Sync City

Let’s call her Iulia. I provided a shoulder for her to cry on when she came back to the Hotel Parc, and she finally succumbed to my charms on her husband’s birthday. Perhaps that was just a coincidence though. The next night, her pubic hair had disappeared.

Long ago, during most of the last decade of last century, I worked two wine vintages each year, first during Autumn in Australia, and again in Romania, when they had their Autumn. The Romanians had rebelled and shot long-time dictator Nicolai Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989, three years before I arrived. On my first flight into Otopeni airport, from Heathrow, the plane had to abort the first attempt at landing and go around for another try because there was a pack of stray dogs on the runway.

The country was in the painful throes of adjusting away from Communism. Life was tough in the last years of the megalomaniac’s regime, when most foreign revenue was used to pay for his gargantuan vanity project, The People’s Palace. It was supposed to be the biggest building in the world, but someone miscalculated, and it is only second to the Pentagon. But after the Revolution, life was even tougher. Inflation was rampant, and the whole country was a crumbling mess! The first time I handed over a US$100 for change into the local currency, I naively kept my wallet open to insert the notes of Lei. But I had to buy a plastic bag to carry the wad of 5000 Lei notes back to my hotel.

I was supposed to be helping them make wine good enough to export to the UK, which was a big step up. Until the Revolution, it was quantity that counted, not quality. So, I had to somehow coax quality out of huge but poor-quality equipment, no refrigeration, and a mindset that resented a foreigner from a wine upstart country coming to tell them how to make wine when they had been doing it for thousands of years. And I had to learn to be diplomatic about the need for hygiene in winemaking.

During my third vintage there, my marriage was rocky due to stupid mistakes I had made years before, which destroyed my wife’s trust in me. She has green eyes, but that had nothing to do with it. My contract for that year was at a dilapidated winery near Turnu Severin, where Roman Emperor Trajan built a bridge across the Danube to invade Romania in 105 AD.

Iulia was my new trainee Romanian winemaker, beautiful, smart, 27 years old. It was love at first sight for me, but she was married, and claimed to love her husband.

Iulia didn’t speak English, so my motivation to learn Romanian got a huge boost, and she was happy to help. Luckily, Romanian evolved from Latin, which was my favourite subject at school, and a lot of words were stolen from French, which I also studied. We were billeted together at the Hotel Parc fronting the Danube, with Serbia across the river. I was in room 42, and she was next door in 43.

I had been wooing her ardently during candle-lit dinners for two weeks in a nearby restaurant, La Lebeda – The Swan, and making great progress ... in learning Romanian. Then she caught the train back to Bucharest for a weekend. While she was home, she discovered some photos of her husband with a work colleague, and realized their relationship was more than just professional.

She couldn’t stay home for her husband’s birthday a few days later. It was peak vintage and the grapes were coming in thick and fast, so she had to come back to Turnu Severin. I met her at the train station on the Monday evening and drove her back to our hotel. She needed a back massage after the long train journey. She let me progress the massage from her slender back down to her delicious bottom, and so it began.

When the vintage was over, she went home to Bucharest, but I arranged for her to come out to Australia on a training visa, to learn about our winemaking techniques. We did a contract together at a winery in Griffith, about half-way between Sydney and Adelaide. Our affair lasted almost a year, but that’s another story. Back to the coincidence.

I had already wrecked my own marriage when Iulia broke my heart and went back to her husband just before my fourth vintage in Romania. So, I decided to try and find another one just like her who wasn’t married.

Back then, Kids, before Tinder and internet matchmaking, there were ‘lonely hearts’ columns in newspapers. So, I put an ad in Romania Libera, a national Romanian newspaper. Something about an Australian businessman, 43, 180 cm, 74 Kgs, looking for a wife. I mentioned that I could speak Romanian, a huge asset for that sort of venture, because hardly anyone spoke English. At least I had that to show for my affair with Iulia. I requested a photo with the reply, to a postal box I rented for a month at a branch of the Romanian post office in Bucharest close to where I was staying.

I waited three days before I went to check the mail, but there was only one reply, dated May 19, 1997, without a photo, and just an address, no phone number to call.

