Trouble in Transylvania (6 page)

“If you’d rather just sit and be quiet, I understand,” she said with aggrieved patience.

“Oh no,” I said immediately. “Hi. How’re you doing?”

“Terrible,” she said, and stopped whispering. “My dad is driving me crazy,” she said. “I can’t believe he’s taking us to Romania. He’s completely out of control.”

“He looks pretty normal to me.”

“He’s
not.
You don’t know him. He’s always on some kick, ever since I can remember. He has
causes.
He has
manias.
He’s interested in
everything.
He was into recycling before anybody else. He subscribes to a magazine called
Garbage.
And we always had to compost everything with worms and he would buy furniture out of catalogs and put it together and we’re, like, sleeping in these beds that always fall down, and have lamps around made of teakettles that suddenly blow up and start fires. And he’s always writing about us in his stupid column, in between interviewing crackpots who’ve been fasting for peace for two months and people who run their cars on gas from chicken droppings. My brother Mark is always Mark the Mathematician and I’m always daughter Cathy the Voracious Reader or Scrabble Champion or some idiotic thing. Now I’m Cathy, Eldest Daughter. I used to be just Cathy, now I’m Eldest Daughter.”

This was said with great bitterness.

“What about your mother?” I said.

“My mom is almost as bad. My mom is totally in another world. She’s so out of it that she doesn’t think anything my dad does is weird. Like, she comes home and all there is to eat is some seaweed casserole, and she just goes, Oh this is interesting. Or maybe she doesn’t even notice, I can’t tell. She has this weird sense of humor, like she’s laughing at things that aren’t even funny. She thinks my
dad
is funny, she
likes
him. Well, she doesn’t have to spend time with him is all I have to say. The whole time we were growing up she was working and my dad took care of us, that’s the problem! And it’s not bad enough that Mark and me are total social misfits, but now we have Emma on our hands. I mean, children are supposed to start talking before they’re a year old. Emma is four and she’s never said one word!”

“She’s not deaf, is she?”

“Deaf? She’s a musical genius. She loves to have the radio on and she was playing the xylophone from the minute she saw it. Mom started her on the Suzuki method about three months ago and now it’s Mozart day and night. It drives you nuts.”

“How old was Emma when they adopted her?”

“She was nine months. That’s another thing. My parents were gone for two months! They just left Mark and me at a neighbor’s house, saying they were going to Romania for two weeks to get an orphan baby, and they don’t come back for
two months.
I know they had a horrible time, even though they didn’t want to talk about it much. My dad
never
talks like anything
bad
happens in the world. He just writes about how lucky they were to finally get Emma. Some luck! What’s she going to do in school if she can’t talk?”

“Send her to Catholic school,” I suggested. “They’ll like her.”

The heat had gone to my head. When I was growing up I never would have thought to confide in an adult about family secrets the way Cathy was confiding in me. Secrets were for the priest in the confessional, and even then you knew enough not to confide your really big secrets to unseen, low-voiced men in dark churches. The best secrets––like crushes—you reserved for your friends. The worst secrets—like not always having money for a movie or even for lunch—you didn’t tell anyone.

Cathy was raging on. “
Romania.
Why did they have to get a kid from Transylvania? Most people don’t even know Transylvania is a real place. I have to watch stupid kids drawing back their lips and making vampire eyes and sucking noises.”

“So is your dad taking you to visit Romania for any special reason?”

“He
says
it’s because we’re here in Europe and should take advantage of the culture all around. My brother Mark is at Harvard, but I had to come along and my dad is supposedly teaching me in Munich. I have to read all German writers, that’s why I’m reading Thomas Mann, I don’t even understand it in
English.
We’ve already been to Paris and Amsterdam and Berlin, and now it’s supposed to be two weeks in Eastern Europe. He
says
he wants to write some article about Hungary and Romania. But I think he’s got some plan to find some of Emma’s relatives and see if there’s a reason Emma doesn’t talk. It would be just like him.”

I realized I had been in the steam room too long and that I was feeling faint. I began to get up, but Cathy suddenly grabbed my arm.

