Anna served my ideal breakfast: a vast dish of cabbage and carrot stew, reinforced by chunks of tender beef. Two tumblers of very sweet herbal tea followed. Also, as a parting gift, my plastic bag was loaded with half a kilo of pickled cucumber, a kilo of cooked beef sausage – deliciously spiced – and a loaf of stale bread.
Then came what I knew would be an awkward moment, but I had planned ahead. No one could object to Ada’s being tipped … She was packing her satchel – school started at 8 a.m. – when I surreptitiously transferred dollars while shaking hands. She however refused to co-operate. Opening her fist, she stared at the money as though it were some noxious insect – then looked, aghast, at her mother. Swiftly Anna stepped forward, seized the bill and thrust it into my pocket with angry violence. (After that, I devised a more cunning ploy; the youngest member of the family would find an envelope addressed to him/her when I had long since departed.)
Freezing fog had replaced the evening snow; it felt so much colder than the day before that Dorana’s slacks were soon being pulled on over my own. The map showed a route leading north into the mountains and before long I was in a region outwardly unchanged since the Starkie/Leigh Fermor era. And this rough earth track, its surface now solidly iced, was traffic-free.
For unpopulated miles I was gradually climbing, on my left dense beech woods, on my right open pastureland sloping down to an invisible river. Beyond rose another steep wooded ridge, each leafless tree silvered by hoar-frost and strangely incandescent beneath the low dull sky. Only the occasional squabbles of jays, and a few subdued notes from goldfinches and blackbirds, broke the midwinter hush.
The sun struggled through as I descended to river level; this mountain stream was almost iced over despite its speed. Here I was in hilly farmland – too hilly to have been ‘collectivised’. The several villages were long rows of sturdy one-storey dwellings, freshly painted in contrasting combinations of colours. The design of these homes – self-built of wood and stone, or wood and brick – showed endless variety and considerable imagination. Rumanian peasants are proud individualists, which partly explains Ceausescu’s compulsion to herd them all into soul- and mind-numbing blocs. In front of each house on my right, beyond the river, an old tree-trunk bridge spanned the water. Elegant wrought-iron gates led into tidy yards where – as in the fields between the villages – maize stalks were stooked and conical hay-ricks woven around tall poles. The doors and windows of barns and stables (some brand-new) were finely carved, as were the roofs protecting each family well. Every yard had vines trained over trellises; in summer these provide cool awnings beneath which to drink the wine from last year’s crop. Carefully pruned fruit trees – apple, plum, apricot, cherry, pear – flourished in gardens where enough vegetables could be grown to allow a surplus for bottling. There were however a few ominous new dwellings which suggested that a milder version of the Irish bungaloid blight could soon hit Transylvania.
There is no need to rise early in midwinter; only when the sky became blue did incense-like pine smoke begin to mingle with the pungency of steaming dunghills. On these, turkeys were energetically breakfasting, the cocks often pausing to display magnificent quivering fans. Then, from yard after yard, came flocks of shrill guinea-fowl and a superb variety of hens and richly plumaged cocks. Grey and white geese halted on their way to the frozen river and hissed aggressively at the stranger – then waddled frustratedly over the ice, thrusting long necks this way and that like caricatures of disapproving school-marms. A shrunken old man, tripping over a patched army greatcoat several sizes too large, led a bony cow to the river’s edge and smashed the ice with an axe. At once geese and ducks came quacking and flapping from every direction and I too stopped to drink from cupped hands – which within seconds were numbed. The old man responded to my greeting with a scared glance and a mumble; seemingly he had not divined my foreignness till I spoke.
From the larger homesteads animals were being released by elderly scarved women, wearing striped aprons, calf-length full skirts and embroidered sheepskin bodices. One woman herded a few brown or white sheep, and new-born lambs, to a nearby sheltered corner where the sun was beginning to defrost short wiry yellowed grass. When she left a white woolly sheepdog in charge I wondered if he could be trusted to remain on duty. I didn’t yet know how highly developed a sense of responsibility has been bred into Rumanian sheepdogs.
