“Sorry,” I mumbled. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t move away. Yet while a hazy, plum-brandy sleep pulled me under, I realized something interesting: neither did he....
Unfortunately, that small, stolen joy didn’t last, because at some point during the night I dreamed of meeting Valentin’s legendary white wolf. Or was it Mr. Sarkany’s Carpathian wolf dog? The creature was outside our wagon, circling and sniffing, and Dream Me crawled over the wagon floor and opened one of the tiny shuttered windows to reach out and offer my hand for him to sniff... until I became afraid that he might bite it off.
I awoke in a cold sweat, head aching from the brandy but painfully sober. I hated vivid dreams. My mother used to say that vivid dreams were your brain’s way of sending you messages that you tried to ignore or had forgotten while you were awake. Was my dreaming brain trying to send me a warning? Perhaps so, because I had a terrible thought:
Mr. Sarkany and his wolf dog trailed us across Europe from Istanbul.
Were we fools to think that he wouldn’t try to follow us into Romania?
JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX
June 25, 1937
Bucure?ti, Kingdom of România
Jean-Bernard has become addicted to the roasted eggplant (“aubergine,” he insists on calling it) that is served on toast at the café across the street from our hotel. We spent half the afternoon there, drinking too much coffee and reading several books for information on the bone ring. I had the distinct feeling that someone was listening to our conversation—I couldn’t say why really. Just a feeling. But we switched to French to be safe.
If Theodora were here, she’d team up with Jean-Bernard and poke fun at my poorly conjugated French verbs. I can hear her now in my head, an eight-year-old slip of a girl, practicing French alone in her room, pretending to have cosmopolitan conversations with teddy bears.
Wish she could spend more time with Jean-Bernard.
Wish I weren’t such a coward.
9
PLUM BRANDY DID NOT TASTEgood coming back up. Not the first time anddefinitelynot the second. A few hours after we’d woken to the sounds of the traders’ camp being torn down and packed up, this was all I could think about. I was well on my way to some kind of vomiting world record. And while the midmorning sun blinded the sandpaper surface of my dried-out eyes, Huck was kind enough to ensure I didn’t tip headfirst out of the canoe that was currently our transportation, holding me by the scruff of my coat while the rest of the passengers looked on in amusement.
I knew one thing: boats and hangovers did not mix.
We were crossing the Danube into Romania, packed like sardines with Valentin and Ana and a dozen other traders. Three other canoes paddled in front of us while the wagon, horses, and carts sailed on what Valentin called a ferry—and whatIwould call little more than a giant raft.
It was all completely unsafe and undeniably illegal, as we were crossing from one country to the next without going through a customs checkpoint. Valentin estimated that we were three or four miles from the Orient Express’s steamboat landing, and though the sky was overcast and the river was the color of dingy pewter, when I squinted I could make out the Romanian port town of Giurgiu along the distant shore.
“Here,” Huck said when I was fully back in the boat, handing me his handkerchief. “Maybe you should concentrate on looking at the horizon? Isn’t that supposed to help with motion sickness?”
Probably not when you’re hungover. “I’m never drinking again,” I whispered. I’d already apologized to Valentin for my drunken speech at the campfire last night. I don’t think I’d ever regretted anything so much. “Why are you not sick?” I asked Huck, miserable.
“Know my limits, don’t I?”
“Bully for you,” I said sourly.
He found this amusing. I didn’t understand how he could remain so obnoxiously cheerful in a swaying boat. I’d never felt so awful in my life.
Thankfully, though, the Danube crossing was not a lengthy one. When our boats glided through rushes near the shore, I was feeling marginally less sick and eager to debark. We were in Romania! Finally! Shame that it looked much the same as Bulgaria here. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but trees were trees were trees, and there wasn’t much else to see. Still, we were so close to civilization, I could almost weep with joy.
There was little time to appreciate it, because even though we’d successfully made our illegal border crossing, now we had to load ourselves back into horse-pulled carts and journey on back roads for several more hours. To top it all off, it looked as though it might rain.
I tried not to think about it. I just huddled between Huck and sacks of horse feed and tried to keep my eyes closed, drowsing occasionally. And before I knew it, Huck was shaking me. “We’re getting off here.”
“Here” wasn’t Bucharest, but instead a crossroads near a village commune called Calugareni. The traders were gathering in a small field off the road in a well-worn area next to a river, with remnants of previous camps. Valentin informed us that the caravan would rest here and wait for two other traders to join them; in the meantime, he needed to conduct some additional business for his father, which would require him to travel to a local village, away from the city.
“Bucharest is six or seven hours by cart, but less than an hour by bus,” he informed us. “You will be better off parting ways with us here and journeying the remainder of the way on your own.”
He then helped us gather up our luggage and walked us across the road to a rural bus stop—a wooden sign basically. No bench. No nothing. Just the dust of the road and fields for days. Huck asked how much the fare would cost, and I was relieved to find out that not only was it cheap, but Valentin’s wife was more than happy to help exchange a few of Huck’s Turkish bills for Romanian lei, as several of the traders were used to doing business with different groups of people.
When Huck thanked Ana, she told Valentin something which he translated for us: “She says it is nothing. Now, you may have to wait here awhile, but the bus will come. It takes you straight into Bucharest. Get off in Old Town at the first stop over the bridge. Walk a few blocks north to the Grand Café on the corner of a busy cross street. Big awnings. It is the meeting place for Europeans. You will find people who speak English there. Someone there will tell you how to take a taxicab to your family.”
“We’re ever so grateful for everything you’ve done for us,” I told him and Ana. “I wish we could pay you.”
