On the crowded train to Bucharest two of the three young men sharing my sleeper spoke some English. The third, a rosy-cheeked conscript from near Sighet, wept quietly while hanging out of the corridor window waving goodbye to his parents. Having failed to get into university, he was doomed to fifteen months’ hard labour on a state farm – or similar unpaid work. Student conscripts were required to do only nine months.
After my physically inactive Baia Mare day (mentally it had been quite strenuous) I was able to stand in the corridor for a few hours, sharing in the prevailing effervescence – an atmosphere of elation so infectious that to some extent it acted as a pain-killer. Wild rumours were being exchanged and, usually, believed. Nicu Ceausescu, though imprisoned, was said to be organising a counter-revolution for the following day (26 January) to mark his father’s birthday. Thousands of Libyan mercenaries were said to have been flown to Yugoslavia in disguise and were about to cross the border. And so on and on and on … This predisposition to credit absurdities, especially those designed to transfer blame to non-Rumanians, then seemed to me merely pathetic. Later I saw it as a dangerous weakness, leaving the simple people (and many others, too) wide open to manipulation.
Between rumours, everyone was loudly proclaiming their hatred of Communism, their trust in Iliescu, their incredulous joy at being free. Long after I had stretched out on my clean, comfortable couchette, ‘Libertate!’ was being toasted in tuica up and down the coach. It was one month, that day, since the Ceausescus’ executions.
During an almost sleepless night I began to suspect that Alina’s advice might have been sound. When we arrived in Bucharest, punctually at 7.30, bending to put on my boots presented a major problem and I had to be helped to descend from the high coach. Rumanian trains are peculiarly unkind to the disabled – as I had occasion to notice again, months later, after my next disaster.
On that grey, foggy, far-below-freezing morning, Bucharest looked not at its best. Even in the Centru, streets and pavements were treacherously covered by mounds of dingy packed snow and the sheets of black ice almost broke my nerve. A fall on ice seemed just what was needed to finish me off. In the only open pharmacy a skeletal sallow woman with a severe squint laughed sardonically when I asked for pain-killers. All the hotels demanded an exchange certificate; without one, the cheapest charged $40 a night. That grotty old building must once have been quite beautiful; now it had a stained and ragged carpet in the foyer, a truculent unshaven man on duty at Reception and stinking blocked lavatories.
As I moved from district to district on the Metro, seeking a non-tourist hotel, people stared at me; despite my inadequate garments, I was visibly sweating with pain. There were few places to sit; most restaurants and cafés had been closed since the revolution, even in the main railway station, and the atmosphere in the hyper-luxurious Intercontinental Hotel felt unendurably sleazy. This was one of America’s Ceausescu-boosting investments during the early 1970s. To make way for it, the architectural heart of old Bucharest had to be torn out; little remains now of a capital once known as ‘the Paris of the East’. As I passed through the swing doors, an ostentatiously-uniformed porter hastened to eject me; socially deprived Rumanians are not permitted to sully this temple of affluence. The man’s expression was comical when I told him to get lost; clearly he was unused to coping with socially deprived foreigners and didn’t know the rules. He hesitated, glanced nervously towards Reception, then allowed me to proceed into the foyer where I sat for a few nauseated moments before ejecting myself.
During that first visit to Bucharest I experienced the city on two levels which, in retrospect, seem curiously separate though at the time they overlapped. On one level I was coping with my own physical suffering, on the other I was responding to the citizens’ emotional suffering. Rumania’s then state of collective shock was most starkly apparent in the capital. Here the revolutionary price had been paid and many were jumpy and/or slightly aggressive. The feeling was quite different from anywhere else I had been.
