Oradea – if you look at the map – is not on the way from Bucharest to Moldavia. Yet I travelled via Oradea; apparently fate had decreed that for me in Rumania nothing was to be straightforward. At 7 a.m., all seats on the night train to Iasi were already booked. Then I met Paula, who had been unsuccessfully trying to book a couchette to Oradea. She explained: ‘Since the revolution, half the population is travelling all over the country every day to visit families and friends. It’s one way of celebrating liberty. But it’s not very good for the economy – they just make a silly excuse and stop working, or go without saying anything. And their bosses feel they have no authority over them. That’s one bad result of not having a real government – this feeling “there’s no one in charge, we can do what we like, the police are afraid of us”. And of course now our trains are heated and comfortable. Before, they were so cold in midwinter a long journey could be dangerous. People often died of hypothermia in the carriages.’
Paula and I immediately took to one another and she suggested, ‘Why not come to Oradea with me tonight? Seats are still available and from there you can get on the Timisoara–Iasi express. Then we’ll have all night to talk – and I want to talk much more with you. OK?’
I agreed; as this first-class ticket cost £1.25, no great squandering of funds was involved. Paula beamed, hugged me, booked my seat – then hurried away to spend her day translating from scientific texts at the university.
Fourteen hours later we were settled in our numbered seats in a modern(ish) wagon with open coaches, the only one of its kind I saw in Rumania. Loud complaints about the tropical temperature were general; Paula deduced the staff had forgotten how to regulate the heating system. Then she exclaimed, ‘I’m so happy! It’s always nice to leave Bucharest! That’s where you see the worst of Rumania – is it the same in all capitals?’
‘I’m prejudiced,’ I confessed. ‘Most big cities switch me off. But today was fascinating, just wandering around talking to people – all congenial, apart from tourist hotel staffs. Is it true they’re mostly Securitate ex-informers?’
‘Wise people’, said Paula, ‘don’t believe they’re “ex”.’
Already our fellow passengers, stripped to shirt-sleeves and blouses, had embarked on serious, sustained political arguments. I remarked on how attentively they listened to one another, how orderly these conversations were, as compared to a coach-load of Irish political debaters.
Paula smiled. ‘These are all intellectuals who respect our new freedom of speech. Six weeks ago they would have travelled in silence, afraid to show their thoughts. Now we all discuss everything with everyone, which is natural for us – we’re spontaneous open people, not secretive or suspicious.’ Then, overhearing some remark with which she disagreed, about the free market, she quickly turned and plunged into economic waters too deep for me. As always in Rumania, everyone politely translated for the foreigner’s benefit, and on finding this ‘capitalist’ an economic ignoramus they looked both incredulous and disappointed.
When our sweating companions had at last slumped on each other in uneasy small-hours slumber, Paula fell into a gloom. ‘All this unorganised foreign aid, thousands of tons of it coming every week – who distributes it? You must have seen what happens to some – how much? – of the food aid. OK, we need aid – especially medical aid, and lots of it. But that needs to be watched, too. Rumanian doctors can be very corrupt – if you meet a poor one you know he’s honest. There’s a rumour the International Red Cross will give us thirty million dollars’ worth of sophisticated hospital equipment, but that’s no use without people trained to use it. And will all this aid encourage us to work even less? Foreigners can’t reconstruct Rumania, that we must do ourselves. Now we’re in a self-pitying mood, which isn’t healthy. I notice it even in myself and my friends – I suppose it’s part of the reaction, after so much stress and strain. But other countries shouldn’t encourage it by being sentimental about “poor Rumania”. I come from Timisoara, I only moved to Oradea five years ago. And I think you’ll find Timisoara people more realistic and objective – we’ve always been mentally closer to Western Europe. Bucharest likes to think it’s cosmopolitan, but historically Timisoara is Rumania’s only cosmopolitan city. Bucharest still lives under two shadows, the Ottomans and imported royalty. Another mistake foreigners make is about our workers. They think it’s so simple: oppressed workers liberated from Communism can now live like Western workers. They don’t understand that our workers can only think Marxist. Now everyone says they’re anti-Communist because they see Ceausescu as the symbol of Communism. But while they’re saying that they’re still thinking and feeling and reacting one hundred per cent Marxist, the way they’ve been trained from age seven. How could they suddenly become different just because the Ceausescus are dead? They’re mentally maimed, probably for life. This generation will always fear freedom because it goes against their mind-set. Most workers in every country are simple people. Aged twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five, they can’t throw away their conditioning and follow new paths. We mustn’t expect real change until the next generation is in control – the children now at primary school, whose brainwashing stopped one month ago …’
In Oradea, at dawn, Paula booked me a seat on the 9.50 a.m. to Iasi and reminded me to get off at Gura Humorului. ‘You should arrive about supper-time but there may be no supper – try to buy some bread here.’ Given the taxi shortage – because of the petrol shortage – her bloc was too far away for me to breakfast with her.