Margareta G, 33 years, Horticultural Engineer, brunette, sensual, but fine and delicate. She had recently returned from Switzerland, where she was supposed to be married. But she discovered that the intended was an alcoholic womanizer, and she had come back to Bucharest with her tail between her legs. She signed off her letter as Margareta Lacrimoasa, Tearful Margareta.

I found the address, but as was often the case then, I had to negotiate through a pack of snarling stray dogs lurking around the entrance to the shabby grey concrete apartment block. I found a stick and picked up a stone to keep the dogs at bay, and made it inside safely.

I took the creaking, rickety lift up and knocked on the door of the top-most apartment in the run-down ten storey block. A bloke called out for me to come in, so I opened the door. He was wet and naked, just getting out of some sort of improvised shower set-up in the corridor that the front door opened straight into. I apologised and went to go back out, but he told me not to worry, who was I looking for? He indicated Margareta’s door down a dingy corridor as he towelled himself.

Margareta was more-or-less as she described herself, but so desperate for foreign male company that she was undressed and pulling me into her bed within an hour. It was very tempting, because she had an impressive lissome figure, but a bit too fast for me. I wasn’t equipped for getting down to it so quickly, didn’t even bring a condom. Aurelia, another Romanian winemaker I trained who became a friend had given me dating advice. I should expect to wait until at least the second date, and this wasn’t even a date yet! So, I made some sort of excuse, got dressed and escaped with minimal risk of having caught something, not even rabies from the dogs waiting for me outside.

The next day there were three replies. Two were promising, so I lined up meetings for the following day: Daniela and Violeta. But the next day, when I opened the postal box, letters started cascading out onto the ground. Over twenty. I had to ask the lady behind the counter next door for a plastic bag to carry them home. I did a quick sort before I had to go and meet a Carmen, who turned out to be a lovely intelligent attractive girl, but a little heavy for my taste – which was rare in women under forty in Romania at the time. Ceausescu had kept most of them hungry, and the standard of living had gone even further downhill after the Revolution. Carmen is the only feminine Romanian name I have heard of that doesn’t end with ‘a’.

I promised Carmen I would call her again and rushed home. I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours before my evening rendezvous, frantically ranking the replies with phone numbers and photos according to their photogenicity and claimed dimensions. Then I began phoning those who lived in Bucharest to set up meetings. By the time I had to leave to meet a Camelia (a voracious kisser), I had two meetings per day arranged for the next three or four days.

Replies kept cascading out of my postal box for several more days, so I was very busy sorting and ranking, phoning, and meeting over the next ten days. Many of the women I met were very nice, but none compared to Iulia. I was even starting to think more often about Tearful Margareta’s attractive bottom, but also about one particular reply that was on top of the ‘without photo’ pile. The age and dimensions were right, green eyes, which are rare, especially in Romania, and there was something about the jaunty tone of her letter, so I gave her a call. She had an attractive melodious voice and a good sense of humour, so I arranged to meet her at the Sydney Bar, of all places, a terrace bar in Piazza Victoria which had employed someone specifically to keep the stray dogs away.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, her emerald eyes were beautiful, she had long shapely legs, and she got goosebumps on her bottom and thighs when she reached orgasm. Let’s call her Gabriela. She couldn’t speak English, but she could speak a bit of French. About as badly as I did. Bizarrely for someone so exaggeratedly feminine, she had graduated from university in metallurgy, and worked at a factory that manufactured bus bodies, and the vans for transporting opponents to Ceausescu’s regime forty at a time. She was recently divorced, and there were suitors sniffing around.

After dating her for a couple of weeks, I moved into the apartment she shared with her 10-year-old daughter, until I had to go to another winemaking region to work. I managed to get back to Bucharest to see her on Sundays, and by the time I finished vintage, I thought she was the one. I brought her out to Australia for six weeks, which was as long as she could arrange to leave her daughter with her mother. I drove her from Melbourne to Adelaide to Sydney, and back along the Great Ocean Road, splurging at restaurants all the way, more-or-less retracing the route I had followed with Iulia, even going to many of the same restaurants and staying at the same motels. Yes, I know how that sounds now.

