I wish this book could have a happy ending, but that would involve writing fiction. While alone with Luke in the mountains, or staying in remote villages, I rejoiced to be back in Rumania. Elsewhere, this return was often saddening and my journal for 18 April records:
A month after crossing the border, I can see no light at the end of Rumania’s tunnel. Several impediments to progress, only discernible in outline this time last year, are now clearly defined. Most serious is a common reluctance to face reality when that means a personal shouldering of responsibility for the future, rather than an abstract analysis of What’s Wrong With Rumania. Many are very good at diagnosing, objectively and accurately, but if you suggest that they might themselves do something about a cure, in their own sphere of operations, they shy away from the idea. A favourite excuse is that ‘the Soviets are now running the country, through Iliescu’. It’s grim that people who in any other ex-Satellite country would be the natural new leaders feel so powerless. Is this largely because they’ve a totally distorted view of the 1991 outside world? But it seems to me many don’t want to be deprived of this view, which lets them off the hook. If the USSR is still controlling Rumania, how can anyone be expected to do anything to drag his/her country off the garbage-heap it’s now on? Like the Irish, the Rumanians enjoy distilling political moods in ballads, and a popular new song begins ‘Ceausescu, forgive us! We were drunk when we killed you!’ The ballad goes on to praise Ceausescu for his nationalistic defiance of the Soviets and contrasts this with Iliescu’s alleged subservience to a Gorby who is widely believed to be a devil very scantily disguised – though his disguise serves to mislead a credulous West. This alarming swing of the pendulum indicates that Rumanians in general don’t truly value the freedom of speech and access to outside information which are among the few tangible benefits of the revolution/coup. As for the intellectuals – I’ve asked several of my friends (old and new), ‘What’s been happening during my nine months’ absence? What developments have there been, political or economic or psychological?’ They looked at me uneasily, then said defensively, ‘There’s not much change. We’re just getting on with our lives as best we can. What else is there to do, when we’re still under Communism?’
Communism does still control many who in theory despise everything Marxist-tainted. But this is unsurprising; none of us is free of conditioning, we’ve all come off a production-line. The central problem seems to be that Communism maims emotionally, even when intellects have survived brainwashing. Hence intelligent people fear to use their sound thinking to initiate reforms they clearly recognise are needed. They came off a production-line that threateningly imprinted the message ‘Don’t assert your self!’ And it remains true that if they did assert themselves now, as reformers, the immediate personal consequences could be catastrophic: at best implacable hostility from more timid colleagues, at worst job loss. One friend said: ‘This country can’t get sorted out without a Havel-type leader, not just a politician but a creative person who can make the rest of us feel it’s not only right but safe to act free, as individuals!’ Too simple a summing-up, but I saw what she meant.
Another problem is that odd low-key anarchy which I (and the Rumanians) regarded as fun a year ago. It’s unfunny now – not a symbol of new-won freedom but a symptom of no consistent government control of anything, from currency exchange to building permits to car insurance to the railway system. The sort of dictatorship that meant everyone knew the crazy rules, and how to bend them in a formalised way, has not been replaced by a regime that imposes sensible rules generally accepted. Many complain that now the only rules are those invented on the spur of the moment by some enterprising local bureaucrat who is no longer afraid of his Party Boss higher up – and, ultimately, of the Conducator. Thus every shrimp in the vast bureaucratic ocean can pretend to be a shark and get away with it at the expense of his helpless victims. Helpless but infuriated; the simple people well know what’s going on and who’s benefiting most from the ‘Liberty’ they all were celebrating when I first arrived.
With Luke I’m finding the Rumanian compulsion to organise me hard to take, much as I appreciated it when invalided last year. This urge to pre-plan my movements doesn’t depend on temperament, on whether or not someone is bossy. People are baffled and worried by my sort of happy-go-lucky journey. They feel I’m exposing myself to the dangerous unknown – dangerous merely because unknown. So they strive to arrange my route in a way comprehensible to them – i.e., staying with their relatives or friends, on a definite date, so that they can check that all is well with me. This is both touching and irritating – how to escape from the network without giving offence? I’ve argued that such obsessional pre-planning is a Communist handicap which must be overcome, a.s.a.p., for a variety of obvious reasons. But they cannot imagine spontaneous decision-making in response to chance events and changing circumstances. Where there is no institutionalised framework, they must create one.