Seeking the station restaurant, I had to push my way through a dense throng including many Gypsy trader/smugglers on their way to or from Hungary. (Oradea is close to the border.) No ‘tea’ or ‘coffee’ was available because the water heating system had broken down; the packed restaurant was simply being used as a waiting-room. Along one wall yards of food display cabinets contained a single plate on which reposed three of those too-familiar grey-brown ‘meat’-rolls. When I asked a cheerful waitress if these were ‘bun’ (good) she flexed her biceps and grimaced – by way of warning me ‘too tough to eat’. That little pantomime brought smiles to many faces; despite the grimness of daily life, most Rumanians laugh readily. When I bought a roll – the pain-killers didn’t function on an empty stomach – several men cheered and clapped sardonically, then watched with a sort of awed admiration as I gnawed my way through some unidentifiable strip of offal. I was not, I noticed, becoming accustomed to the food shortage. Personally it didn’t bother me too much – I carry plenty of spare fat – but it enraged me to contrast restaurants like this with the choice always available to rich Rumanians (and foreigners) in tourist hotels.
Outside the grimy, twilit station – smelling strongly of unwashed garments and stale urine – it was a clear sunny morning, only invigoratingly cold. My bread hunt took me down the Calea Republicii to the Piata Republicii; all very Austro-Hungarian Baroque and neo-Classical, which seems quite beautiful in contrast to Ceausescu cityscapes. The many alimentara stocked the usual thousands of repellant jars, tins and bottles. The general magazins displayed four saucepans in one twenty-yard-long window, two jackets and a few shirts in another, six leatherette belts and an umbrella in a third – and so on. A fast-moving queue signalled the presence of bread; having secured a stale kilo loaf I did not have to queue for the tin of blackberry jam bought to enliven it. On my way back I passed a Gypsy girl peddlar standing on a street corner calling her wares – ‘Antibebi pills! Antibebi pills!’ I lingered at a little distance, wondering who might be her customers; but all the young women passing on their way to work had too much sense to risk a purchase.
Paula had advised me always to travel first class, to increase my chances of meeting English-speakers. In Oradea we were too late for that, but my luck still held. Liana was beside me – a stunted young woman who could have modelled for an anti-Ceausescu poster, with her unhealthy pallor, dull splitting hair, decaying chipped teeth and cracked finger-nails. A faint colour came to her cheeks when she discovered my Irishness; she had never before met a native English-speaker. She came from Brasov, was now doing her ‘compulsory service’ in a Banat village school and had taught herself English from her mother’s old school-books, with World Service help. At first she was painfully inhibited. ‘I have spoken no English since my mother died five years ago – because they made her wait till next day for an operation. So now I’m not sure you can understand me?’
In fact Liana’s grammar and vocabulary were so polished that I had no problem with her pronunciation. She described her years of travail as a World Service listener in a Brasov bloc. ‘I only switched on late at night because we knew the Securitate were lazy!’
‘What would have happened, had they caught you?’
Liana shivered. ‘We would all be punished, all the family, my sister too. I don’t know how – nothing was certain, that was part of the fear. It could be big fines, some imprisonment, losing jobs or apartments, no promotion ever for any family member – it was different in different areas, or under different Chiefs. Some you could bribe, if you had lei enough. Others not – if you tried your punishments would be even worse. But informers frightened us more than officers. If new people came to an apartment near us it was terrible. For months we felt fear, until something happened to show they were safe – though you could never be sure, about most people, even friends, because of intimidation or black-mailing.’
