“My brother will be here at a quarter to 11:00,” I heard Anka say.
“Tell him, I’ll be downstairs at 10:45 sharp,” I assured her.
Anka’s brother Adrian had to pick up the extra key to the apartment I’d been given during my stay. In a few short hours, the 7th floor Bucharest apartment would suddenly become empty.
Anka was heading to London and I was off to Bulgaria.
Shrinking Cars
I took the narrow elevator downstairs with bags in tow and met Adrian curbside at precisely 10:45 as promised. He was already waiting for me in his Smart Car.
“Your car shrank,” I joked.
A few days before he’d scooped me up from the airport in a spacious Jaguar.
“Yes,” he laughed.
Adrian’s tendency to start conversations somehow already in the middle of one reminded me of an old neighbor we used to have when I was a kid growing up in Oakland.
Dolores, who was in her 60s when we first moved into the neighborhood, would often call my mom years after we moved up the street. On the rare occasions I picked up she was already well into a sentence whose topic was as unclear as the intended recipient.
Adrian clearly loved his little car. He swerved seamlessly through mild mid-day traffic before finally asking, “Where are we going?”
“Oh, the train station,” I confirmed.
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We arrived a few minutes later and entered Bucharest du Nord built in 1901.“That’s exactly when the New York Subway started,” I chimed in before Adrian escorted me to the ticket booth like a father bidding farewell to his first child heading off to college.
Adrian was an affable, intelligent, and successful businessman with a background in engineering. Only in his late 40s, it was hard to believe he’d had a heart attack just 4 months before.
“Look at this picture of me,” he said, pointing at the photo on his drivers license.
“Look how much weight I’ve lost,” he beamed. “My stomach used to be all the way out to here,” he said extended his hand far past his abdomen.
For a man who’d just had a brush with death or at least a fierce wake-up call, he was in high spirits. Aside from cursing the 12 pills he was forced to ingest a day and the litany of items he could no longer eat, including Mongolian sheep, you might have thought he planned the whole thing.
He insisted we grab a coffee together since I had at least an hour and half before my train’s departure. He took me on a brief tour, which included the “Mid-town” of Bucharest and Ceausescu’s former mansion. Before long, coffee became lunch as we sat alone at a restaurant overlooking the Herastrau Lake.
Admiration
We spoke a great deal about travel, the great and not-so great cities of the world and about business, which is to say his business. I listened as he shared tales of starting out on his own and how much he’d learned from making ill-advised deals as a young and inexperienced man.
It took me some time to properly decipher what it was I felt towards Adrian. But in the end, I realized it was admiration.
Like my father, he was a self-made man. And though I’d only really seen myself as an artist of sorts, maybe a public servant one day, a humanitarian at best, entrepreneurship began to grow in its appeal largely because of people like him.
After lunch, he whisked me back to the train station with a few minutes to spare. I thanked him for his kindness and generosity before telling him to take care of himself. They were words I often used casually in passing but today they seemed to carry a special significance.
The man had just experienced a heart attack after all. And he was still young but more importantly a good man. Anka often shared stories about how he looked after her during the familiar struggles of an artist trying to find her footing in the world.
“Okay, Nick. See you in New York,” he waved.
I made my way to my train wondering if I’d ever see Adrian or Romania ever again.
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