Romania
Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness.
Between the Woods and the Water
My fear of Romania was gone. I’d crossed the threshold and been accepted, and as I journeyed east in the cool of the morning my delight increased by the mile.
Paddy had walked this road alongside peasants in homespun tunics, sheepskin jackets and foot-tall hats. The trappings may have changed since then, but for the first time on my journey the change didn’t feel so absolute. Suddenly the word ‘peasant’ wasn’t a throwback to a lost era, but an accurate and literal term to describe the people I met, those who inhabit the land; when Romania joined the EU, the number of small and subsistence farms in the community increased by a third. In Curtici I’d noticed that most of the men wore berets, but after only one day’s walk the style of headgear had changed: the men in Pâncota preferred felt porkpies pushed back high on their heads. Fleece waistcoats were worn alongside baseball caps and secondhand sportswear. Roma girls swished down the street in random colourfulness: a clash of lurid stockings, patterned skirts, jumpers of neon spots and swirls, garish shawls pulled over very black, very shiny hair, and lots of gold. Their gaze was open and direct, with the faintest hint of a smile and much humour behind the eyes, something between a challenge and an invitation to intimacy. It was immensely self- possessed, and immensely separate; it struck me as the look of a foreigner to another foreigner.
Not far out of town I was overtaken by a moth-eaten horse pulling a wooden barrow on rubber tyres. The driver slowed and jerked his thumb, an offer not to be refused, and cleared a space among rusty scythes and bundles of wire. He was a young man called Moise, and his face wouldn’t have been out of place in Rajasthan. With him was his wife, a beatific woman in a Stars and Stripes bandana, and their little son, who regularly leapt down to salvage useful scrap from the roadside: a smashed computer, a circuit board, dumped electronic waste, to be cannibalised for profitable parts. Moise attempted communication in Romanian, Magyar and German, and then, as an afterthought, ‘¿Hablas español?’ It was the one language we shared; he had worked, like many Romanian Gypsies, as a farm labourer in Spain. That job had been swallowed by the crisis; now he was scrap collecting again. Along the road we encountered other scavengers on carts and bicycles, whistling greetings to one another, exchanging tips on promising sites, a tribe of modern-day hunter-gatherers living on the verges.
A couple of miles up the road our paths diverged. Moise scribbled his number on a cigarette paper. ‘Perhaps you can help me one day. If you hear of any work when you get back to England, remember me and my family.’ Gold flashed in his mouth as he smiled. His wife and son were already picking through a pile of rubbish in a nearby field.
Throughout the afternoon I had the sense of incrementally climbing. These were arid steppes no more; the hot sun and cold air spoke of a mountain climate. Hills folded into hills, with snow dashed on the peaks. With my water supplies depleted, I was delighted to discover a conical stone structure that turned out to be a natural spring, at which two men were filling up dozens of plastic bottles. They let me jump the queue, and burst out laughing as I drank and then practically threw it back up; the mineral water tasted overpoweringly of rotten eggs.
Near the country town of Ineu I diverted down a sundappled driveway towards the Spital de Psihiatrie Mocrea, the Mocrea Psychiatric Hospital. The link between old country houses and mental health institutions was strong; this was where Paddy had stayed as the guest of another Hungarian count, luxuriating in a life of picnics and after-breakfast cigars, the start of a ‘blessed and happy spell’ of leisurely sojourns with cultured hosts that carried him to the vales of Transylvania. The former kastély of Count Tibor was a hulking custard-yellow building at the end of an avenue of trees. A bemused gatekeeper escorted me to the hospital’s director, a broad, bald man named Augustin, who led me inside. The interior was a facsimile of Slovakia’s Štrkovec – the same over-lit, disinfected corridors, the same compulsively smoking characters shuffling between the rooms – and once again, not a trace was left of its previous incarnation.
‘Here is where the old Tibor used to drive up on his horse,’ said Augustin as we reached the annexe, but when I asked more about the building’s former owners, his expression went blank. ‘I think perhaps they moved to Hungary. They donated their land to the Romanian state. No one really knows…’ Again came that sense of historical vagueness, softening the sharper edges of the past.
A violent and glorious sunset was bursting over the land. The hospital was an island in a warbling sea of bird-song, and the conical hill of Mocrea – Mokra in Paddy’s time, the name, like the estate itself, having since been Romanianised – glowed in golden light. ‘Do you have a place to sleep?’ asked Augustin. I suggested camping in the grounds, but he didn’t think it was a good idea. ‘Not because of the patients, because of the dogs. This place belongs to them at night.’ Instead he offered me a bed in Ineu, ten minutes down the hill, in a dormitory attached to the special-needs school run by his wife. It sounded suitably strange, as appropriate for my journey as staying with aristocrats was for Paddy’s.
The school adjoined a crumbling fortress with trees growing through its windows, patches of sky visible through its roof. It used to be an orphanage, Augustin mentioned briefly. The school itself was empty apart from a young man who worked as a caretaker, and when Augustin was gone he served me macaroni cheese and sat watching as I ate with unusual concentration. At first our interaction was smooth – he found my attempts at Romanian amusing – but halfway through the meal something in him altered. His expression grew dark, his facial muscles twitched, as if he was suppressing great fury; he began swinging back and forth, compulsively rubbing his knees. His questions, which I couldn’t understand, became increasingly threatening in tone, and his anger built and built until I managed to deflect it with a question of my own, a clumsy Romanian sentence or two, which made him giggle. But once the laughter died away his anger built again, the rocking restarted, his fingers clenched and clawed tormentedly. It was a nerve-wracking half hour, and he seemed as relieved as I was when at last I escaped to my room.
Only later did I guess a connection between his anger and this place. The orphanage, I learnt the next morning, was one of those horror stories I grew up hearing about in the 1990s: six hundred infants penned in cribs in the corridors of that ruined castle, by-products of Ceauşescu’s disastrous fertility drive to strengthen the Romanian state. Communism had criminalised both abortion and contraception, pregnancy tests were mandatory for women of childbearing age, and tens of thousands of unwanted children were traumatised and neglected in the years leading up to the regime’s collapse in 1989. Romania’s accession to the EU had prompted the closure of these institutions; the special-needs school at Ineu was set up, largely, to deal with the mental health fallout from those times.
‘My wife and I work hand in hand,’ Augustin had said. ‘Often it happens that the kids she teaches end up in my hospital. They go from one institution to another.’
