Trouble in Transylvania Read online

  “I’ve been to Romania before, you know,” I said, rather impatiently. “And besides, the bread’s great.”

  I’d forgotten how tired one can get of bread.

  Like the hotel itself, the dining room had been constructed during times of greater prosperity, when health-seekers and conference-goers from many countries, particularly the Soviet satellites, had flocked here in the hundreds. The room could have easily seated three hundred trade delegates or a convention of structural engineers. It was elegantly proportioned, with floor-to-ceiling windows along one side and rows and rows of tables draped in white linen with starched napkins. From the entrance, the restaurant was impressive: waiters of both sexes stood at attention here and there, dressed in dark suits and white shirts, with napkins draped over one arm. However, moving into the room, one saw that the glasses on the tables were chipped, and that the plates were worn and faintly filmed with dust.

  There was only one other diner in the whole vast room.

  “That’s the Austrian woman,” whispered Bree. “She’s always here for every meal, right on time. Her name is Sophie Ackermann. We call her Frau Sophie.”

  Frau Sophie beamed encouragingly at us and we seated ourselves at the table next to her. We could have sat anywhere, but something about the enormous room was intimidating. Given a wilderness or desert, humans will always cluster on top of each other.

  “Guten Tag, Frau Ackermann,” said Bree.

  “Grüss Gott,” Frau Sophie responded with great heartiness.

  “Do you speak German?” Bree asked me.

  “Some.” I said to Frau Sophie in German, “I’m a friend of Gladys and Bree, here for a day or two. Do you have anything to recommend on the menu?”

  She chortled as if I had made a very fine joke. “Aber das Essen ist ganz grauslich!” The food is wretched!

  She was a stout woman, nicely dressed in a green printed rayon dress with a small pink handkerchief folded perkily in a pocket above her vast bosom. Her hair was iron-gray, short and full, and absolutely cared for. Her face was the reddish-pink of strawberry jam.

  One of the male waiters came over and stood solicitously with his heels together and his napkin neat over his arm. “Was möchten Sie?” he asked.

  “They only speak German here,” Bree said. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s a trick question.”

  “What’s on the menu?” I asked.

  “Schweinkoteletten. Pork chops,” he replied quickly and politely. “And fried potatoes.”

  “All right,” I said. “And what about a salad?”

  He looked as if he’d do anything to please. “Cucumbers?”

  I nodded, and Bree did too. “Swine—nix,” she said.

  He clicked his heels and bowed in a grave and friendly manner and sped off, keeping his upper body perfectly still.

  Frau Sophie was shaking in silent laughter. “Ganz grauslich,” she said again merrily, downing a small glass of vodka and starting on her red wine.

  “I forgot to mention, you can drink all you want here,” said Bree. “I don’t drink… wine, anyway.”

  “Aren’t there any other guests?” I looked around. “How can they keep the hotel going?”

  “Probably by charging people like Frau Sophie and Gram an arm and a leg,” said Bree. “It’s not such a bad place, except for the food. There’s one really wild waitress here. I could really go for her…” Bree gave me her sideways look.

  “So as far as I understand, the police seem to think it’s murder but they haven’t really charged your grandmother with anything, is that right?”

  “I think Gram was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Do you think someone could have reset the voltage meter before Gladys got there and then tampered with it again while she was lying there in a faint?”

  Bree shook her head. “I never figured out how that thing worked. It looks like some torture contraption from a 1920s horror movie, Dr. Pustulescu’s Nightmare Bathing Machine.”

  “If the galvanic bath is so rickety, it’s strange that the police would even think it was murder instead of an accident or a heart attack. It makes me wonder about Dr. Pustulescu’s popularity here at the spa.”

  “From what Gram says, he wasn’t very well liked. I can take you over to the clinic after lunch and introduce you to Dr. Gabor. He was Gram’s doctor before Pustulescu came along.”

  Our food appeared, two salads consisting of cucumbers in watery vinegar, a cheese sandwich for Bree and my lunch, a plate piled high with thick, gleaming yellow French fries, with a greasy hot pork chop perched on top of the fries like a barge run aground on logs.

