Tony wakes to the sound of horse’s hooves on a road. The open window of his room lets in cool morning air, mist and the echo of horseshoes. It is before real light, when the air is blue. There is another sound, a piercing clank of steel on steel. This sound, and not the horse, has woken him. He pulls himself to the open window and looks out over a landscape that both rises and falls before him. Across the road, at the station, a lone man in a black overcoat walks the track beside a steaming passenger train. He carries a flashlight and a long steel hammer. He walks the length of the train, stopping at every wheel to tap and listen to the sound of steel ringing in the early morning. He is testing for weakness in the wheels. Beside Tony’s bed, a large silver-plated trophy stands in a padded black carrying case. Tony opens and closes the clasp on the case and slips back into bed.
On the third weekend in June 1995, in the northern town of Ilisesti, Romania, there are two wedding ceremonies for the same couple, and the Cup is present at neither of them. On the Saturday, while a small civil ceremony takes place at the town hall, Tony keeps to himself, keeps close to the Cup, spends most of the day staring from his hotel room window into the wooded hills of Bucovina, into the soft hills speckled with sheep, and lush, forested valleys. He watches the comings and goings of trains at the station. He photographs soldiers and tourists walking the tracks and platforms. He uses his binoculars to discover birds in the tall pines surrounding the small tourist hotel.
The next day, at the church ceremony, Tony stands in a crowd of family, friends, reporters and onlookers as Dragos Petrescu marries Irina Mihu, a girlfriend from childhood, hardly even a woman yet, and someone with whom the young hockey player seems oddly formal. Tony wonders if the marriage has been arranged. The priest chants and speaks, guests hold golden crowns over the heads of the bride and groom; many people, guests and casual passersby, kiss a very large Bible. Every woman holds flowers, while fragrant beeswax candles light the stone walls and floor.
Children in rags stand near the entranceway, quietly begging and offering prayers for money. In another corner of the church, an older priest holds a private mass for the dead, one old woman in black standing before him in the gloom. In his mind, Tony recounts the number of times he checked the ancient lock on his hotel room door and feels the weight of the heavy iron key in his pocket.
The only Romanian citizen ever to win hockey’s championship trophy, twenty-one-year-old Dragos Petrescu, a sudden, entirely unexpected national celebrity, has brought the Cup with him to his wedding. It is to be the centrepiece at the reception, set on a small podium behind the head table, to be used as a background for photographs; to be viewed, touched and admired by all the guests and visitors. Tony Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, keeps out of the way, eating tiny meatballs and Black Sea caviar, observing the traffic around the Cup. Occasionally he wipes down the trophy’s gleaming sides with a silk handkerchief, to remove fingerprints and the grease of dinner, to make it perfect again.
There is dancing to mandolins, violins and clarinets. Gypsy music sings from the bandstand and women wrap their men in long scarves on the dance floor. In one corner of the hall, several older men in dark suits crowd around a small table. Smoke rises from them; they laugh and drink, slap backs and tug at the sleeves of each other’s jackets. On the table, there is a game of backgammon. There is cheering for good dice and low, ironic murmuring for bad. Wooden pieces slide across the wooden board with force, are picked up and slapped down again. The groom sits at the table across from a man in his seventies. They smile at each other drunkenly, each smoking a long cigar. Tony assesses the board. The old man is clearly in front, and Dragos appears to be stalling, pointing at his own pieces and speaking quickly in his own language.
“He is explaining how the backgammon is like hockey.”
A powerful hand grips Tony’s arm, and he finds his glass refilling with champagne. Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae, the hockey player’s hulking father, has lurched across the room to accost and instruct Tony, drunkenly, joyfully.
“Soon he will lose this game, so he takes his time now to make this explanation.”
Nicolae leans down on Tony, his gleaming bald forehead speckled with sweat, a cigar raging in his smile. He carries a bottle of champagne by its neck, drinking from it whenever he removes the cigar from his mouth.
“He is showing how the playing surfaces are very similar, a rectangle with a line in the centre separating all the action. Both games, you see, are essentially races, with the fastest player most likely winning the day, but both games also depend on a wise use of speed. There is such a thing as speeding to one’s own destruction. Go too fast at the wrong time in hockey and you are offside, destroying a scoring opportunity. Concentrate only on the speed of your players around the board in backgammon, and you will spend all night on the bar, reading the newspaper, as they say. Like my idiot son himself has done tonight. But who can blame a man for going too quickly on his wedding night? You know what I mean, of course.”
Dragos plays his bride’s grandfather Andrei, a man whose abilities at the game have been tested every day for almost eighty years.