But my daughters hated her. When her visa was up, we had a tearful farewell in Melbourne, and she went home. When I saw her again in Bucharest the next year, we had an argument about a trip she had taken to Paris “to meet some friends”. I knew she couldn’t have paid for the trip herself.

So, I started looking up the women who had replied to my ad who didn’t live in Bucharest. Which was a bit unfair, because after Gabriela had left Australia I put an ad in the local rag, and I had spent most of my time back in Adelaide living with a sexy English redhead, sleeping on her waterbed and driving her car. But on the other hand, Gabriela later confessed why her “friends”, a married French couple she had met in Bucharest, had paid for her to visit them in Paris. They had got her drunk and indulged in a threesome with her. Repeatedly, for a week.

Back to the coincidence. Gabriela was born and raised in Buzau, a town within the Dealu Mare wine growing region, at the crossroads of the three main Romanian historical provinces: Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldova. She moved to Bucharest when she started university, and that’s where she met her husband. Buzau had a population of about 100,000 and was about an hour and half from Bucharest by car or two and a half by train. Coincidentally, Iulia was born and raised nearby in Visani, a little village just over the border with the next county.

I had stayed in a scungy hotel in Buzau a couple of years previously when I was making wine in the Dealu Mare. Water supply crises were frequent in Romania then, due to decaying unmaintained infrastructure, and people not paying their water bills. I had become resigned to not having hot water in hotels, as was usually the case - although it was never mentioned before checking in. But for two weeks at the Hotel Cring, there was no water at all. I had to bring a bucket from the winery every night. And the room rate was still five times as much for me as a foreigner than the official rate for Romanians. But at least they had someone to keep the stray dogs away from the steps up to the lobby.

But there was water somewhere, just not in the pipes, because one night I had killed one hundred mosquitoes in my room, until I gave up and just let them bite me. There happened to be two adventurous American girls staying there for a few nights, so I joined them for breakfast next morning, for the chance to speak English again. Naturally, we discussed the mosquito plague, and the less attractive one complained that all the mosquitoes ignored her friend and bit her. I begged her to sleep with me that night, but it took her a while to get the joke. It was the first time I ever wanted to sleep with a girl because she was attractive … to mosquitoes.

A week later I read in Romania Libera that over 100 people had died so far in a raging epidemic of West Nile encephalitis spread by mosquitoes.

Gabriela’s father had died in mysterious circumstances a few years before the Revolution. She said he stepped out one evening to buy a pack of smokes and didn’t come home. His body was found next day dumped beside the road several kilometres away, evidently hit by a car. She was told unofficially that the police had been involved in the “accident” and those involved had been punished, but it would be a waste of her time, and even dangerous, to try to find out more. Back then, jurisprudence was based on what was good for the Party, rather than justice. After the Revolution, it was based more on who could give the judge the best bribe.

Three years later, six months after the start of the Third Millennium, I was back in Buzau in a permanent position as Chief Winemaker for a wine company owned by a German company, the largest importer of Eastern European wine into the EU. The weightiest attribute on my CV had been my ability to speak Romanian, rather than my winemaking skill.

I was still trying to keep a rocky relationship going with my girlfriend at the time. Let’s call her Alice, a petite black-haired Jewish girl, with a lovely gait and smooth silky skin. And she was a regular squirter: a mysterious liquid gushed from her vagina when she reached orgasm. It is a rare attribute, a sign of well-toned pelvic floor muscles, Google says. Alice was embarrassed about it at first, but I reassured her that it was completely natural and nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary, in fact.

She was a librarian at the School of Economic Science in Bucharest. Our relationship was rocky because we had a few arguments during a two-week test of our compatibility in Kusadasi, a resort beach town on Turkey’s Aegean coast. She had only managed to come up to Buzau once in the first month I was there, and I was still waiting for my company car to be delivered, so, I put an ad in the lonely-hearts column of the local Buzau newspaper. This time with my phone number.

