Great Aunt
Hilda Von Washington was directed related to the Von Washingtons of Bavaria,
who in turn were vaguely related the Washingtons of Virginia, and it was this
claim to fame that had landed her the plum role of New York’s capo de
matriarch. She exploded into the room with all the practised finesse of a
Tanzanian wildebeest dive-bombing in Lake Victoria, sudden and dramatic, and
pointed a finger that had seen more afternoon grilled foie gras at the Ritz
than was polite in civilized society.
“You exist!” she said.
“Yes,” I stammered at this
imposition of philosophy upon a seven year. “I expect I do.”
“This will never do,”
she pointed at the door, “you’ll have to go – again.”
“But I just got
returned,” I opined, having just returned from a three day sojourn with my
Uncle Tobias in India.
She had sent me there to
be rid of me, theorizing the best way to raise a seven-year-old child was
chasing tigers and fighting off rabid monkeys in the subcontinental jungle.
This was to have been
followed with eleven years at the Newton-Wold preparatory school in
Connecticut, with its concomitant beating from ages five to seventeen. Its
motto verum in vehemens pulsus – truth in violent beating, would explain
why Great-aunt Hilda was nothing if not traditional. That I had not only
survived the first test but had returned was a logical premise she refused to
accept.
“You exist, but only in
the metaphysical sense of being in the room,” she riposted “not in the
justifiably valid sense of having the right to exist in the room.”
I shook the noise out of
my head. “Uncle Tobias sends his love.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I would have thought that
followed from his sending his love.”
“You have much to learn
about relations,” she frowned severely, “and to further that education I’m
sending you to your Uncle Erasmus in Quebec. Or is it Quito?”
“Quito in Ecuador?”
“Are there any others?”
Unfortunately there were others and it turned out
Uncle Erasmus lived in Romania, inside a monument called Quito Square, famed as
a dedication to Mircea Zorileanu, an aviator who crossed the Carpathian
Mountains in an airplane in 1915 and died four years later of tuberculosis from
the flight – many are the heroes in Romania.
Uncle Erasmus had been
left behind after the fall of Iron Curtain and Nicolae Ceauşescu, like a
doorstop after the building has been demolished. Previously he had acted as a
sort of aide de camp to old Nicolae by funnelling prostitutes and whiskey over
from Serbia, which had it even worse off than Romania when it came to tyrants.
Uncle Erasmus was now lodged in a tent in the middle of a roundabout, beneath
what could only be described as a statue of four brass vultures and an
engraving of a naked Pocahontas. Knowing why Nicolae Ceauşescu had decided to
have a picture of Pocahontas stuck in the middle of Bucharest would go a long
way to explaining why he also referred to himself as ‘The Genius of the
Carpathians’.
“Uncle Erasmus?” I knocked
hesitantly with a cowbell he used for a ringer.
There was a muffled groan
and a bearded head appeared that for all the world could be described as a
myopic orangutan wearing a toupee.
“Whose that? The police?
I’ve paid this month’s blood money already!”
“Not quite, Great-aunt Hilda
sent me,” I presented a letter that had more double entendres than Mae West and
a bottle of gin.
“Are yes, the great gorgon
still resides in her New York eyrie I expect. Does she still devour young
children?”
“I’m here.”
“I take that as a yes.”
Uncle Erasmus had spent his
youth running guns for the White Russians to the Bolsheviks and back again, in
an endless financial loop that was indirectly responsible for the Great
Ukrainian Tractor Crash of 1925.
He was wanted in more
countries for more crimes than Interpol had offices, and it was only an animal
cunning rivalling Stalin exiling the entire Bolshoi ballet for missing
practise, that kept Erasmus ahead of the law. A lifetime of marrying gypsies
for their dowries and then fleeing on the first train, also meant he was
fabulously wealth and had more death vendettas on him than he could reliably
count.
“It’s time for morning tea,”
he pronounced reliably.
“It’s five o’clock in the
evening.”
“Here we work on Romanian
time, when I get up, then we eat.”
We decamped to the local
coffee house, which served only cured meats and a dyspeptic wine that removed
the lead from the pewter mug it was in. I looked at it circumspectly and
wondered about liver damage.
