ROMANIA

 

I was relieved when the Romanian customs official, preoccupied by a Romanian rugby team returning from London laden with semi-licit electronic treasures, waved me through without examining the contents of my suitcase, which included a memoir by a British intelligence officer of his days in Romania during and just after the war, and a biography of King Carol (both with their dust jackets removed, to avoid undue ‘provocation’). These and other books eminently worthy of confiscation were destined for Romanian intellectuals whose names had been given me in London, and whose addresses I had committed to memory on the train to the airport. In the event of my memory failing I also had them, encoded on scraps of paper stuffed into odd pockets. I was uncertain whether I should remember my own code, though I had little doubt the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, would be able to crack it with ease. I was not cut out for clandestinity.

I was met by a Comtourist guide. She was holding up a placard saying Welcome Mr. Daniels, and though this was a pure formality – for which I had paid an agency specialising in travel to Romania quite liberally in advance – it nevertheless gave me a slight pang of conscience. For here I was, entering yet another country under false pretences, as a tourist rather than as a writer. The argument that I was helping to expose the evil that I supposed existed there did not altogether console me: for the evil I expected to expose was in large part the consequence of the doctrine that the end justifies the means.

Besides, the Comtourist guide belied the clumsy name of her organisation, and was young and charming. She had those soft, liquid brown eyes over which pre-war writers about Romania used sometimes to wax sickly. She was a medical student just entering her clinical training. I explained that I too was a doctor, who spent half his time practising and half travelling the world (I omitted my literary activities). My way of life I knew, of course, to be beyond her wildest dreams. After qualification she would most probably be sent to serve for several years in some unspeakably dreary concrete town with no meat or butter. But I assumed that, as a guide for foreigners, she was, despite her charm, a trusted employee of the Securitate, for whom some said a fifth of the Romanian people informed. I wanted to confront her ideology with a strong draught of freedom. This was before I realised that no one in Romania believed in the ideology, least of all its guardians, and that ideology was the last thing to motivate an agent of the Securitate. I had not yet readjusted once more to that strange looking-glass world where thought and speech, belief and action, were so radically divorced.

‘I would very much like to travel,’ she said quietly and humbly.

My flaunting of my own liberty in the face of her unfreedom seemed callous to me now, mere boasting.

We drove through the semi-darkness towards my hotel. The streets were ill-lit, the lights from the apartment blocks gloomy and yellowish, like the pages of old books. I wanted to ask the guide about Romanian hospitals, but she could scarcely have spoken frankly. Cars for foreigners are bugged, according to old Romania hands, and the driver might only have appeared to understand no English. But it mattered very little in any case, since I later found many people to describe medical services in Romania. They disagreed as to fine detail and I suspected that some of them exaggerated, but all were agreed that elderly people, especially from the country, were often denied treatment on the grounds of their uselessness to the economy.

Perhaps in this they were not entirely unfortunate, since sanitary conditions in hospitals for ordinary people were deplorable, there being insufficient nurses and no cleaners. Often there were two patients to a bed, drugs were unavailable and equipment ancient or broken down. Births were not registered until six months or later, an administrative method of keeping the infant mortality rate under control. Bribes were essential to obtain treatment, officially free. Doctors would not operate, nurses would not help patients, without the payment of ciubuc, Romanian baksheesh. Rags and scraps were often used for dressings in the absence of bandages and ambulances sometimes failed to attend cases for lack of fuel. Attached to gynaecological wards were policemen whose job it was to search out women who had illegally procured abortions. They checked the temperature charts of all miscarrying women, in whom fever was a crime. The dictator Ceausescu had decreed that there were not enough Romanians and it was every woman’s patriotic duty to have at least five children (after which they might have an abortion legally if they chose). Childless men more than twenty-five years old were subject to a special tax.

We arrived at the hotel. It was in the outskirts of Bucharest, across the road from the Scinteia building, an enormous pile in the wedding-cake baroque style of the late Stalin era. Atop its tower was a red light, a beacon in the air-raid darkness of the city. A fraternal gift of the Soviet Union to Romania, the building contained the headquarters of the Party daily, Scinteia, which means Spark (as does the Russian Iskra, the name of the Party newspaper that played so important a part in pre- revolutionary Bolshevik history). The Spark was, of course, monumentally dull – unless one happened to be obsessively interested in the official activities of President Ceausescu and his wife. In the massive and clean forecourt of the building, constantly swept by a peasant woman in a scarf, stood a Pharaonic statue of the Spark’s onlie begetter, Lenin. The rear of the edifice, which I later examined with some interest, was still like a building site, wasteland churned into mud and scattered with unused concrete blocks, the stone facing of the walls fast crumbling away. The front of the Scinteia building was all state power; the rear, neglect and decay.

When I arrived in Romania, it had been a communist state for over forty years. Before the takeover, engineered by the Russians, the Romanian communist party had 1000 members. The leadership soon began to quarrel and held show trials for one another. A ‘hero project’, the Danube-Black Sea Canal, which is said to have consumed the lives of 100,000 prisoners, was instituted, but never completed.

My guide and I parted at the hotel, her duty done. The hotel was of the socialist-Hiltonian type, a grey concrete tower with insufficient lifts so that one sometimes spent fifteen or twenty minutes debating whether to cut one’s losses and climb the fire escape or wait just a little bit longer. How well I knew these hotels! I anticipated correctly the lack of plugs for either the basin or the bath, the mouldy jaundiced light, the mildewy odour of mummified dust emanating from the curtains, the inextinguishability of the bedside radio so that a faint lisp of rhythm without melody seeped from the headboard of the bed. Of course the telephone was tapped; and according to the chief of Romanian intelligence, Ion Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978 and wrote a scurrilous book (not without help, one suspects), there were microphones and infrared cameras installed in the walls of all hotel rooms used by foreigners. Welcome to Romania.

I can resist the allure of television everywhere except in hotel rooms. Hardly had the porter-cum-police-informer left with his 25 lei tip (whether it was generous or mean depended on whether one calculated it at the official or black market rate) than I switched on the clumsy monster in the corner. I discovered that it would not remain on unless I kept the button pressed hard down with my thumb, which soon became numb with the effort. That was not all: my mind was also soon rendered numb, deadened by the solemn recitation, lasting fifteen minutes, of the harvest results of farms around the country. The figures were as honest as the results of plebiscites awarding dictators further seven-year terms of office: Farm Number 3 of Ploiesti had harvested 1427.36 kilos of tomatoes per hectare, while Farm Number 7 of Iasi, two hundred and fifty miles away, had harvested 1427.19 kilos.

This programme, I later discovered, was no aberration: the newsreader, who addressed his ‘esteemed viewers’ (of whom I must have constituted almost half, I should imagine), intoned the harvest results every night. When he finished, there was an equally enthralling programme about Romania’s agricultural and industrial progress, thanks to the untiring and ceaseless efforts of the President of the Republic and General Secretary of the Party, Nicolae Ceausescu. Five minute sequences of tractors ploughing the land, with close-ups of the upturned soil, accompanied by a droning commentary, were followed by similar sequences (all in black and white) of slightly outmoded machinery whirring round producing something or other – there was never any indication of what, production being an end in itself, the ultimate triumph, regardless of whether anyone wanted or could use the thing produced. And then came sequences of factory workers lined up in rows at factory meetings, listening to – or hearing – speeches which they greeted with prolonged applause and chanting of Ceausescu’s name. Later I was told that at both ends of each row there was a Securitate agent to ensure no one stopped clapping or chanting ahead of schedule.

Every twenty minutes or so, the programme would be interrupted by a burst of martial music, a picture of the Romanian flag fluttering in slow motion, and then by aerial shots of a vast complex of concrete apartment blocks. This was an advertisement for the 14th Party Congress, to be held in four weeks’ time.

Later in my visit I discovered that people in Bucharest would queue for hours to copy down the list of Bulgarian television programmes displayed on the noticeboards of Bulgarian institutions in the city. That Bulgarian television should be considered a relief from boredom is surely a phenomenon entirely new in world history, something original and without precedent. The Bulgarians, long accustomed to Romanian assumptions of superior sophistication, delighted in the reversal wrought by the Conducator and his wife.

I went down to dinner, to the restaurant reserved for foreign guests. In the lobby of the hotel there milled half a dozen young men, watching for counter-revolution, dressed in suits that looked as though the linings were stuffed with pebbles.

‘Are you group?’ asked the waiter.

I confessed to being an individual and the waiter frowned. There were several clean and empty tables in the restaurant, but eventually he managed to find me a seat prickly with crumbs at a table that looked as though a 17th century Cossack feast had just finished there. It was a fine cure for appetite.

‘What you like?’ asked the waiter.

This turned out to be a superfluous question since – for individuals – there was only boiled beef and potatoes. The beef was as dry as the Atacama, the fried potatoes half-cooked, greasy, cold and infested with black bits.

‘Vegetables?’ I asked speculatively. ‘Salad?’

‘No,’ said the waiter.

For dessert, there was chocolate cake in which lubricating oil had been substituted for butter.

Before the war, Romania was celebrated for the excellence of its cuisine. Nowadays artistry in the presentation of meals has been replaced by artistry in the concealment of microphones in ashtrays on restaurant tables.

I walked out into the darkness of a Bucharest night to digest Romania’s equivalent of nouvelle cuisine. In the street I glanced behind me to see whether one of the men in lumpy suits who hung about on the steps outside the hotel was following me. No, I was alone. I quickened my pace just in case one of them changed his mind – I had been filled in London with suspicion and unease by stories of such men whose deliberately clumsy tailing was designed to frighten and intimidate.

