Trouble in Transylvania (19 page)

“Meanwhile, all around us, other people seemed to be having better luck. Going out for the day and coming back with a healthy little Dan or Adriana. Most of them were going farther afield than Bucharest and most of them, I think, were buying the babies directly from the parents, without bothering with the orphanages and hospitals. They didn’t call it a black market, but that’s what it was.”

Archie turned back to me, his gold-brown eyes earnest and pleading. “You can’t blame people. I know how they felt. You get desperate after a while. So when Eugen suggested that we try another city further north we went along with it. Lynn had already overstayed her leave of absence, we just couldn’t see any end to it. That’s how we wound up in Tîrgu Mureş.

“I remember that we didn’t want to get our hopes up when Eugen said he’d heard about a nine-month-old girl in the pediatric ward of a local hospital. Her mother had brought her in with pneumonia and malnutrition and then had abandoned her, they said. Eugen said the nurses were concerned about her because she was well now and they didn’t want to send her to an orphanage.

“We didn’t take to Emma right away—we’d done that too many times before and had our hearts broken. Anyway Emma was thin and cried a lot, her hair was scraggly and she had blotchy skin. Not an attractive baby. The hospital in Tîrgu Mureş wasn’t the worst we’d seen, but it was understaffed and depressing. Emma had been in the hospital for two months; she probably wasn’t held much, she didn’t smile. But she was healthy. And she was available, they said. It was like the last sweater on the table in the bargain basement. It’s not quite the right size, but you think you can make it fit.

“The nurse said the parents were getting divorced and that the mother was living with her parents in a village about an hour away. Lynn put her foot down about doing direct negotiations. We’d been on too many wild goose chases. So Eugen agreed to arrange everything. He came back from the village saying that the mother would give up all claim to the baby and allow Emma to be adopted for about $2,000. Considering how much time and money we’d already spent that seemed very little. We agreed and the papers went through. We took Emma back to Bucharest, and then to the States.”

“Why’d you really come back here, Archie?”

“I never felt right about how it happened,” he said. “I felt hardened at the end, kind of heartless about it all. Lynn took it all in stride, but I… I guess I felt mad at the system, the orphanages, the hospitals, even Emma’s mother. Especially Emma’s mother. I wanted to blame somebody.

“But after a while I started to feel like we’d made a big mistake in not getting to know Emma’s mother and family. I guess I want to make up for that.”

I didn’t really know how to say it other than bluntly, “I hope you know what you’re getting into trying to get to know Zsoska. She’s kind of a… volatile person.”

“I keep hoping that she’ll be more friendly, and then we can talk a little, get to meet the rest of the family, see if there’s anything that would explain why Emma has a problem. I know that the Kit-Kat isn’t too pleased to be here, especially since Bree’s been giving her the cold shoulder, but I’m starting to like the place. Didn’t have much of a chance to look around and think about all the history before, we were so busy. Besides, we can’t just leave Gladys in the lurch.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not saying you should leave,” I said. “But just be careful.” I was thinking of the earlier scene outside the treatment center. “Try not to get the police involved.”

“Cassandra, you’re a wonderful person,” he said. “And I find your life, what little I know of it, just fascinating. Would now be a good time for an interview? I’m so curious about your work as a translator and your life on the road. Is there anyplace in the world you haven’t been?”

“Not many,” I said. “But there are a lot of places I haven’t been back to.”

D
URING ALL THIS
time I had not stopped dreaming of Eva. Not in the urban core of my desire, more in the suburbs. I had thought of her quite intensely, for instance, in the mud-packing salon, at the moment when the fiery-hot thick black mud had been smeared on my belly and loins. Seeing Jack and Bree together was a reminder of what I lacked at the moment. There certainly couldn’t be any harm in going to look for Eva.

Besides, if I wanted to find out more about Dr. Pustulescu, it would be useful to have someone with me who spoke Hungarian. Almost everyone spoke Romanian, but I wasn’t confident enough in my own ability to understand every nuance of it.

