Trouble in Transylvania (26 page)

Maybe they were saying something like this: “You tried to control our bodies for twenty years, denied us birth control and watched us to see if we got pregnant. You wouldn’t let us have abortions, and let us die when we did it ourselves. You made us put our children in orphanages because we couldn’t feed them, you gave them AIDS because you refused to sterilize the needles or to import rubber gloves. You did all this to us and now you deserve everything, every grain of mud we’re heaping on you. May you rot in hell!”

Or maybe they were just shouting, “Nyah-nyah-nyah!”

The men had descended into our netherworld, into the realm of women, into the domain of the primal womb; they were two pathetic mortals surrounded by powerful creator hags who were rapidly reducing them to slimy slugs of ooze. They were emissaries of the sky gods being driven back by the earth goddesses. They were marauding Kurgans with weapons of death who had been met by the handmaidens of the Old Religion, by votaries of the Great Goddess who weren’t going to put up with any shit. By Inanna, by Artemis, by Durga and Afrekete, we should have done this a long time ago.

“Say Gladys,” I said. “Do you really think you should be holding his head under the mud like that? After all, we don’t want to kill him.”

“Sorry, Cassie. You’re right. I’m getting a little carried away here.” When she released her victim, he bolted sideways, scrabbled to his feet and began to run, slipping and wobbling, away from us, all the while emitting a low wheeze that sounded like a squashed rubber duck.

“Get moving, toad-face!” Gladys shouted. “And don’t forget your pal.”

The two policemen, almost unrecognizable in their coats of black, staggered and slipped past us into the hallway, while the women shouted their triumph and crowded around me and Gladys, touching our faces and shaking our hands.

What a moment! What a victory! Jack was right. If history had recorded more events like this in the books, it would have been a lot more fun to study in school.

“Now how the heck,” said Gladys, “are we going to get this fool stuff out of our hair?”

It took us a long while to clean the mud off the walls and the floor, and then off ourselves. I felt, even more than the first time I’d had the mud-bath experience, like a wet spaghetti noodle. At this rate, I was going to need a rest cure after I left Arcata.

When Gladys and I finally got ourselves clothed and out of the basement, we encountered Dr. Gabor and his new friend Eva Kálvin strolling the corridor.

“Oh Cassandra,” Eva said nervously. “Zoltán, that is, Dr. Gabor, suggested I teach some medical gymnastics while I’m here.”

“Were you practicing last night?”

She had the grace to blush. “I knocked on your door after dinner, but you didn’t seem to be in. I didn’t find you this morning either.”

“That’s because I was celebrating Beltane out in the woods.”

“Doc,” Gladys broke in. “We’ve had another incident, have you heard? We headed them off at the pass though. I don’t think they’ll be bothering us any time soon.”

“I agree,” said Gabor. “I think we will not see the police again. I saw them running out of the treatment center. They looked very bad, very muddy.”

“We had ’em on the run, Doc. You should have seen Cassie. She was my right hand through the whole battle, she stuck with me, and I mean
stuck
through the whole bust-up. We were firing rounds at them like we were defending the Alamo. Pow! They never knew what hit ’em.”

I left Gladys giving Gabor and Eva a blow-by-blow account of the recent attempted arrest and Alamo defense, and went out into the square in front of the hotel. I intended to find Nadia; I found, instead, a small crowd of familiar faces gathered around a big Volvo station wagon with German plates that had apparently just pulled up.

A tall woman in jeans and a sweatshirt, with taffy-colored short hair and glasses, was standing quietly listening to Archie as he waved his arms about and pointed at the hotel and then in the direction of Lupea. Cathy Snapp was shrugging in a kind of counterpoint rhythm to her father’s gesticulations, while Jack and Bree looked on.

What next? I thought, and went to investigate.

L
YNN SNAPP HAD LEFT
Munich the moment Archie had called her yesterday afternoon and had driven all night to get here. She didn’t look like the sort of woman to be fazed by much of anything.

“This is Cassandra Reilly,” Archie introduced us. “Cassandra’s a world traveler and translator and she’s been a lot of help.”

“It may look problematic at the moment,” I said. “But at least you don’t have to worry about Emma missing any violin lessons.”

