Trouble in Transylvania Read online

  My fiftieth birthday was coming up in a few years. My father had died when he was fifty. I hadn’t been to half the places I’d wanted to visit, done half the things I’d imagined I would when I stared out my bedroom window as a rebellious teenager and vowed I’d get away, I’d do something with my life. What had I, after all, accomplished? My head was an encyclopedia of train and ferry schedules to places all over the globe; my name appeared on the copyright pages of the books I translated and occasionally on the title page or back cover. Compañeras I had plenty of, and lovers more than my share. But I had no real home, no country in spite of two passports, no pension, no savings, no security. I did have about a hundred and fifty close relatives, but they were all Catholic and they were sure I was going to hell.

  Maybe I’d feel better if I had a bath.

  My first treatment, the saline bath, was the one I enjoyed most, in part because it required nothing of me. The water came from the lake, and had been warmed to a toasty forty degrees centigrade. It had a slippery, salty feel; I felt my muscles relax, my joints unstiffen, my bones float restfully inside the whole elongated package of my body. Ilona, the Mistress of the Waters, had the sympathetic face of a Crimean nurse ministering to a young British soldier who had lost a leg on the battlefield. Plump and sweet, she spoke a bit of English and a bit of German in a lovely musical voice.

  “Are you ill or only to rest?” she asked me.

  “Just a little tired,” I said. “I’m thinking about taking the Ionvital shots… I was just reading about them… about Dr. Pustulescu… isn’t it a tragedy that he died? I would have liked to meet him.”

  “No, you would not like,” she said decisively.

  “But he was such a fine man, he did so much for humanity with his discovery.”

  “No! He bad man, chase the girls.” She put on a lecherous expression that reminded me of Harpo Marx getting ready to speed after some unwary female.

  “Chasing women at his age! How old was he, anyway?”

  “Almost ninety! That too old for love! And if you say no, you lose job.”

  “So some women actually said yes?”

  “I never say yes. I am married. But other girls here, they got no choice. These baths the only work in Arcata except the dairy factory… Excuse…” She went off down the corridor to answer a call from someone in another bath.

  I luxuriated uneasily. If Pustulescu had a reputation as a lecher and if almost all the workers at the spa were women, any or all of them could have planned the crime. It was a neat revenge fantasy: instead of an orgasm give him a jolt he’d never forget (or remember). A joint effort among his victims might explain why there was nobody but Gladys and Pustulescu in the galvanic bath room. But it didn’t explain how anyone knew he was going to be there that morning unless he’d told someone besides Gladys. And what about poor Gladys, on the verge of being charged with his death? Would the real culprit(s) come forward? Not likely.

  Ilona came back and helped me out of the bath and gave me a thin sheet to dry myself with. “You don’t stay too long in bath. You faint,” she said. “Now you go to mud, yes?”

  To mud, yes. The brochure had said the mud came from nearby, that it was “saprogenic” which, though I had no dictionary with me, I vaguely recalled as having something to do with putrefaction. “The mud is prehistoric,” Dr. Gabor had told me. “Like the Dead Sea. It has minerals. It is like estrogen. Not estrogen. But hormones. Good for women with problems in fertility.”

  I descended to the underworld of the clinic, to the basement where, in subterranean shadow light, the mud wrapping took place.

  This treatment was done on the assembly line: all the nine-thirty appointments—about a dozen women—entered at one time, and were each given a threadbare muslin sheet and a pair of plastic slippers. Two to a small cubicle, we undressed and lay down on our stomachs on tables draped in more soft, yellowed sheets. None of the attendants here spoke anything but Hungarian, which presented a problem in terms of cross-examination. Not that there was much time to chat. I hadn’t been on my table more than a few minutes when two women in heavy rubber aprons and thick rubber gloves came into the cubicle, wheeling a cart with big buckets of steaming black mud on it. Very rapidly they piled heaps of the mud on my back and legs and smeared it all over me. It smelled intensely like fertilizer, and I had to bite my lip so as not to cry out at the heat. Then they helped me turn over, and just as quickly slopped and smeared the mud up and down the front of my body. With practiced movements they wrapped me up tightly in half a dozen sheets. The whole operation couldn’t have taken more than three minutes, and then they started on the woman next to me.