Black and white piebald pigs, with distinctively short snouts, wandered along the track finding improbable things to eat, like bits of rotten wood and scraps of rope. But Rumania has never seriously attempted to get rid of the class system, and there was a local porcine élite: three half-grown boars guzzling from an eight-foot-long carved wooden trough, burnished with age. Their squeals and snorts of ecstasy were audible thirty yards away.
Little work could be done outside and I saw only two men labouring – one stooking wine-red willows, grown in clumps by the river, the other spreading muck from a cart drawn by two glossy fat ponies. A few weeks previously, Rumania’s revolution had ousted even the US invasion of Panama from the world’s headlines. But what, I wondered, had it meant to those peasants?
Beyond the last village I was climbing again, towards a knot of smooth-crested, pine-dark mountains. The sun shone brilliantly on a slightly snowy landscape of steep, tree-edged fields, some scattered with haycocks, others ploughed. Pausing for a snack, hypothermia seemed an imminent risk; after a swig of whiskey – a rapidly dwindling asset – I marched on.
Then the track became a precipitous path through a forest of oak, sycamore, birch, beech and the dignified, towering spruce fir which bears no resemblance to its puny commercially cultivated cousin. I savoured the illusion of remoteness created by ancient forests, even where one knows villages to be close. On this sheltered slope the path had turned to thick black mud and only my own squelching footsteps broke the silence. On my left, as I followed a narrow ridge, lay a long shadowy gorge. On the other side was brightness; the wide snowy expanse of a thinly forested mountain. Then there was brightness ahead and soon I was on the pass – an open saddle, broad and sunny, its crisp dazzling snow criss-crossed with the footprints of foxes or wolves. (Only experts can tell the difference.)
I lingered, enchanted, reluctant to descend. Clumps of briars – blackberry and wild raspberry – were still russet-leaved between hazel groves and spindly dwarf elders and a gnarled pear tree. The slopes ahead, carpeted in beech leaves, glowed red-gold in the noon sunlight. Beyond them, a dark green density of firs stretched to the silver-grey summit of a craggy mountain. The air tasted of snow and resin, of purity and peace. I wanted to make no sound; the silence was an integral part of this beauty. Almost seventy years ago, an Inuit shaman told Knud Rasmussen: ‘The best magic words are those which come to one when one is alone, out among the mountains. These are always the most powerful in their effect. The power of solitude is great beyond understanding.’
The descent – much steeper than the climb – was difficult. Here the track, following a deep gulley between broken slopes, had become a frozen torrent some three yards wide. Aesthetically this was a pleasing sight, with its translucent loops and whorls and corrugations of ice sparkling where the sun shone through. But it forced me onto the high ground and that evasive action involved some tough climbing; to choose the easiest way forward would be to risk losing sight of the path.
Where the gulley ended – on the banks of a frozen river – a motorable track appeared and gradually descended, through a widening valley between beechy slopes, to a hamlet of wooden foresters’ shacks – wretched dwellings, compared with village houses. Then, as on the previous afternoon, dark clouds suddenly threatened sleet.
As I sprinted for shelter a motor vehicle slowly jolted into view: something long, though not immediately recognisable as a bus beneath its mud coat. Three young women came running through the sleet from the shacks but I got there first and, when the door opened, stood aside to let a mother with baby descend. The driver shouted a question at me – then, recognising a foreigner, made it plain I must not board. Feigning obtuseness, I entered and held out a 100-lei note. He scowled, struck my hand quite hard and pointed to the door. I shrugged and took the seat behind his as the other women entered. Accepting five-lei fares, the driver attempted to enlist their support; but they merely glanced at me sideways, uneasily, before retreating to back seats. When my passport was demanded I showed the visa page; the driver frowned at it, then stared searchingly into my face. Wagging a reproving forefinger, I said sternly, ‘Ion Iliescu gave me this visa’. The name-mantra worked. Turning away, the driver slammed the door and started the engine. But he rejected my five-lei fare, muttering something about ‘the military’.
As a connoisseur of beat-up vehicles, I appreciated this bus. We lurched from crater to crater at walking speed, while the loose seats rattled, a free-swinging roof panel threatened to guillotine me and mud sprayed my legs through a gaping hole in the floor. At two villages, barely discernible through whirling wet snow, we picked up three more passengers. In Buteni, a large village on a tarred road, I made to get off – thereby reducing the driver to apoplectic anxiety. His agitation was so obviously genuine that I agreed to continue to the town of Sebis; it seemed he wished to hand me over to the army.