It was October; there was an autumnal chill in the air and one could feel the fallen leaves underfoot. Such was the darkness away from the hotel that one could barely make out the ground beneath one’s feet. Occasionally a car would go by, rattling over the cobbles, its lights piercing the blackness. Towards me came a small group of drunken revellers, each with a bottle grasped round the neck. In other countries I might have felt slight apprehension, but not here: one of the very few benefits of communism is the apparent rarity of street crime (though the Soviet Union has recently, and for the first time, revealed its very high murder rate, crime mostly of the low-technology domestic variety). The revellers passed by, not noticing me. They were engaged in hilarity, which almost shocked me. How could anyone laugh in Romania? Desperation, hysteria? I was forgetting my own belief that life can never be encompassed by a few simple propositions. My journeys were turning me into an ideologist with rigid preconceptions, a case of travel narrowing the mind.

Bucharest was once known as the Paris of the Balkans, and next morning it was easy to see why. Many of the tree-lined streets and boulevards were built in imitation of Haussman’s Paris. There is even an Arc de Triomphe in its own Place de I’Étoile, erected in 1922 in commemoration of the fleeting victories of the Romanian army during the First World War (before it was comprehensively defeated). Along the Soseaua Kiseleff are the homes, of the size and style of Normandy châteaux, of the former haute bourgeoisie. At the Piata Victoriei, where huge apartment blocks worthy of New Socialist Man were under construction, I caught my first glimpse of Ceausescu’s plans to remodel the city, thus achieving immortality. Down the Bulevardul Ana Ipatescu, the architecture becomes cheerfully eclectic in style, a jumble of Second Empire, Bavarian Mad Ludovician, Bauhaus, and Viennese Classico-bombastic. Aesthetes tend to tut-tut over this admixture (‘a savage hotch-potch’, it was once called), displaying as it does the jackdaw or magpie tendency of the pre-war Romanians to appropriate the surface glitter of the Occident: but I found it charming and, in its overall effect, original.

I walked long distances in the centre of the city. I was surprised to discover that many of the women were not only beautiful but elegant. There were also old ladies who, in their attention to their clothes and jewellery, would not have been out of place in the cafés of Vienna, eating Cellinian sculptures of cake and cream.

Being myself somewhat inattentive to personal appearance, in general I consider it of little importance in others, within wide though definite limits. Yet here in Bucharest elegance took on quite another quality, so that it was not merely pleasing to the eye but moving. For when one considered what was commonly available in the shops – cloth dyed the drab colours of hospital corridors, as in Albania – one began to appreciate the effort it cost women to dress well, the hours of frustrating search for material and then of needlework. Their elegance was not just vanity, therefore: it was a denial and rejection of the values imposed on them by the dictatorship, which everywhere preferred uniformity to individuality.

And so it was a strange thing to see an elegant young woman scramble for a place on a battered and overcrowded bus with large tanks of liquid methane on its roof (petrol and diesel being in such short supply), giving it the appearance of a huge mechanical scuba diver. And it was stranger still to experience the cafés of Bucharest, the last pathetic remnant of an otherwise vanished way of life. Here waiters in white jackets served customers who sat forlornly at outside tables drinking exactly the same drink, either acorn coffee or the nauseatingly sweet, brownish, sticky and chemical liquid with a bitter aftertaste known as orange, a mythical fruit mentioned in ancient texts: for it was beyond the organising powers of these cafés to offer a choice, even had choice not been a suspect concept from the ideological point of view. (Was it not Engels himself who said that freedom was the recognition of necessity?) The Plaza Athénée Hotel, which before the war was a louche hotbed of political rumour and intrigue, and where every employee was now said to be an agent of the Securitate, had a coffee shop that sold only one kind of chemical cake and no drinks at all, not even water. To have coffee and cake in Bucharest meant visiting more than one establishment and could well have been the work of an afternoon.

My first destination was the infamous Centru Civic, with its immense Boulevard of the Triumph of Socialism. Starting in 1984, more than 9000 homes were demolished to construct this insane monumental avenue, as were many churches, some of them ancient. An entire quarter of the old city was destroyed in a concerted assault not only on the monuments of the past, but on the past itself. And Ceausescu’s idea of ‘systemisation’, whereby every Romanian was forced to live in near-identical apartment blocks, was meant to apply not only to peasants, whose ancestral villages were to be swept away, but to town-dwellers who lived in the unplanned and anarchic towns of the past.

Were these just the schemes of a mad dictator? Alas, no. There are plenty of mad dictators in the world, but only those steeped in the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, with its utter contempt for the ‘unenlightened’ past and for men as they are, combined with its boundless optimism about the perfectibility of Man and the gloriousness of his distant future, would engage in social engineering on so vast a scale, at once tragic and comically half-baked. According to the philosophy, the desired homogenisation of the world will have immense advantages (other than the convenience of the secret police):

 

The present poisoning of the air, water and land [wrote Engels] can be put to an end only by the fusion of town and country.

 

And Lenin had an even more poetic vision of the future. Socialism, he said, would bring:

 

…a redistribution of the human population (thus putting an end both to rural backwardness, isolation and barbarism, and to the unnatural concentration of vast masses of people in the big cities).

 

Under communism, green is the tree of theory, but grey is life.

The Boulevard of the Triumph of Socialism is immensely long and wide, flanked on both sides by grandiose apartment blocks. Some of them were completed three years ago but have never been occupied. Recently, however, Ceausescu had opened the stores at ground level. They were supposed to be elegant, indeed Parisian, with brass fittings, polished plate glass, marble floors and gilded mirrors; but like the food, the elegance was ersatz, and missed the mark. It was elegance by decree; by decree, moreover, of a man without taste, of an apprentice shoemaker (as Ceausescu once was) who found himself in the position of Louis XIV.

Furthermore, the stores were not stores (a practical illustration of the truth of dialectical materialism which, it must be remembered, denies the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction). For they sold nothing: their stock of luxury items was for display, not sale. And these luxury items were themselves ersatz, if approached too closely. The packaging of cosmetics, for example, imitated that of cosmetics in the west; but the printing was shoddy, the ink ran, the gold lettering missed its allotted place, the cellophane went yellow. And this, presumably, was the best that could be produced in Romania, for nothing but the best was worthy of the great boulevard. A few ‘customers’, their voices hushed as in a museum, wandered desultorily through these strange Aladdin’s caves of bad tennis racquets, unpurchasable sun-beds and Potemkin home appliances, no doubt recalling (how could they ever forget?) that not so much as two hundred yards away from the Triumph of Socialism a queue, hours long, had formed on the rumour of sausage or bacon.

No adequate word yet exists in the English language for these extraordinary establishments: pseudostores or parashops, perhaps.

The central reservation of the boulevard was given over to gardens and an immense system of fountains, constructed of concrete moulded into floral motifs of outstanding vulgarity. One could always tell when the Conducator (the Romanian word for Führer) was about to go by, or had just gone by: the fountains, otherwise dry, were switched on. Except for policemen, whose purpose was to bully pedestrians who, as a matter of principle, had to be told to walk along a path other than the one they had chosen, and peasant women in kerchiefs who swept the ground with witches’ brooms, few people lingered. And at the top of a slight incline that overlooked the whole length of the boulevard was the building that, like Dracula’s castle in a horror movie, made them look at their feet and hurry on.

This was the People’s Palace which, though still incomplete, had already become the subject of legend. Some said it had 4000 rooms, others 12,000; some said it contained Ceausescu’s necropolis, others that there were as many rooms underground as above; some said it was for the dictator’s personal use, others that all the ministries would have offices there, yet others that it would also house the central gaol and torture chambers for political prisoners. But everyone was agreed that Ceausescu visited the palace daily to supervise its construction, changing the plans constantly according to whim, thus delaying its completion.

The People’s Palace was a vast edifice – larger in volume by three times than Versailles – in an architectural style best described, perhaps, as MGM-Babylonian. No doubt it was of the utmost solidity, designed to withstand both earthquake and nuclear war, but its white stone facade, eight storeys high, with every order of architectural decoration known to Hollywood, gave it the appearance of a film set. One half-expected thousands of extras, carrying spears and wearing breastplates, suddenly to swarm all over it. As you approached, however, you ceased to smile: for at the railings surrounding it were stationed every fifty yards or so brute-faced young men in lumpy suits who clutched walkie-talkies as closely as yuppies clutch mobile telephones. They eyed you with suspicion; a smile would have aroused their dumb hatred. Curiosity, like photography, was not permitted, especially with regard to the huge black subterranean entrance, wide enough to take tanks, that gaped beneath the entire structure.

The People’s Palace was intended as an advertisement, not of a product, but of men’s individual insignificance in comparison with the power of the state. Even the methods employed in its construction tended to this glorious conclusion. One might have expected, in a European country theoretically dedicated to technological advancement and modernisation, that a vast project like the People’s Palace would have been undertaken with the latest methods available. On the contrary: I watched workers sifting powdered cement for stones by hand, like housewives sifting flour before baking a cake. The machines employed were few and by no means modern: an army of workers was used instead. This had the advantage of emphasising the Pharaonic nature of the whole enterprise, thousands of powerless helots having been dragooned into labour by the will of one man, their individual contributions an infinitesimal part of the worthless and whimsical whole.