Overall, a cynical weariness seemed to be the flavour of ’91. Of course some things had improved for the better-off. Petrol was more plentiful. Everyone was free to go abroad if they could get academic sponsorship or otherwise raise the valuta. Few any longer feared the Securitate, though there were constant mutterings about their resurgence under another name – the Rumanian Information Service, established by Iliescu on 28 March 1990. I sometimes suspected that some Rumanians wanted them around again, that they perversely missed the adrenalin stimulus of that particular threat.
There were also countless small private enterprise shops, known as ‘boutiques’, offering imported goods (usually shoddy) that were undreamed of – some even unheard of – in January 1990. The limited selection of tawdry garments came, usually, from Turkey; a Bucharest–Istanbul return bus ticket then cost US$10 and swarms of traders, both Gypsy and Turkish, filled scores of buses every week. ‘Luxury’ goods – soap, toothpaste, chocolate, orange juice (very ersatz), sewing needles, washing powder, tins of salted peanuts, Coca Cola (of dubious authenticity), powdered milk – all sold at astronomical prices. State shop windows and shelves displayed 1990’s range of goods, the bottles and tins now dustier and rustier.
However, some ‘luxuries’ were sporadically trickling through the state system and in Cluj I observed a tense 200-yard queue outside a Centru alimentara. Each person was receiving four 400-gramme tins of bright pink Chinese luncheon meat, a repulsive substance costing 300 lei a tin. (The average monthly wage was then about 6,000 lei.) Most shoppers were pensioners, queuing on behalf of their working children. There was much ill-tempered jostling and shouting, in contrast to the previous year’s docile, disciplined queues. Next day, outside the same alimentara, hundreds were queuing for oranges and when the door suddenly closed a mini-riot broke out, anger streaking through the air like invisible lightning. Somehow the crowd knew that six crates were being retained for the benefit of the staff. (Since the state alimentaras had become self-regulating, each tried to favour its own employees.) The police immediately arrived and insisted on those crates being sold; they then searched the premises and assured the crowd that not an orange remained within.
Private enterprise was most obvious in Timisoara. But who, I wondered, could afford to patronise so many new shops and restaurants where prices were grotesquely high? On a hot Sunday forenoon I wandered all over the Centru, joining in the novel Sabbath pastime of window-shopping. To the Rumanians these displays afforded glimpses of a world hitherto only contacted through illicit pop music or smuggled Western magazines. Yet most goods were tacky, especially the Italian toys and ‘fancy goods’. Crowds thronged around every window, ooo-ing and aaa-ing, the children evidently not thinking of acquiring any toy but satisfied to be able to stare at them, wonderingly. Only around the very long Benetton windows – a recently opened store on a corner – was the atmosphere different. One wouldn’t of course expect Rumanians to be impressed by advertisements showing a tall handsome black man kissing a blonde, a slim slinky black girl caressing a blue-eyed Nordic giant and the usual row of elegantly-clad multi-racial children oozing mutual affection. I wished then I had a camera to record some of the expressions of indignation, horror, disgust, scorn or rage on all sorts of faces – the disgust more marked on women’s faces, the rage on men’s. In one of Europe’s most racist countries, how many garments will this gimmick sell? Yet it may do some good, young Rumanians being so prone to ape the West, by conveying the subliminal message that there racial equality is a respected ideal.
Rumanian reactions to the then recent Gulf War were predictable. Everyone backed Bush, though many women deplored ‘the need for violence’ while considering it completely justified against Saddam Hussein and ‘the brave thing to do’. In Moldavia residual anti-Islamic feeling, after 500 years of Ottoman exploitation, erupted into overt rejoicing because a Muslim country had been reduced to rubble by good Christians. Hatred of the Russians meant the war was also felt, with deep satisfaction, to have been a surrogate defeat of the USSR because all Iraqi equipment was naïvely assumed to be Soviet-made. Television images of American hi-tech superiority in battle sent viewers wild with joy. In their opinion, Soviet diplomatic efforts to avert war were made solely to prevent this exposure of their own military weakness. To try to explain the many facets and complexities of the Gulf crisis – including the extent to which the West had armed Saddam – was futile. American propaganda is one hundred per cent efficient when directed towards a people as ill-informed as the Rumanians: which is hardly surprising, given its success-rate among the Free World educated classes.