We filled up in Buteni, where an old woman embarked with her pet goose, snug in its travelling basket and clearly used to bus journeys. It was a strikingly handsome bird, wearing a tiny pink bow in its contrived top-knot: but it had a hidden vice. When its owner lifted the basket high, while negotiating a pile of sacks, it took a fancy to my right ear and nipped it sharply, drawing blood. This greatly diverted all present, including the driver. Much to my surprise, he bellowed with laughter; I had not hitherto thought of him as a jovial fellow.
Our arrival in Sebis coincided with an immense crimson post-storm sunset. Having shed the other passengers, the driver delivered me to army headquarters, a pleasant old building – once a Magyar mansion – flying Rumania’s holed flag but not otherwise militarised. Leaning out, my captor summoned the conscript on sentry duty who summoned a junior officer who summoned three senior officers. I was then allowed to disembark and the driver sat nervously awaiting developments.
The officers greeted me politely and an English-speaker asked, ‘Can we help? What is your problem?’ I denied having any problem, but explained that the driver seemed to need some sort of reassurance. Whereupon he was dismissed with a contemptuous gesture and the English-speaker directed me to a hotel. Then the trio shook hands and retreated from the rapidly dropping temperature to their doubtless overheated mess.
But for a plaque by the entrance, one would never suspect that Sebis’s tall grim hotel is Class I, Category A. Standing in the doorway, I was unnerved to see eight soldiers armed with sub-machine-guns occupying the otherwise empty lounge. Could it be that the counter-revolution was about to start in Sebis? Then I realised that they had not even noticed me, so absorbed were they in a television programme: the Wales versus France Rugby match. Later these teenage conscripts admitted that their formidable weapons were unloaded; they just carried them around to get used to the feel of them.
My companions’ rapt expressions owed less to the quality of the Rugby than to the fact that they were watching Western television, a novel experience for their generation. At intervals the English-speakers turned to me and exclaimed, ‘We’re free now!’ Or, ‘This is our liberty!’ Or, ‘Now we can watch the whole world!’ They were not drinking their beers, which had evidently been bought as an ‘entry fee’, and when one youth offered me his bottle I understood why. At that date Rumanian beer (five pence a litre at my rate of exchange) was a flat acidic abomination, laden with sharp bits of grit, virtually non-alcoholic and tasting of soap powder – perhaps added in an abortive effort to make it foam.
Soon after the final whistle my companions stood up, adjusted their weapons awkwardly, doffed their fur caps and filed past me to say goodbye, each bowing respectfully and kissing my hand. They were gentle youths; it upset me to think of them being trained to kill.
At the far end of that vast, cold, dimly-lit lounge I thumped repeatedly on Reception’s high counter. Eventually diminutive Irina appeared. Only her fur-hatted head and enshawled shoulders were visible as she gazed up at me in wordless astonishment, before accepting my passport and scuttling away into a back room. Long minutes later she returned and said in precise English, ‘Welcome to our country! But I am sorry, we must charge you 300 lei for one night. It is too much, but that is the rule for tourists. I am sorry again that the restaurant has no food. This is not a good time for tourism. But your room will be warm. Since the revolution, our Front for National Salvation has given us more heating.’
Irina looked miserably guilty as I paid my 300 lei: three days’ wages for the average Rumanian. Then a weedy uniformed figure – one of the hotel’s many surplus lackeys – drifted out of the gloom to conduct me upstairs. ‘Let him carry your luggage,’ urged Irina. On hearing that I had none she laughed nervously; evidently this confirmed her original impression that there was a lunatic on the premises.
My warm double room boasted bedside lamps, television, telephone and an en suite bathroom. But the lamps lacked bulbs, the television and telephone didn’t work and the only water came from the wash-basin cold tap in an intermittent trickle. However, the loo did flush, if one experimented patiently with its hydraulics. And for me, sans sponge-bag, the water supply was unimportant; I simply wiped my face with a dampened end of the grubby little hotel towel.
