Trouble in Transylvania (8 page)

The real borders now were economic. Fortress Europe had pulled up the drawbridge on the former Soviet bloc countries, all begging to be part of the European Community. Hungary might manage it in the years to come; Romania would not. Traveling into Romania from the West was like leaving the wealthy drawing room upstairs for the downstairs servants’ quarters. Hungary might be a butler, able to mix in both worlds; Romania was the scullery cook.

Near the border Eva stopped and filled the tank with petrol. She opened the hood and peered inside.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t think so… Sometimes I think I hear a kind of thumping noise. I’m probably just imagining it.”

“Good,” I said. Car maintenance was never my, nor Jack’s, strong point.

The night was eerily lit here, greenish-white, and the roar of heavy trucks filled the air and then departed, leaving thick silence. The wind came cold and hard across the plain, but there were stars overhead, and the sky was clear.

“Did you know, there were great witch-hunts around here, two, three hundred years ago?” said Eva, as we inserted ourselves back into the tiny car.

“Witches!” said Jack, perking right up.

“Yes. The Calvinists were strong here, but the Hungarian state was Catholic. There were many struggles during the Counter-Reformation. Many trials, not against the village wise men, but against the midwives and the
boszorkány,
the women whose beliefs went back to pagan times.”

“You see,” said Jack. “I knew this was an area with a lot of energy. The witches were directly connected with the Great Goddess cultures.”

“I don’t know if you can really call them witches,” I objected. “Most of them were peasant women accused of killing their neighbor’s cow. They were caught up in a general hysteria of hatred directed towards women.”

“Towards women’s sexuality,” said Jack. “Most of the crimes they were accused of had to do with sex. In the old Goddess religions women’s sexuality was celebrated, but the Catholic church condemned all pleasure in sexuality, and said it came from the Devil.”

“I hate to remind you,” I said, “but when I took First Communion in the fifties, that was still the general gist of church teaching.”

“They also accused the women of giving contraceptive aid and performing abortions,” said Eva. “The authorities did not like that the midwives had knowledge of healing and herbs.”

“I’m telling you,” said Jack, “it’s a sex thing. Men hate and fear women’s sexuality. They use women for sex and then they blame them. The bedrock of male authority is the control of women’s bodies.”

“You don’t need to convince me,” I said. “I had my revelation thirty years ago when my sister Maureen got pregnant and had to get married.”

The Stygian crossing took longer than we expected. There were visas to buy and Eva’s car was inspected thoroughly—for contraband, unfortunately, not for engine trouble. Eva didn’t make it any easier with her haughty attitude towards the Romanian guards, and it was not until after eleven that we were back on the road. I offered to drive and Eva got into the back seat and said she’d try to sleep a little.

“Let’s play a game,” said Jack to me.

Jack and I, when we’d traveled together and had needed to pass long stretches of time in as lively a manner as possible, had had a number of games. Some of the geographical ones were easy—to recite all the countries in South America and their major cities—and some were more difficult: “If you were traveling from Gambia to Bolivia, which way would you go and how?” or “Say you had to get from Bergen, Norway, to Bombay. Which railways would you use and how long would it take you?” One of our favorite amusements, however, was to name a country and then ask, “If you were going to Brazil and could only take ten things with you, what would they be?”

Since there were no size or weight limits, we usually started out with quite fantastic objects, for instance an airplane or a gorgeous Portuguese-speaking guide or a portable schoolhouse. Once I’d said, “The British Museum library,” and we’d had a quarrel about whether that included the books. But gradually we’d reduce the number of things we could take with us. “If you could only take five things,” and “If you could only take two things.”

By the time we were down to the essentials I usually opted for either a Swiss Army knife or a large supply of insect repellent, while Jack almost always chose ear plugs or a foam pad. “Because if I don’t get my sleep, I really can’t cope.”

“Say you’re going to Romania,” said Jack. “What’s on your ten list?”

“A good French bistro, a vegetable shop, a petrol station …” I ended up with: “and a garlic necklace of course.”

