The Romanian

THAT EVENING, after a late dinner, we decide to check out what’s left of the shrunken old quarter, where everything is already closed for the night. All we can find is a bar tended by two grinning teenagers in Scottish kilts. It’s a novelty act. One of them has even bleached his hair blond. With dignified curiosity, they circle us while we sip our single malts. As usual, we form an eerie twosome—an overfed middle-aged American talking in hooded, wheedling tones to a petite, hawk-nosed Romanian hustler with sharp, distrustful eyes, hollow cheeks and pointed teeth. What do they think of us? The question dissolves into the second single malt.

Out on the street, an aggressive chill has claimed the air. It feels more like September than July. A young stray dog starts to follow us, acting as if we’re familiar. When we slow down, he lingers; when we speed up, he gallops by our side. This isn’t the abject ferocity of the poor bitch in Bucharest, but youthful optimism; and before long it begins to touch me. The shivering animal’s body is thin and dirty, his brown-and-black fur scruffy, but his eyes are eager, full of good nature. “I feel sorry for him,” I say.

Romulus shrugs, and when we pass a kiosk, I suggest we buy the pup a can of pork pâté. It doesn’t occur to me that we have no can opener. Romulus stomps on the can with a stone lodged under his thick platform shoe. Finally it pops open, pâté oozing out like lava. But our canine friend, frightened by the noise and the aggressive gesture of Romulus’s stamping, has disappeared. We leave the can right there on the sidewalk in front of a respectable-looking home, in case the dog decides to come back. I can imagine a woman hurrying from her house to work the next morning, stepping into the mess with one of her high heels.

THE NEXT MORNING is exceedingly clear, tingeing the mountains surrounding the city a deep purple. Still traumatized by the drive here, we bribe a good-looking, golden-eyed taxi driver, all in blue, an ex-peasant who used to work in the nearby mines, to take us to the villages on the other side of nearby Mount Gutîi. His name is Emil, and his car is a puttering twenty-year-old Dacia with a floorboard as riddled with holes as a sieve. We pass a smelting plant spewing smoke from a thirty-story chimney and jerk up the winding single-lane road, until we’re lost in thick forest, then caught in a cul-de-sac. It’s a clearing with a strange totem pole rising in the center, carved with cryptic, constantly reversing pictographs. Emil motions for us to get out of the car and draw nearer. Pointing at the weird structure, he says, “Brancusi, the column.”

It’s not, of course, as he thinks, Brancusi’s legendary Endless Column, cast in iron in a foundry at Turda and standing in the park in Tîrgu Jiu with The Gate of the Kiss. It’s just a New Age totem by a local artist, who like Brancusi is inspired by schematic images of Nature: suns, plants, birds in flight. It also reminds me of pictures of those wooden “death poles” in Brancusi’s province of Oltenia—long, thin columns, carved with the angles he later reproduced, sometimes topped by a bird, that mark individual graves, like Jacob’s ladders transporting the soul to heaven.

Back in the car, Emil begins chattering in a mixture of pidgin English and Romanian. To quell any suspicion, Romulus has him convinced that I’m a writer doing research for an American magazine and that he’s my paid guide. The corners of Emil’s lips are white with froth, so excited is he about my being from New York. His most pressing concern is the women there, whether they’re as hot and easy to tumble as those in Romania. “Not really,” I tell him, thinking of the many long-limbed, almond-eyed women I’ve seen in this country. Most of them seem to have a savvy knowledge of their sexual power as well as a fatalistic attitude about some of its consequences.

Emil pushes the subject to a daringly off-color level until the three of us are talking about pussy and ass with the clichéd enthusiasm of working-class guys. For him and Romulus, it’s obviously a preferred topic, and I get my kicks from the atmosphere of male arousal. Emil’s hand keeps brushing against the crotch of his vivid blue trousers. He’s fallen into a casual, bar-room mood, and after each dirty joke, pinches my arm.

Farther up the mountain, thick fog suddenly enfolds us. We’re driving at the edge of a precipice, but at times it feels as if our right wheels are hanging off. All of this is subjective, since visibility has been reduced to zero. This doesn’t faze Emil, who only increases his speed. He puts a tape in his cassette player. A raucous rendition of boom-boom party songs by Nicu Noval hammers away at my anxiety. We scud through the dense fog as he begins describing some of the wilder parties, culminating in orgies, that he’s attended. Romulus’s eyes twinkle with perverse pleasure at my fear of falling off the mountain, as if he knew all along that both our existences were only a sick joke.