Emerging from the Piata Universitatii Metro not long after dawn, I immediately got the churchy whiff of melting candles – and then through the freezing greyness saw them warmly flickering in their hundreds, encircling the long pile of evergreens and wreaths and frost-bitten bunches of flowers that marked the spot where many had died. Simple wooden crosses, embedded in the evergreens, bore photographs of the dead, and messages from their families – often ‘To The Rumanian People’ – and commemorative poems carefully handwritten, mounted on wood and protected by transparent plastic. People of all ages, on their way to work, were crossing the wide streets to light candles and stand by this memorial for a little time. No doubt some were relatives or friends of the dead and the majority still looked traumatised. Many crossed themselves repeatedly and prayed before one of the icons, kneeling on the ice. A few added new inscriptions, tying them to the fir branches with numb, fumbling fingers. Some leant forward, their faces taut, staring intently at the photographs as though striving to reinforce their own courage by recalling the courage of those heroes. The silence was complete; no one spoke, or prayed aloud, or sobbed – or even looked at anybody else.
All around that area, up and down the wide boulevards, were similar though smaller memorials, and fir tree saplings planted on the kerb where someone beloved had been shot. Every few hours, new ‘political statements’ appeared pasted on walls, or in the windows of shops or offices – handwritten, or typed, or crudely printed. Then at once a crowd would gather to analyse passionately every sentence of the latest ‘proclamation’. I was naïve enough at the time to be impressed by the surging fervour of these spontaneous public debates – which made all the sad memorials easier to accept.
At last I came to a semi-sympathetic hotel where the haggard young woman at Reception assured me that the Front for National Salvation – the interim government: FSN to Rumanians – was issuing documents to foreigners cancelling the exchange certificate requirement. This was the first time the FSN had come to my attention as a real live government. ‘You mean the Front is actually organising things?’ I said – with perhaps an involuntary note of scepticism in my voice.
Reception looked huffy. ‘Our leader Iliescu is organising everything and making improvements for everyone’, she coldly informed me.
It seemed unlikely that the FSN would concern itself with my petty affairs yet the notion of seeing it in action tempted me. ‘Where is the Front?’ I asked.
‘In the Piata Gheorghiu-Dej’, Reception said ‘– two or three kilometres away.’ She added that there were no trolleybuses and I’d be very lucky to find a taxi. I was not very lucky; it took me more than an hour to walk there, mincing ultra-cautiously over the black ice.
Manned tanks still stood around that devastated war zone; bullet and shell holes marked every wall in sight. Passing the fire-gutted University Library, I gazed at the infamous balcony of what used to be Party Headquarters and at the sinister façade of the nearby Securitate base; that menacing structure would look sinister even if one knew nothing about its function and history. Two undersized conscripts, with frost-bitten noses and rotten teeth, were leaning wearily against a tank under the balcony. They informed me that the FSN headquarters had moved the day before to the Piata Victoriei, some two kilometres away in the direction from which I had come; there was a Metro stop in that Piata, they added.
Emerging from the Metro, I saw five or six hundred soldiers, in full combat gear with weapons at the ready, surrounding the old Ministry for Foreign Affairs which had just become the Front’s main base – a long, bleakly austere building. Twenty tanks also ringed it, belching black fumes, which one somehow felt was not what they should be doing if in good working order. There were no civilians visible and five or six hundred pairs of military eyes curiously followed my slow progress from the Metro exit across the empty, icy width of the Piata. Reminding myself that the army was, at least in theory, pro-democracy, I tottered boldly towards the centre of the cordon and casually said, ‘Permiteti-mi’, as though moving among a supermarket crowd. Without hesitation two bemused-looking soldiers stood aside to let me through. But as I made for the central entrance, some fifty yards ahead, a senior officer came hurrying after me.
‘Welcome to Rumania!’ he said earnestly, seizing my hand. ‘You are British?’ On discovering his mistake he seized my hand again and this time held it in both of his. ‘So you are Irish! Then you must very well understand our problem because you have a revolution all the time!’
I felt too frail to embark on contemporary Irish politics but asked, ‘Why did you think I was British?’
He laughed. ‘You look unusual, not like French or Germans or Americans. And after reading many English books I think all the English are unusual. So I made a bad mistake and I am sorry!’
Encouraged by all this affability, I enquired, ‘Why so many troops around?’