  My temperature immediately began to rise. The mud was heavy and hot on my body, oily as blackened butter, gooey as molasses. Bound this securely, I couldn’t move an inch; I could only feel the mud oozing between my flesh and the sheets. My nose began to itch. An attendant came by and put a cool cloth on my forehead and stroked my cheek and said something kind in Hungarian. I felt like a swaddled baby in the nursery, helpless and vulnerable. I felt like a child with a fever in the school nurse’s office. I felt as if the world stood still. All the women had been slapped with mud and wrapped in sheets; we lay like a row of chrysalises. The silence was almost total. There was only the drip, drip, drip of water, and the glutinous squish of hot mud between my thighs.

  When Camille Paglia accused women of being unable to contribute to civilization because of being hormonally mired in the chthonian swamp, was this what she was talking about? I certainly didn’t feel cool and crystalline, much less in full possession of my Apollonian faculties down here in the primordial realms of the procreative female. Deep in the twilight womb of the earth, inside my sloppy little cocoon of slimy hormones, I had become a vegetable goddess, an inchoate force of regeneration or destruction, bubbling and boiling, seething with hot volcanic energy and ready to erupt if they didn’t…

  Just in time, the same team came back to unwrap me with friendly efficiency. The air was cool and then cold against my skin as they scraped off the excess mud and pushed me off the table in the direction of the primitive showers with their slatted wooden platforms. The black mud was startling against my pale skin, and at first clung in lumps and clots; its fine, silt-like quality kept creating a kind of wash of black, even after I’d been scrubbing for a while. The silt rained over me like an etch-a-sketch gone wild.

  Meanwhile the other women had emerged from their cocoons and were wandering dazedly over to the showers. They did not look like great scientists and artists of genius. In the dim light of this richly pungent netherworld they looked like tadpoles taking their first steps out of the primal soup.

  After I finally got the mud off, I dressed again and staggered out into the hallway. It was only ten-thirty and I was worn out. But there was more to come.

  I walked upstairs and into a changing area, where I disrobed for the third time since putting on my clothes this morning and was given a thin cotton robe and another pair of plastic slippers. This was something called a shower massage. I had no idea what to expect.

  I was told to wait on a bench in a corridor. It was steamy in this section, and the water was not so much running as sloshing, lapping, spraying and gushing. There was a rhythmic undertone of hands slapping flesh, punctuated occasionally by a groan or two. This area was not divided by gender, as the salt baths and mud-wrapping swamp had been, and I was suddenly acutely conscious of being surrounded by elderly semi-undressed men, most with sheets wrapped around their lower parts, leaving sunken chests and bloated bellies bare.

  To tell the truth, Camille, they didn’t look like great scientists or artists of genius either.

  Someone staggered past me and I realized it was my turn to enter the massage room. A man in a skimpy bathing suit, over which his belly protruded, smooth and round as a brownish-white dinosaur egg, came out into the corridor and called some version of my name. He was wearing smoke-gray goggles that gave him the look of a undersea diver, a
nd as I followed him into the room I realized he was blind or nearly so. In German he ordered me up onto the sopping-wet massage table. The entire room was dripping; water ran down the walls and the windows.

  I lay on my stomach as directed and he pulled a battery of shower nozzles directly over my head, spine and legs. As the warm water sprayed over me it created a kind of tingling numbness and at the same time a peculiar physical awareness, a strange sensory disorganization that increased violently when the blind masseur began to vigorously knead my flesh. There seemed to be no pattern to his massage. He didn’t start by gently pressing my shoulders (asking if the pressure was okay for me, or, as did American bodyworkers, murmuring, If your muscles could speak, what would they be saying right now?) and then working his way down my spine and so forth, giving me time to adjust. This was more like being attacked by a school of sharks. I opened my mouth to shriek and water clogged my nose and throat.

