The Romanian

THE HEAT WAVE, like an episode of shock, is over, too intense to be remembered exactly. Here in the mountains, a mild chill pings the air with promise and cures the past like a tonic. The girl Elena and Mama’s request for a new apartment seem like a lost chapter, an interruption of fantasy—the kind felt by a junkie suddenly shaken awake, before he sinks once more into a fainting, timeless rush. Romulus and I are back together, approaching our seventh month together.

He is sitting next to me in the Dacia as we head north, sighing with relief at this new escape, glad to leave Elena and his problem-ridden family far behind. She’d been shrill and hysterical all morning, bursting into tears when he returned from the hotel, then begging and threatening when he announced his intention to continue with the trip. It dawned on him that my demands were far less difficult than hers to satisfy. His good-bye to her was cold.

Now, slowly, he’s working to reestablish our complicity, sneaking a hand out from time to time to slap me playfully on the thigh. For him, being with me is like bachelorhood, since he has no template for considering himself gay. He’s convinced himself that we share an ideal camaraderie that just happens to involve some inconvenient requests for sex—no big deal.

“You know, you are only friend I have in whole life?” he says to me as we drive past the fantastic homes of a wealthy Roma enclave, their pagoda-like aluminum gables glinting in the sun. The word “friend” lacerates me only slightly, like a paper cut that I try to medicate by answering, “You’re my friend, too, and more.”

For the last twenty minutes we’ve been caught behind an open truck of chestnut-colored horses, a situation I can’t get used to. Seven of them are crowded on a flatbed protected only by a four-foot-high railing, phosphorescent diesel smoke spewing around them. As the truck careens around curves, they struggle for balance, falling one against the other, their dark eyes bulging with fright. Finally, the truck turns off and I barrel up the mountain road, even passing the white van ahead of us. At Romulus’s insistence, I’ve learned some new skills of navigation, closer to those of the other drivers.

We zoom along for about twenty minutes until another open flatbed appears before us—it, too, carrying some live cargo. As we near it, I realize what it is: a peasant funeral. Dressed in their Sunday best, a family is crouching on the open platform, around a black coffin that has been draped with a black cloth. About twenty miles farther on, the cortege mercifully turns off; I press the pedal to the floor again.

We’d planned to leave this morning, but a late rising, complications from Elena and the decision to have lunch in Sibiu delayed our trip to four p.m. Our destination, which we hope to reach shortly after nightfall, is the region of Maramureş, near the Ukrainian border, one of the last untouched places on the continent of Europe. It’s an area where farmers still toil the land with oxen and where some villagers still observe pre-Christian rites.

About sixty miles outside Sibiu, we’re caught in the town of Alba Iulia in the midst of an animal fair. In a field, peasants are examining oxen, horses, goats and donkeys for sale. A long line of animals in pairs, reminiscent of those brought onto Noah’s Ark, have clogged the highway. Three hours later, in an urban traffic jam, my throat is strangled by an acrid odor. We’re nearing Turda, the glass-making town with the lead-ridden air. Surrounded by palpable, bluish-gray wisps of pollution, poorly fed factory workers line the road, waving glass vases and tumblers in the air at us as we pass, hoping to sell them for a few dollars. Within minutes, my head is pounding from—I assume—the toxic chemicals. Although no one has ever said Elena is from Turda, I remember my fantasy of a blonde being from that locale. Forever after, I’ll associate my memory of Elena with this polluted town and its vaporized-metal odor.

After Turda, the air freshens and the houses become more suburban. Large storks’ nests sit atop some of the telephone poles. Romulus has regressed into full bachelorhood rather annoyingly, pointing out anything on the road that looks female and making macho, predatory comments. I’m getting worried. Night’s arriving, and the sky has darkened threateningly. Then, slowly, a few fat drops spatter the windshield.

I gun the engine, hoping that we’re driving out of the storm. When I reach eighty miles per hour, I have to come to a screeching stop in front of an enormous flock of sheep, which are claiming the entire highway. With curly tresses reaching almost to the pavement like astrakhans and led by a donkey saddled with one of their pelts, they’re ambling down the road, oblivious of the cars in front of and behind them. Each of their beady eyes above pointed snouts is fixed and still, in an expression that reminds me of our hitchhiker’s cryptic calm.

It’s almost ten p.m. as we drive across the edge of the city of Cluj-Napoca. Then a stagy thunderstorm begins to follow us up and down the steep curves, strewing the road with slippery leaves and coating our windshield like vibrating gelatin. Forks of lightning burst through the sky, some so close I’m afraid they’ll hit the car. We pass an old peasant woman who’s already drenched to the bone, rivulets of water spilling from the folds of her kerchief onto her face. I try to slow down, to give her a ride, but the car behind me honks threateningly, signaling that it can’t stop so suddenly on the slippery road. Going is rough. I’ve slowed down to about fifteen miles per hour.