It was a bit embarrassing, because my boss had come for a few days from Munich, and the calls started coming while I was driving him back to the winery just out of Buzau after I picked him up from the airport. He wasn’t happy about me driving and talking on the phone at the same time. Which was fair enough because the roads are perilous in Romania at the best of times. Back then, horse- or donkey-drawn carts and drunks stumbling along the edges of the roads were additional hazards. And of course, the stray dogs. And most Romanian drivers seemed to have got their licence by bribing someone, but they all thought they were Michael Schumacher. If you went to put your seat belt on, they got offended because it implied that you didn’t think they were a good driver.

So, I had to keep telling the girls who called that I would ring them later. But later it was difficult fitting the right names to the phone numbers. Some names I had forgotten completely. And I had to put off assignations until my boss went back to Munich later in the week. Nevertheless, after my boss was off my hands, I was very busy for the next week meeting women at different cafés and restaurants in Buzau.

But for someone as shallow as I was, overly concerned about physical appearance, there’s a problem with ads inviting phone responses, rather than letters with recent photos: you can’t see how physically attractive they are. All you have to go on is their own claims about their dimensions – which aren’t always reliable – and how well you relate in telephone conversations. So, many more meetings are required to find a suitable squeeze.

By now, my pretensions were reaching ridiculous heights because I was getting an inkling of my eligibility as an exotic foreigner and one of the most highly paid people in Buzau. And I had a secret weapon: I had the peculiar habit of showering or having a bath every day, which Romanian women appreciated, but which Romanian men didn’t seem to have caught on to. Romanian men were more like once a week. For some it was perhaps once per year. (I read somewhere that soap consumption per capita was lower in Romania than anywhere else in Europe.) So, I had pretensions of finding someone not only young, shapely and pretty, but also intelligent with a melodious voice.

Let’s call her Iolanda. She was less than half my age, but she insisted that didn’t necessarily have to be a deal breaker. Her instructions were that I should walk down a street near my apartment at 7 PM and loiter at a nominated intersection. If my appearance was acceptable, she would make herself known to me.

So, I spruced myself up as well as I could, and followed her instructions. I was glad it was late Autumn and already getting dark, which is when I look best. The street was crowded, as was usual at that hour, with people mostly just promenading after dinner. I passed several attractive girls. Most were in twos or threes or with beaus, though. But there was one on her own, apparently waiting for someone. I hoped that she was the one, but she didn’t appear to notice me.

I ambled up and down for ten minutes or so, thinking that probably my appearance wasn’t up to scratch, and thought about going back to my apartment before I started to look foolish. Then I noticed that the girl on her own was still there, and this time she looked at me. And smiled! And sauntered over. Jackpot!

Iolanda had big beautiful green eyes too. Google tells me that green is the rarest colour for eyes, and most of them are in Northern and Western Europe. They are exceedingly rare in Romania. But that’s not the coincidence I’m concerned with here. Although she wasn’t quite as slender as Gabriela and her legs weren’t quite so shapely, she had perfect high and full breasts. She lived in Vadu Pasi, a village overlooking Buzau City from the opposite bank of the Buzau River. For about a year, she had been working as a kindergarten teacher at a little school in another village.

After we had been dating for a while, she took me home to meet her parents and her younger brother. They didn’t have running water, had to get water by bucket from the communal well at the end of their street. Iolanda had the chore of rounding up their flock of geese and shutting them into the yard every evening, safe from foxes and hungry thieves. Her mother impressed upon me how well Iolanda had done at school.

Her father plied me with his tzuica, the distilled liquor made from plums that just about everyone made at home. He was a retired policeman. Even though he was only about my age, he had been pensioned off due to “nerves”, a euphemism for being a pisspot.

He tried to impress me with what an upstanding Romanian citizen and patriot he was by using any excuse to convey his hatred of Gypsies. Since the Revolution, Romanians had been gaining the reputation in Western Europe of being thieves, liars, cheats and beggars. He insisted that this was because the ignorant Western Europeans – who were so stupid they couldn’t even speak Romanian – had mistaken the culprits as Romanians, when in fact they were filthy Gypsies giving the honest Romanians a bad name – except for Iolanda’s cousins of course, who went to Spain frequently and openly confessed – bragged, in fact – that their motive was to steal from the stupid Spaniards.

