Nothing in Romania is ever as it seems. No word has true meaning. No action can be judged at face value. We crossed the border at twilight. Tired recruits in dated flannel tunics, Kalashnikovs slung over shoulders, yawned at their posts. Travelers, muffled in their winter coats, whispered, huddled in the pool of light around the window that had swallowed our papers. A curtain hid the inspector’s face, but his disembodied hands shuffled passports like playing cards. A soldier ran from nowhere to nowhere else, the sharp snap of his strap on gunmetal. Voices were hushed, half heard as in half-sleep. Everyone wished to be in bed but knew they would have no bed that night.
By the side of the road stood a statue, its hand raised as if in blessing. The statue sneezed. It was a hitchhiker, a priest begging a lift. We offered him a ride. He wore a matted mane of black hair and a shaggy beard. Beyond him rose another figure, a soldier, who was hungry. “Help a starving Romanian,” he said and asked for ten dollars.
We drove through the night along the spine of the Carpathians, across the heel of the horseshoe into the steppe-lands of Moldavia. It had begun to rain heavily and the windscreen wipers packed up. I strung a shoelace from each back through the side windows. The priest and I drew the wipers by hand back and forth across the glass while Zita tried to sleep. He was going to photograph the painted churches and asked us to join him. I was happy for the guide.
“It is a long drive,” said the priest, his clear brown eyes the color of worn leather. “Perhaps you would like if I told you the story of my life. It is a happy story. It will lighten the journey.”
“Tell me.”
“If I do you must promise to tell me a joke. This is the only sadness in being a priest; people forget I am flesh and blood. I like to have a good laugh too.”
His name was Father Dinu, Romanian by birth, Hungarian by blood — a Reformed Church pastor in an Orthodox world, a foreigner in his own land.
His story began at school. In his final year a teacher had asked the class about their plans. The other students answered that they wanted to be engineers on the Danube Canal or drivers of the sleek new Bucharest Metro, but Dinu confessed, “I want to teach Latin in South America.” He should have lied. The class laughed. The dream was forbidden.
“How will you get there?” prodded the teacher.
“In a legal way, if possible.”
The teacher, a dwarf too short to see over the lectern, drew himself up to his full height. “If you were trying to get there illegally,” he warned, “we would have to tell the police.” The confession cost him both America and a place at university.
Dinu had a choice: to lie or say nothing at all. He chose silence and became a woodcutter in the mountains. For three years he lived alone without desire for human companionship. But one cold Christmas his food ran out. Heavy snow had disrupted supplies. Reluctantly he trudged down the valley to the village. He hadn’t eaten for three days or seen a human face in three months. The warm glow of candlelight enticed him to the church.
When he opened the heavy door song seemed to fill the whole valley. He joined the Communion and, kneeling at the altar starved of friendship and food, the wine and bread exploded in his mouth like a kiss. He saw for the first time the villagers and was filled with love. He saw himself and was filled with shame. His God-given gift, his life, was being wasted.
“I had thought that there was no one, that I was alone,” he said, “but I had forgotten that angels walk beside us.”
The woodcutter became a priest. His physical strength mirrored his moral conviction. His sermons drew the faithful from across the valley into his church.
“Face to face,” said Dinu, “people had forgotten how to be honest. For years they were only able to speak about the mundane — the weather or their shoe size — not what they felt or believed or doubted. Everyone was a spy, everyone was to be distrusted.” As he spoke his shoulders bent forward like a boxer prepared to fight. “In my church I taught them to speak from their hearts.”
But priests were paid by the state and supervised by a local Party Secretary upon whom they depended for the annual renewal of their state license to preach. The church hierarchy believed that collusion was the only means of survival. Dinu unsettled the precarious political balance. He was exiled to a drab industrial parish. Yet even there he was too dangerous, his honesty too provocative, and they banished him to an Orthodox village with less than a dozen believers. A police informer was his only regular parishioner. He would attend every sermon and uncross his arms only to take notes or pick his nose.
