I also decided that I needed a teacher. I already knew a few basic words and had followed a course on two cassettes, but now I needed to be guided through the language’s tortuous grammar. I phoned an acquaintance at the Romanian Embassy, asking for help. There was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London who might be interested in giving me lessons, she said. She would make enquiries on my behalf. My tutor turned out to be a beautiful, raven-haired young woman called Cleopatra. Was Cleopatra a common name in Romania? ‘No, no, no,’ she laughed. ‘It was my mother’s idea. I prefer that you call me Cleo.’ The shortened version, she added, was less of an embarrassment to her. She came to the house every Wednesday afternoon for several months. We worked at the kitchen table, with Circe – who approved of her – sometimes curled at her feet. She often brought newspaper or magazine articles for me to translate into English. With the aid of A Course in Contemporary Romanian, I managed to construct sentences that sounded as if they hadn’t come out of a phrase book.