‘But what could people inform about, apart from your radio?’
Liana smiled a little, sadly. ‘You are lucky, not to understand! Every day we had to break some law, to survive. Mostly about food, or medicines if someone was ill. My father’s parents are peasants and he would bring from the village food they stole from their collective – just a little, but without it we would become sick of hunger. We could get no meat, cheese, milk, eggs, butter – even ordinary Party members couldn’t, during the past few years.’
‘Were your local Securitate officers identifiable? And were they all bad?’
‘Yes, they were obvious – but not all were completely bad. Some we knew were a bit on our side, especially since 1986. Then the law was passed that we could only have four hours’ heating in twenty-four, and six hours’ light with a forty-watt bulb. All the Securitate didn’t use their right to enter any home any time to check. But some did and people went to prison for using oil stoves smuggled from Hungary or Yugoslavia. Sometimes the informers would smell those and report and get their money and privileges. Then, if the Securitate officer was a bit sympathetic and did not punish, the informer would report on him and get more money, and the officer would be punished. All the informers were very bad. And there were thousands of them – millions, maybe, all over Rumania. We wonder what will they do next, because they are used to extra money – how will they make it now? I know one who informed on my sister is interpreting in Bucharest for French journalists, getting a hundred dollars a day! He reported my sister had damaged her bedroom by making holes in the floor. She had to put up a tent for their two children – when it was closed up they got warm inside. This is not our normal winter – then you would die, wearing so few clothes!’
I asked Liana, as I had asked many others, how it came about that there were so many AIDS victims in Rumanian orphanages – which are not genuine orphanages, most of the inmates being abandoned rather than parentless children. She looked puzzled, she hadn’t heard about this … And anyway what exactly was AIDS?
When I left home, ‘Children-With-AIDS’ was the aspect of newly exposed Rumania engaging most popular attention. Yet during January 1990 I met no one, outside of Bucharest, who was aware of this most shameful feature of their own society. In June 1989, the Bucharest Institute of Virology had reported that almost one in five children from various ‘Homes’ were HIV-positive. Ceausescu then asserted that only capitalist countries suffer from AIDS. The report was banned and the doctors concerned were ordered to misinform the World Health Organization, which they did. In an interview with Christopher Walker of The Times, Dr Gheorghe Jipa, Director of the Victor Babes Infectious Diseases Hospital, explained: ‘This is the direct result of the dictator’s cruelty. He prevented measures being taken to test blood products and his policies caused the malnutrition which was the reason many of these children had blood transfusions in the first place. The tyrant spent more on feeding his dogs than he did on these children. He just did not want to know about them. We were told that if we spoke out we would die. The Securitate was everywhere, even here in this hospital.’
There was a complete lack of interest when I volunteered information, to Liana and others, about the Children’s Homes in general and the AIDS epidemic in particular. Everyone gave the impression of having too much on their personal plates to be concerned about the fate of discarded children – most of whom are alleged to be Gypsies, though this is wildly improbable both demographically and psychologically.
By June 1990, knowledge of this ultimate horror of the Ceausescu legacy – though not of its Rumanian cause — had spread quite widely. Yet accurate information remained scarce. Grave-diggers were refusing to bury the bodies of infant victims – seventy had died since 1 January – and some parents were refusing to respond to official requests that they should collect their children’s corpses. But still the subject was never referred to unless I brought it up, not even by those most addicted to dwelling on the many other horrors bequeathed by the Ceausescus.
Beyond Cluj – where Liana disembarked – the train gave up pretending to be an ‘express’ and became a fifteen m.p.h. inter-village conveyance. Soon my carriage was full of characters recalling nineteenth-century illustrations of Balkan brigands – bearded men in heavily embroidered homespun clothes with long knives in their belts and huge gnarled hands and strong bony faces and deep-set eyes. They smelt even more pungently than I did; otherwise you couldn’t have more agreeable travelling companions – gentle and courteous and warm-hearted. They too ceaselessly talked politics, as the train very, very slowly climbed up and up and up, between snowy forested hills, stopping for fifteen or twenty minutes at every tiny village. Lacking an interpreter, I could only glean that they were unanimously pro-Iliescu, though far from unanimous about how he should run the country.