“I know you probably think this is totally strange… I just wondered, would you mind—I mean, I’d really appreciate it—if you could give me your phone number here in Budapest where I could reach you, just in case…”

“In case what?” I prompted.

“I don’t know.” She looked upset and embarrassed to be upset. “I’m sure I wouldn’t really call you. The phones probably don’t even work in Romania. But, at least I’d have
one
contact in case something really awful happened.”

I hunted in my plastic bag for Jack’s business card. Over the years I’d given many anxious fellow travelers my phone number, secure in the knowledge that any attempt to make a call on a foreign telephone would inevitably prove more daunting than whatever crisis was at hand.

“You could leave a message for me there,” I said. “But I only expect to be in Budapest a couple of weeks.”

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re really nice, Cassandra. Are you really from Kalamazoo?”

“A long time ago,” I said.

The menu at the Gellért restaurant was full of paprika and goulash and intriguing items like “Roast stag à la Forester’s Daughter.”

“Paprika, paprika! I’m not sure it’s healthy to eat so much orange food,” said Jack, settling for salad.

Not being vegetarian, I had a wider choice, and ordered duck in plum sauce and some roast potatoes.

Eva’s red suit was elegant enough for the dining room, and her loosely pinned-up blond hair was more sexy than disheveled, but Jack and I looked distinctly damp and casual. I was wearing jeans with my (extremely) crushed linen shirt, and Jack’s forties-style dress was looking every one of its decades.

While we waited for Señor Martínez to join us I told Jack and Eva about my encounter with Cathy Snapp in the steam room.

“The little girl is four and she doesn’t speak at all? Something terrible must have happened to her,” said Eva.

“How old was she when they got her? Nine months?” asked Jack. “She must have been adopted right at the age when she would have started speaking. Maybe the change from Romanian to English was too confusing.”

“If you believe Chomsky, that all languages are fundamentally alike, then it shouldn’t matter that Emma was born into a Romanian-speaking family and only heard Romanian in her very formative months. She should have been able to switch into English without any problem. What I wonder is if no one talked to Emma at all. Another school of thought from Chomsky says you have to learn your language from an adult with whom you have a strong relationship.”

“That sounds like you and your Spanish teacher, Cassandra,” said Jack. “What was her name?”

“Dede,” I sighed. “Miss Paulsen.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen. She was twenty-five. She was from northern Michigan and had majored in Spanish and Education. She’d only been to Spain once, for a month. Her apartment was full of things like posters of bullfights and those leather wine bags. She left me with a very bad Spanish accent.”

“I think your parents are very important,” Eva interrupted. It seemed to make her nervous when Jack and I talked so familiarly about old lovers. “My father was a teacher and he always read to me and talked to me. I pronounce many words just as he did.”

“My mother talked to me,” said Jack. “Endlessly. But I managed to tune her out except for a few ladylike phrases that pop out from time to time in the most unexpected situations. I go for Chomsky. I know it’s why I never worry about speaking a foreign language. To me they’re all exactly the same.”

“Chomsky,” I told them, “theorizes that language is innate; ‘an organ of the mind,’ he calls it. It’s in our genes, we don’t invent it. He says that children don’t learn language, they bring it with them when they’re born.”

“If you bring language with you when you’re born,” asked Jack, “what language is it?”

“It’s more of a template,” I said.

“How do you know that the little girl wasn’t born to Hungarian-speaking people?” Eva wanted to know. “She comes from Transylvania, which used to belong to Hungary.”

“No wonder then,” said Jack. “If she has a Hungarian language template on her brain, no wonder she’s confused. Probably she’s got a paprika deficiency, causing the root words to agglutinate in her poor little mind.”

“The trouble is,” I went on, “all theories about language are quite difficult to test. Almost no children grow up without language, so it’s hard to have a pure research subject. To really test out Chomsky’s theories, you’d have to let a child grow up on an isolated island and see if the child developed a language or not, and whether it was like the languages we know. But of course, morally, you can’t do an experiment like that.”

“Of course you can,” countered Jack. “We call it speaking Strine. That’s Australian English to you, Eva.”