Life was difficult for the Hungarian minority: their language could not be broadcast or taught and their villages, like others in Romania, were threatened with “systemization”; their homes were destroyed and the inhabitants resettled in industrial garden cities — concrete deserts without gardens and without industry. Dinu had been in Timişoara during the previous December. There the defiance of another priest, also an ethnic Hungarian, had sparked the revolution. “The people had had enough. They had no food, no heat. For five days there was street fighting. Tanks fired on the crowd. ‘Veniti cu noi,’ they shouted to the soldiers, ‘Come with us,’ but they were shot.” Dinu thrust his hands forward, an advance of tank, leaned his body to the left, a counterstrike of demonstrators, as if fighting the battle all over again. “I saw a boy trampled to death. His mother threw a stone at a tank and the tank ran her down. It was terrible.” Eastern Europe’s bloodless revolution had claimed its first victims.
“You promised me a happy story, Father.”
“But it is. Suddenly, like a gift from God, every tank flew the white flag. The army withdrew and the soldiers waved. The loudspeakers blared ‘Libertate.’ Liberty. The government had fallen. It was a miracle. We had won.” Or so he thought.
“And you?”
“I? I became a man.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, free.”
Zita mumbled something indecipherable in her sleep.
The showers fell in sheets. Through the night obelisks rose up at us, sodden branches closed in on us. The eyes of animals, caught in our headlights, flashed blood red like demons busy by the roadside. The bleak horizon, strung across barren reaches of stone, tumbled away to nothing at a cliff edge. It was not a hospitable place.
Nor was Suceava. By dawn the rain had eased to a dirty drizzle and a filthy mist shrouded the colors of Stefan the Great’s capital. Everything was gray. A cripple with a rubber glove for a hand spat in his handkerchief. Men and women with pallid complexions hunched in queues. Methane-fueled buses, their windows opaque with condensation, rocked workers to factories. Exhaust vapor hung in the air too melancholic to disperse.
Zita blinked at the morning. She had mislaid her teeth in the night but found them in her shoe, the one place in the car where Winston was unlikely to stick his snout.
Dinu directed us along a line of uniform blocks six stories tall. Behind ten thousand doors in dank, damp kitchens, husbands were slumped between table and sink drinking grainy sweet coffee and dropping cigarette ash down plug-holes. Ten thousand wives stood beside them, probably coughing, and refilled their cups from the saucepan on the stove.
A woman in a kerchief pushed a wheelbarrow of wood through the puddles. Loudspeakers blared public announcements about a bakery strike and the evil of Ceauşescu. The dictums, repeated until the words lost all meaning, were as inescapable as the child’s wail that pierced the estate. Dinu led us up crumbled concrete stairs toward the cry. He tapped on a door. No response. He knocked harder. Nothing. He hammered with his fist. Elena opened the door. She wore an old woman’s face: sunken cheeks, long pointed nose, deep-set eyes. Only her soft skin, pulled so tightly over her skull as to be crease-less, suggested her true age. In her arms was the squalling infant and behind her was her mother.
“Who are you?” demanded the mother, slit eyes in a fat peasant face. Dinu offered her a letter of introduction from a mutual friend. She was suspicious. He introduced us. In the gloom of the hallway the slit eyes rested on me and calculated. She smiled.
Broad hands ushered us into the apartment. “My guests,” she said. The ravaged building had deceived us; their flat was spacious and carpeted. Elena turned off the video and prepared tea. Pious icons of, remarkably, laughing saints graced the walls. Mother sat us down, asked questions, inspected our gifts of fruit and wine. Winston, she assumed, was part of the offering and she pinched his haunches before we hastily explained. She never told us her name. “You have come to see the painted churches? They are very beautiful. Stefan cel Mare was a great king. An honest man.” In the sixteenth century the warrior prince of Moldavia and enemy of the Turks built fourteen churches and monasteries, enclosed by fortified walls, adorned, inside and out, with resplendent frescoes.
Tea appeared. “Cake, Elena,” ordered Mother. She was a doctor, a general practitioner. “Do you have a car?” she asked. “Then you will need a guide. I will find someone.” She shouted to the kitchen, “Elena. The Negresses.” Soft sweet squares concocted from chocolate substitute were produced.
“It’s a miracle,” said the doctor as she poured tea. “Two months ago I could not invite foreigners into the house. If we had spoken on the street I had to report the conversation to the Securitate. Now we can speak as friends. Milk?”