At one stop a burly forester and his weedy teenage son settled opposite me, then took out their lunch: a brittle loaf and a slab of slanina. Father sliced the bacon fat thinly, with a knife that was half-way to being a sword, while son struggled to cut the loaf. When I politely declined to join them, though my mouth was watering, they both looked so upset that I had to accept an unwieldy but delicious sandwich; then only slanina made Rumanian bread edible. For pudding we had juicy apples with an old-fashioned flavour; the semi-sword was used to peel, core and slice mine, a superfluous concession to assumed foreign fastidiousness. Then father and son wiped their greasy hands on the window curtain and urged me to do the same; but, absurdly, my adaptability couldn’t stretch that far.
Soon after, I moved to stand by an open corridor window, thereby importing the image of ‘the mad Irish’ into the Carpathians. We had reached the provincial border zone, an apparently uninhabited region of steep, densely-forested mountains and deep narrow gorges fringed with twenty-foot icicles. Every tree was snow-laden; pure, wind-moulded drifts towered by the track; every stream was solid ice – and high on a cliff a frozen waterfall, reflecting the vast red sunset, briefly became a pillar of fire.
Here the temperature must have been at least minus thirty. Yet at half-mile intervals (approximately) I counted eighteen solitary soldiers on duty in open sentry boxes atop tall metal stilts that brought them level with the track. At first I wondered if they were dummies; it seemed impossible that humans could long survive such exposure. But then I saw a few moving slightly. They may have had stoves beside them, though I doubt it, and I later discovered that the guard changes every two hours. But maintaining it, in 1990, was symptomatic of a dangerous global disease: military paranoia. Even then, some off-the-wall Generals in Bucharest must have been taking seriously the ‘threat’ of a Soviet invasion.
When darkness fell the train slowed almost to walking speed, as though it couldn’t see its way, which may indeed have been the case; I had long since ceased to marvel at Rumania’s mechanical handicaps. At the last stop before Gura Humorului a weary-looking couple appeared, father carrying a skinny toddler. Wife and I pooled our pidgin German; she was a doctor, from Sibiu, enduring three years ‘exile’ in Moldavia. Her husband and son had come for the weekend: she hardly ever saw them, her mother looked after the boy. But perhaps soon the Front would set people free to choose their own jobs … Her bed-sitter was too cold for a child so they were going to stay with a friend in Gura Humorului who would of course drive me to the hotel, some two miles from the pitch-dark gara on the town’s edge. This chance encounter saved me from wandering for hours through streets unlit and deserted at 7.30 p.m.
The non-tourist hotel was a dreary 1960s bloc run by a small square peasant woman permanently wrapped in a brown blanket and wearing a fur hat over her headscarf. She greeted me with astonished disapproval; the hotel restaurant had been closed for three years, Gura Humorului had no food to spare in winter, why had I not come in summer when many tourists pass through? (Those ‘many’ tourists – mostly ex-Communist country coach tours – pass through only because two of Moldavia’s most famous painted churches are nearby.) On the first floor my large, clean, frugally furnished room was suffocatingly overheated and the big window proved immovable – not only by me but by Alex, my one fellow guest, a sturdy young construction engineer from Constanta. He it was who directed me to the toalet, down a wide corridor with ominous cracks zig-zagging all along the walls. He cautioned me to stand far from the lavatory when pulling the chain; sometimes the tank provided a cold shower. And then he warned me against the locals. ‘These Moldavian people are wild and rough, all smugglers and robbers – take care!’
