Nathan Cover
Casa de Piatra
“Casa de piatra!” Andrei shouts to me, over the pulsing of the music.
It means, ‘house of stone.’ The foundation that every marriage should be based upon. There is a twinkle in his eye, and his sandy blonde hair is parted over to one side, but he has specifically been cautioned to have one drink with me. The hora is circling louder and faster now that we are about to dance the Brasoveanca and I know I must be out front and center for that.
Stanga (left), dreapta (right), stanga, dreapta, hai sa facem brasoveanca (Ready! -Now we dance the Brasoveanca!) Tre pas inainte (Three steps forward), tre pas inapoi (three steps back), tre pasi inainte, tre pasi inapoi…
We are dancing the Brasoveanca, I am a lousy dancer, but the steps to this dance are literally in the words of the song and the guests call them out as they dance, so it is next to impossible to get lost. Andreea’s white-gloved fingers are interlaced with mine and they soar overhead as we cross backward and forward, left and right, passing each other. After each round of the song, each couple advances one up and the couple at the front runs to the back of the line, to start over again.
My primary function at the wedding is to not get so drunk that I embarrass myself or pass out. This is not as simple as it seems. It very much involves pacing. Romanian weddings are all night affairs. From sundown to sunup, there are courses of food, drinks and dancing, each equally important. The first one I attended was a near disaster and I remember little of it. I was drinking at an American pace and thought they were exaggerating when the length of the wedding party was described. Somewhere around 2 AM I hit a wall and had to sit in the corner the rest of the evening propped up and luckily not vomiting.
But this evening was different. It was not just a wedding; it was my wedding!
The cream-colored tablecloths overlaid with burgundy mantles lent the room a rosy glow, but all the finery just led to more confusion on my part about which fork to use next. Rather than making me feel fancy and special, I just felt inferior and confused. Is this a salad spoon or a dessert fork? Who the fuck knows? These Europeans with their goofy proper table rules.
All the women in her family have these piercing blue eyes. Her mother’s eyes were knives. She was always very courteous to me, but thinly veiled behind the cold stoic blue, the knives were never very far. Her goddaughter had those exact same blue eyes. They are sitting together there on a bench, each set of eyes a scarier replica of the last. Her father sits in an opposite corner of the large hall, nursing a tall, clear drink which is not water.
Her best friend, Crina, had drilled it into my head; “Mire and mireasa, (the groom and the bride) have to be very strong! The entire party will get its energy from you! If you have energy and you dance, everyone will want to dance! If you sit, the others will sit and they will be bored.”
There was also the managing of the congratulatory toasts. I generally have one pace of drinking: FASTER. Up and down the hatch you go. I drink water or soda the same way. It was a mini catwalk of Scylla and Charybdis. Accept every invitation to drink, yet drink as little as possible for fear of offending the toast proposer.
Doctor Mircea, a family friend of theirs, toasts me while taking a huge step forward. I have never seen him unwind to his full height. At 6’7” or so, he towers over me. He looks composed even while wasted. “Casa de PIATRA!” he shouts without a trace of slur, clinking my glass hard. I happen to know that he keeps a mistress in the city center and that his wife knows about it, but doesn’t say anything. She also looks composed while sitting demurely at the table behind him, taking tiny bites of the entrée and sipping carefully at a glass of wine.
Moldova is known for its sweet white wines, but I would not get drunk from sampling those overly much. I have trained for the past decade on harder things, but still it was necessary to continually toggle between eating to keep my stomach full, drinking to keep the toasters happy, and dancing buzzed and giddy on a full stomach to keep the other guests from getting bored. On the other hand, so what if they were going to laugh at me and judge me? I’m dressed the part, tonight at least, with a decent suit on. I figure how hard can it be to dance in a circle?
The hora is a big community dance, everyone’s arms are linked. So, I would just look at whatever they were doing next to me on the right and do that. I would know when the dance was about to change direction because I would suddenly and decidedly smash my foot down on some poor girl's toes as I confidently felt the rhythm of the song and she confidently danced the correct steps going in the opposite direction.
After a couple of incidents of this nature, people usually give me a wider berth, but they can’t get too much space because our arms are still linked. Switching directions is always the worst part, though, because it seems to come out of nowhere. We’ve built anice rhythm and I’ve finally put together the correct order of the steps, and then next thing I know Cer scuze! (excuse me!)
The hora is very inclusive, but it is not free-styling by any means. For the older people in the crowd, these dances are what nightclubs are to the younger generation. During Romania’s communist days, there were no drugs, no nightclubs like today. People would gather in the forest on Saturday nights and dance the hora together for hours. You can see it on wedding nights, people 40 years my senior were outlasting anyone my age on the dance floor.
Teachers at the school I saw move like bags of concrete on Monday morning, miraculously spring to life, like comical marionettes who had suddenly had the true nature of their being revealed to them. The change in rhythm was instant and automatic. The moment they joined the hora, they shed decades in a step. As the sweat and alcohol poured off them, they laughed and sang, clapped and shouted, teased and encouraged, but mostly theirs was a pure childlike innocence possessed of a muscle memory that the mind had no business meddling with. It was a complete control+alt+delete moment and the tired intellectuals I knew from the teacher’s lounge were re-booted as fervent masters of limbs that would have made Shiva blush.
**
Andrei plops down next to me. He cannot stay long. In the countryside, sometimes they will read out the donated amounts people have given to the entire crowd. Ours is a refined city wedding, so no such thing will occur. Yet, the expectation is that others will find out how much you gave, and if it is not enough, you will be shamed in the gossip later.