“The old man almost never loses, even when the dice are against him. He knows this board like a man knows the pattern of moles on his mistress’s chest. He played backgammon against the Fascists in the ’30s.”
“Did he beat the Fascists?” Tony asks.
“He is here today, is he not? Of course he didn’t beat the Fascists. He may be the best backgammon player in this country, but when the Fascists are in power, one does well not to beat the Fascists at any game.”
The game ends as expected, with much cheering for old Andrei who clasps his hands together over his head and then runs to the podium to kiss the Cup. Everyone crowds around to take photos of the two champions, generations apart, posing with the trophy.
“You play?” Nicolae asks Tony.
“Mostly I watch, but I think I’m getting better at it.” Tony searches the room quickly with his eyes, looking for Diana, hoping she will not notice him in conversation over a backgammon board.
“Then we will play. Please sit.”
Tony sits across from the large, sweating man. The heat of hands and exertion rises from the table. Tony checks across the room for the Cup, safe in the arms of someone who won it. The party builds force around them, young and old dancing and singing, men standing in groups near the doorway, smoke rising from them as though from a campfire. Dragos Petrescu has seen his father sit down at the gaming table, and he sends Tony a stern nod.
“You are probably wondering why it is my son uses only his mother’s maiden name?” the older man laughs across the table. “You know how this life is. You try to always live as though you are doing the best for everyone. Sometimes, you do not succeed. If you knew how we sacrificed for this boy.”
Tony looks into Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae’s smiling, half-crazed eyes and the game begins.
Of course, very little the police could do to Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae before he left Romania mattered to him. He was confident of eventually getting away. There was great pressure on the government at that time not to make immigration too difficult for genuine Jews who genuinely wanted to live in Israel. They could stall Nicolae in paperwork and bureaucracy for a few years while they tried to talk him out of it, but eventually they would have to open up the gate at the airport and let him go. At that time, planes were leaving every week for Tel Aviv. The truth of the situation was that there were not so many genuine Jews on those flights, and not so many people who genuinely wanted to go to Israel to live. Israel was the pathway to America, and America, meaning New York, was the ultimate destination.
The police were aware of the leaking hole in international convention, and it made them more zealous in their interventions into the immigration process. As a result, Nicolae had his two fellows assigned to him. Two officers who made it their business to be in the same places he was. The police especially liked to observe Nicolae on Jewish High Holidays. Naturally, when one is asking Israel to take you in, it is a good idea to be aware of the Jewish High Holidays, if not to observe them, at least to know which is which and not be wishing someone well at Yom Kippur when it is Rosh Hashanah. On the High Holidays, one of the two plainclothes men would always find some reason to invite Nicolae into the police station, an invitation he was obliged to accept. He spent many a Jewish High Holiday at the police station in Bucharest answering questions.
“So, Petrescu, I understand you like plum tarts?”
Nicolae would scratch his head, trying to discover if there was some Hebrew proscription against plums, or pastry, or enjoying sweets on holidays.
“Yes, I suppose I have eaten a tart or two in my life. They can be very enjoyable when baked well.”
“Yes,” they would say meaningfully, while writing something down in a small book.
“Did you see the result of this Saturday’s derby, Petrescu? Steaua gave it up in the eighty-ninth minute and it ended in a draw. Damned amateurs.”
Here, perhaps, they were actually looking for sympathy, absurdly because Steaua was the football team of the Party, whereas Nicolae and his friends had always been for Rapid, the team of young fashionable dissenters. Nicolae would have been happy for a last-minute tie against Steaua in the derby, happier still if Rapid had beaten them 3-nil, but on matters of football he didn’t fool around.
When football entered into the conversation, he knew he was no longer on the familiar ground of political or social disagreement. It was one thing for the police to be suspicious of your loyalty to the country, and for them to investigate you for dissent, but let them get a whiff of your sentiment in the arena of football and things could go very badly indeed. He would say it was a shame, and that Steaua should put so-and-so on the second team, or bring such-and-such off the bench. This is all he could risk, knowing so-and-so to be one of Steaua’s best players in fact and such-and-such to be a complete incompetent. He risked this, knowing it was fine to be wrong in an opinion about football as long as you are talking about the correct team.
“Petrescu, why is it you buy your mineral water at the First of May, when you buy your salami on Dorobantilor? What is so special about the mineral water at First of May?”
“It is merely a question of routine. Besides, it is easiest for me to buy the mineral water closer to home as then I don’t have so far to carry it.”
“You sure, Petrescu? You sure you don’t just like the looks of the girl who sells the mineral water at First of May? She’s something to look at I think, but of course, I do not have a wife and child.”
