No Dogs No Gipsies

Life in a Village Fit for a King

“You can have a good life in Romania. But there are two rules. Don’t mess with the Gipsies. And leave the dogs alone.” I immediately thought of a scene in Gatlif’s movie Transylvania where a Romany girl is compared to a stray dog. The main character in the film gets the same advice: Leave them alone. Ionel does not say this to be mean. He says it to save me from heartache. 

For seven years I have bounced back and forth between the Netherlands and Romania. I always thought that eventually I would lean towards Romania permanently. I did not come here to save stray dogs, although I collected a fair few. I also did not come to “fix” the Gipsies, even if I loved working with Romani kids for years. I came for far more selfish reasons. To own my own modest, natural, home and cultivate a forest garden. All I wanted was a small homestead, have time to write and cuddle the cat. Something that I would never be able to achieve in the Netherlands, where, as a terminal cancer patient in remission (there aren’t enough numbers to declare me healthy) with a part time freelance job, I could never afford it. 

What do you do when the dreams you had don’t come true, or they do, and you learn they don’t serve you? When you are forty-seven years old and a decade past the official expiration date of a terminal, dual cancer diagnosis? Is it too late to pivot? 

I spent the last year in Valea Zalanului, or Zalanpatak, the famous Transylvanian village that is so loved by King Charles. It broke my heart. Now I write to heal, to share and to carve out a new path for the future. A future I never even expected to have.

It should have been such a simple story. Girl is born (or found on the beach as the family legend goes). The girl is free and feral at first but moves away from the sea. Closer to the forest she grows up clever and curious, sophisticated even. She becomes a city girl, trades trees for dresses and shoes. Disenchanted, she, a woman now, seeks new adventures. It is not a road without hurdles. Cancer comes knocking, pounding. But she lives, against all odds. She wants to go back to the trees. Rewild. She finds her home in the hills of Transylvania. The End. But it did not quite go that way. At all.

THE VILLAGE VIRGIN

As I was making the rounds in our new backyard, there was yelling. It took me a few seconds to orientate and find out where it was coming from. Someone leaned wobbly over my fence on the far left of the barn. I walked up the slope, towards the figure, with all dogs and cats in tow. A short and sturdy arm crossed the fence, reaching out. I reciprocated and a strong handshake followed.

-‘You are new in the village,’ she said, while trying to keep her balance on the giant river rock she was standing on, just about tall enough for her to peep over the fence. The grey roots of her reddish-brown hair betrayed her age more than the few wrinkles on her face. I was glad she spoke in Romanian. The three paragraphs in my grammar school history book had not been enough to prepare me for Transylvania. Settling in a remote village in Covasna meant being surrounded by Hungarian, a language I had not learnt yet.

-‘Hi, I am Margit. I live there.’ She pointed in the direction of the derelict building across the road.

-‘Do you live alone?’

I knew what question was about to follow, after answering that one affirmatively.

-‘You are not married?’

Bingo. No, I was not. Only one man ever asked, and I said no. He was much younger than I am, and I felt he should have children. Post cancer that was no longer an option for me, so I politely declined. He is now married with kids, so I felt I made the right decision. I did not say all this out loud to my newly introduced neighbour. All I said was, no.

-‘Have you ever been married?’ That one I had not been expecting.

-‘No.’ I replied.

-‘Oh, so you are still a virgin!’ Margit exclaimed cheerily.

Great. Now I will be known as the oldest virgin the village, I thought. This is why I wanted trees and a much higher fence. I felt too exposed out there. Too many prying eyes. Too many questions.

IT’S A DOG’S LIFE

I smelled of dead dog. Not wet dog. Dead dog. “Are you sure you want to do this to yourself?” Raluca had said when I told her I had decided to foster the four puppies hiding in the abandoned barn. They weren’t babies anymore at around a month or two but bloody hell they were scrawny. Bones sticking out and fur all matted and clumped up. Mami was still around but as they were not feeding on milk anymore, she couldn’t do much for them. Quite the opposite I had noticed. Whenever I brought a tin of food or bowl of kibble, she had wolved it down before the babies even had a chance to eat. The logistics of feeding times turned out trickier than anticipated.

