News of our encampment on the riverside grounds spread quickly. Locals came to see us. For twenty years their contact with outside people, westerners, had been limited to none. We were a strange gaggle of young people from beyond their borders and from outside their everyday consciousness. They stood, a respectful distance from us, in groups throughout the trees of the campground. Generally, the Romanians were a slightly shorter people than us, dark skinned, with dark brown eyes and dark hair, and supporting, for the most part, handsome countenances. They did not strike me as particularly happy, nor as unhappy, rather, as if the goal was, “Let me live, let’s get through this, as we have gotten through so much before.”

Then, the mayor arrived.

We didn’t know who he was. He drove alone in small, boxy, foreign car of Russian make. Foreign to us. The car was black and its interior smelled of a car from the 1940’s, if you know what that smell is.

The man stepped from his car. He was dressed in a dark suit jacket and a short brimmed, fedora-like hat, and his body shape I would have called rotund, back then, but now recognize as simply healthy. He spoke no English. We came to understand his position through our broken German and French. He spoke more German than French. And he spoke Russian, too, which probably explained his exalted position within this community. He was testament to the long-standing struggles between Germany and Russia, who have attempted to establish spheres of influence in this swath of Europe for centuries. Oddly, I have known Romanians here in the States who have called themselves Hungarian because they preferred to be associated with the prestige of the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, rather than the province of their birth.

The mayor, after we all shook hands, went to the back of his car and opened the trunk and he took from his trunk a small fold-up card table (the type my mother used to play bridge on, when it was her turn to host bridge night, the table-top made of a sort of super-compressed cardboard -- good for cards to slide across). On the table, he placed a small round cake, like a raisin cake, and some small sipping glasses, and then he brought out a bottle of cognac. It was a celebration! We were willing to toast anything and after a couple snifters of cognac of fine quality, although I am no judge of cognac, happiness became the drug of choice. We all exchanged hats and the mayor road around the campground on my white Raleigh five-speed and the bottle was soon empty.     

Being of college spirit and having seen a second bottle of cognac in the trunk of his car when he brought out the fold-up card table, I communicated in some unknown fashion I cannot recall, that we would be honored to drink his second bottle of cognac as well. He demurred, as if maybe that second bottle was reserved for some other destination, his mistress, who knows? But my boldness sometimes reveals itself, and I cajoled “Oh no, no, maintenant c’est tres bien, c’est tres bon, pas!” putting my hand towards the inside of the car’s small trunk. He took the bait. He could not refuse us. He brought out the second bottle, and the polylingual, multilingual, party flowed on in stammering fluidity.

His citizens reservedly enjoyed seeing their mayor cajoling with us, even if they were not partaking of the imbibement themselves. It was evident that this was the type of class structure that might emerge within a single party system. Advancement was loyalty based, not merit. Although clearly there were qualities that set the mayor apart -- his joviality, his quickness. I had no perspective, no experience, to establish any real contextual understanding of local power beyond this small encounter. He was doing what he could within the system he had inherited, and, even within our limited conversation, I could tell he yearned of future days when he and his people could experience the freedom and protection we from the west embodied, we from the west projected. He packed up. We parted on good terms. The afternoon was advancing. I asked the mayor where I could catch a train to Bucharest. It was time to split up. I was going back south. The van would continue to the Soviet Union. We worked out a plan.

On the way to the small train crossing, we stopped at a country store surrounded by nothing by fields, a couple hedgerows. It was empty. The shelves were empty. A few cans of herring, probably from the Baltic, a wooden crate with sad carrots -- big, but limp -- nothing really, not even potatoes. A big woman sat on a wooden stool near the door. She could not help. She had no choice, no choices. Nothing to sell. We pointed to the fields outside and asked where is all the food, where is the harvest? She understood and waved an arm over her head like pointing to Russia, and conveyed it was all gone, shipped to Russia, taken by the Soviets. Her reservation was heavy on us and we went on to find the railroad crossing and my friends deposited me there at the crossing with no station and others gathered waiting for the train too. They looked at my bike. One man asked me how much it cost and when I did the conversion on a piece of paper with a pencil, he made a scene of it, and he called others around to see my calculations, to show them that I could do mathematics. It wasn’t the cost of the bike that interested them but the numbers, the method of calculation itself. I never knew if his amazement was because I could do mathematics at all, like no one there could?, or that he was astonished I used the same numbers and denominations they used, expecting something more indecipherable or foreign from me. The train came and I had my way south. The country folk, the villagers, the women and old men, climbed aboard the train. They skies were grey and it began to rain and the long fields were wet and brown.