The road the next day threaded southwest, back towards the Hungarian border, through villages of dilapidated bungalows with tiled roofs undulating as if in a frozen wave. The colours splashed on the walls – lime green, neon pink, bilious lilac and lavender – had been unleashed after 1989, an attempt to wash away half a century of uniformity. In the fields along the road I glimpsed my first Romanian sheepdogs, the ferocity of which I’d been warned about: enormous woolly beasts, dreadlocked with matted hair, that looked less like dogs than sheep-demons protecting their flocks, their status marked by horizontal sticks hanging under their throats. They eyed me warily as I passed, but the road was neutral ground and I was allowed to make my way unmolested.
Despite the lack of cars on the road, the corpses of carstruck strays appeared frequently. The ancient Dacians, I’d been told, rode to war under the standard of a snarling wolf’s head, trailing a tube-shaped length of fabric that produced an unearthly howling as they charged. I’d also heard that contemporary myths said their warriors underwent the ritual of lycanthropy – transformation into wolves – which may have explained the popularity of werewolf legends. Could the enormous number of strays, part of everyday life in this country, exist as some collective consciousness of Dacian wolf culture? It was more fun to think so.
It rained, stopped raining, rained again, and I broke my no-lifts rule to accept a ride to reach the city of Arad before dark. The sprawling industrial outskirts, smokestacks and electricity substations gave way to an ebony-domed Orthodox cathedral. Black-garbed priests, with angular headwear and trapezoid beards, congregated on the steps like soldiers in some dwarf army. In the park along the river, catkins bobbled the branches. Old gentlemen strolled by in long tan coats, hands clasped behind their backs, followed by respectful envoys of peaceable stray dogs.
My first Romanian Couch Surfing hosts arrived in their own time. Paul was a blond-bearded, loose-limbed man slouching along in baggy green trousers, while his girlfriend Alexandra was dark, petite and precise of movement. They were representative, they said, of two sides of Romania: he was from the west, where people were known for being lazy and relaxed, while she was from the Black Sea coast, where people were busy and efficient. ‘You want some wine? You want to smoke a joint?’ were Paul’s first questions to me, as if emphasising his regional stereotype. So we sat beside the river, drinking homemade red wine and smoking local grass, and then repaired to their regular bar for more of the same.
The river was the Mureş, which flowed into Hungary to become the Maros, which I had walked and camped beside for much of the previous week. ‘We like that it goes in that direction. It takes all the rubbish into Hungary,’ said Alexandra, only half-jokingly. Even though they were liberal and young, anti-Hungarian sentiment surfaced frequently. ‘They refuse to learn Romanian. Fucking bastards!’ she laughed, a perfect echo of what I’d heard in Slovakia. ‘We don’t hate them all, of course. We have Hungarian friends. But as a culture, they still see themselves as an imperial power. They still think Transylvania is theirs, even though it’s in the middle of our country. They can’t let it go.’
Up until then, I hadn’t really thought of Hungary in terms of a former empire; Hungarians saw themselves, if anything, as victims of other empires, first Austria in the west and then the USSR in the east. But for Romanians, Hungary itself was the historical tyrant. Once again, my preconceptions spun around in the air and fluttered down to land in different places.
Romania was the only country in Europe where the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 turned bloody – over a thousand people died in the uprising and its aftermath – and Arad was the second city to rise against the regime. Paul had been four years old, and remembered the rattle of guns in the streets, people heaping portraits of Ceauşescu onto bonfires. ‘Every book printed back then had his picture on the first page, so there was plenty to burn. It was a big, angry party.’
Like every other Romanian I met, they were cynical about the democracy the revolution had delivered. The current president had dubious links with the Securitate, Ceauşescu’s infamous secret police, and the political class was largely comprised of ex-Communists. Paul talked nostalgically about the 1990s, the cowboy years, when everything was up for grabs: ‘The ’90s were better than today. Life was more free. Gangs beat you up in the street, but things were easier.’
‘Gangs beat you up in the street, but things were easier?’
‘There was an openness, a sense that we could do anything. Now it’s all been closed again. Under Communism we had money, but there was nothing to buy. Now we have everything to buy, but we have no money.’
I’d planned on leaving the next day, but was easily discouraged. We went back to the river, drank more wine, smoked more grass and returned to the bar. An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of hedonistic friends came and went, bearing jugs of homemade booze. The same thing happened the following day, and after that I began to lose track. I sank into an indolent life of mild intoxication and heavy conversation; my time in Arad was as leisurely as Paddy’s country-house sojourns, only with more marijuana and fewer domestic servants. There was a subtle but significant shift in the language of hospitality: the question had changed from ‘When do you have to leave?’ to ‘How long can you stay?’ ‘Two more days? A week? Why hurry? We’re having a picnic by the river tomorrow, we’re meeting friends on Friday night, someone’s having a party. Maybe we can borrow a car and drive to the mountains…’
On one of these long, loose afternoons we built a fire by the Mureş, upriver from a Roma family camped with dogs and horses. A feast was prepared of pork and slănină, cured fat melted on willow switches over the flames and dripped on bread, a Romanian version of marshmallows. The țuică-fuelled conversation turned to the EU, which Paul, Alexandra and their friends regarded with deep misgiving. This was a notable difference from Hungary, where left-leaning people I’d met generally saw the EU as a counterbalance to nationalism, but it was rooted in pride in Romania’s peasant culture. These young, modern, urban people were intensely proud of the fact that country dwellers still raised their own crops, ploughed with horses, made their own wine, butchered their own pigs, produced their own cheese, and retained some knowledge of how to harvest traditional medicines from the forest; this culture was threatened by EU regulation and the free-market ideology espoused by their government.
‘Every year on St Ignatius Day, each family sacrifices their own pig,’ said Paul, his face lit up by the flames. ‘It brings everyone together, and every bit of the animal is used: the meat, the blood, the bone. We make slănină out of the fat. It feeds the family all winter. Now people in Brussels are saying these pigs should be sent to an abattoir, where they can be killed by electricity. What’s the point of that? Is it better for the pig? And the peasants must pasteurise their milk, buy a licence to sell it to their neighbours, they won’t be allowed to sell țuică from the cherry tree in their own garden. They want to turn us into Western Europe.’
‘Our government is embarrassed by the fact we still have peasants here,’ said Alexandra. ‘They think it’s backward, primitive. They’re trying to force peasants off the land so foreign multinationals like Monsanto can grow modified crops here. No capitalist government wants its people to be self-sufficient – self-sufficient people don’t go shopping. They are trying to make us dependent, to take away our freedom, so we can be controlled.’
