T A B L E_T A L K Offer your tips to a Table Talker who plans to spend Easter in Paris with his son   How-to, why-not and what-for -- find it all at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y The camel market of Daraw By Kristan Schiller In Egypt, a centuries-old business thrives at the end of the 40 Days Road (03/21/99) Helen of Troy is in my taxi By Rolf Potts A wanderer discovers the ambiguity of language and love in the Philippines (03/19/99) "Don't shoot -- we're Americans!" By Daniel Becker A hike across the Macedonia-Albania border goes wrong (03/18/99) Original sin By Janis Cooke Newman A culinary pilgrim in Italy succumbs to temptations far more wicked than ripe produce (03/17/99) Where the wild things are By John Fox An archaeologist explores the Galapagos on an expedition run by school kids (03/16/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		A young man bears the lasting burden of Romania's   depraved dictator with a dignity that transcends his   grim surroundings. BY JEFFREY TAYLER | My train left sunny Sighisoara at noon and lulled me into reverie as it rocked along Transylvania's Tirnave Mare River. Romanian peasants in black felt hats leaned on oaken staffs, standing guard over broad-horned cattle foraging on the grassy banks; chestnut smoke drifted from the chimneys of cabins set in dark hollows beyond the water. A pair of long-haired Gypsy youths on stallions galloped along the dirt road that paralleled the tracks, racing the train, falling behind and out of sight after tipping their caps to the engineer. I was on my way to Copsa Mica to visit Saxon churches. I had read in my guidebook that the town was polluted, but so were many places in Romania, and that wasn't going to deter me from seeing its sights. Twenty minutes later the Transylvanian idyll I had been observing began to erode. The forest disappeared; the slopes beyond the tracks were now cankered with bald, grassless patches, their upper reaches increasingly lost in brown haze. A graveyard of charred steel hulks (actually a derelict carbon-black plant) resembling a burnt-out amusement park loomed into view amid a landscape that was steadily waning into washes of grays and blacks. The train, slowing, rolled into a gaseous twilight, lurching on unsteady rails. Above towered smokestacks that belched orange clouds of waste; they were the generators of this chemical gloaming, the defoliators of the valley. A long, ailing screech of brakes on axles cut through the clackety-clack of the rails as the train decelerated for the station. "Copsa Mica!" the conductor shouted. I debarked alone. On the platform, a hobo rifled with gusto through a heap of refuse. The station, once forest green, was black with soot, and many of its rooms looked abandoned, their doors knocked off the hinges, their windows shattered or glassless. A man in a gray uniform emerged from the waiting room; I thought to ask him for directions to the churches but he brandished a club and shouted at the hobo, who skittered off into the plant graveyard and climbed over a mess of piping. From behind it he snorted wildly at his pursuer before bounding away. I followed the access road from the station toward the center, passing grit-encrusted women trailed by broods of runty children, wearing sooty, tattered clothes. On the main drag people huffed and wheezed by on creaking, oversize tricycles; there were few cars. Hoping to find a vantage point from which I might see the churches, I clambered up an ashen path wending through fields of ash-covered ricks, passing bug-eyed cattle that stood like sacks of hide propped up on spindly frames. I reached the top of the rise and walked along above the town, kicking up puffs of soot. My eyes burnt; an ache began behind my sinuses. I halted when two mongrels, all bone and carious fang, started barking at me from the yard of a tarpaper hovel. Retreating from the dogs, I sat down on a stump and surveyed the scene below: a conglomeration of smelting plants, girt by rows of blackened houses, spread along the valley under a pall of acrid smog. The total effect was of a proletarian hell; its creator was, not surprisingly, the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. During decades of misrule, in his striving to bury agricultural Romania under the cement and steel of a socialist superstate, he erected in the once-bucolic Saxon settlement -- and in many other parts of the country -- noisome industrial behemoths that fouled the air and wrecked the health of millions of his countrymen. Though many of the plants were obsolete before completion, they outlived him and function still. Only bankruptcy would cool their smelters. "You! What are you doing up here?" demanded a young man in Romanian who had emerged from the tar hovel. "Buna ziua," I answered. He stared at me. "I'm sorry, I'm a tourist. From the States. I'm looking for the churches." His shoulders were thrown back, his eyes glared into mine. He appeared to be in his late 20s; he had sandy brown hair and pale but clear skin. "Tourists don't come to Copsa. It's the most polluted town in Romania, maybe even in all of Europe." He looked me up and down. "It's not right for you to be up here," he said. "It's not right. For all I know, you're a thief come to steal my pigs." I apologized and told him my name, offering my hand. "Wonderful, and my name's Kennedy," he said, not shaking my hand. "Like I said, the only people who hang around up here are pig thieves. I have half a mind to take you to the police station." My halting Romanian finally convinced him I really was a tourist and not a pig thief. He was a filter operator in the lead smelting plant, he said. Kennedy was indeed his nickname: He had contrived the presidential sobriquet from his Magyar given name, which sounded like it. After a hard stare, he shook his head. "Look at that smokestack. It's pouring sulfuric acid right into our lungs; I've breathed it every day of my life. It rots us from the inside out. You think that's touristic?" "No, but ... I'm here to see the churches." "They're far away and you've already missed the bus. Well, if you really are a tourist, you shouldn't be walking around alone. They'll rob you." "They?" "The Gypsies! Let me change and I'll walk with you." N E X T+P A G E | Gypsies as all-purpose scapegoats