The Romanian Read Online Free

his attempt to get to Italy by way of Vienna—and my money. It was, he claimed, a spur-of-the-moment decision. He bought the ticket and hid in the train toilet when they got to the Austrian border but was caught anyway, and spent a depressing Christmas in jail that he didn’t want to talk about. Still, I tried to picture him lean and inebriated from depression, squatting in a corner of the cell, waiting for the long unraveling of red tape that would ship him home on some hard train seat.
    Home—Romania—is a shadow-desire for me; a few blurry TV images of a monster dictator and his wife assassinated—two crumpled bodies in black-and-white. It was the only violent anti-Communist revolution in Eastern Europe. And then there was that time, in 1991, I think, when I went to Hamburg to work on a film script. At the train station and in the St. Pauli district there were clusters of teenaged refugees working as hustlers who I found out were Romanian. I remember their brooding young faces, with similarly wolfish haircuts and that identical expression—what would you call it? Seductively depressed. A stylized, toreador-Elvis look, full of bruised machismo and oversensitivity, bewildered surrender.
    Other images of his country, perhaps no less obscure, emerge from a book I choose from those scattered on the bed. They’re morbid and fantastic like German fairy tales, full of romanticism and guilt. In a palace in Bucharest, across the room from a throne, a balcony veiled by gauze curtains; food on gold platters and champagne in a crystal flute are being carried to it by a servant in black livery. From time to time, a king in a white silk cloak imprinted with a crimson cross looks up at the curtains to raise his glass in a toast. He is Carol II (1893-1953), prince of the German house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the last king of non-Fascist Romania. The woman hidden in the balcony to whom the king raises his toast is his mistress—Elena, née Lupescu, from the Romanian word lup for “wolf.” She’s at least half Jewish, and her life is in danger. The country is turning Fascist and is against her. They’ve accused her of being a “voluptuous parasite,” the king’s Semitic manipulator, whose wiliness is degenerating the nation. . . .
    What kind of country can produce such risky melodrama? I actually know very little about it. According to these books on my bed, Romania has always been a land of necessary suspicion, hemmed in by larger powers greedily eyeing its riches. A manipulative Austro-Hungarian Empire lurking in the west, swallowing and regurgitating its western territories; to the northeast, the heavy fist of Russia clamoring for influence; to the south, an implacable, exploitative Ottoman Empire and an envious Bulgaria.
    Its people date back to the year 101, when tribes known as Dacians are conquered by the Roman Empire, whose soldiers intermarry with their women. By the end of the thirteenth century, it has become two fertile principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, which hug the Danube River. Centuries of occupation from nearby Turkey follow, aided by Greek governors called Phanariots, who bleed the country dry. The Romanian landed gentry, the Boyars, are in thrall to these foreign leaders; and to compensate for it, they in turn suck the wealth of the land to its marrow, leaving the peasants impoverished and bitter. To make matters worse, Russian and Austro-Hungarian neighbors are hungering for mineral-rich Romanian territory, playing for it against the Turks in a brutal game of Monopoly. But during all this—for some unexplainable reason—the people keep their ancient identity: they believe they are the only true surviving Latins, adrift in a hostile Slavic wilderness.
    It’s only in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1854 -1856) that Romania finally emerges as a nation. In 1866, a foreigner comes to claim the kingship, hoping to put an end to power squabbles.