Throughout the first half of 1990 there was an extraordinary intensity about Rumania, then a country in what can only be described as psychic turmoil. Outsiders were at once affected by this and, after a time, felt mangled by it. An Irishman who has been visiting Bucharest for many years, and is deeply attached to his friends there, responded negatively to my suggestion that he should now explore Transylvania. He said, ‘I don’t think I can handle any more Rumanian contacts, it’s all so wearing!’ – which of course is a compliment to the Rumanians. Theirs is not a country you can visit as a detached traveller; their own talent for friendship immediately engages the stranger’s sympathy and interest and soon one feels irrationally committed, not imagining that one can do anything specific to help, yet wanting to rally round. In practice this means listening, commenting when asked to comment and, above all, giving reassurance – without flattery – to a people who are deeply self-doubting.
By early April 1990 I knew that I was going to have a long-term problem with Rumania, akin to my Northern Ireland problem. Repeatedly I would be drawn back, both to visit friends and because I had become so personally concerned about the country’s future. I also knew that I must now have an interlude of solitude, silence and space. (My mental exhaustion was partly attributable to continuously surmounting the language barrier; most of my conversations, especially those involving translation, demanded maximum concentration all round.) I decided on a fortnight’s trek through northern Moldavia, an uncollectivised region where the attractive little villages look normally bustling, with individuals tending their own healthy stock and family-sized conical hay-ricks in the sloping fields.
Soon after midday on the 10th, beyond an isolated hamlet of half a dozen wooden shacks, I arrived at the base of the Rarau massif’s southern flank. A 3,000-foot climb would take me to the top before dark. Looking up, I could see only the first stage, a grassy mountain that blocked what lay beyond. On either side were even steeper slopes, all forested. A faint path led off the rough motorable track from the hamlet. As I began to climb, the sky was cloudless, the sun warm, the breeze cool, Ceausescu’s Rumania forgotten.
Half-way up that first mountain the path faded, but if I kept climbing I couldn’t get seriously lost. And it wouldn’t matter if I did; my rucksack was packed with camping-gear and food. The first grassy mountain led to another and by now it was cold. Ahead rose a densely forested slope – the steepest of all – and, just visible above it, sharp obelisks of limestone marked the summit.
Approaching the forest, I was astonished to see a strip of ploughland some hundred yards by twenty. Who cultivated what here? The shepherds had not yet moved up and since leaving the hamlet hours before I had seen no one – and no arable land, or livestock, or dwellings. Then, on reaching that thoroughly dug oblong, I recognised it as the oddly symmetrical work of wild pigs. So my farmer friend in Sighet had not exaggerated; rooting on this scale, in a maize or potato field, would cause economic catastrophe. These northern Carpathians support Rumania’s greatest concentration of wildlife: wolves, foxes, lynx, bears, roebuck, pigs, squirrels, pine-marten.
In that forest of ancient, mighty spruce firs, still snow-laden, there was no trace of logging and therefore no path. (It is, I learned next day, a nature reservation.) The Bukovina spruce fir has been famous all over Europe for centuries and many of these trees were too stout for my embrace. The numbers which had fallen puzzled me, until I noticed how shallow are their roots – spreading very wide, but with only a feeble purchase on the poor, thin soil. And here the winter gales are ferocious.
That was a difficult climb; the broken ground necessitated much zig-zagging, as did numerous fallen branches and prone tree-trunks. Underfoot was a slippery sludge – snow and ice over a deep accumulation of black mould. Beneath those towering trees there was virtually no undergrowth and within half an hour I saw two bears – one in the near distance, digging under a tree. The other appeared scarcely fifteen yards away, a shaggy lightish brown creature ambling along with the worried expression some teddy-bears have. When he glanced at me I have to admit I felt scared enough to look away, feeling – perhaps quite wrongly – that eye-contact might be best avoided. He was very much bigger than I had expected a Rumanian bear to be: at least five feet long and sturdily built. It would be an uneven contest were he to fancy some protein. But he evidently considered me of no importance, compared to his personal worries, and continued to plod along parallel to me for about fifty yards. I slowed to keep pace with him, the half of me that wasn’t scared relishing the companionship of a bear – which somehow seemed appropriate, in that magic forest. Then he turned and disappeared into a gully. This was one of those encounters more enjoyable in retrospect than at the time and it prompted me cravenly to revise my plans. I had had thoughts of camping near the summit, but two bears in thirty minutes indicated a considerable local ursine population and it would be unfortunate should one of them happen to suffer from night-starvation. I had been quite successfully brainwashed by numerous folk-tales – which might be true stories – about the Carpathian bear’s carnivorous tastes.
