Early in March Costin, a Cluj friend, invited me for a long weekend to his ancestral village in southern Transylvania – for centuries a mixed village: about half and half, Magyar and Rumanian. Now all but four of the Magyar families have left and their church is a weed-threatened semi-ruin, visited only twice a year by a priest from the nearest city. They left, Costin explained, not because of any local dissension but because they felt unhappy when their land was collectivised in 1962. The Rumanians also felt unhappy but ‘their hearts wouldn’t let them move’. Instead, the younger generation became urban workers – or, like Costin and his brother, intellectuals – while their elders coped with collectivisation and made what they could of the small family plots left to them when their beloved hectares were ‘stolen by the state’. But the Magyar elders couldn’t accept this down-grading and accompanied their children to the cities. ‘They were too proud to take orders from Rumanians,’ said Costin. And I think they were afraid – afraid to be old and unprotected without their children. Not afraid of us, their neighbours, but of village Party bosses and outside Securitate inspectors.’ I understood what he meant; everyone had to break the law to survive, but the blind eye often turned on Rumanian law-breaking might not have been turned on Magyar wheeler-dealers.
On the Saturday afternoon Costin and I walked for hours over the nearby hills. It was a windy, showery day – that precious rain brought delighted grins to crinkled old faces all over the village – but, after weeks of drought, the grass remained winter-drab. Yet the steep, scrubby slopes were bright with primrose patches, and misty blue wood-violets, and miniature dandelions – dainty, strongly coloured blooms. The sun was setting as we descended through a glade where four deer grazed – then gracefully fled, their sinuous, slow-seeming bounds taking them swiftly out of sight. Moments later the whole western sky flared crimson and I paused to stare at the fiery towers of cloud, edged above with gold and dramatically underlined by a long thin black plume. Was this some lighting-effect unique to Transylvania?
‘It’s not possible anywhere,’ said Costin, ‘to be free of Ceausescu. He is dead. But what he did to my valley is alive – you see it!’
From where we stood a humpy hill hid the factory chimney; only its horizontal plume, driven by a high wind, was visible – and had looked quite beautiful, while unidentified.
Costin’s brother Ion, a chemical engineer in that factory, was then an angry man. Front representatives from Bucharest had warned the work-force that only Iliescu & Co. could protect them from outside investors determined to replace them with foreigners trained to use modern machinery – an effective manoeuvre where ‘the dole’ is unknown and unemployment the ultimate disaster. When the workers were asked to sign a pledge of loyalty to the Front, guaranteeing it their votes, only four out of 2,000 refused. That impressive pledge, Ion said, would be used to persuade other work-forces to guarantee their votes: and so the democratic process was being sabotaged, all over Rumania. The International Election Observers, who almost unanimously pronounced the elections ‘valid’, should have arrived in the country two months, rather than two days, before 20 May.
On the way home we made a detour because this was Simbata Mortilor, ‘the Saturday of the Dead’, when candles are lit at sunset on the graves of relatives and friends. It was already dusk when we entered the hillside cemetery where, in the distance, a few other late-comers moved silently like shadows between the gravestones. Costin’s family were buried on the steepest slope, amidst bushes and saplings. When he went first to his grandfather’s grave, and laid a hand caressingly on the simple stone cross above it, I realised that for my atheist companion this was no mere annual duty to placate devout parents. He half-whispered, ‘This grandfather was my most important person for twenty-three years. He taught me all the valuable things – what you don’t learn at school. We loved each other like friends and I still love him. Does that sound crazy?’
‘Not to me,’ I assured him. ‘I felt exactly the same about my own grandfather.’
Taking three thin candles from his jacket pocket, Costin began a protracted double struggle, with the gusty wind and with Rumanian matches – those most potent symbols of the failure of Communism. Again and again he tried to coax the three candles at the base of the cross to remain alight. Meanwhile an almost full moon – fitfully bright between speeding shreds of cloud – was giving that secluded, overgrown corner the atmosphere of a sacred grove. Patiently Costin built a little grass wind-shield – then stood with folded hands and bowed head, gazing down at the wavering flames. By this reverent act of ancestor-worship – not allowing death to loosen the bonds of gratitude and affection – he was conferring on his grandfather the only sort of immortality in which I can believe.
