8

A Minor Mishap in Maramures

Sitting on a platform bench in Timisoara’s gara, awaiting my train to Satu Mare, I was shaken – not for the first time – by the violence and cruelty that in Rumania run parallel with so much spontaneous kindness and generosity. A score of teenage army conscripts, boarding the Bucharest train, were being typically giddy and giggly in the most innocent way possible. Then along came their youngish officer who behaved barbarously, punching and kicking them onto the train. They reacted like maltreated puppies, cowering and whimpering. One could easily imagine that officer in the Iron Guard, with his hard pale eyes, tight grim mouth and blatant enjoyment of the sort of debased power that confers the ‘right’ to bully. This was qualitatively different from our violent crime, which is recognised as such. It was licensed thuggery and, though so obvious, it seemed to attract no reproving – or even surprised – glances from anyone else on the crowded platform.

Six hours later, Satu Mare’s broken pavements would have been treacherous without a bright moon. Just occasionally, during my long walk to Agnes’s house near the Centru, dim street lights briefly flickered. As Rumania is not famous for its night-life there was no one around of whom to ask directions – until I met an elderly Magyar priest, outside the Catholic cathedral, who declared himself to be a friend of Agnes, invited me to coffee next day and directed me to a long, wide street nearby. All the houses, I saw later, were one-storey century-old stucco villas – unpainted but very bourgeois – some detached, others ‘semi’ and each with its little shrub-filled yard to one side, entered off the street through six-foot iron gates that were always, significantly, kept locked.

An obese xenophobic dachshund named Isty (short for Istvan) barked shrilly to warn of my arrival and Petru picked him up before admitting me. Petru – Agnes’s Rumanian husband – was tall and burly, with thick tousled grey hair and a ruddy complexion. His lack of English took nothing from the warmth of his welcome; while he kissed me Isty tried to have my nose for supper. From the doorway Agnes called, ‘You should have told us which train! We could have met you – you’ve been lost!’

When I explained that I had spent many hours trying to telephone Satu Mare, Agnes chuckled. ‘It is your mistake, coming back to this terrible country where nothing works!’

Gabor appeared, towering over his diminutive mother and holding a very small baby under one arm, much as Petru was holding Isty. ‘My son,’ introduced Agnes. ‘He is a new father and not yet expert.’ She rescued the infant while showing me into a large over-furnished living room. Lisa, the new mother, was heating a feed in the adjacent kitchen.

‘My wife has no milk,’ said Gabor sadly. ‘For her first six months from conception we lived in Bucharest and she had never enough good food.’

‘Except what we sent,’ interjected Agnes, ‘and though we sent what we could it was not regular.’

I denied being hungry, to no purpose. Superior Russian salami, sweet sheep’s cheese, potato and egg salad, stale bread, homemade plum jam and a shapely china pot of Russian tea were swiftly spread before me on a white cotton tablecloth edged with heavy lace. As I ate, Lisa fed the baby and Agnes made up my bed near the gigantic stove – twice the usual size and semicircular. Then Gabor – whose English was fluent – proudly showed me a massive leather-bound album of coloured photographs of family holidays, during the 1980s, in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain. For dessert a two-kilo box of Russian chocolates – wearing a huge nylon bow – was ceremoniously offered. And then there was a choice of finest Russian vodka, genuine Scotch whisky or double-distilled cherry tuica – the best tuica I have ever drunk.

In addition to teaching Rumanian and Russian, Petru had been for many years employed as a tourist board guide-interpreter who accompanied Soviet groups all over Rumania – a coach tour being their reward for meeting production targets. I felt vaguely uncomfortable (while recognising the reaction as absurd) on realising that these congenial people were my first discernible contact with the Ceausescu ‘Establishment’. Agnes had naturally said nothing to betray their status during our long January conversations in my hotel bedroom; but here the evidence lay all around me. And now they were fervently pro-Iliescu – ‘An honest, clever man!’

Hungarian was the family language, though Agnes teased Petru for still making mistakes – ‘After thirty years of marriage!’ (I found this wholly unsurprising.) They had met in Cluj as students. ‘There were then more mixed marriages among intellectuals – lately the communities are drawing apart. Of course my parents would have better liked a Roman Catholic Magyar for my husband, or at least a Magyar. But Petru was a very nice young man – you can see he is still a very nice old man! So they made only a small fuss. And he has let our two children grow up religious Magyars, while we respect that Pappa is an atheist Rumanian.’

The morrow was Reunion Day, when I delivered eagerly awaited books to the several Magyars who had befriended me in my January hour of need. Eva invited us all – and half a dozen more – to a buffet lunch; she too lived in a comparatively spacious old house, on the same street. Her husband, Tamas, blunted my appetite for an excellent meal by declaiming: ‘Here, like in the USSR, liberty means nationalism can talk. We have waited a long time to be able to tell the world how Magyars have suffered. Now the world must listen and force the Rumanians to treat us with justice. Now we must have compensation for our culture being degraded for seventy years.’