Beyond the forest, I was on the edge of a mile-long grassy oval valley containing three enormous sheep-folds. To the west this deep hollow was bounded by a silver limestone wall, 300 feet high and topped by a frieze of frosted dwarf pines glittering against the deep blue sky – and ridiculously reminding me of a punk hair-do. Slim spruce saplings covered the steep slope on my right, each supple young branch bent under its sparkling snow burden. I stopped to drink from an ice-fringed stream; urban life had so deconditioned me that I was sweat-soaked, despite a steely cold wind. Then I paused to examine an old shingle-roofed shepherd’s hut – built generations ago but still sound, the thick spruce beams preserved by their own resin. The only nails used were of yew-wood; the yew, known in Moldavia as ‘the iron-tree’, is now a protected species because of its slow growth-rate. On the last precipitous climb to the massif’s long summit, slight breathlessness reminded me that I was now at 5,000 feet.
Rarau is at the very heart of the Bistrita Mountains and as I took off my rucksack, to unpack a bottle of tuica, I felt intoxicated even before opening it. To the north and quite close lay the Obcine range of Bukovina, a curiously neat-looking line of low, rounded, same-size mountains, all spruce-clad and separated by long valleys. To the east was the Stinisoara range: similar, but more close-packed. Behind me, beyond the narrow gorge of the Bistrita river which I had left that morning, rose a chain of rougher, barer peaks, filling the sky-line. And from the west, only a few miles away, beckoned Mount Giumalau, some 500 feet higher than Rarau and with a deceptive ‘volcanic cone’ which is really a twin summit. That, I then thought, was my destination for the morrow.
At my feet lay another sort of beauty, something never seen before and never to be forgotten. On this exposed crest, where only spear grass grew, the wind and frost had interacted to create a fairyland of fragile pennants of ice, streaming from every hoar-whitened blade. All over the slightly curving saddle this wondrous display caught the rays of the declining sun and trembled brilliantly in the wind, each formation flawless.
Three level miles, on the crest’s clear east-west path, ended with a short, sharp drop to Rarau’s cabana through the thick snow that still lay on this northern slope. Here I could see, below the track on my left, the renowned Pietrele Doamnei (the Princess’s Rocks). These three isolated limestone towers, hundreds of feet high, look from a distance like the battlements of some legendary vaivode’s fortress. Then the blue-black, orange-streaked sunset clouds suddenly became a sheet of greyness and it was snowing – face-stinging dry little particles, driven by a gale. Near the cabana I passed close to the Pietrele Doamnei but postponed paying my respects to them; it was not a time for lingering.
Mercifully, the lie of the land, aided by surrounding spruces, prevents Rarau’s cabana from being too conspicuous. In this nine-storey monstrosity (by Swiss chalet out of Stalin) the post-Ceausescu habit of heating buildings had not yet caught on though icicles hung from everything in sight, including the non-functioning lavatory cisterns. In the restaurant a merry party of eight foresters wore mittens, and sheepskin jackets with the collars rolled up, and fox-fur hats with the ear-flaps pulled down. They were celebrating their team leader’s winning of 10,000 lei in the National Lottery by mixing cognac, white wine, tuica and beer, which seemed to me unwise. I little realised how soon I was to be the victim of their unwisdom. The walls of the vast restaurant were 90 per cent glass, something perhaps appreciated by summer visitors though the view was restricted to a cliff-face covered in dwarf pine. Astonishingly, supper was served hot: a heavy-duty soup of potatoes, tinned peas and tender (non-Bulgarian) chicken, followed by a massif of crisp chips, thick slices of flavoursome fried pork, the inevitable bowl of pickled cabbage and a bottle of excellent Iasi dry white wine – all for seventy pence.