At first I was amused by the palace, by its preposterous architectural rodomontade; then I was fascinated by it, for it seemed to me to raise in tangible form the very questions that my Romanian journey sought to answer. What was the nature of the authority that could direct the efforts of an entire nation not only to the construction of something utterly without merit, either utilitarian or aesthetic, but to the destruction of everything worthwhile from the past? Finally, I found that I could not look at the palace a moment longer: it made me too angry for my own good. I could no more stare at it than I could stare at the sun; I felt a strange tension building up within me that might lead at any moment to an irrational outburst. I walked away.

How did it affect Romanians, this Versailles without beauty, this tyrannous monstrosity? I watched as ordinary people went by, searching their faces for signs of anger or frustration. But there were none; they looked neither right nor left, but downwards or straight ahead as they hurried by. Tyranny had made them inscrutable (the Romanians were once known for their southern, or Latin volatility): they had adopted the only defence possible in the circumstances, what the Germans of the Nazi era called ‘inner emigration’.

It was time to visit the people whose names I had been given in London. I felt at first a certain reluctance: fear. This was irrational, for the worst that could have happened to me as a foreigner was arrest, interrogation and expulsion, all grist to my mill, and certainly not without interest. But fear in Romania is like a miasma, the ethereal, gaseous product of the earth that in the middle ages was thought to originate and communicate disease. The means by which this terrible contagion spread was one of the things that interested me.

Do not take risks, I was told in London; if, on your way to see someone you suspect you are followed, abort the visit. Err on the side of caution: the consequences for the person you are visiting can be drastic. Sometimes (I was told) the Securitate wish to intimidate you by making it clumsily obvious they are following you; at other times, they follow with the greatest of skill, so that it is difficult to detect them.

I hired a car during my two weeks in Romania. About nine tenths of the cars there are Dacias, Renaults of old-fashioned design built in Romania. In this classless society, the colour of one’s car indicated one’s occupation or rank – black cars for very senior apparatchiks, white for directors of institutions, pastel colours for people of intermediate importance. My first car was red (until I had to change it for a light blue one when I ran out of petrol because the contents of the tank had been siphoned off and the fuel gauge interfered with in the hotel car park). The car had a special number plate to make me conspicuous to all authority. As I drove around Bucharest, I glanced nervously at my rear view mirror every few seconds. Any car that remained behind me for more than a hundred yards was following me; every policeman who spoke into his walkie-talkie was relaying information about my movements. It was only after I had driven circuitously round back streets that I was able to convince myself I was alone. Naturally, I parked at some distance from my destination; and even then I thought that anyone standing casually in a doorway was observing me.

Having abandoned the car, I walked swiftly and purposefully to the address. It was important, I was told, that I should look confident rather than furtive. But my frequent glances over my shoulder might have given me away, had anyone been observing. I was mildly put out that, after all my elaborate precautions, no one was.

I cannot, of course, describe my visits in too great detail: to do so might endanger those I visited. Romanians were supposed to report, verbatim, any conversations they had with foreigners to the police within twenty-four hours, and failure to comply with this regulation was taken as evidence of disloyalty and even dissidence. It was not actually forbidden to speak: only to say anything.

The people I met were literary intellectuals who knew either English or French. They were not a representative sample of the population, but they told me nothing about daily life in Romania that was not confirmed by people I subsequently met by chance as I drove around the country. Their privations were both physical and spiritual; the former would have been supportable, they said, had it not been for the latter. They saw no light at the end of their tunnel; they were gloomy and dispirited.

The first man whom I contacted, an economist, had just spent four hours queuing for eggs (and failed to obtain them). Did the fact that such experiences had been commonplace for a generation render them more acceptable, less aggravating? A Swiss friend of mine once saw people in Bucharest fighting over potatoes. One effect of the unceasing and time-consuming search for everyday commodities was a general slowing of the pace of life. In all probability, the Romanians were never celebrated for their expeditiousness; but with the coming of the new dispensation, a task which in western Europe would have been the work of a few minutes (such as buying butter or light bulbs), to be fitted into the day’s myriad other activities, had become the legitimate work of a whole afternoon or even of a day. Calculated by the length of time expended upon it, queuing was probably every Romanian’s most important waking activity.

In the Era of Light, as Ceausescu sometimes called his ‘epoch’ when he grew tired of calling it Romania’s Golden Age, there was such a shortage of domestic gas that, during winter, people had to cook after midnight, when the pressure was a little higher. Even so, it took half an hour to heat sufficient water for a cup of tea. The light of the Era of Light was, of course, strictly metaphorical: during winter, when there was not an outright power cut, rooms were allowed not more than one 40 watt bulb each.

Some might consider this ecologically sound, the epitome of the ‘sustainable lifestyle’. Let them, therefore, inspect Romanian factories, which used up the country’s power and whose principle product was pollution.

There were shortages of almost everything (even in my privileged capacity as tourist I was not to eat fresh vegetables once in Romania). There was a black market in books – not in forbidden ones alone, but in all kinds. A novel might cost half a month’s salary (I hope I cannot hear embittered authors murmuring that at least they appreciated literature at its true worth there). As for coffee and Kent cigarettes, those – not crumpled, dirty lei – were the true currency of Romania.

But it was the stifling spiritual atmosphere of Romania that most preoccupied the people I met. Everyone lived in fear; fear was the universal, all-embracing condition, the daily experience of everyone in the country. I had sensed it in North Korea; but my inability to communicate with the Koreans, as well as the enormous cultural differences between us, kept alive in my mind the possibility that I was misinterpreting what I saw. Here in Romania there was no such possibility: whenever I entered a house, conversation was postponed until the telephone was removed from the room, it being assumed not only that telephones were routinely tapped, but that there was a microphone within each apparatus to monitor private opinions expressed in the home. One of the people I visited, who thought himself under constant surveillance, drew all the curtains and turned on the radio before he indicated it was safe to speak.

Was he paranoid? These precautions, it seemed to me, were more likely to draw the attention of the police to him than the reverse; but he told me they were necessary because he had been called to the police station for interrogation after the last foreigner (who, like me, thought he was not being followed) had visited him, and though he had been offered no physical violence there, he had endured prolonged verbal abuse. Next time it might be worse. Was he dramatising his situation to impress me, a person of limited experience? He had a strange intensity about him, a burning quality, that reminded me forcibly of Solzhenitsyn. Was it real, this similarity, or assumed? Everything he did was on a grand scale: giving me food, bread and cheese, he cut hunks with the passion of Goya’s Saturn devouring his own children. He was writing a novel in the style of Gogol (realism was insufficient to capture the madness of Romania, he said) and he wanted me to find a way of smuggling his manuscript out to a publisher in London. Once it was published, he added, he would have become a full-blown dissident rather than an unknown man living, as he now was, on the margins of clandestinity. Therefore it was essential that I and others provide him with the maximum of protective publicity, for it was only limelight from the west that prevented the regime from ‘disappearing’ its opponents.

Various people suggested to me that he was an agent provocateur and warned me to be wary of him. I felt out of my depth, or as though I had, like Alice, stepped through the looking glass and entered a world where everything was familiar yet changed, where nothing was what it appeared to be, where ignorance was guilt and trust foolishness.

 

Logic [wrote Elie Wiesel on visiting the Soviet Union] will not help you here. You have your logic, they have theirs, and the distance between you two cannot be bridged by words. The more you see of them the surer you become that everything you have thought or known till now is worthless; here you must begin anew.

 

I did not take the Gogolian manuscript, of course; but I did take a message of love to an English woman whom he had met briefly in Bucharest a few weeks before. It was not a very satisfactory way to carry on a love affair, but the only way open to him in the circumstances.

I discussed the prevailing state of fear with everyone I met. Each had his own interpretation, but all were agreed that it resulted not only from physical threat but was something deeper. Of course, the regime was prepared to be brutal if need be: it had no ‘bourgeois sentimentality’ about the worth of individuals, or about their rights. It had tortured and killed many, many people. Yet the fear was not merely that of brutality. It was something subtler, deeper, less tangible, almost puzzling and enigmatic. One might almost call it ontological. Certain intellectuals even blamed themselves or the Romanian people, implying that the traditional Romanian craftiness, passivity and patience exhibited in the face of overwhelmingly powerful enemies during the past millennium was really nothing more glorious than cowardice or pusillanimity. One of them mentioned a student in the city of Brasov who had immolated himself publicly the year before like Jan Palach, the Czech student who set fire to himself in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But unlike Jan Palach, the Romanian student’s sacrificial protest found no answering echo in the country: shamefully, even his name was unknown, and almost everyone had forgotten his very existence. This was not because Ceausescu’s regime enjoyed support, far from it: it was simply that Romanians were unable to organise opposition, both because of their fierce individualism and because the Securitate would soon infiltrate an organisation of more than two or three. They lacked the requisite determination to free themselves: theirs was a thousand year Reich.

A lack of determination is not necessarily an unattractive quality. Alone of the people I met, the Great Writer of the Romanian Land (or agent provocateur) possessed the hard edge of ruthlessness; but I preferred the others, though their achievements might in the end be less than his, for they spoke as much in sorrow as in anger and were therefore less likely – if their day ever came – to commit injustices of their own. Furthermore, there was something bittersweet about the physical surroundings in which we met. Many of them retained flats in pre-communist blocks. These flats were innocent of modern appurtenances and their floors were strewn with eastern rugs; their furniture was heavy, antique and dark. Nothing had been thrown away, for nothing was replaceable. The whole atmosphere was that of a vanished civilisation: cultivated, polyglot Mitteleuropa. A historian told me he felt like a member of a dying race; once his flat had been systematised and all traces of the past obliterated (Ceausescu’s great dream), then truly his life would serve no purpose.