  “I think what really freaked me out was when I saw the police,” Bree said, spearing a droopy-looking cucumber slice from its weak vinaigrette. “They’ve got these extremely intense uniforms, and they don’t smile. Nadia was translating back and forth. I could tell she was stopping them from doing anything drastic.”

  I looked at my pork chop and ate a fry or two. The oil had been many times reused. “I remember the Romanian police,” I said. “I used to have two friends, sisters, in Bucharest. I met them on the Orient Express on my way to Turkey and afterwards I’d visit them from time to time. Once we were walking in the street and someone asked if I wanted to change money. I said no, the man got abusive, the next thing I knew we were surrounded by Securitate, the Romanian secret police. We weren’t doing anything, but just the fact that I was a foreigner was enough. They’d tried to set me up. Of course Tatiana and Ana were harassed all the time, simply for being Jewish. They finally were able to get out after the revolution; they emigrated to Canada.”

  “I guess things were pretty bad under Ceauşescu,” said Bree.

  “Almost twenty-five years of state terrorism,” I said. “Of course he wasn’t so bad when he first became president in 1965. But by the mid-seventies he’d consolidated his power. The West liked him because he didn’t toe the line with the Soviets, but Ceauşescu’s brand of nationalistic communism was lethal to the Romanians. I remember when I came here in the eighties how there were huge paintings and photos of him everywhere. It was a totally repressive regime—censorship, imprisonment, constant surveillance. That’s where the Securitate came in.”

  “But it’s better now, isn’t it, since 1989?”

  “I think so… but I still wouldn’t want your grandmother to end up in a Romanian jail on some manufactured charge.”

  Bree suddenly wasn’t listening. “Who’s that?” she asked as Jack threaded her way through the white tables to sit down with us.

  “My friend Jack. This is Bree, Gladys’s granddaughter,” I introduced them. The forties-style cotton dresses that Jack had been wearing in Budapest to do her secretarial work had disappeared, and she had reverted to her typically eclectic style, which was to combine pieces of clothing from all over the world. At the moment she had on Bermuda shorts that showed off her legs, espadrilles and a short red silk kimono tied with a hand-woven Guatemalan belt. Her smile turned rakish when she saw Bree.

  I was irritated to notice that I felt slightly miffed when Bree smiled back. If I could virtuously abstain from cradle-snatching, then Jack could too.

  “Did you get some sleep?” I asked.

  “I went out for a walk,” Jack said. “I can never sleep during the daytime.”

  “Oh, I’m the opposite,” said Bree. “At home I’m up all night writing papers and then I can hardly stay awake during my classes. Sometimes when they show films, I go right to sleep.”

  “Bree is in Film Studies at Berkeley,” I said. “Jack’s not much of a film buff.”

  “Cassandra, that’s not true!” said Jack, looking around vaguely for a menu and realizing there was none.

  “Try the omelette,” I suggested as our waiter took away my half-finished lunch.

  “My problem,” Jack said to Bree, moving closer to her, “is that I travel so much that I can’t keep up with the output from Western countries. So when I get back from six
months in India I can’t understand what any of my friends are talking about; I’m hopelessly behind. But on the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of Indian films. Did you know that India is the biggest film-producing country in the world? Have you been to India, Bree?”

  “No… but I’d like to go.”

  “You should definitely go while you’re young… How young are you?”

  “Not that young,” “Too young,” Bree and I said at the same time.

  At that moment Gladys appeared in the doorway, flushed with health and youth from her life-prolonging treatments, and wearing slacks and a Western shirt. As she got closer, I could see that her bolo tie was in the shape of a silver coyote with a twinkling obsidian eye.

  “Hi, kids,” she said. “Hi, Soph. What’s on the menu? Just kidding. I’ll take a cheese sandwich.”

  “I thought I might go over to the clinic and meet this Dr. Gabor,” I said, rising. Bree jumped up too. “I’ll show you where it is.”

  “Then Jack, you’ll have to keep me company,” said Gladys.

  Jack nodded, looking slightly disappointed.

  Can I help it that I have a magnetic personality? Nevertheless I vowed to keep myself pure for Eva. At thirty-two Eva was probably less experienced than Bree at nineteen, but that only made Eva a more interesting challenge. I would have to figure out a way to discourage Bree.

