Oktoberfest pe românește

The German summer had seen its warmest days, and Munich was preparing for an event I was only too happy to escape: the ‘Wiesn’. But I still wasn’t sure how I would make the journey. Then, at a bus stop, a Lufthansa ad lit up in blue:

‘Discover Hermannstadt – now for €99!’

‘Alright,’ I said.

The announcement that I intended to travel to Transylvania, the ‘land beyond the forests’, as it had been christened in the Middle Ages, was not greeted among my friends with much sympathy or back-slapping. Instead, I was advised to carry plenty of garlic at all times and avoid the full moon. Nobody seemed to know anything more about the place than what it was not: the home of vampires and werewolves, a dark, bizarre mountain wilderness under eternal snow, dotted with castles in the style of Disneyland.

Dimi asked jokingly:

‘What, Transylvania actually exists?’ Then, after a theatrical pause, he added the wise advice that I shouldn’t drink anything that might make me go blind.

‘How am I supposed to tell from the drink?’ I asked.

‘You can’t,’ Dimi replied. ‘Especially not when it’s too late.’

We were having our last beer on Bavarian soil, and Dimi was shaking with laughter. The look I gave him brought him back under control rather sooner than he had intended. Anxious now to contribute something useful, he dug up a story that he himself probably only half remembered, and that nobody else remembered at all.

‘My grandfather went to Transylvania once. Supposed to be lovely there.’

‘Your grandfather? Wasn’t he Russian?’

‘Oh, very!’ said Dimi. ‘But my grandfather was in the war, too. You got around quite a bit as a Russian in those days, especially towards the end.’

‘He was a soldier in Transylvania?’ I asked, rather unnecessarily.

‘He couldn’t praise the place highly enough. Probably because he nearly snuffed it there.’

‘Interesting logic.’

‘As far as I remember what he told me, he spent less time fighting the Hungarians and Germans than fighting hunger. He seems to have got separated from his unit. Or his unit from him. Perhaps he deserted, I’ve no idea. Or perhaps they lost sight of one another on a drunken binge. Anyway, he must somehow have managed to make his way west. He wanted to get to Spain, I think – but don’t ask me for details.’

I did not ask, and made sure I got home, because the next morning the time had come.

I was crouched aboard a Canadair 900, whose central aisle had forced me to keep my head bowed even after boarding, on a flight from Munich to Hermannstadt at Lufthansa’s special discovery fare.

With not the faintest idea what awaited me there, and no precise itinerary either, I stared into the cloudless sky after take-off, separated from it by nothing more than a thin sheet of plastic and the cabin wall. It was hard to resist the thought that I was quite literally flying off into the blue.

I had brought copies of some of the documents and letters Dénes had made intelligible to me, without really knowing whether I would need them, or what for. But they contained addresses, names and dates that I might be able to use as handholds. After all, I would have to follow some sort of route.

Barely more than an hour later, we were already descending. Now I understood why people said Transylvania took its visitors back to the Middle Ages. Below us there was nothing but landscape, absolutely nothing. No trace of motorways, electricity pylons, industrial estates or any of the other dubious blessings of modern life. Instead, I could soon make out carts drawn by donkeys or horses, sharing the narrow roads, and their time, with cars that did not seem to be travelling much faster.

Even the airport looked like a tentative attempt to make the transition from stagecoach to space station: a rectangular block of steel, glass and concrete set down in the middle of an open meadow, bearing the words ‘Aeroportul International Sibiu’. That sounded rather more exciting, of course, than ‘One of Romania’s Four Airports’, and gave the impression that great care had been taken to ensure the lettering could easily be removed again, should the road to modernity turn out to have been a mistake and the block be needed for chickens, corncobs or something else after all.