Just as the ironic delight on his face seems to be the last image of my life, the fog lifts like a pulled-back stage drop. The limpid, glossy mountain light returns, wrapping us in a thrilling cocoon. We’re on the other side of the mountain, approaching the village of Mara, on a single road lined by large, ornately carved roofed gates that look like variations of The Gate of the Kiss. Behind them are the steep brown-shingled roofs of farmhouses. Now we really are in the heart of Maramureş, which is called ţara lemnului renghiat, or “land of ornate wood carving,” by Romanians.

Over Nicu Noval’s partying baritone, our driver explains that a villager’s status used to be determined by how elaborate his gate was. My eyes fix on the most humble—two mangled, moss-covered tree trunks to which have been affixed a mass of branches, like an upright harrow, behind which chickens scurry and a ferocious dog barks. It’s part of a long line of gates of varying size and quality. In fact, the entire village, delineated by a row of gates, is laid out before us on this one main road. All is silent, and we’re the only motorized vehicle. Nothing passes us except a flatbed being pulled by two oxen. Even the faces of those few people I see working in the fields look detached and beyond context. “Is because even Romans could not penetrate these mountains,” Romulus explains.

The most elaborate gate in town is a massive structure covered with rosettes, geometric designs and vaguely anthropomorphic shapes. Detached from house and barn, offering merely a façade to the road, like the others it serves no function besides the symbolic. Gates here represent the threshold between the inner world—and inner life—of the peasant, situated in his home, and the outside world. Later I’ll read that the gates also have a deeper spiritual meaning. They represent the threshold between this life and the world beyond death, a religious affirmation that life and death are easily connected.

Surprisingly, the cryptic ornaments carved into the gates are derived from pre-Christian Thraco-Dacian, Greek and even Persian cults, which found their way into Romania over tens of centuries of migration and whose imagery hasn’t yet been swept away by the cleansing tide of money. But today, what were simplified images of natural mysteries have lost most of their occult power, becoming merely aesthetic designs. The rosettes once paid homage to the cult of the Sun. The childlike stalks with branches are artifacts of the Tree of Life, whose constant burgeoning eventually reaches heaven; and the unfolding spiral is no different from the shape of the universe, which curls upward and back into itself in an infinite series.

Later the French writer Benoît Duteurtre, looking at pictures I took, will claim that the gates of Maramureş look African; and scholars of Brancusi, such as the astute Edith Balas, maintain that Brancusi’s influence comes from both Africa and the Romanian peasant, and that both these cultures preserved an essential relationship to matter by escaping the merchandising influence of Mediterranean civilization. This is, then, an aboriginal geometry, uncorrupted by the greed for objects that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued through late capitalism.

Brancusi’s goal was to reconnect with these elemental forms of matter. He dreamed of sculpting through all the subsequent significations to their fundamental core. The capacity was in his blood and articulated the lonely, exultant years he spent as a shepherd as well as the isolated latter part of his life. But if, in some modernist project, he could strip down matter until it revealed its form beyond the trappings of technology, it was because his fellow peasants had been doing it that same way for thousands of years.

Past the elaborate gate is a fence of long, slender twigs woven in a zigzag pattern along vertical stakes. It’s another specialty of this region, which is still living in the “epoch of wood”—the ability to make wooden structures without the use of nails. Behind the woven fence stands an old man in a conical hat, padded vest and rubber boots, his blue eyes clouded by cataracts. He’s using a thick, whittled branch to scrape mud from a trough carved from a log. So fixed is he on his task that he seems hypnotized, aware of our gawking presence but finding little meaning in it. This reminds me of descriptions of Brancusi working patiently from the core of a meditative trance in his studio tucked away from the hubbub of Paris.

Behind the old man is his low-slung house with its drooping shingled roof, the walls constructed according to the Blockbau system of interlocking beams at the corners, like an American log cabin. With the last of the mud scraped, he peers up at us, but not very closely, taking a cue from our curious faces to invite us inside.

The interior produces a visceral shock. It’s an intensely blue room with clay walls, as minimal as and much cruder than a Shaker house. Everything except the hundred-year-old wood stove, his only source of heat, could have existed in the sixteenth century. There are two stools, which, like the bench, bowls and spoons, have been hand-carved by the old man himself. One stool, a backless pedestal like the mushroom-shaped structures around The Table of Silence that is part of Brancusi’s installation in Tîrgu Jiu, still shows the sloping marks of the axe. It reminds me that for Brancusi there was very little division between the practical and the aesthetic. He was as much an artisan as an artist, and his stools sometimes served as pedestals for his art or as art themselves.