“Just in case…”

We drove through Romania’s Western Marches and passed through Cluj. Like all the Transylvanian cities it had three names. It was once Klausenburg, founded by Germans from Saxony seven hundred years ago. The Hungarian name was Koloszvár. I had not been much in this part of Romania, but I thought of Cluj as one of the most Habsburg of the northern Transylvanian cities, with butter-yellow baroque buildings, and a number of cafés. It was a university city, and very old. The great Hungarian king Mátyás Korvinus had been born here during the Renaissance.

At least that was what I remembered about the place. Jack, who was turning out to be an authority on such subjects, said that right near Cluj the oldest script in the world had been discovered. It had been created by one of those old Goddess cultures (why did such information not surprise me anymore?) and predated the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer by a couple of thousand years. Further, unlike the Sumerian script, which often dealt with economic and administrative functions (men were so linear), the Vinca script had a sacred purpose. At least Gimbutas thought so. Nobody could actually read it yet; the scratchings might only say something like “Pick up some more berries for dessert tonight.”

After Cluj the highway got worse and so did my tiredness. Eva was curled up asleep in the back seat. We came to Tîrgu Mureş, and I turned off for what Jack, peering at the map with her flashlight (fortunately on her list of ten real things to bring to Romania), said was a shortcut to Arcata. It was about two in the morning, and no cars had passed us for a very long time.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Jack said after we had gone a few kilometers, “but that thumping noise seems to have got worse.”

I’d heard it too, but had been trying to ignore it. “I suppose something’s just a little loose,” I said. “In the engine. You know these Eastern European cars. They sound awful, but they last forever.” With that airy generalization I speeded up. The road was empty and the sign had said it was only another 25km to Arcata.

If I thought I could outrun the thumping, the car had other ideas. The noise grew louder and louder; the car bucked under us like a bronco. I slowed down to a crawl.

“I don’t think we can continue like this,” said Jack. “Shall I wake Eva?”

“I’ll pull off the road,” I said as, with a last shudder, the Polski Fiat lost its will to go on and stopped dead.

We were alone in the Transylvanian night, in an ancient forest of wolves, foxes, elk and wild boars. Because our entire journey had taken place in the dark, through sleeping villages and deserted cities, on roads where there were few or no cars, it felt as if we had come to the middle of this ancient land by a sinister magic.

And all those scary passages from the opening of
Dracula,
when Jonathan Harker’s carriage is rattling through a gorge of “great frowning rocks” and the rising wind is barely drowning out the baying of the wolves, on the road to the Count’s castle in the Borgo Pass, seemed to spring vividly to mind.

“Why does the idea of Mrs. Nagy and her flat have a certain appeal at the moment?” I wondered aloud.

Jack and I didn’t have the nerve to wake Eva, who had managed to sleep through the entire self-destruction of her little vehicle. We got out and pushed the car to the side of the road and then quickly and breathlessly hopped back inside and locked all the doors.

“If you were going to Romania, what would you bring?”

“An auto mechanic,” I said. “And some parts.”

But eventually, even though we were surrounded by werewolves and vampires and the ghostly victims of bloodthirsty counts, we, like Eva, slept soundly.

“And don’t start with any of your travel stories,” I woke to hear Eva telling Jack. “I don’t want to listen to you and Cassandra talking about how this is nothing compared to the time you were stranded in the Andes without food or water.”

“But it’s good to remember when times were worse.”

“At least you’ve learned something from experience,” brooded Eva. “We’ve got plenty of food.”

I opened my eyes. “But this is beautiful,” I said.

We were not in dark deep woods at all, but in a narrow valley between rounded, low-lying emerald hills, scattered with copses of newly leafed birch. The sky was light, but the sun hadn’t yet come over the hills; a soft white mist clung here and there. I got out of the car and stretched. The air was pure and fresh. There were birds singing all around us.

“It’s like Ireland,” I said. “It’s just as green.”

“Any place you like reminds you of Ireland,” said Jack. “I’ve noticed that.”

She and Eva had the hood up and Eva was looking doubtfully at the jungle of blackened metal within. “When the thumping got so bad, why didn’t you pull off at Tîrgu Mureş? Now we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

I was still walking around, breathing deeply. Transylvania means “the land beyond the forest” and it did feel as if we had emerged on the other side of the woods, the other side of night and fear. In about fifteen minutes my body would begin screaming for caffeine, so I might as well enjoy this blessed state as long as I could.