‘Just a precaution,’ replied the colonel soothingly. ‘Last evening a big crowd of young came here – impatient, wanting democratic elections now. Some were very angry against the Front. Also, there are little rumours about a vendetta attack on this building today, to celebrate his birthday. That is not true, I think, but to be prepared is better – like British boy-scouts!’ He beamed, proud of this allusion, then added, ‘Of course you are very welcome to visit the Front right now, they always make foreigners welcome – foreign aid is so important for us now …’
Being already pain-demoralised, I momentarily felt unkeen about hanging around in a building that might at any minute be attacked by the resurgent Securitate. Then common sense reasserted itself and I allowed the colonel to escort me to the entrance, where he handed me over to a stocky lieutenant armed with a sub-machine-gun, a long pistol and an unsheathed kukri-type knife.
New partitions divided an enormous high-ceilinged hall into small rooms or offices. Expensively dressed men hurried to and fro looking preoccupied/irritated/angry/exhausted/frightened or just generally harassed. But these civilians were far outnumbered by the armed soldiers on guard and the unarmed senior officers who seemed to be present in a political consultative capacity. As elsewhere in Rumania at that time, relations between the two groups were warmly friendly – even affectionate. Later I saw several soldiers being spontaneously embraced by strangers on the streets or in the Metro.
There was much tension in the air: understandably so, given the Rumanians’ vulnerability to rumour. Far from being welcome, the foreigner was, as I had expected, ignored. The Front after all had a countrywide post-revolutionary upscuttlement on its agenda and could not reasonably be expected to attend to the trivial request of a dishevelled wanderer. For want of a chair, I perched on a little table in a corner; to be sitting was such bliss I hoped no one would focus on me for some time. Then suddenly I fancied that I was glimpsing history in the making; all around was, apparently, chaos, yet out of it would come – surely – a new order for Rumania.
After half an hour I began to feel slightly unreal. I might have been invisible … Easing myself off the table, I presented my passport to the stocky lieutenant at the entrance-desk who spoke no English or French. He studied my visa closely, then summoned by telephone a tall young man with narrow grey-blue eyes, wearing a pin-stripe suit and highly polished tan shoes.
‘Now we have separate departments,’ he said. ‘Today you are not in the foreigners’ department. Yesterday it moved to a building near the Piata Gheorghiu-Dej – do you know where is that?’
‘Yes,’ I said sourly. ‘I’ve just come from your old headquarters there.’
‘So now you return to a street not far from there,’ said the young man, ‘and that department will help you.’
‘Could you’, I pleaded, ‘ask the lieutenant to call a taxi? I’ve damaged my back.’
The young man, looking down at me with a mixture of scorn and animosity, said, ‘In this city it is not possible to call taxis.’ And then he strode away, with no word or gesture of farewell. He was the most unpleasant of the few rude Rumanians I met.
Outside, the colonel mercifully reappeared and sent three of his men in different directions to requisition one of Bucharest’s elusive taxis.
Twenty minutes later, it did not surprise me to find the department for helping foreigners firmly closed, though guarded by a squad of conscripts. Their CO – a beardless youth – was apologetic; the rumoured vendetta attack had made it seem expedient not to open ancillary departments but to concentrate military protection around the Piata Victoriei.
As this conversation ended – it took place on the pavement – an American accent sounded in my ear. ‘You have a problem?’ asked Vicki.
‘Two problems,’ I said. ‘Medical and accommodation.’
Instantly Vicki adopted me; having recently returned from a four-year exile in Florida, she too had a problem – culture shock. She needed me, it soon transpired, as much as I needed her. ‘I’m a dentist,’ she said, ‘so I can figure how to get pain-killers. Come on, keep going! It’s not far to the drugstore and then you’ll be fine!’
Turning a corner, I recognised the pharmacy and wailed: ‘This is no good! I’ve tried here already, they’ve nothing.’
