All those rashly promised books complicated my return journey at the beginning of March; bossy friends protested that it would be ligament-endangering to haul a mini-library single-handed to Timisoara. Rachel therefore came from her temporary Skopje home to meet my National Express coach at Zagreb and porter me, via Belgrade, to the border post near Kikinda.
When we left Belgrade, at sunset, I was beginning to feel the effects of two almost sleepless National Express nights. Few were travelling on our stop-at-every-village tube-type train to Kikinda – a journey quite short in miles but four hours long. Soon after 10 p.m. we alighted at a deserted station. It was pitch dark and very, very cold; there were no street lights; not a mouse stirred – it might have been 2 a.m. Silently we turned towards the distant town centre, stumbling over enigmatic chunks of concrete. On my homeward journey I had become only too familiar with this dreary spread-out town of long straight streets that seem to lead nowhere.
Ten minutes later I muttered desperately, ‘There must be a hotel somewhere!’
‘Why?’ wondered Rachel.
I stood still; that was a good question. Who in their right mind – or even out of it – would ever for any conceivable reason want to spend a night in Kikinda? When I suggested camping Rachel grunted assent and we turned back. Not far beyond the station starlight revealed a level patch of land on which stubble concealed embedded, sharp-edged broken bricks. It was quite a challenge to have to erect a new tent for the first time (apart from a trial run in a Clapham garden) with numb fingers, by torchlight, on singularly inhospitable ground. Watch-dogs in three nearby farmyards barked hysterically as we pitted our exhaustion-blunted wits against ‘the very latest thing’ in light one-person tents. At any moment I expected a suspicious farmer to appear, but none did. Our mastery, within ten minutes, of strange hoops and loops – instead of poles and guy-ropes – boosted morale. Then it sank again as we discovered that this was a strictly one-person tent – not, like my stolen treasure, a single into which two could just squeeze, side by side. We took it in turns to lie on top. The under-person, being pressed onto jagged bits of brick by ten and a half stone (Rachel) or eleven and a half stone (me), suffered extremely. At dawn, as we shook the tent free of its coating of ice, we agreed that that had been our most uncomfortable camping night ever – which, as Rachel noted, is saying something.
By 7 a.m. Kikinda was coming to what passes locally for life. Groups of workers with closed faces trudged glumly towards the day’s toil. Two policemen stared at us as though we were objects fallen off a garbage truck. A few little shops were open but sold only bread. If anyone knew when the next bus was leaving for the border they weren’t telling. ‘What’s wrong with this place?’ demanded Rachel peevishly.
I sat chewing dry bread on one of a row of tree-stumps, thinking how much less dire the street would look had those trees not been felled. ‘At least’, I said, ‘the bread is fresh here.’ Then I added, ‘Perhaps history is what’s wrong – this whole Banat region too messed about for too long – like three thousand years. For centuries Timisoara was the capital, now poor Kikinda is a spoke without a hub.’
We mooched on up the street, between weather-beaten red-tiled two-storey dwellings and bleak four- or five-storey office blocks. Kikinda looks as though built by and for dispirited people. Outside a petrol station stood a bus, about to leave for Belgrade. Its driver thought a bus might leave for the border in an hour or two.
‘We could hitch?’ I suggested, impatient for reunion with Rumania.
‘I’m waiting for the bus’, said Rachel. ‘Who’s carrying the books?’
A long, low building, near the bus-stop, proved to be a ‘supermarket’ offering unalluring edibles but tempting beer. We bought six large bottles and sat in the sun – already warm at 8 a.m. – in the middle of an adjacent half-acre of wiry yellowish grass. ‘Just like Cameroon,’ recalled Rachel. ‘Beer for breakfast …’
By 9.30 we felt more cheerful. ‘OK,’ said Rachel, ‘let’s return the empties and hitch – I’ve lost faith in that bus.’