The most besotted Bush-worshippers are often members of an American-funded Baptist congregation. In Timisoara I attended a Sunday evening service in a church paid for with US Baptists’ dollars and opened on 10 December 1989. (Coincidentally, a significant date in the history of the revolution/coup.) This building is quite beautiful, simple and dignified, and the construction materials and fittings are of a quality never seen elsewhere in Rumania – in fact, of American quality. Built by voluntary labour, it proves how good Rumanian workmanship still is, given competent supervision.
On that sunny Sunday evening the church was, as always, packed. Looking around at the fifteen-hundred-strong congregation, I was reminded of Paisley’s lot – in dress and demeanour. Later I was reminded of their bigotry when, in conversation outside the church, one fervent Christian remarked that it was a pity Hitler hadn’t completed the job – this was with reference to the Front’s three Jewish leaders. Another Christian said he wouldn’t mind finishing the job himself, while a third observed that Antonescu had shown foresight in 1940, when he tried to expel all Gypsies into the USSR where they would have died working on the notorious killer-projects. All over the country, I found Rumania’s racialism being expressed more openly and frequently in 1991; perhaps it was being used as a safety-valve for post-coup frustrations.
The numerous small children remained unnaturally subdued during that two and three-quarter hour service. There was no communal praying but much hymning by a first-rate choir of 100, plus a full orchestra whose instruments had been donated from America. The pastor regularly tours North America, collecting funds for the starving (?) Rumanians. He claimed to have sat at the President’s right hand during the Gulf crisis, when Bush invited Christian leaders to breakfast at the White House, and to have been told by the President himself (so it must be true!) that ‘The USA is a special nation under God, appointed by the Lord to defend democracy everywhere!’ In the course of one sermon, this sentence was quoted in English four times. Other preachers – there were four in all – included repeated references to ‘our American friends’ and ‘the great hero President Bush, who asked specially for the prayers of Rumania’s Baptists to get him guidance from the Holy Spirit during the Gulf War’. (By this stage, it will astonish no one to hear, I was almost throwing up.) Each preacher brought in the refrain, ‘God Bless America!’, the congregation fervently responding ‘Amen!’ Very obviously all four preachers had been trained in some television evangelism school and their oratory went down a treat, reducing many to tears and shaking sobs and inspiring quite a few to stand up and babble semi-hysterically.
Outside, I remarked to my companion that this was the first Rumanian church I had seen without beggars squatting in the porch. Proudly he replied, ‘No beggar would dare come near our church!’ Parked by the main gate was the pastor’s long sleek limousine, an Audi Sport; my companion boasted that it was the only one in Rumania. His expecting this to impress me was worrying. As was the congregation’s general enjoyment of the reflected glory cast on them by association with this rich pastor, based in a ‘First World’ building. Undoubtedly large segments of Rumanian society will be eager to enlist in our ‘Go Grab It!’ battalions, for which this Baptist ‘mission’ seems to be a recruiting sergeant. I also came upon its active agents in several remote villages and was made uneasy by the taped Bush-eulogies they distribute for free among a bemused peasantry.
In 1990 I had detected little royalist feeling, but a year later strengthening pro-monarchy currents were perceptible throughout Transylvania and Moldavia. In part this seemed to be a reaction to ex-King Michael’s having been rudely refused permission to visit his family tomb near Bucharest at Christmas 1990. (Which refusal suggests that Iliescu then saw royalism as a not inconceivable future threat.) In both Cluj and Timisoara several prominently displayed wall posters called for the restoration of the monarchy, showing photographs in which the ex-King looked remarkably like his distant cousin, King George VI. Yet no one with any political nous allowed themselves to give in to this regressive yearning for a Hohenzollern. Ex-King Michael has no heir and it is impossible to imagine how a not-very-bright septuagenarian, on a dusted-down throne, could possibly solve any of Rumania’s problems. However, Communist denigration makes him seem ‘good’ and increasingly desirable as the polar opposite to Communism. To quote several of my friends, ‘He is the only person who could get rid of the Front’. Of course no one can suggest how he might achieve that. He couldn’t organise either a fair election or a civil war, even if he wanted to, and a royal edict would be unlikely to dislodge Iliescu & Co.