Señor Martínez was a rotund man of fifty, with a damp enthusiastic handshake and what the Japanese have taken to calling a “bar-code head”—in which long strands of what hair remains on a man’s head are pasted in straight lines across a pale round expanse of skull. The face under the black and white design was eager and even lusty. As he told us, he was from Bilbao but he’d had an Andalucían mother and this had given him a great zest for life, a zest that became more apparent as the glasses of red “Bull’s Blood” wine disappeared.

Señor Martínez fell into my Spanish as passionately as into a beloved’s arms. Not that he’d previously been parsimonious (according to Jack) with his ungrammatical English, but his Spanish was a force of nature that now gushed out of his mouth like water from a blocked pipe.

In this case the metaphor was particularly appropriate. Señor Martínez was a salesman for a large Spanish bathroom fixture factory and he was here to sell well-designed toilets, bidets, sinks and tubs to the Hungarians. He happened to have his portfolio with him and was not at all shy about immediately showing me glossy color photographs. I felt almost as if we were looking at pornography, particularly the way his stubby, ringed hand lingered over the curved porcelain smoothness of the bidets.

“And you’re the one who will be my translator?” he said to me in Spanish. “Then please tell Señora Eva that her eyes are as blue as the Mediterranean.”

“Señor Martínez says he’s dying to try some paprika chicken,” I said. “But I suggested the stuffed carp.”

Eva handed him her menu. “Please.”

“I speak of love, not food.” He pushed it away and fixed her with a tender look.

“I can’t persuade him,” I said. “It’s gotta be the chicken.”

The Gypsy musicians had appeared and, without preliminaries, launched into a wild
csárdás,
startling a party of elderly British tourists who had been quietly whingeing about the prices on the menu (“I thought you said Eastern Europe was a bargain, Colin.”). There were four musicians, dressed in blousy white embroidered shirts and tight black trousers. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking, but on the surface they were as shiny as copper pennies. The lead violinist had spotted Eva as both Hungarian and gorgeous, and our soup had hardly been set in front of us before he and his violin were leaning over her shoulder. His bowing was so intense it was more like archery.

Eva toasted the violinist with her wine and asked for a special song, not another wild tune, but something haunting and strange.

“Tell Señor Martínez this is a real Gypsy tune, not for tourists.”

I translated and Señor Martínez sighed eloquently, his hand at his heart, “The Spanish and the Hungarians are very much alike. We have the wildness and also the sadness, what we call
duende.
We have both been conquered peoples, we have the souls of Gypsies and the heads for business. That is why I think I can sell our beautiful bathroom fixtures here. I believe they will be understood. And now you have democracy. Hungary, I salute you!” He raised his glass. “Down with fascism!”

“What’s he saying?” asked Eva.

“He says he wishes that paprika chicken would hurry up. He’s starving!”

But Señor Martínez was a single-minded man when it came to the similarities between Hungary and Spain, and the possibility of a spectacular union, plumbing and otherwise, between them.

While the Gypsies made wild music over our shoulders, Señor Martínez outlined a theory of history. “Both Christian Spain and Christian Hungary fought against the infidel Arabs,” he said. “We stopped the Mohammedans from overrunning Europe.”

“But surely you must admit, Señor Martínez,” I corrected him, “that the Moors in Spain created a brilliant civilization of poetry, philosophy, gardens. Not only did they have the first lighted, paved streets in Europe, they had the first sewage system in the world. Plumbing, Señor, they had plumbing.”

“The
Reconquista
was Spain’s finest moment,” he disagreed.

“What’s he saying?” Eva demanded.

“He thinks the Turks have gotten a bad rap,” I said. “He says, Really, what’s so bad about a culture that drinks coffee and sits around in bathtubs all day?”

“The Turkish infidels?” said Eva, shocked.

“What does Eva say?” he asked.

“She says she wishes these Gypsy musicians would take a hike. They’re starting to remind her of a Luftwaffe raid, except there are no bomb shelters.”

Señor Martínez stared at me a moment and then spoke in laborious English, with a pleading glance at Eva, “I am think Señora Reilly is have fun with me.”

“Oh no, Señor Martínez, you’re wrong about that. Believe me, I’m not having much fun at all.”