By Alta Ifland
Queen Marie: If one were to divide people in two categories, dreamers and realists, I would definitely count myself among the former. All my life I dreamed of an ideal house, which I chased with the passion of a man with a parched throat desperate to quench his thirst. I knew, of course, that there is no such thing as a “dream house,” I knew that it was merely a Fata Morgana, yet it was my life’s quest, and now that I can look at my life with the dispassionate eye of the one who’s lived it, I understand that this desire belonged to Maria-the-Artist. All great artists create with their eyes fixed on an ideal, which they attempt to replicate in their works, all the while knowing that this is impossible, that, in fact, this is the Impossible itself, yet not only doesn’t this knowledge stop them, it is this very knowledge that pushes them forward to pursue this illusory dream. If one were to ask me for a definition of the artist, I would say that an artist is someone who longs for a Fata Morgana, all the while knowing that she doesn’t exist. I tried to find this shadow in my writings, and, in real life, I tried to find her in the houses I created.
I built my Fata Morgana in the small town of Balcic in the Dobrogea province, which, alas, now belongs to the Bulgarians. This part of the country is one of the dearest to my heart because it is so unlike the rest of Europe one has the feeling that one is on some other planet at the ends of the earth, maybe in A Thousand and One Nights. The land is arid and the sun unsparing, the houses, primitive and made of clay; yet, the poverty of the land and of the people has nothing depressing about it, on the contrary, it projects a mysterious aura onto everything, lending a magic quality to the passersby, who seem to descend from the pages of an Arabian fairytale. The Turks are fascinating with their colorful turbans, and their women make me think of some strange, fabulous birds, clothed as they are in long, dark blue or black dresses. The local population is very mixed: besides the Turks, there are blue-eyed Russians with reddish beards and crimson shirts, Lipoveni (an ethnic group related to the Russians), Bulgarians and, of course, dark-eyed Romanians. They often pass me by, having no idea who I am, yet admiring my thoroughbred horse, they who are big experts in horses. Their horses too are beautiful, though not quite as beautiful as mine, and we exchange smiles and glances of connoisseurs. Even today, the town of Mangalia in the Dobrogea province is still the place where one can find some of the most impressive thoroughbreds in Eastern Europe.
The Chronicler: Mangalia! Mangalia! Oh, my dear Queen, if you knew what memories you’ve brought back! The last time I saw Mangalia I must have been around ten years old. In fact, this may have been the last time I saw the Black Sea, where Mangalia is a port. I can hear the thud of the waves against the shore, I can see the pelicans and the cormorants drawing large circles in the infinite, cloudless sky, and I can imagine the thin, arrow-like minarets of the mosques whose whiteness and simplicity have inspired your Fata Morgana.
Queen Marie: Indeed, of all architectural styles, the combination of the Romanian brâncovenesc style and the Arabic mosque-like architecture is dearest to my heart. How strange and ironic that Mangalia is for us a meeting point across centuries and continents in the white pages of your book, it too a Fata Morgana! And speaking of the Black Sea, have you ever been at Constantza?
The Chronicler: Sure, I was! More than once, also in my childhood. This is the biggest Romanian city by the Black Sea, the place where the Latin poet, Ovid, was exiled. Tomis—its name in antiquity. Constantza, by the way, comes from Constantiniana, a feminization of Constantin, the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, after whom was named Constantinople (today, Istanbul). I remember how once, during the bleakest period in communism, I was vacationing there, and the local state-owned boutiques, which usually carried tiny Ovid sculptures, were peppered with signs informing us that they were “out of pickles and Ovids.”
Queen Marie: Queen Elisabeta too was in love with Constantza and she even had a pavilion made for her right on the seafront cliff where she used to sit in a large chair all night long, waiting for the fishermen’s return. The sailors were familiar with the snow-white silhouette of the gray-haired queen and were proud of her love for their land. I was the one who made her discover Ovid’s island, where the poet used to come to lament his exile and compose his immortal verses. There is no doubt that one of the major reasons for Queen Elisabeta’s attraction to Constantza was the feeling that Ovid’s ghost hovered above it, and above her.
