Dubbed the Wild West of Eastern Europe, Romania has always inspired ferocious and seamy yarns, from medieval legends passed down its villages to traveler’s tales spread near its borders. Gassed trains and pickpocket gangs scare many tourists off Romania’s railroads; the rugged romance of haunted castles and mountain wolves has other adventurers queuing up for tickets.
I spend July crisscrossing the country by rail. Long cut off from the outside world, Romanians are excited and curious about meeting foreigners, and the slow rides on the hothouse trains quickly cultivate friendships. I meet fare dodgers, math teachers, vodka drunks, new widows and summer hikers. I also encounter many intellectual and creative types, frustrated from living in a stunning but economically depressed country where potential is often wasted.
My travel comrades appoint me train psychologist, although unfortunately there’s no room for reclining. A physics grad went to Denmark to work for a man with a bad back; he almost married a woman forty years his elder to stay there. Now he awaits news from a dodgy Romanian firm he paid to find him work on an American cruise ship. Burdened by an alcoholic father and a schizophrenic brother, an insurance clerk signed up with an on-line matrimonial agency to find an American husband; she wants to know if we really all get divorces. I promise to check up on her prospective fiancés as I step off the train in Bucharest.
The taxi-wolves are nipping at my feet in the station. I shake them off to buy Metro tickets, where there is a crowd and confusion. “Sprecken zie Deutsch?” I hear as a hand hovers over my bag. The would-be thief slithers away, but not before his razor slashes my backpack.
Romanians warned me that their capital is hell on Earth, damned by godless Gypsies, but at least the devil is dead. Nicolae Ceaucescu, with Liberace’s grandiosity, Napoleon’s ego and Reagan’s brains, rivals Hitler as the 20th century’s scariest dictator. Executed by firing squad on December 23, 1989, Nicolae and his wife Elena represent the last regime to fall in that red-letter year for Communism.
I can admire the size of Ceaucescu’s dreams, however warped. During his 25-year reign, he rechanneled the Dombovia River to run through Bucharest (since all great capitals must have a river) and laid plans to “systematize” agriculture by transferring more than half of the country’s village dwellers into concrete apartment blocks. The tyrant’s worst blunder was exporting food to pay off Romania’s $10 billion foreign debt, which created unbearable food shortages and a nation ready to riot.
Ceaucescu’s piece de resistance was the House of the People, a $3 billion beast intended to be the world’s largest building but in fact trails the Pentagon. One of its 64 reception halls could land a helicopter; one of its seven underground floors actually houses a nuclear bunker. Inside, 24-K gold ceilings bear hundreds of hefty chandeliers, their crystal forms reflected in the design of rugs large enough for 5,000 rabid Romanian dogs to lay on. The building stretches for blocks so long the next intersection is a bus ride away. With the French-styled sidewalk lampposts, it is a nightmare set in Paris.
While I expect triumphant words about Ceaucescu’s downfall, instead I am told that “the revolution wasn’t,” as one young cafe owner puts it, meaning the old guard still runs the show. And whereas before people had money but the stores were empty, now the markets overflow with goods no one can afford to buy. Many elders, formerly protected by fat pensions, actually regret the revolution. Some keep the flowers fresh and candles burning on the Ceaucescu graves in Bucharest’s civil cemetery.
The train takes me away from these urban realities to Transylvania’s countryside legends. I follow the tourist flocks to Bran, a small town below the Carpathian mountains, to visit the castle associated with the legendary vampire Dracula. En route, Transylvanian teenagers tell me stories and superstitions passed down by wide-eyed relatives whose fervor transmits belief to all who hear. Surrounded by eerie castles and mischievous Romanians who fuel the fictions, I myself find it difficult to separate myth from reality.
Dracula, however, turns out to be a dud. “Everybody knows Dracula is just a legend,” insists the same girl who swears by werewolves. She informs me that a prince named Vlad Tepes impaled thieves and Turkish foes on stakes; his black methods inspired writer Bram Stoker’s fanged Dracula. Built in 1378 to defend the mountain pass against the Turks, Bran Castle is rumored to be Dracula’s lair, although it is unrelated to the myth or Tepes himself.
Looking for a bed in Bran, I hear strange music emanating from a log cabin. I follow the sounds into the kitchen where the hotel staff are being entertained by vodka and two scruffy Sunday musicians. One toothless guy is banging out a bizarre array of notes on a trapezoidal xylophone; the other gentleman, dressed in a 1950s British schoolboy tie and zipperless trousers, is squeaking on a violin. A moustached redhead raises his glass to me with a strange whisper. The violinist taunts his bow in my face with sarcastic bravado while a chubby waiter hand-feeds me pepper steak. I go to take a photo and the moustache man with the quivering smile and soft beer breath dances me into the scene, slipping his arm around my waist. All too soon, the maestros put on their ragged coats and hats, palms open; they grumble at my lei, expecting dollars.
I stay up all night with the patron, the waiter and the moustache man. Every time I try to leave the table they threaten to send Dracula into my room, and the waiter refills my glass with terrible white wine, sparkling water and Coke. My moustache man keeps saying things slower and softer and spelling them on paper, as if I will suddenly understand Romanian this way. For once I think “no” is more appropriate than nicely nodding.
Then a brilliant accordionist comes in with a flashy gold smile and plays “Oh Susanna”and a German waltz for me. He twists into Romanesti melodies, honking certain notes and playing hopscotch with the keys; he sings with a raspy stagger but ends in sweet vibrato. Everyone joins in on the favorites, when the patron, a Romanian horse with no name, gallops his fingers on the table. I spy a pause between songs and drinks and pull the curtain on the night.
My memory is fuzzy after so much wine and so little sleep, fuzzy in a way that the music seems wilder, the laughter louder, the waiter’s eyes greener. It is such careless evenings that spawn new legends of Romania.