Trouble in Transylvania (17 page)

“Rolf giving me cassettes,” she said. “We are liking music!”

Zsoska’s village was about five kilometers from Arcata. There was a stream overhung with willows and birches, and fields stretching out on either side of the road. Many of the houses were robin’s-egg blue, trimmed with kelly green. These were simpler homes than those in Arcata, but many had the traditional gate surmounted by a long birdhouse. Most had vegetable gardens, edged with tulips and pansies. Off the main square was a Catholic church, but not an Orthodox one; this was a Székely village and many people probably didn’t even speak much Romanian. There was no restaurant, but a small shop where Zsoska took me inside. The shelves were practically bare, with only plastic bottles of Pepsi, some chocolate, a great deal of plum brandy, or
ţuicǎ,
and a few glass jars of unidentifiable fruits and vegetables.

“What wanting you?” Zsoska asked. “You see we having nothing.”

“How about some Pepsi?” I bought two bottles of it and some chocolate. Zsoska approved of my spending money and said something to the middle-aged shopkeeper that made him look at me with respect.

“America, very good,” he said in English. “Clint Eastwood very good. Bang! Bang!”

The main street was the only paved road in the village. Zsoska parked down a dirt street in front of a small blue house, and we went inside. The furniture was sparse and rather low to the ground. There was a kind of divan covered in red shag material and a coffee table with a television set on it. In the kitchen were a table and four chairs, a stove and no refrigerator, and some empty-looking cupboards.

We sat at the kitchen table and poured ourselves some warm Pepsi. A little puppy ran inside and Zsoska swept it up, hugging it tightly.

“This Zizi,” she said. “Only one who is understanding me.

“Where are your parents?” I asked.

“My mother…” She searched for the right word. “Building, milk?”

“A dairy?”

“My father, no working. Pension—600 lei month.” That was just over a dollar, barely a pound.

I was trying to imagine Emma here. Who would have taken care of her? Zsoska and her mother had to work; her father was probably sitting around with his friends drinking
ţuicǎ
most of the day. The house had four rooms: a kitchen, a small living room, and two bedrooms. There was indoor plumbing, but not much of it.

I tried again. “Zsoska, did you give up your baby for adoption?”

“How that?”

“The baby you had, with your husband, what happened to her?”

“If I keeping baby, husband making me stay. I telling nobody. Baby sick, no food, going hospital. In hospital, Tîrgu Mureş, they saying no problem with baby, we finding parents, rich people from America, from France, from Deutschland. You signing paper.” Zsoska mimed signing. “I getting money and buying car, helping parents. Leaving husband. Now I am having
Sass
friend from Deutschland, but they jealous. I am twenty-two. I no wanting more baby, no wanting make Rolf jealous. Now no more baby.”

She gestured to her flat stomach and held Zizi closer.

I understood suddenly that Zsoska had just had an abortion, because Rolf thought that she might have been fooling around with one of his friends and she didn’t think she could persuade him otherwise.

“Zsoska,” I said carefully. “What would you say if your baby, the baby you had in Tîrgu Mureş… if you saw her again? How would you feel?”

She stared at me, uncomprehending. “That baby going away. I never seeing that baby. That not baby I am talking about now.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But she was a real baby. The nurses at the hospital must have kept the baby for a while and then … and then someone adopted her, a couple from America took her back to America.”

“How you knowing? How you knowing baby is she-baby?”

“Well … because I met the father and sister and…”

Zsoska’s black eyes were wide with alarm. She pounded the table. “Snapps!” she said. “Now I knowing why they always trying talking me!”

“Yes, and that little girl, Emma, is…”

“Emoke,” she said. “Her name Emoke.”

Zsoska jumped up, and the little dog fell away from her with a thump, forgotten. “No milk for that baby, cold cold winter. No food anywhere, fighting in the streets, revolution. Baby so sick, I think that baby die. Mother, father never seeing Emoke.”

Zsoska paced the kitchen. Suddenly she stopped and looked anguished. “Rolf finding out I having child, no, no,
no.
I telling her no married before!”

“There’s no reason he needs to find out about Emma—Emoke. After all, he lives in Germany.”