Even after eating, my hands were too numb to write. On the way to bed I passed a dozen wanly exhausted teenagers who had just walked through the blizzard from Cimpulung Moldovenesc, 3,000 feet down. They seemed to be a school party, in the charge of two young men. Doubtless their exhaustion was owing to unsuitable gear: battered suitcases in lieu of ‘not available’ rucksacks.
In my sixth-floor eyrie the north-facing wall was all window – and ill-fitting window at that, through which came draughts like swords of ice. But once in my flea-bag I slept well, only waking briefly around midnight as the foresters sang and hiccupped their way to bed.
The dawn showed a world all white and still. Although the grey sky remained low the wind had dropped and it was freezing hard. Cabanas don’t provide breakfast so I fuelled up on bread and slanina while still in my flea-bag.
Descending the mock-marble staircase in semi-darkness, I slipped on a pile of vomit and landed five steps down with my right ankle twisted under me. It had taken all my body weight, plus a heavy rucksack, and I at once knew it was broken. Apart from the pain, there is an odd audible thing: the brain, if not the ears, ‘hears’ bones crunching. Picking myself up – some moments later, after the first pain-wave had ebbed – I accepted that now was the time to do some involuntary research into Rumania’s medical service. But alas! now was not the time …
I could find only the cabana manager’s disagreeable wife, who informed me in French that the nearest town, Cimpulung, was currently inaccessible to motor vehicles. The prospect of languishing for days in a cabana bedroom, awaiting the thaw, with an injury in need of immediate attention, did nothing to cheer me. Being then unknowledgeable about broken ankles, I resolved to try to totter down to Cimpulung, but tottering proved impracticable; at my rate of progress it would have taken days to reach the town. And the pain was all the time increasing, naturally enough; as the doctor later pointed out, broken feet are not for use. I gave in when my leg began visibly to swell, even above boot-level.
An hour later I was back in the cabana where – mirabile dictu! – an English-speaking final-year medical student approached me as I very slowly crossed the foyer, with no thought in my mind but to sit down. ‘You have a problem!’ exclaimed Virgil. Being by then speechless with pain I merely nodded and was helped up steps to a ‘café area’, with metal tables and chairs, where I gingerly took off my boot (not to be replaced until 22 June) and displayed the damage. Firmly Virgil diagnosed ‘Nothing broken!’ – because I could wiggle my toes. I didn’t argue but inwardly pitied his patients-to-be. He and his friend, Teodor, a German-speaker, then half-carried me to a first-floor bedroom and swung into action.
The Ceausescu era wonderfully revived folk medicine – perhaps its only beneficial side-effect – and while Teodor soaked my foot in icy water, Virgil requisitioned onions from the kitchen, applied layers of raw sliced onion under a very tight bandage and presented me with a bottle of ‘cognac’.
Two very large cognacs later I was able to hold converse. Virgil and Teodor were in charge of the teenagers, whose academic achievements had earned them an Easter holiday on Mount Rarau; when the weather improved they would do a geological project with Teodor. Virgil was of the party because, ‘In dangerous mountains it is necessary to have a medical person. So I can give you many bandages but no medicines!’ He added, ‘For hundreds of years this Mount Rarau is unlucky, the simple people know that. Every year strange things happen – people die from silly accidents, or have misfortunes like you. They tell about a curse on Rarau. A Prince of Moldavia did something very, very bad and the person he did bad to, cursed the mountain. I am scientific, not liking to believe such things. But sometimes, about Rarau, I feel not scientific!’ Later, I heard of this tradition from many local people, who plainly regarded me as just the latest victim of an ancient curse.
All day Virgil and Teodor cherished me, regularly changing the poultice and re-soaking the foot – not as simple a process as it may sound, water being very scarce. I suggested keeping the full basin in my room; but it was the cabana’s only basin and Maria, the strikingly beautiful twenty-one-year-old waitress, needed it for washing floors – her main task. It then occurred to me that a basin of snow would prove a more powerful analgesic than cold water: which it did, for a little time. But despite all this loving care the pain worsened rapidly and the boys had to carry me to the toalet – unfortunately at the far end of a long corridor.