After one a.m., between Dej and Baia Mare, as we descend a chain of mountains, the situation worsens. Bolts of lightning seem to land right on the pavement, illuminating the car in blinding explosions. Great gusts of wind try to nudge us off the road. Our leaf-coated tires begin to slide down hills, sending us across the road sideways. We make wide U’s around fallen branches. From time to time, I pull over to the side of the road, wait to get back my nerve. Because we can see almost nothing, an endorphin-filled calm has invaded the car. Both of us stare without blinking through the spiraling sheets of rain caught in our headlights. This is a state of total alertness, the calm that strikes people faced with dire danger. Strangely, it forges a complicity between Romulus and me, emphasized by the touch of his rough hand on my neck.

As we ascend a narrow slope about thirty miles from Baia Mare, we come upon a dead body in the road. It’s lying nose-down on the pavement in the rain, and no one has even bothered to cover it up. A few feet ahead we squeeze by a police van and the car of the driver who probably hit it. The sight comes as a shock to me, which I’m able to put out of my mind almost immediately; but from the corner of my eye, I can see that Romulus is quietly sulking. An hour later, all my senses are fixed on the red taillights in front of us, the only clue to the location of the road. “I cannot get feeling of dead body out of mind,” Romulus blurts out, then launches into a potential scenario of peasant children waiting anxiously by the fire, only to discover that their father has been killed on the highway.

The story shames me, reveals my ruthless ability to forget traumatic images that stand in the way of my goals. I haven’t been thinking about the dead body at all, just about getting to the end of the trip. Romulus is, I realize, more faceted than I’ve been conveniently supposing. He has to be hiding some delicate, even humanist, quality.

The minutes roll on excruciatingly slowly, ticked away by the successive bolts of lightning. Our vehicle, dark and isolated on the brink of danger, transports us beyond time and context into some rippling, associative sea. My mind lapses into reflections and revises my opinion of remarks he’s made. “Her pussy must be so wet now, because of rain. . . .” The words came from some close identification with the girl, her abject isolation. His words are predatory, yet they intimately share the vocabulary of the prey. Imperceptibly, his secret allegiances, which make up what one might call character, are surfacing. For the first time I can really see him in his context of poverty and urban want. As the car is illuminated by another bolt of lightning, I glance at him with a flash of understanding; telepathically he returns the look, as if sealing a new pact. An image of him as vulnerable, even sentimental, begins to gel, and a kind of anguish spreads through me—panic about dumping those assumptions to which I’d been so attached.

In this eruption of Nature, I think of Brancusi. His spiritual journey has, perhaps, something to tell me. Early versions of The Kiss show the lovers bound together in an infantile fantasy in stone—the rest of the world pushed into another realm. But between 1935 and 1938, The Kiss expands into a memorial for those who died in World War I. It takes the form of a gate, an enormous archway that is part of an ensemble celebrating love, in a park in the town of Tîrgu Jiu. To transform The Kiss into The Gate of the Kiss, the two lovers had to be moved far apart in a gesture of objectivity, forming an arch, which created an entrance that let in the whole world. Brancusi described The Gate of the Kiss as a “fragment of a temple of love,” and the critic Sidney Geist said the gate was “love and community, upheld by sexual energy.” He didn’t see the fact that Brancusi created variations of this image over and over during a forty-year period as obsessional, but merely as “reverie” that attains the cosmic, something “outside of chronological time.”

It took forty years for Brancusi’s kiss to invite us inside. But when it did, it opened itself up to the universe. The cleft circle of its two joined eyes, once blind, now gazed out at us. By some miracle, Brancusi had turned obsessive love into agape, a love of life’s energies.

Just as dawn is peeking over a hillside, the storm dies abruptly. The hills and curves smooth out as we near Baia Mare, and in the gradually increasing light, everything turns limpid. I want to touch the moist air. It’s clear and viscous, the way water gets when okra is boiled. Beyond an odd formation of wet haystacks piled into perfect cones like some witch’s charm is a tile-roofed brick barn with ornately carved wooden doors. Through its open window I can see a cow’s full udder and haunches; and the tree beside it, split lengthwise by last night’s lightning, is spectral, vulnerable, like Romulus’s face now.

An ancient wooden Orthodox church with a steep shingled steeple looms from a grassy hillside. It’s a style of architecture that’s been termed “Maramureş gothic” by historians because of its high, sloping roofs and razor-thin steeples. Huge, wet fields, some dotted with sheep hovering in the morning mist, swallow the landscape.

The sheep lead us to the outskirts of Baia Mare, a mining and metal-processing city remade in an insipid image of the new global market. Again, a strange metallic odor in the air, but not nearly as bad as in Turda. We find a white, suburban-looking hotel and fall on our beds without unpacking. Images of the rain-swept road are still pulsing behind my eyelids as I sink into a black sleep.