The child, too intrigued to cry, lay on the floor with Winston. She stuck a finger in the pig’s eye. Winston squealed and hid behind Zita, who had clutched her jaw in pain. The sugar had wormed under her dentures. I picked up the child and offered it cake. “No,” snapped Elena too sharply. “She’s eaten.” The baby promptly peed on me.
Elena took Lucia and led me to the bathroom. Washing lines stretched overhead. A viewless window stared blindly into a gloomy lightwell. The single cold-water tap dripped into a full tub. Water, like electricity, could be unexpectedly cut off.
Elena gave me a rag and began to change Lucia. She avoided my questions. When she did speak it was without a hint of emotion, as if reciting a bus timetable. “This is my mother’s house. She wants you to stay.”
“The three of you live here?”
“Plus my grandmother.” She unpegged a cloth diaper from the line and gestured to a closed door. Four generations of women in a cold-water flat, but only her mother worked and doctors were paid less than manual laborers. Their island of luxury in the sea of deprivation left an impression of deceit, like a fine silk suit on a haggard whore.
Dinu had told me that Elena was a writer. I asked if she wrote for one of the many independent newspapers that had sprung up since the revolution.
“For sure I write,” she replied, “but for a Western magazine. It is possible now. I cannot concern myself with politics. I have a daughter. Could you hold this, please?” She wiped her child’s bottom. I asked which magazine.
“I write what you call pornography, the letters column: ‘My girlfriend can only achieve an orgasm if her schnauzer, et cetera, et cetera.’” She laughed, unguarded for one moment, and talced her daughter. “Does it surprise you? I have Lucia to support.”
“And the father?”
“Lucia is un copil din flori — a child of the flowers.” Illegitimate. “Birth control was illegal in Romania.” I felt the embarrassment of sudden intimacy; of strangers who unexpectedly touch or the son at his father’s funeral who confesses, “I never kissed him.”
“Ceauşescu was an evil man,” the doctor explained. “Life is better now. There is food in the shops and electricity all day. We can use as many light bulbs as we can find, not just two as before.”
Dinu nodded. “Now I too have hope,” he volunteered. “Did you see? The soldiers who executed Ceauşescu crossed themselves first. In the end they still have faith.”
“Such is life and so is the world. It’s because of Iliescu; he is a man of good faith,” she added.
Elena sat Lucia near Winston. “After the revolution I felt free inside like never before, but now I feel pity for my dead and buried hopes.
“My daughter knows nothing.
“They have killed the dog but kept the chain,” she said and her child again poked Winston’s eye.
The lights flickered and went out. “Terrorists,” said Elena’s mother, then snapped into Romanian. French is a language of curves, German of parallel lines; Italians converse in spirals and Hungarians at right angles, but Romanian is the tongue of ever-decreasing circles.
The women didn’t speak to each other but exchanged bursts of fire like machine gunners at the Somme. Elena’s voice became mechanical again. “Lucia and I can take you to the churches.”
In the dim morning light Zita looked tired. Her lower lip protruded in a scowl, like Churchill piqued. “I have to recover first,” she grunted. “I’m not the youngest anymore.”
“You must rest,” ingratiated the doctor. “First you sleep.”
We drove north away from the city’s filth into the heart of Moldavia. Sandy paths twisted through emerald fields that rolled toward the Ukraine. A shepherd lazed by his flock. Two hens, their feet bound, dangled from a bicycle’s handlebars. Buxom women, cardigans straining over ample bosoms, tilled the earth by hand. Their husbands lashed spindly horses and their children planted potatoes. Leathery old women in kerchiefs drew water from wells headed with gazebos of wood and glass. They gossiped and gesticulated with the crippled gestures of gnarled hands. The dust was stirred by scrawny chickens and fat geese.
The villages were clustered along Roman roads lined by flowering trees with white painted trunks. Every home was fenced with elaborately carved porţi, or gateways, which proclaimed a family’s prosperity. The houses were built in stages over a number of years: first of logs, the winter wind howling through the gaps in the rough wood, then a lattice of wooden slats was attached when money allowed. Finally straw and plaster were applied and the surface decorated with intricate floral designs.