This appreciation for wildness and tradition cropped up again and again over the next few weeks. It was a kind of hippy nationalism that dovetailed with something else that emerged as the fire burnt low: a mystical admiration for the ancient Dacians. ‘The Dacians were free people, a highly advanced civilisation. Look at the beauty of our country – we have mountains, rivers, forests, we are rich in salt and gold. It was paradise here. The Romans invaded, destroyed the culture, destroyed the language, stole our resources. Now the EU wants to do the same. It’s a new Roman Empire.’ These words resonated with something I’d heard before. It took me a moment to work out what, and then I remembered Harry, the broken-toothed drunk I’d met beside the Rhine, babbling about the freedom of Germanic tribes against imperial oppression. The sentiment was identical. Both versions of history were wildly over-romanticised, but accuracy wasn’t the point. This mythologised affinity with suppressed ancient cultures spoke of a similar yearning for a long-lost age of greater freedoms, unbounded by rules, that bubbled under Europe’s surface like a buried river.
On my last day in Arad, Paul got hold of a car for a long-planned trip to the mountains. His objective was an Orthodox church, to stock up on the mineral water that flowed from a nearby spring; he spoke of this water as being so pure it was almost miraculous. As I was helping them fill the bottles, I became aware of a rattling rhythm sounding from somewhere above – at first I thought it was a woodpecker – a complicated paradiddle punctuated at intervals by the clang of a bell. A black-robed priest was drumming on a suspended plank with a pair of wooden sticks; this was the toacă, played every day from now until Easter. We sat and listened, sipping the sweet, achingly cold spring water, as the rhythm grew in speed and complexity, culminating in a frenzy of tapping before rather bathetically fading away.
That was my call to move. The next day was damp and grey, but I was set on departure. Hymns drifted down the streets as I headed back towards the Mureş. It was Easter Sunday, for Catholics at least – referred to rather dismissively as ‘the Hungarian Easter’ – the Orthodox version wouldn’t take place for another week. I passed the charred remains of our fire, and when I looked back Arad was only a jumble of steeples and power lines on the horizon. The river wound scrappily east and south, its banks occasionally mounded with trash, overhung with blossoming trees that looked like frozen explosions. I met no one that day. It felt good to have escaped the city.
The E68 hummed to the north, and beyond it surged a procession of hills that marked the beginning of the Mureş Valley; I considered climbing up to camp, but a week of indulgences had left me lethargic. Instead I pitched my tent by the river, and woke at dawn to see the grumpy face of a beaver scowling from the shallows. After kicking off downstream it gave a final intolerant glare and disappeared underwater, slapping its paddle tail to warn other beavers that an Englishman was camping there.
As the valley rose around me, I had the sense of being enfolded in a wave of green. Pale blossom spattered the slopes, the trees throbbed with new leaves, and vineyards lightened the darker green of the hillsides. I was in an excellent mood: the piles of garbage and discarded plastic bottles only enhanced the prettiness of everything around them. By noon I had reached the Franciscan monastery of Maria Radna, where Paddy had played skittles and conversed in Latin with a monk called Brother Peter.
Today there were no brothers in sight. The basilica had seen better days. Wooden ribs protruded from one of its twin steeples, and torn plastic sheeting fluttered in the wind. The statues of two battered saints, Francis and John Nepomuk, flanked the steps exhaustedly as if recovering from a bruising wrestling bout. I was here to meet someone called Ileana, who had contacted me several weeks before in a rather mysterious fashion: the email had simply said she was researching abandoned country houses and wanted to help me locate the places where Paddy had stayed. Once again, I was aware of the rhizomatic network of fans spreading across the continent, popping up when least expected. Nevertheless, there was something slightly different about Ileana’s message. She was driving from Bucharest, a journey of six or seven hours, and our meeting was clearly of unusual importance to her.
I had several hours to wait, and spent much of this time studying the votive paintings inside: hand-painted offerings of thanks for deliverance from various disasters. They were naïve, beautiful paintings, charting a folk history of everyday catastrophes: housewives being consumed by flames from gas stoves, a builder plunging Icarus-like from a crane on a construction site, and one, unintentionally humorous, of someone getting stuck head-first in a cement mixer. In every scene, the Virgin Mary regarded these events with concern, but never appeared to be in a hurry to physically step in. The faces of the crushed, the mauled, the bleeding and the burning showed the same gloomy acceptance, impassive in their suffering.
Ileana was younger than I’d expected, a slight girl in her mid-twenties. We sat on the steps outside the church in the afternoon sunshine.
‘There is something I didn’t tell you,’ she said. ‘I am the great-granddaughter of Count Jenö Teleki.’
‘A tall, spreading, easy-going middle-aged man, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a remarkably intelligent, slightly ugly and very amusing face … he had all the instincts of a polymath: everything aroused his curiosity and sent him unwieldily clambering up the library steps. He delighted in gossip and comic stories, and he had a passion for limericks, the racier the better.’ That was Paddy’s description of the count, with whom he had stayed blissful weeks as a guest in Kápolnás – now Câpâlnaş – thirty miles east along the valley. A scholarly, cultured and generous man, historian and butterfly collector, his speech inflected with Scottish from his upbringing by a Highland nanny, the kindly figure of Teleki represented the best of the privileged culture that the war, and Communism, had torn apart.
The story of Ileana’s family was a permutation on a narrative that was familiar by now. Their estate was nationalised in 1948, and they were preparing to flee when they were betrayed by a former servant, arrested and imprisoned. Their property was confiscated. ‘Recently we obtained an inventory of the things taken from the house. It was obvious no one had any idea what they were dealing with. Very valuable items were marked as “ring”, “piano”, “painting”, “chair”. We asked the National Bank what happened to it all. They said it was sold to help pay off the external debt in the 1980s.’
Throughout the Communist era, the remaining members of the family were disgraced and humiliated. After being tortured in jail, Jenö’s son Eugen was given a menial job in a railway station and became an alcoholic. When people used to jeer at him, asleep in the waiting room, he would say: ‘Let me be. This is how the last Count Teleki wishes to die.’
Ileana had grown up knowing nothing of this. Her grandmother had kept it secret, knowing the Teleki name was a black mark against the family. But after Ceauşescu’s televised execution in 1989 and the fall of Communism, they pieced the story together. Ileana’s father had won back the house – used for decades as a psychiatric hospital – in a legal case, but as they had no idea what to do with such a property, they continued renting it to the state.
‘Have you ever slept in an asylum before?’ she asked. ‘There’s a room we can use. You can stay as long as you like.’
But first, she wanted to show me other broken houses in the valley: the continuation of the trail of ruins I had followed since Štrkovec. In nearby Odvoş – formerly Otvos – we broke in through a shattered door to explore the shell of the house where Paddy had stayed with Mr v. Konopy, a learned wheat-breeding enthusiast. Dust motes swooshed as we passed through the rooms. Traces of silver-patterned wallpaper still gleamed on the walls. In the family chapel the ceiling had collapsed in a downward sneeze of straw, and a crack running down the wall bisected the painted face of Christ. Since Ileana had last been there, the pews had been stolen.