Queen Elisabeta: I even have a short story, “Snake Island,” about Ovid. “There once was a Roman poet called Ovid”—that’s how it begins. Not many people know that this land—now Dobrogea—was called at the time Moesia. It was my husband, King Carol, who took Dobrogea from the Turks after our Independence war in 1877, and it was afterward that the Turkish Kunstendje became Constantza. During Ovid’s time, this territory was mainly sand and swamps with very few inhabitants, a morose, mute piece of land to which, for the first time, he gave a voice. Often, a land needs someone from afar to be given a voice. The most beautiful song often springs from the throat of a migrating bird. On this soil where, today, one sees elegant women moving to and fro, listening to the marching bands that play military melodies, almost two thousand years ago wandered poor, lonely, sad Ovid. Because he had no one to talk to he had become friends with a little snake named Colubra, which spent its time tied around the poet’s neck or arm. The author of “The Metamorphoses” believed that his pet snake must have been a cursed princess on whom a spell had been put.
One night he dreamed that Colubra told him to go to Snake Island in the Danube Delta and witness true metamorphoses not just write about them. He followed her advice, but, as soon as he set foot on the island, he noticed that his pet had vanished. However, he forgot about her immediately because an unusual sight extended before his eyes: a charmed garden with bountiful fruit trees through whose branches rare birds sang their magnificent songs, marvelous fountains from which water sprang high up in the air, green grass with forget-me-nots and red poppies polished by soft sunrays, marble stairs descending in white slowness toward the turquoise sea. Before Ovid had been able to pull himself together, he noticed an enchanting young woman advance toward him. The woman took him by the hand, and said, “I am Colubra, and you are now on Snake Island, where all men who had lied in their lifetime are exiled. Once in a thousand years we come back to our human existence, the island regains its vitality, and everything is in bloom. But among the living, only one man can see us, a most unfortunate man who cannot speak, for if he does, he will be punished for the tiniest lie and be transformed into a snake for thousands of years to come.”
At sunset, Colubra looked into the poet’s eyes and said, “You need to leave now. Better to remain with a beautiful dream than experience an ugly reality.” But Ovid refused, and soon, an old, white-bearded man named Caron appeared with a boat, and all the island’s strange creatures gathered around him, pleading to be taken on his boat. “Who has spoken the truth in the last thousand years?” Caron asked, and when the creatures answered, “I have,” they were instantaneously metamorphosed into snakes. Colubra too had answered positively, and she too was now a tiny snake that wrapped itself around the poet’s neck. Frightened, Ovid asked the sailors with whom he’d traveled to take him back. Since then, Snake Island turned itself only once more into the celestial garden the Roman poet had once seen, but no one had been able to see the divine metamorphosis, no one save for another exiled Poet.
Queen Marie (to the Chronicler): As you can see, Queen Elisabeta thinks of herself as a new Ovid, a misunderstood, lonely soul, a martyr on the altar of tragic beauty. In defense of the queen, however, I should add that when I came to Romania, I too identified with the exiled poet. How well I understood his sfâsietoare melancholy, here at the ends of the earth! What’s the English word I’m looking for? “Heartbreaking” is not quite it; “poignant” is a very weak and banal approximation. The word comes from “a sfâsia,” in Romanian to tear to pieces. Strange, I just realized that it must have the same root as fâsie, “strip,” as in “a strip of land.”
The Chronicler: How ironic it is, once again, that you are looking for your (English) words, while I am often at a loss when it comes to the Romanian language! That I too have come to the other end of the earth, here in the land of California, named after a fictional island ruled by Queen Kalafia, whose name was very likely derived from the Arabic “Khalif.” How ironic that you are I and I am you in this California-Dobrogea, Dobronia-Calibrogea! Both lands equally beautiful, both sanctuaries for refugees and exiles, so alike even in their elongated geographical shape and arid landscape.
Queen Marie: There is something devastatingly beautiful about Dobrogea and its inhabitants, about its patient, quiet, dark-skinned men. The Turks welcome you with their traditional gesture: a hand placed first on the heart, then on the forehead. They are friendly, but their faces are impenetrable, they never betray any wonderment. Their women are seated, silent and apparently shy, at a respectful distance, but if you approach them, they become chatty and gregarious in their incomprehensible language. Their children too are charming, dressed as they are in their Turkish harem pants, especially the girls with their long hair braided in many tresses. There is something majestic about this desert-like land sprinkled with boulders and cliffs, the salty air merging with the turquoise waters and the azure sky, the silver brightness of the moonlit nights sheltering myriads of seagulls that cross the skies like spectral visions, something so eerie that I took the decision to erect my Fata Morgana on these lands.