I heard mild criticisms of Romanian intellectuals when I returned to England: they did not protest enough, they did not unite, they had no programme in common. These were criticisms I felt I could not make . . .

By an extraordinary irony, these were the last words of this chapter I wrote before the Romanian revolution broke out six weeks after I left Romania, during which millions of unarmed Romanians faced rifles and machine guns rather than endure another day of the Conducator’s rule. At the time, I was also engaged on chapters about Albania, North Korea and Vietnam, but I had planned – more or less – what I was going to write about Romania.

I followed the course of the revolution with more than mere interest: passion would be a better word. I listened to every news bulletin without fail, and when I heard that Ceausescu and his wife had been winched aboard a helicopter from the roof of the Party Headquarters, that they had fled, I felt a depth of satisfaction, happiness, that no other piece of news has ever given me. My heart raced, I hugged myself, I wanted to jump and dance: I felt I had to share the joyful tidings with as many people as I could. I went to buy a newspaper in the small town where I was writing (and where the postmaster, confronted with a letter to Romania, was likely to ask whether Romania was in Asia or Africa).

‘Ceausescu has been overthrown,’ I said to the lady at the till.

‘Oh dear,’ she replied.

‘What do you mean, oh dear? He was a monster.’

‘Perhaps it’s just as well, then,’ she said, unconvinced.

But there was no doubt that the revolution presented me with a few small problems. Should I scrap my chapter or continue it as though nothing had happened, should I write with the not inconsiderable benefit of hindsight, should I lay claim to more political perspicacity than in fact I had at the time? Should I write of Ceausescu as if he were still alive, or as if he were consigned to that infinitely capacious vessel of Marxism, the dustbin of history?

There were problems that went beyond those of mere style. Could I now safely reveal the identities of the people to whom I talked? When I resumed this chapter, there were doubts about the character of the revolution: too many of the old guard were still in place. And was it safe yet to reveal that when I ‘talked’ to officials at our embassy in Bucharest, we went into a ‘safe’ room, believed not to be bugged, and even there communicated by passing notes to each other?

I decided to continue as I should have done had there been no revolution, as far as possible not allowing subsequent events to colour my descriptions of what I saw, though hindsight would inevitably affect my interpretation of what I saw. To prove my good faith in this regard, I shall mention an article I wrote that caused me grave embarrassment when it was published in a magazine in the United States, six weeks after I wrote it, on the very day of Ceausescu’s overthrow, and several days after the Securitate had shown their true ferocity, which I – no friend of the regime – grossly underestimated. In the article I stated that the terror in Romania was Kafkaesque, having almost as much to do with metaphysics as with torture. I had come rather hastily to this conclusion because I had met people who had been asked several times to inform for the Securitate, had refused, and yet had suffered no obvious reprisals. There could hardly have been a less opportune moment at which to publish such an opinion. I did not then know that every police station in Romania had its torture chamber. On the other hand, I did predict that Ceausescu would not last as long as the pessimists in Romania had suggested to me.

I have one further confession to make. When I saw film of Ceausescu speaking from the balcony of the Party Headquarters on the day before his downfall, and suddenly become frightened and bewildered when the crowd turned against him, I felt almost sorry for him, forgetting for a moment who he was and what he had done. I saw only a lonely old man facing the abyss. Surrounded for years by time-servers and flatterers, perhaps he really had imagined he was the nation’s favourite son. All the telephone tapping, the espionage, the denunciation, the blackmail, the torture, had not helped him discover the most elementary and obvious truth: that he was a man who inspired the uttermost loathing and contempt, loathing of a depth quite unlike that inspired by any other political figure I have ever encountered, a loathing that reached into every fibre of every Romanian’s being and that was reinforced by each day of his dictatorship.

During the revolution I recalled a painting in the Bucharest Museum of Fine Art that was of quite a different quality from all the other paintings exhibited there. It was by Breughel, and it was called The Massacre of the Innocents. I went three times to see it, arousing the suspicion of the staff (for the museum was otherwise empty). The painting shows a party of cavalry arriving in a village in winter. At first one admires the beauty of the composition, the blue of the sky, the landscape, the perfect arrangement of the figures. Then, as one approaches closer to the canvas, admiration gives way to horror, as one sees dismounted soldiers piercing babies with their swords or dragging children from their frantic parents. They do this with the calmness of those simply going about their duty (I am only obeying orders, one can almost hear them say). The mounted soldiers look on indifferently. Worse still, some of the villagers appear to be helping the soldiers in their ‘work’, and in the foreground two dogs frolic, as if to underscore the truly bestial unawareness of one of the soldiers who urinates happily against the wall of an inn while the innocents are massacred.

I do not know whether this wonderful and terrible picture survived the revolution. The Museum, just around the corner from the Royal Palace and the Party Headquarters in the Piata Republici (a square, it was once said, that awaits the coup d’état for which it was designed), was badly damaged. If the picture survived, and if it is exhibited again, I wonder what message it will convey to the Romanian people, so many of whom co-operated in their own enserfment?

Meetings with people in Romania had a special and quite extraordinary intensity. All frivolous chatter was excluded; within the hour, one felt united by indissoluble bonds of friendship (and more than friendship). On three occasions I spoke for several hours to a historian in Bucharest, a man whose father and grandfather were historians, not noticing or caring about the passage of mealtimes. He was not a dissident and would have laid no claims to exceptional bravery. But he had refused to join the Party, and thus remained on the lowest rung of the academic ladder, earning the equivalent, at the age of forty, of $25 a month. Moreover, he wrote only the truth – as he saw it – though this confined him to historical subjects so arcane that even the ideologues ignored them. He hoped that by patiently publishing the results of his investigations on small and seemingly unimportant matters, he would eventually, like a pointilliste, achieve a large picture: a picture totally opposed to the preposterous official caricature of Romanian history that was propagated everywhere.

Was his a worthwhile project? In Romanian circumstances, did not research into the church in 17th century Wallachia bring to mind the old Romanian proverb: the whole village is on fire, but grandmother wants to finish combing her hair? Should his project be construed as cowardice or essential groundwork for the eventual recovery of the Romanian nation from the damage inflicted on it by communism and Ceausescu? If he had compromised a little with evil, who was I, who had done the same in far less dire circumstances, to blame him? Exceptional courage is a virtue, but it can never be a duty. Still, there are those who might say he should have chosen exile rather than prevaricate over truth: but it is a terrible thing for a historian to be separated from his language, his culture, his subject matter. It is a kind of death. And would it really have been better for Romania had the field been left entirely to hacks of the most abject stamp?

The historian and I explored together the workings of totalitarianism. He spoke from experience and intimate knowledge, I from superficial observation and a certain amount of reading. I was rather proud of my deduction – which admittedly it took me an unconscionable time to make – that within an established totalitarian regime the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade, much less to inform, but rather to humiliate. From this point of view, propaganda should not approximate to the truth as closely as possible: on the contrary, it should do as much violence to it as possible. For by endlessly asserting what is patently untrue, by making such untruth ubiquitous and unavoidable, and finally by insisting that everyone publicly acquiesce in it, the regime displays its power and reduces individuals to nullities. Who can retain his self respect when, far from defending what he knows to be true, he has to applaud what he knows to be false – not occasionally, as we all do, but for the whole of his adult life? How else could one explain the insistence of the Ceausescu regime that it had brought the Era of Light, at the very time when light itself was rationed?

The historian was passionate about the preservation of the past precisely because so concerted an attack had been made on it. His admiration for Orwell knew no bounds (I have found the same admiration all across eastern Europe). Never to have lived in a totalitarian state and yet to have understood so well – that was genius! For to understand eastern Europe one needed not just information but imagination. Orwell grasped intuitively but with astonishing precision the importance to a totalitarian regime of control over the past. But I said that his conclusion in Nineteen Eighty-Four was nonetheless mistaken: Winston Smith could not be made to love Big Brother, only to pretend that he did. I said that in 1988 I had witnessed a hundred thousand people singing the Latvian national anthem for the first time in nearly half a century, despite its previous total proscription, despite the years of terror, deportation, murder, collectivisation, indoctrination, untruth and destruction. This had convinced me that the annihilation of the human spirit was not possible.

But here in Romania, said the historian, the evil was etched into people’s souls, and it would take two, three, even four generations to erase it (an observation not entirely contradicted by events subsequent to the revolution). From time to time as he spoke, he would glance out of the window to see if there was anyone below in the street: his apartment block was next door to an embassy which was guarded day and night.

Then I spoke of the other deduction of which I was rather proud: that in a tyranny such as Ceausescu’s, shortages of material goods, even of necessities, were not a drawback but a great advantage for the rulers. These shortages were not accidental to the terror, but one of its most powerful instruments. Not only did shortages (which were known to be permanent, not temporary) keep people’s minds strictly on bread and sausage, and divert their energies to procuring them so that there was no time or inclination left over for subversion, but they – the shortages – meant that people could be brought to inform, spy and betray each other very cheaply, for the sake of trivial material benefits that obviated the need to queue. (Let him who has not queued for hours a day cast the first stone.) And since everyone in Romania had to resort to the black market to live, everyone laid himself open to blackmail by the authorities, who could threaten him with ‘justice’ unless he co-operated.