A gallery of fir-lined slopes unfolded and Voroneț, like a brightly illuminated Bible, lay open in a dark green meadow. The church curved as nature about it. No line was straight. The shingled roof was cambered to the roll of the hills. Beneath its great overhanging eaves, the walls were pages of a book, painted in gold and azure. The west wall wove the story of the Last Judgment. God, portrayed in a triptych and held aloft by angels, rose at the apex. Below him stood Christ circled in radiance and surrounded by apostles. A river of fire, the Gehenna, slashed diagonally across the wall and divided Paradise from eternal torment. On one side St. Paul led the devout to Judgment, on the other Moses plunged the sinners, all turbaned Turks, down to Hell. The souls of the Christian dead arose as a concourse of saints entered Paradise.
Nuns with black cylindrical caps, home-knitted sweaters, and artless eyes talked us up the thirty steps from Hell to Heaven. Each step represented a mortal sin. Rows of angels aided the faithful ascending the Virtuous Ladder. They speared winged demons, who tempted the fallen from the ladder into the mouth of the satanic beast.
Dinu set up his tripod and carefully removed the camera from its bag. He composed his shots with painstaking care. The colors seemed aflame in the afternoon sun but the blue of the church at Voroneţ, a deep cobalt of malachite and iron as livid as plum, and the green of Suceviţa could never be captured or reproduced. The secret of the pigments had been lost.
The churches were built when the country was under siege, cut off from Constantinople. Armies massed behind the fortified gates and waited to do battle with the Turks. The paintings, at once universal and specific, fired the soldiers’ patriotism. The Virgin was portrayed as a Byzantine princess and Christ wore a Moldavian shirt. Archangels sounded the Resurrection with bucium, wooden Carpathian shepherds’ horns. King David played a cobza, a Romanian lute. In depicting the seventh-century defense of Constantinople the Persians were dressed as Turks, the courageous defenders as Moldavians.
Elena breathed deeply and relaxed away from her mother. “It’s a wonderful fresh air,” she said. “I like being far away from the civilized world.”
The engine stalled on the road to Putna. The car seemed to have lost its spark with the burial of Mirek. It was as if his soul had spirited us forward, but now the Trabant gave up the ghost and we coasted to a stop.
“Oh, fantastic,” said Zita.
Dinu and I looked under the bonnet. Zita shook her head. “The little beastie and I are going for a walk.” As they rummaged over the carpet of marsh marigolds I heard her ask, “Where the ruddy hell are we, Winston?”
I was no mechanic. My usual method was to hit every exposed part with a screwdriver handle, tighten the odd nut, and hope. But I thought the problem might be electrical and wrapped the fuses in silver cigarette paper. Zita would be displeased, her duty-frees now loose in a carrier bag, especially as the car still didn’t start. I turned the key and the Trabant wheezed an asthmatic gasp.
“You disapprove of me because I am a pornographer?” Elena had slipped out of the car and her shoes without a sound. She stood barefoot in the dust, Lucia perched on her hip. “That is all right; it is more comfortable to put labels on things. But this is just a part of the truth, which is worse than a lie.”
It was difficult to imagine her at home, as she washed diapers and stewed carrots, inventing provocative sexual problems. I wondered if Grandmother helped? I imagined sex in Suceava could only be bereft of eroticism. It provided comfort, certainly, but probably precious little other joy.
“I have to live my life on a realistic basis. All I want is to buy some things for Lucia, not much, a little house — with a kitchen and a bathroom — and a place where she can have a hammock and sleep like a fish in a fishing net.” Her English was lucid, learned from books but rarely before spoken. Many words she had translated directly from Romanian, assuming similar Latin roots conveyed identical modern meanings. Elena looked askance, out of the corner of brown eyes, her whole head tilted back as if in suspicion.
“You know it is not like my mother says. We have to make real investigations to get what we need, sometimes at the back door, giving tips and acting friendly with the shop man. And the shops are almost empty now that we have ‘democracy.’ We have to be content with very few food and no medicine, even those of great need for stomach and heart. We are walking on moving sand.”