At sunset my door was slowly pushed open and Bogdan timidly entered – a gnarled little gnome of a man, with tears in his bloodshot brown eyes. He it was who had vomited on the stairs and now, guilt-ravaged, he had come to crave my forgiveness, bearing a large bottle of tuica. I was quite overwhelmed; where else in the world, in similar circumstances, would the culprit have confessed and been so genuinely upset? By the end of the bottle (we were assisted by my nurse-attendants) Bogdan looked much more cheerful, having been assured that I quite understood his aberration – that occasionally I, too, had over-indulged to the point of throwing up. This admission on ‘granny’s’ part severely shocked Virgil and Teodor: another example of Rumanian primness.
In February, a London friend had loaded me with pain-killers, lest I might absentmindedly return to Rumania without any, but even a triple dose left my ravelled sleeve of care unknitted that night. And sleeplessness did nothing for morale, which by midnight had sunk to a new low. Not only was my Easter holiday kiboshed, but a few months of immobility loomed; having cracked my spine in 1984, I knew it would be months rather than weeks. By about 3 a.m. I had convinced myself that my trekking days were over, because old bones never heal properly. Soon after, I desperately needed to pee – which was a good thing, since that conundrum diverted my mind from endless vistas of gloom. After some thought, I cautiously lowered myself to the floor and proceeded, on my hands and bottom, to the balcony …
Next morning my foot was, if viewed objectively, quite beautiful – the size and shape of a rugger ball and marbled blue, green, brown and red, like high-quality nineteenth-century endpapers. Virgil, applying more sliced onion, said, ‘I think you have sprained this ankle in a very bad way.’ Teodor, the geology student, said in German, ‘I think it is a broken foot.’
During that second sleepless night my demoralisation was accentuated by the ‘If only …’ factor – always a dangerous one and by now becoming an obsession. If only I had noticed the vomit! Then I wondered, ‘Why has Rumania been, physically, my jinx country?’ Somewhere in my pain-addled brain lay an answer to that, but it didn’t surface until very much later.
Towards dawn the temperature rose abruptly; it became less cold than it had been the previous noon. When Virgil and Teodor appeared, bearing snow and onions, they announced that by mid-afternoon the track should be motorable.
At 3.30 I was man-handled downstairs and carefully packed into the front seat of a Dacia. Its tyres, I noticed neurotically, were bald. A weeping Maria followed with my rucksack. She longed to talk to her mother, who lived in Cimpulung, and I had tried to persaude the cabana manager that I needed her help. But he curtly refused to allow her even half a day off.
Had I been able to imagine the nature and state of that track, nothing would have induced me to be driven on it – especially in a bald-tyred car. Twenty years ago slave labourers (‘hero-workers’) from Cimpulung carved it out of the mountainside and its hairpin bends are more suited to roebuck than to wheeled vehicles. The thaw was at that early stage when the new snow has melted, only to reveal sheets of corrugated black ice and a five-months’ accumulation of packed old snow. The driver – redolent of ‘cognac’ – was having an angry argument with his nasty wife and frequently turned to glare at her. I realised then how permanently unnerved I had been by January’s car accident. The cold sweat of fear – by some erroneously supposed to be the prerogative of Mills & Boon characters – broke out on my forehead. Our downward journey seemed to last for hours although within twenty minutes we were on the level, in Cimpulung’s wide ice-free valley. This is a famously beautiful region, though not without some ‘anthropogenic modification of the natural background’ – Ceausescu-speak for pollution. Self-pity threatened again: I should have crossed this valley on foot, forty-eight hours earlier on my way to Putna Monastery …
At 4.30 I was abandoned at one of the several entrances to Cimpulung’s 500-bed hospital which is staffed by twenty-five doctors – none of whom happened to be around. Nor, it seemed, was anybody else around. With my rucksack dumped beside me, I stood on one leg at the bottom of eight steep steps, hanging on to the railing. As the manager returned to the car I could hear his wife shrilly abusing him for having accepted 500 lei instead of demanding valuta (dollars).