The Transylvanian Problem makes Northern Ireland look like a four-year-old’s jigsaw puzzle. Almost every English-speaker I met, on both sides, asked my opinion of it and my responses had to be trite – though none the less sensible for that. I could only say it is time human beings stopped looking back into history and keeping ancient – and often irrelevant – grievances on life-support machines. Most of the political ‘Past’ is bad news for most of us: only negatively useful, as a warning notice. But the future, if constructed along the lines suggested by Mikhail Gorbachev in his book Perestroika, could be good news. As no one I met in Rumania had read Perestroika (or wanted to), this argument failed to win wild applause.

Next morning Gabor (my translator) and I had coffee with Father Banyasz in his roomy book-filled flat in a converted Magyar mansion. The once-splendid courtyard held a collapsed stone fountain and was overlooked by fanciful but disintegrating wrought-iron balconies; the wide outside stairways had finely carved but rotting banisters. I was vividly reminded of North Dublin’s Georgian slums.

Father Banyasz was short, thin and bald, with deep-set grey eyes and a long chin. His faded blue jeans and frayed scarlet sweater looked incongruous. We were given instant German coffee and invited to sit on a long, unsteady horse-hair couch – while Father Banyasz, who lived in a state of permanent warfare with his pipe (or maybe it was the tobacco) sat in front of us on a high stool. This odd placement made me feel I was going to be preached at or lectured to – as was indeed the case. It at once became apparent that I was taken to be a zealous Irish Catholic, a misapprehension I did not correct for some time.

‘You know’, began Father Banyasz, ‘we have here more than one million Magyar Catholics?’ I confessed that I hadn’t known there were so many. ‘Yes – we are about one point two million, mostly in Transylvania, in the dioceses of Satu Mare, Oradea, Timisoara and Alba Iulia.’ (He used the Magyar placenames but I will spare you that confusion – e.g., Gyulafehervar for Alba Iulia.) ‘We have about 650 priests and 800 churches for nearly 520 parishes. And we are very proud because only the Catholics have kept their independence under Communism. Like in Poland, we stayed free, we would not compromise – ever – about anything. The Orthodox Rumanians and even the Magyar Reformed Church let the party have total control. The government chose their leaders, so their leaders obeyed the government. For Magyar spiritual freedom, for our liberty of conscience and independent thinking, only the Catholic Church has struggled – and won!’

When our host went to the kitchen across the wide hallway, to make more coffee, Gabor said, ‘Everywhere it is easier for the Catholics to keep their independence, under dictatorships – with the Vatican behind them. But other Magyars were also good Christians though many of their clergy let them down, like his bishop betrayed Laszlo Tokes. There are nearly a million Calvinists and the rest little groups like Baptists and Adventists. Christianity is more serious for us than for the Rumanians, who don’t even understand their own Orthodox cult very well.’

I felt a by now familiar Rumanian fog descending on my brain. Tentatively I mentioned this new source of muddlement. ‘How did Magyar support for the left wing between the wars come about? And why was there such strong Magyar support for the Communist take-over when so many are Christians?’

Gabor’s expression conveyed that I had committed a major faux pas. At that moment Father Banyasz returned and Gabor translated my query. The priest snapped at me, flushing with anger. ‘That is not true! It is Rumanian propaganda! Always most Magyars fought Communism!’

Gabor backed him up. ‘Yes, you have heard a lie the Rumanians spread to make us more hated – that only we and the Jews supported the Communists.’

Cravenly I said no more, though I knew it was true that there had been considerable Magyar support for Communism; one would need to be a highly qualified psychiatrist to tackle either Rumanian or Magyar historical misperceptions. Later, in Sibiu, a scholarly Saxon cleric explained that between the wars many Magyars saw the then illegal Communist Party as a valuable bulwark against the fascist anti-Magyar governing elite. And for the same reason a significant number backed the Communist take-over. Disillusion came fast and was so humiliating that by now most Magyars have discarded the facts in favour of a soothing myth.

As we walked home (my faux pas long since forgotten) Gabor observed, ‘Father Banyasz is not a typical Magyar. In Transylvania we have been famous for centuries for our religious tolerance, long before anyone heard of an ecumenical movement! But this Father is a little bit fanatic, not all the time fair to Orthodox priests. Many of them stood out against the Communists and were killed or disappeared – thousands! The Government discouraged people from going to church because they knew some Orthodox clergy would always talk against them. Especially in the villages they couldn’t depend on clergy support. The top clergy and most city clergy were bought over, that’s true – but it is not only Communism that made it bad. Always the Orthodox leaders were ready to support any vaivode or king or general or pasha who would keep them in luxury!’

After a few days among those Satu Mare Magyars I had got a strong whiff of ‘ghetto’ and that word was used by Agnes on my last evening. She and I had been to visit Eniko, who was so determined to move to Hungary when we met in January, ‘because of the children’. Since then she and her husband Tibor – Eva’s younger brother, a corpulent man in his mid-thirties with a harsh voice and abrupt manner – had changed their minds.