‘This vandalism was deliberate,’ she said. ‘The library at Căpâlnaş contained communications with the Vatican, illuminated manuscripts written on calfskin. When the house was nationalised the peasants didn’t know what to do with them, so they turned these manuscripts into socks to line their moccasins.’
We went next to the kastély at Bulci, where Paddy had attended a party, rubbing shoulders with monocled Francophiles and ladies in gorgeous gowns. Now the house was Sleeping Beauty’s castle: weeds prised through the broken tiles of what might once have been a breakfast terrace, shutters hung at crazy angles from boarded-up windows, and paint flaked from the doors like tiger bread. Since Ileana’s last visit, the portico had collapsed. I tried to imagine the windows lit up, the hallways humming with life. Now there were dogs sleeping in the ruins and the only sound was birdsong.
My ruin guide left me there, to camp beside the river while she drove on; we arranged to meet at her asylum the next afternoon. I pitched my tent beneath a white willow on the bank of the Mureş, and woke to a field of frost. The sky was the colour of a smashed blood orange. On Bulci’s overgrown lawn, a man was quietly cutting grass for his animals with a sickle.
For most of the day I followed the river, struggling through jungled woods and tripping over vines. The river had widened since Radna, here and there narrowing into bottlenecks or forking to enclose wooded islands. ‘Everything in these reedy windings was inert and hushed under a sleepy spell of growth and untroubled plenty,’ wrote Paddy, but now much of the land had grown wild. As I neared my destination I fought through a stubble of charred stalks from the burning of the winter grass, pushing my way through scorched willow that whipped across my face and arms, giving me charcoal stripes. Coated in ash and sweat, I came to Căpâlnaş looking like I’d escaped from a fire.
‘I loped exhausted through long shadows to the kastély at Kápolnás. Double flights of steps mounted to a balustraded terrace, where people were sitting out in the cool moment before sun set; there were glimpses through french windows of lighted rooms beyond.’ If I squinted it was almost the same, though the people on the terrace wore dressing gowns rather than evening wear. Dogs slumbered in the sun, and a stocky, powerful-looking man was strolling in the garden. He was wearing what looked like a walkie-talkie, and from his authoritative bearing I took him for an attendant. It was only after he’d seized my hand, linked arms and marched me to the house that I realised he was one of the patients; the walkie-talkie was actually a blaring radio. Weirdly, he looked a lot like Jack Nicholson.
‘Ion,’ he introduced himself. ‘Like the singer, Elton Ion.’
‘Nicholas,’ I said.
‘Sarkozy?’ he cried, then slapped himself on the forehead and erupted with laughter. ‘Vive la France!’ Then he seized me by the head, a slightly alarming turn of events, and landed two bristly kisses on my cheeks.
A curious circle of patients gathered round, shaking hands and smiling: men and women, old and young, in plastic slippers and woolly hats, smoking furiously. One young man with a shaved head and white socks pulled up to his knees approached me with an expression of rapture. Ion impatiently shooed him away, circling his finger in the air and giving me a meaningful look.
‘Crazy,’ he explained.
Double doors of polished wood led to a dim, tiled hallway. A marble staircase laid with dirty rugs climbed to the upper floor, where an ornate gallery looked down on the glass-panelled ceiling of the room below: once the famous library, from which the moccasin-socks were made, now a recreation room scattered with stained sofas. The dining room was a dormitory, where daylight from the French windows spilled onto hospital beds piled with slumbering forms, disordered heaps of pyjamas and legs, men in various stages of exhaustion or depression. The rest of the house was a mildewed warren of corridors and mysterious halfclosed doors, lit by flickering chandeliers, where patients shuffled in semi-darkness in a fug of tobacco. Women in shawls scowled around door frames. The upstairs bathroom was occupied by aggressive stray dogs. Unlike Štrkovec or Mocrea there was nothing sanitised here: this hospital looked more like the set of a low-budget horror film.
Ileana showed me to the room set aside for her family’s visits: three hospital beds and a ceramic stove the colour of a glazed pie dish. She showed me family photographs – Count Teleki staring owlishly through round spectacles, with a spotted bow tie and a toothbrush moustache, Eugen glaring at the camera in traditional costume – and took me on a tour of the estate: the overgrown gardens reverted to nature, the half-collapsed stables and outhouses, the attic, the roof, the labyrinthine cellars.
As evening wore on, I started to feel curiously at home. Under the surface creepiness was a gentle, even tender sense, as if the house and the gardens around it were, like the patients themselves, deep in convalescence. We visited Teleki’s grave in the woods; he had died during the war, before the estate was nationalised, and his resting place was surrounded by lichened columns and vaulted with trees like a chlorophyll cathedral. In Communist days the family was forbidden from setting foot here, so they couldn’t lay flowers on his grave. They used to throw them over the wall; it was the closest they could get.
As her great-grandfather had done with Paddy, Ileana drove me down the valley to Hunedoara the next morning, on the now traffic-snarled E68, to visit the famous castle. This was the stronghold of Ioan Hunyadi, a medieval ruler with the rare distinction of being a hero to both Romanians and Hungarians, who had defended these lands against Ottoman attack. She told me the legend of the well in the courtyard, dug for fifteen years by three Turkish prisoners on the promise of freedom when it was done. Hunyadi’s widow later broke the promise and ordered them put to death. The story said they’d left a message carved at the bottom of the well: ‘apă ai, inimă n-ai’, ‘you have water, but you have no soul’.
From Hunedoara we ventured on, winding through the hills to the Hţeg Valley to see the church at Densuş, constructed on a Dacian place of worship with pillars made of Roman tombstones; thousands of years of history layered into an edifice that resembled a collapsing cake. The eyes of the saints on the icons had been cut away; powerful charms in witchcraft, Ileana said. She told me local vampire stories – ‘not like Dracula, you know, more like energy-sucking beings’ – tales of female forest spirits that people went blind if they saw, went deaf if they heard, went dumb if they talked to. Perhaps there was something of Teleki in her passion for these tales. To the south lay snowcapped mountains, forming a seemingly impassable barrier to whatever lay beyond. This was the massif of Retezat, one of the highest and wildest parts of the ‘wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds’ Paddy had set out to find, and my desire to walk through those peaks was overwhelming. It was a bit like falling in love: a breathlessness and a sense of dizzy possibility, accompanied by an immediate fear of somehow losing my chance. It affected me like a chemical shift. But for now I had to turn my back: following Paddy’s trail, my route lay north and east in a loop through Transylvania. In a month, I would return this way.