“Exactly Comrade Officer, you and I have different responsibilities, and so it only makes sense that you would notice this detail while I do not. If you say she is pretty, I will believe you, and maybe hazard a look next time—but only a look.”
“Petrescu, did you do well in science at the gymnasium?”
The questioning would continue in this vein, often for two hours or more. Police and suspect together would smoke an entire pack of Carpaţi, the stubby, intensely fragrant Transylvanian cigarettes, sitting across the broad table from each other, with the mysterious table set in the corner doing nothing. Sometimes the officers would get up from their chairs, and without saying a word would leave the room. Nicolae understood at these times that he was to stay perfectly still, not leave his seat, and worry about what was to come. Whether this was a strict rule or not, it seemed the thing to do, and though he often felt lonely and anxious, there was always some kind of disturbance to concentrate on, some clicking from behind the walls or the sound of something scraping across the floor above his head. All part of the game, he could tell, but distracting in fact, and comfortingly banal in a way he was sure was not intended. The fear of what might be behind those sounds was obviously intended to disable him in some way, to suggest horrors he could then expand upon with his own imagination. And this he did, at first, but even horror can become familiar.
After the Revolution, Nicolae discovered, along with everybody else, what had always been suspected about the building he was taken to again and again. These people, these secret police, did indeed kill their own fellow citizens in that very building. They killed and maimed and ruined the minds of many, many people in that very building with the crazy backgammon game in one room. It is for this reason that many of the Securitate were dragged into the street and kicked to death by mobs during the Revolution. Many people were touched with real pain because of this building in central Bucharest and what went on in the rooms.
By the time it was his turn to get on a plane and leave Bucharest, Nicolae was no longer amused by the games he was forced to play. While the Securitate may not always have had the authority to hurt or kill, while they may not have been in a position to justify an outright disappearance, they were always able to place a threat on the table and leave it there. They were never without this option, as it was the simplest thing to do. Only they really knew whether or not they were prepared to follow it through. And when they got the threat right, it was an enormous burden on the mind. Sometimes they would not get it right and it would just seem ridiculous. Mostly, they succeeded.
Inevitably, they figured him out. Despite the fact that he did indeed escape to Israel, the Securitate won the little game they’d been playing before Nicolae left. They found the lever controlling his self-confidence and they used it. It was a matter of simple psychology. Their greatest success came not in actually catching Nicolae at anything shameful or illegal, but in presenting to him evidence that his sense of security had been compromised.
To live at all comfortably in such a police state, it was important to have something in your life that was completely secure and private. A man had to be able to walk down the street with a secret folded into his brain, and know it was safe. A man had to have at least one source of unwavering trust. He had to trust himself and anyone else who knew his secret. It was this essential trust that made it possible for entire generations to live without real freedom, because within this trust there was a kind of freedom.
Nicolae owned a radio. It was a small Grundig his father bought for him in Berlin during the 1950s when he was stationed there at the embassy. It was commonplace for diplomats and dignitaries to bring back electronics from the West, and it was not so strictly controlled in the 1950s as it was later. Western radios generally were not tolerated well, especially good German radios like the Grundig, which were capable of scanning the shortwave bands to pick up Western radio broadcasts. Nicolae’s father knew that particular radio was capable of these things, but in his naiveté about his son, he did not imagine Nicolae would have any interest in such broadcasts.
Romanian citizens, even in the time of greatest strength for their Republic, when they depended so much on the friendship of the USSR, still they hated the Russians. The USSR would send touristing dignitaries to the Romanian countryside to hear Gypsy music, eat peasant food and treat the common people as their servants. If the tourists went away unhappy, soon they would return in tanks. That was the understood agreement with the Russians. In this environment, to hear someone from the West on the radio, someone not afraid of the Russians, to hear someone who might make a joke at the Russians’ expense and not suffer their anger, it was pure romance. Many people, especially young people, found ways to enjoy the illicit shortwave broadcasts, and for a long time it was relatively safe entertainment.
When the People’s Republic was strong, the government didn’t worry about what was being said about them on Radio Free Europe. But when times were difficult, and they soon became so, then the radios became a problem. For a time the government blocked the signals of Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and the BBC World Service. At some point they came to realize that almost anyone who could listen to these broadcasts was listening. And they weren’t listening just to get the football scores from England, though these were very important. There had been some high-profile defections from the country. Before it was commonplace to listen to the BBC, Nicolae and his friends almost never heard about a defection, except through the street network if the defector was in any way famous; a poet or filmmaker for instance. But then, someone from the graduating class at the university, someone Nicolae himself had met on many occasions, Valentin Cescu, a hobbyist radio technician and sometime broadcaster on student music shows, went to the seaside and never came back.