Across the Banat’s insipid flatness, our narrow traffic-free road was discouragingly visible for miles ahead. In relation to the population there was an astonishing amount of litter by the wayside. An hour later the bus overtook us and stopped in response to frantic signals. A squat scowling woman conductor abused us stridently as we strove to fit our load into the bus’s already packed belly. But her bark was worse than her bite; she gave us a free ride because we were foreigners going to Rumania – evidently, in her estimation, an act of lunacy and one mustn’t take advantage of lunatics …
Soon we were on the last lap, a two-mile walk from a straggling, muted village to the frontier. When I saw the Rumanian flag on the horizon my spirits soared and I began to chant sentimentally – ‘Olé! Olé! Olé!’
‘And what about poor little me?’ said Rachel. ‘How do I get back to ghastly Kikinda?’
‘Easy!’ I replied with callous cheerfulness. ‘It’s just noon so you’ve six hours of daylight and no books to carry.’
We parted on the Yugoslav frontier line and when I looked back from Rumania, down that long straight road, my daughter was a dot in the distance. Later she reported more favourable second impressions of the Banat. An ancient shepherd riding a moped transported her to Kikinda on his carrier, then invited her home for a meal with his wife before escorting her to the 4.30 bus for Belgrade.
It would have been easy to leave Yugoslavia unobserved; I had to knock on a door and yell loudly before an irritated-looking officer slouched out, glanced at my passport and waved me on. A hard-currency shop – no more than a big shack – occupied the narrow no-man’s-land and in February had been doing a brisk trade; now it was closed. Then – perhaps because it was a Saturday afternoon – there had been much cross-border traffic.
My re-entry formalities were speedy enough but rather nasty. Two truculent customs officers, redolent of tuica, roughly unpacked everything before leafing through the Rumanian volumes and pronouncing them confiscated. Promptly I produced a letter of introduction to a senior member of the Front – a household name in Rumania, someone who not long after became disillusioned and resigned. When I claimed, untruthfully, that those volumes had been requested by him, the officers both changed colour; one went red in the face, the other white. And at once the books were thrust back into my mega-briefcase. Meanwhile a third crook – this one very grandly uniformed – had been going through my plastic carrier-bag. As I turned away from his colleagues, I saw him strolling into an office openly clutching my precious bottle of duty-free Scotch. When I shouted indignantly the others hastily retrieved it, muttering about ‘a mistake’. Without that letter, I might have again entered Rumania as one of the dispossessed.
I had almost finished repacking – a wearisome process – when a rusty, much-dented Yugoslav car came through. The scruffy middle-aged Kikinda couple immediately offered me a lift to Timisoara. They were small-time smugglers, a common local occupation, and on excellent terms with the customs officers.
Five minutes later, at a traffic-lights stop on the outskirts of Jimbolia, we were suddenly surrounded by a dozen shouting young toughs waving fat wads of lei and demanding ‘Change! Change!’ They banged on the roof, shouldering each other out of the way, yet co-operating to prevent the car from moving as the lights changed. ‘Tigan’ (Gypsy), explained the driver unnecessarily. When he dismissed them in Rumanian, revealing that he was a local, they kicked the car, hard – then withdrew looking sulkily frustrated. It would have done me no good to encounter them alone and on foot, wearing a brand new rucksack and dragging heavy cartons.
In the middle of the town we turned down a side street and stopped outside a disintegrating school. This was evidently a routine; at once a mob converged on the car, looking almost as threatening as the Gypsies. Frantically they swarmed as the smugglers got out, opened the boot and began to sell – for enormous sums in lei – Yugoslav cigarettes, toilet soap, condoms, toothpaste and tiny gimcrack combs. I too got out, my luggage being exposed in the boot; and as I stood poised to foil a thief one sneaked up behind me – a small boy with a filthy pinched face, red-rimmed eyes and an air of savage desperation. He tried to pick my jacket pockets while my hands were in them. Meanwhile several adults, also with haggard faces and wild eyes, were physically fighting over bars of soap and packets of cigarettes. Jimbolia is not recommended for a first crossing into Rumania; there one would be unlikely to fall in love with the country.