I finally located Eva in the physical therapy section of the treatment center, in the “medical exercise room.” Wearing only a one-piece bathing suit, she was on the mat doing handsprings, much to the admiration of a couple of creaky codgers on exercycles. Her blond hair was tightly pulled back from her heart-shaped face, and her forehead was beaded with moisture. The scent of sweat off her body mingled with the stale, old-socks smell of the room.

“Eva,” I said. “I need you.”

She sprang, literally, to my side.

“I mean I need your help with the women who work in the treatment center. I want to question a few of them, and I think Hungarian would be best. Can you translate?”

“Of course, Cassandra,” she said. “You know, I’m beginning to like it here. If it weren’t for worrying about my car and the business, I would be quite happy. Except for Nadia and her brother, everyone is Hungarian.”

She swung up to the vault and sat there.

“I’m curious, Eva. How much of your dislike for the Romanian people as a whole is based on Nadia Comaneçi and her three gold medals in Montreal?”

“What do you think it’s like to kill yourself from the time you’re six years old and then lose to some Romanian? I wouldn’t have minded losing to the Russians—that, we expected. Olga Korbut, she was marvelous, but Nadia Comaneçi! Every time she walked by with her head in the air, holding one of her dolls, I wanted to kill her. The judges were in love with her. Seven perfect tens! Three gold medals! The Hungarian team was sunk before we started,” she said, swinging her body on strong arms. “Imagine, and I had spent my whole life preparing for that moment. I went to a gymnasts’ school where I practiced six hours a day and squeezed in my other studies when I could. I was six when I started; everyone always said that was almost too old. Some of the girls in my class had started at four years old, can you imagine? Our coach drove us like horses. Once I had a bad fall and dislocated my ankle; he said, You’re not to cry and make a scene. It happens to everyone. We’ll tape it and you’ll go ahead with the program. I was eight.”

“You must have liked some of it though.”

“Oh, there were benefits. I studied English and traveled. My father, who had lost his job after the uprising in 1956, was given a pension. My aunt, who took care of me after my mother died, was given a modern flat. I know you think our flat is small, but in those days, the sixties, when there was no housing, two people in a flat like that was luxury. I’d grown up in one room, with four people. I was glad to make life easier for my relatives.”

Eva jumped off the vault, ran across the room and dashed back again to leap over it. I massaged my newly diagnosed arthritic knee.

“After Montreal, I was finished. Age fifteen. I didn’t win a medal, my scores were respectable but not spectacular. There was no reason to go on, I would be too old for the next Olympics. And so I left it and began to be ordinary again. Of course that was impossible too. A fifteen-year-old girl who has traveled widely, who speaks English, who was in the Olympics, who has a flat—that was not normal in Hungary. I’m afraid I grew stuck-up and didn’t study. I married very young, at nineteen, to another athlete, a soccer player.

“It was a terrible six years,” she said, panting after another leap. “He was often with other women, often cruel to me. I was unhappy. I realized I didn’t love him. I made a plan to escape, but the only place I could go was back to my aunt’s. This time the flat did not seem so big. I started thinking, what can I do? I knew English, but otherwise I was very stupid. I began again, to educate myself, to use my English to read everything. I found a way to go to London when it was possible to travel and to take a secretarial course for a year, along with some business classes. It was there I became interested in feminism and it was there I got the idea to start a secretarial business.”

Eva slowly turned a somersault on the mat. “If I had not been to London I would not have understood the feminist movement in the West. There had been no women’s liberation movement in Eastern Europe in the sixties and seventies. They would have said, What do women need to be liberated from? We are all socialist citizens, we live in an egalitarian society. The early communist theoreticians never described what an egalitarian society would really look like. Some of the Utopians of the Bolshevik era imagined communal living and crèches for the children, to liberate women for the larger world of work. But that world of work came, during Stalinist times, to be heavy industry, construction and agriculture.

“Yes, women built dams and drove tractors; they also had to stand in queues for food and do the cleaning and washing and childraising. It’s no wonder that when women thought they had a choice, they said, I’m not a feminist. Feminists are ugly, man-hating lesbians. They said, I don’t want to work. I want to stay home and be a housewife.”