A very short time later they began to hear Cescu’s voice on their radios, coming through Voice of America. Now this, a young man so well-connected in Bucharest society, in fact a son of the Party, broadcasting back into Romania for Voice of America? This was too much for the government to tolerate. No longer could they scoff at the popular broadcasts as ignorant Western propaganda. Suddenly it was as though it were coming from directly inside the country. For them, it was nothing less than an intellectual insurrection. When Cescu satirized the powerful, he was able to use their names and popular nicknames. When he spoke of the imprisonment of the soul in Romania and the freedom to be found in West Berlin, it was all first-hand knowledge. And then, after speaking for a while, would he play some state-approved marches or patriotic folk songs as he had been directed to do when he worked in Bucharest? No, he would play the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin.’” He would play the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” He would play Frank Zappa. And to sign off, he would say simply, “Cescu, ciao.”
Right away the government set out to block his signal. The young people of Bucharest enjoyed a few weeks of hearing their friend on the VOA Romanian broadcast for two half-hours every day, and then suddenly nothing, static, just noise. It was a crushing loss for young people in Bucharest, and the beginning of even more exciting times.
It is the way with governments who would like to exercise complete control over the minds of their people, that they are often too easily satisfied in their small victories. It’s true they managed to block the signal reaching Bucharest, but they could not manage to block it all over the country. Services like VOA and Radio Free Europe were aware of the government’s transmission blocks, and were more than willing to build new transmitters at different border areas to try to slip their signal under the block. Soon, very soon in fact, it became known that the signal could be heard in Timisoara, a city very near the border with Yugoslavia. There was a rumour the US had sent a special ship into the Adriatic to blast the signal across. Crazy speculations like these abounded—special ships, special aircraft, livestock with transmitters in their coats. Crazy, impossible ideas, but wonderful fuel for gossip, and a new opportunity for the young in Bucharest.
Everyone knew someone in Timisoara, and eventually a network was arranged in which reel-to-reel tape recordings of Cescu’s broadcasts were passed around Bucharest. Nicolae’s group would arrange parties just to listen to the latest tape from Timisoara. Naturally, such activity was much more dangerous and risky than just listening to a radio program. A radio signal is the air, but a tape is something physical. A tape is evidence. Whereas, before the signal-block, listening to Cescu was simply a matter of closing the window so the neighbours could not hear; after the block, in the time of the tape network, there were tapes to be transported and hidden. An absolute trust in the network of like-minded friends became the one thing, the only thing. You did not lend the tape to anyone outside the network, and no one outside the network was to be aware of the parties at which the tapes were heard. Many networks existed already to share copies of banned books and pamphlets, and they were all extremely private things, dependent upon everyone in them being known to everyone else from a very young age. Otherwise, it would have been like handing the police evidence about yourself and your friends.
Among Nicolae’s small group of friends, very few things were taken at all seriously, but this was one. Any disruption of the network caused immense concern with everyone. There was an instance when one of their group misplaced a particularly dangerous book that had been in his possession, a new collection of poems by a poet who had been exiled years before. It had been published by an expat press in Paris, and smuggled into the country by someone’s father. The book was passed through Nicolae’s group in a hurry, and it was hot, not something anyone wanted to hang onto for very long, because it contained plainly anti-government sentiment and no less than a call to arms for the Romanian people against their oppressors. Very poetic, very exciting, but too hot for the time and place. They agreed on a system in which each member of the network would keep the book only three days before passing it on, and once everyone had seen it, they would gather to burn it together. One of a few sad book burnings the friends, by necessity, had to perform over the years.
When it came time for Ion Lupescu to pass the book on, he was unable to produce it. In fact, it was revealed that he had misplaced it on the very first night he had it, and had been vomiting from nervousness for the two days since. This network was normally not very serious a group of people, the same boys in fact who would toy with the street police after curfew, a few close girlfriends and one or two trusted professors from the university. But this was an ugly scene. Lupescu wept when he finally revealed his error, and Nicolae went so far as to strike him across the face. It was not out of anger that he struck, but fear, a fear they all suddenly felt at the thought of the book being connected to them. A small group walked Lupescu back to his apartment, and set about searching. This was not an easy task, as Lupescu’s parents and grandparents lived in the three small rooms of his apartment with him, and the network did not extend to members of family. There had been too many patriotic public betrayals of family members for any one of the young men to relax their guard at home.
Two of the group, Paul and Dan, were to distract the older members of the household with some chatter or other, to talk about the football match or some such thing, maybe to talk about some good fresh yogourt that was to be had at Dorobantilor market. These topics were always welcome in Bucharest at that time, and while they talked, Nicolae was to help Ion search the apartment for the book.