Mami was a sweetheart though. Always rolling around on her back so I could scratch her belly full of enlarged nipples and other weird lumps. Poor thing. I wondered how many litters she had had since being dumped in the barn. While pregnant, as Margit told me, who had kept Mami alive for almost a decade. Who does that, I wondered. The former mayor of Zalanpatak, Margit told me.

My intervention wasn’t going as planned. The first one I buried the day before in my garden next to the apple tree. I had called her Bibi. You can’t be buried without a name. You also can’t leave this earth without being loved. This is what I was telling one of the remaining three puppies who also stopped eating. I was using an empty cat food tin to pour water into her mouth. I called the vet over at Malnas who said he would get here as soon as possible. But then he got delayed by an emergency with a horse. Horse trumped dog, apparently.

The barn stank. I sat counting the poops scattered around the rotting hay. I really had to watch where I walked. They all had a different consistency and a different colour. I was guessing it was because they had been eating anything they could find. Some of them were white and stony. Others looked like small heaps of cow dung, but yellow. God, it was a depressing sight. The puppy on my lap was so still, her breathing so shallow that for a split second I thought she was already gone. I told the tiny dog that if it was all too much for her, she could leave. And that if she chose to stay, I would look after her.

I of course was praying to an unknown higher power that she would decide to do the latter. She just stared at me helplessly with blank eyes but at least has started lapping up a bit of the water from the cat tin I keep shoving under her nose. I found a patch of clean hay on the barn's far short side and laid her down there, next to what must have been some kind of feeding trough. She was too weak to run away from me the way her siblings still did.

I stared at the spot where I had found Bibi. I felt guilty. I should have called the vet already yesterday when I noticed she wasn’t eating and just lying there on the side of the dirt road. Normally all pups came running when they saw me and fought over the kibble that I threw around like confetti. She lifted her head a little this time but otherwise wouldn’t budge.

I woke up with the sun and after jumping out of bed nauseous with anxiety I quickly swapped my pyjama pants for jogging bottoms and ran over to the barn. Her lifeless body was already stiff when I found her. I wrapped her in a piece of cloth that I cut off an old bed sheet. Bibi was buried in leopard print, weighed down by earth and river stones, and covered with wildflowers. “I am so sorry.” I said it repeatedly while a snotty cry set in. I had nothing to wipe my face with.

Korcsiko asked what I was doing. I read our WhatsApp conversation and spotted the music he sent me a few days earlier. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do I picked up the small dog again and cradled her in my arms while we listened to Chopin Concerto no.2 op.21. “Please don’t die” I pleaded. “I can’t bury you all.” 

The vet came out finally and another neighbour appeared at the barn to let me know. She seemed annoyed but as I didn’t understand Hungarian, I couldn’t tell what she was yelling. Her arms flailing about, her gesturing made me wonder if she was drunk. I followed her with the still nameless puppy in my arms and went outside onto the dirt road. The vet was a tall and handsome man who made more of a fuss over the fact that I owned a car than over the half-dead dog I was holding in my arms.

-‘I have a car but it won’t make it over the hill on your side,’ I explained apologetically.

He came in a sturdy four by four, high on its wheels. VET it said on the number plate. He said nothing but pulled out four syringes from his bag.

-‘Pencilin?’ I asked. I wondered if it was Parvo that was making the puppies so sick. In that case with or without antibiotics we didn’t stand a chance in hell.

-‘Yes,’ he replied while he shoved the needle into the puppy, that was too weak to even react. I was still crying.

I went back to the barn and laid the pup down in the hay. I tried to catch her two brothers, but they wouldn’t have it. One was hiding under the rusty trailer outside. The other had snuck into the smaller barn that was locked, through a hole in the door where the wood looked eaten by termites. Giant beetle tracks snaked around on the remaining boards. I was begging them to come out.

