a dreamer but a traveler, heat and love were my elements and I would never stop never go back never be cold again…

Far away in the land of the twin crowns, under the hot African sun, it took me a few moments to become fully aware of a loud commotion somewhere at the other end of the room. A series of screams traveled down the row of cubicles like vocal dominos.

“What’s going on?” I asked in all the languages I was capable of. In vain. The woman on the table next to me in the cubicle was frantically wiggling out of her cocoon of sheets; she’d managed to get one arm out and was unwrapping herself.

“
Rendőrség!
” she said. Archie’s Hungarian phrase book could have helped me, but unfortunately I had no arms to reach for it. The muslin trapped me like a shroud around a mummy.

There must be a fire, I thought. The mineral smell of the mud would mask any scent of smoke. Or an earthquake. Hadn’t Ilona hinted at the fact that this place was falling down? I looked up at the ceiling and saw cracks. Big buildings like these shouldn’t be constructed on soft saprogenic mud. In a few minutes perhaps we’d be part of the element that we originally crawled out from.

These thoughts took milliseconds, as I writhed frantically inside my muddy winding sheet. A feeling of panic was palpable in the corridor. The screaming got louder, and the attendants ran back and forth shouting either warnings or instructions. A minute or two later the first black-bedaubed figures began to appear, in flight. Their white hands, faces, and feet made them look like pale root vegetables recently pulled from dark wet earth.

Finally, I squeezed my hand up to the top of the muslin sheets and looked for the start of the folding. The woman next to me was already unwrapped; she was just starting to help me unpeel my cocoon, when we heard men’s voices shouting above the female shrieks, and with that my companion was off, leaving me to unfold the last of my chrysalis myself. Feet pounded past; it was a stampede of turnips. I sat on the side of my narrow table, the blood rushing to my head and muddling my escape plan. Should I run too? Yes, if it were a fire; no, if an earthquake. Then I should get under a doorway.

“Oh no you don’t.” To my astonishment these words were shouted in English, and in a very peppery way too. A blackened Gladys appeared in the open space by the showers, with a bucket of mud in one hand and a wooden mop handle in the other. She seemed to be fending off someone or something. Or else she had just gone crazy, like everyone else around me.

I peered around the corner of my cubicle and saw that her antagonists were the two young Romanian policemen of the day before. One of them looked cowed and horrified, but the other was steadily advancing on Gladys with a pair of handcuffs.

I got up unsteadily and went to her aid.

“Gladys, what’s going on?”

“They’re trying to arrest me!” She feinted with the bucket of mud, and the two boys drew back. One of them looked as if he would never get his eyes back to their proper shape. I consoled myself by thinking that I wasn’t
exactly
naked. All the important bits were covered, so to speak.

I mustered up as much Romanian as I could, and where I didn’t know the Romanian, threw in a kind of Franco-Italian.

“You can’t come down here and arrest this American woman. You don’t have any proof. First of all, you don’t know that Pustulescu didn’t have a heart attack, and secondly, I think that Gladys was set up. But the main thing is timing, boys. This is a sacred place, this is women’s space.”

“It’s no use, Cassie,” said Gladys. “They don’t want to talk about it. Better grab some mud.”

It was a scene from of one of the First People’s creation myths. Out of the chaos of darkness and water, out of the pulsating mysteries of the fecund earth, out of the loins of the Great Mother herself, two almost indeterminately-sexed figures had emerged—me and Gladys. We had metamorphosed from chaos, from a fertile soil that contained within it every sort of potency and possibility. Primal beings, we stood alone, confused and yet alert. Then, as if realizing a vital impulse to dive into the goo whence we’d come and to create other beings like ourselves, we looked around until we saw one of the hot-mud-bucket carts behind some curtains. Quickly I filled a bucket of my own with steaming globs of black silt and, rushing back to Gladys’s side, tossed it directly at the stiffly pressed blue uniform of one of the policemen.

“Okay, now we’re talking,” said Gladys, letting fly her own bucket of mud and coating the other cop in oozy black earth. “Now we’re going to town.”

The mud-drenched Romanians, furious now instead of just aggressively doing their duty, came towards us with renewed determination. The younger one held out the handcuffs, but the bigger and older one took out his gun and pointed it first at Gladys and then at me. He didn’t speak, judging that actions spoke louder than words.

“Holy Moly,” said Gladys, slopping him with another bucket. “You’ve got to disarm him, Cassie.”

“Me! What if it’s loaded?”

“Oh heck, the big chump isn’t going to shoot us. Probably. Jump him.”

I made a flying leap and the two of us came down hard in a fertile puddle of hot mud, the big chump somewhat harder than me because I was sitting on him. The gun went flying. “Now what, Gladys? He’s squirming uncomfortably.”

Gladys gave me and my hostage another good slopping. The other policeman, the younger one, who was not quite so bespattered, seemed to be thinking twice about this whole adventure. He didn’t take his gun out from his holster. “Ladies, ladies,” he said plaintively. “It’s my job.”

“Sit tight, honey,” Gladys instructed me. “Don’t let the big guy get away. I’ll deal with this other babe in the woods. He’s going to be putty in my hands.”

But already the big guy under me was rolling towards his gun. We grappled. In some respects, I had the advantage. Naked, I was like an oiled seal, squeezing through his grasp.

Sweet Jesus, this was probably my mother’s worst fantasy about the kind of thing I’d been up to since leaving Kalamazoo.

“Gladys, I’m losing him. Do something or he’ll get the gun again.”

“Sorry Cassie, I’ve got my hands full with the young’un.” She combined a karate kick to his knee with a bucket of mud over his head. The bucket stayed there a moment, giving the boy the look of a robot.

I couldn’t help laughing and the big guy chose that moment to heave me off him so that I went sliding stomach-first through a big black puddle.

He was reaching for the gun…

And then, from an unexpected direction, a huge slurp of mud came flying. It hit my hostage squarely in the face and momentarily blinded him.

I turned to look: a battalion of women, coming in twos and threes, was massing behind us with buckets. None had showered or gotten dressed: they were all wonderfully barbaric with streaks on their faces as well as their thighs and shoulders, with their torsos caked with black as if they wore breastplates. Their bedaubed faces were set in expressions of resolution. For most of them this was probably the first time they had stood up to authority of any sort, much less Romanian police authority, much less stood up en masse, in solidarity.

As if to an unheard clarion call to arms, they began to plunge their hands into the hot mud and to fling handfuls at the cops. One of the women grabbed the gun and buried it in a bucket of silt; another helped me to my feet, while the others barraged my hostage with a steady rain of mud.

And as they fought and threw and tossed, the women began to talk, and then to shout and then to laugh and then to scream. I could only imagine what they were saying, since most of it was in Hungarian, and all of it was at a very high volume.

Perhaps it was something like: “You stinking Ceauşescu agents, you worked for a man who took the wealth of this country and spent it on a goddamned palace, a man who turned off the electricity and heat all over the country and let the people starve while he dined on caviar and strawberries in winter. You stood by while he destroyed our traditional villages and moved us into apartment blocks so that people like you could spy on us. You made us inform on each other.”