  “Ist gut?” he said, assaulting my thigh muscles with powerful fingers; my legs promptly clenched up as I braced myself against the table.

  “Nein! Halt!” I glugged, as water poured down my throat. I wasn’t only being mauled by sharks, I was drowning as well. “Not so damned hard! Donnerwetter!”

  After a few more minutes, I begged him to stop and crawled off the table, half-drowned, trying to collect my senses and my wits and stuff them all back into the vulnerable bundle that was my body. I didn’t know why Dr. Pustulescu’s murderer had bothered with the galvanic baths. This shower massage was a near-death experience. I felt as if I were competing in a triathalon by this time; nevertheless I dried myself off as best I could with the thin sheet, dressed again and made my way over to the galvanic baths.

  Fortunately, here I didn’t have to get completely undressed again; I only had to take off my jeans, socks and boots and to roll up my sleeves. I was made to sit in a small plastic stenographer-type chair, surrounded by four small ceramic tubs of water: two at waist-level for the forearms and hands, and two on the floor for feet and legs up to mid-calf.

  The attendant, a young woman with a morose expression, was fooling around with a machine to the side. It was a rectangular case the size of a shoebox, with a few dials and a half-circle of numbers. From where I sat I couldn’t see how high the numbers went up.

  I asked in Romanian if this was the voltage meter that had been here when Dr. Pustulescu was fried, but perhaps I didn’t phrase it quite correctly, for although she said yes (“Da, da.”), her smile seemed more diabolical than mournful.

  She signaled to me that I should now put my limbs in the tubs. This I found hard to do. As an older child in a family of eight children I had been instructed over and over not to let any electricity ever come in contact with water and with me or my siblings. I could see that each of the tubs had a narrow strip of metal to the side and presumably the electric current came from that. I had visions of monster movies in which my eyes would bug out from my head and my hair would stand on end, straight for once, and for all time.

  I had visions of Dr. Pustulescu.

  However, I had to know how the contraption worked and so, closing my eyes and muttering a quick “Mary, Merciful Mother, protect me,” I put my arms and legs in the water and the attendant switched on the current. I felt a slight tingling, as if thin needles were pricking at my skin. I could see her looking at the meter and I quickly said, “I think that’s enough voltage.” She indicated that I was hardly getting any and that if she had her way she’d definitely turn up the juice.

  Intellectually I knew that even if she turned it up all the way I probably wouldn’t be electrocuted. If Dr. Pustulescu had been murdered, it was because someone had fixed it so he would. I wished I knew more about electricity. How much current was too much? How could you tamper with the meter to increase the voltage? Who would have had the opportunity; who would have had a motive?

  From the sound of it, almost everyone who knew Pustulescu had hated him.

  When I knocked on Dr. Gabor’s office door, there was a pause and then Margit rushed out, laughing nervously when she saw me. Dr. Gabor was seated behind his desk, reading what looked like a Hungarian political review.

  “Oh, Mrs. Really,” he said, “I have been expecting you. I have something for you.” He gestured to a pile of small cardboard boxes on his desk. “Sit down. How are you?”

  “I’m completely exhausted,” I said, collapsing on the chair. “I haven’t done as much in a morning since I left the Marine Corps.”

  “The cure is very taxing.” Dr. Gabor nodded. “You must be careful to take long naps and not to overexert yourself with walking or dancing.”

  “Dancing?”

  “There is a discotheque in Arcata, by the cinema,” he said. “I am too old myself.”

  “I am too,” I said. “What are these things?”

  “Beauty treatments!” he said, opening one of the boxes and pulling out a sea-green plastic jar. On its lid, in gold script, it said: Prof. Ion Pustulescu.

  “Did I ask for these?”

  “You asked about Ionvital. Well, you should know it comes not only in shots and pills, but also facially. It will rejuvenate your wrinkles and feed your dry skin.”

  I tried reading the Romanian on the box. It was cremã nutritivă with lanolină and vaselină. That seemed safe enough.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try them. Hard currency?”