“But your table is full,” said Dinu. “You should be thankful for God’s gifts.”
“They are from my mother’s garden. She is a person of low quality.” The pornographer judged the doctor.
A horse and cart passed us. Tassels hung from the mare’s bridle and red wool was entwined in her tail and mane. Three men rode in the back. Each wore a fleece hat and a dark, disheveled suit, each held a child dressed in home-knit trousers and a woolen bobble hat. They didn’t stop.
The priest spread a picnic — kindly prepared by Elena’s mother — on the roof of the car while I siphoned off the petrol. The distributor cap had been damp and I suspected that there was water in the tank. Elena ate little and fed Lucia only on packaged food. It was no wonder the child looked pale. A band of Gypsies, young and defiant, appeared on the road. They walked as one, clasped together as a single beast, a hydra of reeling heads and tentacles. The car was surrounded. The boys mocked the engine. The girls feigned disinterest and demanded gum. Suddenly the leader, a stocky bully with a provocation of bristle, slapped his girl. His honor, somehow, had been slighted, and he spat accusations. She laughed it off. The group gripped, grasped, and danced a mating rite as power shifted. Her allies withdrew and the girl was isolated, her supplications ignored. The boys closed the circle to cut her out, then turned their backs. The hydra lost a head.
The beast vanished as quickly as it had appeared when the police arrived. The Romanies had been tortured or murdered under the old regime. Officially the persecution had stopped with the revolution, but as suspicions lingered the band didn’t. Dinu instinctively put away his Praktika.
In the back of the police car sat Zita, looking excited, with Winston by her side. “Did you hear it? The cuckoo? I heard the first cuckoo of spring.” The door didn’t open from the inside. “For heaven’s sake, let me out,” she ordered. The police didn’t share her enthusiasm for fauna. They puffed with self-importance.
“They’re completely around the twist,” said Zita as she clambered free. “They started waving their blasted guns about and everything. Poor Winston nearly had a fit.” She had been found on the road without papers but with a pig. They had assumed she had stolen it.
“Absolutely ridiculous, I told them. Where could I steal one? These two,” she said pointing at her captors, “are the only swine left in Romania.” Before the revolution every pig was exported to earn hard currency, only the trotters could remain in the country. A pair had been hung on Ceauşescu’s grave after his assassination.
I gave the police Zita’s passport.
“Go on,” she said and shook their hands. “I accept your apology. If you can’t make mistakes, what can you do?” Thankfully, Zita didn’t speak Romanian. Elena explained and they seemed satisfied.
“Isn’t this ruddy tin can running yet?” inquired my aunt. “How about a push and bump? The boys will help.”
Somehow she persuaded them. Elena refused to get involved. She told us that recently the police had been subjected to an intelligence test. Every officer was given a board punched with various-shaped holes and the corresponding pegs. They were asked to insert the right peg into the right hole. The results were encouraging. It was found that two percent of policemen were very intelligent and ninety-eight percent were very, very strong. The flatfoots who push-started the car were among the majority. The Trabant had never moved so fast.
“Just don’t say anything,” instructed Zita when we were back on our way. “At least the cuckoo’s song was very beautiful.”
“It must be frustrating being a policeman,” mused Dinu. “We used to fear them, but now they are told to work within the law.”
“I wonder,” asked Elena, “if law and freedom can ever coexist?”
“Not that old chestnut,” moaned my aunt.
Law for Dinu and Elena was not of the people, for the people. It was the dictate of an elite imposed by force on the oppressed. Law had meant injustice.
“For sure it is the same as the church,” said Elena. “We learned at school that Christianity is an instrument used to exploit people. Like the law.” She laughed. “You can imagine what sort of history we were taught.”
“My child,” said Dinu, his fingers splayed as if to catch the ether of her soul, “God is love.”
“I’m not your child.” She held her daughter in her arms. “She is all I love and I am my own god.”
The spirit of society had been fractured. Laws did not reflect the will of the people. God was not a righteous judge, strong and patient, but an instrument of repression. The young didn’t know Him.
“It’s different for you; you can have a pleasant life — useful and clean.” Elena smiled her crooked smile, wily but not to be distrusted. “You mock my ignorance, but I am a child of communism. I have been corrupted by it.” We rode in silence to Putna, the last of the churches.
