Oneşti–Bucureşti

Night was falling, I had travelled all day from Bucharest in a coach, the hotel where I had booked a room was deserted, each room was as big as a suite. Iuliana had arranged to meet me in the lobby, she lived close by. I had imagined an embittered woman, but she was energetic, warm and pragmatic: everything was prepared, as if time was an issue. On the kitchen table she had opened a book with hand-tinted photographs from the communist era and a photo album crammed with press cuttings following the triumphs of the golden team.

‘What is the book you’re writing about, exactly? Romanian gymnastics in general, or her? I’ve known Nadia since nursery school,’ she says, pointing to a photograph of the two of them aged six. ‘And I’m the first person she called after she fled the country.’

The photo album contained the illustrations for the film I’ve been trying to reconstruct since I began to write a year ago.

The young Béla and Márta, neither of them much more than thirty, leaning over a group of serious-looking children in smocks sitting on their classroom benches. Béla and the young girls in Paris, in front of the Eiffel Tower.

‘That story about the exhibition in Paris, what happened? Did Béla really force his way into the Palais des Sports?’

Iuliana shrugged, then passed me a plate of apple cake. ‘The team was split in two. I was in Rome, so I can’t tell you anything about that.’

The girls doing winter sports, Iuliana with her arms round Nadia’s waist on a sled. At the seaside, each of them holding a ball, pale-faced and scrawny.

‘You know – get this down – here, use this pen, yours isn’t working properly – Béla taught me to ski, Béla taught me to swim; in other countries if there were things to see, he would take us, he wanted us to learn. He even acted as a tour guide! He was a lot more than a mere trainer, a…’

‘A coach?’

‘A father. It’s such a shame he was bought by the Americans… In Romania nowadays we no longer have the means to create champions, private foundations don’t want to invest. We have no more trainers, or the medical equipment to detect and quickly heal anyone injured, like we used to. And besides… who these days would make so many sacrifices for what in the end isn’t worth all that much? Our 2004 European champion was forced to sell her medals in a TV show, just so that she could buy a tiny studio apartment; others have posed for Playboy… Girls these days dream of becoming top models. We wanted to be invincible. Everything changed when the Wall came down, even for gymnasts… Nowadays they have to wear make-up for competitions, even when they’re ten years old. Sequins, lipstick, and their leotards have such low necks, to be more… sexy. Do you remember ours? Not exactly the same style, were they? Have you got enough time to get all this down? Have another piece of cake! You haven’t asked me anything about Nadia, is there something in particular that interests you?’

‘Yes,’ I replied as soon as I could get a word in edgeways. I recited the questions I had prepared during my trip, but they were stale and badly expressed, and she gave responses that seemed to me prepared in advance. There would be nothing to learn or discover.

‘One more thing,’ I added, a naive concern that had been troubling me for months, ‘did Nadia have one or more close girlfriends, who she could share something apart from gymnastics with? She never mentioned anyone to me.’

Iuliana smiled, was silent for a while, then said, ‘Perhaps when she was seven, yes. Afterwards, how do you expect her to…’

‘You mean she didn’t have time? Or that everyone was too jealous of her?’

She interrupted me, waving her hands as if to dispel my words. ‘We couldn’t be jealous of her, what she was doing was too… far beyond the possible. We were like preliminary sketches of Nadia. I’ve read so many profiles of her that concentrate on her results, but every sportswoman wants to win! As for her, how shall I put it, she liked to be on sure ground… We are all rough drafts of Nadia, and I’m not talking about the medals… Perhaps that’s what interests you as well, is it?’ Then, without waiting for my reply: ‘What I found extraordinary was that her parents didn’t come to talk to Béla at the end of each term. Nadia had to face him on her own. And she did stand up to him. He adored her. Sometimes we had the impression that he was following her suggestions, and not the other way round! Nadia wasn’t one to please others. When she was little, she was taken to task for it, claimed she was busy fighting monsters and didn’t have time to do what other people wanted, I don’t really know what “monsters” meant to her! But… I imagine you’ve been in contact with her, so you know all that.’ We stared at each other without saying a word, numbed by the lack of light in the room. She smiled at me.

‘You ought to go and see the gym and the statue,’ she recommended as I was standing up. ‘I’d have liked to show you the gym myself, but unfortunately it’s Saturday and nowadays the girls don’t work at weekends. We used to train seven days a week!’

We said goodbye, she promised to send me the recipe for the apple cake by email.

The next morning, I followed the route she had indicated: the pebbly river, the bus stop. ‘We used to be so exhausted after training that even though Nadia lived three hundred metres away, going home on foot was impossible!’ A tarnished bronze statue heralded the entrance to the park, with the hands of a young girl bent backwards between grass and sky. Beneath it, the engraved names of the seven young girls, a monument in homage to child soldiers who had faded into adulthood.

The gym looked like a huge floppy tortoise, diamond-shaped windows striping the exterior’s flaking blue paint. I walked round it until a gardener came up and asked me to move on.