“He coming soon visit. No, no!”

She stopped and glared at me. “What wrong that child? She no speaking.”

“Well… you see… the Snapps were hoping to find out if there was anything in your family, anything that…”

“My family, we speaking!” She hadn’t sat back down, she was so agitated, and now she grabbed her purse and keys. “Come.”

In the red Dacia her child had bought for her, Zsoska drove me back to the hotel. She did not say another word, in any of her languages.

Outside the treatment center we found an alarming scene in progress. Gladys, in a red flannel bathrobe and felt slippers, her white hair damp and disheveled, and without her glasses, was standing in the entryway behind Dr. Gabor, who held out both arms as if to protect her. Two men looking young and unhappy were there in full police regalia: brushed blue uniforms, black boots, guns and tricorn hats. They were gesturing at Gladys and trying to get her to come with them into the open back door of their police car.

Off to the side, in her leather jacket, Bree was videotaping the whole thing.

Zsoska pulled up beside the police car and I jumped out.

“What’s going on?”

“Mrs. Really, Mrs. Really,” said Dr. Gabor. “You are a witness, these men are trying to
abduct
Mrs. Bentwhistle. I say to them, Have you an arrest warrant? I say to them, This is not Ceauşescu times any longer, my friends. You can not just come and take off innocent people to your torture chambers. Securitate! No more!” He began to shout at the thoroughly cowed-looking policemen again. The crowd of bath attendants, doctors and nurses assembling behind him got into the spirit and all began shouting in Hungarian, probably something along the lines of Ceauşescu was a murderer and all Romanians were murderers. The black dogs that always collected around Gladys howled in unison.

I turned to Gladys. Someone had brought her glasses and she attached them firmly to her straight nose.

“Gladys, are you all right?”

“Sure thing, hon. They’ll never take me alive!”

“What happened?”

“I’d just come out of that shower-massage room—you know, twenty minutes of that wakes you right up!—and was going for my next appointment at the mud baths, when these two bozos come up behind me and take me by the elbows. Well, I learned how to deal with muggers in my self-defense class, so I gave one a jab in the stomach and the other a kick in the knee cap, and hightailed it for Gabor’s office. They caught up with us right here. Bree was walking by with her video camera, so I told her, Get this on tape. We’re suing!”

Someone had alerted Nadia and she came rushing up from her office, out of breath. Her bun had come undone and strands of dark hair fell across her round face.

When the two policemen saw Nadia they burst into explanations, and these I could partly understand: All they had wanted was to ask the American lady a few more questions; they had wanted to take her down to their office to get a statement; whether or not Gladys was a murderer, she had been a witness, and their superiors in Bucharest were demanding that some action be taken.

“Yes, yes,” Nadia said. “Gladys, they are not arresting you. Not to worry. They have questions only.”

“We know the kind of questions the Securitate ask!” Dr. Gabor shouted. “They turn you into informers, they torture you if you don’t answer.”

“Doctor!” Nadia said. “These not Securitate, you know these men. These men live here in Arcata. They only do their job. There is murder, in democratic countries also murder, you cannot just ignore.”

“Where did the Securitate go then?” Dr. Gabor countered. “After the so-called revolution that keeps the same men in power, you think the Securitate just disappear? No! They are still living all around the country. They are used to torture and intimidation. They are
Romanian
.” For the benefit of the police he repeated the same thing in Romanian.

The two policemen, angry now, burst into justifications and counter-accusations. They had dealt with Dr. Gabor in the past. He was trying to protect his clinic as usual. But they were well aware that he and Dr. Pustulescu had had a quarrel, and that Dr. Pustulescu had demoted him the day before the murder. He shouldn’t think he himself was not under suspicion.

“I have been under suspicion my whole life in this godforsaken country,” Dr. Gabor said scornfully. “Are you telling me something new?”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere without a lawyer,” said Gladys. “The idea I’d kill some aging Lothario is a load of bull. They already questioned me and I told them I was innocent. I know my rights. I stand with the Hungarians on this one. Hell no, don’t you know. The Romanians have got to go!” she chanted, and a few enthusiastic bath attendants took it up. The black dogs, who now numbered six, barked wildly. Bree moved in for a close-up of her grand- mother. It was like watching a made-for-nightly-news demonstration.