Basically, it was the Spaniards’ own fault that they were robbed and cheated, because they were so stupid, he said. It was even a sort of badge of honour to be clever like the Romanians who exploited the Spaniards’ stupidity. Their word for it is smecher. The closest English translation is cunning, but with positive instead of the negative connotations. But Gypsies weren’t smecher, he said. They were viclean, which means sly. And their women were all curve – prostitutes.

When I said that I understood that most Gypsies lived in abject poverty, segregated into their own villages, he said that was because they were all lazy, didn’t want to work. When I asked him who would trust them enough to give them a job, he changed the subject.

After I had demonstrated my good intentions with his daughter – I'm still not sure how – he tried to ‘borrow’ $2000 which a friend needed to pay as a bribe to get his son into the police force. I had a feeling that the actual bribe sought was probably only $1000. But Iolanda forbid me to give him the money and scolded him for asking for it. She wanted me to buy her a car instead, so I could teach her to drive.

After a couple of months, I persuaded Iolanda to move in with me. She was handy and decorous to have around the apartment, and an entertaining companion during week-end trips to beaches on the Black Sea and up into the Carpathian Mountains. It was fun for over a year, but I knew she was never a realistic prospect as a wife. Besides, the father-in-law situation would have been problematic.

Friction gradually accumulated. For a start, I still hadn’t bought her a car. And I had shown no sign of proposing. So, we had an argument, and I went to Bucharest for a weekend, and spent some time with the little Jewish librarian. When I got back, Iolanda had packed up and quit the apartment, along with my laptop and a few other knickknacks. The following weekend she went to the local disco that I only took her to once (where I was the oldest bloke by some margin) and met a local.

I went to talk to her mother where she worked at the local council office and came away with the impression that she was in my corner. So, I rang Iolanda to persuade her to meet me, with a view to convincing her to come back.

I arranged to meet her at the MacDonalds which had opened in central Buzau recently. It was the most prestigious restaurant in the city then, and people used to dress up in their finest to parade there. A burger, fries and Coke cost more than the average daily wage.

I slipped away from the winery, said I would be gone for about an hour, and she arrived just after me, with my laptop slung over her shoulder. She gave it to me and said she only took it to make sure there was nothing compromising of her in it. I suspect that she gave it back to me because she couldn’t be absolutely sure she hadn’t missed something compromising, and she didn’t want to risk her new boyfriend finding it.

She was using a new eye-makeup that highlighted her beautiful emerald eyes. She took off her coat and sat down, revealing a low-cut top that displayed her fine assets to considerable advantage. She was also wearing the Chanel No. 5 I bought her at the Istanbul airport duty free.

She listened patiently, sipping her coffee while I listed the reasons we should got back together. Then she smiled and held up her hand with a wedding ring that I had failed to notice. “Too late, we got married last Saturday. My husband is watching us now, over there.”

So, back to the coincidence. I put another ad in the local paper and started interviewing some of the girls who replied. It was a smorgasbord of women because by then it was quite well-known that I had been promoted to General Manager of the company, after the German owners finally got wind of how much the previous General Manager was stealing. My main qualification that got me the job was that I’m not Romanian.

Of the respondents, I dated two several times, a Mirela and a Roxana, before I finally settled on Mihaela, who also had pretty green eyes. (I tried to calculate the odds of having three girlfriends from Buzau within six years, all with green eyes. It has to be at least a million to one! But that’s not the coincidence I’m concerned with.)

Roxana knew Iolanda’s family, and she harboured a grudge against her father – something to do with a run-in Roxana’s father had with the cops. He was a pawn broker/loan shark who was handy with a baseball bat. Normally, alcoholism wasn’t enough on its own to get sacked from the police force, but Roxana had heard a rumour that Iolanda’s father had been sacked because he ran someone over with a police car while drunk. At about the same time that Gabriela’s dad was run over after going out one evening for a pack of smokes.