A few sad-looking Swabian villages lined the road to Timisoara. These had once been exceptionally prosperous; the detached dwellings were roomy and solid, often with the German family name and date of construction (I noticed 1897, 1908, 1922) over the main entrance. When this region went from Turkish to Austrian ownership, in 1718, thousands of Swabian peasants were ‘relocated’ to farm the Habsburgs’ new and very fertile territory. Like so many of their Saxon cousins in Transylvania, an unrevealed but disquieting number – also subsidised by the Bonn government – migrated to Germany during Ceausescu’s ‘Golden Age’. Rumania will soon notice their loss; as peaceable, hardworking, intelligent farmers, they formed part of an unusually productive community.
In Timisoara, at 1.30 p.m., the kind smugglers offered to find my friends’ bloc – though the address meant nothing to them. But no one would be home before 3.30 so I asked to be put down in the city centre. My first thought was, ‘How quiet it is!’ Certainly the traffic was heavier than on my previous visit – some petrol for private use had just become available – yet it remained soothingly light compared to any other European city I can think of. Slowly I dragged my load through the spacious sunny square overlooked by the Orthodox Cathedral; all the seats were occupied by citizens visibly luxuriating – like cats – in the spring warmth. Since last I saw it the horticultural shrine to the martyrs of the revolution had been elaborated on and much expanded. Now the stylised carved wooden crosses were almost buried under mounds of evergreen branches, plastic blooms, lovingly renewed fresh wreaths and enormous black nylon bows that from a distance looked disconcertingly like monster bats. Hundreds of thin orange candles still flickered steadfastly and yards of melted tallow made solid pools around the fir branches. In the middle of the square, facing the cathedral steps on which many died, a high metal archway surmounted by a cross had become the centre of the shrine. Panels on either side supported life-sized paintings of the Crucifixion: the work, I was told later, of a Maramures village artist. These were strangely moving, unlike the conventionally correct paintings by the state-subsidised artists who during the past few decades restored many Orthodox churches. Around and above them were smaller depictions of Christ crowned with thorns, the Virgin Mary and a dreamy-looking Pantocrator; from Maramures had come a weird but forceful merger between the Byzantines and the Impressionists, with a touch of severe El Greco mysticism.
Two solid, cheerful-looking peasant women, wearing long skirts and striped aprons, and dirty sheepskin jackets and black kerchiefs, were amiably competing as candle-sellers. The many other faces around the shrine wore varied expressions: sad, thoughtful, stern, puzzled. And some were still anguished and shocked.
For how long, I wondered, would (or should) this intense public commemoration of the dead continue? Was it perhaps in some danger of becoming an unhealthy cult, a retreat from reality, a substitute for organising coherent political action (as distinct from having political discussions) because the sacrifice of those being mourned had not made it easy to be free? Another key was needed to unlock the door to liberty, an intricate key that could not be cut in a few days of reckless, despairing heroism. Then I reproved myself for being too insensitive to the inner needs of a city that so recently had suffered so much – perhaps mentally even more than physically. Yet it worried me that the Rumanians may – like the Irish – be dangerously prone to martyritis. The political martyr syndrome, based on a natural impulse to honour and seek inspiration from brave patriots, too often breeds myths that mislead and paralyse whole generations.
In a small foodless dingy restaurant there was no choice of drinks; the waiter brought a tumblerful of something known as ‘bitter’ which tasted unique and looked like stale blood. At the next table three shabby unshaven men were fervently debating the trial of four senior Securitate officers which had opened in Timisoara a few days earlier. Then I noticed Gheorghe, a well-built youth with light brown hair, dark brown eyes, rosy cheeks and an open expression. He worked in a shoe factory and had taught himself a rudimentary form of English. By one of those happy coincidences that littered my Rumanian paths, he lived in the bloc behind my friends’ – some two miles away – and was returning home. So he became my porter and we arranged to meet again at 7 a.m. next day. ‘Tonight I make a programme for you!’ said Gheorghe. ‘You are like the radio for me, giving a lesson in English!’
Vintila and Elise lived in a standard three-room apartment (plus kitchen and bathroom) on the top floor of a ten-storey bloc overlooking similar blocs in every direction. Elise was Paula’s sister – Paula with whom I had travelled overnight from Bucharest to Oradea. Both she and Vintila were by now vehemently anti-Front, though they admitted to having been pro-Iliescu for a few weeks after the Revolution – ‘Before we had time to observe and deduce …’ Their two sons, aged thirteen and eleven, were scandalised to find me devoid of opinions about Ireland’s chances in the World Cup. They had no doubt about the real, central significance of the Revolution: now they could watch all the World Cup matches.