Back at Căpâlnaş we shared a bottle of wine on our hospital beds. The night was cold, so we summoned someone to light the stove in our room. ‘Excuse me, one fire!’ the assistant yelled, charging through the bedroom with a flaming log balanced on a shovel; as soon as he thrust it into the stove the room filled with smoke, flowing through cracks in the tiles and pouring into the corridor, where patients gathered anxiously, prepared to evacuate. Luckily, there were no smoke detectors in the hospital.
Dogs sang in the garden and patients griped in the corridors. The lights intermittently brightened and dimmed as if controlled by an unseen pulse from the overworked heart of the building. The house itself, I had come to see, was the victim of a trauma; it seemed an appropriate sanctuary for people who, in ways I’d never know, had been through traumas of their own. It was like the special-needs school in Ineu, built to deal with the damage caused by the failed orphanage system: traumatised children housed in the ruins of a traumatised culture. Căpâlnaş, like its current inhabitants, was in recovery from history, refugees from the modern world. Ileana repeated something Ion had said, when she’d told him of her family’s plans to renovate the house.
‘Why renovate?’ he’d replied. ‘Objects, like people, get morally damaged.’
I left on a grey, overcast morning, the birds singing as if before rain. Ion shook my hand and planted two last tobacco-smelling kisses on my face. He was standing at the gate to say goodbye, hand raised in salute.
‘Long live the Kingdom of Great Britain!’ he roared as I went by. Then greenery closed over the house, and Căpâlnaş was gone.
The inward migration of storks had begun. Storks were a recurring motif in Paddy’s journey, and I was delighted to see their return; cumbersome and awkward birds, all joints and pivots, hinges and elbows, settling in giant nests on telephone poles and rooftops. The sound they made was extraordinary, less a song than a knocking together of pebbles in the throat. I followed an unmetalled road on the south side of the Mureş, and was gobbled at by turkeys in the villages and rushed by gangs of geese that lowered their heads to attack, hissing like evil lizards.
There was one final stop on my tour of ruination. In the hills above Gurasada I climbed through a broken window into the kastély where Paddy had spent his longest, and happiest, country-house sojourn, befriending an ex-hussar called István and falling in love with a married woman, with whom he embarked on a love affair in a grand loop through Transylvania. This house was smaller than the others, and I wasn’t sure I’d found the right place until I recognised the octagonal pillars, the ochre walls of the arcade, the fanlight of green and purple glass, amazingly still intact.
Nothing stirred inside but dust. The rooms were empty apart from piles of musty agricultural pamphlets. In lieu of the ‘fine portrait of an ambassadorial ancestor’, the centre-fold of a porn magazine was pasted to the wall.
I’d considered sleeping the night inside, but there was nothing to stay for. I’d had my fill of ruins. So I spilled my last drop of țuică on the steps and headed to the woods. Acorns crunched under my boots. As I was putting up my tent, I heard the first spring cuckoo.
I’d got myself on the wrong side of the river. The next day’s walk was dominated by the E68, the so-called ‘international road’ on which half the trucks of Europe seemed to be racing for the border. There wasn’t much option but to follow, squeezed precariously into the kerb, sometimes having to leap aside when traffic careened too close. Shepherds in conical felt hats tended flocks of longhaired sheep either side of this zooming stream, as if refusing to notice. The valley narrowed into steep hills and widened out again, and I followed the river past a cluster of cooling towers huffing water vapour. This was the industrial overture to the city of Deva.
I wasn’t much in the mood for cities and my time here was fleeting. I stayed with a young mixed couple: he was Romanian and she was Hungarian, or more properly a Csango, who, she explained, were descendants of Szeklers, a separate Magyar-speaking tribe that had guarded the eastern frontier. These bewildering subcategories were a sign that Transylvania was close, with its patchwork of ethnic groups. The idea was slightly unreal. Thanks to the Dracula industry, probably nowhere else in Europe occupies the same hinterland between fact and imagination, and the proximity of that magic-sounding region – the loss of which drove Hungarians into such masochistic grief – urged me swiftly on. I left Deva early the next morning, taking a shortcut through a riverside slum towards open fields.
The price I paid for my impatience was nearly rabies. A series of huts, roofed with plastic, abutted fields scattered with waste like a parody of healthy crops. The reason for the frequency of rubbish soon became clear: these hovels lay in the shadow of the dump, a broken mountain of trash that soared from the earth, spilling its innards, layer upon layer of compacted garbage like an archaeological dig of twenty-first-century culture. The wind changed direction and the smell of it hit me, a stench so thick it filled my skin. As I passed its perimeter, there were movements within. Scrawny dogs emerged ghoulishly from nests of rotting mattresses, seeping out from behind broken fridges, watching me with mustard-yellow eyes. They were the same colour as the rubbish, perfectly camouflaged.
These hyena-like hounds were the worst I’d yet encountered. Sensing that something bad was coming, I stopped to fumble for my walking poles, telescoped up and strapped to my rucksack since I’d stopped using them weeks before. Seeing me clumsily arm myself, the dogs launched into attack. I’d just managed to extend one pole before the pack came foaming in, rushing me from the left and right; I was forced constantly to dodge and wheel, striking out first in one direction then lashing the other way, while more and more dogs rushed from the dump, outraged by my defiance.
A rangy Roma man was leaning on an axe nearby. He had paused from chopping wood to watch as I hopped and swung towards him, his expression as impassive as the Virgin Mary’s in the votive paintings at Radna. I had the impression it was some kind of trial: that only once I’d fought my way through the gauntlet of dogs, proving my worth in some way, would he deign to help me. And so it seemed: when, at last, I managed to reach his little hut, he shouted something that made the dogs swiftly draw away. Then he fanned cigarettes in offering.
My nerves were rattled. I didn’t stop walking until the town of Simeria, by which time it was pouring with rain; the downpour was a deliverance, driving the dogs under shelter. I crossed the bridge and turned east under a mesa-like rock to where the land was greener, cleaner. Gradually the rain eased off. The cloying stench of garbage was replaced by the sweetness of blossom.
‘Drum bun,’ called an old woman in the village of Bobâlna. She wore a red and gold shawl, and her back was so hunched her upper body was parallel to the ground. The words meant ‘good road’, and it started to become one. To the north the land rose into rocky outcrops snarled with hawthorns, while to the south, beyond the river, across a sweep of agricultural land, the furrowed wall of the Carpathians glowered beneath a belt of clouds. The houses grew squatter, their stone walls thicker, giving an impression of greater permanence.