-‘I am only trying to help you!’ I cried out in sheer desperation. I could taste the salt of my tears stinging on my sunburnt cheeks. I had been doing nothing all weekend apart from building a fence from scrap wood to keep my own dogs safely in the yard and trying to save the pups. I was miserably failing at both. Choccy kept escaping and wandering off into the forest. Pups kept dying. 

-‘Well, that’s nature, isn’t it?’ Raluca said when I told her I buried one of the pups.

I disagreed.

THE ART OF LOGGING

Fuck. You know when it is bad. You don’t have to even look to know it. It is not that you feel it, because the insane amounts of adrenalin and other survival hormones are rushing through your veins. There was just this faint throbbing, this numbness that wasn’t comfortably numb, because you know it is just the prelude to an avalanche of pain. Fifteen minutes ago, I was lugging a big branch home. The forest road was wet and slippery, but with my good boots and a firm grip, holding the beam clenched very tight under my armpit, it was fine. We are lucky that the forest is uphill, so we never have to fight gravity when dragging firewood home. One more I thought, after dumping the branch in the yard. Just one more and I am done for the day. But the bugger got away from me. I was wearing the wrong gloves. Lost my grip and splash. The branch landed on a rock, with my hand caught in between. There was a lot of blood. I ran home and wrapped a tea towel loosely around my hand. By the time I got to the neighbours to ask for a ride to the emergency room I was trembling and pale as a ghost. I asked grandma for a paracetamol. She gave me two ibuprofen. I took them both. Robi quietly started the car. Did Timi come with us? I don’t even remember now.

The doctor at the emergency room in Sfantu Gheorghe. God, I wanted to kick her the same way I wanted to kick the doctor who stitched me up the first time. When I was four. Can you imagine? What are the odds. To smash up your left ring finger in exactly the same place twice. With a few decades in between. Back then the doctor was nice though. He didn’t deserve a kick. This one did. I don’t know if she didn’t speak any Romanian or was just being a nationalist asshole. Yes, women can be assholes too. This is not a gender thing. Everyone has one, so everyone can be one. When she put in the first stitch, I realized she had missed a step. One involving a syringe containing some pain relief. I screamed the house down. The doctor stopped. Good. Then she yelled at me. In Hungarian. Not good. Then she left the room. That was neither here nor there. The next doctor kept me waiting long enough, but at least she had brought a kind nurse. And finally, a syringe.

The ride home was a blur. We stopped at the pharmacy. This time I handed them all the prescriptions. Normally we weeded out the ones we shouldn’t take. The ones that are either irrelevant for the specific ailment, or the ones that have been banned in the rest of Europe. Romania is a stubborn country. When I got home grandma and Margit had lit the fire in the wood burner. There was an enamel pot on it with some soup. I laid in bed. Lolli the cat was on my belly. Dog Stella by my feet on the right. Choccy on the left. Puss Puk was at the top of my head, balancing on the edge of the pillow. Muki was flat on the floor, pretending to be a carpet again. I swear one these days that dog is going to sink into the old oak floor never to be seen again.

IF GOD LOVES YOU

Still clutching my coffee in bed, rubbing me eyes I heard a bit of a racket outside. It sounded excited, not alarming. There was only one person the dogs responded to that way. Margit. I stumbled outside in my crumpled pj’s, my hair all twined like a bird’s nest from the tossing and turning. I wanted a cigarette. Ever since surviving cancer I wasn’t clear on how I felt about smoking. It was either life affirming or incredibly cynical. Margit is impatient, annoyed, and indecisive. She was wearing a pink T-shirt, a mid-length floral dress from some synthetic floaty material, and rubber boots. I could tell she was not sure if she should go with patience and letting me go back to bed to finish my coffee, or follow her goal which was dragging me into the forest. It was mushroom season.