A rough seven-mile dirt track leads to Costin’s village – where it ends, at the base of the ridge. From here one looks across a wide, unnaturally discoloured river to a broad flat valley, scarred and tainted by gigantic petrochemical and fertiliser factories. Beyond, a mighty mountain range, some forty-five miles long, rises above 7,000 feet – and looks higher. Between this dramatic snow-laden barrier and the cultivated land no hilliness intervenes.
During Costin’s childhood, thirty-odd years ago, his village was an energetic community of more than fifteen hundred farmers. Now the population is down to less than 500 – mainly old folk, with a few younger people who are, mentally and/or physically, too below par to survive in a city. Anyone familiar with the natural rhythms of village life must find this a tragic place, lacking the sunrise and sunset bustle of noisy animals to-ing and fro-ing, poultry being released or rounded up, children working and playing and laughing and wailing. Here the children are quiet bloc-bred weekend visitors, too neatly dressed. And though the physical farmyard structures remain – stables, barns, byres, sties, coops – most now are empty. Beyond the village, its animals are crowded together in long standardised collective buildings of dead-grey concrete, all enduring concentration-camp conditions and many dying of starvation or neglect – while Rumania’s towns and cities depend on Swedish cheese, German ham, Danish butter, Irish beef, Italian salami, Bulgarian chickens.
In this village’s typical cow-byre, 150 animals were being cared for (or not cared for) by five Gypsies. The floor of the long shed was inches deep in stale liquid manure and ammonia fumes made my eyes stream as I walked down the centre, to examine several sick cows and calves. The calves were scour victims, lying in their own ominously pale shit and with not much longer to live. In this reeking shed all the hand-milking is done by Gypsies who never wash their hands, or indeed any other parts of their anatomies – you can smell them coming ten yards away. Elsewhere on that same ‘average’ collective – centred around a Magyar landlord’s centuries-old farmyard – hundreds of sacks of chemical fertiliser had for months been lying out in the rain; half the bags were split, their contents long since hardened into unusable lumps. In another corner a superb antique saw-mill (I longed to salvage it for some industrial museum) had been abandoned because the collective was compelled to obtain its cut timber from a county depot three hours’ drive away. The fine old stables had been crudely converted into another repulsive shed, its floor a pisssquelchy mess of straw and droppings where lay five sheep too sick to stand up. Incredibly, their lambs had been left with them though suckling was in vain.
Central to this sordid scene was the mouldering nineteenth-century manor house of the local count who, before his flight in 1940, owned half the village land. The rest had belonged to the peasants since the agricultural reforms of 1921. A faded notice on the half-rotten hall door of this modest little manor described it as the office of the commune’s agricultural co-operative. Now the old folk recall the era when they were count-dominated as a Paradise, compared with what followed.
The depopulation of rural areas is a global problem but in Rumania the manner of its happening seems peculiarly distressing. As the guest of villagers, one becomes acutely aware of the violence of the process that has torn so many communities apart. These are the homes of an intelligent, thrifty, creative peasantry, proud of their knowledge of animal husbandry and crop cultivation but now humiliated and impoverished by collectivisation. In far-away city offices, bureaucrats called ‘agricultural engineers’ made disastrous decisions, then drove into the countryside, ordered villagers to do X, Y and Z, threatened them with dire punishments if they disobeyed – and drove away leaving everyone enraged, yet with no alternative but to do what they knew was wrong, what would debase the land and debilitate the stock while leaving them feeling like traitors to their forefathers. No rotation of crops was allowed and in some regions collectives were ordered to produce 5,000 kilos of grain per hectare – a physical impossibility, but failure to reach this target would have involved the stoppage of all wages for one year. So half the pastureland was devoted to crop production and the local cattle have been on short commons since 1963. Many stories are told – all true, Costin assured me – about the ignorance of those theorists from the Central Planning Committee in Bucharest. One ‘fruit engineer’ arrived to inspect a collectivised orchard and, having surveyed it, gave detailed instructions about what must be done to double apple-production. When he had finished, the collective’s chairman said, ‘Thank you, comrade, I’m sure that’s very good advice about growing apples – but these are plum trees.’