‘But they can find something’, said Vicki, ‘if they want to.’ As she bullied the skeletal woman I sat on the floor, not to make a point but because by then I could no longer tolerate the pain of standing, which had become much worse than the pain while walking. Eventually a girl assistant was despatched to some mysterious source of Piofen and Mydocalm, one of each to be taken every four hours. I had been prepared to pay whatever number of dollars might be demanded but those 200 pills cost a total of thirty lei – about twopence. In certain contexts the Rumanians are singularly free of corruption.
Within fifteen minutes I was sufficiently pain-free to be able to think of other things, like food. When I suggested lunch Vicki was decisive: ‘Let’s go to the Intercontinental, we can’t get a real meal anywhere else.’
‘But it’s horrendous!’ I protested. ‘This morning I looked in – it’s unbearable. There must be food somewhere else, even if not as good.’
Vicki stared at me, baffled. ‘All foreigners like the Intercontinental, it’s the only civilised place in this shitty dump!’ Plainly she longed to escape into that oasis of cosmopolitan vulgarity. So we made our way to a restaurant on the twenty-first floor (or was it the twenty-second?) and were served an excellent meal, with a bottle of superb Rumanian claret, for a total of £2.90 at my rate of exchange.
I asked our smarmy young waiter where the crisp lettuce came from – the first lettuce I had seen in Rumania. ‘From Holland, madame – Aid flown in this morning.’ And the tender juicy beef? ‘From Ireland, madame. Many gift tons come in refrigerated trucks.’ And the perfectly ripened blue cheese? ‘From Italy, madame – all foreign countries are very, very kind to Rumania.’ He obviously saw nothing wrong with a state-owned luxury hotel commandeering food donated for free distribution among the deprived. Nor, depressingly, did Vicki. ‘It’s all helping Rumania,’ she argued. ‘Otherwise how could we look after the foreigners who’ve been here since the revolution? They’re used to good food, they expect it – and we should give it to them.’
Vicki ate like one starved; she admitted that this was her first ‘normal’ meal since leaving Florida three weeks previously. Yet being in this Americanised refuge from the realities of her native city was obviously as important as having a square meal. The Intercontinental symbolised what had become her preferred world. ‘I need to be able to spend time here,’ she said, ‘but I have no money so I can’t. You must be able to buy something. The staff watch people like me and if I don’t buy I’m thrown out.’
‘So why did you come home?’ I asked.
‘Because I’m Rumanian and I love Rumania. We make bad exiles, we’re always homesick, even after a lifetime abroad. When the revolution happened I thought it would all be different and rushed home. Now I see it will take years for anything to change, if it ever does. I planned to practise here – in Florida I couldn’t, my degree wasn’t recognised so I had to work in all sorts of crappy jobs. But it was crazy to come back and spend all my savings on the fare. Now I’m stuck, living off my mother who hasn’t enough for herself. Or off my brother, who needs all he earns to get black-market food for two kids …’
Vicki’s immediate dilemma was painful; she yearned for foreign companionship and felt deeply ashamed of her home. After much prevarication, she blurted out an invitation to stay the night ‘– if you don’t mind a really beat-up place? It’s my mother’s house – my father’s dead – and it’s just a shack … D’you figure you can take it?’
To reassure her I gave a graphic description of my own home in Ireland, stressing its more primitive features.
‘We’re a long way out,’ said Vicki, ‘and the buses are too crowded and smelly and slow – let’s take a taxi!’
That eight-mile ride, in a battered Dacia along back-jarring streets – all potholes and ridges of packed snow – cost less than £2. On the way we passed what was to have been the Ceausescus’ new residence, designed to out-palace all Europe’s royalty. The clearing of the site had involved the razing of hundreds of substantial, beloved homes.
This provoked Vicki to an anti-Communist frenzy and she tended to sulk when reminded that in Rumania such vicious extravagances pre-date Communism. King Carol II had ambitions to outdo Buckingham Palace and on the way to fulfilling them he too ruthlessly razed the dwellings of the hoi polloi. Vicki was only one of many friends who disliked being encouraged to look farther back than the Communist take-over in their analyses of Rumania’s present problems.