This was all very true as far as it went, said the historian, but I had not plumbed the depths of the Romanian degradation even yet. Totalitarian regimes created a debilitating psychology of complicity. Because they owned and controlled everything, and recognised no limits to their own power, every mouthful of food, every moment of rest, every item of consumption, was enjoyed solely by their grace and favour, which could be withdrawn at a whim. Therefore even the most everyday of activities served to remind everyone that they lived on dictated terms, that they had compromised their principles for a potato or a piece of paper. Even freedom – that is to say, non-incarceration in a penal institution, the highest form of freedom known at that time in Romania – was a privilege, not a right, and a fragile one at that. To walk the streets at liberty was conditional on not raising one’s voice against injustice as one ought. Thus even this limited liberty was bought at the cost of moral emasculation. Everyone – except out and out dissidents – was an accomplice of the regime; to live in Romania was to be stained by its indelible corruption. Everyone was both victim and culprit at the same time: that is why it would take generations to repair the damage that had been done, to unmake the New Man, now entering his fifth decade and third generation as a toady, a sycophant, a hypocrite, a coward, a blackmailer, a gutless double-thinker…

There was an irony in all this, of course: which was that everything he said confirmed the Marxist idea, adumbrated in the Theses on Feuerbach, that man’s social being was not determined by his consciousness but that his consciousness was determined by his social being (au fond by the relations of production). The historian believed that communism had really wrought a change in people’s souls, in their innermost being. I was not so sure (though I could hardly say so to a man who had lived forty years in a cesspit which I was visiting for only a few days): repeatedly in Romania I met fine people, many born well into the communist era, who made compromises, it is true, but who never lost sight of what they were doing. Indeed, I never met a Romanian who did not passionately abhor what had been done to his country. And it seemed to me that as long as this was the case, the New Man had only a shadow existence. Hypocrisy is no doubt a vice in itself, being the compliment that vice pays to virtue: but a hypocrite still knows what is virtue and what is vice, and there is therefore still hope for him. The New Man, by contrast, has lost the capacity to tell the two apart.

In the Moldavian city of Iasi, 250 miles to the north east of Bucharest, I met a historian who lived among books stacked three deep against the walls and up to the ceiling of his room. He was a gentle man, as bookish people often are, reserving his venom, insofar as he had any, for scholars with whom he disagreed. He spoke in a lowered voice, as if afraid of discovery with a foreigner. I took him Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog, which he received with delight. I rather assumed by his manner that he was a timid man, more Hamlet than Don Quixote.

I was mistaken. On the 400th anniversary of the birth of Michael the Brave, the prince who briefly united the provinces of Romania for the first time, he arranged not a demonstration but an unofficial celebration. This was before 1965, the beginning of Ceausescu’s Era of Light, when Michael the Brave was still considered a bourgeois nationalist and not a national hero. To celebrate the anniversary of his birth, even with a cake, was then regarded as a sign of deviation from the True Path of Socialist Internationalism. The young historian was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour in a prison camp. He passed over his sufferings there (he served six years) with a lightness that was as eloquent as any harrowing description. He was released in the first flush of Ceausescu’s ‘liberalism’. That he had asserted something that subsequently became orthodoxy had nothing to do with his release. ‘Objectively’ – in the Stalinist sense – he had been mistaken. For truth in totalitarian countries does not depend on correspondence to reality; it depends merely on who propounds it, and when.

On his release, the historian returned to his books. He was a specialist on Romanian historiography and had at various times been offered scholarships abroad, in Germany and France. Why had he not gone, I asked, and stayed where he could have worked in peace?

‘I wanted to show my students that it was possible to live in Romania and still be a human being,’ he said.

And was this not a dangerous project?

‘I am not afraid. I already know what hard labour is like.’

One man against the state: Don Quixote against not just windmills but armoured cars, tanks, tear gas, informers, torture, prison camps, blackmail and murder. My habitual pessimism now seemed to me rather a cheap stance towards the world.

All the same, a cynical thought recurred to me every time I met Romanian intellectuals: if totalitarianism were ever defeated in Romania, would they not soon come to miss it? In a strange way, its very denial of the value of life gave value to life. The evil of the regime was so overwhelmingly omnipresent that one didn’t have to worry about complex and boring questions such as the level of income tax that maximised both justice and economic efficiency, or the best way to organise old age pensions or scientific research. One went straight to the large issues of human existence, bypassing mere administrative details.

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish notion that only the oppressed can achieve righteousness or – more importantly – write anything profound. I thought that if only I had lived through even a little of the Romanian experience, my literary problems would solve themselves: there would be no casting around for subject matter, I should write under feverish compulsion and profundity would come of itself. As for the suffering entailed, I accepted it in advance with a light heart: for even if I were wrong, and suffering does not necessarily give meaning to artistic endeavour, artistic endeavour certainly gives meaning to suffering.

My historian in Bucharest had an almost unmentionable professional interest: the history of the Jews in Romania. This was a subject on which no work was done or published in Romania; an impenetrable veil of silence had descended on the fate of nearly a million people, of whom only a mere 20,000 remained, and anyone who sought to lift this veil was regarded as an enemy of the state. Though he was gentile, the historian well understood the importance of preserving the memory of this once large community from all the official efforts to forget it had ever existed, for no country can regain its own health while so terrible a crime remains unexpiated, or worse still, unacknowledged.

The official silence about the extermination during the War of so considerable a part of Romania’s population was the result of several mutually reinforcing factors, the first and not least of which was the anti-Semitism of the Danube of Thought, the Conducator himself, who in this respect shared the prejudices of a large percentage of his people. According to Ion Pacepa, Ceausescu constantly reiterated that two of Romania’s greatest assets were Germans and Jews, since both could be held to ransom for hard currency. Outright public anti-Semitism was impermissible, of course, ever since the Holocaust; what greater revenge on the Jews, then, than simply to forget they had ever lived in Romania in large numbers? This inhuman amnesia was made all the more diabolical by the presence of a pathetic Jewish remnant, too terrified to protest against present persecution, too aware that everything could be worse to demand that anything should be better.

Irony of ironies, therefore, that – as the historian told me – there was a notice on the door of the Chief Rabbi of Romania’s office stating ‘We do not accept conversions’. Why was such a notice necessary? Because every day before it was posted, the office was besieged by Romanians offering to convert to Judaism in the hope that they could thereby escape from the Romania of the Era of Light to evil, Zionist Israel and thence to the west. More poignant still, I found myself in my hotel dining opposite two elderly Jewish ladies who lived in Israel but had been born in Romania, and who spoke to each other in Romanian, their mother tongue. Ostensibly they had come for treatment for their rheumatism, as they did every year, there being some bogus Romanian remedy involving mud and injections (available only for hard currency) for this condition. But really they came so that they could joke with a waiter – even for a short while – in their own language, in a language that was not forever foreign, and to enjoy for once the pleasures of speech without translation.

At first I wondered how anyone who had lived through suffering such as they must have witnessed could bear to return to the scene of it; but I was forgetting the importance to human beings of language, greater perhaps than that of any subsequent experience. How should I survive separation from the English tongue? English, of course, has many lands of exile; but if you are Romanian, where can you go to hear your language except Romania itself (or Soviet Moldavia where, incidentally, I was told they speak the purest Romanian because Russian was until very recently the official language, and thus Romanian had been preserved from the distortions of communist langue de bois, and was used only for the transactions of daily life)? The Israeli Romanians were so delighted by the sound of the waiter’s speech that they minded neither their memories nor the disgusting food they were served.

When I returned to Bucharest after two weeks travelling round the country I visited the historian again: by now he was my guru on all matters Romanian. Knowing his interest in Jewish history, I mentioned that in the far northern town of Sighetu Marmatiei I had unexpectedly come across a monument in Hebrew and Romanian, commemorating the deportation of Jews in 1944 from the town to death camps elsewhere. But in Iasi, a third of whose population before the war had been Jewish, I found no such memorial, not the faintest indication indeed that Iasi had ever been other than it was now, Judenfrei. Watching people go about their business in Iasi – not very cheerfully, it is true, but for reasons other than their city’s cataclysmic history – I wanted to stop them and ask where all the Jews had gone. Did they know, did they care? People cannot live by recollection alone, of course; but can they live entirely without it?

I speculated on the difference between Sighetu Marmatiei and Iasi. I guessed that the memorial to Transylvanian atrocities was permissible because Transylvania was then under Hungarian jurisdiction, and it was the Hungarian gendarmerie who had rounded up the Jews of Sighetu for extermination; whereas in Iasi, the same task was performed (all too willingly) by the Romanians themselves. This unfortunate fact was indigestible from the point of view of official Romanian historiography, according to which the history of Romania has been a continuous triumphal progress to the glorious present, any negative phenomena being solely attributable to foreigners or a handful of anti-national members of the ruling class. The monument in Sighetu was not in mourning for the Jews; it was anti-Hungarian propaganda.

My surmise was essentially correct, said the historian. The rabid nationalism by means of which Ceausescu sought to give legitimacy to his dictatorship was a straitjacket in which all serious thought about historical or political matters was impossible. It was at this point in our conversation that I mentioned a curious volume, half in English, half in French, that I had found in a Bucharest bookshop: The Priority of Paulescu in the Discovery of Insulin. The purpose of this book, first published in 1977, was to establish that insulin had not been discovered in Toronto by Banting, Best and Macleod, as described in almost all textbooks, but by Paulescu in Bucharest, and that the Canadians had nefariously deprived Paulescu of the credit (and hence of the Nobel Prize).