I was supping off Anna’s bounty when a knock on the door heralded two worried-looking young men. Liviu was dark and stocky, Gabi tall by any standards and freakishly so for a Rumanian. They were worried because the hotel had charged me the tourist rate. Gabi returned my 300 lei while Liviu explained, ‘You must be the guest of Rumania because Ceausescu exploited tourists, so now it is our duty to make them welcome.’ Ignoring my argument that 300 lei was a reasonable charge, they bowed and withdrew. Later Irina informed me that they were Timisoara students who had ‘helped to make the revolution’ and were now ‘serving on the Committee’ in their home town. ‘The Committee’ was defined as a spontaneously formed group which had in effect replaced the local Party bosses; hence Irina’s acceptance of the young men’s decision that I should be given free accommodation. Such Committees were most influential in small towns but did not last long anywhere; their practical know-how fell far short of their idealism.
At eight o’clock next morning Irina thought breakfast might be served some time after ten but she couldn’t promise … I assured her that I had ample food and was hoping only for a glass of herbal tea or a cup of acorn coffee. She grovelled: neither was available. Then she grovelled again because of the weather. Usually, in January, it was much colder with heavy snow and then hours of bright sunshine. Together we stood peering through sheets of sleet at Sebis’s ‘systematised’ town centre, which even on a balmy spring day is uninspiring. ‘You cannot walk on now,’ observed Irina. Agreeing, I returned to my room.
Since leaving Arad my action-packed life had protected me from booklessness. Now the full horror of having nothing to read, for the first time in my life, induced panic. Then I remembered the pocket diary given me as I left London: it contained printed matter. Seizing it, I found numerous gardening-related quotes and was musing over the potted biography of Sir Joseph Paxton when Liviu and Gabi reappeared, to assure me that my second night in Sebis would also be on the state. As it was Sunday they were free to relax and talk. Gabi commented, ‘There is much to be done, reorganising things, even on a Sunday. But in this country it is hard to get people to work on any day and impossible on Sundays!’
My friends were curious to know how the outside world had viewed Rumania’s revolution – a widespread curiosity at that time. I reported our astonished admiration for the bravery of the unarmed young and our elation at the apparent triumph of People Power.
‘But why were you astonished?’ asked Gabi. ‘If you were young and lived in Rumania under Ceausescu, wouldn’t you be willing to risk your life to change things?’
Liviu added, ‘And it had to be the young who acted, the others were too worn down and terrorised. But people who didn’t live under Ceausescu couldn’t imagine it, that’s why they were astonished.’
As I later realised, both these young men were much more politically astute than the average Rumanian. They felt pessimistic about the immediate future, believing their country needed at least a year to prepare for its first attempt to organise democratic elections. ‘At best,’ said Liviu, ‘it can only be an attempt!’
We parted after a few instructive – I hoped for all of us – hours. At supper-time we were to meet again in the restaurant; there might be no supper, but there would certainly be a Gypsy band and a popular local singer of post-revolutionary ballads.
The sleet had stopped but a low sullen sky made noon seem like dusk. As I rambled around the town a distant choir, sounding more fervent than tuneful, drew me to the little Orthodox church where a funeral service was following the Sunday Mass. Recently the building had been redecorated; its walls and ceiling were covered with bright stilted murals on conventional Byzantine themes. All Rumania’s Communist rulers secured the support of the Orthodox church by lavishly funding restoration work and new building, as well as paying local popes 2000 lei a month, by way of supplementing their other sources of income, and paying senior clergy a great deal more.
The overflowing congregation included all age groups but had a predominance of wizened women in black headscarves. Soon after my arrival the mourners uncovered baskets of large buns, or unwrapped huge circular loaves, and for some ten minutes ritualistically raised their offerings – each with a lighted candle on top – high above their heads, then lowered them, then again raised them. Meanwhile, the pope in gilded vestments, and two adult acolytes who wore only slightly less gorgeous robes, were swinging censers and solemnly singing in the centre of the church. There tall candles surrounded an ornate brass table supporting two gigantic pottery basins full of some dark brown gooey substance. The ceremony concluded with the distribution of bread and goo; within moments I had received a dozen buns and several dollops of sticky stuff wrapped in paper napkins. The accompanying smiles and handshakes were heart-warming; unfortunately I could converse only with the pope, who too closely resembled the worst sort of Irish parish priest: plump, complacent, calculating and sure of his power over his people. Those buns proved just edible, though of a weirdly rubbery texture. But the goo – different versions of some anti-human confection – could not possibly be forced down. Immediately after the revolution, the sheer repulsiveness of most Rumanian food and drink was beyond exaggeration.