“I brought all the food from the house with me,” Lynn said. “And a bag of fresh rolls and bread. Is anybody hungry?

Is anybody hungry? Frau Sophie would go crazy if she could see the bags with salami and bread sticking out, the boxes full of fresh fruits and vegetables. We stood around the car like ravenous beasts and for at least ten minutes no one said anything but “Oh my god, a banana” and “Tomatoes, I’m dreaming.”

If Archie was an exploding sun, radiating good will and curiosity in every direction, Lynn was an imploding sort of celestial object; she absorbed energy like a black hole and never grew any larger or brighter. Information went in her direction and somehow vanished without obviously being heard. She gave only infrequent signs of reacting to what anyone said. In a peculiar way, she reminded me of Emma.

“Mom,” Cathy said with her mouth full. “I am so
glad
you came.”

“There’s really nothing to worry about, honey,” said Archie.

“This has been a totally weird experience,” said Cathy.

“I think that Emma has probably been having a ball,” said Archie.

“Mom, I can’t believe you actually came here in the first place to get a kid.”

“Honey, this time we’ve seen so much more of the countryside than you and I did three years ago. I don’t think you and I realized how ethnically diverse it was. You’re going to love hearing about the Székelys. I didn’t realize that this part of Romania had so much history. The Székelys were warrior tribes that were encouraged to settle here in the Eastern Carpathians as border guards in the twelfth century. Well, can you imagine, it turns out that Emma is a Székely, not a Romanian. Now isn’t that going to be something to be proud of when she gets to school and wants to tell people about her ethnic background? You know, I’d like to do a piece for the
Gleaner
on the Székelys and their customs and traditions, I think our readers…”

“Cathy,” said her mother. “I’m a little worried about Willa Cather. She seems to have lost the top of her head. Was it a brainstorm, or did you have a fight with someone?”

“Uh, no … it’s just the way you wear it these days. Mom, I’ve been thinking—how would you feel if I went someplace else besides Harvard? Like Stanford or even… Berkeley?”

“I think right now we’ll all concentrate on going to Lupea.”

A decision was made to leave immediately and somehow Jack and Bree were invited along. The three of us sat in the back seat, while up in front Archie and Cathy competed for Lynn’s attention (how could poor Emma have gotten a word in edgewise, even if she’d been able to speak?) and occasionally brought us into it.

“What’s this about Berkeley?” Archie said at some point. “Isn’t that where Bree goes? Have you been talking to her?”

“No,” said Bree firmly.

“Where did you go, Cassandra?” he asked. “Western Michigan? Ann Arbor?”

“Neither.”

“A little farther afield, eh?”

“You could say that.”

“Even if I went to Berkeley,” interrupted Cathy, stung by Bree’s indifference, “I wouldn’t do anything stupid like Film Studies. I’m thinking of pre-med. I’d like to help people with incurable diseases.”

“That’s my girl,” said Archie.

“Are you still reading
The Magic Mountain
?” asked her mother.

“I’ll find the cure for AIDS,” said Cathy, somewhat wildly. “Then you’ll be sorry.”

“Well, you might as well go somewhere else,” said Bree. “You wouldn’t fit in at Berkeley.”

“Why not?” Cathy turned all the way around and fixed Bree with a look compounded of equal parts hopeless attraction and fierce antagonism. “Because I’m not bisexual? How do you know I’m not?”

Bree laughed contemptuously. “In your dreams.”

“Did you go East to school?” Archie asked me, in some desperation to change the subject.

“No.”

“West then?”

“People know they’re gay when they’re my age,” said Cathy. “Don’t they, Mom?”

“I don’t know, dear. That’s wasn’t true for me.”

“Don’t say you went to a southern college, Cassandra,” Archie said.

“Archie, what does it matter?”

“Background, background,” he said. “I’m working on your profile for the
Gleaner.”
Suddenly he thought of a solution to this uncomfortable conversation. “Okay, Jack. Cassandra. Let’s talk about travel. I want to hear about the best trip you ever took.”

“Best as in best, or best as in worst?” asked Jack.

“The best trips are always the worst trips,” I explained. “Terrible journeys become delightful in recollection, chiefly by becoming even more terrible than when experienced.”