Our arrival was correspondingly immediate. We did not slide through a narrow passenger bridge with yellowing windows into an air-conditioned holding pen for tourists. We were allowed to get out properly and walk straight into a wall of heat made of burnt kerosene and a hot late-summer day. Nor was there a shuttle bus waiting to herd us aboard in a hurry. No, we were given time to arrive at our leisure and explore the apron in every direction. Only when two passengers threatened to disappear into the vastness of the Transylvanian pastures, obediently following the satnavs on their smartphones, did a uniformed official rush over and whistle us sternly into line for passport control.

The customs matron behind the revolving door – not yet accustomed to being an EU citizen herself – examined and leafed through our passports with great care, lest anything that had accidentally slipped between the pages should go missing. Then there was only the motionless baggage carousel before us, our suitcases already on it. They had overtaken us while we crept through the checks, and since there was not another aircraft to be seen through the enormous glass panes, we could be certain they were ours.

Immediately beyond the carousel, the rectangular block came to an end. Once again I stepped outside and saw: there were no taxis. Nothing but grass and countryside and … taxi brokers.

A handful of apparently multilingual mobility agents, who had been waiting for passengers in the shade of the block, approached us stranded travellers without the slightest haste and asked each of us where we wanted to go. If a sufficiently large group could be found heading in the same direction, a leisurely round of telephone calls to taxi owners began, accompanied by the simultaneous arrangement of commissions on the service now being provided.

By nightfall the first vehicles began to trickle in, were loaded with bag and baggage, and soon rolled away again. My hotel was evidently outside the mainstream accommodation circuit, for I was assigned a taxi of my own, a Dacia, naturally, though I also had to wait longer for it than anyone else.

Then it took a mere half-hour to cover the ten kilometres to Hermannstadt, which turned out to be quite a brisk pace by Romanian road standards. The journey felt considerably longer nonetheless, because the driver wanted to chat.

It was astonishing how well he understood my Italian, and appalling how little I understood his Romanian. So the time passed in laboured jokes about our mutual incomprehension. But at least it passed. At our destination the meter showed just under 30 lei, a little over six euros.

The driver stared at my twenty-euro note as though I had threatened him with a dagger. Its value considerably exceeded his supply of change. I offered to take the difference in lei, but the thumb-thick wad of banknotes he pulled from his trouser pocket was nowhere near enough. Muttering plaintively, he got out, forced to reveal his secret foreign-currency stash. To my surprise, it was in the boot, beneath a flat spare tyre.

While the driver rummaged about in a cavity, he asked whether I intended to stay in Hermannstadt and, if not, where I planned to go next.

I named Schäßburg as my next destination, even getting the Romanian right:

‘Sighișoara.’

Schäßburg? How wonderful! That was his home town! What a fortunate coincidence: he had been planning to go home one of these days anyway. We could set off at once, his car was as good as mine, shall we say eighty euros? Perhaps I would like to drive myself? No problem at all. The police never asked to see a driving licence; they preferred to see banknotes. Why check into this hotel, then, when I could be in Schäßburg this very evening, truly?

A gentle bout of haggling ensued, a mercantile warm-up for the rest of my journey, I told myself, until we had reached forty euros, and there we stopped.

‘Final offer?’ grinned the driver, his face contorted with pain.

What on earth was I doing? I didn’t want to go to Schäßburg at all, at least not today. Why were we negotiating a price?

I pressed the change he had just retrieved from the boot back into the driver’s hand.

‘That’s for not driving to Schäßburg today. Agreed?’

Fourteen euros in tips vanished straight into the taxi driver’s pocket. He waved me goodbye with a laugh, a gold tooth flashing solemnly in the evening light.

I checked into my room, wondering how much a beer might cost at those taxi rates, perhaps even one accompanied by dinner.

The old town was only a ten-minute walk from the hotel, and the way there was excellently signposted.

