Lost In Transylvania
Such is the power of myth that simply saying Transylvania conjures a world seemingly so distant and shrouded in mystery you almost feel it couldn't be found if you tried to get there.
Is it even a real place?
Turns out it is, and if you drive the mist shrouded route that runs north along River Olt and through the Southern Carpathian Mountains from Bucharest, it does feel mythic and remote.
Sibiu, a town in the region of Transylvania, still possesses its medieval square and surrounding buildings, the sort of which evoked in me memories of the childless town in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Defensive walls that partially surround old town can still be seen.
Centuries old, narrow-cobbled streets snake their way under the town's 19th century iron walk bridges and encircle steepled churches that overlook terracotta shingle roofed homes, which probably housed cobblers and small artisans before the world industrialised, and still house wine taverns.
Outside of town, the preserved and restored remnants of an old Romanian farming village remain, complete with thatched rooves, wooden windmills, water wheels, and forests with breadcrumbs on its paths leading you, somewhere...
Sibiu just feels like the place a fairy-tale might start. Or probably did!
When young, Michaela lived on a small farm before moving into town, tucked away from plain sight behind not-so-discreet high walls and steel gates.
True to a fairy-tale, our young and beautiful protagonist escaped the mythic corner of the old world to land in the New World, working in finance and leveraging her beauty into the world of fashion, and falling in love.
Finance and fashion in New York are a long way from the cobblestones and waterwheels of Transylvania.
The "glory days" she called them.
But we didn't meet in New York, we met on a rather misty and drizzly afternoon in Sibiu. The Airbnb profile said she and her partner ran their bed and breakfast, which fit my BnB preferences; staying in a comfortable home with a bit of interaction with English speaking locals.
It seemed both Michaela and her daughter Isobel were happy for a guest when I arrived. Michaela apologising for my not-so-long wait to get inside the steel gates, three-year-old Isobel taking my hand as I walked down the driveway.
"This is a great town, we really like it here, I hope you will too" she said, as we got through the normal 'great place to visit' chitchat you expect and enjoy from hosts. We talked some more, and Michaela generously offered to drive me to old-town, saving me a walk in the drizzle.
"No. He's not here today. He doesn't like it here very much..." she offered a little curiously when I asked if her partner was around or might join us.
Amongst other moments, the delivery of his whereabouts gave me that sense, which only occurs after the fact, that something seemed just ever so slightly off.
Simple tell-me-about-you-and-this-place questions sometimes came with slight vagueness or detail that seemed designed to compensate for...well, I'm not sure. Sometimes there was a hint of... resignation. Was it resignation? Sadness? Perhaps. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, whatever it was.
Later that afternoon Michaela, with Isobel in tow, gave me a town tour. As Michaela pointed out the famous and noteworthy town locations; the town square, a famous bridge, where to eat traditional food, Isobel occasionally grabbed my hand or even motioned to be picked up in the way kids sometimes do. She wasn't shy at all.
"I'm sorry if she's annoying you. She can do that."
"No, not at all. She's fine, I'm enjoying it!" which was true.
"Her curly hair reminds me of my daughter when she was young."
Talking to strangers is sometimes easier than people we know. Perhaps that's why, one little revelation at a time; in the car, on the impromptu town tour, morning and afternoon chats as I came and went, Michaela shared her story. Not through extraction on my part but more from wanting to talk, I think.
The I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it feeling started to make sense.
Her mother, and only surviving parent, took ill with pancreatic cancer when Michaela was living in New York. American health care might be outrageously expensive but it's probably better than Romania's, so she brought her mother to the States for treatment.
For a while it worked. Her mum got a little better, Michaela met somebody (in the hospital where her mother was being treated, by chance), fell in love, and soon fell pregnant with Isobel. The fairy-tale was still alive, life in the new world continued.
But the illness returned after her mother had returned home. She was beyond hope. Life circled back to Romania as the family came back to be with Michaela's mum.
The unwinding of the glory days was underway.
Eventually the illness took her mum, and the temporary return became permanent as the family's life took root in Romania.
"It's better to raise Isobel here" she explained, "we have a big house with a yard. You can't get that in New York". Having been to New York, I could see the sense.
Your hometown can always feel a little foreign after you've lived away, as it was for Michaela. But Romania is unquestionably foreign for a New Yorker who has never lived there, not least because of the language.
And as if the earlier vagueness never happened, the price paid for the house and yard was revealed. "He doesn't like it here" wasn't just a general observation of her partners opinion of his new hometown, and "he's not here today" wasn't just the reason I wouldn't meet her partner on that day.
There was no partner, not anymore.
The only people rattling around the oversized house were Michaela and Isobel. I immediately wondered if that was why Isobel attached herself to me? Was she really just an openly friendly three-year-old or did she gravitate to a male presence now there was none at home?
“We took it hard when her dad left, Isobel had many nightmares. She still sleeps with me.” That revelation and the weariness of its delivery said much.
Still, it seemed curious to maintain a pretence he was around. Counting Isobel as part of the 'we' was accurate, but the context was just a little unconventional. Maybe nobody bothered to ask? Maybe she didn't interact with guests long enough to even discuss such topics? Most likely it was just a way for a single mum to deter trouble.
After putting together all previous conversations, the question I chewed over most was "I wonder which loss she grieved the most? Her mother, her partner, or her life in New York?".
We expect to lose our parents. That's an inevitability, even though it amounts to a loss of a constant in our life, for most of us anyway. And maybe the relationship with her partner wasn't long and deep enough to generate the heart break it could, even though it still amounted to the traumatic loss of partner and father to her daughter.
Something told me it was probably the loss of her life in New York. A life of glamour, sparkle, and maybe even status. That's the loss that hard-landed her back in the place she escaped. The unwinding of the dream and the unlikelihood any part of that life would return.
Resignation, if that was what I sensed, would be understandable.
It seemed Michaela was climbing out of the triple-blow of loss and trying to build some happiness and acceptance of her new life, back in the place it started.
When you're travelling it's easy be absorbed in your own journey. You're writing your own story as you go. You expect and hope your path intersects with the journey of others, maybe becoming companions for an hour, a day, or a week, and that intersection becomes part of each traveller's story.
This was different. This had a feeling of me dropping into someone else's story, nothing more than a passing observer with no part to play whatsoever.
Not a footnote to be made.
And so, as I quietly walked down the drive early on the last morning, it felt like I wasn’t just leaving a town and destination but a story. A story with a fairy tale-esque quality that started and finished behind the high walls and steel gates of an empty house, in a medieval town, in a faraway corner of the world, where myths are born.