Tibor said (Eniko translating), ‘Why should we allow ourselves to be frightened and driven out? Transylvania is our homeland, not any other part of Hungary [sic] and like all civilised people we have an attachment to our homeland. We are not Gypsies, content to wander and have no roots.’

Eniko added, ‘It is important too that we are educated. So it is bad for the Magyar nation left behind if we go. Since Trianon thousands of Magyar intellectuals have left, to enjoy their cultural freedom in Hungary.’

Later, Agnes commented to Gabor and me, ‘I see it that Tibor and Eniko are afraid to leave. Here they have grown up in what is now something like a ghetto and is very comfortable for them in some ways – though difficult and maybe soon dangerous in others. In Satu Mare they are known and respected, like their families for generations. So they have that sort of security. In Hungary they would be just two more refugees from Rumania. They have friends there, people who went earlier and could help. But as more and more went, during the last few years, it became harder and harder to help newcomers and the welcomes get less. The Budapest government, talking about the problem in public, always sounds very welcoming to us. But in the real life there is not always love between us and the Hungarians. Sometimes I think they love the land and the wealth of Transylvania more than the people!’

Lying in bed that night, I reflected that in a totalitarian society not all the collaborators have to be ‘baddies’, horrible people with whom one wouldn’t wish to associate. The West’s crude dividing line – nasty Commies on one side, nice dissidents who think like ‘us’ on the other – is quickly blurred when you are in the middle of it all. Then you begin to wonder: how many ‘nice’ people in the democratic West don’t think too closely about from where (and at whose expense) they achieve prosperity? Is Petru’s toeing of the Party line, which gains goodies and privileges for his family, any more reprehensible than the toeing of the Stock Market line by a capitalist also keen to benefit his family? That led me to speculate about the Agnes—Petru marriage. It seemed tension-free, blessed by much mutual affection and consideration. Yet the husband was an irreligious Party man, the wife a devout Roman Catholic. Ethically and ethnically they should have been oil and water, but plainly neither had any inhibitions about ‘compromising’. I transposed their relationship to Northern Ireland and there it didn’t work. No such flexibility would be possible: emigration to a ‘plural society’ would be essential. So was Transylvania more civilised – or merely more wily and less genuine in its commitments? At which awkward point I drifted into sleep, thinking as I went ‘– Maybe it’s something to do with the Balkans …’

At breakfast next morning Petru looked embarrassed; he had not enough petrol to drive me to Baia Mare – please, would I stay another day? A tankful had been promised by that evening. No one understood my recoiling from the very idea of their squandering precious petrol on my transport. I was their guest, their foreign friend – I was carrying heavy books – transporting me would be their duty and pleasure. To placate them, I agreed that Petru should drive me to the obvious hitching-spot at the edge of the city. On the way, Agnes mentioned the importance of having family cars in action again, even if they couldn’t get very far. ‘For all of us, it is a symptom of recovered personal freedom. We had earned and saved to buy our cars, then we couldn’t use them – which made us feel like serfs. It was very enraging!’

There was considerably more traffic than on this same road in January. Soon I was picked up by what would elsewhere be described as a bush-taxi. The small jeep, driven by a Gypsy, had long since lost all its doors and exhaled life-threatening fumes from unlikely apertures. Huddled in the back, among a selection of timid, smelly, dejected-looking peasants, I covered fifty miles for the equivalent of eight pence. No one else was travelling far and we stopped often, usually where narrow tracks met the road. At each stop the trussed sheep on the passenger seat bleated piteously, hoping for release.

After another reunion-cum-book-delivery day, I stayed the night with Justinian and his mother and baby son; his wife, a teacher, was doing her compulsory stint in a village near the Bulgarian border.

Mother, from Moldavia, felt personally and obsessionally embittered about ‘half my country’ having been given to the USSR by Churchill. Justinian observed that Rumania has always been treated as though not inhabited by humans – as mere territory, the pawn of various empires. Which is terribly true … Mother could find food for her obsession in 1945: Year Zero by the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs: ‘Not to bother about Bulgaria or Rumania when, in exchange, one could get a free hand in Greece was Churchill’s old way of doing business.’

Throughout supper Justinian waxed very anti-imperialist, while all the time implying that the cultural and economic development of Rumania’s various regions had depended on the quality of the conquerors. And, despite being virulently anti-British in relation to Rumania, he saw the British Empire as ‘civilising’ in relation to ‘primitive coloured people’.

Next morning, as I climbed towards the Gutii Pass, crowded cars suddenly began to overtake me at regular intervals; evidently a local petrol station had just received its quota. Sometimes cars had to queue for thirty-six hours or more, relatives and friends taking it in turns to guard the vehicle. The longest queue I ever saw stretched for almost five miles (seven kilometres) on the outskirts of Cluj. But that was in summer, before an extended holiday weekend – a post-revolutionary novelty that tempted everyone to escape into the countryside.

