Much to the astonishment of the natives, I was becoming quite an admirer of Rumania’s railway system. Admittedly, many of the trains are disintegrating; sometimes gaping holes in the corridor floors allow one to study the state of the sleepers (poor) as one chugs along. The carriages are usually filthy and the toalets always catastrophic – in fact unusable, unless one can tolerate wearing shit-clogged boots. But everything is relative and thus far I had found the trains astoundingly punctual, starting and arriving not even one minute early or late. They are also, on the whole, less slow than Yugoslav trains and much better organised. When you buy your ticket – sometimes, conveniently, in a main urban Post Office at a special desk – a second ticket is provided giving coach and seat numbers; and there is no reservation fee. In my experience this system never fails. My seat was always vacant, even when I joined a train midway on its journey and found a dozen seatless passengers in the corridor nearby – those who had bribed their way on without reservations.
There are no long-distance intercity bus services and some of the scenes in urban stations reminded me of India – minus the colourful clothes and baggage, and the variety of food and drink on offer. At village stations many passengers board with turkeys and geese in baskets, or lambs and pigs in sacks, or hens under arms. Second-class journeys are often enlivened by pan pipes and folksongs, the musicians recklessly stamping on the unstable carriage floors as they play and sing. It is pleasing to be in a region where folk music just happens, where it is still the peasants’ way of avoiding tedium. This will soon change; ‘trannies’ and Walkmans are already regarded by Rumania’s youth as symbols of liberty and sophistication.
From Gura Humorului I travelled second class, opposite an endearing old couple with quite a large pig in a poke on their adjacent laps. He slept in transit but woke at each stop and squealed most piteously – causing his owners to stroke him through the sack while crooning a sort of lullaby.
One dramatic symptom of that winter’s climatic moodiness was visible for hours as we traversed the Carpathians at less than cycling speed. February was only beginning, yet a recent thaw had broken the frozen river Dorna into mighty chunks of ice. Then a flood from an even warmer spell, farther upstream, had tossed those chunks about; and then again it froze hard, welding the weirdly misshapen slabs of ice one to another, at improbable angles – turning the wide river bed into a freakishly beautiful polar landscape. For much of the way a main road accompanied the railway, carrying scarcely any traffic.
Beyond Vatra Dornei I invaded the first-class corridors, in search of an English-speaking smoker. As smoking in carriages is forbidden, and most Rumanians of both sexes are hopeless nicotine addicts, many passengers spend much of their time in the corridors.
Soon I was talking with Camil, a young chemistry lecturer at Iasi university. Noticing my discomfort while standing, he obligingly moved to second class – then horrified me by berating the old couple for inflicting their porcine companion on the travelling public. To me he complained, ‘These people are too primitive, they give you a very bad idea of Rumania!’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I feel an affinity with people who have meaningful relationships with their pigs.’
Camil looked at me suspiciously; unlike most Rumanians, he didn’t have much sense of humour. He did however share in his compatriots’ tendency to exaggerate the length of the Ceausescu nightmare. For twenty-four years, he asserted, Rumanians had been allowed to read only Communist propaganda. I made no comment; it was certainly true that Rumanians had been isolated for long enough to cause an alarming unawareness of and indifference to the rest of the world. I met no one who was even slightly informed about Yugoslavia’s current problems; the two countries might have been on different continents.
Camil smiled scornfully when I mentioned that Gura Humorului’s cinema was advertising, for the coming week, British, West German, Swedish, French and American films. ‘That is the new policy,’ he said, ‘to show everyone life in the West. But what will those primitive peasants understand? From foreign films they will get more bad influence than education. And they will be very confused – all they see and hear will contradict all they have been trained to believe and feel. Our revolution was so sudden we have no good plans for dealing with its success. It was unique because Ceausescu was unique. Now he is compared to Hitler, which is stupid. Nazi paranoia was more healthy. The Ceausescu mafia used Rumania like a personal estate, they were only interested in their own gain and for that they took Rumania to hell. But they didn’t want to conquer the world. The Nazis were inspired by a sort of idealism, they weren’t only criminals.’
Involuntarily I shivered; this was the dark aspect of the Rumanian psyche, which I had already glimpsed on a few occasions. It is one more measure of (among other things) the Rumanians’ isolation, that many people so unselfconsciously reveal their prejudices. Plainly they cannot imagine the effect, on a ‘normal’ Western European, of remarks such as ‘I hate Jews!’ Or, ‘Gypsies are below human beings! Here we have millions and they breed very fast – somehow we must get rid of them …’ Words with a dreadful resonance: first you convince yourself that the people to be somehow got rid of are not human beings …
Camil, unusually, did not give me his address before he left the train at Cluj; there had been a mutual failure to recognise a soul-mate.