Only now, walking along after all that transfer theatre, did it become real. The cobblestones beneath my feet: unquestionably genuine. The hand-plastered walls of the houses, the stone archways, the cast-iron street lamps that were gradually beginning to glow – I could stop and touch them. They were really there, and so was I. I was in Transylvania. Actually in Transylvania, after so much thought and yet with no plan at all. And in one of its most important towns, too: Hermannstadt, which had been a European Capital of Culture five years earlier. Indeed, there were corners where preparations for the occasion were evidently still in full swing, and in the heart of the town a few had even been completed.

What on earth must it have looked like before?

The centre of the town, on a rise, consists essentially of two successive squares, the ‘Little Ring’ and the ‘Great Ring’, with sections of the old town wall still enclosing them to the south, towards the nearby Carpathians.

While the ‘Little Ring’ knew how to make excellent use of the approaching sunset, glowing almost extravagantly romantically in muted pastel shades, its big brother was a disappointment, though through no fault of its own.

A loop-the-loop roller coaster dominated the middle of the square, illuminated by glaring coloured spotlights. Techno music hammered out a rhythm to the adolescent screams from carriages hurtling round in spirals, while the wooden stalls and the spaces between them gave off pretty much every smell by which one recognises a fairground.

At the centre of it all stood a beer tent. What else? As though beamed in from the Bavarian Alpine foothills, it was already packed in the early evening and being vigorously blasted with music by a brass band in red-and-white checked shirts and leather breeches.

Behind the trombones, a banner hung from the back of the stage.

‘Oktoberfest pe românește’

it read, beside a photograph of a man in Styrian costume holding up a shot glass as if to toast the guests, his face glistening with grease as he grinned as though he had just invented bread spread with crackling lard.

But apart from the man and the music, the local version of ‘Oktoberfest’ was pleasantly superior to the original. The crowd was lively, but not out of control. It was easy to find a seat: people waved me over instead of staring fixedly at me and hoping I would move on. The noise was considerable, but conversation was still possible, and the air had not yet thickened to the point of being unbreathable. Nobody was dancing on the tables; nobody was lying underneath them. The beer was excellent, Timișoreana, flowing from real barrels rather than imitation ones, and pulled not by cube-shaped men with high blood pressure, but by an unusually large number of unusually pretty girls. Their duties were confined entirely to keeping the beer flowing. They appeared as though from nowhere, laden with several half-litre (!) tankards, transformed for one brief moment upon receiving a tip into enchantingly smiling elves of unearthly beauty, and vanished again immediately afterwards, presumably into another dimension.

What a pity there was not a mirror to be found anywhere, so that I could test a theory in which, after my second beer, I was beginning to put some faith. How nimble these delightful creatures were, and how easy it was to gather several of them around me at once when one raised the price of a glass from thirty cents to two euros! Was one of them actually licking her blood-red lips? Or was that already the beer?

They did not bring the food, of course; you had to fetch that yourself. And here the festival finally left its model standing, breaking every record in the feeding department: the entire long back wall of the tent was one enormous grill.

Sausages as thick as a forearm sizzled on it, along with mountains of schnitzels, great heaps of pork neck and various other things improved by heat. Pork knuckles rose from terraces of fried potatoes, having first been boiled in copper cauldrons over open fires to enhance their crispness, and now browned on the grill to a delicious, juicy finish, gleaming like a cooked image of that shiny mass queuing in front of the grill.

There were other accompaniments, too: loaves of bread the size of small children, for instance, and preserving jars larger by far, filled with everything the fertile soil could produce. They were piled so high you might have thought they were holding up the tent roof.

With enough food for several days on my tray, I found another table with fewer people and more room for reflection. So this was the land of my ancestors?! Yet so far I had met only Romanians. What would change when I went to the places where the Saxons and Székely lived?

When the evening and the general mood had advanced far enough to set a polonaise winding through the entire tent, I took it as my cue to leave. Besides, my train was leaving early the next morning. I would see the rest of Hermannstadt on my way back. At least, that was what I thought as I walked through the cool night to my hotel, hoping that the next stop on my journey would be a pork-knuckle-free zone.