It was sunset and the chants of the monks merged with the wind in the pines. Putna’s defensive walls, bereft of frescoes, stood stark white against the forest. In contrast, its interior seemed shrouded in funereal crepe. The air was thick with incense and the light dimmed by vapors. Candles hissed and spat, blackening the pillars. Centuries of soot and damp had corroded the paint. Smoke rose into the inky dome where Christ, with great raven eyes, glared from a universe of stars. The monks were unseen and their eerie voices muffled. The mass was celebrated behind the iconostasis, the sacred screen that stretched across the width of the church, a curtain between altar and nave. Here heaven and earth were divided. Here Occident and Orient were parted, not by Turks, but by an idea.
Christendom’s fault line between Rome and Constantinople was not an historical curiosity but a division of worlds. In the west the Protestants, the protesters, had torn down the screens. Their ideas came to be accepted in most of the Catholic world. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, the interconnected upheavals that created the modern world, championed individual consciousness. Every individual became answerable directly to God. But the upheavals took place outside Orthodoxy. In the east the church, through its priests, remained an intermediary: middlemen between man and the Almighty. Individuals were answerable to the priest, who slipped behind the iconostasis and sorted out their destiny with God. It was a dictatorship of faith. The priest alone heard the word of God. The law was based on doctrine, not debate. The society accepted that a mortal, flawed as all men, could administer divine power.
Bells tolled, the Royal doors opened, and the priest emerged. He chanted in ancient liturgical Slavonic, words unchanged for a thousand years. A ray of evening sunlight caught the gold thread of his Easter surplice. He held the chalice, the bread and wine, to administer the Sacrament.
“Pretty,” whispered Elena. “But what’s the point?”
I found Dinu outside. He sat beside a lilac bush, framed by clusters of deep violet flowers. His callused hands hung limply by his sides.
“I had begun to think,” he said, “that the priority was making the economy work. It’s not. It is the spirit of the people that must be rebuilt.”
* * *
Roses were placed in the center of the table. The rich blooms, grown under glass in the allotment, were tightly closed. The stretched fleece of a lamb dried on the balcony. Its flesh, minced and spiced with wild thyme, made the meatloaf for dinner. Dinu said grace. Elena’s mother raised a glass of ţuica, crisp plum brandy. “Eat, my friends, and see how well we eat. Poftă bună, bon appétit.” She and Elena knocked colored Easter eggs together until they cracked. “Christ has risen,” the godless chanted, “truly he has risen.”
“In Romania we eat one and a half times more than you, and” — the doctor nodded at the dentures wrapped in a tissue on the table — “our dentists are better too.”
Zita explained about her teeth. For years a mysterious ailment had poisoned her system. It could not be diagnosed. By chance an infected tooth had to be removed. Her dentist was appalled by the decay it revealed. When all the remaining teeth were pulled out her health improved.
“Marigolds,” prescribed the doctor. “Soaked overnight in water, warmed and drunk in the morning. Every day. That would have saved them.”
“What the blazes. They’re dead and gone now.”
“It cures cancer too.” Her home remedies claimed to have saved the life of a friend. “Priests must be careful with their throats,” she advised Dinu. “Linden leaves are best for bronchitis, camomile for digestion.” She had grown up on the land. Her father, a laborer on a plum orchard, taught her nature’s secrets. She had little respect for medical science and only became a doctor because the education board needed to fulfill a five-year plan.
“And blueberries,” she added. “All my aunts and uncles went blind. It’s in our blood.” She gestured at a closed door. “I’ve fed my own mother blueberries for forty years and she has eyes like a bat.”
The allotment was the doctor’s passion: there she kept chickens and a turkey, grew herbs and great heads of cauliflower. Away from the stink of Suceava and the unheated hospital with three patients to a bed, she would bury her hands in the earth and feel whole.
The food was the best we ate in Romania. Zita mumbled a compliment as she sucked on an enormous gherkin. “No wedding without bread, no funeral without laughter. I do it all myself,” bragged the doctor. “My daughter never helps me. She’s too busy with that child.” Elena, who had eaten little, went into the bedroom and returned with Lucia. The child had woken from a nightmare and her face was bleach white.