The old man points to a large sunken structure with a chimney, made from the same clay as the walls, which he says he uses as a bread-baking oven. It’s almost identical to the clay oven that Brancusi built in his Paris atelier, which can be seen in a reconstruction of the room at the Centre Pompidou. Running along the top of two walls in the old man’s vivid blue room are crinkled paper illustrations of Eastern Orthodox saints. Hanging from horizontal poles above the narrow bed, which is covered with a handwoven sheep’s-wool blanket like those I saw at the mititei stop, are rugs, evidently the most valuable of his earthly possessions.

In this house without electricity or running water, there isn’t any distraction, such as a book. Certainly, back-breaking labor beginning at five a.m. and illiteracy preclude leisure activities; but it’s clear from the man’s placid, slightly arrogant face that he has no need for pleasure or meaning outside work, rest or prayer.

It hits me. If Romulus’s family’s village hadn’t been razed to build a factory and his family exiled to a city, he might still be here or someplace like it, in mute preoccupation with the forces of Nature. My hunch is confirmed when the old man, who’s been making a show of ignoring me, fixes him with indulgent, almost tender eyes, then slyly mumbles a phrase in Romanian. Romulus blushes, almost hanging his head.

Yet not even the blessing of the old man can save Romulus—and perhaps the old man himself—from that great shift toward the West and its materialistic values that was accelerated by the fall of Communism. It’s a shift that will continue as the European Union pushes eastward, until perhaps even the old man or his son finds its tentacles at his doorstep, questioning his children’s health and education, suggesting better ways to till his field, frowning at his unlicensed plum brandy or grinningly promoting cartoon versions of his seasonal rituals, as designed by an ethnographer in Bucharest.

IN THE VILLAGE OF HĂRNICEŞTI, we pull alongside a graveyard and climb the steep hill on foot. The corroded metal crosses are hand-lettered. Women with grimy hands, in kerchiefs and long woolen socks, rake leaves and clip branches. Their faces are set in a perpetual half-smile that reminds me of the best times I’ve been high. Is it the smile of Christian piety, a satisfied pantheism or merely isolation from modern distractions? Obviously, they believe they owe a certain humility to the mystery of death, and to both living and inanimate things. Their gestures betray an eerie lack of ambivalence, without any tendency to irony or struggle. Next to them, Romulus in his cheap club-kid platforms with dollar signs in his squinting eyes and me in my East Village black jacket and jowls set in intellectual ambivalence must look like the picture of degeneration.

We move away and climb to the top of the hill to look at the sharp-angled wooden church, probably similar to those Brancusi’s grandfather, a church builder, used to carpenter in Oltenia. Its outdoor religious paintings and wooden cross have been draped with crisp white embroidered cotton shawls. I pick up a green apple that has fallen onto a weed-choked grave and bite into it. Romulus points to the name of the deceased on the rusting metal cross and tells me to thank that lady for feeding me.

In Giuleşti, we pass a farmhouse flying a black flag that Romulus says is a sign of a recent death. Just as when we saw the dead body in the road, his eyes brim with hushed respect. Two doors away is a tree whose branches have been adorned with upside-down pots, pans and pails in bright colors. Emil winks at the tree and makes a remark to Romulus in Romanian. “He say we must hurry past,” says Romulus.

The black flag, pails and even the conical haystacks are elements of the peasants’ rich mystical life, most of which predate Christianity. In fact, the region is fraught with the notion that talismans and charms connect the user with hidden forces, that everyday occurrences—the crowing of a cock, a raven flying overhead—hold signs about the future, portending good or ill luck. These spiritual tools keep the mind focused on the authority of natural processes; but in more sophisticated settings, they degenerate into superstitions and prejudices that can open the mind to manipulative mythologies, such as those that were projected onto Lupescu, Carol’s mistress, merely for being Jewish. Later, in New York, I’ll read about the Romanian mystic Carmen Harra, who lives in Queens and counsels people about color energy, bedecking herself in all kinds of magical precious stones. This will confirm my conception of Romania as a well of occult belief that enriches art and literature but that also provides fodder for irrational constructions—going so far as to have interfaced at one time with Fascism. For better or for worse, the joke between Romulus and Emil about the pail-covered tree has betrayed their folkish link to each other, and puts me on watch for Romulus’s peasant qualities. He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism; and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me.