The Lipoveni are among the most striking people I have ever met. The bearded, red-haired men, dressed in their crimson shirts, make me think of some enormous red poppies, and their women too wear brightly colored dresses. I’ll never forget a journey when our yacht stopped in the middle of the lake: it was at twilight and we could see the tall minaret of a white, ghost-like mosque in the distance, behind the pale hills. The Danube was suddenly full of boats that were quickly advancing toward us, carrying thousands of locals in their Sunday best with armloads of flowers, while above us, the sun was exploding, and from its liquid body, streams of red and orange merged with the sky’s blue.
All of a sudden, a boat stood out among the rest with a tall man in a priestly dark garb standing by the bow, his golden hair descending in waves past his shoulders, so bright that it obscured the sun’s own brightness, truly a divine apparition. The man carried a big, wooden cross and seemed to have sprung out of the very waters, like some kind of mythical Christ, half fish, half man. He climbed onto our yacht’s deck, followed by two peasants in crimson shirts who sang some kind of church songs, and he handed us the cross to kiss it. As he did so, he spoke in Russian with a soft and melodious voice. I will never forget him and his companions, all three from another world, like three magi brought to us by fate to give us their blessings. Like the three wise men, they brought us frankincense, represented by the incense spread from one of the peasants’ censer, myrrh, in the form of a vial carried by the other peasant, and the most precious gift of all, gold, metaphorically embodied by the mysterious man’s golden locks.
The Chronicler: These Russian mystics still exist. Just the other day I saw in the news that some weirdo with long, sandy hair, who fancied himself as a second Christ, was arrested in Russia at Putin’s directives, no doubt.
Queen Marie: I have always been fascinated by unorthodox forms of spirituality, and for me, such men are no “weirdos.” It is rather sad that they have no place in today’s societies. Dobrogea and the Danube Delta have many such men who seem to have come from another planet. One really has the feeling of having arrived at the ends of the earth where everything we know about normal life is being challenged. There, I have seen islands whose inhabitants can barely be distinguished from vegetal or animal forms of existence, old shepherds sitting still for hours, like some kind of mute tree roots, Sphynx-like in their enigmatic presence, forever morose and silent, manifesting their disapproval at our arrival through their dark eyes and frowning foreheads. Clothed in pelts and long woolen coats that resemble the very animals whose guardians they are, they have become akin to these animals and to the surrounding wilderness. Statue-like, supporting their tall bodies on some long walking sticks, staves, I suppose they are, or as they call them in Romanian, toiag, pronounced to-jag, one of those words impossible to pronounce by a foreigner, they let their detached, impenetrable gazes float over the unwelcome guests that we are. They respond in monosyllables when we address them, as if they had forgotten how to use speech, as if they had become one with the landscape whose peace we have disturbed. By contrast, their sheep are very gentle and often eat from our hands. At night, these wild shepherds gather around enormous bonfires and proceed to sing songs whose melancholy sadness reaches our yacht in fragmentary bursts, filling me with longing for another life, a simpler, freer, quiet, anonymous life I will never know.
Every now and then, we leave our yacht and continue our journey by car through unknown villages with Turkish names such as Caramurat, Bairam-Derde, Anadolkioi, Casapkioi, names whose unusual sounds gave them the attractive allure of magical fairylands.
We often visit monasteries where we are greeted by nuns whose enthusiasm at our sight stands in stark contrast with the shepherds’ grumpiness. One such monastery comes to mind, a monastery with a strange-sounding name, Cilic-Dere, where, after a long journey through winding, dusty sideroads, we are welcomed by Russian and Romanian nuns who offer us the traditional rose preserves accompanied by cold water from their well, followed by Turkish coffee served in tiny porcelain cups. The monastery’s grounds include a modest church whose inner walls have been painted in striking colors by the nuns themselves. I have always preferred these simple churches, often made of wood, to the fancy, opulent constructions the clergy favors. We leave the monastery, our arms full of presents—roses and dahlias, embroidered napkins and an icon of the Virgin Mary—and, driving back, we come across peasant houses decorated in our honor with countless, enormous bouquets of marigold; even the telegraph poles are decked out in yellow and orange, the entire village like a wheel of fire resplendent under the magnificent sun.
The Chronicler: Caramurat-Bairam-Derde-Anadolkioi-Casapkioi … They do sound like a poem, or rather, o poema, an ode, one might say. As does the entire book in which you depict them, The Country that I Love, which is the closest literary equivalent to George Enescu’s musical masterpiece, The Romanian Rhapsody. A Romanian rhapsody written by a former British Princess in which the ideal beauty is Oriental. Your Fata Morgana has Scheherazade’s magic: dressed in white, her face covered with an Oriental veil, she is of here, but not from here. She is your California—the untamed East merged with the Wild West.