Their immediate assumption was that someone in the family had found the scandalous poetry and hidden it from Lupescu. This might be done for any one of many reasons. As a joke perhaps, though considering the nature of the book, it was not a very funny joke. Perhaps the book had been hidden from Ion out of fear; perhaps his mother had picked it up and, fearing her son would get himself into trouble with such a thing, had secreted it away. Most sickening, of course, was the thought that it had been taken as evidence and was right then in the possession of the authorities who were building a case against the little group of friends.
In the end, it was none of these. Knowing his friend to be susceptible to exaggeration, Nicolae suspected that rather than actually losing the book, Ion had merely hidden it away from himself through carelessness. He insisted Lupescu show him all the normal hiding places for such things in the apartment. In this time, every house and apartment in Bucharest contained any number of secret compartments and hiding places for the safe storage of whatever needed hiding away—religious icons, the inevitable stash of American dollars, compromising photographs and banned literature.
Lupescu showed him first the compartment he had fashioned beneath a heavy writing desk in the entranceway to his family apartment. Designed as a small and very narrow drawer beneath the back left-hand corner of the writing surface, the compartment hung from wire runners and could be completely removed and stashed beneath one’s coat in a matter of seconds. In place, it looked exactly like a simple wooden corner support, and in fact Lupescu had built a solid support in the exact same style for the back right-hand corner, as a decoy for his compartment. The false support even contained screw heads on its surface to make it appear permanently secured in place. The great advantage of this spot was the speed and quiet with which things could be hidden away or removed from it. Lupescu insisted it was not possible either his parents or grandparents were aware of this spot, as he had built it while they were away on a seaside holiday years before. The lost book of poetry would just have fit into this tricky drawer, and in fact this had been the spot Lupescu had chosen for it, but it was not there.
Two other spots, a traditional loose floorboard in the bedroom and a very public inside ledge beneath the stairwell leading to the street, were also empty. Hiding contraband in a public place was also very popular as it could not necessarily be linked to whomever had hidden it away. The disadvantage, of course, was that one often lost one’s contraband. This was the risk one took.
Lupescu was frantic as he showed Nicolae this last spot, having already conducted this exact search several times himself.
“You see,” he cried, “someone has the book. It can only be in one of these three places. Someone has found it.”
“Only these three—nowhere else?”
“I have only three places. What else do I have to hide?”
“What about temporary spots? I know when I am reading something I don’t want my father to see, I often put it directly onto the bookshelf in the living room. There is one top corner of the shelf; it has only old German novels my mother bought in Berlin. He has no interest in these, so if I need a spot in a hurry, I slip a book behind these novels. Anything like that?”
“No,” Lupescu moaned, “my grandparents are constantly rereading everything on the shelves. There is no safe place there.”
At this moment, Nicolae had an inspired memory. He remembered a time he’d spent working with Lupescu in the north. Through a connection he had in the tourist office, Ion had managed to get them both summer employment as tour guides. They took East German and Russian tourists through the monasteries around Suceava, and stayed the entire summer in a hotel in Câmpulung.
One morning after a night of vodka with the Russians, Nicolae had a need that could not be postponed and he crashed through the bathroom door without knocking. Ion sat on the toilet, reading an Italian fashion magazine given to him as a tip from one of the female comrades. As Nicolae came through the door, intent on the toilet, he caught Ion in a position embarrassing for all men. Ion made a desperate attempt to hide the magazine from Nicolae. It was a standard large book of colour photographs of beautiful Italian models. What clothes they wore in these photos were wonderfully colourful and fashionable, but, in fact, they wore very little. To hide the magazine, Ion slipped it between the toiletry cabinet and the wall. The story of Ion’s fashion magazine had become legend among Nicolae and his friends.
Nicolae excused himself to the toilet in the Lupescu apartment, and left Ion fretting in the drawing room, listening to Dan and Paul talk about yogourt. Indeed, there was a narrow space between the toiletry cabinet and the wall in this toilet as well, and there was the missing book of inflammatory poems. It had been flung far back into the space, as though in a terrible hurry, and was not readily noticeable from the toilet. Even had Lupescu remembered the possibility of this temporary spot, a spot he obviously used only in the most desperate moments, he might not have been able to see the book back there in the dark on first glance.
How the book came to rest in this spot, and why Ion forgot flinging it there, Nicolae did not want to know. He slipped the book into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and carried it with him out of the apartment. Only on the street did he open his jacket briefly to show Ion and the others that they had recovered the contraband. When Nicolae mentioned where it had been, Ion’s face at first lost colour and then slowly adopted the shade of undercooked beef. At the time, the friends were all too relieved to spend much effort on embarrassing Ion, but for years afterward, his passion for poetry was often referred to, to his great shame and everyone else’s great delight.
