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		TRANSYLVANIAN NIGHTMARE | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - He went back inside his hovel. In a few minutes he came out sporting a black leather cap and wearing a slick black jogging suit over a starched white shirt. We set off down the path, our footsteps kicking up soot as we passed through the lank grass. One of the mongrels, limping, fell into stride with us. Soon we were leading a half-dozen skulking mutts, each with its own disorder: a bulging red eye, a patch of mange, a mangled ear, a gnarled paw. Kennedy turned to them and shouted, "A casa! A casa!" and they scampered away. "My guard dogs," he said. He asked me what I did for a living; I suddenly felt embarrassed to say I was a writer, from which he might deduce that I was looking at him as a story opportunity (I was not). "I'm on vacation." He shrugged. "Want to see our local ruins? Look at this swimming pool. Ceausescu had it built." A concrete-lined hole stretched over a 50-square-yard rectangle at the edge of the rise. He bent down and blew at its rim: A puff of black dust whirled into the air. The sarcastic tenor of his voice hinted at the absurdity of building such a facility atop a roadless promontory. The sun shone dimly through sepia-tainted clouds, casting a feeble backlight over what, on the hill opposite, looked like a block of Dresden still smoking from Allied firebombs. We wandered toward it, and traversed a moatlike hollow where Gypsy toddlers stomped about on reddish slimy earth. One waved a homemade bow at us; he cocked an arrow and fired it. It plugged the muck at his feet. It was cold, but mosquitoes buzzed in our ears. Up close, Dresden, actually a quarter of town built only 20 years ago, resembled the South Bronx. On the tenement walls pastel pinks and greens splotched through soot. Carpets and laundry hung from blackened windows; Gypsy women in scarves idled on doorsteps. All eyes fell on us. "These Gypsies thieve and deceive and ruin whatever is given them," Kennedy said under his breath. "Ceausescu forced them to stay in their villages, but now they go wherever they want. Democracy." Gypsies served as Kennedy's all-purpose scapegoats for Romania's ills, and he could not mention them without sneering. The filth of Copsa Mica was not Gypsy-generated, though; it was Ceausescu's legacy. When I pointed this out, he waved his hand in disdain: "The Gypsies have turned this town into Africa. We have an Africa right here in Romania." We walked on. Cooking fires flickered in the lower rooms of abandoned buildings; an aroma of roasting meat filtered through the foul air. Smoke was everywhere. "Don't step in that," Kennedy said, pointing to a yellow-brown rill running along the pavement. "Sewage." We wandered through the quarter and descended toward the Tîrgu Mures River and the main road. "Look." He rubbed a tree stump and held up his blackened forefinger. "This is what we breathe. It eats away our lungs. You, an American, have never breathed this air. Your skin, your eyes -- you grew up healthy and it shows." "You look healthy yourself," I said. "Looks mean nothing." Feeling compelled to offer some consolation, I brought up the Rust Belt and polluted cities in the United States, but Kennedy's face registered no interest. He waited until I finished and said, "You have never really breathed this air, tourist. Everything about you shows you've been breathing healthy air all your life. But I breathe this." He held up his forefinger again. "And no one in Europe or America cares." We reached a concrete hut emblazoned with a black and red Dracula motif. "Let's go in here," he suggested. "It's sort of my hangout." We entered. Two Gypsy youths, stunted, squint-eyed, were playing billiards on a frayed pool table. They turned and looked at us. The jukebox screeched and the music stopped. "I'll get you a drink," Kennedy said, and walked over to the bar. He returned with a Coke for me and a rum and cola for himself. I sat back and looked at him. Unlike the others in town, he was fresh and clean: His fingernails were spotless, his collar white. The tone of his voice implied spirit as much as rancor. "Got a map? I'll show you where those churches are." "No." "Who would need a map of this hell. Look outside: mizerie. Mizerie. There's hardly any work here now. Everyone is sick from the air. Mizerie." "You are one of the lucky ones, if you have a job at the plant." "For the privilege of that job, where I get to breath sulfuric acid and other poisons in return for a monthly salary worth $10, I had to bribe the director with $50 cash. I work 24 hours on, two days off. Most of this money goes to support my parents; they're pensioners. In my free time I raise those pigs I thought you had come to steal." The jukebox screeched and the Bee Gees squealed into the mottled shadows of the bar. The Gypsies stood motionless, dumbfounded, watching our lips move. Kennedy fixed them with a stare. They started toward us; he reached into his track suit top, as if for a gun. They halted, then dropped back. "Come on," he said to me. "Let's get out of here." On