One can see in almost all your stories the theme of a Christ-like child of light in which Paganism and Christianity are intertwined, just like the shapes of your Scottish milk thistle and Romanian ciulin. Whether visual (light) or aural (the divine music of a thousand harps), the quest for the Impossible is always there, hidden behind your desire for a white abode, a mythical, almost sacred, Heideggerian dwelling clothed in Beckettian whiteness. Light and whiteness—the unbreakable thread of your life, uniting the search for divine peacefulness with your affinity for Oriental architecture, the kind of whitewashed humble dwellings one sees in Arabic landscapes against the bluest of skies and the equally azure sea. Nowhere is this desire more present than in “The Sun Child,” whose protagonist is a young girl with golden hair blessed by the Sun (clearly, an alter ego of yours), and whose words are like the diamonds (a word that in Romanian can be translated as diamante but also as margaritare, which comes from “margareta,” “daisy”) that a legendary queen has threaded on silk. In this story, you are both the humble girl with golden hair and the legendary queen who needs her help. Like all great artists, you can split yourself in two and you are both the object and the subject of your quest—you are your own creation.
Queen Marie: The Sun Child was blessed--or maybe cursed—with a heart and body that captured within themselves the pain of all the mortals, which she preserved in tiny vials. The vials were full of people’s tears, which, through the power given to her by the sun, she could transform into precious stones, and the tears-stones began to tell the sad stories of the people who’d lived them. Thus, both tears and stones are endowed with the transgressive gift of enchantment that suffering can bring to us as it cleanses and purifies us.
The Chronicler: Another Christ-like character and theme—for, in the end, the Daughter of the Sun dies, suffocated by the countless vials that end up covering her tiny body; her heart is broken by too much pain, and when it breaks, all the sunlight hidden inside it at birth rushes out, cascading in an avalanche of blinding light, just like the girl’s hair.
Queen Marie (pensive): Your words about my being my own creation and splitting myself in two . . . I never thought about it, but I think you are right. In asking to have my body buried at Curtea de Arges and my heart at Balcic, I wanted my royal self in the family vault, and my true, artist self in the home that was my own creation, my Fata Morgana.
The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process
Intellectuals and artists from the Western world have forgotten that “culture” comes from “agriculture” and that it has many things in common with it: just as in agriculture one cultivates a piece of land by planting seeds, watering them and harvesting something in the future, culture involves the cultivation of the past, taking care of one’s roots and transmitting something one has inherited to future generations. A world in which culture matters is a world that is grounded in the past (which is not to say that the past can’t be criticized). There is no culture without agriculture, and no knowledge without concern for the natural world.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
“Fata Morgana” is an excerpt from my unpublished novel Two Queens and a Chronicler, which is written as a dialogue between Romania’s Queens, Marie (granddaughter of Queen Victoria) and Elisabeta, who speak from beyond the grave, and their Chronicler, an alter ego of the author, an American writer of Romanian origin who lives in California. Both Queens were very good artists and writers, Queen Marie’s style having been praised by Virginia Woolf herself. This excerpt focuses on creation, metamorphoses, renaissance and recreation—themes present in the Queens’ stories, but also in their lives. The excerpt is also inspired by the beauty of Dobrogea, a multiethnic region from South-East Romania and Bulgaria.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
The natural organism I love most is the human body. I would love to live in a world in which people understand that our bodies are an integral part of nature, not separate from it. My paternal grandparents were illiterate peasants who lived in a village where they satisfied all their needs from their small garden and animals, almost everything they owned was homemade, yet they never thought of themselves as "eco-warriors." I would like current generations to put their lifestyle where their mouths are and live in harmony with the whole of the natural world, rather than wage war on the past. I would rephrase your question as "to what kind of people are we leaving our world"? In comparison with previous generations, it is the youngest generation that has the biggest negative footprint on the natural world: they can't live without their phones, without their technical devices (made with rare minerals from Africa), their fast food, fast clothing, fast cars and vacations (by plane). My ancestors never travelled farther than two villages away and owned no cars; my grandparents didn't even have electricity or running water. I myself lived in a country with electricity 2 hours a day and saw my first computer when I came to the US. I think the younger generations should stop blaming others for their luxurious lifestyle, and if they are concerned about the natural world, they should change the way they live.
