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Legends
of Romania
Published
in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 1998 around-the-world-series
Dubbed
the Wild West of Eastern Europe, Romania has always inspired
ferocious and seamy yarns, from medieval legends passed down
its villages to traveler's tales spread near its borders.
Gassed trains and pickpocket gangs scare many tourists off
Romania's railroads; the rugged romance of haunted castles
and mountain wolves has other adventurers queuing up for tickets.
I spend July crisscrossing the country by rail. Long cut off
from the outside world, Romanians are excited and curious
about meeting foreigners, and the slow rides on the hothouse
trains quickly cultivate friendships. I meet fare dodgers,
math teachers, vodka drunks, new widows and summer hikers.
I also encounter many intellectual and creative types, frustrated
from living in a stunning but economically depressed country
where potential is often wasted.
My travel comrades appoint me train psychologist, although
unfortunately there's no room for reclining. A physics grad
went to Denmark to work for a man with a bad back; he almost
married a woman forty years his elder to stay there. Now he
awaits news from a dodgy Romanian firm he paid to find him
work on an American cruise ship. Burdened by an alcoholic
father and a schizophrenic brother, an insurance clerk signed
up with an on-line matrimonial agency to find an American
husband; she wants to know if we really all get divorces.
I promise to check up on her prospective fiancés as
I step off the train in Bucharest.
The taxi-wolves are nipping at my feet in the station. I shake
them off to buy Metro tickets, where there is a crowd and
confusion. "Sprecken zie Deutsch?" I hear as a hand
hovers over my bag. The would-be thief slithers away, but
not before his razor slashes my backpack.
Romanians
warned me that their capital is hell on Earth, damned by godless
Gypsies, but at least the devil
is dead. Nicolae Ceaucescu, with Liberace's grandiosity, Napoleon's
ego and Reagan's brains, rivals Hitler as the 20th century's
scariest dictator. Executed by firing squad on December 23,
1989, Nicolae and his wife Elena represent the last regime
to fall in that red-letter year for Communism.
I
can admire the size of Ceaucescu's dreams, however warped.
During his 25-year reign, he rechanneled the Dombovia River
to run through Bucharest (since all great capitals must have
a river) and laid plans to "systematize" agriculture
by transferring more than half of the country's village dwellers
into concrete apartment blocks. The tyrant's worst blunder
was exporting food to pay off Romania's $10 billion foreign
debt, which created unbearable food shortages and a nation
ready to riot.
Ceaucescu's
piece de resistance was the House of the People, a $3 billion
beast intended to be the world's largest building but in fact
trails the Pentagon. One of its 64 reception halls could land
a helicopter; one of its seven underground floors actually
houses a nuclear bunker. Inside, 24-K gold ceilings bear hundreds
of hefty chandeliers, their crystal forms reflected in the
design of rugs large enough for 5,000 rabid Romanian dogs
to lay on. The building stretches for blocks so long the next
intersection is a bus ride away. With the French-styled sidewalk
lampposts, it is a nightmare set in Paris.
While
I expect triumphant words about Ceaucescu's downfall, instead
I am told that "the revolution wasn't," as one young
cafe owner puts it, meaning the old guard still runs the show.
And whereas before people had money but the stores were empty,
now the markets overflow with goods no one can afford to buy.
Many elders, formerly protected by fat pensions, actually
regret the revolution. Some keep the flowers fresh and candles
burning on the Ceaucescu graves in Bucharest's civil cemetery.
The
train takes me away from these urban realities to Transylvania's
countryside legends. I follow the tourist flocks to Bran,
a small town below the Carpathian mountains, to visit the
castle associated with the legendary vampire Dracula. En route,
Transylvanian teenagers tell me stories and superstitions
passed down by wide-eyed relatives whose fervor transmits
belief to all who hear. Surrounded by eerie castles and mischievous
Romanians who fuel the fictions, I myself find it difficult
to separate myth from reality.
Dracula,
however, turns out to be a dud. "Everybody knows Dracula
is just a legend," insists the same girl who swears by
werewolves. She informs me that a prince named Vlad Tepes
impaled thieves and Turkish foes on stakes; his black methods
inspired writer Bram Stoker's fanged Dracula. Built in 1378
to defend the mountain pass against the Turks, Bran Castle
is rumored to be Dracula's lair, although it is unrelated
to the myth or Tepes himself.
Looking
for a bed in Bran, I hear strange music emanating from a log
cabin. I follow the sounds into the kitchen where the hotel
staff are being entertained by vodka and two scruffy Sunday
musicians. One toothless guy is banging out a bizarre array
of notes on a trapezoidal xylophone; the other gentleman,
dressed in a 1950s British schoolboy tie and zipperless trousers,
is squeaking on a violin. A moustached redhead raises his
glass to me with a strange whisper. The violinist taunts his
bow in my face with sarcastic bravado while a chubby waiter
hand-feeds me pepper steak. I go to take a photo and the moustache
man with the quivering smile and soft beer breath dances me
into the scene, slipping his arm around my waist. All too
soon, the maestros put on their ragged coats and hats, palms
open; they grumble at my lei, expecting dollars.
I
stay up all night with the patron, the waiter and the moustache
man. Every time I try to leave the table they threaten to
send Dracula into my room, and the waiter refills my glass
with terrible white wine, sparkling water and Coke. My moustache
man keeps saying things slower and softer and spelling them
on paper, as if I will suddenly understand Romanian this way.
For once I think "no" is more appropriate than nicely
nodding.
Then
a brilliant accordionist comes in with a flashy gold smile
and plays "Oh Susanna"and a German waltz for me.
He twists into Romanesti melodies, honking certain notes and
playing hopscotch with the keys; he sings with a raspy stagger
but ends in sweet vibrato. Everyone joins in on the favorites,
when the patron, a Romanian horse with no name, gallops his
fingers on the table. I spy a pause between songs and drinks
and pull the curtain on the night.
My
memory is fuzzy after so much wine and so little sleep, fuzzy
in a way that the music seems wilder, the laughter louder,
the waiter's eyes greener. It is such careless evenings that
spawn new legends of Romania.
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