Dear Dad:
It’s a long way back up the Danube to the little spot on the
bank where I sat and watched the Bulgarian fishermen as I typed my last letter
to you, but I'm going to try to make it up now. ...
...
The Bulgarians are the poorest and the unluckiest people in
the Balkans. They have been particularly unsuccessful in war, and every time
they attempt to get back some of their old territory they lose another slice
from the ever-diminishing core that is left. The seeds of their territorial
discontent carefully nurtured by Germany, the Bulgarians are now particularly
strenuous in their demands that Dorbrudja be returned to them by Roumania who
grabbed it at the close of the second Balkan War, which preceded by a year or
two the World War. It is typical of the dilemma which Bulgaria finds herself in
that her friend Germany is also her greatest potential enemy. The fact that all
Bulgarians who consider the matter realize this does not make it any easier to
decide what to do.
...
Before 1933 Germany bought about a quarter of Bulgaria's
produce. Since 1935 she has taken more than half of it. The rub is this.
Germany is in a position to ruin Bulgaria's economy simply by refusing for one
year to buy Bulgarian goods. Because she has threatened to do this, Germany can
dictate to Bulgaria's policy-forming officials. ... But the thinking about such
things is done by city folk. Plodding ever in the background of the country are
the farmers, dirt-poor tillers of poor dirt. All day they work in their tiny
fields, many of them without the aid of draft animals, and the women often toil
far into the night making baskets and pots and dishes for the markets of Sofia
as well as dresses for themselves and suits for the men. These hardworking,
poverty ridden men and women are Bulgaria.
Twelve days ago we left the Romur lying beside the Roumanian
navy at Girgiu, expecting to be back to see it in not more than five days. We
still hope to get back to the river tomorrow, but one can never tell what will
happen to plans in this country. We spent most of the morning we arrived in
Girgiu trying to get registered with the police, and then we began to worry
about where we could leave our boat while we took the two-hour rain ride to
Bucharest. Eventually the Commander of the Roumanian Armed Forces on the Danube
came up to say that we could moor the Romur by the side of a Roumanian warship,
where the sailors would see that nothing happened to it. The warship turned out
to be an overgrown tug with a few armored plates and a twenty-two with elephantiasis
mounted forward, but the offer was more than willingly accepted.
Since no train left till late afternoon, the commander
decided he ought to entertain us. I don't know whether he realized the humor of
it, but he took us on a boat ride on the Danube. We went putting along in an
outboard motorboat while all the soldiers along the shore saluted. It made us
feel quite important. They don't salute the Romur, for some strange reason. We
finally putt-putted up to a swimming beach and spent the afternoon drinking
lemonades and trying to converse with the Commander in mongrel German-French.
...
Bucharest, though historically fairly old, is really a
mushroom city. It has more than quadrupled in size since the World War, and for
the most part it has done a good job architecturally of its expansion. The tall
buildings are well laid out and there seems to be no real problem of
congestion, even at rush hours.
Murray and Rosa were
taken under the wing of an Embassy undersecretary who took them out dinner and
a nightclub, took them home for lunch the next day, and introduced them to
several people in Bucharest.
 |
| Rosa in her Romanian embroidered blouse |
...Later in the day we went to the National
Bureau of Tourism to look up a fellow named Dico Maxim. D.D. Dimancescu had
given us an introduction to him, but for some reason we had expected Maxim to
turn out to be a pompous puffy-pants. Instead Dico was an athletic young fellow
of 27, a sportsman, aviator, journalist who looked like a cross between Gary
Cooper and Noel Coward. Dico, who soon become "Dick," invited us to
spend the rest of the afternoon at his yacht club, and also broke the pleasant
news that Dimancescu was in town for a few days.
Dico spoke pretty good English, and we asked him about it.
Not long ago, he told us, a young American girl from Boston was in Bucharest
and she offered to teach him the language. In two months of intensive
instruction he became almost letter perfect. He also became divorced.
 |
| Clare Boothe Luce, 1937, photo by Carl Van Vechten |
... In the evening Dimancescu drove up with a couple of
other Americans who had flown into town, including Clare Booth, the author of
"The Women," one of the most successful plays in recent years in
America. I sat next to her at dinner ... [where she entertained him with racist
stories about a "buck negro" and a "big strapping Jew" who
became the main character in her play "A Margin for Error."]
It was nearly one when the dinner was over, and it must have
been after five when Dico drove us up to the Ambassador Hotel. I went to bed
and stayed there for three days, running a fever ... We called a doctor the
second day and he decided I had infected bowels and he gave me some pills, but
I really think it was sleep I needed. Anyway I got plenty of it, and now I feel
strong as an ox again.
There is another kid from the University of Washington in
town here. He had found a little Hungarian pension just down the street a
couple of blocks were we could both live and eat three meals a day for a
combined total of eighty cents.
