The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (26 page)

“Well, I could show you the bad neighborhoods,” he said. “But this part of town, yes. Cluj and Timișoara are probably the more beautiful Romanian cities. Their old towns were preserved. Not like Bucharest, which was completely leveled and rebuilt.” Alex Two had been a work/travel lifeguard in Ohio. “People there were Catholic and conservative,” he said approvingly. “They respect
authority. It was great!” Paul, who booked the place, doubled as a tour manager, and we compared notes on border crossings. His bands don't even bother with Croatia, he said; the border guards are sticklers for what is called the “ATA paper,” the equivalent of a work permit, which costs about a hundred euros.

The soundman Sergio was Catholic, thus missing his Easter “vacation” and not a little resentful about it. He played cajón, of all things, with the opening act, alongside an acoustic guitarist and a singer in a Wasted Youth T-shirt. By showtime, he'd relaxed a little and told me he worked as a geologist for building and roads projects. A civil engineer, I clarified. “Yes, a civil engineer. Five years ago, we were turning down work in Bucharest because there was so much here. Now we would go anywhere!”

It was a late club. Maybe it was a late town. Sergio's opening act was due to go on at eleven p.m. on this Easter Sunday, and Alex One worried aloud whether people would know the show was starting so early.

The next day I headed south into the Romanian heartland, over a ridge through a thick, obliterating cloud, then down into a wide valley walled with hills denuded by and speckled with sheep. Roadside vendors in one village sold blown glass on folding tables set up every hundred yards, like a head shop's display of distended bongs. These were dirt-road towns where old men stood around, shadowed by stray dogs ranging in temperament from wolfish to craven. Between villages, hitchhikers and police traded stations beneath the ubiquitous storks' nests. One village had a brilliant church shining in brass, brick, and copper. Outside the next, a monstrous doughnut of trash, tended by a bulldozer, slumped slovenly around a central fire. As I turned west,
I began to pass castle ruins of medieval Hungarian provenance, a fortress church, fuchsia and lime houses tucked in between irregular mountains. A donkey cart slouched past men dismantling a roof. Driving conditions, I pondered while stuck behind trucks and flinching at kamikaze passing maneuvers, go a long way toward determining my opinion of a country. Traffic manners have emotional consequences.

I was on my way, at the suggestion of my uncle, to a village called Mașloc. It is located in the historically, if not presently, polyglot and multicultural western Banat (named for the Persian word for a Turkish military governor) region of Transylvania and was the ancestral homeland of my maternal great-grandmother and her sisters. I'd known one of the sisters, Sophie, as a feisty ninety-year-old living in a Jersey City walkup. Their father had been a tobacco farmer in what was then, in the pre–World War I twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a farming village with the German name of Blumenthal. The young girls helped smuggle tobacco across the border and snuck out of the house to party in the provincial capitals of Timișoara (then known by the Hungarian name Temesh) and Arad. They were, I believe, part of that German diaspora known to West as the Swabians
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or Banat Deutscher, “which is to say,” to quote West, “a German belonging to one of those families which were settled by Maria Theresa on the lands round the Danube between Budapest and Belgrade, because they had gone out of cultivation during the Turkish occupation and had to be recolonized.”

There are several stories about the scattered German communities in the east. Some German colonists were resettled in former church lands after the dissolution of Catholic monasteries by the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II. Some moved to lands left vacant after Tatar raids. Kaplan tells a different, and older, story of the larger “Saxon” community in western Transylvania. He says it was the twelfth-century Hungarian king Géza II who “recruited the Saxons to settle in what was then medieval Hungary's eastern flank against the Byzantine Empire. There, the Saxons founded seven fortified cities . . . [and] entrusted themselves to nobody, building tight and efficient communities behind their fortress walls. . . . They became, in historian Lukacs's view, ‘the grimmest Lutherans in all of Christendom.'” It was this isolated community of Saxons, claims Kaplan, that gave rise to the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (a town in lower Saxony), who enchants and steals German children, as gypsies—long associated with Romania—were reputed to do, away to his homeland in these Transylvanian mountains. What better way to explain a community of Germans, isolated both from the larger Germanic world and from their Romanian neighbors, speaking an archaic dialect, tucked away in a European backwater?

My great-grandmother and her family emigrated to the United States in the years before World War I. In retrospect this might be considered “getting out while the getting was good.” In the wake of the war, the region was quickly annexed by Romania, which made the Saxon community first a target of Volksdeutsch reabsorption by Hitler, and then a target for expulsion by and retribution from Romanian Communists and their Soviet allies. The bulk of the community, Kaplan wrote, was exiled to coal mines in eastern Ukraine and Siberia or “sold . . . for hard
currency, as visa hostages to West Germany” by Ceaușescu. Most of the few “Germans” remaining by the time of the fall of the regime in 1989 wasted no time self-deporting (to borrow a phrase) to Germany.
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When imagining the home of this line of my family, I pictured the kind of bucolic villages I passed during the bulk of the day's drive: pastel-washed cottages, tin-roofed churches, and donkey carts, hidden in the foggy Chinese-tapestry mountains and little round turtle hills along the Mures River, by the castle ruins of Lipova.