Andrei smiles at me. “Uite-te la tine! (Look at you!) Do you remember sleeping on the beach, you rascal? And now look, here you are, dressed and stuffed like a prize pig!”
“If you had shown up on time, I wouldn’t have had to.”
He waves his hand and laughs. “Ce sa fac? (What can I do?) Am venit cu acceleratul, (we have very slow and old things in Romania. I cannot be responsible for the behavior of the trains).”
I smile also and hold up a glass to toast. Andrei catches something out of the corner of his eye. Before I can move, an unseen hand has deftly removed my beverage.
“Come now boys, the next dance is starting. You can’t spend the whole night gossiping like old ladies. Let’s dance!”
“No one is even up there, Crina.”
“Of course not! They are waiting on you, domnul mire!”
I resent her intrusion and her not-so-subtle efforts to shoo Andrei along on his way. Out of all the faces in the crowd here, there are many I have never exchanged more than a sentence with. By the time I return from the dance, Andrei has departed out the door of my life and off into his own.
Stanga!
Sure enough, though, once I get up and move toward the dance floor, others begin to follow and the DJ changes the music to a more hora appropriate song.
“How am I supposed to lead the dance? I don’t even know what it is!”
“Just do what I’m doing,” she says. “Where is Andruta?”
Dreapta!
I don’t know.
Andreea arrives. She has been talking with her brother Ion. Ion and I have made an uneasy peace, I think. He finds me a little weird maybe, but if that’s what his sister wants, well, ok I guess. He is my ‘best man’ for our purposes, well-fit and sporting, likes cars and status and being a well-born son of Iasi. We have very little in common. None of my friends from home are able to attend due to the wedding being so far away, and come to think of it, I didn’t invite them. Not even my own parents are at this wedding.
I had to convert to Romanian Orthodoxy to make the wedding happen at all. The priest, a considerate man, agrees to do the wedding even though it isn’t strictly legal with the state, no marriage license and all that since we want to do that in the states for paperwork reasons. He considers it worth going under the table to save a lost Protestant soul from the clutches of hell.
His concern is that the bond be acceptable in the eyes of God, not the eyes of the bureaucrats. That was a pretty ridiculous ceremony in and of itself. Me repeating a bunch of phrases in the old language forms of Romanian, something akin to a non-native speaker trying to make sense of the King James Bible. Luckily, they only needed me to repeat and nod yes for the magic transformation to occur. That and a lot of crossing myself right to left in the Orthodox style. It was everything I could do to keep from laughing as he flung the holy water at my heathen face repeatedly.
On the next break in the music, I am informed that the bride has gone missing. “Oh no,” I feign dismay.
STANGA!.
Eventually her captors are located and after I slug down several good hearty drinks in her absence, we begin the negotiations for her safe return. The price is set at several bottles of imported Jack Daniels whiskey. I try to talk them down from 3 to 2, but am accused of being cheap.
I mean, what the fuck, I was just told I’m supposed to negotiate. I couldn’t care less if they take everything in the place from the tablecloths on down. Whatever is left at the end of the night is going back to their house anyway. 3 bottles it is.
DREAPTA!
Andreea is returned to me about half an hour later. She grins slightly, convinced that the look of worry on my face is from fear that she might have been legitimately captured.
“Three bottles of whiskey, that’s all I’m worth to you! Hmph,” she pretends to pout.
HAI SA FACEM
“Come on,” I say, “I didn’t even know what I had to bargain with! I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t deliver.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she mutters, theoretically joking, but it stings nonetheless.
BRASOVEANCA!
Our interaction is disrupted by calls for specific bride/groom dances which I can now only vaguely remember...Something with a garter and chants and the lifting of a chair?
TRE PAS INAINTE!
I should have known it was doomed from the start. I went to the wrong restaurant on our first date. By the time I figured it out, we were at two different pizza places on the opposite side of town.
TRE PASI INAPOI!
Different energies. Different angles. Story of us.
That night, as the wedding was winding down, we were trying to get a large vat of wine into the car. My father-in-law and I were “helping” but it kept spilling a little in the corner.
“Curge din el” he kept repeating (It is leaking)
‘Curge din el.’ (He is leaking/the vat in Romanian is masculine). The others continued to ignore him, as we all gathered around trying to get the damn thing situated. It took several tries to turn it to get it to set right so we could get the other leftover items in as well.
“Curge din el,” Gheorghe kept mumbling on the ride home. The others, tired as they were, took up this chorus, and began laughing hysterically every time he repeated it, The melding of the sunrise and everyone’s exhaustion brought us out of our heads a little loopy.
I’m delirious by this point of the night, but my father-in-law keeps muttering about the stupid wine vat leaking. Half the time he goes off into rants about reincarnation in his thick Moldovan accent and I can only understand every tenth word. The rest of the family will immediately ignore him when he starts on these. The man is a ghost in his own home. People walk out of the room right by him in mid-sentence without bothering to glance in his direction. His thick tangled beard obscures a lot of his face, and though he grimaces from tooth infections, there is still something likable about him. He doesn’t fit in with this crowd. He’s lived here his whole life and isn’t made for this kind of event any more than I am. He’s lost among his own people.
I’ve had too many horas or glasses or judging looks or celebratory toasts or what have you by then to keep track of everything., but I remember the sound of raucous laughter as Gica mutters one last time half to us and half to himself,
Ai grija, domnilor, curge din el!
As we slosh up the gradual hill of Copou and into the mercilessly bright sunlight of the next morning, part of me smiles and drinks on leaving a leaky trail out onto the world where the rest of our stone house life awaits.
Nathan Cover is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Romania from 2004-2006. His flash fiction has appeared in X-ray and BULL and his nonfiction work can be found in Hypertext Review.