Conversations in English are made no easier for anybody by the Rumanians’ reluctance ever to silence the monster in the corner. However, that evening two illuminating programmes followed one another – illuminating both in their content and in their wider political significance, as interpreted by my friends. The first showed, with a plethora of technical detail, exactly how the state – in the Bad Old Days – had bugged telephones, homes, offices, factories, shops and collective farm buildings. The police officers demonstrating these countless arcane electronic wonders wore expressions of righteous indignation which failed to impress my companions. Vintila commented that three months ago the same officers were probably using those very gadgets and tricks which they now regarded with such virtuous disdain. Elise added, ‘And in another three months they may be using them again!’
The next documentary illustrated how Ceausescu’s manic industrialisation had polluted Rumania’s air, soil and water to a homicidal degree. Elise frowned and cracked her finger joints. ‘All this is too clever! It is a campaign to make us think only about Ceausescu – how wicked and cunning he was, how much harm he did. Then people will feel more and more grateful to Iliescu and the Front for our “national salvation”. And because the Front allows such anti-Ceausescu films to be shown, and the simple people think “Ceausescu equals Communism”, they will believe the Front is anti-Communist – so it will feel safe and right to vote for them!’
Vintila, like many others, worked hard though unsuccessfully to convince me that ‘Rumania has never been a Communist country, most of us never supported Marxism!’ Not surprisingly, Rumania’s sordid inter-war political scene had created a substantial number of Communist sympathisers. These were mainly miners, and oil and transport workers, who tried to organise protests against avaricious foreign companies and their corrupt Rumanian allies – including King Carol II and his mistress (much later his wife), the notorious Magda Lupescu. The army, backed by the then ostensibly governing National Liberal Party, dealt ferociously with all protests and strikes. (In fact the king was governing, in so far as anyone was at that date.) The army’s worst excesses, during this period, occurred in February 1933 when Gehorghiu-Dej of the illegal Communist Party led a strike of oil and railway workers. Subsequently he and other Communists were held for years in Doftana, a humid, pitch-dark, completely unfurnished hell-hole where, a generation earlier, survivors of the 1907 Peasants’ Uprising endured confinement and torture.
Also during the 1930s, Rumania’s homegrown fascists – Codreanu’s Iron Guard – were rapidly gaining strength among a traditionally anti-Semitic population. When these thugs became anti-monarch as well as anti-Jew the king outlawed all political parties in February 1938 – a move which did not go against his grain. Nine months later he ordered Codreanu to be shot ‘while trying to escape’.
There are noteworthy resemblances between King Carol II and Ceausescu. After the Depression, which caused most Rumanians to suffer acute deprivation, he deposited at least $40 million in his foreign bank accounts. Much of this loot was acquired through business deals with such men as Max Aushnit, who founded Rumania’s steel trust, and Nicolae Malaxa. The latter was an armaments billionaire, a fervent though closet supporter of the Iron Guard, a well-known Nazi collaborator and – when he fled to the US in 1946 – a protégé of one Richard Nixon, who helped him to get his residency permit.
In 1940 Marshal Antonescu took over as Conducator (the Rumanian equivalent of Führer), following King Carol’s abdication and the ceding by his heir, the present ex-King Michael, of dictatorial powers to the Marshal, backed by the Iron Guard. Antonescu, however, ‘wasn’t the worst of them’ – as we say in Ireland. His personal integrity was beyond question, which made a nice change. Also, he was unusually realistic in his assessment of Rumania’s potential for economic progress; and he seems to have been sincere in his wish to see that progress benefiting the entire population. In September 1940 he established the National Legionary State (the Guards’ formal title was ‘The Legion of Archangel St Michael’) and he never pretended to be anything other than a fascist military dictator. But this didn’t worry the Rumanians, who gave him genuine majority support from June 1941, when he rashly took Rumania into the war against the USSR, until August 1944 when Soviet troops marched into defeated Rumania – which promptly changed sides, though not promptly enough to secure Anglo-American support and save itself from Communism. One friend of mine pointed out, ‘Antonescu fought with Hitler only to get back for us Bukovina and Bessarabia – and that was his duty. The British fought with the Soviets because it was their duty to oppose Nazis. That did not mean they were Communists or approved of Stalin’s death-camps in Siberia.’