“Believe me, they still say that in the West. Without having built any dams,” I said.

“The situation since the fall of communism is not better for women, not at all. The Czech women and Polish women worked for freedom as much as the men, but where are they in the government? Now the Roman Catholic Church reasserts itself everywhere to make women’s lives worse. Abortion is almost illegal now in Poland again. We go backwards even as we go forwards.”

“Yeah, pretty soon it will be as bad as Ireland,” I said.

Eva addressed me from a pretzel position on the mat. “I don’t understand you, Cassandra, I admit. You come from a country where you could have anything, do any thing, where there is nothing to stop you, nothing material in your way. You come from America, from the birthplace of modern feminism. And yet you spend your life wandering aimlessly, involved in cultures that are not your own, doing nothing for the cause of women.”

“I believe I provide a model of rugged independence for oppressed womanhood everywhere. Besides, you act as if I don’t work… I just don’t work all the time.”

“But don’t you feel you belong in your country? Don’t you have patriotic feelings? Don’t you want to help your country?”

“As Virginia Woolf said, ‘As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ Besides, once I left home my class status went up significantly. Being an American in the rest of the world is like being an Upjohn in Kalamazoo.”

The two old men had staggered out and we were alone in the room. Eva approached me, sweating, her blond hair in disarray. “You intrigue me, Cassandra. Your lifestyle is extremely anti-social, almost parasitical. I would not like to be like you, and yet…”

I took her chin in my hand and kissed her. “And yet?”

“I am sometimes interested in women,” she confessed. “I mean, in the way that you and Jack are. In London such opportunities were available to me, but I did not have the courage to take advantage of them. I suppose I was afraid…”

I kissed her again. “Believe me, it’s easier than you think. Like falling off a vault.”

“Not here,” she whispered. “Later? Later tonight? Now I’ll get dressed and help you ask your questions.”

Modestly she turned away. Immodestly, I watched.

Eva and I went first to the scene of the crime, where Ester, the galvanic bath attendant with the morose expression, was cleaning out the four porcelain basins in preparation for a new patient. She reminded me that I had missed my scheduled appointment that morning. Already the excursion with Zsoska seemed long ago, but Ester had given me a new idea.

I asked Eva to inquire if there was a full record of everyone who had had the galvanic treatments, and if so, could we see it. Indifferently Ester pointed to a clipboard hanging on the wall. Eva and I went over and took it down.

“It would have been last week, Friday,” I said. “Gladys has said that she and Pustulescu were down here early, at eight o’clock, before the day’s appointments started.”

“These names are hard to read,” she said. “But the first appointment is at eight-thirty.”

“So that would have given someone time to come in and tamper with the voltage meter and then enough time afterwards to adjust it back before the first patient.”

“But wouldn’t there have been a huge commotion after Pustulescu died?” Eva asked reasonably. “How would there have been the opportunity? Maybe it was just time for him to go and a little electrical current sent him off.”

I wasn’t quite convinced. There were too many people who didn’t like Pustulescu. Probably everyone in this clinic, starting with Dr. Gabor.

“Ask Ester if she remembers who were the first people to arrive after the incident.”

After a moment, Eva translated: “She says when she heard Gladys scream, she came running, and many others also. Then in half an hour the police came, and they looked at the voltage meter. They couldn’t see anything wrong with it but they took it away anyway, and Ester had to find another meter. Then the first patient came and sat there and everything was fine.” Eva nodded, and added, “Ester says she knows nothing, all she does is clean the basins between the patients and turn on the meter.”

“And who was the first patient that day?”

Eva looked closely at the schedule. “I think—yes—Ackermann.”

Well, Frau Sophie obviously hadn’t suffered any ill-effects from the treatment. It would be worthwhile talking to her again.

Next we tackled Ilona, Mistress of the Waters. She put Eva and me into adjoining dressing rooms.

“How are
you?
” she asked me, as I took off my clothes. “Your arthritis better here?”

“Much. Listen, Ilona, did you hear about the police coming yesterday to question Gladys?”