When darkness fell, soon after, no lights came on. The system had failed – a common occurrence – and for five hours everything happened in pitch darkness, the ticket collector operating with a dim torch hung around his neck. To me there was something surreal about passengers plunging deep into conversation with people they had never seen; many familiar words rang out – democracy, economy, liberty, Ceausescu, collectives, election, Iliescu, Securitate.
At Oradea, a young couple boarded with difficulty; ours was the last coach and so beyond reach of the feeble station lights. They found their seats with the aid of my torch and, on discovering that my Jimbolia train left Timisoara at 1 p.m. next day, at once invited me to stay the night.
‘Tomorrow’, said Maria, ‘I can show you where the revolution started. I am angry because now the Front tries to make people believe the revolution was made in Bucharest. They want all the honour for themselves, to have it looking like somehow Iliescu organised everything!’
Hours later, on the platform at Timisoara, we looked at one another with open curiosity – then simultaneously laughed. ‘Only in Rumania’, said I, ‘could a wandering foreigner be invited to stay by a hostess who hasn’t yet seen her!’ Maria – short and wiry – had curly black hair, large luminous brown eyes, a quick generous smile. Radu was tallish and frail-looking, his mousy hair thinning, his voice gentle; at thirty-four he looked nearer forty-four.
On our overcrowded tram, Maria proudly told me that Timisoara was among the first cities in the world to run trams; in 1864 the horse-drawn version appeared. Twenty years later it became the first city in Europe to install electric street lighting. Ironically, its street lights are now conspicuously few and feeble, even by Rumanian standards.
High in a bloc, an ample meal was swiftly served: salami, sheep cheese (Radu’s parents were peasants), home-pickled forest fungus, white bread brought from Hungary by a Magyar friend and a hearty red village wine.
Like many of their generation, Maria and Radu had married as students; ‘shacking up’ was illegal. ‘We’ve been lucky,’ said Maria. ‘It went one way or the other – either very young couples couldn’t cope, given all the daily problems, or they made a special marriage. Our baby came nine and a half months later – an accident, but without contraceptives we didn’t know then about managing. Nobody blamed us, but bringing a baby into such difficulties made me feel guilty.’
For that baby – Mihai, now aged ten – not only his parents but Maria’s parents and her brother (five years her junior) sacrificed much; if there were only six slices of salami, Mihai got them. So effectively was he protected from the worst deprivations that he wondered why the Ceausescus had to be executed – indeed, why there had to be a revolution. Politics had never been discussed in his presence; as the child of ‘unreliable’ parents he was likely to be under special surveillance at school.
Maria and Radu had both acquired bad files by refusing to become Securitate informers. Therefore Radu was made to work in a distant factory, getting up at 4.30 six days a week and arriving home fourteen hours later. And Maria had to teach in an even more distant village school, leaving home at 4 a.m., changing slow buses twice and returning, shattered, at 5 p.m. Living nearer their workplaces would have meant meeting only on Sundays, if then, and they would have seen even less of Mihai. But because they worked outside their city of residence they were not entitled to accommodation there and for five years shared Maria’s parents’ standard three-room flat, where her brother needed one room in which to study. Then their period of punishment was over. Both were allowed to work in Timisoara, where they soon bought a flat with financial assistance from both sets of parents. Even then, however, Maria’s parents had to continue to look after Mihai, the customary role for accessible grandparents. Often a widowed grandmother (or grandfather) lives in, or close by, and this inter-dependence of the generations has forged powerful family bonds just as these are weakening in the Occident.
After too little sleep and too much wine, we were bleary-eyed at 6 a.m. Radu had to fetch Mihai from his grandparents and take him to school before going to work. Maria was determined to introduce me to ‘the revolution’s birthplace’ before starting her job. The sun rose over a frost-bound Timisoara as we stood in a packed tram, swaying towards the central Piata Huniade. Maria pointed out a huge banner, proudly welcoming people to the ‘First Free City of Rumania’. Then she began to air a complicated hypothesis about the forty mysterious corpses forcibly removed from the city morgue on the night of the 17-18 December by Securitate officers – while the Director in charge of post-mortems, Dr Milan Leonard Dressler, was held at gunpoint. As we walked towards the splendid Opera House – an Austro-Hungarian legacy – Maria paused by a wall-poster display. ‘See this!’ she exclaimed. ‘All is uncertain – listen!’ And she translated a poster which accused Dr Dressler of having collaborated with the Securitate to conceal the number of those killed during the revolution – and which threatened his life.
Timisoara’s Orthodox Cathedral is a 1930s hybrid which not unsuccessfully combines neo-Byzantine and traditional Moldavian influences. In its shadow, on 17 December, many young demonstrators were killed. As we stood beside the piled wreaths and fresh bouquets, watching the prayerful candle-lighters, Maria asked, ‘Do you feel very emotional? Often foreigners come to this spot and weep – they know our revolution started here!’
