Dracula's Jumpers

Inside Bran Castle.  Photo: wikipedia

 

Exposed beams of brown wood held the ceiling and brown wood made the floor.  Neither small nor large the room accommodated neither light nor ventilation.  Rather it was musty, dull and brooding.  Bats could have lived in it.  There was almost no furniture, although centuries ago it might have been a place of small medieval gatherings, that modest space inside the castle at Bran, first built by the Saxons of Kronstadt in the 1370s under the privilege of a Hungarian king. 

The old lady, I can’t tell of her face: it was years ago and she may have been slightly stooped in her posture.  But she was shrunken and seemed to have all the ages and upheavals of Romania within her.  Despite it being summer, she wore an odious light cardigan in an unfortunate pea-green.  Conspicuous for the absence of other furniture, beside one of the walls was a brown wooden chest, of the usual type, rectangular, with a rounded hinged lid.

Unexpectedly she made us wait and as we watched she crept about like a stowaway, first to the one side of the room then the other, clutching each doorway with the curl of her bony fingers and poking her little head into each passage beyond.  There’d be no witness to her plan.

It was certainly a place where things could happen, nestled in amongst the lightly rolling and slightly wooded borderlands that divide the mysterious regions of Wallachia and Transylvania.  It was Bran Castle, famed as the home of that murderous, villainous and bloodthirsty vampire, the fabled Count Dracula.  Once satisfied we were alone the old woman turned.  From the far doorway she came and with bony curled fingers we were beckoned, closer, towards the brown wooden chest.  She looked guilty.

Romanians are a people whose temperaments are as wide as the sky.  As the steely chilly clouds winter brings, so their spirits can be tested and down, and with the summer they can crackle with a brightness outdone only by the sun.  It’s anecdotal, read-about, said-about and seemingly-witnessed, but it would explain the divergence between my summer experience and my brother’s narration: he’d been there just six months before.  The change of season might’ve been the reason. 

Regardless, there is indeed some difference: unlike most of the neighbouring nations in Eastern Europe, Romanians are not cool and cynical Slavs but rather, like Italians and Spaniards to the west they are Latinos, hot-blooded and expressive, which we’d observed but the night before.

Settling into humble lodgings in the minor town of Râşnov, on our way to Bran, we’d headed out for dinner and found a nondescript local venue.  There were few customers, but a group of maybe five young Romanians sat nearby and with ease our conversation spread.  They had just graduated from high school and were out celebrating, they said, and I wondered where all the other students were, though Râşnov wasn’t large.  Of all of them I recall Nini because, and I’m not quite sure how it came up, he was a self-confessed geography addict and we were soon quizzing each other about obscure capitals: I caught him in the Pacific Islands, beside Australia, where he did not know to give a Funafuti to my Tuvalu, and he caught me with his neighbour for I’d forgotten that his Moldova’s answer was correctly my Chisinau.  But for the most part he was faultless on his capitals, no doubt.  I’ll give him that.

After we’d connected, that group of friends invited us to another place on top of a hill by the town.  There was a white building and tables in the garden and a poor unfortunate couple, a middle aged woman with a dump of heavily styled bottle blond hair and her man were attempting to canoodle in romance.  We utterly destroyed their moment, as the only other patrons.  And we were rowdy and boisterous by then.  The woman took initiative.  She left her man to scream at us: she really yelled, such that we should be more considerate and refined.  A season of anger rolled across from her table.

Not much unusual there but the Romanian part came next, I thought.  After some time and several bouts of scolding we discovered the need to take a photo of our Romanian-graduates-and-two-Australians group.  ‘Excuse me madam,’ Nini said…  It was remarkable.  From one minute sounding as if almost ready to throttle us she obliged, and moments later, featured with her man amongst us, in the snaps.  The antagonistic parties had merged like noodles, almost in an instant!  What a change! Hot-blooded and expressive, changeable, arrange-able and connected: all the seasons in her.

Count Dracula is fictional of course, but based upon a real historical figure.  Prince of Wallachia in the 1400s, Vlad III was perhaps not a vampire, but it hardly means he was nice.  His nickname says it all, ‘Vlad the Impaler’ with reference to his favourite execution method, and with victims that are said to have numbered in the tens of thousands, his infamy spread across Europe.  Perhaps his temperament went up and down, at the ready to snap and impale.  It’s not to say he never tried to have quiet romantic dinners with one of his two consecutive wives.  Perhaps his was but a more extreme version of that read-about, said-about and seemingly-witnessed Romanian fashion: all the seasons in him.

Bony curled fingers clutched the latch of the chest, that following afternoon in the castle.  She looked around once more to see nobody coming, then at us, before opening the lid.  It wouldn’t have been out of place had there been blood or gore or an infant vampire in that chest in the castle at Bran.  But instead she unfolded, lifted out, not less than ingenuity and survival.  With the upheaval of Romania within her and the post-communist era to greet her old age, she’d taken to knitting and I don’t know if she was a paid guide at the castle or not, but in that chest was her little secret: the garments sideline.