Some of my academic friends insisted that the younger generation had migrated happily to the cities, eager to experience the joys of running water, central heating and nearby shops and cinemas. Doubtless this is true of many. Many others, however, left their villages only reluctantly, having been disinherited by the state and finding themselves unable to adapt to farming methods that outraged all their instincts. The Gypsies who often replaced them had no knowledge of farming and in exchange for a pittance were content to follow directives from ‘agricultural engineers’. Corruption, Costin said, was endemic at every level of the collective farm system; and so many labourers being Gypsies (‘our most expert thieves!’), with numerous offspring, meant that a considerable percentage of the grotesquely low output never reached any market, black or white.
Costin’s parents, in their early seventies, were tall, dignified and weather-beaten. They graciously received their first ever foreign guest, giving me a warm but unfussy welcome – though my arrival was unexpected. Not being able to talk to Mamma without an interpreter frustrated me dreadfully. A handsome woman still, with a most striking presence, she was very keen that I should appreciate how relevant to modern Rumania is some of Eminescu’s poetry, written more than a century ago. She found the worn, leather-bound volumes, and the particular poems, and bade Costin translate. One of them went like this:
Fallen among these wolfish fools your glory will be torn to shreds,
While all that is not understood will be decried by wagging heads.
Then they will probe your private life, dissecting that, discounting this,
And searching out with eager eyes each little thing you’ve done amiss,
To make you even as themselves. They will not care for all the light
Your labour poured upon the world, but for the sins and every slight
And human failing they can find, and every petty thing that must
Befall the life of hapless days, of every mortal child of dust.
And every little misery that harassed a tormented mind
Will seem more tolerable to them than all the truths that you did find.
(That is Corneliu Popescu’s translation; Costin’s was more approximate but no less moving in the Rumania of 1990.)
The outside world was unknown to Costin’s parents; they could not conceive – except unreally, through television – what it might be like. They had no notion of bloc life, nor did they want to experience it, even briefly. Every coaxing invitation – ‘Please come and stay with us, just for a week!’ – was firmly declined. During the war Pappa, like thousands of other schoolboys, had had to work in an urban munitions factory; but since 1945 he has remained in his village, apart from a rare journey – once a year or less – to the nearest market town twelve miles away. Mamma was born in the village and has never once left it. This degree of voluntary immobilisation is apparently quite usual among their generation and Michaela – Costin’s wife – wondered if they feel unable to cope with Communist Rumania beyond the comparative safety of their home ground. Everyone was astounded to hear that in my corner of rural Ireland some elderly countryfolk have never been to a city, not because they couldn’t afford to go but because they see no point in going. (We don’t use the word ‘peasant’, which for some curious reason has derogatory connotations in Ireland.) Countryfolk are not travellers, unless outside forces propel them; their world is where they are. And from within the calm security of their own territory they often utter words of wisdom that make the judgements of ‘the travelled ones’ seem trite. Staying with village families, I realised that Rumania’s new generation of graduates has been bred not by bucolic thickies but by strong-minded thinkers. Circumstances may have limited the older generation’s intellectual development, but their capacity for it has borne fruit among those of their children who have replaced the banished – or at least suppressed – bourgeoisie.
Costin’s post-revolutionary wish was to set up as an independent dairy-farmer in his village, making cheese and butter for the nearest city market, and to see Ilie, his weedy, city-pale ten-year-old son, growing sturdy and ruddy-cheeked and one day taking over the farm. Ilie shared that ambition; whenever I stayed with the family in their bloc, 180 miles away, he talked incessantly of grandpa and grandma in the village where he would like to live always. Costin’s brother Ion – the factory engineer – had similar ambitions; but Pappa and Mamma found this regression deeply upsetting. For thirty years their diminished lives had been made tolerable only by their sons’ ‘success’. At least Communism had allowed both boys to become ‘intellectuals’, with jobs good enough to enable them to run motor-cars – when petrol was available. This was their parents’ only and greatly valued compensation for the miseries of collectivisation. Having made that adjustment to an alien regime, they were finding it impossible, in old age, to adjust again. Why did Costin and Ion wish to reject their prestigious status and revert to being peasants? Their own ignorance of the outside world left them unable to comprehend their sons’ longing to escape from it. A return to the village would mean disgrace. Everyone would think the boys had somehow failed …
Within days of crossing the border, I had diagnosed Rumania as a far from classless society. Communism made possible the emergence of a new middle class, rather as the Welfare State did in Britain, by providing a free university education for the children of peasants and workers. And these self-labelled ‘intellectuals’ usually sound either condescending towards or contemptuous of the ‘simple people’ en masse. Yet they remain devoted to their own unacademic relatives – cherishing them in old age, visiting ‘our village’ as often as possible and teaching their children to love and respect those peasant grandparents whose way of life is so unlike their own. Given a certain unhealthy political climate, this new middle class could easily swing to the extreme right, just as many of Britain’s first-generation graduates are among the most fervent Thatcherites. But that analogy with Britain needs qualifying: no Rumanian intellectual is ashamed of lowly origins, as their equivalents so often are in Western Europe. Instead, they are proud of having started out from simple homes and primitive village schools and ended up as graduates. Is this a benign effect of Communism?