The next village was precisely divided between Roma and non-Roma neighbourhoods. First came a commotion of hooves and a cartload of children clattered past, pursued by a pack of hounds; wild boys zoomed around on motorbikes, naked infants hunted in the river for useful scraps along the banks, washing flapped between cob-walled houses, and stout old ladies bellowed conversationally through windows. Then I crossed an invisible border and the streets were deserted, the houses neatly fenced and gated. After that lay empty fields again.
With a loaf of bread and a lump of sheep’s cheese, I branched at last off the road and hiked a steep track into the hills, through terraces and pastures, until the tree line. I hadn’t stopped walking for eleven hours and the effort almost did me in. I sprawled shirtless on the grass as a stain of clouds spread from the south, between me and the mountains. Thunder thudded distantly, like a car door being slammed. Lightning flooded the valley and dark rain streaked the land, but the sky above me was clear enough to see the first stars. I worried briefly about bears, and then forgot about them. The storm rolled on, and a cuckoo sang like a bird without any other ideas.
I woke to the patter of rain and the tolling of church bells. The valley was obscured behind gauzy cloud, sunk in a yellowish twilight. The bells got louder as I descended. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday.
‘Hristos a înviat.’
‘Adevărat a înviat.’
My hosts in Deva had taught me the exchange: ‘Christ is risen.’ ‘Truly he is risen.’ I tried it out on the people I met, but there were few abroad. The birds were silent under the rain, the stray dogs peering sadly from under dripping bushes. I wandered in a muted landscape with the strange sensation that I was no more than a dream the land was having.
In the afternoon the dirt road ended and became tarmac. The tarmac summoned, as if by dull magic, the inevitable sprawl of cement that heralded a city: Alba Iulia, the seat of Transylvania’s Roman Catholic church. Past the cathedral lay a redbrick fortress, a brute of a structure that expanded, the more angles I viewed it from, to a size that appeared completely impossible. Shaped like a seven-pointed star, it was a vaster relation of the one I’d seen in Arad, an outpost of Hapsburg military might to defend against the Ottomans. Its double layer of defensive walls meant that assailants could be cannonballed from two separate angles in a deadly bowling alley. It was like a psychopathic growth, a military super-organism, and given the effort that had gone into making it, it must have been almost a disappointment the Ottomans never came.
A triumphal archway rose whitely above this death machine, from which the two-headed Hapsburg eagle glared defiantly southwards. The monument was carved with reliefs of horses and billowing cannon smoke, topped by kneeling Turkish prisoners, hands bound behind their backs.
‘With the erosion from the rain, the sculptor who renovated the statues couldn’t work out what the Turks were clutching behind their backs. They each seemed to be holding two objects, but he couldn’t tell what they were. In the end, he worked it out. It was their testicles.’
This grisly history was told to me by Vali, a colleague of Ileana’s, whom she had phoned to inform of my arrival. His parents lived beside one of the bastions, and after a fortress tour he led me to their house. His mother and father were white haired, red faced and blue eyed, and they fed me pork wrapped in cabbage leaves washed down with thick, greenish wine that fizzed on the tongue like sherbet. They put me up in a spare room cluttered with unusual artefacts – a bronze bust cast by Vali’s brother, a replica tall ship built by his father, his mother’s collection of wooden folk masks – and wouldn’t hear of me leaving so soon: I must stay at least one more day.
The family had duties in the morning visiting friends in another town. They loaded me up with offerings of cold lamb and nettle stew and deposited me at their local church, where an Easter Monday feast was about to begin. Under the wooden witch-hat steeple, a trestle table was heaped with food. A handful of people were decked out in traditional Romanian costume – pleated skirts and wide white trousers, waistcoats embroidered in black and gold – and the rest were wearing clothes that came straight from the 1950s, with fur collars, elegant hats and kidskin gloves. The priest said a prayer, and dramatically flung up his hands to commence; elderly women elbowed past to shovel cakes onto their plates and children converged on a bowl of dyed eggs – reddened with onion juice and painted with delicate silver flowers – to commence a game like conkers, smashing two eggs together until the first shell broke.
‘Hristos a înviat.’
‘Adevărat a înviat.’
I broke eggs with the priest, who spoke good English. He told me his church was located here – outside the fortress walls – because in the past Romanians weren’t allowed to build within the city; unlike Hungarians, Szeklers or Saxons, they were not a recognised ‘estate’ of the province of Transylvania. For much of their history, Romanians had been second-class citizens here.
As my predecessor had been, I was passed from one host to the next: Vali’s family arranged for me to stay with friends in the next town. ‘But you should probably take that off,’ Vali advised as I left. He was pointing to a badge someone had given me at the feast, depicting Avram Iancu, a Romanian hero who had rebelled against Austro-Hungarian rule in 1848. ‘Our friends in Aiud are a mixed couple, Romanian and Hungarian. To Romanians, Iancu is a freedom fighter. To Hungarians… well, I guess you could say a genocidal terrorist.’
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ cried a big man with a walrus moustache waiting by the angled bulk of Aiud’s Saxon church later that day. The journey had been a sodden slog, rain falling ceaselessly from morning to afternoon, and I was more thankful than ever at the prospect of shelter. Vali’s family friend was named Laszlo – ‘like Victor Laszlo, from Casablanca’ – and the Magyar sz gave it away: he was the Hungarian half of the couple. I made sure my genocidal terrorist badge was out of sight. Back at his house we smashed eggs together and drank toasts in various languages: ‘noroc’, ‘egészségedre’, ‘cheers’, to which he added, a bit incorrectly, ‘God help us!’
I woke in grey submarine light, saw water sliding down the window, and groaned. I was getting tired of rain, tired of boots that never quite dried, tired of my waterproof coat that was no longer waterproof. The accumulative exhaustions of walking had mounted over the past few days: my body ached with a general weariness of the flesh and I longed for somewhere to rest. Twenty miles north lay the city of Turda – I had another invitation there – but a combination of the weather and my overall fatigue made that day’s journey exceptionally depleting; from the moment I left Victor’s house, everything went badly.
An early decision to escape the thundering E81 led me into a line of hills that looked like a pleasant route from below, but became an obstacle course of deep mud, thorns, barbed-wire fences and unexpected drops, more a fight than a walk, ascending and descending through groves of impenetrable blackthorn that snagged my clothes and pulled me back, ripped the hat off my head, scoring all unprotected skin with bloody scratches. On the highway below vehicles guzzled past in seconds, speeding towards my destination, while I had to struggle for half an hour to round a single hill. I cursed every car I wasn’t in. It was one of those days when I was struck by the sheer futility of what I was attempting. Only my fury at motorised transport – fury at the fact it even existed – prevented me from giving up and sticking out my thumb.
