Peter Riley: Ocna Spa

Ocna Spa by Peter Riley

There is a "spa" at Ocna Sugatag. Apart from some recent pre-derelict constructions – a few huts and puddles labelled "spa", etc. on the edges of the salt lakes, which are all that is left of the old salt mines below the town — it consists of a hotel and swimming-pool complex on the main road north. Ocna is really no more than a cross-roads village; there is at the most one parallel street each side of the main road running north-south. Most of the housing is distinctly rural: bread ovens in the yard, a few beasts, etc. But the central square is quite large with town-like modern buildings, smart by local standards, and a stone church in the middle. It was a Hungarian foundation for the mines and so never a clustered wooden village like those that surround it, and it remains the administrative centre of the mini-region.

So the hotel+spa stands on the main road out to the north. The usable feature for hovering visitors is the bar, which is in an annexe to the hotel on the first floor, overlooking the swimming pools from its large veranda.

It is rarely boring to sit in a bar in Transylvania. What is the man we were introduced to two days ago as a "priest" from Viseu, but who doesn't dress as one, doing here conversing in a business-like way with a woman at one of the tables, and why does he keep moving around mysteriously, exiting normally then reappearing through the back door of the bar which looks like a staff entrance? We shall never know, but he greets us heartily and excuses himself for being so "busy".

It is September, sunny and quite warm but nobody much around, a few off-season Romanian visitors, mostly quite elderly, to be seen pottering in the grounds of the hotel from time to time. The bar also is quiet, except for the table next to us, which contains seven or eight villagers. They too are elderly, five of them women, and clearly distinguished as the old style of "peasant" with their headscarfs, leggings, home-made clothes etc. They are drinking big glasses of draught beer and compared with everyone else they seem small, rounded and compact but above all lively and happy. They are full of talk and curiosity, rattling on to each other, and they keep catching our eyes, smiling and nodding repeatedly.

They become very interested in three people, the only people using the circular swimming pools below us, a man and two women of fifty to sixty in swimming costumes (having removed their dressing gowns) who are lazing in the thin sunshine on the edge of the pool. All three are corpulent. The two women spend most of their time lying on pool-side benches; the man mostly sits but occasionally enters the pool, then climbs out and goes to a shower which is just behind them, and returns to sit on a bench.

The villagers find this trio very amusing. They look at them, laugh, drink, look back at them, laugh, comment to each other, look again, shake their heads, giggle, laugh. All of them, men and women alike, agree that this spectacle is really quite hilarious. It might be the near-nudity, the man's blue swimming trunks almost invisible under his over-nourished belly, the exposure of such fleshliness... it might be the activity or lack of it: lying in the sun, immersing yourself in water, both ridiculous and pointless activities. I can't be sure what it is.

But the villagers are killing themselves laughing. The more they drink and talk and the more they look the more they laugh until they approach helplessness. This is really the funniest thing they have ever seen, this is the funniest thing in the world.

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Ocna Spa by Peter Riley