Part of Rumania’s present demoralisation must be rooted in its pre-Communist history, though various ‘revised versions’ glorify some of Rumania’s least savoury leaders as national heroes. However, a people’s social history does not have to be learned from books, in each generation, to influence their gut-reactions. And one comparatively recent chapter – foreign profiteering – must surely be contributing to the post-revolution reluctance to see Rumania’s economic doors again thrown open to Free Marketeers. Rumanians have never had a democratically elected government with responsible public representatives concerned about their constituents’ welfare. Why should they believe that in the 1990s a coalition of fundamentally right-wing parties, however prettily tinted with ‘liberalism’, will not yet again betray them for its own profit?
Next morning Gheorghe was waiting for me outside the bloc at 6.55. He had ‘made my programme’; I was to meet Marie, his ex-aunt-by-marriage who taught English in a large school on the far side of the city. ‘She have a big likening for peoples with English,’ explained Gheorghe. ‘Then to work I go and after we talk more.’
At first Marie’s English was rather hesitant; clearly her ‘likening’ was not often indulged. Yet within half an hour she had regained fluency and then she said, ‘I feel we are on the same wave-length, yes?’ The feeling, I assured her, was mutual. All her grandparents had come from Ruthenia when it was part of Czechoslovakia – ‘So I don’t look Rumanian, and sometimes I don’t feel it …’ She was small, plump, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, with soft blurred features and a lot of sadness behind her good cheer.
The teachers’ Common Room – long, low-ceilinged, mustard-painted – would have been dismal if not filled with early golden sunshine. As we sat at an unsteady formica table Marie introduced me to her colleagues, who were all the time arriving. The majority showed a predictable tendency to forget their pupils when Marie announced that I was spending the morning with her. Repeatedly the door opened and youngsters of both sexes slid shyly in to present to the women teachers bouquets of primroses, crocuses and violets, interwoven with fir-top sprigs. This was World Women’s Day, Marie explained – an occasion taken very seriously in Rumania.
Then a gangling, blushing youth, distressingly acne-afflicted, arrived with a laden tray – the staffs breakfast, I assumed. But Marie laid a firm hand on my shoulder and turned me towards the platters of sausage and salami, the three kinds of cheese, the hard-boiled eggs and the stack of thickly sliced bread. ‘Eat!’ she urged. ‘It is your breakfast.’
My claim to have eaten well only an hour before was not an acceptable excuse. ‘You must eat often in Timisoara,’ insisted Marie, ‘because in Maramures you may need extra fat!’ She then set about the tedious – and to my eyes perilous – process of making coffee. The water had to be boiled in a mug containing a minute electric element, the wall socket was so loose that a hand had to be kept on the plug throughout – and the mug took longer to boil than a full kettle back home.
Suddenly an excited young woman rushed in, flung her briefcase on the table and clapped her hands. She was the bearer of such sensational news that momentarily everybody forgot me. An elderly teacher, who had been mysteriously absent for a few days, had fled to his brother in America after discovering that he was about to be exposed as the school’s chief Securitate informer. The elated reaction to this news indicated that he had been no one’s favourite colleague. Several exclaimed, ‘I told you so!’ – or words to that effect. There was much laughter at the fugitive’s expense; only Marie looked pensive. She beckoned the young woman and asked in English, ‘What about his wife?’
The young woman shrugged. ‘She stays – he wouldn’t waste dollars on her fare!’
