Trouble in Transylvania (3 page)

Lately she had turned, somewhat dramatically, to women’s spirituality. The last time I’d run into her, at Camden Locks on a Saturday, had been just after the winter solstice, when she was returning from a tour of sacred stones of the British Isles. Jack had been wearing a layering of ethnic and athletic clothes, reminiscent of certain tribeswomen in a transitional state of civilization. She talked quite a lot about passage graves and stone circles and, most suspiciously, about the tour leader, an American called Charis Freespirit.

Obviously things with Charis hadn’t worked out spectacularly well, for here was Jack in Budapest, in a cotton dress from the forties and a short, boxy sweater. Her curly brown hair was carefully cut, and she was even wearing a bit of eye makeup and lipstick. Could the woman next to her have anything to do with this new fashion development?

“This is Eva Kálvin,” Jack flashed her white smile. “My new business partner.”

Barely five feet tall, Eva had a heart-shaped face with thickly-lashed brown eyes and heavy blond eyebrows. Her light hair was tucked under a hat and she wore a sharp red suit and high heels that contrasted with a physical impression of coiled muscularity.

“Cassandra, welcome to Budapest,” she said in beautiful, charmingly accented English.

From the corner of my eye I could see Gladys, Bree and the Snapps searching around for me on the platform. I’d purposefully said my good-byes in the compartment and had been one of the first off the train precisely in order to avoid the confused, beseeching looks that arrivals in foreign cities inevitably provoke. Although I was sure that the Snapps, at least, had hotel reservations, I also knew that even experienced travelers can undergo utter disorientation in a strange train station at night.

“Are those people waving at you?” Jack asked. “Do you want to say good-bye?”

“I’ve already put them out of my mind,” I said firmly. “I don’t expect to see any of them ever again.”

Eva had a car, a tiny Polski Fiat shaped like a snub-nosed revolver. As we walked toward it I asked Jack, “Any problem booking me into that little place in the Buda Hills?”

Although it was my idea to come to Budapest, Jack had said on the phone that she would make all the arrangements, and not to worry; she was dying to see me, and if I wanted to I could bring her a bottle of Glenlivet. That had been two weeks ago; I’d remembered the Glenlivet but had somehow forgotten that Jack had trouble with follow-through.

“It’s shocking,” Jack said impatiently, looking at the queue for taxis in front of the station. “You can’t get a taxi, you can’t get a meal, you can’t get a room. There are
tourists
everywhere, even now at the end of April. It’s really terrible. You know how I love Germans—one of my best friends is Edith, you know that I’d do anything for her since that time in Tierra del Fuego; she was so incredibly resourceful with that sheepskin—but I have to tell you, Cassandra, the Germans have
discovered
Budapest. They come here with their Deutschmarks, which are just like gold really, and they can buy anything, do anything. The cafés are full of Germans, the concerts are full of Germans, the streets are packed with them—Cassandra, the Germans have
moved into
Budapest. Real estate, industrial investment, shopping complexes, this country is going to be completely transformed within a few years and it will all be because of the Deutschmark…”

“Jack,” I interrupted. “Can we back up a moment? To the innocent phrase ‘you can’t get a room?’ Does that mean what I think it means?” I said, my voice rising. “Does that mean you only remembered that I was coming about an hour ago and you called around and it’s Friday night and all the rooms are booked?”

Jack squeezed my arm sympathetically. “Well, I don’t even have a place to stay,” she said. “I’m sleeping on a futon in our office. The first futon in Hungary, I think.”

“I’m
not
sleeping in your office,” I said.

“Of course not,” Eva said calmly. “You’ll be staying with me.”

“Oh. Well. That’s all right then.” I was mollified.

“Cassandra, would I ever let you down?” Jack said plaintively. “Okay, don’t answer that, I know you’re thinking of that time when I let the boat sail without you to the Galápagos. But believe me, now that you’re in Budapest Eva and I will show you a wonderful time.”

At first I believed the wonderful time might start that night. I had plenty of energy and was ready to hit the new nightlife of the city. But Jack said she was exhausted and didn’t think she was up for much. Could we drop her at the office? We’d all meet tomorrow. She whispered in my ear as I got out of the back seat to get into the front, “We only have a business relationship.”