I replied honestly, ‘If I’d come here first, after crossing the border, I’d probably have felt more emotional. Now, I see too many question marks …’
‘Is that why you’re coming back?’ probed Maria. ‘To look for the answers?’
‘Not really, because I don’t expect to find them. I’ll only find more question marks.’
‘So you’re coming back because you like places with many question marks?’
‘Well, yes – I suppose I do, now you mention it …’
When Maria had reluctantly left me (she could have taken the day off but on principle wouldn’t) I soon sensed quite a strong anti-foreigner undercurrent. Several young men, of whom I asked the way, snapped at me in English – and revealingly.
‘Why no camera?’ ‘Reporter go home!’ ‘You’re late, there’s no blood left!’
Plainly Timisoara was reacting strongly against its recent overexposure to the global media. Thrice I was abused for being English but when I showed my passport two of the young men apologised and one befriended me – and succinctly explained the anti-British vibes. ‘We know how much respect the Ceausescus got, all over the Occident, because the Queen of England gave him an important medal – the one she gives her own ambassadors. Then a few hours before we shot him she took it back, to try to save England’s reputation. She didn’t want a man executed for terrorism, by his own people, to go down in the history books as Elizabeth-decorated!’
Ion was pitifully undersized, with a shocking crop of boils on his neck and a longing (very common among young Rumanians) to go to Australia. ‘I’m a well-trained electric engineer, I want to work hard and have good schools for my little sons – they are aged one year and two years. And here is a bad future for them. Now so much aid comes from all over Europe – hundreds of trucks day and night. And who gets it? Ceausescu’s mafia, who could fool the foreigners! And that is a sign of how our life will be.’
Ion urged me to go with him to visit a friend in hospital who on 17 December had lost both legs. ‘If you are writing about Rumania you must see our hospitals – all the reporters want to see them. In the Occident you have nothing like our primitive conditions.’
I thanked Ion but could not bring myself to visit a legless young man in the role of ‘reporter’ gathering ‘material’. My virtue, if such it was, later had its own reward when Fate organised an opportunity for me to study Rumanian hospitals at first hand.
Then Ion noticed that I was flagging and invited me to his apartment in a semi-derelict bloc conveniently near the gara. Some of the apartments had been abandoned – damp seemed to be the main problem – and this was the most impoverished Rumanian home I had yet seen, apart from Vicki’s cottage. It was however glutted with expensive electronic equipment, doubtless ‘perks’ accessible to any enterprising ‘electric engineer’. No one was at home; the boys were in a state crèche, their mother at work. To entertain me, Ion showed a video of the Ceausescus’ trial, execution, and burial – the most horrible film I have ever watched. That evening I wrote in my journal:
Ion’s video was shattering, not least because of my own reactions to it. Despite knowing the denouement, an extraordinary tension built up within me as N.C. was dragged from an armoured vehicle to face his judges. And despite knowing that E.C. was dead, a no less extraordinary fear – a primitive sort of terror – gripped me as I gazed at her face. (I’d never before seen Her and had only glimpsed Him during the revolution.) Whereas N.C. looked not only bad but mad, She looked completely sane – and utterly evil. One sensed in her case no extenuating circumstances, such as the paranoid megalomania that so clearly afflicted Him. As the film continued (it seemed agonisingly long-drawn-out) I found my hands sweating and felt a churning mix of emotions: a squeamish distaste for the violence of the imminent executions but also a longing to see the Ceausescus’ corpses. Part of me wanted to experience vicariously the awful savage exhilaration of taking revenge. It shocked me badly to be taken over, for the first time in my life, by pure hatred of fellow beings. (Hatred, as distinct from fierce antagonism to the policies of certain governments, or angry contempt for the cruel greed of certain corporations.) During the past few weeks of exposure to the grievous sufferings inflicted on the Rumanians, I’ve been uneasily aware of this hatred smouldering within. Yet when it burst into flames today I was appalled, not only on my own behalf but on behalf of the Rumanians – because I knew I was then feeling what so many of them have been feeling for years. And hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.
On 25 December the Ceausescus had to be killed without delay and the entire population had at once to be convinced that they were dead. As long as they remained alive, everyone would have felt threatened, fearing that at any moment the Securitate might rescue and reinstate them. This I fully understand, after watching that film and myself experiencing an irrational but real fear of the dead E.C. (Or was it irrational? Obviously I feared not the dead woman but what she represented: the power of evil manifestly to control an individual.) It seems fitting that the nation was persuaded to believe in the tyrants’ deaths through a video film, television having been one of their favourite propaganda weapons.