Because of this episode, the network’s involvement with the tapes of Cescu’s broadcasts was more tightly controlled. Rather then lending them around, the group appointed one person, Nicolae, to keep them safe and he was to bring them to parties and play them there. His preference therefore was to have parties at his own apartment. In that way, he would not have to travel with the tapes. With less than a week to go until he was to escort his wife and young son onto a plane and fly off to Tel Aviv, Nicolae was spending more and more time talking to his two Securitate at the station house in Bucharest. They no longer bothered with an excuse to pick him up on those last days. They were simply waiting for him a block from his office and he would walk with them to the station, the three of them commenting casually on the weather or the price of cigarettes.
It was a sad time for Nicolae. As much as he desired to leave Romania, to travel the world and eventually see places like Greenwich Village, Brooklyn, the blues clubs of Chicago and Saint Louis, as much as all that was suddenly within his reach, he was leaving behind everyone who had liked him and tolerated his bad behaviour, who had entertained him in his beautiful country made horrible.
What happens in such a circumstance, when the subject has not responded to all the previous stimuli and therapy, and instead continues to insist on leaving the country, on betraying the People, what happens is the tempo and focus of the game changes. Once the plane ticket is in hand, and the bags are packed, it is like the moment in backgammon when the two players have managed to safely move all their pieces past the other’s pieces. At this point, it is no longer a struggle, but simply a race. Also, the intensity and quality of the game changes, as in a good endgame of chess when each player has little more than their king, a few pawns and perhaps one meaningful piece. Suddenly, moves are at once more forceful, less subtle, full of ultimate importance. No more room for error. Little hope for a sudden and unexpected reversal of fortune after a blunder. Make a mistake at this stage, and it means the game.
Nicolae’s two police friends were no longer interested in convincing him to stay. He was leaving; they had accepted that. Their mission had changed, and they were now only interested in limiting the damage he might do from out of the country. There were no more suggestions that Nicolae was robbing his son of a homeland, and that he was unaware of the realities of life in the West. No more lectures about the plight of the blacks in the American south, or the destruction of entire races of North Americans for the sake of expansionist commerce. They had each of them lost and won parts of these little battles over the three previous years of afternoon meetings. Nicolae mostly allowed them to win the debates on ideology, since there was little to gain scoring intellectual points against men with such heavy fists. Occasionally, for his amusement, he would gently question assumptions, make them struggle for answers, but he never took the last word.
“I understand, Comrade,” he might say, “the American Negro lives in a state of extended economic slavery. They are beaten into a subhuman existence by the cruelties of the profit motive. What I don’t understand is why then are there so few Marxist American Negroes? Why is it we do not cultivate their oppression for our ends in extending the Revolution to the West?”
They would respond with an inevitable reference to Paul Robeson, as though one very well-paid entertainer sympathetic to Communist ideology could make a difference in a population in love with the idea of one day becoming as well-paid themselves.
Nicolae would nod and repeat, “Yes, Paul Robeson, I had forgotten,” and they would write something down in his file. But these discussions were now long past. The question was no longer would he leave? but was now what would he do once he had left? It had become important to convince Nicolae that Romania’s control over his life would continue once he had crossed the border for the last time. This last job was one of their specialties and, quite possibly, the thing they did best.
They succeeded by showing Nicolae a simple photograph and then uttering two small words. Three days before he was to leave, after a short talk about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, one of the officers opened Nicolae’s file, took out an eight-by-ten, black and white photographic print and placed it on the table in front of him. It was a photo of Nicolae, several years younger, on his birthday. He recognized the occasion immediately. In the photo, Nicolae was smiling the shy smile he put on whenever he received gifts. One of the gifts, plainly visible in the shot, was a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
This photo the police placed on the table in front of Nicolae. Then they both stood and left the room. On his way, the last of the two said “Miki, ciao.”
Photographs are often used as devices for code in wartime and between secret societies. It is simply a matter of predetermined meaning, or a meaning that can be gleaned from one’s understood intent. Imagine a revolutionary group working within a country for the overthrow of the government. Imagine this group works in blind cells who do not know each other, but who are being controlled by a central intelligence and who must be mobilized quickly and with little forewarning. This mobilization message must also be silent so as not to inflame suspicion among the authorities or give them advance warning of a coming strike. This can be accomplished by coding the message within an innocuous photographic image. A picture of a family picnic perhaps, where the order to strike appears as an apple in the centre of the picnic table. No apple means the attack has been called off, but if there is an apple, this is an order of immediate action. The very elements of the image have specific meaning, and if you speak the language of the photograph, the meaning is clear.