Bullying my way through one entanglement I came upon a boy of around seventeen, swathed in a dripping leather cloak with plastic roped around his legs, minding a herd of tender-eyed brown cows. He was so astonished to see me that he couldn’t speak. As I fumbled for my map, thinking this was the best explanation, his eyes flicked nervously from my face to my hands, as if half expecting me to produce some kind of weapon. I was conscious of the long-handled axe hanging at his side.
The map didn’t do much good. The boy continued staring in scarcely concealed horror, so I wished him bună ziua, good day, and continued up the hill. At once I became ensnared in a thicket of thorns that held me like an absurd fly in a spiked, dripping web. More furious than ever, I thrashed and tore until I was free, knowing I looked ridiculous, and when I glanced back he was gone; whether home or to fetch reinforcements, I didn’t know.
The rain hammered down with renewed urgency as I approached the final hill before the descent to Turda. Sheep were scattered wetly about and sheepdogs watched from a distant slope, but they seemed safely far away, and I was too weary to make a precautionary detour. Halfway up the hill, I was stopped by the sound of baying; I’d infringed whatever perimeter was considered acceptable, and a cavalcade of dogs was pouring down the far side of the valley, closing the distance between us with unreal speed. The sight had a dreamlike quality and I could almost have stayed to watch, but survival instincts kicked in: these weren’t scrawny garbage-dogs like the ones outside Deva, but hounds bred to bring down wolves. I abandoned all thoughts of appeasement and started running. The dreaminess became nightmarish: my feet were clumsy with exhaustion and, dragged back by the weight of my bag, slipping and sliding on wet grass, I hauled myself up a hill that may as well have been a ladder, hand over foot, in open flight, while the dogs gained the bottom of the valley and rushed unchecked up the slope. I reached the top, found myself on tarmac and was almost mown down by a truck; luckily, my pursuers accepted the road as the limit of their range, and contented themselves with frenzied barking until I was out of sight.
A new landscape opened up. The ground fell away towards cloud-capped mountains, below which was the cleft of the white-rocked Turda Gorge. On the valley floor, I could see the clutter of the city.
Even now, Turda gave itself to me begrudgingly. Sticky agricultural mud stretched either side of the highway, so I followed a concrete drainage canal through a waste of industrial parks, crisscrossed by motorway bridges, into a derelict factory zone where looming gantries sloughed their forms in flakes of concrete. When at last I gained the outskirts my welcome was a rock, hurled by a couple of bored teenagers, which narrowly missed my head and hit the metal gate behind me, the final cymbal clash to the mocking drum roll of the day. I stumbled on until, ten minutes later, I halted beneath the statue of a long-coated man called Dr Ioan Rţiu.
It was a welcome sight. Ioan Rţiu – signatory of the 1892 Transylvanian Memorandum, which demanded equality for Romanians in the province – was a forebear of Ion Rţiu, an eminent politician who had opposed Ceauşescu’s regime, himself the father of Indrei Rţiu, the man whose hospitality I was shortly to enjoy. The route that had led me here was far more circuitous than that day’s dog-plagued battle through rain: in a ruin bar back in Budapest I’d met Luke and Camilla, a young English couple on the verge of moving to Romania. They had put me in touch with Indrei, who said I could stay as long as I liked in a room set aside for visiting writers. It seemed almost too good to believe.
The Rţiu Centre for Democracy lay just across the square. Depleted in body, depleted in brain, I found myself being led through a courtyard into a homely abode: a glimpse of a winding staircase and a reading room filled with grey afternoon light, antlers mounted on the wall, sofas and armchairs arranged around a fire. Indrei was a late-middle-aged man with heavily lidded eyes, who resembled a kind and intelligent turtle. ‘Familiar faces,’ he said, pointing towards the kitchen. I couldn’t imagine what he meant until a pretty, smiling girl emerged bearing a mug of Earl Grey. It was Camilla, from Budapest. Her boyfriend Luke was having a nap upstairs.
My relief at finding myself in this haven was too much to contain. Rain started pouring again outside. Peacocks mewled in the flowerbeds. I lay in an enormous hot bath and started, for some reason, to cry.
Indrei was leaving shortly to catch a train to Bucharest, so I only had the privilege of his company for a few hours. Fortunately he was a man capable of packing a lot into a short space of time; in a beguilingly tranquil voice he moved swiftly and precisely from one subject to the next, weaving a tapestry of important information. He told the story of his father Ion, who had started his career as a civil servant, fleeing to England when Romania – threatened with imminent Soviet invasion – allied itself with the Nazis in 1940. He remained exiled in London after the Communists came to power, opposing the regime so vocally he was placed on a Securitate death list; framed photographs of him posed with Richard Nixon and Pope John Paul II hinted at his diplomatic standing. After Ceauşescu’s death he returned to Romania, made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency, served in the Chamber of Deputies and founded a newspaper. When he died a decade later, his funeral in Turda was attended by ten thousand people.
Indrei himself had been brought up in Cambridge – he was as much English as Romanian – and the Rţiu Centre for Democracy was, in a sense, a continuation of his father’s work. Besides giving shelter to visiting researchers, scholars and the occasional English tramp, the centre existed to promote a greater understanding of democracy, and was a hub for everything from environmental to anti-human trafficking campaigns. The totalitarian system Ion Rţiu opposed was gone, but corruption was entrenched at every level of public life. ‘Until very recently, Turda’s reputation was particularly bad. I didn’t realise quite how bad until the chief of police was arrested for keeping girls imprisoned in a locked room in his house.’ Between recounting these stories and packing for his Bucharest trip, he was conducting a rapid discussion with an assistant about the visa complications of a Bahraini pro-democracy activist they were trying to bring into the country. By the time he left, elegantly attired – his trilby hat and battered suitcase gave him the look of a benevolent spy – I felt as if I’d received several educations.
My fellow strays Luke and Camilla had the room next to mine. They were travelling around Romania looking for a place to settle, to find a crumbling cottage to restore with traditional building techniques. The longer I spent in Transylvania, the more I realised it was full of romantic English types seeking a cheaper, simpler life, though normally the demographic was older and better heeled. This bewildered me at first, but understanding came one day when I saw a landscape that reminded me of rolling hills in Somerset; rather than the crags and brooding pine forests I’d expected, Transylvania resembled nothing so much as an idealised English shire. With its fields and woodlands, meadows and mountains, its local peasant farmers producing organic, sustainable food, it offered a cross between a back-to-the-land, eco-friendly lifestyle and a return to a rustic idyll, a half-mythologised identity that England had lost. This, I suspected, might have been why Paddy had loved it so much.