Sebis – not to be confused with the much bigger Sebes, near Alba Iulia – lies on the banks of a polluted river at the base of a long, forested, wolf-infested ridge. During the night I had heard persistent howling: to me the eeriest of sounds, arousing an absurd atavistic fear. According to Gabi, the ‘simple people’ (a Rumanian euphemism for peasants) suffer from chronic wolf-phobia though no local adult has been killed since the winter of 1962-3. Then three foresters disappeared, in separate incidents; the simple people couldn’t understand why their boots were eaten but their scalps discarded, a detail which for them greatly magnified the horror of the tragedies. During the past few decades small children have occasionally been attacked in midwinter, but for that Gabi and Liviu blamed careless parents rather than hungry wolves.
I spent that cold dark afternoon walking briskly around Sebis and its environs, adjusting to Ceausescu-scarred Transylvania. This process was helped by my having acquired two good Sebis friends who tentatively hoped, if all went well politically, to visit me quite soon in Ireland. Already my focus of interest was shifting from the Transylvania of my dreams to the Transylvania of today.
Before its cruelly enforced transformation into an ‘agro-industrial complex’, Sebis was a small attractive town surrounded by prosperous farming villages. Now the whole area is ugly, impoverished, dispirited, its handsome sturdy village dwellings replaced by dreary rows of jerry-built farm-workers’ blocs. No one was around, on a Sunday afternoon, to hinder my probing the scandals of ‘collectivisation’. Wading through ankle-deep liquid manure, between a score of broken-down rusted tractors, I found animals being kept in Belsen conditions. An Irish farmer who inflicted half as much suffering would be jailed. But then, no Irish farmer would be so improvident; Irish livestock make money for their owners. To console myself, I reflected that farms never look their best in midwinter.
Over supper my friends declared that the new regime should at once return the land to private ownership. To us this sounds trite; one tends merely to nod before raising some more debatable point. Yet how can the return of village collectives to the original owners (or their descendants) be fairly organised after the passage of forty socially deforming years during which the land has been consistently abused and most of the younger generation have migrated to the cities? All their lives the peasants have been paid only a slave-wage, apart from the elite corps of state farm tractor drivers and mechanics, who were paid more than academics. So how can individuals afford to nurse sick fields and animals back to health? And how can the younger generation be persuaded to exchange steady urban jobs, with regular hours and wages and mod. con. flats, for the unpredictable incomes, long hours and material discomforts of private farming? When collectivisation began, thousands of peasants who refused to co-operate were arrested and punished. Forty years later, will it be necessary to arrest and punish their children and grandchildren for refusing to return to the ancestral fields?
Another problem: who is to decide how to share out the vast state farms, expropriated from the nobility? Should those millions of hectares go to peasants who have never possessed land, the descendants of the poorest serfs of the feudal landlords? (Feudalism lasted longer in Rumania than anywhere else in Europe.) Poetic justice suggests that, but could such people cope? Might it not be wiser for the state to lease those potentially fertile hectares to the most prosperous and dynamic villagers, those who were best able to manipulate the black market under Communism?
Romantic city-dwellers, Gabi said, argue that the mere possession of land would trigger an instant chemical reaction in most peasants, stimulating hard work and efficiency. This might well be true if the majority were not geriatric. Throughout the Communist years, village families put much energy and initiative into producing the maximum of food in the minimum of space; otherwise Rumania would literally have been famine-stricken during the 1980s. But Liviu and Gabi feared that those whose homes have been razed and gardens lost might be irredeemably demoralised. As unthinking cogs in the collective wheel they have become reluctant to assume responsibility for anything outside the narrowest circle of domestic concerns.