At sunrise I went food-hunting; improvidently, I had eaten all my Oradea loaf for supper. In its original incarnation, as a compact logging town on the banks of a swift mountain river, Gura Humorului must have been attractive and lively – the market centre for many modestly prosperous villages in the surrounding valleys. In its Communist reincarnation it is an industrialised shambles, where ex-farmers make unwanted goods in jerry-built factories. Near my hotel, a row of solid, brightly painted farmhouses was being bulldozed to make way for yet another factory and monster cranes were erecting yet another prefabricated bloc. Mindlessly the building juggernaut rolled on, oblivious of the revolution: to me a frightening symbol.
The several restaurants were closed – not unreasonably, so early on the Sabbath, but none looked likely ever to offer sustenance. Then a functioning café appeared, built on that grandiose Communist scale – seventy yards by thirty, its frontage glass – which somehow makes the chronic shortage of everything all the more exasperating. Trays of pastries, buns and colourful little iced cakes were on display but experience had taught me not to rejoice at the sight of food. Availability signified inedibility. A dozen men, women and children – dull-eyed, hollow-cheeked, blue with cold – were sitting at rusty metal tables drinking ersatz fruit juice from unlabelled bottles. Although starved-looking, none was attempting to ingest the solid matter on offer. They stared incredulously as I made a bed for my pain-killers by eating a bun and a cake – or rather, gulping them like a greedy dog, since they discouraged retention in the mouth. Now I regret not having taken samples of Ceausescu-fare to London for analysis; it would be fascinating to know exactly what went into those synthetic substances on offer to Rumanians in January 1990. And this in a country naturally self-sufficient in every basic foodstuff.
Despite the pain-killers, my back resented the five-mile walk to Humor Monastery, up a wide shallow valley through long villages. In most gardens tall crucifixes, under peaked wooden shelters, had bouquets of plastic flowers at their feet. The several little churches were packed to overflowing with congregations of all ages and both sexes. This is one of the few corners of Europe where peasants still dress traditionally every Sunday, and the women wore brightly striped knee-length swinging skirts, brown sheepskin bodices, homespun stockings and kerchiefs. The men – young and old – gained dignity from their tight pure white trousers, of finely woven wool, with long matching tunics, dazzling white sheepskin jackets and high black lambskin hats. Every garment was exquisitely and brilliantly embroidered – an endangered art, dependent on indifference to the cash economy.
Moldavia’s painted churches, post-dating the fall of Constantinople by at least fifty years, have been described as ‘a posthumous child of Byzantine art’. The blizzards of some 450 winters have almost completely erased the frescos from northern and northeastern walls but of the survivors Josef Strzgowski wrote in 1913, ‘No other country in the world offers us anything similar’ – a statement never since disputed. The still-glowing colours are believed to have been derived from madder; ochre or unripe wheat ears; indigo plants or lapis lazuli; charcoal and soot; gold dust. Before its application to a plaster base containing lime and sand, each paint was mixed – experts surmise – with weather resistant egg-yolk and cow’s bile. One wonders – whoever first discovered that cow’s bile was weather resistant? And how did it come about that so many of these esoteric technical discoveries were lost during subsequent centuries?
At the head of its valley, Humor Monastery stands alone, few traces remaining of the original fortifications. It is a long simple building with a steeply pitched roof and no tower, surrounded by level grassland – that morning covered in sheet ice. Nearby, a protective semicircle of spruce-clad peaks and ridges rose darkly against the deep blue of the mountain sky. There was no one in sight – nothing moving, no sound – as I sat on an old wooden bench in the warm sun and gazed at Humor’s south wall.
Those frescos break the time barrier; one is prepared for their beauty, but not for the anonymous artists’ eerie ability to communicate, across four centuries, the emotions and concerns of their own day. For illiterate peasants – forbidden to enter churches and unable to understand what they could hear of the Slavonic liturgy being chanted within – this ‘mass medium’ provided the only religious education available. For us it still provides much gloriously exuberant comedy, often revealing direct links between the humour of sixteenth-century Moldavia and the abundance of sly black jokes which now serve the Rumanians as safety-valves. Most memorably, at Humor, all twenty-four stanzas of a hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary are illustrated in minute and entertaining detail. This hymn commemorates the legend that in 626 AD Mary personally intervened to rout the Persian and Arab armies then besieging Constantinople. The besiegers, however – last seen being flung into a demon-infested inferno – are depicted as contemporary Turks and Tatars. These artists’ princely patrons expected them to keep up the level of popular anti-Ottoman feeling, an urgent political need during that crucial century in Moldavia.