Most of ‘the shack’s’ tiny snow-filled garden was occupied by a rusty car skeleton, proof that before his sudden death in 1980 Vicki’s father had been a car-owner. Status symbols, I was discovering, are extremely important in Rumania; but this squalid heap of scrap seemed to be taking the preoccupation rather far. Crunching through deep snow, we were greeted with joyous wags by Goofy, a shaggy white sheepdog permanently chained beside his commodious wooden straw-carpeted kennel. Although rarely exercised and never allowed into the house, he had inexplicably remained good-tempered and loving. Then Mango appeared – sleek, smoky-grey and plump – an ever-purring bundle of frisky affection. As Rumania knows nothing of feline birth-control she had produced twelve litters in her nine years but seemed not at all worn down by family responsibilities.
The solid, red-tiled, five-roomed cottage, built a century or so ago, was one of a few score strung along the roadside, each in its own garden. This had once been a prosperous farming village, now it was about to be engulfed by Bucharest. But still it retained a village peace and that feeling of neighbourliness which is so threatened by bloc life – though not always conquered by it, in Rumania.
During winter only one small room was used, as a shared bed-sitter; wood for the tall tiled stove was expensive and scarce. Vicki apologised for not lighting the stove. ‘My mother does it when she gets home at 6’ – it was then 3.45 – ‘because I’ve lost the knack of making fires. Americans don’t have them.’ That was a cheerless, impoverished room, half filled by a double divan bed on which Vicki said we could all three fit – if we slept across it, with our feet resting on chairs. (How I grieved for my lost flea-bag, on such occasions!) The television set had been broken for years but an old wireless was at once turned on and left on all evening, though no one was listening.
Vicki sat on the divan, wrapped in a blanket, and offered me one. But I was warm enough in my padded jacket, sitting at a small table by the window with Mango on my lap, looking out over flat snowy fields that had, Vicki said, belonged to her paternal grandparents. Her parents were not peasants; Father had worked in an alimentara and just been promoted to manager when he died. Mother had been a cashier in the same alimentara, retiring two years ago at the age of fifty-five. Vicki’s brother, a year her junior, was a nuclear physicist married to a chemical engineer. Every day Mother went to the far side of Bucharest to look after their two small children.
Vicki’s culture-shock was worryingly severe. Rocking to and fro on the edge of the divan, she burst out: ‘If only I hadn’t seen our revolution on TV! I could still be in my lovely Florida apartment … I got carried away, I figured this was a real revolution, that all those brave heroes dying must make a new country for all of us – all the blood and sorrow … And I wanted to be part of creating the new Rumania. Now I see the truth. Goofy’s been seven years tied to his kennel, he doesn’t know anything about freedom. If I let him loose he doesn’t want to run away, he turns round and goes back into his kennel. And that’s what Rumania is going to do, though most people don’t see it yet. They’re muddling the Ceausescus being got rid of with a real revolution. They’re ignorant about freedom and democracy and they don’t know how to begin to learn.’
‘But you’ve experienced freedom,’ I remarked, ‘so perhaps you can help people to learn? And there aren’t many Rumanians who speak three major European languages fluently – you could be an invaluable link with the outside world.’
Vicki gestured impatiently. ‘Now you’re talking like we’ve had a real revolution! With Rumania back in its kennel, what role will there be for people like me? Except as a prisoner, good fodder for the Securitate when they surface again …’
As the light faded I went out to the squat-over earth closet in a ‘sentry-box’ wooden shed beside the kennel. Since Goofy was emotionally dependent on people going to the loo, I stopped to fondle him; his thick coat was well groomed – by Mother, it later emerged.
It was pitch dark and freezing hard when Mother arrived, a woman as cheerful and relaxed as her daughter was gloomy and tense. Quickly recovering from the shock of my presence, she gave me a typical Rumanian welcome: hugs and kisses and exclamations of worry about my inadequate garments. Briskly she lit the stove, before taking an ironbound wooden pail to a deep well behind the house – evidently another chore her daughter had lost the knack of in Florida.