The doctor wanted to know about the West: the price of a loaf of bread and a house in Hampstead. When I answered she hissed, a remarkable sound like an enraged swan.
“You’ll need some lei for your stay in our country,” she said suddenly. “It’s dangerous to change money on the street. You’ll be cheated. I’d be happy to arrange it for you.”
We did need currency but had changed some illegally with Elena that morning. She was saving to buy a house and had asked us to keep our arrangement quiet. Lei and lies. I apologized to the doctor, explaining that we had changed money elsewhere. Her face set into an expressionless mask.
“He was a tall man,” said Zita in an attempt to give the lie substance, “with a small head and very big glasses.”
“It’s not easy for us, you know.” The doctor eyed Elena.
“The true riches are in heaven,” suggested Dinu. “But it’s nice to have a little pocket money before we get there.”
“I work at the hospital all day, evenings, and Sunday on the land while she” — the doctor pointed accusingly — “she just sits.”
Elena refused to rise to the bait. “I know that I cannot afford to remain a child as long as I have a child myself.” She held her daughter. “And a very sweet one too. So I write my articles,” she concluded softly, then slapped Lucia’s hand as she reached for a slice of apple. The child wailed. It seemed hungry.
“You should be ashamed of that smut. What does it pay for? Certainly not the child. We didn’t need another mouth to feed.”
“All my friends had abortions,” Elena said plainly. “Their wombs are ruined.”
The government had wanted to increase the country’s population. Abortions were forbidden for women with less than five children. “Demographic command units” examined females at their workplace every three months. Pregnancies had to be registered. Fertility control became a criminal offense. It was not uncommon for a woman, between the ages of twenty and thirty, to have seven or eight abortions. A quarter of Romania’s women had been mutilated.
“Stupid girls,” clicked the doctor. “They went to amateurs, nursing assistants or orderlies. They should have gone to a professional.”
Elena held her child. “With what? Doctors charged a month’s salary. A month’s.”
“You didn’t have to worry about money.”
“I wanted someone to love. She’s all I have.”
As we spoke the heat from the overhead light warmed the roses. Their petals spread, heavy and wet. From under the leaves and within the buds crawled minute lacquer-black beetles. They dried their wings and flew, swarming over the dinner table, into our food, our wine, our hair. They seized their few brief moments of life and mated on the rose petals.
“I do not know how you can eat this food grown on that land.” Elena was standing, shaking as she spoke, “All those dead babies — it is horrible.”
By Saturday the bread strike had been settled. In the run-up to the election the “interim” government, the National Salvation Front, bought peace. Party funds were spent to win favor, and the disputes didn’t last. Demands were met. There was food in the shops for a few weeks.
It was a relief to eat the bread. It was gray, the color of cement, with pockets of uncooked dough under the crust, but its wheat had been fertilized by orthodox methods. A customer in the queue raved to us, “It’s a miracle. Now we can buy bread and cheese and sausage.” Before the revolution Romanians often survived on bread alone. It gave us a stomach ache, of course, and the doctor produced beakers of camomile tea to settle the ferment.
The Romanians were not a courageous people. They had always survived as best they could by cheating and lying. They deserved better but failed, with few exceptions, to demand more. Why? Ceauşescu had been a dictator, but how much had individual Romanians defied him? They needed gods to deify and consume. Authority was feared but discipline loved. On a tram I had overheard a passenger say, “If Ceauşescu had given me more to eat, I’d have kissed his ass.” The people had been degraded so that they might be squashed underfoot like silverfish on a urinal floor.
We said our good-byes. Father Dinu asked if we would drive him to Sighişoara. He felt uneasy in Moldavia. “And you haven’t told me that joke,” he reminded me. Zita and I collected our bags, but the doctor, thick arms crossed, blocked the doorway. Her attitude toward us had altered after we had refused to exchange money.
“You’ve eaten my food, drunk my wine, slept in my beds. A hotel would charge you one hundred dollars for the night. Let’s call it fifty. Each.” After we’d paid she warned, “Watch out for the terrorists.”