CHAPTER 3 To Grandmother's House
Present Day — Sinaia, Romania
Alex never cried, and she'd never known love. It wasn't because of the fact that she was a little tall and deficient in the cleavage department. Well, maybe some cleavage, not enough, but she'd just turned eighteen, and other girls her age were in and out of love daily. She attributed it to her family. No, not the breasts, but staying to herself. She had been a family afterthought, accident actually, with an older brother and sister, both planned. Her brother was seventeen and her sister fifteen years older. Alex had come along when no one was expecting her — this rude intrusion into her parents' post-kids plans, disrupting both their hopes for financial stability and her mother's professional ambitions. The lawyer syndrome, Alex called it. Gavril was off to Braşov in Transylvania working political angles, not married. Sonya was married with four kids, but she lived with her wealthy husband on the other side of Bucharest. Their mother and father had always worked, and her two siblings had raised Alex — got her dressed in the morning, fed her breakfast and put her out the door. One day they just walked out and didn't come back — off to college and then to live their own lives, leaving Alex in the lurch.
And then there was school. She was quite the intellectual, or so the other kids said, accusingly. Yes, she got good marks, always had, and she loved to read. Mostly European stuff and in English. She had been hooked on psychological novels, but lately had moved on to ancient military, and had a soft spot for lieutenants and colonels. Anyone in uniform who could manage a sword. She told her friends, if you could call them friends, that she was saving herself for a military man. She loved war. She wanted a large family, several kids. She'd treat hers differently, she promised, give each all the attention she could muster.
She'd been asked out on dates, more than her share, she'd heard, been on quite a few, but couldn't really get into being that close to someone. She'd tried making out but what was the point of gnawing on someone's face and drinking a bunch of their spit? "Plictisit acum," is the expression she used when someone mentioned a boy she might date.
"You're too British," one boy complained. "You've read too many English novels." Another claimed she must be Scottish. Several girls laughed at her for appearing American. Alex took it as a compliment.
She'd had a tutor, many of the better-off kids did, and her after-school hours had been spent with the retired English schoolteacher. Not a bad old lady, but not someone you could brag about to friends. Alex didn't have much of a taste for television and only occasionally saw a movie — a dud pretty much in anyone's world. But now she'd be off to college, and she was eager to leave secondary school behind. She wanted a new start in an intellectual circle.
It wasn't as if Alex was content with herself. She felt empty, and she didn't believe it was entirely her lack of a love life. And it wasn't as if she didn't have something she desperately wanted. It was more like a vacancy, a vacuum within her where something should be but just wasn't. Perhaps I'm a crippled person, she thought at times, someone who is outwardly fine but inside, missing a metaphorical arm or leg.
She didn't much care for her name either. Alexandra was alright, but everyone called her Alex. Alex pronounced it Al-Ex and said it was Arabic, or half Arabic. She translated it as meaning "The ex-person, she who had at one time been real."
Dance was the one thing Alex did like. While the other girls wanted to be gymnasts, the fame of Nadia Comăneci, Sandra Izbașa and Cătălina Ponor ever occupying their minds, Alex want to be a ballerina. The problem, of course, was that she wasn't good at it. She had quickness and power but no coordination. She lacked control and seemed to have no feel for music and its rhythms. Yet, she never gave up, persistence her one virtue, and practiced in her room during her long hours alone. She loved the clothes, the tiny shoes, the tights, the little skirts and tops. She had the body for it, sleek and tall. It just never quite jelled. She loved classical music that her friends thought morbid: the dark moods of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, and Rachmaninov's The March of the Dead. She was captivated by the last two movements of Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique: "March to the Scaffold" and "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath." Yet, she could never consummate her compulsion for music with emotional surrender. She reached for the ecstatic heights where she knew it could take her, but she could never quite rise to its level. One by one, her ballet instructors abandoned her.
And now comes the best part, or perhaps the worst, depending on how she looked at it. She was with her mother in the car headed north to visit Alex's grandmother, her bunică, or at least Alex was going to visit. Her mother would unload Alex in Sinaia, pass a couple of hours with her mother, and return to litigating. Alex would be there for some weeks. The DN1 expressway hillsides outside Bucharest were lined with massive firs, linden, apple orchards. Red-tile roofs and whitewashed walls dotted the green fields. Alex could breathe better once they got through Ploiesti, the farmlands beyond seeming to stretch to the horizon.
They started up the winding road into the mountains. She saw an old horse-drawn wagon with two men and two boys in sheepskin vests. The boys waved as she passed, their smiling faces, and this was as close as she came to feeling affection. She had to turn away her own irrepressible smile. She was much more interested in the boys, and the towering walls of mountains rising up on both sides of Prahova Valley that separates the southern from the eastern Carpathian Mountains, than anything in Bucharest.
Alex heard a "beep" from her cellphone, checked the text message and deleted it rather than respond. She was through with secondary school and looking forward, skeptically, to a more adult environment at university. She hoped her hopeless social network would collapse in her absence, and this was her first strike against it. In the fall, she'd be off to Christ Church, Oxford, the realization of which made her "friends" at school standoffish even before the year was out. She'd applied at the insistence of her grandmother, who undoubtedly used her influence to facilitate Alex's acceptance. Herself, Alex wasn't so excited. Just more classrooms, professors, and writing papers, papers, papers. Still, it offered an excellent curriculum in European history, the one subject she felt she could tolerate.