I had walked about twelve miles when, without warning, a blizzard struck. Dolefully I plodded on; where magnificent views should have rewarded my exertions, visibility was down to fifty yards. Eventually I thumbed a beer-truck. The young Moldavian driver offered me a lift to Suceava, many miles away, and looked disappointed on hearing that my destination was the capital of Maramures, Sighetu Marmatiei (Sighet for short), only twenty-five miles ahead. He opened a bottle of beer for me but didn’t have one himself; most Rumanians obey the law forbidding drivers to drink any alcohol.

On the 3,300-foot Gutii Pass several vehicles were parked outside a grotty chalet-type ‘motel’. In the large gloomy café – without tables or chairs – people stood around devouring whole chickens like there was no tomorrow. Otherwise only ‘cognac’ and real coffee were being served. The availability of coffee was the most dramatic sustenance development since January and Bogdan, the driver, ordered three cups simultaneously but disdained the chicken when I offered him ‘lunch’.

We emerged to find the sky blue and the noon world dazzling. To the north sharply peaked hills and long rough ridges overlooked narrow valleys – all brilliantly sparkling and beckoning. But when I eagerly made to take my rucksack from the cab Bogdan registered extreme alarm – it would be dangerous and foolish to walk, more blizzards were on the way. He laid a restraining hand on my arm, looking touchingly worried. I hesitated, then reminded myself that in such situations one should always heed local advice.

The next half-hour was unnerving as we very slowly descended, without chains, on a narrow road two feet deep in new snow. Then came a wide, fertile, densely-populated valley where pale grey tin roofs have replaced the characteristic Maramures shingles on many churches, houses and barns. These however are not the crudely applied corrugated sheets common throughout the Third World. Here tin is used with considerable artistry, in carefully shaped panels, and much work has gone into creating replicas of the traditional carved eaves.

Suddenly, in mid-valley, Bogdan’s prophecy was fulfilled by a dramatic meteorological phenomenon. The sun was still shining when a mass of silver-grey cloud poured over a mountain wall to the north-west. At ground level and hurricane speed, it swept towards us across the flat fields like some fabulous gigantic live creature, writhing as it raced. We were still in sunshine when it hit the road some hundred yards ahead, ripping branches off the wayside trees as though they were twigs. Moments later the windscreen was obliterated and it seemed the high truck might keel over, despite its heavy load. Before stopping, we rescued a little girl going home alone from school and sobbing in terror. Within ten minutes the hurricane became a mere gale, driving sleet almost horizontally. When Bogdan got out to clear the windscreen a figure appeared, far away, wavering in the mighty gusts and wailing like a banshee. It was the little girl’s mother, certain that she had lost her ewe-lamb. A mile further on we dropped them off at their isolated roadside shack.

On the ‘systematised’ outskirts of Sighet I descended into ankle-deep yellow mud. All around cranes gangled beside half-built blocs. The rain had just stopped but the wind was icy and water gushed everywhere – including down my neck, off gutterless roofs, as I walked towards the storm-emptied, branch-strewn Piata Libertatii. Happily Sighet’s dignified old Centru has escaped modernisation, apart from a crude concrete fountain (nonfunctioning) in front of the Tisa Hotel.

That agreeable three-storey Austro-Hungarian legacy offered remnants of gracious living for £3.75 a night. My high-ceilinged room had faded rose-and-silver embossed wallpaper, a tall, arched french window, leading onto a wide wrought-iron balcony, and a dehydrated en suite bathroom. Unfortunately the warped window wouldn’t quite close, the antique radiator didn’t work, and by 8.15 my hands were too numb to write. Then, just as I had thawed in my flea-bag, and was drifting towards sleep, the maze of archaic bathroom pipes began to shudder and growl and hiss. Moments later cold water came gushing in noisy spasms from all four taps, which could not be fully turned off. When I pulled the lavatory chain – its ivory handle was delicately carved – the cistern made a noise like a large animal in pain. Nothing else happened. Grumpily I dressed and went downstairs in search of plumbing advice.

The shadowy foyer was occupied only by a ragged drunk with a week’s beard who lay snoring on a leather couch with a pile of vomit beside him. Maria, the young woman at Reception, was having a major row on the telephone. Tall and much too thin, she had long straight black hair drawn tightly back from a pale oval face. While yelling abuse into the receiver, she gestured eloquently with her free hand as though the enemy were present. Clearly she was in no mood to consider plumbing problems.

The rest of the staff were standing on ladders in the huge restaurant, decorating it with jolly bunting. At 11 p.m. a World Women’s Day party – postponed to this Saturday evening – would start and continue until dawn. My foredoomed attempt to complain about defective taps in sign language caused much hilarity; two waitresses fell off their ladders and rolled giggling around the floor – perhaps they had already begun to celebrate World Women’s Day. Defeated, I returned to my noisy taps – and found them silent.

Three hours later, Maria roused me from a deep sleep. The party had begun, the Irishwoman was invited – begged – to attend. Feeling churlish, I explained ‘At night I like only to sleep.’

Maria smiled grimly and moved to the door. ‘Tonight you won’t sleep,’ she foretold threateningly – and she was right.