“Meaning?”

“Good luck!”

I got back in the car, scrunching my long legs up to my chest, and we drove off into the József District. Eva said her flat wasn’t far; it was just off Baross Street. Did I know Budapest well?

I told her I’d been here several times, but not recently, and never for long. But even as we chatted about how rapidly Hungary was changing under capitalism, I was imagining Eva’s threadbare old flat on the fifth floor, full of antiques her family had saved from before the war, a flat smelling pungently of paprika and apples and chocolate. Flowering begonias on the windowsill and complete editions of nineteenth-century Hungarian poets in leather bindings, along with old green Penguin editions of Chandler and Hammett. Perhaps a claw-footed piano draped in embroidery and lace, with framed sepia photographs of stout Hungarian generals and little children with enormous bows in their hair. But I was confusing Eva with someone else, Elias Canetti’s mother perhaps, for although the Polski Fiat carried us into the right sort of neighborhood, badly lit, shabby but suggesting better days, its driver stopped in front of a complex of apartment towers, six of them, twelve stories high, that could have come straight from the Bronx, though there was less graffiti.

Still, not everyone could live in the past, there wasn’t enough of it left. Anyway, at my age what did I want with romance, if it meant having to walk up five flights of stairs and wash in a sink with cold water? Elevators and showers were much better, I reminded myself, and Eva would give me tea and we’d have a good conversation about Eastern Europe’s transition to a market economy.

“This is my home. Welcome!” said Eva in front of a door on the fourth floor that looked like all the other doors.

I wondered why she didn’t put the key in. Oh dear, I suddenly thought, is there a Mr. Kálvin inside? Eva as a married woman didn’t seem quite as attractive somehow.

She pressed the buzzer and the door opened immediately, as if whoever was on the other side had been watching us through the peephole. An elderly woman with an expression of worry etched into her forehead stood there smoothing her apron and staring at me with great disapproval.

“Cassandra, my aunt, Mrs. Nagy,” Eva murmured.

“Enchanted,” I said, inwardly cursing Jack. “So kind of you to let me stay, probably only a night or two, other accommodations fell through, but I’ll find something else, don’t worry about a thing.”

“Cassandra,” said Eva. “She doesn’t speak English. But it’s late, come in. I’ve put you in my bedroom.”

The flat was tiny, consisting of a kitchen, a bath, and two other rooms, one of which was Eva’s. There was also a winter garden, a glass-enclosed balcony, full of potted plants and boxes of potatoes and cabbage.

Mrs. Nagy was like one of those fascinating flip books where you can put together different heads with different torsos and legs. Her lower half did not correspond with her upper; looking only at her feet, for instance, in their little-girl white ankle socks and single-strap shoes, you would not deduce a face with the consistency of moldy Spam. Like Eva, Mrs. Nagy was very short, but her figure went straight from the shoulder of her tightly buttoned cardigan to the hem of her wool skirt. She held her arms stiffly by her sides, as if afraid to touch anything in her own flat. Yet her eyes were as inquisitive as a ferret’s. Her white hair was bundled on her head in a way that suggested she was just about to take it out with the garbage.

Mrs. Nagy may not have spoken English, but she knew how to get her point across. Eva might have foreign women friends, but her aunt didn’t have to like them. Mrs. Nagy gave me a push on the shoulder and pointed in a threatening manner in the direction of the bathroom. It appeared she was telling me not to use the shower. Eva said brightly, “She says, Our home is your home.”

Mrs. Nagy frowned and waved at the kitchen door; she snapped her fingers and said, “Papf, papf.” I thought she might be warning me not to use a gas stove that might blow up. Eva smiled. “She says, Help yourself to anything you want to eat.”

Mrs. Nagy pantomimed either a flood or a vast conflagration.

“My aunt wishes you a good sleep.”

“Tell her not to worry. I won’t destroy anything. Once my head hits the pillow I’ll be out like a light. I won’t be any trouble at all.”