“Drink up,” he attacked a
platter of odious meat and goblet of wine that could have been used as an
industrial solvent.
“I’m seven.”
“That means you’re older
than the wine, never drink anything that’s older than you, you never know where
it’s been.”
Hesitantly I raised the mug
and found it singed my eyebrows. Wisely I pushed it to one side and lived
another day. Remarkably the wine had no effect upon the constitution of my
uncle; rather it seemed to disinfect the meat he was attacking, in much the
same way as Norwegians used caustic soda to render lutefisk into edible rubber.
After late breakfast where
he reminisced about his exploits, we returned to the statue he called home in
the perversely named Paris Street.
“Our mission today is to woo
the grand countess Romanova.”
“Is she one of the
Romanovs?”
“No, she’s one of the
Romanovas, different royal family but equally crack shots.”
“Shouldn’t I unpack first?”
“If there’s one thing I
learned, always have a suitcase packed and waiting by the door. Since you have
only the one and I lack a door, I suggest we leave the state of world affairs
as they are.”
It turned out the grand
countess Romanova was more of a building inspector who wanted to turf Uncle
Erasmus out of his incontinently placed shanty. It also turned out she was
partial to chocolates and flowers, and it was the avenue of romance my uncle
hoped to follow.
The sun had set and the
streets were filled with revellers driving their cattle home from market, or
revellers finishing their factory shifts, or revellers emptying their
trashcans. The truth was there was little to revel about in Bucharest so they
made do with anything that justified a noise.
The grand countess Romanova
lived on the fourth floor of an apartment block that could be euphemistically
described as Stalinist-grey, a dark morbid affair framed with broken windows
and dead cats. Under the new European building standards it would have been
condemned and demolished as an assault on the senses. Uncle Erasmus pointed her
out sitting in the window, reading a newspaper and occasionally taking pot
shots with an air rifle at pigeons for her dinner. She was a solid woman; in
much the same way Romanian cattle could be described as light-footed.
“Here’s where you come in my
young Romeo.”
I disliked what I knew was
coming so much I was three streets away before Uncle Erasmus was able to corner
me in a tree.
“Come down,” he poked me
with a broom. “You don’t know what the plan is yet.”
“I do know what the plan
is,” I protested, “and it involves me climbing up four stories of rickety
masonry and delivering your chocolates and flowers to the aforesaid baroness.”
“Why yes,” Uncle Erasmus
cracked a smile, “have you done this before?”
“I played the Nurse in a
school play of Romeo and Juliet,” I wailed, “they don’t call them a pair of
star-cross'd lovers for nothing.”
“Nonsense that’s an
exaggeration,” he insisted as he pulled me down with a shepherd’ crook he had
appropriated and led me back to the building. “You merely need to give her
these flowers and sweets, there’s really no danger at all.”
“Won’t it be more romantic
if you do it?”
“War wound, bit nasty I’m
afraid.”
“Which war?”
“All of them, now up you
go,” he launched me up a crumbing wall that had so many loose bricks it could
have been used as a brick pile. “And read this to her,” he stuck a note in my
pocket.
As I climbed I noticed the
sound of pinging around me and wondered what it was, until there was sharp bite
on my hand and I realized I was under fire from the countess and her air rifle.
“She’s shooting at me!” I
wailed.
“Nonsense, she thinks you’re
a cat. Just keep climbing.”
The firing continued and
seemed to be coming more accurate until I reached the second floor, at which
point her tactics changed and I came under a barrage of empty vodka bottles and
rusty sardine tins.
“She’s brought out the heavy
artillery!”
“She’s just emptying this
weeks garbage,” Uncle Erasmus said encouragingly. “Remember the Alamo!”
“Why does no one remember we
lost that one?”
At the third floor she ran
out of munitions and resorted to swishing the air with a bundles of twigs
attached to a log she probably considered a broom.
“She’s switched to
bayonets!” I screamed.
“Lad!” came Uncle Erasmus’
rejoinder, “I seen butter knives that are sharper! Almost there!”