My room happened to be immediately above the jollifications and for hours I was tantalised by trying to recall in which compositions Dvoák, Kodály or Bela Bartok had used popular local themes. Here too I met my only Rumanian fleas, who for a week kept me shamelessly scratching – a common activity, I noted, in Sighet.

Sighet’s end-of-the-road atmosphere caused me at once to fall in love with the place. My journal records:

Sunday After an all-night party, it would have been callous to demand breakfast. At 8 a.m. the hotel was silent, the restaurant a shambles, the air noisome with stale cigarette smoke. On the foyer couch two waitresses wearing balaclavas lay asleep under a pile of sheepskins.

The Centru was deserted, the sky low and grey, the wind icy. Soon deep-toned church bells began to chime, sounding curiously assertive in the empty Piata. Three churches were visible: Orthodox, Calvinist and Roman Catholic – from whence the bells. Here the Soviet border is only half a mile away, with no crossing-point, and despite modern transport nowhere else feels near. Having failed to find an open cafe, I rambled around the old residential area – long straight nineteenth-century streets of solid one-storey Magyar houses, some newly painted in contrasting pastel shades, some with pairs of gaudy plaster gnomes grinning in porches, or comic wooden masks (locally carved) hanging beside hall doors. This is a pleasingly rural town. Cocks crow far and near, hens wander on pavements, turkeys gobble in little front gardens, invisible pigs grunt in sheds.

Later I joined the Mass-going Magyar bourgeoisie, all wearing their dull respectable Sunday best with expressions to match. For late-comers there was standing room only in the large unremarkable church. A superb children’s choir, accompanied by a teenage boy guitarist, made that a memorable Mass. In contrast, very few (mostly elderly peasants in village attire) attended the Orthodox service in a new church – traditional design, modern materials, not quite finished. Opposite, the enormous bleak Calvinist church is semi-derelict with broken windows. That joyless service drew only a few dozen; I slunk out after ten minutes – attracting some reproachful or angry glances.

Brunch happened at 11.30: two fried eggs, four thick slices of well-flavoured bacon, a dish of shredded pickled cabbage, six slices of bread (slightly improved since January) and strong Russian tea with lemon – a staggering innovation!

I spent the afternoon in a cold, dirty, uncomfortable peasants’ café – part of the hotel but crowded with wild-looking types (male and female) who eschew the rather elegant and for them expensive restaurant. One can enter this cafe only from the street; the connecting door to the hotel foyer is kept locked. No booze was available, after the all-night party. Behind me in the long, slow coffee queue stood a handsome shepherd – tall and courtly, with weather-beaten but fine features, wavy grey hair, deep blue eyes. His woollen knee-length jacket and tight pantaloons were homespun, his cowhide boots handmade – by himself. At a nearby table sat his round-shouldered, anaemic-looking son, on sick leave from Cluj University. He is suffering from asthma and a stomach ulcer and arrangements are being made for him soon to have medical treatment in Vienna. (Shepherds are among Rumania’s richest citizens; they were never collectivised.) As we savoured our Turkish coffee, father condemned the Front for maintaining the embargo on hunting big game. Ceausescu allowed no one else to hunt bears, wolves, deer or wild pig anywhere in Rumania, a manifestation of megalomania that appeals to me but was totally impractical. Immense damage is now being done to crops by bears, deer and wild pig. And to flocks by wolves, who are also becoming increasingly dangerous to humans, because small game may be shot or trapped – so while the unmolested wolf population expands, its food supply dwindles. Farmers and shepherds sent several mass petitions to Ceausescu, pleading to be allowed to cull big game, but never got any reply. I asked why, in remote areas, they didn’t simply ignore the law – a stupid question. Everywhere the Securitate were feared; nobody could trust all their neighbours not to betray them. The black joke is that Ceausescu rarely shot even a rabbit – he just longed to project a macho image of himself as The Great Hunter. His last recorded bear-hunt was with his close friend, the Shah of Iran. How odd that his final days were spent with another close friend – called Rafsanjani! He must have been an adaptable chap. I’m invited to stay in the shepherd’s small hamlet, somewhere in the mountains between here and Salva; his son wrote detailed directions on the back of my notebook and warned me to beware of wolves – not sure if he was joking …

Monday Today a cloudless sky, warm sun, cold breeze. Went to explore hamlets on high roadless hills west of Sighet; the steep tracks mucky, as first spring heat melts packed snow and iced mud. Photographed the most attractive of the all-wood houses, and the artistically built hay-ricks under their shingle roofs, and the long line of snowy USSR mountains in the near distance. Then was physically attacked by a youngish farmer who darted out from behind his hay-rick, twisted my left arm and tried to grab the camera. Naturally I was bewildered, the more so because he was appalled to discover my foreignness. Looking stricken, he apologised with tears in his eyes and invited me into his cosy wooden house for tuica. He and his wife (fair-haired and blue-eyed, with rotting teeth) tried frantically to explain the misunderstanding but left me baffled. We parted the best of friends, wife hugging me and stroking my hair and presenting me with an embroidered tablecloth. Later the mystery was solved by Mircea, my teacher friend. I had been mistaken for a ‘spy’ from a political party which advocates an immediate division of local collective farmland, giving equal shares to all. Sounds fine – but before collectivisation there were Big Farmers and Little Farmers and the descendants of the former don’t accept being put on an equal footing with the descendants of the latter. So they passionately oppose the plan and are suspicious of, and quite often violently antagonistic to, unannounced strangers who come to report on the lie of the land – literally! Since this isn’t a tourist area, my camera at once marked me as a ‘political spy’. The implications for the future of democracy are grim – if you deal with political opponents by assaulting them on sight …