A genuinely egalitarian flavour certainly co-exists with Rumania’s blatant ‘graduate/non-graduate’ class-consciousness. This is something impossible to imagine in Britain but quite strong, though not all-pervasive, in modern Ireland – also essentially a peasant-dominated society, though its evolution to that stage took a longer and more tortuous path than Rumania’s. It fascinated me to watch the everyday interaction between ‘intellectuals’ and ‘simple people’. They don’t often mix socially, unless – pre-revolution – under the aegis of some Party occasion; but in general they do unselfconsciously treat one another as equals. At a military dinner party to which I was invited in Tirgu Mures, I noticed much friendly banter between the restaurant staff and the guests – all senior officers in gorgeous uniforms and government ministers from Bucharest. If an imitation of this took place in the average Western European democracy, it wouldn’t seem ‘natural’. In Rumania it does and I think ‘unselfconscious’ is the key word. The intellectuals are not merely being nice to the simple people, as civilised members of a superior class are everywhere ‘nice’ to their social inferiors. There is a strong and very attractive sense of individuals spontaneously responding to individuals as individuals. Since the basis of Rumania’s new snobbery is intellectual arrogance, workers as such are looked down on – while simultaneously the individual worker is usually treated as an equal human being. Commenting on the shocking brutality of the miners’ invasion of Bucharest in June 1990, a few days after my departure from Rumania, a friend wrote: ‘It’s terrifying to see how usually non-violent people can be driven into such a mess’. She might have written: ‘What else would you expect, when the hoi polloi are let off the leash?’ But she looked deeper; the miners were normally decent individuals who had been incited to violence by Iliescu – deliberately manipulating ancient resentments – and who then lost the restraints that normally curb individuals and became a savage mindless mob, no better or worse than enraged mobs anywhere.
None of Rumania’s Communist dictators – least of all Ceausescu – encouraged genuine egalitarianism; and the tensions that were building up for the new middle class, before the revolution, show no sign of being reduced. One afternoon, as we sat sunning ourselves in the yard, under the leafless vines, Michaela commented on a wireless news item about the election campaign. ‘If Iliescu goes on like this, Ilie will be discriminated against as an intellectual. We don’t want to go back to the social elite having privileges and respect only because of their pedigrees – but Communism making an elite of the workers isn’t much better … Now we’re being discriminated against because we think, which makes us dangerous. Ilie’s four grandparents are still in our villages, simple people working on the land – but now the workers are being trained to despise every child able to think.’
‘The Rumanians are still serfs, in their minds,’ said Costin. ‘Why have we nothing like Solidarity in Poland, no samizdat tradition, no leader like Havel, no clergymen like those who inspired the East Germans to struggle free? We can’t take control for ourselves, we must be told what to do – the way serfs always are.’
We were sitting outside a five-room extension that fifteen years ago had been added to the original primitive cottage in which Costin and Ion grew up. It puzzled me that even moribund villages contained several large, well-maintained, newish houses, or elaborate extensions. Admittedly, the spacious bathroom in the Costin extension, fully equipped and pink-tiled everywhere, had to be serviced from the family well and was rarely used; piped water, promised in 1962, had not yet arrived. (Relief showed all round when I intimated my preference for the century-old earth-closet in a far corner of the yard, beside the buffalo byre.) Costin saw house-building as an important ‘statement’; in the past of defiance, now of celebration.. ‘Systematisation’ was first announced as part of the Rumanian Communist Party’s programme in 1968. During the 1955-65 decade, over a million village homes had been owner-built. After 1968, material shortages and new regulations restricted private building; yet some peasants, in collusion with anti-systematisation local Party officials, continued to defy this most detested of all Ceausescu’s diktats. As Michaela pointed out, peasants liked to spend only on their homes: not on food, drink, clothes, entertainments, cars, holidays, consumer goods. However, the houses going up in so many villages in 1990 didn’t accord with everyone’s low wages. Some of these grand-looking suburban villas were visible evidence of Party officials’ nefarious deeds and deals. Others proved how well the more enterprising farmers had done on the black market before 1984.
