Snapshots of Romania
- By Rachel Hall
A Review of King of the Gypsies, a short story collection by Lenore Myka (BkMk Press, 2015).
In praise of linked story collections, Michael Chabon has said: “A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning to them again and again. The interest lies in what has happened in the interstices.” This is certainly true of Lenore Myka’s rich and compelling King of the Gypsies, winner of the 2014 BkMk Press G.S. Sharat Chandra Book Prize. Romania provides the link between the eleven stories within the collection, though the protagonists alternate between American and Romanian. Such shifts provide a kaleidoscopic view, one that reveals both our stark cultural differences and our deep similarities. We meet Americans who have come to Romania for work or study or to adopt a Romanian child. We also meet a number of Romanian characters who find themselves in the States, yearning for home. But the most distinctive stories here examine the lives of Romani characters—orphans, street children, beggars, or girls sold or tricked into prostitution. Myka is especially good at revealing the way poverty, discrimination, and neglect shape these characters.
The first and titular story in the collection, first published in MR in Winter 2007, introduces us to two of the characters who will reappear in later stories: Dragos and Irina. When we meet Dragos, whose mother affectionately called him “The King of the Gypsies,” he’s twelve years old and has been living in an orphanage for seven years. Here, he plays in a semi-derelict park, climbing a forgotten sculpture of Ceausescu as if it were a jungle gym, and tries to retain his memories of life before the casa de copii, or home for children, a name he finds troubling and inaccurate: “The casa resembled nothing of the single-bedroom apartment he’s known for the first five years of his life . . . Instead, it was hollowed and damp, with barbed wire . . . each child was assigned [to] rooms where a dozen or more of them slept at night." In this grim place, where Dragos is insulted and marginalized for being Romani, and attacked by the stray dogs that harass the children on their way to school, he remains hopeful—and therefore vulnerable.
At thirteen, Irina is brought to the orphanage by her sisters in an attempt to save her from the “marriage” her parents have arranged. She, too, is Romani, so the director of the casa asks Dragos to look out for her. But she is gone before he can do much, and besides she isn’t particularly tractable; she rejects the tutoring Dragos offers, because “It’s not a woman’s place” to know how to read, an opinion enforced by beatings in her father’s house.
We encounter Irina twice again, once in “Rol Dobos,” when she is living on the streets and begging, and again in “Palace Girls.” Irina is a compelling character—impetuous and shrewd—and the American she calls “Kelly Beverly Hills” is drawn to Irina despite her demands. From the start, however, Kelly refuses to give Irina a handout; instead, she takes Irina to a café every morning and buys her hot chocolate and rol dobos, a chocolate and caramel confection that Irina craves. Eventually, though, Kelly can’t abide Irina’s increasingly bad behavior. Only after Kelly finally gives up on her does Irina understand all she’s lost—not just the immediate and urgent need for sustenance, but the possibility of friendship.
In “Palace Girls,” when we encounter Irina again, she is older, less impetuous and wild. Forced into prostitution, the circumstances of her life are even more brutal, but she’s fashioned a tentative happiness with Lidia, another young prostitute. By the end of “Palace Girls,” Lidia is gone, but she has imparted important information about love and friendship and dignity. Lidia’s own story, “Day of Lasts,” is perfectly placed after “Palace Girls,” making it all the more wrenching. In this tale, the reader learns first about Lidia’s demise, and then Myka takes us back in time to see a younger, naïve Lidia, a girl who tacks perfume ads from fashion magazines on her bedroom wall, hoping that even “a shadow of the scents” might linger. When she’s recruited by Gheorghe, who claims he’s an agent for the ABC Modeling Agency, Lidia is persuaded to leave her family for a “a life like the ones [she’d] watched endless hours of on television.”
Things don’t end as badly for all of Myka’s characters. The reader is pleased to come across Dragos again in the penultimate story, “Song of Sleep,” and to learn he has fared well for himself. He owns a farm and has largely integrated into the surrounding community. Most significantly, he has married an American musician, Lucy, whose studies have brought her to Romania. “Song of Sleep” is one of the finest in the collection: shifting between Dragos’s and Lucy’s point-of-view, it is notably the only story in the collection to encompass both an American and a Romanian perspective, and it beautifully and painfully reveals the difficulties inherent in marriage, especially an international marriage —particularly during family visits. The reader feels for both Lucy and Dragos; we understand his jealousy and alienation, her awareness of all she’s left behind, as well as Lucy's desire that everyone get along during her parents' first visit to Romania. We don’t know, in the end, what will happen to this young marriage, but the story's final imagee —which depicts the carcass of Lucy’s pet goat —isn’t hopeful. Dragos claims to finds “something peaceful about it,” but we suspect Lucy will feel the loss of her pet very differently. It’s hard in this moment not to think back to the Dragos of the first story, a boy who learned to kick stray dogs in order to protect himself. The reader is left wondering if these different perspectives can be bridged.
Myka’s characters want many things—family, love, security, food—and their desires drive these satisfying stories. It is a strength of Myka’s writing that we sympathize equally with those characters whose needs are less basic and elemental. In “Manna from Heaven,” for example, we understand that Stella’s alienation and sense of displacement are what’s at stake, though these sentiments manifest as a profound craving for American breakfast cereal. Although her family thinks she’s escaped to a better life, Gabriella, the Romanian wife of an American in “National Cherry Blossom Day,” isn’t so sure. Her longing for home is intense, “a hunger for something that isn’t on the menu.” The two settings of this collection aid and abet conflict, because to know and love two countries, or to love people in two places—as many of Myka’s characters do—is to exist in a state of longing.
King of the Gypsies is a love song to Romania, a doina, with its “mix of lullaby and blues,” or perhaps more like the song Lucy composes for Dragos in “Song of Sleep,”with its “tidal sensation.” Myka depicts the many challenges of a country still reeling from revolution and dictatorship, yet the reader finishes King of the Gypsies and wants to go to Romania, to sample the mulled wine, cherry brandy, sheep cheese, and stuffed cabbage—to see for herself where the mountains fall away and there are miles of floarea soarelui, vibrant and golden sunflowers. If that isn’t possible, then one can at least return to Myka’s stories, and with each reading, see more deeply into the human heart.
Rachel Hall is the author of the forthcoming story collection, Heirlooms, winner of the 2015 G.S. Sharat Chandra book prize (BkMk Press). Hall’s recent work appears in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Midwestern Gothic, and Lilith, which awarded her the 2016 fiction prize. She teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where she holds the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