Surprisingly though, even her cottage industry had a ghastly side to it.  Politely one could say she was new to the craft or mention the deterioration of eyesight common to old age, for her range of offerings was coarsely knit and in style, no less other-worldly than a vampire.  There were jumpers in vomit yellow and jumpers in mottled maroon.  There were lopsided hats in beige which should have been round; and it could be a failing of memory but I seem to recall the sleeves on the jumpers were not necessarily and entirely of the same length.  One might be for a short and stout gent while its mate was orang-utan suitable.  At the very least I’d be sure to count the number of fingers on any gloves for sale there.  It was Dracula’s castle.  It was frightening.

But, ingenuity and survival, she’d tried; and I tried nonetheless to find something that might be vaguely of use, to support her, to encourage her, to reward her little venture; but alas, after viewing all the stock there was nought, not a single item I could bring myself to purchase.

Weeks later at home in Sydney I met my brother, and we spoke of our separate travels in Europe’s East.  ‘Did you meet that old woman selling jumpers from a chest in Dracula’s castle?’ he’d said and we laughed, comparing notes on her special artistry.  ‘I bought a few things,’ he confessed, and truth is, in retrospect, I wish I’d bought a few things too.




More knitwear? Well of course the jumpers are smaller in Lilliput, and coloured-pencil-set designs are sometimes worthwhile... but whatever, as long as it's winter, without dispute.


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Dracula's Jumpers

About Mrs. Val

Mrs. Val (Centre) with her wonderful daughter and Aunty Val (left)

There were gloves and a scarf in it, not to mention a woolly hat, the day Val took me to their family apartment to her mother.  Donetsk in Ukraine is a city of about two million people and four full seasons.  It has forty-plus summers and minus-twenty winters and we’d not reached the summer yet.

It took me a while to come across her name these years later.  It’s Tanya.  I suppose it’s a peculiar habit to get about renaming people quite independently of whatever arrangement of letters the rest of the world has granted them, but I often do.  It’s why her regular name didn’t come easily, because I never used it.  It may be my mother’s inheritance, because in her family several of the names in use have no correspondence to birth certificates.  As with Bengali newborns, in my mother’s family allocating names is like clothes shopping.  Names need trying out first, it takes them a while to fit and sometimes they get changed before they suit.  It’s unfortunate for it’s neither very creative nor as a title correct, but by virtue of being Val’s mother it was Mrs. Val that settled in to be her name.  There is significant doubt she knows I call her that, but none that she wouldn’t much mind.

Mrs. Val lives in the usual Soviet apartment block, tall, slightly dour and similar to all the others thereabouts.  I lived in one too, that the language centre had rented for their native-speaker English teacher.  Outside the block was the arrangement of dilapidated swings and previous seesaws amongst the still leafless trees that marked the usual generous allotment of space between the several blocks in the cluster.  Val and I followed a path of worn damp earth to the stoop of the building.

The block had eight or so floors to it, which meant inside it featured one of those gorgeous old lifts of the criss-crossed iron out door variety, doors to be pushed apart by hand, of the laminated plywood inner door variety, door to be opened by hand.  With some luck once all the doors were shut again the little light in the lift would turn on automatically and hopefully upon pressing the chunky black plastic button for the floor the little engine would whirr.  Luck and hope: they were with us on that day.

Mrs. Val seemed a little nervous when she opened the door.  I was too.  In part it was because like her daughter and I, she was an English teacher, though in her achievements Mrs. Val was on an altogether higher level.  Ukrainian English teachers: how I admire them!  To think they had studied the language for five years at university without the benefit of having had the opportunity to converse with a native-speaker.  In Soviet times there had been the occasional guest lecturer, so they said, but because of politics it’d hardly been possible to have a chat one to one.  On the very earliest occasions some of them spoke with me, there remained a slight hesitation with regards to how their language skills when confronted with a native would fare.

Just inside, we removed layers: gloves, scarf and shoes; before she led us into the sitting room.  I took it in, Mrs. Val and the room.  Isn’t it funny how new experiences can sometimes gently accidentally touch upon a childhood moment and bring to the present warmth and light?  Mrs. Val made me remember the elephants.

When I was six or seven one of my father’s work colleagues used to live on the corner down the street.  They were family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery and my parents used to take me there when they’d go to visit.  While in that house there hadn’t been much for a kid to do I used to enjoy it: it had a kind of happiness in it that used to rub off.  So while they spoke about adult things I would busy myself with the elephants, the big, medium and little black wooden ones that must’ve emigrated from Africa to settle as a herd by their fireplace.  And Mr. Montgomery would serve one of his concoctions of soda water and lemon flavouring, with a plastic drink mixer or even one of those little umbrellas in it.  ‘Be careful with the elephants,’ my father used to say.