On first arriving in Transylvania, I went along with the Rumanian tide and blamed Him and Her for everything. But soon the more complicated reality emerged, as it did for many foreigners. Aid workers who rushed to the rescue, moved almost to tears by what had just been revealed, expected the Rumanians to be as concerned as they were about abandoned babies and juvenile AIDS victims. The professionals were not entirely unprepared for what they found; some of the amateurs’ eventual bitter disillusionment was in proportion to their original emotional investment. (Perhaps it is an advantage to have had all one’s possessions stolen on the border, by Rumanian officials, so that one first sets foot in the country without illusions.)
When it became obvious that the spontaneous generosity of Western Europe was being systematically abused, certain aid-workers began angrily to ask, ‘Does Rumania deserve so much help?’ Superficially the answer seemed to be ‘No’. Yet this rapid curdling of the milk of human kindness was partly owing to the naivety-cum-sentimentality-cum-impetuosity of uninformed and disorganised helpers. Rumania was a country newly released (or apparently released) from Communism and everyone knows that corruption is endemic in Communist societies. Why were the Rumanians expected to be different? Only by the exercise of superhuman virtue could they have co-operated honestly in distributing luxuries, unseen for decades, among the most deprived – when the average Rumanian considered him/herself sufficiently deprived to be entitled to whatever was going.
Moreover, in relation to the Children’s Homes, officialdom had literally degraded their inmates to non-human status, so categorising them that they were seen as not belonging to society. Foreigners noted, with horrified incredulity, the withholding from them of all affection or normal concern. This was the savagely logical consequence of the nature of those institutions, with their shortages of staff, food, medicines, heating, clothing, equipment. The children could only have been treated differently had the staff done the unthinkable and staged their own revolutions, refusing to collaborate in running such hell-holes. It is too easy to forget that our own ‘caring society’ is a recent development, based on the sort of national affluence Rumania has never known. The profound changes undergone by Western Europe during the past century – changes in perceptions, expectations, sensibilities – make it hard for us to understand Rumania’s comparative indifference to those at the bottom of the pile.
It saddens me now to hear and read a growing volume of criticism from which all the ‘positives’ are deleted: the Rumanians’ courage, resilience, unstoppable humour, disinterested kindness. I have never, anywhere, encountered so much of the last – total strangers going to extremes to help me with no vestige of an ulterior motive. True, some of those same individuals remain unmoved by the tragedy of ‘Ceausescu’s Children’. But is that very different from my – or any other European’s – acceptance of children dying at our feet on India’s urban pavements? If unable to do anything to help, one must either turn off the compassion tap or develop a neurosis. And the kind Rumanian who busts him/herself to help me cannot think in terms of being able to help tens of thousands of children. That’s a big permanent problem, beyond reach. I’m a little temporary problem, the sort an individual can somehow cope with, even if at considerable inconvenience. Ordinary citizens having a collective responsibility for conditions within a state-run institution is part of our democratic way of thinking. In a state that has never been democratic, the individual feels powerless to change anything organised by the Authorities, be they boyars or Phanariots or Party bosses.
Yet Rumania does have an extraordinary inner strength. How else could the peasantry have survived centuries of tyranny and hardship with their culture intact? They may now have a national inferiority complex but, unlike us Irish, they have no identity problem. And their vividly defined Rumanian-ness – which has nothing to do with politically encouraged nationalism – gives an enduring integrity to the spirit of the place, despite all that day-to-day corruption.
Scientists are optimistic about Rumania’s topsoil, though it has been so degraded and impoverished by agricultural abuse and industrial pollution; they foretell that time and education will ensure its recovery. The same may prove true of Rumanian society.