  Chapter Seven

  THE SIGN ABOVE the door said TRATAMENT, and although everything about the peeling white stucco building was worn and shabby, the place bustled with an energy the restaurant lacked. People in various states of dress and undress—from the crinkly, paper-thin training suits that upwardly mobile Romanians seemed to favor, to ragged bathrobes, to ordinary wool skirts and suits, to the long, brightly patterned red and green skirts of the Gypsy women—sat on molded plastic chairs or walked up and down the stairs and through the corridors. Some wore bewildered expressions and clutched their schedules; others, the regulars, strolled calmly from one appointment to the next or chatted in groups about their ailments.

  Not a great fan of hospitals, I found the atmosphere here more cheerful than sickly. Many of the passing nurses and attendants nodded at us.

  “Have you been having treatments too?” I asked Bree.

  “Me? No, they know me from Gram. Everyone’s been completely sympathetic.”

  Dr. Zoltán Gabor’s office was on the first floor.

  “Hallo, Bree,” he said graciously in English and invited us in. “Is this the American friend you were telling me about? Dr. Gabor, at your service.”

  A youngish nurse with bleached blond hair, very short, and an anxious expression masked by a bright, professional smile, pushed forward two chairs. “This is my assistant, Margit,” he said. She wore a perky cap and a uniform of that almost diaphanous white nylon that droops after the first washing.

  She nodded vivaciously and then, flinging a stethoscope over her arm, zipped out the open door and closed it. “Always in a hurry,” Dr. Gabor excused her.

  He was a tall man with an imposing nose and blue-black hair, silver at the temples. Under his white lab coat he wore a striped suit with very wide lapels. It may have been in fashion in the seventies. His eyes were gray-blue and his eyebrows winged up at the corners, giving him an alert, slightly demonic appearance.

  “And what can I do for you, Mrs.—Miss?—Really?” He leaned forward in the concentrated listening posture of the doctor, and suddenly I was aware that I had no particular standing here, no reason to be cross-examining him about the death of Dr. Pustulescu and Gladys’s supposed part in it.

  “Mrs.,” I answered demurely. “I’m a widow actually.” Beside me I heard a choking sound from Bree. “Perhaps we could speak alone a moment?”

  “Yes, yes,” he rose with great alacrity and showed the speechless Bree out.

  “I too,” he said. “I have also lost my wife. Very sad.”

  When he’d reseated himself behind the desk, I began again:

  “We all get older, as you know. I was traveling in Europe to forget my tragedy, and met Gladys and her granddaughter on the train. Gladys told me about this spa and how much better she feels being here. I’m thinking of taking the treatment myself.”

  “But you’re young,” he said graciously, even as his hands reached for a pad of paper and a pen. “Surely you are only thirty-seven, thirty-eight?”

  “Mid-forties,” I sighed.

  “Symptoms?”

  “Nothing definite. Vague things. Stiffness in my joints in the morning, more aching than usual when it’s cold or wet…”

  “Pain?”

  “No… not really…”

  “Melancholy?” he suggested.

  “Of course.”

  He got up and stuck his head out the door. “Margit,” he called, and to me, “Please undress.”

  This was slightly more than I’d bargained for. I took off my shirt as slowly as possible, and talked more quickly. “I was so surprised to hear from Gladys about yesterday’s events. What a pity. I’d heard so much about Dr. Pustulescu. I was eager to meet him.”

  “Yes, a pity,” Dr. Gabor said, pulling out his stethoscope and listening to my heart.

  “Had he been here long, at the spa, I mean? I know he invented Ionvital. Was he the director here?”

  Margit had returned and with quick movements had the blood pressure cuff around my arm and was pumping it up. Her eyes looked everywhere but at my face. “Yes, but only in name. He had his own treatment center, in Bucharest, very famous. He just came here from time to time to check on us.”

  Why was Margit perspiring? Beads of sweat gathered on her forehead.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked her.

  “Oh, no. No, no,” she stuttered, and took the cuff off.

  “He was Romanian, wasn’t he? Not Hungarian?”

