The Wall by the Maros

What do a Romanian long-distance bus and a spaceship travelling at the speed of light have in common?

Time passes more slowly inside them.

Not so slowly that I feared finding none of my friends alive when I returned to Germany, but slowly enough to put my nerves to a considerable test on this journey to Marosvásárhely, the German Neumarkt am Mieresch, and the Romanian Târgu Mureş, which lay on the way to Kolozsvár.

And it was not only the journey and the many names that strained my nerves. There was also the suspense, and my anticipation of meeting the mysterious Mr Farkas, whose name meant ‘Wolf’ in German, and who might prove so helpful in my hunt for my ancestors and, who knew, the Hundehaut.

As the bus, its diesel engine roaring and belching dark smoke, laboured up the narrow, winding road into the wooded Harghita Mountains, I rested my head against the window, cushioned by a grubby brown curtain scarcely younger than the Shroud of Turin, and surrendered to memories of the past few days — particularly the previous one.

Naturally, nobody had driven me to the station in Keresztúr, so after taking my leave of the ‘Parsonage Inn’ I had seven sun-drenched kilometres to walk back. How I managed the distance in my condition I remember only in fragments. A match was now under way on the football pitch where I had lost my watch on the outward journey. A sizeable crowd had turned out for this classic village Sunday fixture, which naturally had to follow church and lunch. Nobody took any notice of the stranger staggering past, dripping with sweat. There was no point looking for my watch a second time: either I would not have seen it or somebody else had already found it.

The subsequent train journey to Schäßburg had been wiped from my memory altogether. I could summon up the evening meal, though. To reward myself for the privations of the homeward journey, I had treated myself to a steak that cost a fantastically small amount and came with a side dish I had never encountered before: a lukewarm purée of beans and garlic, garnished with raw onions. It helped bring me a little closer to sobriety and protected me against every conceivable form of nocturnal harassment.

The next morning I changed my itinerary. Only two destinations remained on the list, both of which had meant a great deal to my mother: Székelyudvarhely and Neumarkt.

In the first of these towns, which boasted an unusually high concentration of ancestors and the attraction of a large cemetery, she had spent a summer with her grandmother and an aunt when she was three years old, learning Hungarian in just a few weeks.

We would see how much I could pick up in a day.

In Neumarkt, my second destination, she had lived for several years. Her younger sister and the first of her three brothers had been born there. The family was doing well; my grandfather earned his living at a large furniture factory. My mother had often spoken of those years. Of Sunday walks along a wall, for instance, when she was allowed — no, required — to wear her best dress, much to her delight. It must have been a Transylvanian version of the Italian passeggiata, where the point is not so much to get anywhere as to see and be seen. I was determined to find that wall.

A train runs from Schäßburg to Udvarhely, some fifty kilometres away, almost four times a day and takes little more than an hour. Once beyond the familiar belt of hideous socialist architecture that encircled this town too, the place became quite pretty, even splendid in some streets. It was easy to imagine Udvarhely a hundred years earlier: bustling, elegant, urban. But to do more than imagine it, to feel it properly, I lacked both a guide and the patience. So my visit was more of a quick blanching than the long, slow simmer I had hoped for. I promptly added the cemetery to my private collection of graves, and failed to photograph one particular grave — much to Mr Farkas’s later dismay. But I am getting ahead of myself.

As expected, there were fewer Mátéffys here, but Lőrinczys abounded, along with other names familiar from old letters. Presumably relatives, all of them, once again.

I even found my great-grandmother’s house in tiny József Attila ut, since the street still bore the name it had had when she lived there. Yet when I stood before the modest but vine-covered Székely gate, I could not bring myself to ring the bell and ask to be let in. I felt too strong an urge to move on, too keen a need to tick Neumarkt off the list, to have done my duty and at last be allowed the pleasure of Kolozsvár. I would have liked to write ‘in all haste’, but I had already experienced Transylvanian trains and was now discovering what its buses were capable of…

It was a weekday morning, and every seat was occupied by commuters and traders for whom a three-hour journey to work appeared neither unusual nor particularly long. They would spend two-thirds of the day, or more, away from home; their luggage was correspondingly substantial. Suitcases, baskets, boxes and the odd cage filled the luggage racks with weight and life. One passenger had brought two pygmy goats, which he kept between his knees.

After a good hour we made our first stop in Corund, a mountain village known for its handicrafts. While the driver smoked a few cigarettes, the tourist could have picked up any number of bargains: wicker baskets large enough to hold a winter’s firewood, sheepskin and other fur capes, painted porcelain chamber pots, leather whips, hunting knives of the ‘bear-killer’ variety, wooden milking stools, tack, shepherds’ caps, cowbells, enamel cauldrons on iron chains, bales of straw and countless other things one might find indispensable back home in Germany.

What one could not do, however, was have a piss.

The tourist circled the bus a few times, squeezed himself back into his seat and held on for another hour, until the second stop.

There were trees there, admittedly, but something else put them quite literally in the shade. One moment we had been rolling along through sunlit countryside, with gardens and herds on either side; the next, the bus was plunged into darkness.

Propelled by an urgent need and curiosity in equal measure, I leapt out of the bus and almost collided with the wall that had appeared beside it. Grey, moss-covered, immense. Cold concrete, slightly damp and curving away, with no end in sight to left or right. Slowly the fly looked up; slowly it grasped the shape of the colossus, a shape from which one generally prefers to keep one’s distance: I was clinging to the cooling tower of a power station.

There it stood in the middle of nowhere, right beside the road, without so much as a fence: a relic of the past, built for a future that had never arrived. Immediately behind it stood another. Both shut down and left standing, indifferent to the beauty of the landscape, monuments to Romania’s dream of greatness through a planned economy.