Some minutes later – by which time I had sat on a step – a nurse appeared in the doorway above: a thin pale little woman, wearing a tattered butcher’s-type coat that may once have been white. She stared at my rucksack, then at me. I jabbed my chest and said ‘Irlanda!’, then pointed to my foot and said, ‘Ruptura!’ Her face crumpled with sympathy; she leaped down the steps and embraced me. Cimpulung hospital, I was to discover, is short of everything except loving care. I gathered that a strong man would be summoned: the local substitute for wheelchairs, stretchers, lifts. He arrived quite soon, a powerful, gentle, elderly fellow with kind eyes and a worried expression that reminded me of my bear companion. He indicated that I was to hang onto him with one arm and hop. Unfortunately there was a long way to hop (more than a hundred yards) to the X-ray department – also approached by eight steps. It seemed downright sadistic that a hospital devoid of all conveyances for the maimed should have steps at each entrance. Here I was left – I thought – with another patient, a frayed-looking sunken-cheeked woman wearing a shabby brown dressing gown over muddy black slacks. She was however the radiographer, who must have been frayed by her years of struggle with the X-ray equipment. It had been defective since 1976 and worked only after being struck hard with a clenched fist three times in rapid succession.
I lay, the machine was beaten, the foot was X-rayed. Our next hop, to the ghips room – down two long corridors, up three flights of stairs – inspired the strong man to remark on my ‘curaj’. The plaster of Paris (ghips) expert explained that he could do nothing until a doctor – who would come on duty at 7 p.m. – had seen the X-rays. Then two sturdy beaming nurses hopped me into a ward where only crab-wise movement was possible between the four narrow beds. Two patients shared one small locker; there was no other furniture. Each bed had a rock-hard mattress, a meagre lumpy pillow, stained and torn sheets and one threadbare blanket; during winter, families provided extra bedding. This hospital was half-empty because it could only cope with fracture cases.
At 6 p.m. a nurse wheeled in a rattling squealing trolley bearing four platefuls of something indefinable that smelt nauseating. Solemnly she announced, ‘President Ceausescu invites you to eat!’ Everyone smiled sourly and the trolley was wheeled out. This ritualistic black joke well conveyed the despair of those for whom nothing had improved since the revolution. Most hospital meals went in vast cauldrons to the local pigs – reputedly an extraordinarily undiscriminating tribe, even by porcine standards.
Soon after, relatives brought soups, stews, sausages, bread and herbal tea. The foreigner’s welfare became everyone’s first concern; being family-less, I must have something of everything. This was awkward, there being little to spare. I extricated myself by indicating that pain had robbed me of my appetite, which was true.
When the doctor arrived my remoralisation began, not because of what he had to say (‘three bones broken’) but because of what he was. In the ghips room he interpreted while my leg was being encased, from mid-thigh to toes, in a weighty substance unseen by Occidentals for decades past; henceforth hopping would be less painful but much more strenuous. I didn’t protest when he ordered my transfer to a tiny private room; by then I was some way beyond having ideological scruples about preferential treatment. The nurses’ staff-room was next door; if I needed anything during the night I was to bang hard on their wall. (The bell system has not yet reached Moldavia.) Rumanian nurses – uneducated, untrained, ill-paid – have the status of maid-servants and in Cimpulung the same women were on duty day and night: ‘an irregularity’, I was told.
Next morning the immobility imposed by an unbendable leg and a mighty load of ghips induced slight panic; never before had I experienced such physical dependence on others. Vladimir, the doctor, suggested my staying in the hospital, free of charge, until the ghips came off in June; but that was not a real option. I decided to move to Cimpulung’s Zimbru Tourist Hotel (the more congenial alternative lacked a lift) and there consider long-term plans.
The region’s ‘ambulance’ fleet, visible from my window, looked like a good start for a scrap-yard. Three of the vans hadn’t been used for years; the fourth, unused for months, was now being reactivated on my behalf though I had wanted to take a taxi. At noon the strong man hopped me to an exit, then hastened away to give a piggy-back to a pitiable youth with a mangled leg who had just been delivered by horse-cart. No one could explain why crutches were not available in this region of supremely skilled woodworkers. When I asked Vladimir to order a pair from a local carpenter he said that that would not be possible but promised to try to find a pair himself – somehow, somewhere.