Marie looked at me and sighed. ‘Now too many families are being shocked to find one of them informed. Last week my neighbour collapsed with hysteria – her seven-year-old daughter was terrified and came running to me. The husband had disappeared overnight, a kind, gentle husband and father – also a loving, generous son and brother. He left a note to say he would live in Germany because someone wanted to kill him for revenge. He told her to look in a cupboard and then follow him. She found hidden $2,700, for us huge riches. Then she knew what was the problem – in his job he could never find so many dollars. But she cannot follow him, he is not who she thought he was. Now even their two children frighten her because she feels no trust in his children. He is another person and she hates him and her whole self is broken. What she thought was reality, with their good marriage, is only a dream.’
The responsibility for disrupting that day’s schooling was not solely mine; most of the female teachers and some of the males would in any case have relaxed in honour of the World’s Women. And now all were eager to ‘explain’ the revolution to the foreigner.
One young woman asserted, ‘There has been too much foolish talk about our courage – the demonstrators never expected to be fired on, with young women and small children in the front line!’
‘But’, argued an elderly man, ‘when they did see how dangerous it was they stayed on the streets – even some of the women stayed.’
Marie leant across the table and pretended to hit him. ‘Especially today you must not talk this way about women!’
A gloomy stooped man in his forties remarked sombrely, ‘The foolish talk is calling our tragedy a “revolution”. It was prepared by Iliescu and his comrades. They used us here in Timisoara to get rid of one dictator to make way for another.’
‘In Bucharest’, said Marie, ‘they think they got rid of the dictator!’
A tall slim young woman, with curly black hair and angry grey eyes, responded quickly. ‘So why did Bucharest wait five days before joining us?’
There were then about a dozen teachers in the room and one could sense antagonism to Bucharest uniting them.
‘How much did Bucharest know?’ wondered Marie. ‘When my friends there rang me, to ask about the rumours, I was afraid to tell them anything. Did anyone here tell their Bucharest friends exactly what was happening?’
There was a significant silence. I broke it by remarking, ‘To us it seems frightening that modern communications could be so controlled, that Bucharest really didn’t know what was happening in another Rumanian city, only 563 kilometres away, for two or three days.’
‘They did know,’ persisted the angry-eyed young woman. ‘They were told by the BBC and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.’
‘How many people listen to foreign broadcasts?’ challenged Marie. ‘Only a few! Most couldn’t know!’ She turned to me. ‘Dictatorships rest secure only on this foundation of controlling information. And Ceausescu had total control, more even than Stalin, because Rumania is quite small. Where else did you have to get a police permit to own a typewriter!’
A young phoney-blonde with high cheek bones was applying Gypsy-smuggled Hungarian varnish to very long nails. ‘All the Securitate can’t have been bad,’ she reflected. ‘If most hadn’t held back, there would have been many thousands dead! So all should not now be punished.’
‘Not one will be punished!’ the elderly man exclaimed vehemently. ‘And they only held back because they had changed sides, from one dictator to the next. Tomorrow if Iliescu told them, “Kill thousands!”, they would obey.’
Dorana, a gaunt chain-smoking woman with greying hair, spoke from a corner where she stood cross-legged, leaning against the window ledge. ‘I believe last year even some of the Securitate felt pity for the rest of us. And they knew soon we would rebel. It was in the air. I watched faces in the street. Last autumn I saw sad despair becoming desperate defiance. Little children cried with hunger. A cauldron was seething. When the revolution started, no one thought “I am starting a revolution”. But the cauldron boiled over. People had to express their hatred for the Ceausescus – not really hoping or planning to make a big change.’
‘So now,’ said the gloomy stooped man, ‘they will be satisfied because they have made a little change!’
At some stage someone decided that the Irishwoman was to be guest of honour at the school’s World Women’s Day luncheon party in one of Timisoara’s posh restaurants. Soon after 1 p.m. we all squeezed into a fleet of decrepit Dacias and juddered across the city to an exclusive windowless ‘banquet-hall’ in a Stalinesque hotel. The kitchen staffs timing had gone so agley that we were all pie-eyed on tuica before any food appeared. Looking around the long table – while I could still focus – I marvelled at the variety of physiognomies: Italian, Turkish, Irish, German, Jewish, Slav and sheer Anon.