In the crowded hotel restaurant each customer could have only one portion of leathery beef kebabs with stale bread. There was nothing else, not even pickled cabbage or cucumber though the local shops were packed with those delicacies. The hotel had used up its pickle allocation, my friends explained, and rations are not transferable, however embarrassing the shops’ surpluses. An alimentara gets its quota, a hotel gets its quota – and that’s it …
‘But,’ I protested, ‘you’ve had a revolution! For how much longer must this lunacy go on?’ They exchanged gloomy glances. ‘Who knows?’ said Gabi. ‘Where can we begin?’ said Liviu. More than any other eastern bloc country, Rumania seemed unable to find the answer to that question: or was, for reasons that gradually suggested themselves to me, unwilling to seek it.
The Gypsy band failed to turn up; having played elsewhere at lunchtime, they had been too well rewarded with tuica. However, the ballad-singer – dark-skinned with mischievous laughing eyes and wavy shoulder-length jet-black hair – arrived only an hour late. He wore the sort of jeans that threaten emasculation and an ‘I LOVE JESUS!’ T-shirt over a polo-neck sweater. His grinning blonde girl-friend accompanied him on an ill-tuned piano in a corner of the dining-room; her black tracksuit was decorated, fore and aft, with a skull and crossbones. The anti-Ceausescu ballads were wasted on me but evoked semi-hysterical giggling and tumultuous applause and foot-stamping from the audience – including a group of hitherto sombre-looking army officers, sitting close to our table.
In the middle of the room three youths were equipped with a full-sized ‘Free Rumania’ flag, tied to a shepherd’s crook, and at intervals they waved it joyously. I found the prevalence of those triumphantly mutilated flags curiously moving. They flew from offices, army and police barracks, churches and schools, private houses, bloc balconies – and, in miniature form, from trucks, tractors, buses, trains, trams, motor cycles, cars and horse-carts. That neatly-cut hole then seemed to symbolise, most powerfully, Rumania’s sudden change of fortune. When I suggested it as an appropriate permanent national emblem the young men remained silent. Then, looking down at the table, Gabi slowly said, ‘But maybe … one day it will be patched?’
A waiter passed us, bringing labelled wine bottles to the officers, and I at once became over-excited. (During our forenoon session we had emptied the whiskey bottle.) However, my suggestion that we too should indulge was scorned – ‘That is not real, it comes from a laboratory. All our real wine goes abroad, except what we make at home.’
Despite the alcohol drought, and my companions’ underlying pessimism, I suddenly felt intoxicated. A month previously, this scene would have been beyond the imagination of the most fanciful Rumanian. I looked at the crowd; years of malnutrition had left people abnormally susceptible to cold, and all were wearing woolly caps or fur hats, and sheepskin jackets or heavy drab anoraks. Yet to me the room-temperature seemed just right – and ecologically much sounder than our Western hot-houses. Many faces showed signs of long-term exhaustion and strain but now were relaxed: even, in some cases, serene. On one level this revolution had been totally successful. After decades during which only silence was safe, all Rumanians now felt free to express themselves loudly, as individuals, in public – and in the presence of members of the security forces. So completely do we take this freedom for granted that only then did I fully appreciate what it must mean to those to whom it is new.
My impression in Sebis, and during the next fortnight, was of a dazed and grateful people celebrating their escape from a diabolically efficient terrorist state which had used a tiny minority to repress a stoutly anti-Communist majority. This, like many political first impressions, was misleading – as Liviu and Gabi could have told me. Perhaps they were superstitiously reluctant to be explicit, lest voicing their fears might help to fulfil them.
After my friends’ departure I lingered, hoping for further interesting encounters. Rumanian is not an insurmountable barrier, if both sides are keen to communicate, but no one else wanted to become involved. All along my route, during that significant period, my appearance in a restaurant or other public places caused atmospheric crackles; the simple people were still uncertain about responding to friendly overtures from an inexplicable solitary stranger. Yet their reaction was never hostile; in some villages my reception incongruously recalled Ethiopia’s Simien region, where the local headman would courteously offer me hospitality while everyone else backed off.
Before departing, my friends had warned me that the sleety weather would continue and, intuiting that I had exhausted Sebis’s charms, suggested my going north to Maramures by wheeled transport. There the weather was likely to be more seasonable: real snowstorms interspersed with sunny days conducive to trekking. They arranged for me to be given a lift to Oradea early enough to catch a train to Baia Mare. From there, weather permitting, I could walk over the mountains to Maramures.