Nicolae’s photo meant, for certain, the police were aware of the Cescu broadcasts and Nicolae’s role in playing them for his small network of friends at parties. The photo, and their final words to him were meant to say we know about the Cescu tapes. All Nicolae’s work to hide the tapes in the special hiding places, all his network’s secrecy and all their pride at being so subversive, these things could be thrown away. None of these things were ever real, because plainly, the Securitate knew of the Cescu tapes.
But, there was more to be read in the image. It was a photo not just of Nicolae and the tape player, but of him, the tape player and his parents. Certainly there was no Cescu tape being played on the device when the photo was taken. This was taken the day he received the tape player, years before Cescu made his fateful trip to the seaside. Also, it was Nicolae’s practice to keep the existence of the illicit tapes from his parents, as his father would have sniffed treason and his mother would have worried for his safety. Yet, there were his parents in the photo, smiling widely at him with the new tape recorder, the tape recorder they have just given their son, the son who will someday betray his country.
Here then the police were showing him the subtle consequences of his decisions. Here they were beginning to whisper to him. You know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, and we also know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, but if we want to, we can make them involved. Yes, you are escaping our control, but if you doubt our continued power, please take a look at these two smiling people in the background, and know that you have given us control over them.
This whispering would visit Nicolae every night until that Christmas morning in 1989 when he woke in his bed in Montreal to the sound of his wife shrieking from the kitchen, “They’ve shot him, the bastard, they’ve killed him and that bitch of a wife as well.” They watched CNN all that day, watched Ceauşescu’s body slump against the wall over and over.
There was a final message in the photograph, the most insidious suggestion, and the favourite message Securitate deliver. Nicolae sat alone in that room, listening to the clickings and scrapings behind the walls, staring at the photograph, trying to read its code, trying to decipher what it is they wanted to tell him. And then, like a sudden blow from behind, he remembered who took the photo. Because of course the photographer had been in the room at the birthday, he was right there in front of Nicolae, smiling as well and telling Nicolae to get that stupid look off his face. He was wearing the cream from the cake on his nose and getting a little too drunk on the ţuică he brought for the occasion.
He was the one who always brought a camera, and the one who developed his own photographs in a small darkroom in the basement of his apartment block. He was the one who controlled so carefully the distribution of prints so they might never fall into the wrong hands. He was the trust Nicolae had in that small circle of friends he had known his entire life. And here he was, invisible but undeniably present in the police station in downtown Bucharest three days before Nicolae was to leave for Israel.
“On the plane to Tel Aviv, I tried not to think any more of the two fellows in the station back in Bucharest,” Nicolae says across the backgammon board, wiping sweat from the top of his head with a balled handkerchief. “I tried not to think of the people I was leaving behind and the painful doubts I had packed into our luggage. I tried not to think about photographs and my good friend Petre Dobrescu, the smiling photographer. I remember pointing out the window for Dragos to look at clouds—the boy had never seen clouds from above. I held my wife’s hand and smiled at the pretty Israeli stewardesses, hoping for a free drink. I tried to imagine what waited for us on the ground, and could not. I tried to watch the film they were showing, and again could not.”
Tony listens to the older man intently, and just as intently he rakes the board with his eyes, trying to discover some strategic advantage, some way for him to win, but it seems impossible.
“Then, I noticed two men sitting in the centre section of seats. They were a row ahead of us, and they passed a matchbox back and forth between them. One man would take the matchbox and shake it in his fingers, as though to shake up the matches, except whatever was being shaken did not sound like matches. That man would then slide open the box and both men would peer in. The one who had shaken the box would then say something in Hebrew, and both men would nod. Then the matchbox changed hands and the second man shook, peered, said something, et cetera, over and over again. I watched this strange procedure for a long time, and finally, overcome with curiosity, I left my seat and walked past them in order to see what mystery they were sharing. In the matchbox was a small pair of dice.
Late in the evening, the doors to the wedding hall are opened, sucking in gentle summer air and the scent of pines, a slow cleansing of cigar haze and the smudge of beeswax candles, the sweat steam of musicians and dancers. The celebration slows and calms, catching its breath and resting before beginning again. A lone violinist scratches a slow, romantic waltz. It is a time for touching hands and cheeks, for fixing hair and dresses. Old people sit down. Stories continue around the backgammon board. Tony and Nicolae play the fourth game of a match of five. Other men take notice and crowd around. A foreigner is holding his own in the national game. It’s an oddity.