By 1980 the peasants’ official income was 40 per cent lower than the workers’ and their pensions and social security benefits were only half (occasionally two-thirds) that of the rest of the population. In the mid 1980s fierce new laws threatened them with starvation; until then, they had been free to dispose of the produce of their family plots and of any sheep they might be running on uncollectivised hillsides. When a drastic reduction in plot size was combined with a compulsory production structure, surpluses – in the unlikely event of there being any – could only be sold at fixed low prices. Black marketeering penalties were increased and Securitate officers swarmed through the villages demanding from each household its bureaucratically determined and often wildly unrealistic quota. As always, the poorest suffered most. One elderly widow, living alone and too rheumaticky to cultivate her plot, instead kept a cow on it. In February 1989, when no milk came for lack of fodder, she felt such terror that the wretched animal was sacrificed – tethered one night on the railway track. Costin noted a connection between the effectiveness of state terrorism and the potential victim’s relative wealth. ‘By ’89,’ he said, ‘even fairly high-up Party and Securitate officials were very hungry and as the laws became more hard they were often enforced more softly – if you knew how to deal with officials and had something to sell. Because that old widow had nothing to sell, she would have been punished – very cruelly, as an example to others. And as proof that the Securitate locally were doing their duty, supervising quotas – though often they weren’t! She was not a stupid woman to be so frightened.’
That was a deplorably alcoholic weekend. I suffered (gladly) from an ancient Rumanian custom, the imbibing of neat tuica before breakfast – a custom that hits particularly hard when breakfast doesn’t happen until 11 a.m. Every night the family sat talking into the wee hours, making the most of their reunion, while I slept soundly in the new parlour-cum-guest-room, with the usual tall tiled stove in one corner, a fine cabinet of old cut glass and ‘best china’ in another and a handsome new dining-table – unmistakably For Export Only – in the centre. At about 9 a.m., when I got back from my long early walks – already starving – everyone was assembling around the twelve-foot-long white-clothed table in the living-room. Of breakfast there was never a sign but an enormous decanter of pale gold eleven-year-old apricot tuica stood surrounded by delicate liqueur glasses. This was Pappa’s moment of glory; no one else in the village made apricot tuica or knew how to treble-distill it to such a point of pixillating perfection. Of course it was not served habitually: only for special guests, like stray Irishwomen, or on festive occasions. And it had to be drunk on the premises because Pappa believed that even a brief journey would irreparably damage it.
From the old kitchen – cramped, ill-lit, cosy – breakfast was at last carried across the yard by Mamma (a superb cook) and her three small grandsons. We began with two fried eggs each, followed by as much as one could eat of rissoles of veal, thinly sliced slanina, three sorts of homemade sausage and salami, buffalo-milk butter and cheese, fresh radishes and scallions, not-too-stale bread, herbal tea and real coffee. This brunch banquet continued in a leisurely way until the early afternoon. Then, between 5 and 6 p.m., another banquet appeared: mutton soup dense with meat, potatoes, onion, garlic; braised veal cutlets, crisp golden-brown chips, floury boiled potatoes, spicy steamed beef sausages, pickled fungus. Luckily puddings never follow such marathons; the prolonged sugar shortage has caused everyone to forget such things once existed. Rumania is the most carnivorous country I have ever been in; when meat is available it is eaten by the kilo in a wide variety of forms, all equally delicious. Our evening meal was of course preceded by more (a lot more) tuica and accompanied by an excellent rosé which proved Pappa to be as skilled at vinification as at distilling. He and his sons expressed infinite contempt for those uncouth enough to use sugar when wine-making. And they assured me, correctly, that even the most reckless over-indulgence in Rumanian villages goes unpunished next morning.
