The Romanian by Bruce Benderson Read Free Book Online

weeks he just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
    That was a salad year, all the same, he claims, exhaling self-satisfied smoke rings. The money he made! He sent most of it home, over four thousand, which paid his parents’ rent for four years when he got back. And not all of it came from hustling. He was an ace wire-crosser, a car thief. A Romanian network takes the car right off your hands. It’s not such a big deal in Italy like it is here in Hungary. A lot of times they let you go, just make you give the car back.
    Then, finally, he met Angelita, a real Italian and a real woman. And not far from a tin shantytown in a dusty Roman suburb, there they are dancing on the terrace of a club. The strings of colored lights leave glints on her satiny forehead, her wet lips and shiny brown hair, under a heavy, starless black sky impregnated by metallic music. The air feels humid, oppressive, especially since he’s drunk too much; and the alcohol’s moving through him like shifting quicksand. Each dance step he takes seems so perfect, in that minimal way he’s learned to move, as if it’s a gesture rather than a dance; but there’s also that leaden feeling.
    Out on the street, the polished fender of a Ferrari. He realizes he’s yanking Angelita toward it. No, no, she’s giggling under her breath, as he makes her go over to it, caress the shiny hood and ornament with the palm of her hand. Who in this lousy neighborhood could have such a car? Then he remembers the gold bracelet on the wrist of the silver-haired, bag-eyed businessman in the severely tailored suit and polished shoes, and the two scrawny African girls in bright blue dresses, needle marks on their arms, the hookers who were dancing with him. He thinks of the man’s stiff expression of entitlement . . . which to his surprise makes him think of the tiniest newborn, the cutest imaginable, in a flowery crib, it’s the businessman’s child, and here’s the father carousing in this sleazy neighborhood until dawn, fooling with skanky prostitutes.
    He’s suddenly so furious at this . . . this father . . . that in seconds he’s accomplished the trick of prying down the Ferrari’s window by twisting his knife between the rubber and the glass; and as Angelita keeps giggling nervously, he unlatches the door and pushes her into the car. And while her voice, now shaky, obviously drunken, is breathing, No, no, no . . . he shows her how he can break a lever to silence the shrieking alarm and cross the wires of the engine, which starts with a roar. . . .
    â€œBut I crash it a couple blocks later, I was so drunk, and get arrested,” he says with a grim chuckle. “And it seems asshole who owns car is what-do-you-call-it, government official. So police taking me to border of Slovenia and saying to me, you can never coming back to this country, buddy, you stealing a car, get out of here. And then the Slovenians having to ship me back to Romania.”
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    THE TREES OUTSIDE MELTED into the dark sky hours ago. Our first evening together is half over. We’re still in bed in front of the television. His leg is still hooked over mine. Though the late-February weather is mild, all at once the room is chilly. Outside, the leaf buds look weirdly hardened, molded from some dark metal, their branches like black bundles of cable.
    Shiveringly, we climb into a cab to ride to dinner. His peppery rankness fills the air inside. It’s a perfume part rebellion and part musk of depression. Some of it still stings my tongue from the sex we had, plunging me deeper into his dislocated thoughts. Years of failed exiles have turned him into a language machine. I can feel his mind jigsawing through multiple lexicons—Romanian, Italian, English, Hungarian, Greek, German. Language for him is the cubism of survival. He’ll speak a word and, under his breath, quiz himself for versions of it in the other languages he