We hadn’t been on a proper hike in a long time. If we walked, we didn’t go far and we didn’t take the dogs anymore. First it was to protect the baby deer. My dogs could chase them for hours and then come home bouncing from the adrenalin, so they weren’t allowed out for a while. Then it was to protect the dogs, and ourselves, from Arpi’s dogs. Then it was the hunters. Now it was the bears. I had seen giant piles of poop being dropped closer and closer to my fence. Nobody knew exactly how dangerous it was. Some villagers still went foraging, other would warn me daily not to go into the woods. Margit was terrified of snakes hiding in the tall grass. Vipera. Bears didn’t bother her.

She had been pestering me for about a week or two now to join her. She wanted to go mushroom picking. The woods were full of chanterelles. I still had three Tupperware boxes of those from last season in the freezer. Not the best way to keep them I had found out. Fresh they were so much better. Ok, I thought. I didn’t come here and live next to forest to just stare at it from the garden. I came to be part of the forest.

Still somewhat groggy I got changed and locked up the dogs. I felt sorry for not taking them. The carefree abandon with which we all spent hours exploring the woods last summer had been replaced with panic and dread. By the time I got outside Margit had already made her way up, through the vegetable garden to the far end. 

-‘Yooohooooo baby drujba. Sunt aici!’ I heard her yell.

Baby chainsaw was on her way, visibly trembling. I opened the wooden gate and locked it behind us by pushing an old shovel up against one of the broken beams. Even though I was glad to be out for a bit, it completely lacked the lustre of last summer. Everything required too much effort these days, came with too many worries and it drained me. Very slowly we made it up the first part of the hill, where I had to stop to catch my breath.

-‘We have to make more noise,’ Margit yelled.

-‘Why don’t we sing then?’ I suggested. I couldn’t’ sing to save my life, but for the sake of keeping the bears at bay I was willing to go for it. Margit started singing in Hungarian. I hummed a long a bit and clapped my hands. The deeper we went into the woods the more often I stopped to look around. There was something about the light here. I often sat on the cracked concrete steps in front of the kitchen to be to just stare at the light. Before, when I would take the dogs, and Puss Puk, up the hill every morning the view over the valley made everything worth it. The builders who refused to fix the leaks in my newly renovated roof. The two dozen dogs in the village barking and keeping me up at night. Arpi’s midnight musical antics. The disappointments and betrayals. The isolation.

-‘Are you scared?” Margit asked.

-‘A little, yes,” I replied.

-‘Don’t be. If God loves you, you will be ok.’ Margit said while she marched on, her hawk eyes scanning the ground for mushrooms. I lingered and thought “why doesn’t that entirely reassure me?”.

THE STORY OF MUKI

Muki did not vanish into the floor. Muki disappeared because after a year of extreme sleep deprivation, depression and fear I no longer had the presence of mind to make the right decisions. Muki died because someone poisoned him. Probably rat poison. I knew who did it, but I can’t prove it. I buried him in the garden. Under the plum tree, next to the others. Side by side with his mother. Mami and Muki. A stone throws away from Bibi and the others, I did end up burying them all.

When I think of Muki and really feel it, there are only two options. God, you give him back. Or you let me die too.

I have been pretending to be a person ever since. Someone who vaguely resembles who I used to be. But who I was, or would have been, started to fade with the first of the burials. I got mixed in with the earth I threw on their bodies. I disintegrated with each of the passings and parts of me got trapped under the giant river stones I lugged and lay down in circles. The last of me left with Muki. Looking into his eyes while the vet loaded his tranquilizer gun was the ultimate betrayal of us both. It annihilated the bond we had. It haunts me. I hope my remaining pack doesn’t hold it against me, but I never loved another creature more than this magnificent beasty. My Muki. “Look at me my lovely” I kept saying from a distance when I should have been holding him in my arms. Not standing in the street surrounded by people who saw our suffering as their Sunday entertainment. (Instagram)

I think of a friend. From the village where I lived before. How he unravelled after someone poisoned his dog. After taking a lot of pills he let himself fall into the icy water. The river Niraj never sounded the same after that. The water carried him for miles, all the way to the next village. His wife, widow, is strong. We talked on the phone not that long ago. She has moved to the city. The kids are doing well. Everything happens for a reason, she still says. Is this to soothe ourselves? Because any alternative is too hard to bear? Is this how we make sense of the senseless?