Spectator chatter weaves through the games, interrupts the stories. There is a general willing of the dice for Nicolae. There is laughing and swearing. Plates of food are brought to the players from the never-empty side tables. Tony eats the blackened skin of a young pig, killed that very morning and roasted whole over a firepit dug into the earth outside the reception hall. The delicacy is salty and rich with burnt oils. He eats anchovy fillets mashed into soft butter on fresh crusty bread, pickled cucumbers and pickled hot peppers all from the local farms. Finally, he is handed a candied plum from the orchard of Irina’s father, one of few plums not used to make ţuică. Ţuica is in the air, the smell of it lifting from the forearm skin of all the men crowding the table.
Diana appears behind Nicolae, shy at first around so many men who knew her as a child, but with laughter and ţuică, heartened into joining the profane cheering. Her face is flushed from dancing, a greenish-tan dress open at the collar, a neck slick with perspiration. She looks away from Tony’s eyes, and smiles at everything. He remembers how he caught sight of her in the plum trees earlier in the day, picking the fruit that will become next year’s ţuică. She had been seated in the upper branches, as though in the balcony of a theatre, carefully twisting the ripened plums from the branches, rubbing each one in both hands to test the firmness. At that time as well she had looked away from his eyes, and smiled. She had brought each plum to her nose, closed her eyelids and inhaled deeply.
The men notice Tony noticing her. There is a roll of laughter and Diana’s face glows brighter in the candlelight. She yells back at the men, spitting fire, and they laugh even louder. Tony loses the game, stuck on the bar reading a newspaper while Nicolae quickly clears his perfectly blocked house. The match stands at two games apiece.
“My dear niece. She has been challenged to kiss you if you win. She has agreed, but I don’t think you want to know what she said about you.”
Nicolae smiles at Tony from across the board and scratches at his goatee. He lights another cigar and picks up the dice.
“Do not think she wants to. She’s just responding to a dare from the men. She cannot resist a dare. It is my job to make sure she does not have to kiss you. Please, nothing personal. For the honour of my niece, you understand.”
“I understand.” Tony says, but he has a physical memory of Diana’s lips and, caught in a fog of drink and borrowed joy, he feels a need for more.
Another loud roll of laughter from the circle of men, and finally, Diana looks directly at Tony. She is defiant, proud. She sticks out her tongue and places both hands on her uncle’s shoulders. Everyone slaps Tony’s back at once. The bone dice clatter on the board.
“Six and six, the emperor’s opening.” Nicolae winks and sets up two solid blocks at the bar. Diana cheers and claps her hands, spins on her toes. A full glass of ţuică slides across the table to Tony.
“You will need it, for the disappointment.”
Unable to catch up in the race, Tony satisfies himself with blocking his house and holding two men back in the desperate belief they’ll have a chance at a capture. A strategy of last hope, a prayer to the dice. When the roll comes, it feels as nothing other than a gift of fate. Nicolae is on the bar and trapped. Diana shrieks and tries to run away, but several men catch at her flailing arms and hold her in place, cursing. The match ends, three wins to two for Tony. Tony drinks his glass of ţuică at once and sits back in his chair. In the crowd of men he recognizes Dragos smiling at him. Dragos raises a glass to him and drinks as well.
“Let her go if she wants to go,” Tony offers. “Winning is enough.”
Nicolae stands and holds his niece’s hand.
“I’m sorry Diana. There are worse bets to lose, believe me.”
“She’s just embarrassed,” Dragos laughs, “because she knows she can’t do it without liking it.”
His arm suffers for the joke. Diana’s fist flies through the crowd, bruising him.
“Tony, you’d better hope she doesn’t kiss like she punches. Not this time at least.”
And his other arm suffers.
Tony feels his chair being lifted beneath him. He is turned from the table into the spreading crowd. Diana walks from the edge of her friends and relatives, suddenly onstage. She turns her back to Tony and curses the laughing crowd. When she turns back, she is smiling. She slips off a long silk scarf she has tied around her waist, and twirls it into rope between her hands. It feels cool on the back of Tony’s neck, then suddenly tight and hot. Diana lands on his knees and draws him into her lips with the scarf.
The kiss is violent and contemptful. The heat of her forehead crushes into his ear. As she begins to pull away, Tony tastes her tongue on his, a final flash of anger, delicious and warm. To Tony, his reward seems to last much longer than the couple of seconds Diana gives him. The scarf slides from his neck and trails along the floor as she walks away lashing out with her fists at the drunken, hysterical crowd. They part to let her pass and Tony, confused and humiliated, watches her walk past the small podium where the Cup has stood since the party began. The podium is empty.