“We’ll have to walk,” said Jack. “The question is, should we walk back to Tîrgu Mureş and find a garage, or on to Arcata? I think we’re closer to Tîrgu Mureş, but I don’t know how much closer.”

Eva thought Tîrgu Mureş, too.

“What about Gladys?” I said. “She might be in a Romanian jail. We can’t backtrack now.”

Before a serious disagreement could develop however, a woman driving a horse and cart appeared over the hill behind us. She was going in the direction of Arcata, and she offered us a lift.

Two hours later, having been picked up by two carts and finally by a Dacia, the Romanian-made car, the three of us came to the small town of Arcata, in the foothills of the Carpathians. We had traveled through a valley of forests and small farms, of villages of blue- and green-painted houses very neatly kept. Some of the houses had elaborately carved wooden gates in front, wide as the length of the house. Words we couldn’t read formed patterns with vines and flowers on the gates, sometimes freshly painted, sometimes splintered and worn. Most of the gates had long birdhouses like dormitories built along the top.

Large, ungainly stork nests balanced on roofs and on electrical poles by the side of the roads. Occasionally a long-beaked head poked out to look at us. We passed farmers in the fields ploughing furrows for planting; sometimes they worked the land with horses, more often by hand. The men wore fedoras and the women kerchiefs. Here and there were Gypsy families too, in brighter colors, hoeing poorer land.

Arcata was a real town, not a village. The Dacia dropped us off on the main street and we started up a steep hill, along a road fringed with pine and fir, in the direction of a sign that said Arcata Spa Hotel. Up here the sun angled through the dark needles of the trees and dappled the gardens of houses that grew larger and more ornate the higher we climbed. There was a holiday feeling to the place, and the evergreen air was deliciously cool and intoxicating.

I sang to Eva, who was lagging:

Kathleen Mavourneen, the gray dawn is breaking

The horn of the hunter is heard on the hill

The lark from the light wing

The bright dew is shaking

Kathleen Mavourneen! What, slumbering still?

“I’m not slumbering,” said Eva ill-temperedly.

“Don’t get Cassandra started on her Irish songs,” warned Jack. “Her enthusiasm and her ability to keep a tune are unrelated. Believe me, I heard every song Cassandra knows while we were traveling in South America. Motown is one thing, but watch out for ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘The Green Hills of Antrim.’ Your eardrums will never be the same.”

“Anyone can keep a tune,” I said. “But I remember all the words. Are you ready for the chorus?”

“No!”

I would have sung it anyway, but the sight of something ahead stopped me. In a bright blue training suit, a familiar figure came speed-walking, elbows out, knees high, down the hill right towards us.

It was Gladys. And she was not alone.

Three scruffy black dogs ran after her.

“G
LADYS, ARE YOU
escaping?” I half-expected to see armed militiamen racing after her.

“Well, hello there, Cassie.” She stopped in front of us, hardly winded. Her white hair was slicked back from her forehead in a smooth wave, and her cheeks were a fresh pink. The dogs, after a cursory greeting, slipped off to some nearby bushes for a sniff and a squirt. They were ugly, wild-looking beasts, large enough to be wolves, and their fur was black and matted. “I guess you got Bree’s message, huh? The poor kid was real worried about me. No, I guess I’m not going anywhere … not for a while yet. I’m just taking my morning constitutional before I start my treatments.”

“But what about this murder then? Has it been solved? Who were you supposed to have killed? Did they find the real murderer?”

“Nope, they didn’t. I reckon that still makes me the main suspect. They might get around to locking me up one of these days.” The thought made her laugh. “Me—in a Romanian jail! What the heck would I do there? But Cassie, why don’t you introduce me to your friends and then let’s go back on up the hill and sit down somewhere so I can tell you about it. See these dogs? I collect them everywhere I go. I’d love to get them into a bath, but I don’t think that would go over too good around here. I bet you could use some coffee, you all look pretty near worn out.” She plucked a piece of straw from my hair. “You got here awful fast, but how? Where’s your car?”