HIERARCHY OF PAIN 

Do you know what hurts most? All of it. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of pain anymore. Not having the resources to provide for all of us. Not having emotional support directly around me. Someone to stand next to me in my grief. What I got was empty words. Nodding heads. Ridicule. Schadenfreude. How they rejoiced in my anguish connected me with a primal rage I never felt before. I did not want to lash out. I did not want to merely hurt. I wanted to obliterate. It is then that I understood scorched earth. I wanted to burn the whole place down.

Eight times I stood here in the garden with a shovel. Alone. I am not even counting the winter puppies. I had to wait so long before I could finally bury those. The ground didn’t thaw until late March. They had been hanging in the pine tree like a forgotten Christmas present for months. In that fucking plastic Santa Claus bag. I recognized the bag from Laci’s, the local everything shop. Were they Olga’s babies? Or Charlie’s? Was it Feri who killed them? Or grandpa? Leaving them out to freeze is still murder. I am surrounded by puppy killers.

When Lolli was killed I called Ralu to come over. Turned out she is ill equipped for situations like these. I sent her away, saying “This is so not about you right now.” I did not need someone giving me a lecture on how I should care about animals less, because then it would hurt less when they die. Grief and love belong together. The more you care, the more it hurts. Fair enough. It’s a bargain.

My friend Maura once said it. She is a good friend who I met in a weird way when we both had reasons to write on a cancer patient forum. “Sometimes it is hard to stay warm and fuzzy when faced with sheer stupidity.” I couldn’t handle the apathy, the complacency. The constant upping. You think you know pain? I had it so much worse. There was no compassion here. Was everyone really just that broken?

HEAD OVER HEART

-‘Did you choose with your heart or your head,’ Mariana asked.

She asked it sternly, with a tone that suggested she already knew the answer. And that I was wrong.

-‘My heart, I believe.’

But I did now feel I needed to have my head examined. Because following my heart I got it so wrong. And that scared me more, than if it had been a misconstrued rationale. Why the hell did I stay so long? I should have left the moment Api got killed. I remember standing in the garden, talking on the phone with my mother. “Things like this can happen anywhere. It could have been a fox. In the city they get hit by cars. These things happen. Think about all the good things. About the plans you have,” she had reasoned. It did sound reasonable. I stayed.

But it was not a fox. It was not a car. It was Arpi. It was Arpi who was a mean drunk that intentionally sets loose his dogs. They bit me. They killed Apollo, my Api. Then two weeks after Mami passed away, they came after Lolli. My entire nervous system got shot to shit that evening. When Eva heard me running on the streets screaming like a wounded banshee she had thought it was about my mother. That maybe she had had another heart attack. These types of responses were reserved for humans, not animals.

How much worse did it have to become for me to leave. Was I really such a glutton for punishment? Living in a pet cemetery slash prison, with us all cooped up in the yard because I was too terrified to walk my dogs. Puk locked in the house. Because Iboyo kept taking Arpi’s dogs with her when she washed her rugs in the stream next to my house. If Sergiu and Michele had not insisted that I pack up all the pups, and Puk, would I have stayed until there was nobody left, maybe not even me?

Mariana had left the table on the terrace to check on breakfast. I kept ruminating. I thought I was following my bliss. That this was destiny.

It had to be, no? There I was a year and a half ago. Judit had offered me the house her dad left her until April. That should be enough time to determine my next step. But when you are headed to the supermarket with your Christmas shopping list in your hand, April is not that far off anymore. I had started my mantra: Before the year is out ,I will have found my home.