Her grandfather had died five years before, and every summer sense, Alex had spent much of it with her grandmother, to keep the old lady company and help run her rather large home, the "Estate" Alex exaggerated, but the "Cottage" as it was known to her family. Her grandmother had a couple of workmen who performed outdoor chores, and inside she had a maid, but her grandmother let people run over her and didn't make them work as they should. On the other hand, Alex had a mean streak. She liked to boss people, particularly men, and they seemed to enjoy the adolescent's sassy attitude.
But the situation was more than that for Alex. She had been born in little Sinaia and loved the thought of being "home" again — its stone buildings, massive forests, and towering mountains, the cold summer nights. Peleș Castle was there, built by King Carol I, and although Alex never rubbed shoulders with them, dignitaries and royalty from all over the world congregated in Sinaia to argue the great issues of the times. Foreign dignitaries such as American presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, along with terrorists Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Yasser Arafat had been guests there. These were the movers and shakers, the Masters of the Universe, who determined the fate of the world, and it was all happening a short walk from her grandmother's home.
Alex's grandmother always paid attention to her. She could peruse her grandmother's treasure trove of books, and she loved working in the garden. It was her grandmother's influence that created her interests. Throughout her childhood, her grandmother would come to their home in Bucharest and stay a week or two, probe into Alex's classes, and query her about her homework. It didn't matter if it were maths, science or history, she had something helpful to say about everything. And then in the summer months, Alex would to go to Sinaia to stay with her bunică for several weeks. These were magical times, walks through the forest, singing songs of
love and war. Her grandfather had been the great hiker, and had taken her deep into Sinaia's forests and up the steep mountains of Prahova Valley.
After Alex's grandfather had passed, her grandmother was more anxious than ever for Alex to stay with her. The joy had gone out of her grandmother's life, and now their times together were even more intimate. Her grandmother never talked much about the family, but about things concerning the divine, she was all aflutter. She was not religious, but quite spiritual and claimed to have seen an angel hovering above her own property years ago, the night Alex was born. They talked about dreams they'd had recently, or memorable ones they'd had perhaps years before and what they possibly meant. She'd tell Alex stories of royalty, what the kings and queens were like, the messes they made of their lives, and how they ruled over countries. Alex wondered how she knew such things.
Her mother turned off the highway and took Bulevardul Carol to the traffic circle at the center of Sinaia. From there she turned left onto Strada Aosta and through a series of loops and switchbacks, which put them among tall pines, ended up on a mountainside halfway between Sinaia Monastery, from which the city got its name, and Peleș Castle, the main tourist attraction.
The one last reason Alex was anxious to again be in Sinaia was to see the one person her age she liked. When Alex was at home in Bucharest, she wondered if the girl was real or perhaps an apparition. While there at her grandmother's, Alex at times played by herself outside amongst the trees and bushes at the edge of the Estate. When she did, a girl would join her in the deep shadows or just at twilight. Alex couldn't remember how long ago the girl first came to visit and play with her. She'd always been a part of the landscape and never seemed to age. She came out of nowhere and dissolved into the forest when she left. She was a curious girl, dressed in boys clothes, and she talked about the strangest things, wondering mostly about Alex's life, her friends at school, and what it was like to have a family. At times, she seemed to be older than her years, much older, but at heart, she was just a teenage girl and liked to play and laugh. She would never tell Alex her name. "Call me Ariel," she said. Alex asked her grandmother about her mysterious neighbor, but she knew of no such girl.
Her grandmother must have heard the car coming up the short drive. She was standing in the doorway, a white cat at her feet. Her grandmother's scowl masked an excitement that she'd only reveal later, after Alex's mother had left. A metal cross escaped her blouse and flickered sunlight as it pendulumed across her breasts. She curiously tucked it back inside. She betrayed nothing as she kissed her daughter, calling her Madalina, and took the hands of her grandchild, studying Alex's face as if deciphering an ancient scroll. Alex wondered what it was that could demand such acute attention. Perhaps she had a zit. Nălucă, the cat, ran for cover once he saw Alex. He'd never liked her.
Her mother gone, Alex unpacked, but it was evening by the time she'd settled into her bedroom. With the maid also gone, she helped her grandmother fix the evening meal of bread, cheese, and a little sausage left over from lunch, her grandmother apologizing for not having something special for their first evening alone together. They sat for a while next to the fire drinking hot tea, Sinaia's perennial evening chill settling over the old home. Her grandmother questioned her about her studies wearing a perpetual smile that gave away her great pleasure at having her granddaughter alone with her again. The white cat hopped up into her grandmother's lap, and she cuddled it while they talked.
"Your face is changing, child," she said. "You're finally coming into your looks. You're a beautiful young woman." Her grandmother was staring off into the fire, a distant look in her eyes, as if remembering something or someone from times past. She looked up at Alex. "All that hair. I'll need to brush it to bring back the luster."
Alex had let her hair grow, but all that bushy stuff was a nuisance, and she'd considered getting it cut. She thought that her grandmother seemed more tired and older than when last she'd seen her. She didn't get around as well.
After warming her feet, her grandmother was off to bed, leaving Alex up with the cat. "Don't let Nălucă out," she called over her shoulder. "He fights with skunks."
Alex fondled a few books in the library and then went to bolt the backdoor. She opened it a second to feel the cold mountain air and peer into the darkness, but as she did, the stupid cat squeezed out and scurried off. Alex ran after him, wishing she'd grabbed a sweater first, but thinking she'd only be out a second.