In Central Transylvania I stayed with friends of a friend – Dinu – in a village very unlike Costin’s. When the aid convoys first arrived, foreigners were confused by the many prosperous-looking villages lining Transylvania’s main roads. With their brightly painted exteriors – including jolly or sentimental murals on some gables – and their neat gnomed gardens and luxurious vines, and quite often a shrouded Dacia in the barn, they spoiled the ‘Rumania-on-its-knees’ image. As my daughter Rachel remarked, when she came from Skopje to rescue me after my ultimate Rumanian disaster, ‘Yugoslavia looks much poorer.’
These main road villages, within bus reach of cities or big towns, look so prosperous because many of the younger inhabitants commute to factory jobs and save on household expenses by living at home. The older generation, often state farm pensioners, tend the small children (if any) and the poultry and livestock: possibly a sow and bonhams – perhaps a few sheep, depending on the nature of the local terrain. In the evenings and on Sundays the gardens are productively tilled and this rural–urban compromise makes these commuters seem the least misfortunate of Rumanians. It also made them the least favourite of Ceausescu’s victims. He felt a special impotent hatred for such villagers, who showed open contempt for his December 1987 directive: ‘Those workers who live in a commune should move to a work-place settlement.’
Systematisation was not among Ceausescu’s unqualified successes. The explanation lies in his concluding statement to the National Conference of the Rumanian Communist Party in 1972:
Despite what we have already stated several times – that new buildings could only be erected in the inner regions of townships – people continue to build houses where they wish, and the People’s Councils fail to properly control this and to hold those responsible who violate the laws of the nation in this respect.
The People’s Councils naturally failed to control this situation because they were the people’s councils – stubborn peasants who abhorred systematisation. For years Ceausescu tacitly accepted that even he dared not replace some 7,000 villages with 250 new towns (or ‘agro-industrial centres’). In 1972-3, forty new towns were hastily jerry-built; since then, only one has appeared. Not until 1987, when his megalomania was in full spate, did he revert to his all-out systematisation obsession. Soon, however, he was thwarted again, by a sustained international protest campaign threatening Rumania’s commercial interests.
Dinu’s friends, Con and Maria, were a retired couple whose son and daughter commuted to the bakery where Con had worked for twenty-five years. Maria had laboured for thirty years on the nearby state farm, once the property of a Magyar nobleman. On 1 March 1990 her pension had risen from 150 lei a month to 500 lei. An individual could just survive on this, living in misery, but the 150 lei pension was deliberately homicidal. Ceausescu liked people to die very soon after they had ceased to be productive and doctors were instructed not to attend patients over the age of seventy. Presumably the Conducator disapproved of his mother-in-law, who died a few days after the revolution at the age of 103. A television camera showed a death-bed face frighteningly like her daughter’s.
From my seat by the small window of an over-furnished parlour three storks’ nests were visible, cleverly balanced on top of electricity posts (jarring concrete monsters – the only ugly things in most villages, towering over the little houses). According to Dinu, the same pair return to the same nest year after year and storks bring good luck; so this was a particularly fortunate village, with more than twenty nests up and down the long street. The migrants had arrived only recently and, having put their nests in order, were now standing on those unwieldy-looking piles of twigs gazing soulfully at one another for hours on end. Everyone was amused by my interest in the colony; Ireland being storkless confirmed their suspicion that it suffers from permafrost.
Dinu had prematurely white hair, deep-set dark eyes, a wide smile and a long lean face that seemed always aglow with enthusiasm and kindness. Being unmarried at forty-five made him seem freakish in Rumania. When we first met, in his work-place village elsewhere in central Transylvania, he had told me, ‘If the Securitate were not so stupid, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be an ordinary married man with some secure academic job in a city.’
As a sixteen-year-old, Dinu was arrested by the Securitate who had mistaken an innocent schoolboy prank for ‘subversive activity’. He spent the next five years in a prison work-camp, among many criminals and a few dissidents. From the latter he learned to look at his Communist-throttled country in a new way – having started life in an apathetically apolitical family. Inflamed by the injustice of his own fate, he resolved to become a closet social worker: the only sort that could survive in Rumania. Although city-bred – his father a doctor, his mother a physiotherapist – he developed an almost mystical commitment to helping collectivised peasants to preserve both their traditional skills and their self-respect. He believed Communism to be so evil that it must soon – within his own lifetime – be overthrown. His release coincided with Ceausescu’s coming to power and during the ‘moderate’ years that followed, most of his contemporaries were content to count their blessings while he pursued his mission. Normally it would have been impossible for a convicted subversive to get into a university. However, Dinu’s innocence was recognised by ‘certain people’ who, being afraid to confront the Securitate, made no effort to have him freed but did give him a ‘clean file’ on his release. He then completed his schooling, qualified as a vet at the age of twenty-eight and has since been working on various state farms, combining his official job with the subtle boosting of peasant morale – including vigorous encouragement to continue practising the traditional handicrafts of Transylvania. Marriage was postponed because he couldn’t expect ‘a nice civilised wife’ to share his spartan accommodation and way of life.