Nadia stood helpless, hands up in the patty-cake way, saying, “Please, no Yugoslavia. No Yugoslavia.”

Finally, the Romanian cops got back in their car, without Gladys, and drove off. A cheer went up from the clinic staff, and Dr. Gabor said to me, “We begin now to make a stand against the tyranny of the Romanians.”

Nadia said to him in English, “You just make more trouble for Gladys. They only want her to sign paper. You watch, they come back and arrest her next. And it is
your
fault!”

But Dr. Gabor, flushed with the success of the impromptu revolt, had turned away. “Now, now, Mrs. Bentwhistle,” he was saying, “you see, nothing to worry about. We Magyars will protect you.”

Gladys gave him a friendly wallop on the arm, and they all trooped back into the clinic.

I began to follow and then remembered Zsoska. One minute she’d been standing next to me; now she was gone.

“Nadia,” I said to the distraught tourist agent beside me, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“Allons-y,”
she said. “Let’s go to my office. There we can speak
in peace.
”

I
T IS ONE OF
the remarkable aspects of language that we can appear to take on different personalities simply by making different sounds than the ones to which we are accustomed. For those who are truly bilingual this seems so obvious as to hardly bear mentioning: they flit easily between tongues—an English set of vowels and mannerisms flows into Urdu patterns and intonations with scarcely a ripple—though they will talk casually about “my Pakistani self” and “my English persona.” But for those of us who came late to another language, it is always something of an odd experience to see and feel it happen, the moment when you notice another personality overtaking your familiar one, the moment when you become “Italian” or “Japanese.” It’s the moment when you stop worrying about grammar and accent, and allow the other language to possess you, to pass through you, to transform you.

When I speak Spanish, the language that I know best besides English, I find my facial muscles set in a different pattern, and new, yet familiar gestures taking over my hands. I find myself shrugging and tossing my head back, pulling down the corners of my mouth and lifting my eyebrows. I touch people all the time and don’t mind that they stand so close to me and blow cigarette smoke into my face. I speak more rapidly and fluidly and I use expressions that have no counterpart in English, expressions that for all my experience as a translator, I simply can’t turn into exact equivalents. To speak another language is to lead a parallel life; the better you speak any language, the more fully you live in another culture.

Whatever Nadia’s inadequacies in English, in French she was quite at home.

“Oh France!” she said when I asked her about it on the way to her office. “If one could live in France one would be perfectly happy. I did live there once, you know. I studied in Paris for six months. It was the happiest time in my life. The cinema, the cafés, the shops, the French themselves, a brilliant, artistic people.” She kissed her fingertips. “I was spoiled forever by those few months.

“France and Romania have always had a special relationship,” Nadia went on, opening the door to her bleak, bare office. “We are a Latin people, you know, an island of Latins in a sea of Slavs—language orphans. That is what makes Romania more Western than the other Eastern European countries. The Hungarians, the Polish, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Serbs: they are heavy, Teutonic, theirs is the barbarian tradition. But we Romanians are Francophiles, we love literature, especially poetry, philosophy, the delicate arts of love and conversation.

“You know Rimbaud?

O saisons, o châteaux

Quelle âme est sans défauts?”

Nadia sat down heavily at her desk and gestured to me to take a seat opposite.

“Yes, I have read all the great French authors and poets,” she said. “Voltaire, George Sand, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, de Beauvoir. There were once many cultural exchanges between the two countries, and a great deal of Romanian literature has been translated into French. We have a kindred spirit, our two countries. Unfortunately, it is only in spirit. Romania’s history has been very different, tragically different.”

She pinned up her hair absent-mindedly, “I believe that we were placed on the earth for love and art, to enjoy the beauty that God has given us and make more beauty if we can. And yet, except in places like France, that does not happen. We do not allow ourselves to be happy and creative. We argue, we hate, we punish, we kill. Even here, even here in this beautiful town of Arcata—death and murder!”