‘My mother knows nothing about enjoying life,’ observed Vicki peevishly. ‘It’s all work, work, work – non-stop, from dawn till dusk. She doesn’t understand any of my attitudes. She’s never made the most of her opportunities.’ (‘What opportunities?’ I wondered privately. She was still a child when the Communists took over.)
For supper Mother had the hard end of a grey loaf, smeared with that ubiquitous blackberry jam and helped down by two cups of sugarless herbal tea. There was no other food in the house and she rejoiced to hear that we had lunched well. Her appearance suggested that she never lunched well; although a year my junior, she looked at least seventy-five.
‘They say we’ve more food now,’ observed Vicki, ‘but to get it you’ve gotta queue half the day in the snow. I’m not used to that, I can’t take it …’
There are disadvantages in not having peasant parents; among Rumania’s urban millions the first-generation city dwellers had least difficulty surviving Ceausescu’s Dark Age.
At 8 p.m. I curled up on my part of the bed, explaining that the previous night had been virtually sleepless. Before dawn Mother would escort me to the Centru; every day she had to be with her grandchildren by 7 a.m. Vicki said she never rose before noon – and even then the day was too long …
The radio woke me at 5 a.m., announcing Bucharest’s temperature: minus three degrees centigrade – a mild January morning by local standards. But to me it felt otherwise as Mother and I walked a mile to the trolleybus terminus, negotiating by the light of my torch fearsome hillocks of newly-iced snow. Although I felt quite supple, as compared to twenty-four hours previously, any incautious or involuntary movements were punished. My revised plan was to spend the next week among the painted churches of Moldavia; now I would go straight to the gara to book a couchette on the night train to Iasi. Within a week my nameless injury should either be on the mend, or decisively not on the mend, making a return to London inevitable.
In Baia Mare I had begun to keep a detailed journal and part of my entry for that day records:
The metal seats of our trolleybus were so cold my bum ached. At the terminus it filled up with wretched workers: faces sad, worn, bewildered, resigned. No conversation. Bucharest seems not to be feeling its fair share of post-revolutionary euphoria. Too many people look trapped in their own day-to-day miseries, plus perhaps personal grieving for people dead or injured – and/or acute anxiety about the future. Yet many others are in a political fever, or as though drunk on Freedom of Speech. Up and down the wide boulevards, or in Metro stations or shop queues, strangers suddenly form groups to debate – loudly – what should or should not be done, and by whom and how and where and when: with ‘when’ often the most crucial issue. Riveting though confusing for me, hearing so many differing views vigorously expressed. English-speaking students always appear, eager to translate. These groups, sometimes swelling to small crowds, are mixed: all sorts and ages and both sexes. Four more people have begged me to send them a ‘book about democracy’. Among the youngsters, especially, there’s a healthy apprehension about this country’s having suddenly been pushed off, in a frail vessel, onto a rough political sea – and without a compass.
There’s much fear in the air. Not of the Securitate (most seem confident they and the immediate Ceausescu mafia have been effectively dealt with) but of the essential immutability of ‘The System’. Several people asserted that millions of Rumanians have a vested interest in ‘no change’; the only change they wanted was to get rid of the Ceausescus. A regime so corrupt, cruel and cynical leaves a scary residue of vicious racketeers at every level all over the country. One young woman said, ‘All the world thought our revolution was a glorious thing, an inspiration – and it was, our young people were brave like mythical heroes. But we’ve taken only the first step of a thousand-kilometre walk to real freedom, stability, prosperity.’