There was nothing half-mythologised about Turda. Outside the historical centre – which, as Paddy said, was oddly reminiscent of a Devon market town – post- industrial dereliction sprawled into the valley, horses and carts rattling down potholed roads past abandoned factories, a potent image of the failure of Ceauşescu’s modernising vision. It was a slightly depressed and often ugly Romanian city – a very normal Romanian city – and I felt happy there: my week in Turda was a time of much-needed restoration. Madly bearded, with a stench that had worked itself into my pores, feet so sore they felt like they’d been pounded with a tenderiser, I revelled in the luxury of a soft bed, daily baths, and the other pleasures of sedentary life. With Luke and Camilla I wandered the streets, visited the famous salt mine and drank țuică in the rain, and when they left on the third day I found myself in the house alone, a guest without a host.
I washed my clothes for the first time in weeks, and got to work on rents and tears with a sewing kit. Paddy said that Turda was a town of cobblers and I hoped that was still the case: my boots were leaking worse than ever and worrying cracks were starting to appear in the soles. The thought of replacing them was anathema – we’d been through so much together they’d taken on an almost talismanic quality – so I sought the help of Radu, Indrei’s garrulous assistant, who located a cobbler’s shop halfway up a tower block. When I picked the boots up two days later they were restitched with twine, leather tongues sewn down the seams, fiercely waxed and scrubbed. They looked reborn.
I tested their powers on a walk to the gorge, that cleft in the white rocks I’d glimpsed when I first saw Turda. An hour’s scramble over the hills brought me to the entrance-way, where the Hăşdate River crashed between monumental walls, and narrow goat tracks led to caverns skittering with bats. I branched off the path to zigzag up from the shadowed floor, squeezing between granite juts until I had gained an upper level of circling birds, wild flowers and sunlight. It was precarious enough to feel the enjoyable tremor of risk, before the inevitable disappointment of a safe descent. I stayed there a long time, listening to the wind. According to legend, the gorge was created when a Hungarian king, fleeing from pursuing Tartars, entreated God to grant him passage; the rock parted like the Red Sea.
A market came to town, and for several nights there were musicians and dancers in the square. They were dressed in embroidered waistcoats, absurd foot-tall hats of straw or crested with peacock feathers; the men high-kicked and slapped their thighs, the whirling women’s pleated skirts inflating like hot air balloons as they span. Tremulous songs were sung, overflowing with passion and pain, voices ascending and descending to the jerky backing of accordions, clarinets and trumpets.
The crowd watched placidly, barely tapping their feet. The only dancers were the town drunk making alarming lurching motions, and the town fool pirouetting in a pink skirt, his face a mask of snarling happiness. Gypsies looked on as if enjoying a good cockfight: the women in ludicrously clashing clothes with ponytails plaited in bright ribbon, ending in enormous bows that reached to the backs of their knees; the men with moustaches, gleaming teeth and hats of impressive circumference, dressed, as if in opposition to the women, uniformly in black. These were the Gábors – a staunchly traditional and relatively affluent group among the Roma – so called, Radu said, ‘because all the men are named Gábor.’
Back in Arad, Alexandra had taught me a Romanian word, dor, which couldn’t be translated. ‘It’s the feeling that an animal is tearing you into pieces, but it’s still very hopeful. Pain and hope together, like you’re going to burst.’ It described an emotion similar to the Hungarian sweet pain, where one eye might be smiling but the other is weeping. This music had something of that dor. Watching the inscrutable faces of older people in the crowd, it was impossible to know what they’d lived through: years of deprivation and paranoia in which friends informed on friends, family informed on family. Such a system of total control, of institutionalised mistrust, was something the teenagers in the crowd, in their branded clothes and stylishly tousled hair, surely couldn’t understand; or had no interest in.
I couldn’t understand it either, but Radu helped somewhat. We took a circuitous walk through town, from the Roman ruins on the hill to the glittering Gypsy palaces on Turda’s outskirts. He told me that he, like many others, had been monitored by the Securitate due to his involvement with foreigners – he wrote letters to pen pals all over the world – and when he asked to see his files after 1989 he discovered that his closest friend had informed on him for years. This was not an unusual story, and he didn’t particularly blame his friend; who knew what blackmail or extortion had been used against him? At the height of Ceauşescu’s power, it was popularly believed that one in four Romanians was a police informer.
‘Things were fine until the 1970s, but then that bloody bastard went to visit North Korea. He saw all the banners saying “Long Live Communism”, he saw the children dancing in the streets, people throwing flowers at his car. It was all stage-managed. But the bloody bastard believed it! He fell in love with it! He decided that Romania should be like that, a European North Korea. When he got back from that trip, things started to get much worse.’
Inspired by what he’d seen in one of the world’s most repressive states, Ceauşescu launched on a visionary remodelling of Romanian society, aiming to transform its peasants into modern industrial citizens. He called it ‘systematisation’, a programme of urban expansion that involved the destruction of eight thousand villages; the Hungarian and Saxon minorities were especially targeted. It was the same as I’d seen in Slovakia, where mud cottages had been replaced by high-rise flats in a generation, but carried out with even greater megalomaniacal fervour; the grand scheme for Transylvania included bulldozing castles and fortified Saxon churches, obliterating anything that hinted at the past. In Cluj-Napoca a few days later, I would see the line where the advancing tower blocks, laid out either side of boulevards designed for motorcades and military parades, stopped abruptly at the old town, a cement wave breaking. Like a fossil record, it preserved the point at which the regime fell.
‘See this building?’ Radu asked as we passed a block like a concrete anthill. ‘There used to be cottages here, cottages and gardens. But that bloody bastard decided that people couldn’t live in cottages, couldn’t grow food for themselves, because that made them self-sufficient. So he knocked them down and built flats. The flats didn’t even have kitchens. If families had kitchens they would eat privately, and maybe they would say bad things about the government, so instead they all had to eat in canteens, so their neighbours could hear what they were saying. He wanted machines, not people.’
There was something in Radu’s face that I’d seen before: something tight about the eyes that reminded me of people I’d met in the hospital at Căpâlnaş, and also the young man in the special-needs school in Ineu. It had nothing to do with craziness, nor with being angry or sad – Radu, in fact, seemed perennially joyful – but rather an impression of shock, like flesh recoiling after a blow, the memory of impact. In certain lights, history could be glimpsed as a shadow under the skin; I saw it now, underneath the brightness of his smile.
We passed Turda’s old concrete factory, closed in the 1990s. ‘It was so polluted here,’ Radu said. ‘The air was poisonous. Now the factory’s closed and the birds have come back. There’s good and bad in everything. Now we have no jobs, but we do have birds.’