Needed a drink when I got back to Sighet at 3 p.m. Only Murfatlar ‘vermut’ available; took a bottle to my room where I was due to meet Mircea. Not being used to vermouth (if such it really is) I tossed it back like wine and was quite tiddly when Mircea arrived. Wavered down to restaurant to sober up on tender stewed pork, tinned runner beans, spaghetti, yet another bowl of pickled cabbage and lots of bread. This pickled cabbage, Maria says, will be served to everyone with every meal till hotel’s quota used up – to be replaced by pickled cucumber or apples. Only under the influence of Ceausescu would anybody think of pickling small sour whole apples: the result is nauseating beyond any possibility of description.

Alas! my left shoulder has been dislocated again: something easily done since it first happened when I fell off a path in the Andes. That farmer really did have a hate for ‘political spies’. Mircea has relocated it – a simple matter – but it will no doubt take a few days to settle down.

Mircea believes the Front is ‘very good for Rumania’ but says they are making one big mistake, being too soft on the Securitate and leaving most of them free to cause more trouble in the future. He’d like to see them under strict army control, forced to work unpaid 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., then confined to their homes all evening. He reckons they’re so rich, having been paid in dollars, they can afford to sit around drinking all day, eavesdropping on everybody’s uninhibited political conversations – which they may yet use, if restored to power. I argued that if the Front is genuine about establishing democracy they can’t submit all Securitate officers to hard labour and a curfew under army control. Unless formally charged and tried, they cannot be punished. Mircea couldn’t see that, though he claimed to be ‘a real democrat’!

But for the revolution, Mircea was sure many Rumanians would have died of hunger next winter. He has a son (five) and daughter (two) and one morning last November he could find no food for them; children, however hungry, won’t eat pickled cabbage, cucumbers, apples etc. As a comparative newcomer to the town, he lacks ‘contacts’. Some black market meat, milk, eggs, were always available but not affordable on 2,800 lei a month. That particular November morning, he spent half a month’s salary on enough food for two days.

Tuesday For breakfast a giant omelette and six slices of yesterday’s stewed pork reheated in a frying-pan: potentially lethal but very tasty. Another day of low grey skies but much milder and no rain. Explored three big roadside villages on the left bank of the Tisa, which here is the frontier – an unimpressive river, meandering between straggling alders. To celebrate being in Free Rumania I photographed several watch-towers: most now empty. From the one occupied, two conscripts waved cheerfully – then posed with their rifles pointing towards the USSR. After all, Rumania has had a revolution, however partial or unsatisfactory. As elsewhere, most of the local garrison work on collectives; two downy-cheeked conscripts, driving a primitive wagon, obligingly reined in their horses to be photographed. Last evening, in the hotel restaurant, a young career officer shared my table and was fretting because the Front shows no inclination to treat the army seriously, rather than as an endless source of slave labour.

In one village I came upon a land-reform quarrel – enraged men and women shouting abuse, with much stamping of feet and waving of fists. The positioning of the groups – a dozen or so in each, on either side of the wide road – seemed curiously ritualistic, but eventually several women had to restrain their menfolk from taking the matter a stage further. When I addressed a youth in English – deliberately loudly – the quarrelling at once stopped and a beaming neutral woman led me by the hand into her spacious farmhouse. Elaborately carved wooden tankards hung from the ceiling; embroidered cushions brightened every corner; hard-boiled eggs and tuica were lavished on me. Quickly the room filled with excited protagonists from both sides, their animosity in abeyance. No one spoke English but some communication was possible with the aid of my mini-dictionaries.

Even by Rumanian standards, Maramures hospitality is extraordinary. In Sighet total strangers (usually an impoverished-looking peasant) often insist on paying for my meals, coffees, drinks – and will never allow me to stand the next round. I must be their guest because Ireland sent so much ‘gift meat’ to Rumania within days of the revolution.

Wednesday By noon the sun was warm and the Centru thronged, mostly with peasants each carrying two huge striped woollen sacks over one shoulder – fore and aft, in imitation of pack-animals. Why have they not invented some less masochistic method for transporting heavy loads? Sighet really is a marvellously vivacious town: one wonders what it was like pre-revolution. This light-heartedness can’t be all new – perhaps remoteness to some extent insulated it from the Ceausescu depression? Significantly, the locals don’t all the time talk politics. Also they look less starved than most of their compatriots. Yet even here too many young faces seem old and most primary school children (I’ve studied them en masse) have black bags under their eyes. Hungry children don’t sleep well. The problem of protein-deficiency brain damage is never mentioned in Rumania, though inevitably it will affect some of the generation born around 1984. Probably most parents are mercifully unaware of that risk.