Dinu escorted me around the state farm; its animals were kept in conditions marginally less dire than on the collectives I visited – they might be described as ‘Victorian gaol’ conditions, rather than ‘concentration camp’. This was a mainly arable farm (mile after mile after mile of wheat and onions) but some state farms run three thousand dairy cattle and Dinu has seen more than five hundred dying on one farm at the end of a hard winter. The next county then had a fodder surplus (edible straw) but the transfer of resources from one state farm to another was forbidden. There are of course no milking machines; the villagers to whom I described them simply didn’t believe such unnatural devices could exist. Nor did they believe that Irish cows yield a daily average of nine litres. The state cows’ average daily yield, in both winter and summer, is two litres – little more than is given by India’s scavenging cattle. State farms employ scores of Gypsies to milk their thousands of cows and ‘those people make trouble’. A favourite trick is to colour watered milk by adding bicarbonate of soda, and one such contaminated collection ruins a whole tanker-load, which then has to be given to the pigs. To stimulate production, post-revolution, the state was paying six lei a litre to the collectives, though the alimentara price was being held at four and a half. ‘The Front,’ chuckled Dinu, ‘won’t raise any food prices before the elections!’
The élite corps who drove and maintained a state farm’s tractors – before these folded up for lack of spare parts, tyres and fuel – earned a comparatively decent 3,000 lei a month. But much of the land was cultivated by slave labour, starvation-driven people who received only one hundred kilos of grain annually as their free food ration, and therefore continued to steal food despite being caught regularly. As the penalty for stealing even a pocketful of corncobs was no pay for six months, the poorest workers – those without a family plot – were in fact never paid any wages. Each six months penalty merged with the next, which perfectly suited a bureaucracy predisposed towards slave labour.
Back in the village, we found the commuters (two defiantly childless couples) using the last of the daylight to plant vegetables. Both wives were pregnant – not for the first time, but now they were willing to give birth.
‘They have faith in the Front,’ said Dinu gloomily. ‘All this family will vote for Iliescu. I tell them to support the Christian Democratic Party but they feel too grateful to Iliescu. They think he saved us from Ceausescu and Communism. It’s hard for simple people to understand politics.’
The Christian Democrats were among the countless mini-parties with no hope of winning even one seat in the Assembly. Yet according to Dinu only they had a clear policy on agricultural reform and peasants’ rights – issues being dodged by everyone else, including the revived National Peasant Party which, in 1990, seemed as ineffectual as it had been when governing Rumania in 1928-30. Dinu was not surprised to hear of my recent meeting with a Front government minister, touring Transylvania on ‘election business’, who told me he knew nothing about the Front’s agricultural policy or Rumania’s farming problems. He did look briefly abashed on being informed, by a foreigner, that thousands of elderly state farm workers were terrified of losing their pensions should the Front ‘give the land to the people’. But Bucharest Fat-Cats find ‘primitive peasants’ and their concerns frightfully tedious and he made no effort to conceal his boredom.
Before I left that village, Dinu took me to a pensioners’ meeting in the primary school, called by him in his capacity as a Christian Democrat leader. A local Front official (an ex-Party ‘agricultural engineer’) was spreading that pernicious rumour which I had mentioned to the minister. The objective was to arouse or sustain opposition to land redistribution. The effect was to reduce these already destitute pensioners to a most pitiable state of anxiety. There had never been any basis for this rumour, yet it was being injected into many villages by Front thugs. Happily the underdogs of that county loved and trusted – almost worshipped – Dinu and his reassurances brought about a palpable relaxation of tension; in the eyes of those sitting near me I saw tears of relief. Rumania could use many more Dinus; I only met one.