As the dervish of the fourth
floor battered with me enough Romanian insults to curdle water, I breached the
casement of her balcony, and from within my shirt I pulled out a box of Turkish
delights and faded field daisies that a rangy goat would have refused and
vainly offered them up.
“For me little one?” she
spoke in insolvent English, suddenly a coquettish sixteen years old of a hundred
and ninety pounds and a face that would have sent Genghis high tailing back to
the steppes. “From mister Erasmus?”
“Yes, and a letter,” I hung
on gamely with a view to survival.
“Aw,” she melted as she
parsed the script, “tell mister Erasmus I thank him for his gift, and he may
stay.”
With this, she closed the
window on my fingers and I fell four stories into a convenient pile of manure
that was as high as the horse that made it.
“What did she say?” Uncle
Erasmus dragged me out.
“She says you can stay,” I
almost swooned with the heady smell of fresh horse urine. “Are you sure she is
a countess?”
“Over here every woman and
her poodle counts as a countess.”
“Why on earth don’t you just stay at the Hilton?”
“Records dear boy, the one
thing I can’t afford to leave is a trail of records.” He grinned a mouth that
had so much heavy metal it made gold mines in South Africa seem financially
insecure. “Otherwise the coppers would be on to me in a flash. Now first
mission accomplished, next to the duchess.”
“There’s more?” I gasped,
more out of the stench of the horse manure than annoyance.
“The high duchess Grimalda
Hackenstacken has possession of my violin, and trust me my boy, if there’s one
thing the ladies like it’s a Romeo with a fiddle.”
We set out across at the city as the Moon began to
rise. Dogs barked at us, people barked at us as well, but at least they didn’t
try to bite. Bucharest in spring is a beautiful city if one can see past all
the defaced statues of Nicolae Ceauşescu, every three-legged horse, and more to
the point every three-legged war veteran.
We entered the salon of the high duchess Grimalda
Hackenstacken, who had had seen it all roll across her country. About the wall
was a rogues' gallery of every dictator and minor tyrant Eastern Europe had
seen in the twentieth century. First the Tsar had visited her boudoir before
his all too unfortunate misalliance with the Bolsheviks. Then came moonlight
dancing with Leon Trotsky before his industrial accident with an ice pick in
Mexico. Herman Goering was laughably brave and dashing as the Soviets drove him
and the Luftwaffe out of Romania. Stalin put in an appearance and astoundingly
didn’t send her to a gulag or leave her with a bullet in the head. Pride of
place turned out to be not surprisingly, the jaunty profile of Nicolae
Ceauşescu, minor god of the Carpathians, and those that disagreed with him were
soon unable.
“Come in darlings, come in,”
said a woman that had more folds in her face than a Parisian boulangerie has in
its croissants. “My what a handsome one, you are.”
Her hands cradled my face
and I could have sworn parts of them sloughed off onto my epidermis. I
shuddered compulsively. She made me sit beside her and I wondered if the smell
was human or wild porcine.
“What brings you here, to
visit me in my prime,” she lisped in the way that reminded you of grottos of
bones and the high points of the Middle Ages. If this was her prime, her pupal
stage must have been positively frightening.
“To visit the most beautiful
madam in all Romania,” said my uncle, who was nothing if not suave - he should
have considered a role in bomb disposal. “An evening with you is an eternity in
paradise.”
I looked at her and wondered
how severely my uncle suffered from cataracts.
“And you brought this lovely
man with you,” she smiled with the face that sunk a thousand barges.
Again she had referred to
me, and this was starting to worry me, it was starting to worry me in the sense
- animals felt worried as they stood outside the abattoir worrying what all the
mooing was about on the inside.
“I seem to remember I have something of yours,” at
this point the high duchess Grimalda Hackenstacken picked up a violin case and
held it for Uncle Erasmus. He leant across to retrieve it, but she held onto it
and smiled the sort of toothy grin normally reserved for mako sharks. “Why not
leave your young fellow with me.”
Uncle Erasmus winked at me,
grabbed the violin case, gave his salutations and bolted for door like he was
front-runner at the Belmont Stakes. I found myself left alone with a woman who
had ridden more jockeys then the Charge of the Light Brigade and probably some
of them as well.