I thanked both of them for their kindness in putting me up and went into Eva’s bedroom and closed the door. It was a long narrow room, with a single hard bed covered in cushions, a small desk and bookshelves that held economics textbooks in English and German. Over the desk there was a cork bulletin board, fluttering with notes, cartoons and postcards from countries around the world. There were some framed color photographs of a little gymnast doing handsprings and bar work with the Olympic logo in the background, but as I moved closer to study them, there came a harsh tapping on glass, and I looked up to see that the window at one end of Eva’s room faced the winter garden. Mrs. Nagy was standing there, with her solid body and deranged hair, watching me suspiciously.

I waved in a friendly manner as I stepped away from the photographs; then I sat down on the edge of the bed and mimed yawning and closing my eyes. When I looked back up she was gone.

It wasn’t what you would call private accommodation.

I got into my nightshirt and went out to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. When I came back to Eva’s room the light was off. I turned it back on, all 30 watts, and got into bed to read Elias Canetti. Without a knock the door opened. Mrs. Nagy was standing there with a pained expression on her face. I couldn’t have left a mess in the bathroom, could I? She pointed to the weak bulb in the lamp overhead and slapped her palm a few times with the fingers of her other hand. Eva appeared behind her, wearing a thin red slip that came straight out of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
She said, apologetically, “My aunt wants to tell you that she is a widow.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said.

“On a pension,” Eva translated.

“Yes?”

Suddenly the overhead light snapped off.

I said, “I guess she’s careful about her electricity bills, right?”

Eva sighed. “See you in the morning, Cassandra.”

I consoled myself by remembering that on some of my travels there’d been no light to turn off at all, and eventually fell asleep.

The next morning Eva brought me a tiny porcelain cup of instant coffee in bed. She was dressed again in the red suit and high heels, and smelled of duty-free Chanel. As usual I’d doffed my nightshirt during the night and was enticingly nude under the sheets.

Eva appeared not to notice.

“I told Jack I’d be at the office at eight-thirty. Here’s the address. Will you join us later in the afternoon? Perhaps we can go to bathe at the Gellért Hotel, yes?”

“Ummm,” I said, remembering that Budapest was full of bathhouses dating from the Turkish occupation.

I drifted then into an erotic dream painted by a French orientalist at the turn of the century. Immured in the harem of the Grand Seraglio, we odalisques reclined around pools of water that reflected the rich magenta and indigo of silk carpets and latticed windows. Eunuchs stood, arms crossed, in the background, while Eva and I soaped each other with languorous movements, and ladled perfumed water over each other’s shoulders and breasts. Afterwards we rested on divans piled with cushions, drinking coffee, smoking opium and feeding each other melon and delicately scented sherbet, while fountains bubbled in the pools at our feet.

I lay dreaming until I saw the solid and threatening figure of Eva’s duenna through the glass window at the end of the room. I yawned and waved. She glared at me and looked at her watch. I got the impression she thought I needed to be up and about. And fast.

When I came out of the block of flats I found myself in one of the old Pest districts, which at the turn of the century had been jammed with workers and peasants flooding in from the countryside. The golden-brown stucco facades of the nineteenth-century buildings were still riddled with bullet holes from the last war and from the Soviet occupation of 1956.

It was early still, and the fresh green scent of the acacias and linden trees still had a fighting chance against the industrial and car pollution that would later become almost lethal. Budapest was an easier city to like than Vienna; it had been the capital of the other half of the Dual Monarchy, but even then, during the Habsburg era, Budapest had been the wilder younger sister who wanted to play music all night (Bartók, not Brahms), and invited all the unsavory ethnic neighbors into the living room for a party.

These days the Hungarians were throwing off the last remaining traces of forty years as a Soviet satellite. They’d dumped the Soviet statues into the river, and now they were enthusiastically changing all the street names. Maps were practically useless; everywhere you saw street signs with the names crossed out in red: a big scarlet slash through
TANACS
, through
MAJAKOVSZKIJ
. And everywhere were new names too: Burger King, Siemens, Philips, Sony, Minolta.

Andrássy út had once been the most fashionable boulevard in the city; it spent seven years as Stalin’s Street and (very briefly) in 1956 became Hungarian Youth Boulevard, until it settled down resignedly to being the Avenue of the People’s Republic. I was glad it had gone back to Andrássy út, because I never really could get my tongue around Népköztársaság útja.