TWISTED GILDED GHETTO

A Torrid Affair. By Eric Page

January, the month of looking both out and back, the portal to a new year and a new beginning, a transition we step through into more uncertainly, lockdown, anguish. We take a step to the future every day, but mid-winter focuses the mind.

My Grandmother (Poison) Ivy once let slip that she’d spent a new year in a Romanian prison. Settled down after a big lunch, my sisters and I visiting on Xmas Day 1989 sipping port and watching the news. Ivy suddenly shouting “Yes!” when she heard the news of the execution of the appalling Romanian dictators, always one for vengeance was Ivy, and the wicked getting comeuppance. I raised my eyebrows at her, with a “what now” look and smoothing down her pink gingham tabard she waddled off to her sideboard, bringing back a walnut box inlaid with a brass hammer and sickle motif. Inside was a cracked rubber swimming hat, with lurid yellow rubber primroses all over it. “Oh,” she said, and made the vowel so long and wistful, “that was a lush swim”, and started to talk.

Ivy, fiercely glamorous with her raven hair piled high, moped and menthol cigarettes, had met Elena Ceausescu in Manila in 1975 and apparently caught the eye of her husband, Nicolae. They had a torrid fling until Ivy discovered his taste for caviar and champagne outweighed his commitment to the socialist cause. She’d left him one night, puttering off into the Manila night, she told us, after he’d spent an hour making love to her and looking at his own reflection in the mirror next to the bed. “I didn’t mind a bit of vanity,” she said, “but he could have had the good manners to conceal it, like Elvis did.” A few years later, while swimming the Danube for charity, she’d received a telegram from the Ceausescus, congratulating her on the swimming and inviting her to dinner. When Ivy arrived the Romanian secret police, The Securitate, were waiting for her and she was bundled off to prison. That would have been the end of her, had she not been a personal friend of Mrs Brezhneva, wife of the Soviet premier, who was following the swim with interest being a keen ice swimmer herself. When Ivy didn’t arrive the Russians launched a search team, but by the time they’d heard what had happened Ivy was gone.

Escaping from Sighisoara prison aided by the prison cook, swathing herself in lard, hiding in a barrel and swimming down the Târnava Mare river at night, Ivy made it across the border to Odessa and the relative freedom of the Soviet Union. “Jealousy is a daemon,” she told me. “Elena was no beauty, envy was the tribute her mediocrity paid to genius, jaundiced by knowing I’d turned NooNoo’s head, plain women always are.” I nodded off at this point, sitting in front of Ivy’s warm coal fire, stuffed full of Madeira cake and schooners of white port. She woke with me with the deftly landed sting of a flicked tea towel. It was like being polished by a wasp.

I drove across Transylvania a few years ago and stopped off to visit the daughter of the cook. Her mother had received regular cards from Ivy every year since their meeting and after the revolution Ivy had arranged for a ready supply of reading glasses, knitting needles and haemorrhoid ointments to be sent her way. There was photo of Ivy and her mother on the mantel, arms linked, the pair of them grinning in Berlin. Along the bottom Ivy had written: “Daria, be exquisite and never explain.”