The hunt: ‘Desperate search for Nadia’ (l’Équipe); ‘Where could Nadia be?’ (Le Monde)

1 December 1989

At the centre of her disappearance, she is suddenly no longer there. She deepens her mystery. Just as during those two mysterious days back in 1978 when she is nowhere to be found despite being constantly watched in Bucharest, and no one can discover her until she herself decides to reappear. Trafficking time, trafficking numbers, exploding computers, cursors on the blink. All the documents point to it: there’s something not quite right in the story of Nadia’s escape. Some things are imprecise, inaccurate, incoherent. I send a version of her flight to Mihaela G.: she left Romania in 1985 by the same route. She returns my text with words underlined, phrases she turns into questions.

Nadia leaves Bucharest on the night of Sunday 26th in a hire car, together with six other people. P. drops them close to a border post, arranges to meet up again in Hungary. But the group gets lost and crosses the border at Mezsgyán at 6 a.m. on the 28th. At 8.36 in the morning of Wednesday 29th, a cable informs the world of her escape. She says she walked for six hours through icy forests, leaving on Sunday evening and arriving in Hungary at dawn on Monday. What is this gap of thirty-six hours? How were they able to rent a car on Sunday night in Bucharest? How could P., who fled ten years earlier, return to his country without arousing suspicion? How could Nadia go unnoticed when she was famous and followed everywhere? It is approximately four hundred kilometres from Bucharest to Timişoara, it’s impossible they weren’t stopped and checked on the way, especially at night and in a hire car. Where did she get the money to pay P., who was demanding five thousand dollars per person to get them out of the country, when she was earning barely a hundred and fifty dollars a month?

On the 29th, the alarm is raised in Bucharest, the Securitate sets out to find her. At midday, Hungarian television announces she has vanished from the hotel the police had put the group in while they were deciding whether to grant them asylum or not. Rumour has it that she has been snatched by the Securitate. But the hotel employees tell journalists that she left the previous evening in an Austrian car. An unidentified source formally recognizes her in the toilets of a restaurant in Austria. An English journalist, claiming to be her ‘secret lover’, says he is convinced she has been abducted by the CIA.

At the time, Béla is in Montreux with the American gymnastics team. Obviously he is suspected of being behind her escape; his presence in Europe is a coincidence, he protests. He declares to the press: ‘Nadia knows that the best thing she can do is to go to the US embassy in Berne’ – is this a message for her? And why, in Berne, did the ambassador stay silent for twenty-four hours before finally promising the press that she wasn’t there? To give her time to get out of the country?

She arrives in New York wearing the clothes she stands up in, the ones she claims to have worn ‘through kilometres of snow’. What snow? The weather forecast for 27 November 1989 shows temperatures of between minus three and minus seven, a westerly wind, but no snow.

Just as when Nadia was my only interlocutor, the facts overlap until they form an opaque mass: I am told of an officer who apparently was ordered to forbid his men to patrol at the exact time and place when the group crossed the border. Then a former soldier, Valeriu C., states that on 26 November 1989, an NCO warned him that ‘very soon’ he was going to meet the great gymnast in person.