Nobody cared. The driver was already leaning against the tower, his first cigarette between his lips. Two more would follow: that was my window of opportunity to disappear into the greenery. Then we were off again.

Around midday we reached Neumarkt. The city was bursting with life. A four-lane road led into the centre, choked with cars; the noise was tremendous, the filth appalling.

A street map at the bus station showed how far it was to the centre. It did not show how to get there, so I walked.

A long square, rather too lavishly decorated with flowers, marked the beginning of the city centre. On the left stood the former town hall, with a statue of the Capitoline she-wolf, who here appeared to have suckled a third child, and the city’s Palace of Culture, an Art Nouveau building in the style of concrete folklore. Directly opposite stood the people’s palace of culture: the first McDonald’s restaurant I had seen in Transylvania.

Countless obligatory flags fluttered on either side of the square, as if to reassure any doubters that everything here was firmly in Romanian hands. Unlike the towns I had visited before, the streets were conspicuously crowded with younger people, different in appearance too, with darker complexions and darker hair: the lads dressed for contrast in gleaming white sportswear, the girls in midnight-black leather.

Life here, it seemed, was devoted chiefly to mating, and mating was to be done early. Anyone who, after a certain age, was not off the market — married or rejected for ever — had to withdraw from the display and undergo a sort of reverse metamorphosis. Either never destined to become a butterfly or too preoccupied with tending its offspring, the caterpillar resumed its fattening.

The tall, tight-fitting boots gave way to clumsy, brightly coloured, shiny trainers, possibly adorned with fluffy pompoms; midriff-baring tops became pastel-coloured tents, and support tights as black as wet seals replaced the miniskirt.

The men were no better. They too changed shape shortly after becoming fathers, or by forty at the latest. Their peacock vanity, however, remained essential to their character and only faded when they were approaching the walking-stick stage.

The leather jacket remained compulsory well beyond sixty, shiny and invariably a little too tight. The hair, whether abundant or sparse, stayed thick with gel and trimmed like a hedge. The heavy necklace of younger days now reappeared, link by link, elsewhere: a ring on every finger was standard equipment, but the most important hung from the thumb. There dangled limply what was meant to promise virility — a key ring bearing a star, a propeller or four interlocking rings from Ingolstadt.

With these and other impressions to digest, I reached my hotel, which completed the picture rather neatly, for it looked like a brothel.

I had no intention of staying long. For the first time on this journey, nothing felt even remotely like home. For the first time, I was nothing but a tourist.

And here of all places, in Marosvásárhely, the marketplace on the Mieresch. For six hundred years the city had been a Székler stronghold, perhaps more Hungarian even than Budapest itself, before it fell to Romania. The original population’s share fell below half — and not without tension. In the spring of 1990, bloody clashes between Romanians and Hungarians had required military intervention; since then, people had returned to grinding their teeth in peace.

In search of traces of the people who were the real reason I had come, I found Strada Mihai Viteazul beyond the old town, named for Romania’s Michael the Brave. My grandparents had lived here for a time, by then with three children. A little less than a century earlier the street had been called Klástrom utca, a name that pointed to a monastery. Now it led through a distinctly unmonastic district lined with houses from the heyday of the old bourgeoisie. But here too, as before, I did not know the number of the house in which my ancestors had lived. So there was nothing for it but to walk up the street and down again, as I had in Keresztúr and Keisd, my camera permanently at my chest, photographing one house after another to the astonishment of anyone who saw me.*

The houses looked remarkably alike. They had the air of small villas in all their neoclassical elegance, yet every one was badly decayed. They had probably been built around 1900, when the whole street was given a new face in one sweep. These bourgeois residences were not wide, perhaps six to eight metres, but with at least two storeys they offered more than enough room to live comfortably. An entire pastel palette was reflected in their façades, their plasterwork divided into vertical sections. The windows were large, divided into six panes and arranged symmetrically across the storeys. At the very top, in the middle of the house, there was often a dormer providing more living space. And behind it? Perhaps a garden.

About halfway along, the street was crossed by an old avenue. Its trees stood in two rows along the edges of a walkway down the middle of the road, their trunks painted white against the heat. Traffic lanes ran on either side, followed by a further pavement on each outer edge. Between every second tree crouched a bench, painted green, with an ornate backrest, a wooden seat and cast-iron legs. In the next gap after a bench stood a lamp. A path made for strolling. Wide enough to greet those coming towards you as you passed, with the trees pruned high enough for a gentleman to raise his hat. The houses on either side seemed grander still, with brick and stucco that gave them an almost English air.

After my long walk, the first bench was far too inviting to resist. I sat down. Only then did I notice that the avenue described a broad curve. Almost hidden by the bend, I made out a kiosk, an old structure of green metal decorated with white stripes. Two men stood there drinking beer.

A splendid idea.

‘Ursus’, said the writing on the can. The cold bear did me good. The men raised their drinks to me; I returned the salute and wandered back to my bench.

One of the lamps bore a very old sign, almost concealed by the branches. It read ‘Bulevardul Cetăţii’ — Fortress Boulevard.

As I sat down, understanding dawned, probably with some assistance from the beer.

A fortress had a wall. This avenue, so inviting to walk along, curved around the edge of the old town. It was the wall, or what remained of it, along which my mother had promenaded on Sundays. It could hardly have been better suited to the purpose.

For the first time I was truly standing in a place where she had certainly stood too. In a parallel universe, perhaps she was standing here now, a seven-year-old girl beside her ageing son, holding her father’s hand.

How warm that afternoon was!

But it was not sweat that dripped into my beer.

 

 

* It was only many years later that I was to discover which house it had been. A Hungarian architect from Marosvásárhely, whom I had met with her family in Siena, took the trouble to identify it from my photographs and the municipal archives. It was No. 11 — my mother’s birthday.