The intense young man on my right – Marie was on my left – wanted to know how much longer it would take Ireland to get rid of the ‘British imperialists’. He believed the IRA to have killed thousands in Britain and saw Northern Ireland as another blood-drenched Lebanon. To him the IRA were ‘Freedom Fighters’ and he physically shrank away from me when I described them otherwise. ‘You betray your country!’ he barked, staring at me with contempt.
Marie intervened. ‘This may be a complicated problem. Dervla could know more about it than we do in Rumania!’
The young man gestured dismissively, overturning a tuica bottle; but then he so swiftly rescued it that not much was wasted.
I asked Marie, ‘From where do you get your information about our Irish problem?’
‘In the past from the Soviet Union – but not now. Now they have stopped anti-British propaganda. So we hear about Ireland only when the IRA kill someone else and they are described as “terrorists”. For us it is very confusing.’
‘And for us,’ I assured her. I felt too disheartened to embark on a debate about why the fiercely anti-Soviet Rumanians should have been so influenced, in relation to Ireland, by Moscow’s propaganda. On every continent I know (four) the IRA are the propaganda champions, proving how little the British understand about – and thus how inadequately they explain – their own problem in Northern Ireland.
The Headmaster was not amongst those present, nor were several other teachers who had been in and out of the Common Room all morning without ever lingering to talk.
‘There is a big gap’, said Marie, ‘between those who had to be Party members, like most of us at this table, and those who are now ex-Communists only because there is no more a Party!’
I asked how much school time had been wasted on indoctrination. ‘Not much, for the last decades. It wasn’t necessary to have direct brainwashing like I had at school thirty years ago. The whole curriculum had been so twisted by Communism – our own sort of nationalist Communism – that almost every lesson was indirect indoctrination. And that’s so much worse! Some children can resist direct indoctrination, but the other sort is like polluted air – you take it in without knowing it’s damaging you. This is why many of our best teachers left to take other jobs, even jobs that seemed less suitable. For them, not to be free to teach honestly was impossible. Others, like myself, had not courage to do that. And some of us hoped to be able – very quietly – to pass on a little real education. In the villages and small towns that was easier. City schools all had their informers. And now this is one of our biggest problems – we have few truly educated people. We have been kept in an intellectual prison, given only food without nourishment. So it is important that visitors talk with us and bring us books. This is the sort of aid we need most, even more than medicines and food.’
Marie’s parents were retired university lecturers – ‘with small pensions and big worries! Since the revolution so many things have not changed … I have my own small house since I was a baby – of course my mother’s, but as a wife she could not keep it because my father also had a small house, so hers would be confiscated. But these places are old, always needing costly repairs. First you go to the office and pay in advance for materials – floor-boards, roof tiles, window frames, door handles. Then you wait a long time. To and fro to the office, queuing – then the office closing when you’re half way up the queue. So back next day, and next week – until you’re told nothing is available. But your money doesn’t come back. You go on then to pay the black rate, and to get materials even at that big cost you must always first pay the official rate. We would be richer living in a bloc, but only money-richer. My mother would weep without her cats and my father would die without vines to make wine every year. And I would have no little garden for growing us all flowers and vegetables. So if our houses do not really fall down, we should think we are lucky people!’
Later, when we were on our own, Marie explained that she was Gheorghe’s ‘ex-aunt’ because of infertility. Pre-revolution she had had to pay an annual ‘childless’ fine of 2,400 lei (her monthly salary was 3,000 lei) and had she remained married her husband would have had to pay the same fine. Soon after their divorce he remarried and now has two children.
Walking into the Centru, on my third day in Timisoara, I saw a heart-wrenching bit of new graffiti (something rare enough in Rumania) on the wall of an alimentara. NO FUTURE it foretold in large black letters. The site had been well chosen. Standing on the far pavement, looking through the long window of the customer-less shop, I could see exactly the same choice of dusty bottles and rusty tins as had been on offer in February. Seen in Timisoara, this legend had a peculiar poignancy; and it tersely conveyed the mood of almost everyone I had spoken to since my return.
