No one would ever guess where I am now. An ancient 400 year old monastery in Romania. It’s a 400 year old complex spiralling headfirst into the 18th century. You can’t tell them it’s the 21st in the face of cows grazing lazily and the nuns still holding to hard wooden bed traditions. Not to mention the thrashing you get when you misbehave.
I’m not a nun and don’t intend to become one. I’m not even Orthodox. But I live here for now while my husband does some things for the sisters. I seem to make a scandal everyday and dance precariously close to one of those disciplinary encounters at each move I make. But since I’m immune, I might as well continue to exist in my own favourite American way.
Today I finally found an internet signal for my laptop. Unfortunately it was located on the cement in the parking area right next to the back kitchen. So I sat there in the middle of plain sight- as around the corner came the main director/sister/ leader of the place with an even greater high religious church official and his entourage of bishops. Oops! In this country it’s believed that if a woman sits on the concrete she’ll get a bad disease so people freak out. Not to mention that I was there with some strange machine gathering foreign transmissions and repositioning it every minute like E.T. phoning home. In penance I may be inclined to kiss her ring in submission like the others the next time I see her.
But this was really nothing compared to my morning adventure traipsing thru the village in a rickety gypsy wagon pulled by a skin- and-bones horse and a wild man with a whip. All this just for a measly phone recharge card. I can hear them now “What were you doing with that blonde woman in your wagon Mr. and Mrs. Gypsy?”
I did get to telephone my husband for the first time in two weeks. He’s currently in Vienna and I am forced to plow through this terrain alone. I can see why Shakespeare said “Get thee to a nunnery.” If I can just steer clear of the workmen, avoid the snakes, keep my fingernails just a little cleaner, get rid of these moths that keep flying in the window, have something more than potatoes and cabbage to eat once and a while (like meat maybe???) and not get discovered smoking, then there’s a chance for survival.
But this is naïve thinking. There are dangers, and manoeuvres, plots and subplots here that would make your hair curl. We have a spy, a crazy lady who says she smokes porn cigarettes but is really quite charming, tourist men walking about in skirts, hard working monks in long black dresses driving tractors, two distinctly separate kitchens depending on your status- which I visit often just to make a stir, really pink pigs who do nothing but eat all day, a girl who lets the cows take her for a walk and one crazy Cujo dog of my husbands who likes to kill whatever he can catch. I’m on his hit list..
While I wait for this termination I continue to write my manuscripts about living in Romania and Austria, as well as a book about Eastern European mentality. The first two are pure fiction because people would accuse me of exaggeration if I tried to bill them as fact. The third one is everything you should know if you don’t want to be mugged, have your organs removed, be poisoned by food, kidnapped by the mafia, sold into prostitution by gypsies or left in a foreign country to die of the common cold.
So my question is- since I can’t seem to find a Deep Throat in this forsaken land… Does anyone know a good agent? Drop me a line. E-mail,…… not cement shoes.