  “He was the only Romanian here,” said Dr. Gabor, motioning me to sit down and starting to bend and tap various joints. “We are all Hungarian at the treatment center. Magyar.”

  “That must have caused some problems then?” I heard a distinct creaking coming from one of my knees as Dr. Gabor manipulated it.

  “It’s the beginnings of rheumatoid arthritis,” he said.

  “What!”

  “It’s normal as you age. You can dress now.” He sat back down at his desk, and Margit dashed out the door again. “Are you taking medication? Do you have other health problems?”

  “No, really, I’m fine. I mean—I’m interested in this Ionvital treatment.”

  “Yes, I can give you shots, or pills if you prefer. And you say you want to take the full course of treatment? Two weeks of baths and massage and mud, you will be a new woman. A recent widow?”

  “Very recent.” I was suddenly inspired. “André’s parents were Hungarian émigrés, that’s why I feel a great kinship with the Hungarians, wherever they may be: in America, in Hungary, in Transylvania, in the Czech and Slovak Republics, a great and wonderful people.”

  “Then you know, you know about Transylvania, our sad history,” he said. His handsome, sympathetic face lit up. “We are a different race, we are not of the Orient, we belong to Mitteleuropa. That is where we turn for civilization—to Vienna, to Prague, not to Bucharest or Sofia or Istanbul. You know the work of Václav Havel and Milan Kundera? Josef Škvorecký, Czeslaw Milosz?”

  “Oh certainly…”

  “Yes, of course you do. They are great men. And what they write is our culture too. Everything is translated into Hungarian, we know what is happening in Central Europe, the world. That is the civilization we belong to, we Transylvanian Magyars. The Romanians, they are ignorant of great literature and democratic ideals. Such authors are not translated into Romanian. The Romanians, the Serbs, the Slavs and the Greeks—they are all corrupt, all writing only lies. But the Germans, the Hungarians, the Czechs, they write the truth. The Romanians only write lies.”

  “Why do they lie?”

  “It’s the Orthodox church. From the beginning i
t was all symbols and icons, corruption and power and spying. Byzantine thinking. How else could a man like Ceauşescu come to power in Romania? The worst dictator in modern times after Stalin.” He suddenly shook his fist at the wall. “Are you listening? You are liars!”

  “Securitate?” I asked. “Still, after the revolution?”

  “Hah, the revolution,” he said. “We will have a revolution when the Magyars throw the Romanian communists out of Transylvania.” He looked pleased with himself. “I have a dossier this tall, every day a black mark.”

  Margit had come back in with a thin piece of paper, the kind I’d seen other patients carrying around.

  “So. Margit has put together your schedule. Every morning a warm saline bath, then you go to the mud packing and to the shower massage. You take the galvanic bath every other day, more often is not good.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to shriek that I wouldn’t touch the galvanic bath with a ten-foot (and certainly not a metal) pole, but I figured that I had to get to the scene of the crime somehow.

  “It’s too late now,” he said, looking at his watch. “Treatment is over. But you can start tomorrow morning, eight-thirty. Now, you want to get the Ionvital shot every day?”

  “Tell me again, what’s in it?”

  “Procaine, you know, like Novocain, for your teeth? It affects the metabolism positively. You’re having your menopause? You’ve finished?”

  “I’ve had a hot flash or two.”

  “Ionvital will help you with your glandular upheaval. Here,” he added, seeing that I looked less than convinced. “I look for something in English for you to read. Margit,” he called. “Every time I turn around that girl is gone. She is so restless.” Margit came back in and Gabor said something in Hungarian that made her look even more vivaciously anxious. She rummaged around in a file cabinet and came up with a lurid orange pamphlet that said GERIATRIC CURES IN ROMANIA and another titled IONVITAL: THE ANSWER TO AGING?

  “Read these,” Gabor said, “and we discuss more tomorrow.”

  “Is everyone here getting shots?” I asked.

  “You mean the foreigners? Oh yes, the foreigners are my specialty. The Vanderbergs, very regular patients. And Frau Ackermann, she comes here for ten years for the shots. They have a mild euphoric effect,” he added thoughtfully.