“May I have something to
drink?” I stammered as she tousled my hair and undid my tie.
“Whisky?”
“I’m seven.”
“Never too young to discover
whisky I say.”
She waltzed across the room
with all the elegance her swollen ankles and loaves of flesh would allow.
Seeing my chance, and realizing it would be my only one, I darted to the door
and scuttled down the stairs, as a scream that would have done justice to all
three of the Stygian witches when they discover young Perseus have scarped with
the eye of seeing.
I joined Uncle Erasmus
downstairs.
“Well done, I can see now why you graduated to one
of my relatives.” He grinned as I tried to remember how to breathe. “Now we
must to Lyubitshka, supreme princess of the gypsies, no less.”
Given the preceding Romanian royalty, I had the
feeling it was time to elope.
“And what minor task is it this time?” I hesitated
to ask.
“Marriage actually, but I’m hoping her relatives
will forgive me for the previous engagements.”
“Were there many?”
“Does a pine forest have needles?”
“That depends on whether we are talking
horticultural or surgical.”
It was now late evening and this being Romania,
wolves and wereman stalked the streets in search of romance and a pint of
blood. Twice we had to shelter in a convenient tavern as prowlers swept the
streets, and they were actual street cleaners, imagine what real wolves would
have been like. Eventually we made it to a large forbidding castle that had
seen the better side of the Renaissance.
“I thought you said she was a gypsy?” I piped.
“She is.”
“And the castle?”
“Hollywood built it for a movie, actors and
production costs are incredibly cheap over here. No genuine Romanian royalty would
live here, which reminds me, whatever you do, don’t mention any other royalty.”
“Will bad things happen?”
“Do you enjoy eating borsht?”
Uncle Erasmus stood at the foot of the drawbridge,
and started to play, and I have to say that as musicians go he could beat out a
mean Khachaturian. Windows started flying out open, doors started slamming and
the sounds of feet rattling down stairs could be heard in accompaniment. Within
no time the drawbridge had fallen at our feet and we were dragged inside, if there
was any doubt at my Uncle’s ability to woo, it was quickly displaced as he was
carried in on the shoulders of enormous men to be presented to an enthroned
princess of the gypsies. All the time Uncle Erasmus kept furiously fiddling
like the devil on cocaine.
“Where did you learn to play like that?” I asked my
uncle in amazement.
“It’s really the fiddle, I won it in a poker game
from Yehudi Menuhin. Yehudi was a great violinist but a terrible drunk.”
I looked up and beheld a princess who surprisingly
was my age. At this point a thin sliver of doubt crept into my mind, and I
regarded my uncle with serious misgivings. Then it dawned on me I was the
groom.
“No,” I said plainly and started moving to the
exit.
“Go on, my boy,” he grabbed me by the collar and
nudged me forward, “you’ve got to get hitched sooner or later, preferably
sooner, that way you can spend the dowry before she comes of age.”
“I’m too young, she’s too young. I’m still learning
algebra, she’s still learning algebra, but I do know that one plus one doesn’t
always add up.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he whispered in my
ear, “just say yes, we have a party, get drunk and leave as soon as they hand
over the money.”
“I can see how you made it to be one of my
relatives.” Then in a moment of inspiration I blurted out a relative truth.
“But what of the other princess?”
Immediately the room fell silent and a dozen
wedding contracts were torn up.
“Fool! We’re undone!” Uncle Erasmus yelped as we
escaped by a window and jumped in the moat. By one o’clock he had packed me on
a Romanian air transport via JFK and shipped me back to Great Aunt Hilda with
the expressed wish I never visit the expanded Europe ever again.
Great Aunt Hilda looked at me with some annoyance.
“Visits are only permitted once every ten years.”
As a peace offering I held up the Stradivarius I
had appropriated off Uncle Erasmus at the airport. Her eyes narrowed and she
looked at me severity that destroys country clubs.
“I recognize that violin,” she said, “I seem to
remember Yehudi Menuhin using it to get my dowry off me. We are not amused.”
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