Farther down the road in Giuleşti, we gawk at the biggest gate, a rustic Arc de Triomphe. The massive structure is supported by thick columns decorated with the Tree of Life, rosettes, star petals and crosses enclosed in circles. Its large main doors, meant to give passage to horses or oxen, have semicircles cut out of the top, under which is a line of little fleurs-de-lis. On the right, a newer-looking door under an archway is meant for less majestic traffic—that of humans. Although the gate looks over-decorated, there’s nothing oppressive about it, perhaps because of its pleasing proportions. I doubt it was designed from blue-print; it probably grew from the dimensions of the wood that was available. As Brancusi said, “Measurements are harmful.” He thought that all measurements had already been taken by Nature. The question he never answered is whether Nature is not only balanced but also avaricious, the source of a primal appetite that leads inevitably to the greed and commerce that, in my world, will destroy Nature itself.

Back in our taxi, we have to wait several minutes as another farmer lumbers down the road. This one is wearing mud-caked pants with an improvised slit for a fly, and a bedraggled peaked hat. Wooden staff in hand, he leads a horse with a frayed canvas bridle, pulling a wooden cart piled with twigs, obviously his only source for cooking and heating. Surprisingly, this man stares us down, a determined, wily stare full of stubborn presence. There’s also a tinge of Romulus’s accusatory look, a challenge to my polluting presence.

We drive back toward Mara, feeling elated. Romulus’s usual catlike crouch has softened into a kind of proud relaxation, revealing his satisfaction with my finding something interesting about his country. A few miles down the road, we pick up a hitchhiker, a gangly blond farmer with a strong-boned face, tired eyes and one hand wrapped in a thick white bandage. Two weeks ago, he lost a finger while sawing a tree. He managed to get to the hospital in Baia Mare on horseback without bleeding to death. However, the lost finger, which he forgot to collect, arrived after him, too late to be grafted on.

At the foot of a mountain, Emil spots a husky peasant woman selling mushrooms by the side of the road. Having made more than three days’ pay chauffeuring us, he decides to treat himself. The mushrooms are laid out in rust, white and brown piles on a blanket, and the woman has a stubborn look of pride on her face. Emil strides toward her like a gladiator ready for combat, but she fixes his face with shrewd, narrowed eyes and a sly, toothless smile. She demands 200,000 lei, about six dollars, for a large grocery-sized bag full of the mushrooms, and Emil shows how absurd he considers the price by turning his back to her and moving toward the car. The woman shrugs imperturbably, waits until his hand is on the door handle and calls out a lower price. The pantomime recurs several times, until Emil has talked her down to 30,000 lei, about a dollar. As the woman is scooping the mushrooms into a bag, the mood between the two mutates abruptly. Raucous chuckles pass between them, a rascally twinkle bouncing off both sets of eyes. Then Emil climbs into the car and tosses the bag onto the backseat with a macho flourish, and we head back up the mountain, which is now fog-free.

After dropping the hitchhiker at the hospital clinic, Emil takes us back to our hotel. He’s hoping, he admits, that we’re planning to stay for a while and that we’ll use him as chauffeur every day. But when Romulus explains that we expect to leave early the next morning, Emil’s face sinks into a disappointed frown and he hugs us farewell like a brother. The gesture produces a sentimental feeling in me. “He was cute. I hope we run into him again.”

The drive back to Bucharest the next day is accomplished in only nine hours, once we determine a much more efficient route. During it, I try to broach the subject of our relationship by telling Romulus, “I think I’m learning to love you in a different way.” He puts a finger to his pursed lips, like a sorcerer worried about releasing someone from a spell. He turns up the radio, which blasts more Romanian rap. We pull into a wild, honking traffic jam in Bucharest just as the sun is setting, and get the car back to the Marriott fifteen minutes before the rental place closes.

Romulus admits that this is the hotel where he once had a bellboy connection. He’d bring three girls to the casino to find tricks, and the bellboy would lend them his room for the purpose in return for forty percent of the take. The story clothes the ostentatious curving staircase, crystal chandeliers and respectable gleaming floor with a lack of authenticity, as our rental agent, a genteel, chubby woman with carefully manicured nails and a sensibly chic suit, fastidiously figures the charges by hand. She looks up only for a moment to call our attention to a lavish wedding party moving up the staircase. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it,” she gushes, pointing to the bourgeois-looking older groom and young white-clad bride. “She’s too fucking young,” Romulus blurts out in English, adding, as the agent gasps and pales, “Must be for the money.”