Humor replaces an older church, destroyed in the early 1520s, and was partly subsidised – to placate certain hostile Orthodox clergy – by Petru Rares, an illegitimate son of Stephen the Great. In 1527, after a long exile at the Polish court, Petru was manoeuvred onto the throne by a process even more devious than usual and his subsequent career prompted the following judgement from R. W. Seton-Watson:
It cannot be denied that the kaleidoscopic character of his perfidy is almost unique even in the annals of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to admit that he was in any way fitted for the role which a modern Rumanian historian has treated as feasible – namely that of rallying the Rumanian masses under the Habsburg banner and playing them off against the Hungarian nobility, which was using the dire anarchy of the times to strengthen its feudal power.
That was written in 1933; Communism does not deserve all the blame for the present sad state of Rumanian historiography.
Some twenty yards from my bench stood Humor’s high belfry, an open wooden platform under a shingle roof. Suddenly an elderly man appeared, clad all in black, and climbed the ladder-like stairs to ring the changes on seven mellow bells – from a sweet tinkle to a sonorous bass. At intervals he paused to drum, very fast, on a suspended length of wood which reminded me of the hanging stones used to summon Ethiopia’s Coptic Christians to prayer. That was an interlude ‘soothing for the soul’, as my Rumanian friends would say: just me and the mountains and the vivid sunlit frescos and those ancient rhythms, their undulations seeming to take possession of the whole still valley.
My return route to the town – west of the river Humor, avoiding the road – took me through several straggling hilly villages where everyone seemed wary of me. Perhaps they had not yet got the message that talking to foreigners was allowed. Or perhaps history has left them with a permanent distrust of all outsiders. Mercifully Gura Humorului’s industrialisation is not – or was not then – of the sort that uglifies the surrounding countryside by being visible and smellable for many miles. Here nothing marred my enjoyment of the astonishing creativity expressed in the original designs and decorations of these peasants’ wooden dwellings, each with its eaves-high supply of firewood symmetrically cut and stacked – obviously another local art form. The rough lane ways were thronged with flocks of geese, turkeys, ducks. And a ‘rare breeds’ buff would have swooned over the variety of hens and cocks: crested, trousered, ruffed, some jet black, some a shimmering peacock green, others a rich blend of every possible colour. In each yard were tethered a few pigs or sheep – or both – and the dog: either a large white sheepdog or a small personable mongrel, the majority looking better fed than the average local human.
Back at the hotel, I found the blanketed one and her friends huddled on an uncomfortable sofa in the lounge – no more than a hallway, leading off the street – watching television. Alex and I joined them for the news, which was followed by a Czech film of the aftermath of the revolution in Bucharest. All of it was disturbing and the final scene showed hundreds of corpses piled in mortuaries, being identified by stricken relatives – usually parents. Typical was a peasant mother struggling to drag her stark naked son from a roughly-made coffin while another son, his schoolboy face contorted with grief, tried to persuade her the youth was really dead. By the end all the viewers, men as well as women, were in tears.
Alex turned to me and asked, ‘Do you think it’s good to show such films, now? What is the motive? All these simple people here are weeping, made sad, agitated. Why do this to them? For what purpose? Why not give this time to teaching about democracy, about election systems, about the free market, about all the changes we hoped the revolution would bring? That film was only anti-Ceausescu. When will we have some anti-Communism on our TV?’
I deduced, ‘You’re pessimistic about the future?’
Alex stood up and frowned. ‘You think I’m pessimistic? But you are a visitor, knowing nothing about Rumania. I think I’m realistic. Noapte buna!’
At intervals throughout the night my back reproached me for having walked some fifteen miles that day. The writing was on the wall, though my eyes remained averted from it.
Early next morning – it was cloudy and slightly less cold – I found a loaf and took it back to the blackberry jam; I had given up uselessly yearning for tea or coffee. Then I made my slow way to Voronet, shuffling along like a patient in a geriatric ward.
