A Balkan
TRAGEDY
After the decline of her scandalous Balkan family, a misfit Eastern-European heiress moves to New York to track down a long-lost family inheritance. Chronically incapable, arrogant, and bored, she discovers the harsh comical realities of the working class, and soon finds herself entangled with a histrionic Wall Street mogul.
Torn between her new humble status and the world of Manhattan's ultra-rich, she must play a brutal game of survival, deceit, and
self-discovery that will end in her entire family's salvation or doom.
FOREWARD
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Perhaps it is most useful to begin the story near the end, after we lost everything. A closer look indicates, however, that I should begin with the enormous moment I turned my villa into a flea market. Or I might commence with the gypsy thugs, or the roasted pig, or my mother screaming violently as her mink furs were being scorched. Or perhaps a few months later, in New York, on the day I met The Man Without A Name which, as his description suggests, adds some needless drama to the story. Why would one turn a villa in a flea market? What did the gypsies want? What was I doing in New York, and what more could a roasted pig possibly add to all this? I assure you the pig is paramount, as are the gypsies, and I shall clarify all questions in due course. There are indeed many places I can begin my story and it would unfold in much the same way. In fact, it is their baffling connection that alludes to something deeper in our tale.
Something profound, mysterious, and eternal.
Something like the comedy of human life.
ONE
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It was a raw, bitter night in March when I arrived in New York, and the wind was blowing so hard it could strip the face and slap it on a windshield. And here I shall begin the story, as I suspect this turn affected my life more than others. I had left Romania in a hurry just twelve hours before, and after the flight, my ears were popping with recycled air, and faceless whispers and that dooming chime of the seatbelt sign. It was a quarter to midnight. No cozy dark had welcomed me, however, but a vicious brightness that embraced me at the terminal like an afterlife experience. Then the endless rush of bodies. The ceaseless whirl of luggage carts. Excuse me, miss. Sporadic chimes. And when the sliding doors opened and shut, ghosts in sweatpants drifted to some other side. Eventually, I drifted too. Then everywhere I looked, there was a keychain and a hotdog. A bright and soulless Hell, yet with all its trashiness, it had an ultra-modern kind of charm.
TWO
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The car turned right on 67th Street, and stopped in front of number 24, not far from the Queensboro Bridge. It was a neighbourhood of everlasting middle class, with small, uniform brick Tudors perfectly aligned to form an urban, polite kind of poverty. The houses exuded the stale weary appearance of three generations, this last fact being their only asset. In front, tiny manicured lawns, neatly trimmed hedges, and various flower pots preceded the entries to achieve that sort of dressed up frugality that only Soviet fugitives are capable of. Across the street a television flickered, a man released a large, unhealthy stomach from its shirt, and a woman washed the dishes. Daily life is filled with sneaky, repetitive, incurable tragedies. One minute you’re sorting the garbage, the next you fall dead. Vivienne, my father’s estranged cousin, waited in the doorway, her face in part illuminated by the porch light. She seemed well-intentioned, with a touch of fraud. I had received her call a couple of weeks earlier. She’d heard I was coming to New York and wished to extend her invitation.
THREE
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My life, until the drama which brought it to a blast, had not been uneventful. Some would call it extreme. A superbly extreme life, for which little credit is attributed to me. Allow me to summarise. My name is Patricia Lăzărescu and I am the first child of a formidable peasant and a destitute aristocrat. My father came from new money. My mother hailed from old ruin. My mother became an extravagant housewife. My father is a very important man. But long before all this, they left for America during that capitalist craze in the nineties, in search of a big house and a nice car, or what all ex-communists dubbed “a better life.” As for me, I was deserted on my grandparents’ farm. It was a big old farm in an ancient little village at the heart of Transylvania. Most girls have a dollhouse as their early occupation. I had a barn, with its talking lambs and sparkling ponies. I grew up lonely, sequestered, but very happy, in a fresh world of milk buckets, and haystack, hoofbeats, and the smell of manure on freshly turned soil. This heaven of mine glowed with an unearthly dust that slowed its motion in the sunlight. And when it rained over the wild lavender, the fields glimmered in a bluish mist.
FOUR
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It took no more than a week for Vivienne’s intentions to unravel and before long I suspected that her generosity cloaked something else. It was not that she was a lousy host. On the contrary, she possessed the rather fussy hospitality of a five-star luxury resort. In fact, in some ways I still felt overly spoiled, as in my old life. And because I had moved to New York to cure my mellow lifestyle, I was upset to find how reluctant I was to leave her little bed and breakfast in the mornings. She was, as I imagined then, the Queen of Housekeeping. And in this pink snippet of home life, there were never any shortages of pastries, nor of any home-made breads, and carrot juice, and pumpkin seeds, and all kinds of almond things. She was obsessed with nutrition. Her refrigerator, notably, was the paradise of every hypochondriac. It was clean, and colourful, and healthy; and every time I'd open it, I could hear an angel choir. And yet, there was a disproportionate, intrusive generosity in Vivienne. Something I realised when, despite my horrified protests, at night I'd find my prettily folded panties –