The historian asked whether I had ever heard of Popov and he was surprised to discover that I had. Popov was the man the Russians claimed had invented radio before Marconi. I knew of him because my father had possessed a huge book about the Soviet Union, published in Russia in 1947, which claimed every conceivable achievement for both the Soviet Union and pre-revolutionary Russia. The book was cream coloured and the arms of the Soviet Union were embossed in gold on its front cover. Inside were sepia photographs of buxom peasant girls in national costumes holding baskets of fruit in fields of waving corn, a row of combine harvesters reaping plenty on the distant horizon. The book was arranged like a religious calendar, every day of the year commemorating a political event or the birthday of a Russian genius. As a child, I spent many hours with the book, looking at its pictures and committing the exotic names – Mendeleyev, Mussourgsky, Lunacharsky, Dzherzhinsky, Zhdanov – to memory. And it was from this book that I learnt of Popov.

‘Paulescu is the Romanian Popov,’ said the historian, laughing.

Actually, the book was very convincing. Paulescu was a physiologist of considerable renown who published the results of his work on an extract of pancreatic gland several months before the Toronto group. For some reason, it was not taken up by the scientific community (Paulescu published in French, but in those days English had not yet reached its complete pre-eminence in the scientific world). The Toronto group knew of Paulescu’s work, but persistently misrepresented it in their own papers. According to the author, they realised at once that Paulescu had already discovered what they had also set out to discover. They therefore deliberately misunderstood his work so that they might claim priority in the discovery.

I started to read The Priority of Paulescu in the Discovery of Insulin with something of a superior sneer on my face. I assumed I already knew the story of that discovery (I have a degree in physiology), and no doubt there was more than an element of cultural arrogance in my reluctance to concede that so important a scientific contribution could have been made in a Balkan backwater. But the documentation in the book was decisive; and the subsequent evasions of the Toronto scientists were not pleasant to read. I understood the feeling of outraged national pride that such devious and discreditable behaviour were likely to inflame.

Nevertheless, one thing puzzled me about this book, and that was its date of publication. A retired British physician had drawn attention to Paulescu’s claim to priority several years earlier in the British Medical Journal; and according to the historian, the book’s author had struggled for many years in vain to bring posthumous lustre to Paulescu’s name. The author was himself a physiologist who had been taught by Paulescu, succeeding him to the chair of physiology at Bucharest University; the book was written in a spirit of filial piety rather than nationalist vehemence.

But why, I asked, had it taken so long for Paulescu to be recognised even in the country of his birth? Because Paulescu later became an intolerant Roman Catholic, a fascistic anti-communist who in addition to his scientific papers wrote vile anti-Semitic pamphlets. It was decided only latterly that the glory to Romania of his scientific discovery was greater than the risk of having to admit that a man could be both a brilliant scientist and a fanatical anti-communist (for in the official world-view, which declared itself scientific above all else, anybody who achieved anything worthwhile prior to the revolution must have been at the very least a communist avant la lettre).

Before Paulescu’s rehabilitation, therefore, you could not mention him because he was a fascist; after his rehabilitation you could not mention he was a fascist because he had been rehabilitated.

In these circumstances, the historian asked, was it any wonder that intellectuals were leaving Romania as fast as possible? He felt he would soon be the only one left. He asked a favour of me: as I had been so successful in smuggling books into Romania, perhaps I wouldn’t mind smuggling a few out? An archaeologist friend of his was leaving for France, but couldn’t bear to leave his painstakingly acquired library behind. It was illegal to export second-hand books from Romania, which were regarded as national treasures even when it was not permitted to read them. When he left he would be allowed to take none of his library with him, which would be forfeit to the state. If every sympathetic visitor took one or two of the most important volumes to the west, the library could perhaps be salvaged, at least in part. I agreed, though I was alarmed to discover that the books allotted me were in Greek and Russian, neither of which I read. But at the last minute, the risk both to the books and to me was considered too great and my mission of bibliographic mercy was aborted, not without a certain relief on my part.

The first time I visited him, the historian gave me a very valuable piece of advice: I should go to the National Historical Museum which, like Gaul, was divided into three parts. The most important part, admittedly from my slightly peculiar point of view, was that devoted to ‘Proofs of the love, high esteem and appreciation that President N. Ceausescu and Comrade E. Ceausescu enjoy’. The museum was in the Calea Victoriei, the once fashionable central street of Bucharest which was now permanently closed to all traffic except the Conducator’s motorcade en route twice a day to or from the grim and sinister Party Headquarters, and along whose pavements people queued at midday to buy little balls of glutinous starch fried in rancid oil for their lunch. I bought my tickets for the museum and made straight for the Proofs of Love section.

This was housed in three or four large rooms, the first of which contained in glass cases all the decorations and academic awards bestowed on the happy couple during their voyages abroad. Here were sashes and medals from every country in the world, including – I am ashamed to say – my own, which awarded the Conducator an honorary knighthood, withdrawn shortly before he was shot. The Royal Institute of Chemistry elected Elena to its fellowship, apparently under the misapprehension that she was some kind of chemist (she had chosen to be known in Romania as a ‘world ranking scientist’, though she was as much a chemist as Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess). There were gaudy sashes from Africa, complete with large bronze stars embossed with elephants and zebras, medals from Italy and West Germany, and honorary doctorates from Peru and the Philippines. The last came with a citation, which was at the bottom of a glass case near floor level. It was so odiously sycophantic that I had to copy it down, and I went on to my knees to do so:

 

For your lifelong commitment to national and social liberation from the forces of fascist and lawless regimes, a commitment which earned for you the honor of having been incarcerated for your political beliefs, thus joining that distinguished company of true leaders of men who, even while political prisoners, affirmed the integrity of the mind through the resoluteness of their will and the strength of their ideas . . .

 

It was at this point in my copying that I noticed I was joined by a policeman’s boot on my left side. I looked up and there, as they would say in Nigeria, was a whole policeman. The frumpish museum attendant, who had in any case found my entry into the Proofs of Love section highly suspicious, had fetched him as soon as I started my very odd behaviour. I tried to explain to the policeman that I was only copying down this Philippine eulogy to his employer, but it was clear that voluntary devotion to the cult was unwelcome, first because it was voluntary and any voluntary action was suspect, implying as it did the ability to choose and therefore to think, and second because it was obviously mad. My efforts to persuade him of my harmlessness were to no avail: he insisted that I discontinue. Rather than risk confiscation of what I had already written – the only notes I took in Romania – I complied. In any case, the rest of the citation was worded in the same rolling thunder eloquence and was without interest, except as evidence of how completely wrong or cynical in their judgments it is possible for humans to be.

I went from the awards and decorations to the gifts given to the Ceausescus on their journeys round the world. The gifts were divided geographically by continent, and I was particularly anxious to see the certificate of Nicolae’s honorary citizenship of Disneyland, conferred on him by Mickey Mouse. Alas, the room was very ill-lit, and I could scarcely make out the words. In the American section I was surprised to discover that American astronauts had carried a small Romanian flag to the moon, at a time when Ceausescu was considered the ‘good’ communist and it was hoped he might prove a Trojan horse in Eastern Europe.

The gifts displayed were worthless, cheap junk such as tourists bring home from two weeks on a foreign beach. There were coconuts with carved husks, tropical landscapes made out of seashells, cups and saucers with municipal coats of arms, small dolls in national costume, mass-produced tribal masks and shields, and little bronze cathedrals. By all accounts the Ceausescus, crudely avaricious, kept for themselves anything of value that they acquired. But it was in the final room of the Proofs of Love, whose lights had to be switched on specially for me by the incredulous attendant because no one had visited it for days or possibly weeks beforehand, that kitsch really came into its own. Bad taste was here elevated into a government policy. The final room of the Proofs of Love contained gifts given to the Ceausescus by people and organisations from all over Romania.

Hung on the walls were portraits of the presidential couple in oils, mosaic, tapestries, batik and carpets, all in primary proletarian colours. Madame Ceausescu, with her beehive hairdo, generally clutched a bouquet of flowers while her husband waved to a crowd of adoring children; in several portraits Ceausescu appeared in immanent proportions against the sky (in fact, he was a small man who used to receive visitors in his office sitting on a raised platform to ensure that he had to look down rather than up at them), the crowds of tiny people below reaching up to him as though he were distributing celestial chocolates. Naturally, there were white doves everywhere. In one portrait with faintly biblical overtones the couple were framed by a brilliant rainbow, their covenant no doubt to the people of Romania. But best – or worst – of all were the huge porcelain vases with painted portraits of the Conducator, produced ‘in their spare time’ by workers at porcelain factories. These were the purest throwbacks possible of the Stalin era: once again I recalled the hours of my childhood spent with that Soviet volume, with its colour plates of Stalin vases, ‘the largest in the world’, gifts to the Vozhd from workers grateful to him for their fruitful, happy lives etc.

Before I left the Proofs of Love, I bought the nearest thing to a catalogue, which contained badly printed pictures of the happy couple inspecting the proofs of the love and high esteem in which the whole world held them. I bought it in the hope and expectation that it would soon become a collector’s item.

Out of the frying pan into the fire. Next to the museum was an exhibition hall into which I watched a large party of schoolchildren, all with red neckerchiefs, file under the direction of their teacher. I followed them in: it was an exhibition of Romanian economic achievements, under the guidance of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. At the end of the hall was an enormous Romanian flag, red, yellow and blue, with the communist coat of arms on the central yellow stripe. On another wall was a huge photograph of Ceausescu standing in a field of corn, a group of peasants gathered round him (at a respectful distance) hanging on his every word as he, the former shoemaker, explains to them how to grow cereals. So that his words should not be lost to posterity, so that they could be entered into Volume Sixty-Three of his Collected Works, there stood next to him a man with a notebook, leaning forward with just the right degree of eagerness and obsequiousness to catch the falling pearls. The Conducator himself was wearing silver mohair trousers and jacket, halfway in design between a safari suit and a Mao costume. He also wore a flat cap of the same material, which was a neat iconographic resolution of what dialectical materialists would no doubt call a contradiction: on the one hand the need to appear unique (everyone else in the picture was bareheaded, and no one else wore silver mohair) and on the other to appear proletarian – hence the flat worker’s cap.