the way back toward the center Kennedy's face registered disgust. "The thing is, here in Romania we have no slums like you do in the States. In the States, you know where it is safe. But not here in Copsa Mica. Everywhere here is a slum. They'll knock you over the head with a pipe to steal your $10 salary. And the police won't do anything." Ragged phalanxes of plant workers, coming off their shifts sooty and sullen, were ambling by us. They were silent and dazed-looking. "See their faces? The grit never washes off. Never. It's inside and out. Yet we fear most of all that the big smelter might go under, as some of the others in town did. We'd be out of work then, and who needs us anywhere else?" He pushed up the brim of his cap. "What we have here is an oras-fantom, a ghost town. Peopled by the living dead." Indeed, the people passing by, sallow and despondent, looked only half-alive. I asked if Emil Constantinescu's recent election to the presidency gave him hope; he brushed aside the question. No Romanian politician gave him hope. We picked up the main road again. Twilight set in for real; my head ached from the filth I was inhaling with each belabored breath; my throat felt scratchy. Kennedy stopped and pulled a small mirror from his vest pocket, and, running his hands through his hair, checked the angle of his leather cap. He examined his fingernails and flapped the dust from his track suit lapels. "Excuse me, this street is, well, it's sort of like our Broadway." A nag, half-gagging, half-snorting, plugged toward us dragging a rickety cart laden with firewood. More plant workers were drifting in our direction. A tiny Fiat covered in soot sputtered along: Though the road was empty, we all converged at the same narrow point. The workers filled half the road, crowding the car as it passed; it swerved and frightened the horse, which bolted and jerked the cart's side wheels into the gutter. Wood spilled onto the shoulder. The driver exploded into lyrical Romanian, showering us with expletives. Kennedy ignored him. A young woman in a smart gray overcoat and black pumps was walking toward us. Kennedy's face beamed with an anticipatory smile. "Buna Seara!" "Buna Seara!" They launched into an animated flirt, with Kennedy tipping his cap, with her batting her lashes and tossing the hair away from her eyes with deft turns of the head. A time was mentioned and a street address was discussed. "La revedere!" "La revedere!" We walked on. Kennedy swelled his chest and affected a swagger, ever so slight but noticeable still. There were more women, more buna searas, a few saluts. The beauties kept coming, and he knew them all. I remarked that he was quite popular; he rubbed his jaw. "Of course! I'm no Gypsy. And some of us don't suffer from the so-called town problem." "Which is what?" "Impotence. From the chemicals in the air. We have the highest divorce rate in Romania." Dusk was thick with smoke from chimneys rising above the hovels; sparks and flame crowned the plant's smokestacks with ignescent haloes. There were no streetlights. We turned down the station road. "So, where do you go with your dates?" I asked. "We go to that Saxon church you came to see, actually. It's been abandoned. The Saxons all left after the revolution. Now there's a bar inside it and a restaurant and a disco. It's wild." "Is it also a hotel?" "No. The church is no place to take a girl for intimacy. That is one big problem here among the young. Nowhere to go for intimacy." We approached the station. A shift in the wind brought the gaseous clouds down on us; the lamps of the platform were now ringed with orange haze. We stopped by the illuminated schedule. My train was due in five minutes. "Thanks for showing me around town." Kennedy looked away. He shook his head and waved dismissively. "Why don't I give you my address," I said. "Not necessary. Really." I extended my hand. "Hope you found it interesting," he said, ignoring my hand. "My life, that is. I ... I've got animals to tend to." He stepped back out of the light; then, turning away, he slipped into the drifts of gases and was gone. On the train back to Sighisoara I felt vaguely ashamed and disconcerted. In meeting Kennedy outside his hovel it was as though I had stumbled in upon someone in a private moment but could not retreat. Unlike the proles and thugs of Copsa Mica, he kept himself free of the grime floating through the air; he possessed a dignity that transcended his surroundings. Yet he was still there, still tending animals, with no hope of leaving; that very dignity, plus his high personal standards, seemed to make him an alien in his hometown, if a flamboyant one. He belonged elsewhere. But where? Staring into the dark outside the train window, I wondered how many Copsa Micas, hived off from humanity's mainstream and forgotten, there were around Eastern Europe. And how many Kennedys were making do in them, bearing the lasting burden of some of the century's most depraved dictators and their ruinous schemes of national grandeur. SALON | March 23, 1999 Jeffrey Tayler has written about Siberia, Uzbekistan, China and Ios for Salon Wanderlust.