“I think I see,” said Archie. “How about the best of the worst then?”

Jack and I pondered this. Was an earthquake worse than dysentery? Was being lost worse than being on a bus ride from hell, crammed in between goats and sick children? There were so many ways that travel could go wrong. Some problems—transport that arrived late or not at all, unwelcome male attention (that irritant of our youth had diminished as we’d grown older, though never entirely), food that did not agree—had happened to each of us so often that they seemed more inconveniences than disasters. The bottom line was that the things you were afraid of in travel were the things you were afraid of in life. To get through fear was to survive, and to tell a story about survival was to testify both to your own inner strength and to the general beneficence of the universe.

Jack began. “I was on a bus in Bolivia. I’d been traveling with my friend Edith from Germany, but she got dysentery and ended up in a hospital in La Paz. They didn’t think I had it, but in fact I did, and was getting progressively sicker. I’d left La Paz and was on my way to the Yungas valleys. The bus was a local and very slow. Because it didn’t have a loo and I was needing to relieve myself pretty often, I’d get off at every stop and look for someplace halfway hidden. We were passing through a stark, high landscape, gaining in altitude; it was bitterly cold and night was falling. I couldn’t see my way very well away from the bus and fell into a kind of gully. While I was squatting, something stung me, I couldn’t see what, but I panicked, thinking it was a scorpion.

“I staggered up from the gully, weak from dysentery, with a stinger in my behind, and saw the bus roaring off without me. I tried to run for it, but because of the twilight I couldn’t see a thing, and tripped and sprained my ankle. All my stuff, except for my passport and money, was on the bus.

“I hardly ever cry, but as I lay there on the ground, I thought, This is the absolute end, this is the worst moment of my life, nothing could be worse than this. Then I heard footsteps…”

Jack paused so that we could imagine rescue and went on. “When I looked up, two men in uniform were standing over me with submachine guns pointed at my head.”

“Don’t forget their German Shepherd,” I murmured.

“And
they had a huge German Shepherd that looked ready to tear me limb from limb.”

“And you didn’t speak enough Spanish to explain.”

“Cassandra, I’m telling this! So I’m lying there, thinking, Go ahead, put me out of my misery. But no, they say something, and then when I don’t move, they haul me up and drag me to their guard house and they…”

Archie interrupted anxiously, “Is this something Cathy shouldn’t hear?”

“Dad, you keep treating me like a baby. I’m not a baby!”

“And they dressed my ankle, pulled out the stinger and showed me it was just a nettle, gave me some hot soup, and put me into a warm bed with blankets. And the next day they drove me to the hospital in La Paz, where I spent the next two weeks!”

Bree said, “You’ve lived such an incredible life, Jack!”

“I’ve got a South American story too,” I said. “Jack and I had been traveling in Ecuador [“Not fair!” Jack poked me in the side], and had decided we wanted to go to the Galápagos Islands. Actually it had been my big dream for years to get there. We’d made our boat reservations from Quito and then the day before we were supposed to leave we traveled to the port city of Guayaquil.

“The next morning we had a big argument about something…”

“You were being completely obnoxious…”

“And I took my stuff and said I’d meet up with her at the boat at six that evening. I went to a bank to change some money and a few blocks later someone robbed me at knifepoint and took my bag with all my money and identification.

“This turned out to be one of the times when having two passports was a very mixed blessing. When I went to the police station to report the loss, I told them I was American. Meanwhile, someone had found my bag and brought it in. It had my boat ticket to the Galápagos and my Irish passport. Apparently the thief had decided to keep the American one. The police found this all very suspicious. They said I wasn’t going anywhere until they found out who I
really
was.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those dreams where you’re late for the airport and you haven’t packed and you have too many clothes to fit in the suitcase and your taxi hasn’t come and all the time the clock is ticking very round and large on the wall, and you keep only having five minutes before departure but you know you’ll never make it. Well, that was what my day in the police station was like. They locked me up in a cell and wouldn’t let me make any phone calls. I kept telling them that I had a boat to catch and that my friend would be worried about me, but they ignored me until finally they got a confirmation from the American Embassy in Quito that I really was an American citizen. They let me go just before six o’clock.