It suddenly seemed strange – as I walked on, past the Botanical Gardens – to see ordinary European human life going on all around: young lovers kissing on park benches, children playing with the family dog, parents worrying about examination results, young women seeking new blouses for springtime wear, OAPs discussing their aches and pains, adolescents queuing for the cinema … Normality, apparently, prevailed. And yet, in conversation with individuals, one realised that after forty-five years of Communist repression few Rumanians are entirely ‘together’.
In the Centru I bought – for fifteen pence – a real leather belt from a shop assistant who asked, ‘Have you been to our Cathedral? Have you lit candles at the shrine? It is good to believe … Here in Timisoara, before the revolution, religion was our last refuge. We had nothing else, only hope and trust in God. In October, November things got so bad we wondered had God forgotten us. But still we believed and prayed and then this revolution miracle happened. We don’t know why God wanted so big a sacrifice, so many dead young. But we must not argue with God. Then it was right that the Ceausescus were killed on Christmas Day. It was symbolic. The birth of Christ who is all Good and the deaths of the Ceausescus who were all Evil!’ This young woman, speaking such excellent English, was not in a more appropriate job because both her parents were semi-invalids – ‘So I had to leave school quickly and earn.’
That evening I supped with Dorana in her one-room flat; she was unmarried at thirty-seven, which is unusual in Rumania. ‘I’m too much of an individualist to marry,’ she self-analysed – it seemed to me accurately. She would have liked to become a single mother – ‘I love children very much and they love me’ – but that was not possible. Her adored and ‘old-fashioned’ widowed father would be too devastated. ‘He would die of shame, he could never be happy again with a “bad” daughter!’ So instead she was planning an adoption from one of Rumania’s infamous orphanages – more correctly described as ‘Children’s Homes’.
Dorana was equally unusual in her attitudes to Gypsies and Jews, sympathising with the former and greatly admiring the latter. Many of Rumania’s three million (or so) Gypsies have long since, she told me, been ‘settled’. Some cities built special blocs for them, in others the Rumanians tended to move out of an area when they moved in. It took time to overcome their ‘readjustment problems’ – using furniture and doors as fuel and lighting cooking fires in the middle of floors – but now most live as ‘normal people’ with steady jobs. However, a significant minority remain reluctant to send their children to school, calculating that they could be more gainfully employed begging, thieving and/or acquiring smuggling skills. Several Gypsies attended Dorana’s primary school and one boy was rather backward. A teacher therefore asked Dorana to help him with his homework and for several years they regularly studied together. Then they lost touch – until one day a tram made an unscheduled stop in the Centru and the driver leaped out and rushed to embrace Dorana. But then he drew back – ‘Maybe you don’t want to remember me? Now you have a diploma and I am only a worker!’ He was not long left in doubt and soon Dorana spent an evening in his apartment getting to know his wife – also a Gypsy, working in a magazin – and their two children.
As we ate a tender casseroled chicken, skilfully herbed, Dorana looked into the future and was gloomy. ‘The system wasn’t really shaken by our so-called “revolution”. Why? Because in every shop, school, factory, university, hospital, office, state farm there are stupid people in power. They could get no other job if Communism was finished. They got their jobs only for one reason, not to do with talents or training. A real revolution would put them with the garbage. They would need a dole which our government couldn’t afford. When a situation is like this, a country needs some moral and intellectual giant to make a revolution. Where is our giant? Maybe he is among the young … It is like a miracle, but we do have many strongly thinking young – especially in Timisoara. Only one thing is sure. Another revolution we must have – the real one next time, made with brains instead of blood.’
I didn’t doubt Dorana’s estimate of the present Party bosses and their henchmen, in all spheres. Yet during the latter half of the 1950s, the fulfilment of some of the Party’s industrial ambitions fired many ordinary workers, as well as their enthusiastic and able technocratic leaders, with considerable pride. By 1962 Rumania’s industrial growth rate was the fastest in Eastern Europe and her trade with the non-Communist world was also increasing rapidly. It is startling, now, to think back to that era, when Rumanian defiance of the Soviet bloc had led to the country’s being regarded, in Stephen Fischer-Galati’s words, ‘by Rumanians at home and by sympathetic observers abroad as a respectable member of the international community, as a “third force” in the international Communist movement, as the most influential small Communist nation in world affairs’.