The Romanian

Author:Bruce Benderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

IT’S LATE IN THE AFTERNOON when we reach nearby Braşov, a city founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 1200s. A calm elation has spread over us, created by the wild, trembling firs of the Carpathians and the crystal sharpness of the mountain air. Walking past the gothic Black Church, we survey the square, framed by buildings in cotton-candy colors like a Bavarian town’s. While Romulus smokes, I gape at a dirty begging child holding a nearly comatose baby in a matted pink bunny suit. “Don’t you know they rent those kids?” he says, hoping to nip some naive show of charity on my part. He makes a point of ignoring them and turns his head away, blows a few smoke rings toward the blue rim of mountains surrounding the city.

Exhausted from only a few hours of driving, I suggest we hire a taxi to see the town. Romulus signals a rust-encrusted Toyota and spends a few minutes bargaining with the unshaven driver, who’s been hunched in the front seat over a scandal sheet. Thrilled at his catch, he gives us a royal tour, pointing out the remnants of the city walls and the oldest original portal, known as Caterina’s Gate. Then his broken-down car putt-putts up a steep hill to the remains of the sixteenth-century citadel. Bad as my Romanian is, I realize that not everybody we encounter is speaking it. “Are they speaking a dialect of German?” I ask. Romulus and the taxi driver exchange a sly, cynical look. “Hungarian,” spits Romulus, as if it were a curse word. They’re part of the 1.7 million Hungarian ethnics who live in Romania, mostly here in Transylvania, who don’t call this city Braşov, but Brassó; and tension between them and ethnic Romanians is legendary. Things are quiet now, but in the past there was constant struggle for ascendancy, climaxing during the last days of Carol II, when Hungary, at the behest of the Nazis, again took Transylvania for itself. Romulus, a Transylvanian, has an innate resentment of these Hungarians, aggravated by his difficult days in Budapest.

At my request, the driver takes us to a Roma settlement, built against a quarry. No one but them has claimed this site, because of the danger of falling rocks. According to the driver, the mayor wants to demolish their shantytown anyway, now that it’s started to grow.

It’s a bare-dirt encampment with shacks made out of anything at hand: corrugated fiberglass sheeting and car fenders, hastily sawed boards. As soon as we enter, in a cloud of whitish dust, a glowering man rushes toward the car, followed by three raggedy children holding sticks. Nonchalantly the driver swerves away from them and heads for a small incline to show us the outhouses: five tiny shacks, like miniature cottages in a fairy tale, with ramshackle doors and roofs painted bright pinks, greens and yellows.

On the way out, the same man tries running toward us again, a look of outraged dignity on his face. I’ll understand his expression

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