This most lovely village is hidden among steep, then snow-streaked, forested hills, three miles from the town. Scores of houses line the road, many two-storeyed and each in its spacious yard-cum-garden with superb barns – several brand new – their doors, windows and eaves finely carved. Even the iron-bound pails over the wells – recalling Little Grey Rabbit illustrations – were decorated, to match the lattice-work walls and roofs of the wells themselves. But alas! garish paint, instead of creosote or stain, is everywhere coming into fashion. I paused to watch two new dwellings being built: all of wood, including the roofs. No foundations are dug; the frame goes up on a four-foot-high substructure of large mortared stones. Here the ancient tradition of craftsmanship in wood seems safe; it was good to see youths working beside their grandfathers, creating beauty.
Voronet’s reputation as the ‘Sistine Chapel of Moldavia’ has brought about a car-park, a tourist-trap hut/shop – not too offensive in winter, when closed – and a ticket barrier beneath the handsome entrance archway. Previously, according to the Rough Guide, this archway sheltered an enormous photograph of Ceausescu conducting ‘lofty foreign guests’ – the Shahinshah of Iran and Empress Farah – around Voronet. Happily, though the gate was open there was no one about to give me one of those guided tours that drain the joy from every aesthetic experience.
Voronet celebrated its quincentenary in 1988. All Moldavia’s fortified monasteries, which served both military and spiritual purposes, were founded by boyars or princes in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries and endowed with vast estates and swarms of serfs. Inexplicably, they survived unblemished the gradual Ottoman conquest, which coincided with the painting of the frescos. Why did the Turkish troops, who left few fortresses standing, spare these churches on whose external walls they were depicted as the very epitome of evil?
Stephen the Great built Voronet in a few months, to commemorate one of his numerous military victories, but the frescos are later – between 1547 and 1550. The ghoulish comedy and agile inventiveness of the Last Judgement on the west front must have terrorised all True Believers – as undoubtedly it was meant to do, by way of keeping the serfs docile. My favourite figures were ferocious semi-mythical beasts in the process of regurgitating human bodies, very much in the manner of a cat who has hastily gulped too big a fish-head. Less amusing, given the subsequent history of anti-Semitism in Moldavia, were the Jews seen writhing in company with the Turks.
On the way back I was offered a lift by an elderly man in traditional garb: not spotless as on the Sabbath but frayed and farm-stained. He had a kind smile, merry blue eyes, long white whiskers and shiny red cheeks. His red-tasselled, smartly-trotting bay also shone and was drawing a long, narrowish wagon, beautifully proportioned and – of course – elaborately carved. I longed to be able to climb aboard but was too stiff even to attempt such a feat.
At 2 p.m. the town was surprisingly crowded, mostly with shabby, unshaven, hungry-looking men just hanging about. Many wore baggy homespun trousers and fleece cloaks, or calf-length homespun overcoats edged with leather all around – including the pocket-flaps. But again those friendly vibes I had come to associate with Rumania were absent.
Hunger drove me to explore the enormous new market, opened only a few months previously on the edge of the town – an attractive traditional market-place, built not of the usual concrete but of red brick. Only three of the one hundred numbered stalls were in use, presided over by ancient grim-faced peasant women offering a few braids of garlic, five rotting cabbages (literally rotting) and a small mound of marble-sized onions.
Turning towards the hotel, I realised that a truck-load of alcohol was being distributed among Gura Humorului’s restaurants – which event is everywhere guaranteed to bring Rumania’s males into the public arena. As my own alcohol level had fallen dangerously low during the past several days, I hastened to the nearest restaurant. The delivery had been of something described as ‘cognac’. It looked like real cognac, and was warming, and tasted like a cocktail of poteen and arak. Everyone had ordered three or four glasses simultaneously, one of the many bizarre customs evolved in Ceausescu’s Rumania where supplies so quickly ran out. When I did likewise the genial waitress, while arranging my four glasses in a neat semicircle, murmured that I could have a bottle of cognac for one dollar. ‘Bun!’ said I. Moments later a newspaper-wrapped bottle was slipped into my Hatchards plastic bag – which by then looked not at all West End-ish.
