In part two of this episodic psychological thriller, Nicole Jeffords. convinced that healer, Victor Goodlove, who disappeared ten years earlier is buried under her studio, continues her search for him, contacting old patients all over Austin and dis...
We had one day in Bucharest before flying back to the States. Everyone, including Eddie, had told us it wasn't a city worth exploring, but we had hired a guide who was to meet us in our hotel lobby at ten the next morning. Eddie dropped us off at the JW Marriott Grand Hotel after a drive through the Carpathians that took hours due to heavy traffic caused by a single traffic light in one of the mountain towns. I begged him to stay the night, but he had important business in Sighisoara and had to turn around and drive back in the dark. The last I saw of him was his diminishing figure, grey clothes melting into grey marble as he exited the gargantuan lobby of the Marriott (the hotel had been built in the Ceausescu era as part of a civic center). I burst into tears as I watched him go, not knowing when I would see him again and worried about all the world situations and bad politics that separated us.
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Marriott Lobby
The hotel was creepy, so big that it dwarfed all its guests and seemed more like a mausoleum than a hotel. We met our guide the next morning, a very scholarly woman named Ana Albu who, it turned out, had been trained as a librarian. As we shook hands, she looked at me thoughtfully, trying, I knew, to figure out where she had seen my face before. When we were in the car, she interrupted herself pointing out monuments, and said: "You look like Maria Mocanu, a famous Romanian actress from the seventies and eighties."
"You mean Maria Danciu?" I said.
"That's her name now. Mocanu was her stage name, but her birth name was Neagu. She comes from a well-known family. There are lots of stories about her."
"I'd like to hear them," I said quietly. "We were at her house in Brasov yesterday. She and I had never met before (in fact I'd never even heard of her), but we discovered we had a number of connections in common." I explained how we had come to be at Maria's house in the first place and about the strange coincidence of my mother having painted Maria's mother, Clara Becker.
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Ana & Nicole
"You must be related," Ana said, studying my face. "There is no other explanation for the resemblance."
"That's what I thought. But my mother's family was Jewish and Maria's wasn't."
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Ana
"People change their religion when it's expedient," Ana said. "I'll do some research on Maria. But in the meantime I'll tell you what I know, starting with the fact that she had an affair with Ceausescu's son, Nicu."