Urban Rumania encourages escapism; at least half of Sighet’s 40,000 inhabitants live in new Ceausescu-land but I’ve confined myself to the quietly imposing, once-prosperous old Sighet. Much of its prosperity was based on smuggling, in a fairly decorous way, to and from Ruthenia – then Czechoslovakia’s eastern province. Always there’s an odd feel about places so visibly/architecturally at odds with their present dominant population. Maramures peasants now dominate – they and the Rumanians from elsewhere who’ve been settled in Ceausescu-land. Very much in the background are the Magyar descendants of the founders and builders of Sighet. No wonder they look – most of them – defensive and dour.

Sighet’s Ethnographic Museum has an international reputation – in certain circles – but during most of the year is opened only on request. The town’s Culture Officer was rumoured to hold the key and I not unreasonably expected to find him in the House of Culture – a bizarre 1911 hybrid, part Victorian gaol, part Loire château. Originally a Magyar theatre, it has long since been overtaken by silent, sad, damp-smelling dereliction. A white marble stairway, cracked and muddy, sweeps up to a circular gallery where the corpse of a grand piano – legs in the air – lay on a mound of rubble. Off this gallery, down high narrow creaking corridors, little girls were typing in little offices. My arrival caused them to crane incredulously over the tops of cumbersome (1911?) machines and then titter nervously. None made any attempt to communicate in any language.

At last I found two older, sour-faced women; they shared a small desk, surrounded by tall filing cabinets, and were barely discernible through a haze of cigarette smoke. The Culture Officer did not in fact operate from the House of Culture but they – somewhat reluctantly – telephoned him. It took seventeen minutes to get through, though his office was less than a mile away, which could explain their reluctance. A slim, blue-eyed teenage girl, tongue-tied with shyness, was then summoned to guide me to the Museum.

Dumitru – small and dark, with longish hair and a drooping moustache – spoke fluent English. Alas! the keys to the display rooms were at his home, far away in a bloc. But he would be happy to show me round next day – meanwhile would I drink coffee with him?

Over our first cup, Dumitru began to unburden himself. His engineer wife was on sick leave, suffering from a serious sight impairment, and they were saving up to go to either Hungary or Russia in search of ‘special spectacles’. But how long would it take to save so much on their joint monthly income of 7,600 lei? And with two children to feed …

Over our second cup, Dumitru revealed that until 1985 he had taught in Timisoara. But at the age of thirty-two he felt compelled to quit a profession that made him feel ‘false’. Given his qualifications, the only alternative job on offer was in Sighet, where his wife was ‘all the time lonely and restless’.

Over our third cup, Dumitru observed that Rumanians are now suffering from collective guilt, asking themselves why they didn’t get rid of the Ceausescus ten years ago but unable to find any morale-boosting answer. ‘It is important for foreigners to understand this because our mental state now is making it harder for us to behave the way the Occident thinks we should. You must be patient while we recover our self-respect. Soon after the revolution, the Front began to expose the true nature of the Ceausescu regime in detail, scandal after scandal being shown and discussed on TV. All these proven scandals traumatised us – this wasn’t only rumour. For years we’d known things were going dreadfully wrong but Ceausescu’s propaganda made us so confused we couldn’t understand how or why the country was becoming like hell. So those programmes made us feel like fools. We hadn’t believed the propaganda, but also we hadn’t been clever enough to see the truth. We only went on and on, suffering more and more, like people mesmerised, till those brave revolutionaries in Timisoara inspired Bucharest to kill the Ceausescus. And now we’re ashamed of having been so weak for so long. Especially my generation, whose children were damaged.’

I was relieved, next morning, to find Dumitru in a more cheerful mood – almost a mood of elation, so dearly did he love his museum and so rarely did he have anyone with whom to share it. The main exhibits are Maramures wood-carvings – every conceivable household object and agricultural implement, from salt spoons to ploughs. Most beautiful of all were the ten-foot-high farmyard roofed gateways, the traditional peasant status symbols: the bigger and more elaborately carved a gateway, the more impressed were the neighbours. As my enthusiasm for wood-carving equals Dumitru’s, we had a blissful morning. But it ended on a mournful note. ‘Soon,’ said Dumitru, ‘the status symbols will be tractors.’ It would have been unrealistic to dispute that point.

One evening I asked Mircea about the strong metal mesh that defends many Sighet shop windows. He explained it as a relic of pre-war days, when most of the town’s richest merchants were Jews, living aloof from the rest of the community and mistrustful of everyone. ‘In 1944,’ he added, ‘the Hungarian police took them all away, to help the Germans. During that war the Hungarians ruled northern Transylvania again, including Maramures. Hitler gave it to them, to make them help Germany. Then we got it back when Germany was beaten.’