As for the exhibits, they were material evidence of the enormous economic strides that Romania had made – precisely the same strides as Albania had made. Displayed in glass cases were telephones, bottles of apple juice, electrocardiographs, cups and saucers, vials of antibiotics, tomato ketchup, radios, plastic cucumbers, chocolate, wheelchairs, indeed a gallimaufry of the products of Romanian industry, which brought to mind the exclamation of an exasperated Soviet author, ‘When will we stop regarding a sausage as an economic achievement and simply as something to eat?’

The children were given a turgid lecture by an attendant as they went round the exhibition (I could tell the lecture was turgid even though I understood only a few phrases, and I could tell also that the attendant didn’t believe a word of it, for she spoke with the passion of a tape recorder). I am glad to say that the children spent far more time looking at me than at the exhibits, and I likewise looked at them. How beautiful and lively were the girls, with chestnut hair and dark brown eyes, slim and too young yet to have succumbed to the southern tendency to fat. Before long the teacher, noticing their distraction, tut-tutted and shepherded them away from me, so that they should concentrate on the glories of socialist ketchup, unprecedented in the world.

I visited two more people in Bucharest: a former diplomat who was writing his memoirs and a poet, both under surveillance, the latter for writing love poetry of no political content, which automatically made him suspect in the eyes of the authorities. Both had signed a letter protesting at the expulsion of a writer from the Writers’ Union, which had caused displeasure in official circles but so far no harsher penalties than prohibition from publication – a mildness of response for which it was possible that visits from westerners were responsible.

I left Bucharest after a few days without any clear itinerary. By now I had such an aversion to planning that I refused to think ahead, even in simple personal matters.

I made for Brasov, on the borders of Transylvania, by way of Ploiesti. The latter is an oil town, thirty miles from Bucharest, with an interesting history and a foul smell. One of the first oil refineries in the world was set up there in 1856. In 1916, the British-owned oil installations were destroyed by British agents to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Germans. Subsequently, the British demanded compensation which the Romanians reluctantly paid. Then the British sold out to the Germans before the war and bombed the installations once more in 1944, in the process destroying the town altogether.

Ploiesti had been rebuilt in a style typical of communist modernity, rectangular concrete block after rectangular concrete block, like a blueprint for paradise drawn up by Le Corbusier, except that standards of actual construction were so abysmally low. Of all building materials concrete is the least attractive, the most impossible to humanise, and therefore beloved of communists (and British architects). At best, its widespread use creates a bleak wasteland; but where, as in Romania, its use is accompanied by wide, grey, treeless boulevards which act as wind tunnels and are without traffic, and empty shops called simply ‘Shoes’ or ‘Groceries’ or ‘Books’ or ‘Clothes’, the effect is to call into question the very meaning or purpose of life, to induce a state of apathy and hopelessness. Ploiesti is such a town, with a sulphurous pall of various shades of grey and blackish mauve hanging over it.

I ran out of petrol just outside Ploiesti, my petrol gauge still showing half-full. I stood by the side of the road and waited for someone to take me back to the town, from where I hoped to telephone the car hire company in Bucharest (at this stage I did not know the problem was lack of fuel). A passing bureaucrat gave me a lift, and deposited me in the largest, most important hotel in the town, from which I was able to telephone for help. I waited an hour and a half in the lobby, a fine example of Romanian modernity, dispiriting in its deadness. There was nowhere to have tea or coffee, there were few people around, and the concrete walls absorbed all sound, muffling it in an almost sinister way. At least there was no muzak. I read and was entertained for a time by two workmen who came to remove a large plastic pot plant from the lobby, which proved difficult to manoeuvre through the door. Where were they going with the plant, I wondered? Was an important visitor arriving at Ploiesti party headquarters, which had to be made attractive for him? Perhaps the whole town possessed only this one plant (plastic at that), which was moved from office to office as need be. Here indeed was a theme for a Gogolian novelist…

The men from Bucharest arrived while I was having lunch in the hotel restaurant, a vast expanse of tables with not many customers and a dearth of waiters. I had excellent red cabbage soup with sausage and general leftovers, followed by meat of uncertain provenance cooked some time in the nineteenth century, served with vegetables of positively British mushiness. The men from Bucharest decided to have lunch too, but did not sit at my table.

We drove to my stranded car afterwards, where they proved beyond all doubt that I had run out of petrol. The fuel gauge, they said, had been interfered with by the siphoners of my petrol. I must be very careful in future, because petrol was scarce in Romania and people were always stealing it from each other. (At the beginning of the month, when car owners received their petrol ration coupons, the queues outside petrol stations were not hours but days long.) Unfortunately, my petrol tank had no lock, so their warning was of little value: I could hardly spend the nights standing guard over the tank. They brought me a new car in exchange for the old, even though, with fuel, the old was perfectly all right. Regulations, they said. As payment they demanded only petrol coupons: considerably more than the fuel they could have expended to reach me and return to Bucharest. I suspected they were trading on their own account, and that I was being robbed of yet more petrol. Still, they had helped me not a little, and I gave them some Kent cigarettes as well. In other communist countries they prefer Marlboro.

I decided against visiting one of the only tourist attractions in the vicinity of Ploiesti, the prison of Doftana. It was here that participants in the great peasant uprising of 1907 were imprisoned and tortured. Later the prison was used for communist leaders, including Gheorghiu-Dej, the Romanian leader, until his death from throat cancer in 1965, after whom a boulevard in every town in the country has – or had, before the recent revolution – been named. (Ceausescu believed that the Russians gave Gheorghiu-Dej cancer by irradiating him while he was in Moscow, and was terrified of meeting the same fate.) There was, apparently, an exhibition in Doftana of the instruments of torture used on communists, of the old police files about them and of the little devotional Marxist tracts they kept hidden in their cells to restore their spirits. If ever there were a refutation of the popular fallacy that the persecuted are in some manner more devoted to justice and freedom than others, the prison of Doftana was that refutation. Here was evidence, if any were needed, that it is perfectly possible to be staunch and brave, heroic even, in pursuit of undesirable ends. I sometimes wonder whether intellectuals will ever realise that the worth of a cause is not necessarily proportional to the lengths to which people will go to promote it.

On the way to Brasov I passed through Sinaia in the Bucegi mountains. It was cool and the countryside was magnificent, clouds slipping silently over the edges of awe-inspiring escarpments, the slopes of the mountains dark green with fir trees. As for Sinaia itself, it was a somewhat Germanic alpine settlement with timber-framed chalets and a mad Teutonic schloss, the whole town being in a state of decay caused by the absence of any commercial incentive to keep it attractive. Its tourism was now internal, and opportunities for Romanians either to earn or to spend their virtually worthless currency were almost non-existent. Romanian holidaymakers milled around aimlessly, as though simply waiting for time to pass. Released for a time from their daily drudgery, what purpose did these people have? Unanswerable questions that transcended politics, concerning the meaning of life, rose unbidden to my mind.

The countryside restored me somewhat: sufficient unto the day are the pleasures thereof. But the approach to Brasov itself brought radical pessimism flooding back. For what seemed like several miles, there was a grey boulevard running like a cavern through cliffs of concrete, proletarian apartment blocks from whose windows hung washing like trophies from some inglorious war. There was no life on the street, no vulgar commerce (how one misses it when it is not there, how one criticises it when it is), only Lowry-like figures endlessly trudging, probably in search of potatoes, in that inhuman landscape created by humans.

The centre of the city belonged to a different age. Such was one’s relief to see architecture of a humane type, buildings constructed for various proper purposes and not for some overarching plan to reduce human consciousness to absolute uniformity and unthinking obedience, that one began at once to romanticise the past, always a dangerous thing to do, especially in the case of Romania. Could a civilisation that produced such a city really have been so terrible? At least it had something in its favour; I should be hard put to it to find anything to say in favour of Romanian civilisation today.

Brasov was what in communist parlance would be called a ‘Hero City’: anti-government riots broke out there in November 1987 at a time when everything seemed under control, at least from the executioner’s point of view. It was said that thanks to this manifestation of discontent, the city was under particularly strict surveillance by the Securitate, and that foreign visitors would be even more closely watched here than elsewhere. I don’t know whether this was so in my case; all I can say is that the lady in the lift of my hotel, whom I naturally supposed to be an agent, or at the least an informer, of the Securitate, made about the clumsiest attempts at seduction I have ever witnessed, hitting me several times between the ground and second floors with her vast peasant bust (which came up to just above my waist) and fluttering her artificial eyelashes, all gluey with mascara, at me in a manner one might have expected to see in an early silent movie of the life of Mata Hari. Did she want to compromise me, as in a spy novel, or were the Kent cigarettes I gave her the real object of her behaviour? Having experienced a few torrid moments cornered in the lift (she was built like a wrestler), I subsequently chose the fire escape.