At a basic level it was the red of Mrs. Val’s hairdo that linked her with Mrs. Montgomery, but more than that it was the ambience of her living room.  Mrs. Val spoke gently with an accent rich in that Russianness which once was East Ukraine.  She spoke about the changes in the classroom: how once teachers had been dedicated enough that if one of the students was absent they’d take it upon themselves to visit the family in person to inquire the reason.  She still had that quality.

When she spoke of that and because of the tapestry on the wall I thought of Iran.  The tapestry seemed like one Iranians might choose to decorate their apartment, and her words about teaching I’d heard from one of her Iranian colleagues, Farhonde.  Mrs. Val was calmer I suppose.  Farhonde always specialised in energy and not a day under sixty she was, when she started the snowball fight on the slopes of Damavand.  Yet how much they had in common: teachers to the bone.

After the Soviet collapse the economics of things were more than tight.  In the larger capital, Kyiv, teaching salaries might barely cover the cost of the transport to get there and home again.  In Donetsk the situation was hardly better.  Mrs. Val used to spend her free time at her small land plot on the city outskirts, digging in and digging out potatoes.  I know she enjoyed that but there were times it’d been a little more necessary than it should have been; and of course the pension system she had spent her whole working life anticipating was more or less gone.  I don’t suppose while westerners were celebrating the Soviet collapse they thought much of Mrs. Val; but on the other hand without political change I couldn’t have met her so freely.

Donetsk is a city of mines: they’re dotted about even inside suburban areas and from Mrs. Val’s balcony you could see a few slag heaps rising up from the horizon.  From my arrival in Donetsk I used to consider myself a bit of a miner, though while others went underground in search of coal the minerals I sought were new experience, new culture and new learning.  Of the other sort of mineral I cannot tell you, but in what I fossicked for Donetsk was incredibly wealthy.  From the balcony Val pointed to the slag heaps.  ‘When I was a kid,’ she said, ‘I used to think those heaps were the mountains of Georgia.’  It was the opposite from me, for I’ve always found distances reduce as we grow.

‘Well…,’ it was the silvery and the sublime, the word Mrs. Val used, drawing it out slightly and peppering it through the conversation.  It was a word she’d crafted to mean anything, dependent on the occasion.  Sometimes it was an acknowledgement we were sharing an imperfect world; sometimes it was like a solitary drum beat to mark time. But mostly that tiny word held an exact and easily comprehensible meaning: nobody brings to it the adaptability she does.

‘Well…’ she said, standing.  It was time to prepare lunch.  I don’t know, just I followed her and in the kitchen we sat making pilmeni, Russian dumplings, together.  We pushed the meat filling into the folded pastry and crafted little scalloped edge packets with our fingers.  Mrs. Val’s pilmeni were neat and exact; mine were inexperienced and shoddy.  And sitting there I was at home.

I remember too the salt.  Val had left the living room during the meal and after some minutes, returned.  ‘What have you done with it?’ she asked her mother, a little demandingly.  ‘I’ve hidden it. You’ll never find it!’ Mrs. Val said, unapologetic, and, turning to me added, ‘she eats too much salt.’  ‘Yes, she does,’ I said without thinking and we laughed.

In the classroom, it’s Mrs. Val I think of: if ever I managed to be half the teacher she is then I did well.  Even without seeing her teach I knew it, that she was the professional high-water mark.  And isn’t it nice to imagine a Mrs. Val world?  There’d be no battlefield in it, only the classroom.  In Australia, the Federal Police would not have recently completed jungle training to prepare to potentially shoot pellets at the Afghan asylum seekers who arrive by boat, many of them children, in order to force them onto a plane to Malaysia.  In a Mrs. Val world there’d be no need to refuse to help people or to expel foreignness.  ‘Well…’

After several hours we left, and walking down the stairs I said, ‘your mother is wonderful.  So I don’t know what happened to you!’  Val stopped in her tracks, shooting an arrow of a glare; but we were well passed the stage where she could not know the meaning was opposite.  With me, she had long since lost her licence to be genuinely offended.  It’s the way of things.

And in Dhaka we’re reduced to the text box.  After chatting away with Val a few months ago, as we were winding up, I typed, ‘and when you see your mother, tell her I love her.’  ‘I know,’ the message came back, ‘and she loves you too.’ ‘Well…’





Mrs. Val may teach, but did she ever face the challenge of the the skull in the classroom, or have to overcome the language barrier to explain about the buffaloes or accidentally end up as a juice-drinking golfer?  Such things can happen, believe you me...


This article is also published in Star Magazine, here: About Mrs. Val