After that, I spent a week in Bucharest. Met three journalists, two of whom had reported on the Montreal Olympics. A writer, as well. Each of them passed me on to others: ‘Listen, I know someone who…’ I went to parties, conferences, picnics and bars, people marvelled at the amazing weather for early April, how mild it was. My hosts spoke of my protagonist with respect, what a nice topic, most of them told me stories I already knew. I had no questions to ask. I wasn’t investigating anything. I wanted to write to Nadia C., I missed our exchanges, but my efforts at writing seemed too much like the excuses of a contrite, ambivalent lover: I’m not learning anything, Nadia, that you wouldn’t want me to know, I’m not betraying you. Contrary to what she insinuated, it wasn’t a matter of uncovering the hidden aspects of her narrative, but simply understanding her journey without it being rewritten, including by her.

I criss-crossed Bucharest, with its road surfaces softened by tram tracks, night falling between houses that formed a dark mass barely picked out by the sparse street lights whose orange glow was so dim it was impossible to decipher the uneven pavements. I walked along huge boulevards; the grimy-fronted 1970s apartment blocks ended in a broad square dominated by a giant, almost empty, H&M store. Seated on the ground, an Orthodox priest held out to the passers-by a small dish decorated with fake red, blue and green gemstones; at his feet was a card reading ‘Help Me’. The image was so symbolic it was as if it had been deliberately staged on my behalf. I hastened to take notes and crossed the boulevard and was set straight; a maze of calm side streets gave the lie to the certainty of the liberalism displayed in the centre. A sense of shelter. The houses huddling against each other, each one different, glimpses of small rectangular courtyards behind fences often reinforced by corrugated iron, the smell of dead leaves being burned, a young boy beating a carpet hanging on a washing line, a cock crowing loudly. Shops with signs I could not decipher but whose windows explained their purpose: watchmakers, repairers of vacuum cleaners and dolls, barbers, seamstresses, drapers. In the daytime, stray dogs slept in the shop doorways or in the hollows of earth in the flower beds; as the sun went down they gathered along the main thoroughfares where the cars were speeding, looked right and left before venturing cautiously across.

You never told me about the trees of Bucharest, I could have begun my letter to Nadia, in a concrete, anodyne way; here, they poke through the roofs of abandoned houses and grass grows over the grooves in an eviscerated pavement; here the trees spread above their shadows, the foliage inserts itself, takes over. Elms, lilacs, oaks, willows, beeches, poplars and plane trees, limes and horn-beams overcome the space, put an end to time.

You never told me that here nothing is hidden. In the West all cables are buried, façades are restored, everything has to look dolled up, the roads are smooth and freshly concreted; here, whenever a tram goes by, bunches of mysteriously tangled cables sway gently up in the sky.

I wandered all over the city, went to my appointments on foot, fervently noted everything down. The bridge over the Dâmbovița with two metres of missing balustrade with no warning sign, because here its citizens were not seen as fragile: in Bucharest there are none of those flashing signs warning that tomorrow will be hot and that people should drink water; the gaping holes in the crumbling asphalt formed craters that pedestrians stepped round without interrupting their mobile calls. I watched a young couple in front of me in a supermarket queue: he had a beard, and was wearing a Paul Smith T-shirt; she had dyed black hair scooped up in a high ponytail, a pretty, graphic face, intensely self-aware of her absurdly long eyelashes and perfect colouring, her eyebrows redrawn in pencil; her fingers were giving winged caresses to her smartphone screen. She and her bearded companion had already reached the exit when the cashier called out to them, holding up the change they had not bothered to collect. This nonchalant spare change of the new rich in the hand of a bewildered, bitter cashier, as if she no longer knew who the money belonged to now it had been so casually abandoned.

I had meetings in fashionable cafés installed in beautiful Victorian mansions with wrought-iron porches; their gardens strung with multicoloured lights, packed with young people dressed the same as anywhere in Europe. One of these cafés was decorated ‘as in the olden days’, by which was meant under the communist regime, it was the most popular place in the city, and played only old pioneer songs. From a church squashed between Zara and Bershka, loudspeakers poured out the priest’s chant, the tune opening its arms to the street, torn by the sound of noisy engines. Inside the church, red lamps dulled the gold of icons that everyone went along embracing one after another; an old woman brandishing a cloth and a window-cleaning bottle regularly wiped down the glass face of the Virgin Mary. On the table, women in headscarves placed a few offerings, a cake known as cozonac, hard-boiled eggs and bottles of oil in plastic bags; a Mickey Mouse bag so full of gifts its torn handles hung down from Christ’s forehead.

Old men looking strangely formal, dressed as if for an important evening celebration, stood on their own on the pavement in front of what they had for sale: a collection of Verlaine’s verse in French, a set of bathroom scales from the 1970s, the odd battery. Others, the open boot of their car making a kind of stall, were offering crates of carefully arranged fruit, bunches of dill, pairs of new shoes, aubergines, round red peppers, toilet paper, nails. I walked towards what was once Ceauşescu’s palace, which seemed close, but the farther I walked, the more distant it became. When I said this to the people I met, quite pleased at my observation, they shrugged their shoulders, they had all had the same experience, that building was immeasurable in size. Why not demolish it? I asked, and they looked at me, annoyed, We have no past because we’ve silenced so much, said men and women who as children had witnessed its construction, we’ve already got enough with the older generation refusing to put up with our happy memories!