This crowded, filthy, noisy restaurant had a brown tiled floor, a low nicotine-discoloured ceiling and dark green walls. It also had food: gristly minced meat balls (what had been minced?), squidgy tinned peas and pale pink puffed-up discs which were, I suppose, potato crisps Ceausescu-style. I was devouring a double helping of these horrors (‘Hunger’s good sauce!’ as my mother used to say) when Lilia shyly approached. Her English was poor but adequate; would I join her when I had finished? Her friends would like to buy me a cognac – she pointed to a table in a far corner, where two men sat staring at me.
Lilia had just qualified as a vet and was from Suceava. She was in Gura Humorului on her first job – bovine TB eradication. One of the men was her husband, a pale skinny twenty-one-year-old with carroty hair; he was trying hard to grow a beard to make himself look older. They had a two-month-old son; it had been a shot-gun wedding. ‘You sell me anti-bebi pills?’ Lilia pleaded wistfully. I tried to explain that anti-bebi pills without medical guidance (or even with it) are dangerous; but Lilia’s English wasn’t equal to that … She was however eager to work at communication and her companions had a lot to say about the new feeling in northern Moldavia, where most people have relatives beyond the Prut. The possibility of eventual reunion with an ex-Soviet Moldavia was of much more interest than the day-to-day machinations of politicians in distant Bucharest. Yet here too Iliescu was much admired.
The older man, Petru, was a charmer – in his forties with a long narrow sallow face, fiery brown eyes and thick drooping black moustaches. When Lilia gave me her home address, urging me to come to stay soon, he slipped the piece of paper into the top pocket of my jacket – then took it out to add his own address in a village almost on the border. Petru agreed with Lilia that Bucharest had never done anything for Moldavia – ‘under kings or Communists all the same no good’. I never discovered Carroty’s name but he was adamant that ‘Here we’re much closer to our own people over the Prut. Chisinau (Kishinev) is our capital, the capital city of our souls.’ English-speaking Rumanians use the word ‘soul’ with interesting frequency.
We left the restaurant together, then paused to say goodbye on a wide terrace where overflow customers – dozens of men – stood around clutching glasses. When Petru suddenly put his hand in my jacket pocket I assumed he wanted to add something to his address. Instead he whipped out my Swiss knife and said, ‘For me!’ His face was transformed; now he looked like the nastiest sort of bandit. Momentarily I was too taken aback to react. Then I made to grab the knife and he transferred it to his other hand, yelling abuse. Enraged, I struck him hard on the shin with my stick and, as he doubled up in pain, prised the knife from his loosened grip. I felt slightly scared of the possible reaction of the half-drunken crowd all around; it seemed ominous that Petru had felt free to rob me in public. As quickly as my condition permitted – not even glancing at Lilia and her husband – I descended the steps and made for my hotel in a state of mild shock.
Lilia soon overtook me, in tears and looking quite scared. She insisted that Petru was drunk, though at no stage had he shown symptoms of even mild intoxication. She begged me not to change my mind about staying with them in Suceava. Petru was not her real friend – she was not that sort of bad person – her husband was afraid of Petru, which was why he had not helped me … I soothed her as best I could and invited her to the hotel that evening for another chat. She said she’d come, but she didn’t.
Later, as I was writing in my room, the bulb died and could not be replaced. Alex explained, ‘This town is waiting for the next lot of smuggled goods from over the Prut. Already some local people get rich on free enterprise. In Russia they buy cheap in bulk – bulbs, salami, cooking oil, electric kettles and batteries – then sell very dear.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘aren’t the Soviets short of everything?’
‘Compared to us, now,’ replied Alex, ‘they’re affluent! But ten years ago it was another way – then we had many Poles coming to Moldavia to buy food.’
That evening the writing on the wall had to be read. My plan was reluctantly to catch the Iasi–Timisoara 9.15 a.m. ‘express’, en route for Belgrade and a cheap flight to a London doctor. There were then no cheap flights from Bucharest.