  “Yes,” he said carelessly. “Whatever you want. Five dollars, ten marks, even forints I take. I am trying to buy a good car. An Opel Kadett.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I tried the galvanic bath. But I don’t really understand how it works.”

  “It is meant to stimulate the nerves. It will help your circulation.”

  “But it makes my nerves nervous. I keep thinking about Dr. Pustulescu. I can’t relax.”

  “Oh, it’s perfectly safe,” he said. “Except in that one case.”

  “Do you think Dr. Pustulescu’s death was an accident then?”

  Dr. Gabor’s iron-blue eyes shifted to the wall. “You are worried about Mrs. Bentwhistle, that I understand. But there is no need to worry. They have put the voltage meter back. Nothing was wrong with it. The doctor was old. He simply had a heart attack. When they finish the autopsy, it will be clear. They will not put Mrs. Bentwhistle in jail unless they wish to make international fools of themselves.”

  He held up his journal. “Do you know what I am reading? It is report on the situation of we Magyars here in Transylvania. So shocking, you would not believe me, what happened during Ceauşescu times. Now it is better, but not so much, not when we are still controlled from Bucharest.”

  I could see that the way to Gabor’s confidence was through his ethnicity. “How many Hungarian-speaking people live in Transylvania anyway?”

  “Two million, three million. Once it was all Magyar, but then Ceauşescu had plans. First to move Romanians here to Transylvania, then to send students, professionals away from here. When I studied at Tîrgu Mureş at the medical school, everybody was sent away. I was sent away first, then I came back. So the population of Magyars in Transylvania got less and less. In 1988 Ceauşescu had a plan to destroy 8,000 villages, mostly in Transylvania. This way he would have more land, more control of people. They would have to leave villages, go live in big apartment blocks. He started to do this, then he was killed.”

  Dr. Gabor shook his handsome head. “You know the saying about Ceauşescu? People said, ‘We are a dream in the mind of a madman.’ And that is true. Now we are waking up, but to what? A past that is a nightmare. They say there were ten million microphones. This, in a country of twenty-three million! When everyone was an informer, the whole country must be corrupt. And yes, Magyars informed too. But not like the Romanians. Why should we inform on each other when the Romanians will do all the informing?”

  “It sounds to me that there was a reason to kill Dr. Pustulescu during the Ceauşescu years, but not now. He must have had far less power after the revolution.”

&n
bsp; “When the same people are in charge, how could the doctor have less power?” said Dr. Gabor. “Oh yes, he was a friend to Ceauşescu and for several months during the winter of the revolution he found it convenient to travel abroad. But after the elections, after Ilescu was elected, he knew it was safe to come back. That he could live the same life as before. Even now he had the same power over us. Do this, do that, come here, go there. But these days, sometimes, we said no. We said no!” He slammed his journal down forcefully on the desk. “He didn’t like that, but without sending us to prison like in the old days, what could he do?”

  “Then there was no reason for anyone here at the clinic or hotel to kill him?”

  “You keep saying kill, but why? A simple heart attack.”

  “He may have been old, but he was healthy, wasn’t he? He invented Ionvital! I read those pamphlets—he could have lived to be over a hundred.”

  “You must not believe everything you read.”

  “Well, answer me this. Why did it happen to be Gladys who had to switch the meter on? Was it because someone knew the Romanian courts would never convict a foreigner?”

  “Questions, questions,” Dr. Gabor said. “So many questions. Do you have any more questions for me?”

  “Yes! Why does Margit always leave the room when I come in?”

  “Margit?” Dr. Gabor hesitated. “There is nothing wrong with Margit. She’s a happy girl, she’s always smiling, and laughing. Very restless though, many times I have to tell her relax, relax.”

  He looked at his watch and pushed the little jars of cremă nutritivă towards me. “You try these, yes? Maybe later have injections?”

  “You don’t think it’s bad for the hotel and spa’s reputation that the inventor of Ionvital just met his death here?”