One evening I got lost and wandered along edgy, nameless streets, zones of unease, with trees piercing the fences and holed concrete; kids watched me like inquisitive dwarfs. When I stopped to consult a map, people came up to help, in French, English, and often we ended up having lengthy discussions without knowing each other. I began to get used to things, to know I was going to hear that in the olden days, in spite of ‘all the rest’, everyone had a job and an apartment; no one was out of work. Before, there was nothing in the shops, today there is everything but we don’t have the wherewithal to buy any of it, so which system is better? They posed the question like a bitter equation. I was shown a leaflet announcing a demonstration in homage to the 1989 revolution.

Back in 1989, did they give their lives so that we would have more Coca-Cola and McDonald’s? Did they give their lives for us to become slaves to the IMF? Did they die for us to flee farther and farther from this Romania, a country that cannot offer us a decent life? Die for thousands of old people to sleep out in the open and die of cold? Did they die for the Orthodox church to become this prosperous business that pays the state no taxes? In 1989, they gave their lives for our freedom. That was their Christmas present. What’s become of it? What have we done with that freedom? Has it been stored away in some cellar, or are we watching it half-heartedly like an old TV show?

At a birthday party, I said your name and they all sat up as if you had suddenly appeared in your white leotard, still revering that never-to-be-forgotten perfect 10. Late that evening, several thirty-year-old drunken women stood up to launch into a pioneer song they had learned at primary school, embarrassed that they had so much enjoyed singing songs to the glory of the Comrade. A young man with wavy hair sighed comunişti for their benefit and hastily crossed himself.

To admire someone who went around with Ceauşescu’s son, she was a real opportunist, look at the way she fled thanks to the secret services and left everything behind her, frankly, why devote a book to her? the young man railed without looking at me, while a woman shook her head and covered her ears, That’s enough, shut up, you’re cursed every last one of you, cursed, daring to soil childhood like that, its enchantment, talking like that about our Nadia, who gave us so much joy!

Around dawn, I asked for the nth time, ‘What was it like here in the last years?’ In the 1980s when they were all kids; they were so keen to give me their version of things that they kept interrupting each other.

One girl screwed up her mouth when I read out the list of the documents I had consulted, that succession of terrible decrees. ‘All that’s true. But… we were so sure it would never change that we organized to survive, we developed an internal vigilance, not for one minute did we forget that what we were being made to recite was false. By doing that, we salvaged a life outside the state. Communism? Nobody believed in it, not even the Securitate! Whereas now… they believe this stuff! They want it! They will do anything to join your European Union, they’re on their knees in front of holy capital, they get out of work at eleven o’clock at night, and all for what? I haven’t been on holiday in six years! But my parents, under Ceauşescu, went to the seaside and to the mountains, to restaurants, concerts, the circus, the cinema, the theatre! Everyone earned more or less the same, and prices hardly rose at all! It was true they were constantly scared, scared someone might hear them say forbidden things; nowadays you can say what you like, that’s great, except that nobody hears us… Before, we didn’t have permission to leave Romania, but today, nobody has the means to leave the country… Oh, political censorship has gone, but don’t worry, economic censorship has taken its place! This pseudo-liberal regime that pretends to coddle us when really it’s poisoning us, we swallow it because it doesn’t taste bad for us, we end up believing in it, but in the end what state does it leave you in? Completely empty! You say communism destroyed our country? But nowadays Canadian companies drive people from their villages and are preparing to blow up our mountains so that they can start fracking, with the blessing of the Romanian government: what a great deal that is! Ceauşescu demolished the city, our parents say? But last night at four in the morning because they were afraid of protesters, speculators demolished an old market, one of Bucharest’s historic monuments… and what are they going to replace it with? A supermarket or offices. What is your model? To croak of hunger in the street or to die of loneliness. Boredom in instalments? Struggle–succeed–make it? Make it where? I’m so fed up with being forced to want you, the Western dream, oh, those poor filthy people from eastern Europe who you are constantly teaching the lesson of your marvellous ideal democracy to, OK, we’ve got it!’

‘Write this please: in the olden days nobody wanted to watch those ridiculous patriotic programmes on television, in fact we went out, we lived outside, not huddled up inside in our own homes, we all left for the countryside together, write that, yes, there weren’t many things to buy, but really, who needs fifteen kinds of coffee? We used to play music and dance for free, did you get that down?’

They were anxious I should add that side of things, not just the harsh memories of their parents’ generation, their terrible version, the ration coupons, the surveillance, the cold, the fear. I noted it all to acknowledge it, the city, the people, the country, the words, as if there was something concealed within it, evidence, I wrote it all down, every shopkeeper greeted me with a ‘spuneți?’ (tell me?) which I translated as ‘out with it’, say what you have to say, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, had Nadia said what she had to say, had I heard her? I took note of the country that made you, bore you high like a banner, and which you left on 28 November 1989.