Deviously I asked, ‘So what happened to Sighet’s Jews in 1944?’

‘They never came back. Rumanians got their shops, which was good.’

‘Why didn’t they come back?’

‘I think the Germans killed them,’ said Mircea. ‘Hitler didn’t like Jews – they had too many in Germany, taking all their money.’

Later I asked Dumitru if Sighet’s Jews had had any reason to be mistrustful of their neighbours.

‘Of course not,’ he replied, ‘but they were very nervous people. You see how friendly Rumanians are, you have told me how many good friends you are making. But the Jews were afraid of everybody else.’

To question people about their local Jews is not tactless, Rumania’s history of anti-Semitism having long since been ‘revised’. On my next visit to Bucharest a forty-year-old historian gave me the official version: ‘During the first half of the nineteenth century, Moldavia and Wallachia were dominated by the Ottomans and then by Czarist Russia, which for a little time was supposed to be protecting the Rumanian Christians from the Turks. Then many Jews moved in, from Poland and Russia, and took over local trade, squeezing out our hucksters and pedlars because Jews always had more capital. And they invested everything in commerce – at first they weren’t allowed to buy land. Then in 1859 the nation of Rumania was founded and one of the conditions of international recognition was giving Jews equal rights – which was no problem. But soon many Jews became stewards for boyars who preferred city life – people who wanted only profits, not to trouble looking after their land and people. Most stewards were as greedy and cruel as the Phanariots. So the peasants and small merchants resented Jews more and more, because of their behaviour. Quickly they became more numerous and powerful and richer. By 1918 they were between one-third and half the population of Iasi and not popular in the city – or anywhere in Moldavia. In the 1920s many Iasi students marched against Jews and broke Jewish shop windows – but this was nothing serious. Then an important professor founded the League of National Christian Defence and Jewish students were kept out of the university, not by law or by force but only by intimidation. One of the League’s student leaders, Corneliu Codreanu, soon after founded the Legion of Archangel St Michael – the Iron Guard – which became very influential and was later used by the Nazis.’

My tutor was misleading me – though not deliberately, I am certain. He was simply passing on the ‘revision’ which his generation has been unable to check for itself. The ferocity of the Iron Guards’ 1920s anti-Semitic campaign – vigorously supported by the Moldavian peasants, in particular, once Codreanu had roused their blood-lust – was not mentioned. Nor was the anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Bucharest government in 1937. The impression was given that only as a result of Nazi pressure did the Iron Guard become Jew-killers – assisted by simple people too easily persuaded to focus all the angry frustration of immemorially oppressed peasants on Europe’s traditional scapegoats. History revision is alarmingly easy in ‘an intellectual prison’. I was often assured that Marshal Antonescu had done everything possible to protect Rumania’s Jews during the war – including putting them on trains which were sent chugging round and round Rumania in circles, to deceive the Nazis into thinking their passengers had been sent to concentration camps. Although my informants were intelligent people, they resented this story’s authenticity being questioned.

By the end of that week, it was clear that my Maramures trek must again be postponed. Although the weather had settled, my shoulder had not; it couldn’t yet bear a rucksack. On an infuriatingly perfect early spring morning, I took the 7.20 train to Salva, en route for Cluj.

Walking to the gara, with the rucksack over my right shoulder, I passed the local offices of various new political parties, including the Front – buildings to which I had repeatedly failed to gain access. It seemed characteristic of Sighet that they were always locked and no one knew how to contact the parties’ representatives. Then I noticed an angry-looking young man with long brown hair photographing the widely scattered contents of three outsize overturned dustbins. He spoke only Rumanian, but his message was simple enough to be easily understood. As a member of the local Front Committee, he objected to Sighet’s dustmen feeling free, post-revolution, to neglect their duty. If they didn’t get off their arses (his tone suggested that sort of phraseology), he would send his photographs to the Front Headquarters in Bucharest. So Sighet does have its political activists; I wished we had met sooner.

The long but almost empty Sighet–Salva train was a marvel. There seemed to be no technological reason why such a specimen of nonagenarian machinery should have retained the power to move, even at ten m.p.h. At frequent intervals it paused for breath, as nonagenarians will, allowing me ample time to appreciate the landscape.

For an hour or so we dawdled along the frontier; the few Soviet hamlets of timber shacks on the far bank of the Tisa looked much less prosperous than their Rumanian neighbours. Then, turning south, we crossed several awesome gorges. There was no new growth: the thaw had just begun. Sheep were still crowded in round or square pens, skilfully constructed of woven strips of wood, eating hay from carved hollowed-out tree trunks. As we descended, the first lambs appeared; and two water-buffaloes, pulling a cart, induced nostalgia for India. Their ancestors presumably accompanied the original Gypsy migrants.

At Salva Junction I was reunited with my old friend, the Iasi–Timisoara ‘express’. It did now seem express-like; the fifty-mile journey from Sighet had taken five and a half hours.