But once I passed another husk of a nuclear plant, the foothills melted back into the familiar tedium of the Hungarian plain and the serpentine alpine byways turned into new highway laid over dull fields. The rich purple and loamy brown landscape gave way to dusty tan. Without the slopes to confine them, the villages became indifferent sprawl, like used cardboard thrown in a ditch. I left the highway for a series of unnamed asphalt roads ridden with potholes, sometimes stripped to their cobblestones, then down to what West called “a casual assembly of ruts.” Squat concrete mile markers, like miniature postboxes, counted off the distance between the passing towns and the regional centers of Timișoara and Arad. It was flat, soggy, uninspired land. One farm complex looked abandoned, until a barking dog alerted me that at least one of the buildings was still occupied. Demonic black chickens picked over its yard of mud.

Past a filthy hamlet with the telltale German name of Neudorf, the road improved a little as I crossed the Timiș county
line. The mile markers at least had a fresh coat of blue and white paint, but the concrete pillar that once read “Timiș” had been stripped of the letters. Someone had spray-painted a red heart around the scar where the “ș” had been ripped out.

Mașloc, when it finally appeared, had a long, low central street of cracked asphalt and a few dirt side lanes where chickens pricked mud puddles. A general store sold a Romanian pilsner called Neumarkt. Two churches faced off across the main street: one, beige on tan, bore the inscription “Bete! Rette Deine Seele! Arbeite!” (“Pray! Save Your Soul! Work!”) carved in old German script over the lintel. A fuchsia primary school that looked like a barracks faced a crumbling, white-plaster monument to five local Germans who had died in World War I. A banner over the playground urged the case of two regional politicians.

The bourgeois main drag, smelling of wood smoke, belied the muddy farm life in evidence off the side streets. Barbed wire strung between trees passed for fencing. A man in dirty purple track pants whipping a horse with a stick gave me a dirty look. Someone was building a small, round chapel out of brick, but the rest of the houses and barns were gray and weathered wood. There weren't many people in evidence, but I had the distinct sense I was arousing suspicion in the few that were, as I circled this town of horse carts in a new rental car with German plates. I was looking for the cemetery; I thought perhaps I could find a familiar name or two. It took a good fifteen minutes of driving up and down this not-large town before I found it, tucked in a back corner and fenced with barbed wire and bramble. I realized that the entrance was through some private backyards, and while pondering my next move I was approached by a toothless shepherd in a conical black fur cap. He shook my hand, grinned—I'd
been unfair, he did have one yellow incisor—said something, and gestured toward the cemetery fence. Following his hand, I noticed the fresh corpse of a vulpine feral dog, sodden from the day's rain, hanging upside down from the barbed wire. I decided I'd seen as much as I needed to of this godforsaken hole. I mentally thanked my great-aunt Sophie and her sisters for leaving a century ago and headed back to the relative comfort of Hungary.

It was still a holiday when I got to Szeged: Easter Monday, when, according to promoter Peter, “You water the girls. All the guys go to all the girls they know and—it used to be they would dump water on them, with a bucket, but now it's eau de cologne, perfume. Sometimes they get chocolates or cash too, but it's mostly about the watering with perfume.”

“Mostly it's fun when you're younger,” his friend says.

“I don't know—I watered my girlfriend today!” says Peter. “It's like a fertility ritual, and the coming of spring. And it's like a popularity contest for the girls—who has the most guys watering them. And the guys get drinks and food when they go around, so you can get pretty wasted. So that's why the cops are out today.”

“That's a crazy tradition,” I said.

“I think only three countries are doing it—Hungary, Slovakia, and maybe Czech Republic.” Anyway, he said, I shouldn't have any drinks if I'm driving to his house after the show, lest I get caught in the girl-watering dragnet.

Southbound the length of Serbia toward Bulgaria, I am traveling all week the route of a major Roman and Ottoman military road: Istanbul to Belgrade, and on to Buda, via Plovdiv, Sofia, and Niš. This stretch more or less follows the Velika Morava River, whose
Wikipedia entry deems it “a textbook example of a meandering river.” The river carried barges of gravel past colorful riverside fishing cottages. The highway developed that phantom third lane you find in countries with lax policing and indiscriminate passing standards. South of Belgrade alleviated the tedium of the flat farmland and industrial trucking infrastructure of the north. The land blistered into low, green mountains reminiscent of Ireland, and the road slung viaducts over paved ditches, railroad tracks, and valleys of trash. It was wine country, though some of the vineyards had gone to seed and were grazed by storks. The graveyards had unfenced black tombstones, not the manicured and colorful plots of Croatia, and the mountain tunnels were eerily lightless. Once through, I was almost the only vehicle on the road to NiÅ¡ in the rain.

The ancient town of Niš, birthplace of Constantine the Great and the site where the Roman emperors Valentinian and Valens met to split the empire, was a low city spread like a quilt over a gently sloping valley. As I approached it, the traffic coalesced into a dual stream of speeding BMWs and Audis on one side and putt-putt Yugos and Zastavas on the other. A hitchhiker with a birthmark covering half his face waited by a tollbooth.

I passed through the city as quickly and fluidly as through a one-crossroads village. Its southern end, through the suburb of Prosek, was a slim fortress of a mountain pass flanked by hundred-foot gas tanks painted to look like huge vodka labels. The lumpy and irregular mountainside villages became increasingly ramshackle, their shack walls stripped of plaster exposing wooden slats, and then petered out into forest.