As I balanced on one leg, clutching the railings and trembling with pain, the lean, scowling ambulance-driver – clad in filthy dungarees – emerged from the cab with a tangle of wire and disappeared under the engine. Ten dreadfully long minutes later a sudden stuttering roar fell as music on my ears. Then the driver, having roughly hopped me to the van’s three-foot-high side door, left me to sit on the floor and drag myself in backwards, just as we jerked off. The walls and floor were streaked with old vomit, phlegm and blood-stains; but probably time had disinfected everything.
When Vladimir and his wife visited me that afternoon I arranged for an SOS to be sent to Rachel, asking her to bring crutches and escort me to Cluj. There my base could be a ground-floor room in the friendly Vladeasa Hotel, within reach of the university’s English Language Library.
That telegram took four days to meander to Skopje. It was 7 p.m. on 19 April before an exhausted Rachel arrived, after a forty-six-hour train journey, bearing a stout pair of wooden crutches borrowed from a Yugoslav neighbour. Apart from the moment of her emergence from the womb, I have never been so glad to see my daughter.
A week later we were in Cluj, where my friends rejected the Vladeasa Hotel plan with shudders of distaste and found me a comfortable ground-floor flat elsewhere – of course rent-free. The Rumanians take their responsibilities to foreign guests very seriously indeed and within twenty-four hours a strong team of Dervla-minders had been formed. For seven weeks these genuine ‘hero-workers’ saw to all my needs – books, food, drink, postage, entertainment, transport – without ever making me feel a nuisance. As Walter Starkie wrote of Transylvania sixty years ago: ‘It would be difficult for me to repay in words of gratitude the treatment I received’.
A broken foot in Darkest Moldavia may seem a wholly negative event but I now discovered an apparent paradox: for travellers, physical immobility can have certain advantages. People who had been amiable acquaintances became trusting friends – trusting enough to give me valuable insights into the foulest corners of Ceausescu’s Rumania, these being not necessarily the most dramatic. A few academics needed help with their translations into English of Rumanian plays and short stories – a fascinating exercise, during which they and I learned quite a lot about the very different workings of Rumanian and Irish minds, as revealed through the use of language. My supply of translated Rumanian history, folklore, poetry, essays and fiction was ample and illuminating. And my dependence on others, initially so hard to bear, became much more tolerable when several friends pointed out that ours were give-and-take relationships, that it helped them to have a foreigner around with whom to discuss Rumania’s (and their own) problems.
This static period coincided with the run-up to Rumania’s (allegedly) ‘first free elections’ and with the tense three weeks that followed. This was a peculiarly stressful time for the pro-democracy intellectuals, as day by day the ominous design of the election campaign became clearer. In friends’ flats I saw for myself the manipulation of public opinion through the Front’s complete control of the national television service. By 20 May I was sufficiently expert with my crutches to tour six polling-stations, in and near Cluj. Voting was indeed ‘fair’, as elsewhere in Rumania – apart from minor incidents. During the previous two months a campaign of systematic intimidation – ranging from subtle threats to lethal physical violence – had ensured that an outwardly honest ballot would give the Front a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly and make Iliescu President with 86 per cent of the votes. There was no need for ballot-rigging, so effective had been the mind-rigging of the electorate.
I was harrowed by my friends’ post-election fear, anger and despair. Five months previously, they had seen a mirage of liberty – vivid and inspiring. Now it had vanished and I left Rumania full of sadness, knowing the country to be still in the grip of Communists, thinly disguised as the Front for National Salvation. That was on 9 June, less than a week before my friends’ most pessimistic forebodings were justified by the Iliescu-organised miners’ attack on Bucharest’s anti-Communist demonstrators.
At Cluj gara my team of hero-workers helped me onto the train for Budapest–Vienna–Munich–London (I was still on crutches) and urged me to return soon. I promised that I would – early in 1991, on a bicycle. By then experience had taught me that in Rumania trekking is impractical because so much of the country has been despoiled by industrialisation. On a bicycle one could speed through those dreary and often health-endangering areas; on foot it can take half a day to escape into beauty. That so much beauty has survived the Communist era is of course owing to the terrain. I was looking forward most keenly to cycling around – or rather, up and down – Harghita, and to getting onto little motor-free roads or tracks in the heart of the Carpathians.