The main fear is of the Front rigging the elections and retaining power. Yet few dispute the need for an election soon; this self-appointed interim government is too unsettling, something more noticeable in Bucharest than elsewhere. Here many shops, hairdressers, hotels, offices, pharmacies, restaurants and so on have closed, or open only briefly and irregularly, and there is a general sense of passive anarchy – of a society close to collapse. I find the city unexhilarating despite ‘Incredible!’ being constantly in use to express the joy of being free to display and discuss political documents stating precisely what the individual thinks, wants, believes. Too much violence and terror, too many deaths and injuries have left the citizens with long-term shock in their eyes. And there’s an odd hush over Bucharest, apart from those geysers of political debate. People queue or walk, or ride on the Metro or trolleybuses, in silence and unsmiling. When a whole city is behaving thus, the feeling is quite eerie.
Today, as yesterday, four young soldiers guard each Metro ticket-barrier. Their rumoured function is to deter any homicidal remnants of the Securitate from taking revenge on platform crowds – surely an extreme improbability? But doubtless that rumour is contributing to the atmospheric unease.
At dusk, as the workers were going home, many gathered around the main memorial near the Intercontinental and just stood there, with bowed heads, for some minutes – then lit a candle and went on their way. This strong communal emotion is all the more overwhelming because so muted.
After dark, a young couple invited me to accompany them to the Piata Victoriei where there was another anti-Front student demo confronting a double line of troops and tanks. This was a small crowd, no more than twelve or fifteen hundred – waving placards, chanting enthusiastically and, despite their anger, somehow creating quite a jolly atmosphere. I suspected them, and their many senior allies, of demonstrating just for the hell of it – to flex their liberated muscles rather than to make an ideological point. But my companions foretold that much more would be heard of student-led opposition to the Front.
During the forenoon it occurred to me that I should inform my long-suffering publisher of my intention to write a book about Rumania. (He then had other plans for me.) Finding it impossible to ring London, I went to the British Embassy to look up the Murray telex number – little guessing that as I sat anonymously in the hallway, under the disdainful gaze of a porter (it was then some considerable time since I had changed my clothes or washed), the Embassy’s higher echelons were diligently battling with Rumania’s telephonic eccentricities in a vain attempt to establish my whereabouts and state of health. I watched my message being telexed from the nearby Hotel Dorobanti and was given a copy and a receipt for my $5. But it never made it to London.
In that oppressively gloomy hotel foyer, while writing my journal, I noticed a grey-faced, well-dressed elderly man sitting opposite, staring fixedly at a newspaper cutting. His hands were trembling and he looked so forlorn that I spoke to him. He beckoned me to his side; the cutting was a photograph of his twenty-five-year-old son – his only child – taken the day before in hospital. His mother was bending over him and he was giving the V-sign with his left hand. On 22 December his spine had been fractured and his right arm so bady smashed it had to be amputated. He was an architectural student, in his last year at university, and will never walk again – and perhaps, without adequate physiotherapy, will never draw again. Two small tears trickled down his father’s face as he said, ‘Mamma and Pappa cannot accept this, but Gheorghe can. He has a vision of what Rumania can be – and must be. Now we hope the future will not betray him. Mamma and Pappa must pray to God to give courage. We cannot have enough ourselves.’
Gheorghe was one of more than a thousand victims of the revolution incapacitated for life; other thousands were seriously injured but will recover. As Nothern Ireland has long since taught me, we too often tend to forget the permanently disabled (physically and/or psychologically) while mourning the dead.
Arriving early at the gara, I added to my journal:
Rumanians are shocked to learn that the Irish language ceased to be generally used early in the nineteenth century. I can understand why. Imagine a Rumania in which everyone spoke Russian or Hungarian or Turkish – could it feel itself to be an independent nation? Granted, all Austrians and most Swiss speak German, and many Belgians speak French; but they didn’t abandon their own languages, with all that that implies. However, Britain did give us something very valuable, something none of Rumania’s conquerors or exploiters knew anything about. And that genuine respect for democracy preserved the new Irish state during our post-Independence civil war and the uneasy decades that followed. Rumania’s pre-war pseudo-democracy was proved a mere pretence on many occasions. I fear Rumanians won’t be greatly helped by ‘books about democracy’. It’s not after all a mechanical political technique, but a collective state of mind that takes a long time to evolve.