Missing in action

December 1989

And so, yet again, she returns to silence to get her breath back: on 16 December she disappears.

‘When you’ve come back to your senses, get in touch!’ Béla says sarcastically in a televised interview. ‘I expect I’ll come across Nadia in a gym competition soon, if she has the money to buy herself a ticket, that is,’ the president of the American Gymnastics Federation adds prophetically. When he is asked what she is worth now, the director of a well-known actors’ agency replies: ‘Her disappearance is undermining her marketability. She has to give something of herself, doesn’t she?’

The former communist icon vanishes, but out in reality, her trial continues. At least unless all this is nothing more than a funeral. The funeral for a world, once known as a bloc, protected by a rusty iron curtain. Because after all here in the West, although we didn’t love him, we appreciated him, that B-movie villain. That world beyond our own. Implacably better, more rigorous. A boarding school for excellence, their discipline, the beauty of those keen muscles, the brilliance of the red and gold star, the immensity of the dream, a fight between equals, hand-to-hand between scouts and pioneers for almost a century.

Women workers with golden forearms, peasant women smiling in their flowery headscarves, outstanding chemists with strict chignons, reclusive, persecuted poetesses, sportswomen, oh, the elastic gymnasts, limpid children who are both mischievous and super-strong. All that is dead and buried, now it is transparency, perestroika introducing all those girls who, as if escaping from a nightmare mirror, have turned into the others, into us. Famished whores, wretched, haggard mothers, drab adolescents addicted to the strains of pop capitalism, super-con-artist-businesswomen-models, self-consciously eager to leave behind them a ruined world which, on 19 December 1989, comes toppling down in televised loops interrupted every ten minutes by promises of fresher breath.