The trial’s aura of unreality also seemed fitting. Of course whoever was taking decisions at that time (Iliescu & Co?) erred badly by staging such a phoney trial and producing the absurd charge of genocide. It would have been more honest and equally forgivable had the two been shot on 23 December ‘while trying to escape’. But what the trial lacked in legality, according to international law, it made up for in poetic justice. The Ceausescus had created a state in which ‘a fair trial’ could not even be imagined; it was a concept belonging to another world. And they died by the standards they had set. If it is true that they rejected the offer of a ‘civil trial’, in which their defence could have been insanity, that was the only constructive thing they ever did for Rumania.
Some outsiders thought it gratuitously barbarous to show the corpses in such gruesomely minute detail, with close-ups of both faces immediately after death, while the blood was still streaming from E.C.’s body and N.C. lay looking like a discarded rag doll, his legs folded back under him. But for the Rumanians to credit the apparently impossible, it was essential that they should see every move of the doctor’s post-mortem check, establishing that life was extinct. In Rumania, for at least half a century, all official statements have been lies. Without that brutally graphic film, many would have continued to suspect or believe that somehow the Ceausescus had been rescued, that the executions were fakes and the corpses mere dummies.
The cameraman had a duty to linger for long minutes on those bodies, and especially on the faces, both immediately after death and when they were being coffined for burial in a ‘secret’ spot in Bucharest. Allegedly they had prepared for themselves coffins of solid gold, but they ended up in crude wooden paupers’ coffins and again the camera lingered on their faces, showing them from every angle, and remaining steadily focused on each coffin while a white cloth was placed over the inmate and the lid was firmly closed. The scene then shifted to the burial site – evidently the corner of a cemetery – where large snowflakes were swirling softly. When the Ceausescus had been laid in shallow graves, a tall burly man stepped forward (Ion didn’t know who he was) and threw a handful of earth onto the coffins. The incongruously familiar noise recalled that both were born into peasant families in a Christian country. Each grave was then sealed with massive stone slabs. And the final shot showed a young soldier plastering cement over the cracks between those slabs.
Ion grinned as he switched off the video machine. ‘Good sport! But better if we didn’t shoot them – too quick. I would like to see them dying very, very slowly – maybe starving to death, the way they tried to kill us.’ He was only one of many Rumanians who made similar remarks to me – and looked puzzled when I didn’t enthusiastically echo them.
The train to Jimbolia, on the Yugoslav border, moved at walking rather than cycling speed. I shared my carriage with an elderly couple recently retired from their factory jobs, two sisters in their mid-twenties and an exhausted-looking mother who sat with her head on the shoulder of her nineteen-year-old son. As a political debate raged, I noticed again how attentively – often respectfully – many of the older generation listened to their juniors, as though aware that National Salvation depended not on the Front but on the young. (Women, interestingly, are no less assertive in public than men: possibly a beneficial side-effect of Communism?)
Andrei, the young man, spoke English idiosyncratically but uninhibitedly. He too longed to go to Australia and when I asked why so many young Rumanians regard Australia as Utopia he replied, ‘We don’t like America so much because it has too many Jews and negro people. And we would like to be in a big country where we could have land to farm – we are mostly peasants, we like to have land, not to live in the dirty city. I tried all is possible to leave Rumania and go somewhere. In Australia they don’t receive me because I have no money and no any friend there. In June they will call me to the army and my mother will be crying all the time. My father is dead, my mother has only me. Please forgive me for my English is not good – they did not teach me at the school. But I learn myself, to give me more chance if ever I can leave this country. Can you help me? Can you take me to Ireland? I can do any work, I will be your servant! Please, try to help me! When you return to Timisoara, please come and be our guest. We are poor people but we have rich hearts!’
In Belgrade that evening I completed the first part of my journal:
Poor Andrei! Indeed he is right – ‘We have rich hearts’. Now I realise that what has kept me going since the crash was falling in love with Rumania – always an invigorating experience, whether with a person or a place. How have so many Rumanians, despite their history, retained so much generosity, wit, vivacity?
I didn’t expect such a marked temperamental affinity between Irish and Rumanians. Also, many details – positive and negative, trivial and important – remind me of Ireland forty years ago. The way women dress and their crude make-up; children’s acceptance of parental discipline and authority; the eager unsophistication of adolescents; the lack of luxury consumer goods; the light motor traffic, even on main roads. And, most significantly, the brand-mark of centuries of oppression – a half-apologetic, half-defiant national inferiority complex.
On my arrival in London, after a series of nightmare hassles at Belgrade airport, I felt sufficiently like an ‘emergency’ not to protest when my friends rushed me to a casualty department. A fractured coccyx and torn back ligaments were diagnosed and a fortnight’s immobility was enjoined. I spent much of that time telephoning bookshops in search of the numerous volumes I had promised to provide on my return to Rumania – books in English and French on democracy, books in English on Rumanian history and politics, books in Rumanian by exiles and a wide selection of school textbooks for teachers of English, physics and mathematics. It pleased me to have this task, to be able to repay some fraction of the Rumanians’ touchingly generous hospitality.