December 31^st. I was done with all the preparations. I used to love fireworks. After having pets and seeing how petrified they are, not so much. No parties for me. I would spend the night with all beasties on my bed, curtain closed, reading a book, some soothing tunes in the background. It was still early in the day and I decided to call a friend from Austria who once owned a carpet factory near Sibiu. I wanted his input for the PhD I was planning to do at the University of Sibiu. It would have been my first long term commitment since cancer. Other than my pets. We chatted for a bit about the documentary he was making on wool in Europe. When he asked about my living arrangements and if I was still planning to find a house in the country, he suddenly said that was something he thought I should meet. That is how Raluca was introduced, and now the rest is history.

Freaky how I saw the signs. Raluca like me loved nature and worked organically. Like me she had two dogs and three cats. Like me she had cancer. We even wore the exact same hiking boots. I got my pair from the Intersport clothing donations. After my cousin shipped it from Amsterdam I had to laugh when checking all the shoes. Made in Romania the label stated. Welcome home I had said. Raluca had bought hers at a local factory shop. Weren’t we twins destined to meet? A few weeks after moving buyer’s remorse set in. Or was it something else? Either way I felt utterly lost. After listening to me listing all the things that made me000 regret the decision of buying the house, Raluca had said “No place will be perfect. You have to create heaven with what you have.”

Maybe next time ask for a “signier” sign, another friend had said when I told her all this. She had also said that I stank. Which was true. The fear had not just permeated the core of my being. The stench of it laid thick on my skin. It would take weeks to scrub it off. “Wash it all away. The grief. The fear, all of it.”

A GOOD PERSON

-“Living in Romania is harder and hurts more than having cancer.”

Did I really say that out loud, again? The first time I had thought it was, walking down the lane, away from my other house, in another village. The first failed attempt at rural bliss. Did I survive cancer for this? To bury pet after pet, have my fingers stitched without anaesthesia, to have everything burgled away, to spend fortunes on idiot builders who leave you under leaking roofs and collapsing ceilings? I had fallen so far out of love with Transylvania that I couldn’t remember what brought me there in the first place. “People have good lives here” Matt had said when I told him I was leaving. He had also been the one to tell me that I “do move the strangest places”, conveniently forgetting how he had encouraged me to move there. The same way he had bailed on his promise to rewire the little house.

“Live owes you nothing.” I think by now it does. It owes me to the space to really be alive. A safe place to live. One that I can afford. The goodness of people, in spades. And hugs. I am due so many hugs. Then there is the back payment of all the losses, the house that burnt down, the house that was burgled, the house that collapsed, the house that kept leaking. Can I also have my childhood returned to me, unscathed this time? It is not like physical pain. It is not an epidural in the wrong place. It is not a 42-degree fever spike. It is much worse.

(Instagram post)

-“What did I do wrong,” I cried.

Rachel was patiently listening the way she had been for months.

-“Oh how I wish I could hold you right now. You did nothing wrong. The opposite. But you can’t control everyone and everything. You did not cause this to happen. And you don’t deserve this.”

I should have learned by now that many things in life find their way to you, whether you think you deserve them or not. Cancer was just one of them. Me tragically failing, yet again, to create my little slice of heaven, my homestead, another one. Letting go of the dream hurt so much more now than letting go of life did then. Why? What was the difference in acceptance? Everything was upside down and back to front. When I was told I was dying all I could think of was spending my last days in Transylvania. Now, all I could think of was to leave.

SOMEWHERE GOOD

I picked up my mail from the King’s house. It was a letter from the court in Ludus. I opened the envelope and as soon as I saw it was the verdict in the old burglary case, I stuck it right back into the envelope. Margit cried as we hugged goodbye. I hadn’t told her I wasn’t planning to come back. All she kept saying was “you are so missed when you are not here, you have no idea. You are so missed.”

Just as I closed the boot of the car my phone buzzed. Matt’s last WhatsApp message, after which I no longer replied.

“You have to go somewhere where it is good.”

SACRED GROUND

-‘Will you ever go back?’ dad asked.

-‘Or is Romania completely out of the picture now?’

I had a hard time breathing and had no answer. I couldn’t sell the house. My last bank statement read minus 8 euros, but I couldn’t make myself put the house in Zalanpatak up for sale. It was where they all lay buried. It was now sacred ground.