In Brasov I met another historian, a young man struggling to survive on the lowest salary level. He was approaching the age at which he would be fined for not having children, but he preferred a fine to bringing a child into the world in impossible conditions. His young wife was still a student. Originally she had wanted to study philosophy, but her brother had escaped to Yugoslavia and thence to America, thus bringing suspicion on the whole family. Only students with an irreproachable family record of loyalty to the regime were permitted to enter the philosophy faculty: she had to content herself with Romanian instead.

The historian told me of the conditions in his small institute. He knew well enough who was the head of the Securitate in the institute – everyone knew, for he made it perfectly clear – but as for the rest of his colleagues, it was impossible to tell. What a charming atmosphere in which to conduct research! The Securitate had approached him twice to ask him to inform on his colleagues, in return for coffee, money etc, but he refused and had not even been threatened as a result. It was quite possible, though, that everyone else in the institute had succumbed, so that informers informed on other informers, and vice versa. At some point, I thought, this mania for espionage must be counterproductive, with nobody being able any longer to distinguish real information from vague suspicion, thanks to an infinite regress of paranoia. It was almost as though the model for the Securitate were not the Cheka or the Gestapo, but Feydeau and the French farceurs.

A Zimbabwean rugby team was staying in my hotel, and I overheard their bewilderment at the lack of anything to do in the town at night. Down the Strada Republicii, it was true, one could hear a rather desperate band playing in a cafe, but one’s ears soon tingled with the sheer volume of sound it produced and spurred one to leave before catastrophe, in the form of burst eardrums, struck. So the rugby team stayed at its table in the restaurant (another joyless canteen, where foreigners were seated separately from Romanians) and drank the kind of beer that produces a hangover well this side of drunkenness. The waitress, though, made up for it with her charm. She told me that, with a little bit of negotiation on her part, she could find some ‘big chicken’ in the kitchen, a real delicacy. I waited for it in suspense, drinking beer from a brown bottle with no label. ‘Big chicken’ turned out to be duck, cooked in that extraordinary manner that I thought only the British had fully mastered, namely par-boiled and half-roasted without seasoning, with limp skin and served lukewarm. Still, it made a change, worth every one of the Kent cigarettes I gave the waitress. After dinner I walked the crimeless streets of Brasov composing anti-Ceausescu tirades in my mind.

I moved on, further into Transylvania, travelling 50 or 100 miles a day. I passed through the Burzen Land, taking the smaller side roads. The landscape here was of rolling hills and villages with fortified Saxon churches of the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries. The Saxons were invited into Transylvania by the Hungarian king, fearful for Hungarian control of territory inhabited mainly by Romanians. The Saxons, hard-working and thrifty, soon become rich; they controlled all trade and ruled the towns, eventually becoming a caste apart, so that mere Romanians (then called Vlachs) were not permitted to reside within the walls of Transylvanian towns. The Saxons later lost their privileges, of course, though they retained their culture; and during the fascist years, many of them volunteered for service in the SS, which is why, perhaps, the world was less than indignant at Ceausescu’s policy of selling them into freedom on payment by the West German government of a ransom of DM8000 each.

On one of the smaller roads pointing eastward, I picked up a hiker, obviously a manual worker to judge from the roughness and deeply ingrained greyness of his hands. He was dressed in everyday clothes of coarse twill, and he wore a real workman’s cap of overalls-blue. He was fascinated by my excellent road map of Romania, staring at it with great intensity. Then he pointed to Yugoslavia. Romania was no good, he said; there was nothing to eat. He indicated that Yugoslavia was where he was headed, and he mimed his swim across the Danube. I set him down at a crossroad and wished him luck. By nightfall, he would either be free or dead. But what about his family, I wondered as I watched him disappear from my rear view mirror.

I reached Sighisoara, perhaps the most perfect of the Transylvanian towns. It is Germanic in architecture, if no longer in atmosphere. One’s eye is drawn to the ramparts of the citadel on the hill where the old town was built, and in particular to the magnificent clock tower, with its roof of patterned tiles and a clock that sends out a different medieval figure each day of the week to mark out the passage of the hours. In the shadow of the tower stood the small house where, in 1431, Dracula was born. It was now a small bar and restaurant. Surprisingly, fish was on the menu (though nothing else was), and as I ate a sentence that I thought I should one day use at dinner parties at home ran through my mind like a record with a stuck needle: I have eaten fried fish in Dracula’s birthplace.

The cobbled lanes of the old town with their neat, pastel-coloured houses reminded me of Tallinn in Estonia, another transplanted German settlement. There, of course, Hitler destroyed the centuries-old German community once and for all; surely the Romanian Saxon settlements would not long survive the miseries of Ceausescu combined with the attractions of the Federal Republic.

At the very summit of the hill stood the Bergkirche, approached by a covered wooden staircase. All around the simple white-walled Lutheran church, which was closed, was the wooded German cemetery, overgrown with weeds and ivy, the grandiose tombstones everlasting to the memory of people now entirely forgotten. These tombstones were made of marble and granite and carved with Germanic precision, and I was surprised to see that even the graves of the last few years maintained this tradition. The tombstones in the German cemetery were the only modern objects I saw in Romania manufactured to the highest standards.

On the way from Sighisoara to Tirgu Mures I gave a lift to a young factory worker. He spoke a fair amount of English, and lost little time in describing the hardships of life under Ceausescu. When we arrived in Tirgu Mures we had a drink of rasping Romanian cognac in the bar of my hotel, and then set out to explore the town. My companion took me first to the supermarket, so that I should experience for myself the pleasures of shopping during Romania’s Golden Age. Whatever was for sale was not wanted; whatever was wanted was not for sale. All the goods were of the quality one associates with prizes won at the fairground, crude in design and rough in manufacture. Although my companion was young enough to have lived his entire life in this atmosphere of ugliness, and had never experienced through travel abroad anything different, he was not reconciled to it. He picked up objects for me to examine, the better that I should appreciate their shabbiness. He did not doubt that beauty in small things improved the quality of life: when he had looked at my road map of Romania (produced in West Germany), how much pleasure had he derived from its beautiful printing, and with what deep respect had he handled it!

The supermarket was large and drab, on three extensive floors in a construction of unadorned concrete. The goods on display, if gathered together, would comfortably have fitted into half a floor or less. Rack after rack was empty, shelf after shelf. The whole store was like a vague and unspecified promise that one day in the not-too-distant future all this space would be needed for an abundance of goods hitherto undreamed of. No one took this promise seriously, of course, as they shuffled round the store looking for something that had not remained unsold for three years.

From the supermarket we went to a bookshop nearby. Displayed in the window to the exclusion of everything else were the works of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, World-Ranking Scientist and Academician Dr Elena Ceausescu. Given prominence was a large volume devoted to the spectroscopy of beta-blocking anti-hypertensive drugs (a subject dear to the hearts of the population of Tirgu Mures), allegedly edited by la Ceausescu. Why she chose to pretend to be a chemist rather than, say, a microbiologist or a mathematical physicist is shrouded in mystery; but the pretence gained for her the direction of all of Romania’s scientific research.

Inside the shop, the works of the presidential couple took up the space occupied in our bookshops by alternative health, radical politics, self-development, the Third World and the occult combined. I bought a book in English by Ceausescu’s brother, General Ilie Ceausescu PhD, concerning the dispute with Hungary over which population, the Hungarian or Romanian, arrived in Transylvania first. By coincidence, most Hungarian historians have found that Magyars arrived first, while most Romanian historians have found the opposite, claiming that the present-day Romanian inhabitants of Transylvania (the majority) can trace their occupation back to pre-Roman times. The latter assertion had become unquestionable historical dogma in Romania (where there were museums of Two Millennia of Continuous Occupation’), and all writing on the subject had become apologetic, grist to the mill of ancient enmity, and supposedly useful for lending spurious nationalist legitimacy to the Conducator’s regime.

I took a last look at the bookshop window and laughed.

‘You laugh,’ said my companion, ‘but we did not laugh.’

He showed me Tirgu Mures’ Palace of Culture, an astonishing and elaborate edifice built just before the First World War, when the Hungarians ruled the Transylvanian roost. Dark and gothic, one felt its style was not governed by aesthetic preference alone, but by an imperative to establish a distinctive national architecture that would somehow justify political domination of the numerical majority. Nevertheless, it was not aesthetically a failure.

We had dinner in a fin de siècle restaurant, with mirrors and plaster cherubs, whose atmosphere had been completely altered by the reversal in the social status of the waiters and customers, and by the presence of dusty plastic flowers in the moulded vases. The waiters were the bosses here, the customers the ones who had to obey and grovel for tips – for in a country where food is rationed, the waiter is as powerful as a mayor (and better fed). It is the waiter who determines who shall enter his establishment, how long the customers need wait for a table and whether they shall have a slice of cucumber; it is the all-powerful waiter who decides whether or not wine is available. Woe betide anyone who offends him, or answers back.

We secured a table by the usual argument: that I was a distinguished foreigner whom it would be inhospitable to refuse. And so we ate in such luxury as Tirgu Mures could afford, all the town’s officials and some of the policemen eating precisely the same meal. A band began to play, very loudly and not at all well, and couples, lumpish from a lifetime’s consumption of starch, began to dance. It was like a scene out of a film by an acclaimed East European film director; and though the scene appeared superficially to be in colour, really it was in black and white. At half past nine precisely, the band stopped playing and everyone left. My companion insisted on paying the bill, though it was nothing to me and a fortune to him. I could not very well refuse him his gesture of friendship, however. By this time I had drunk rather too much wine and, slightly inebriated, tottered back to my concrete hotel. The streets were as deserted as during a curfew.

In the next restaurant in which I ate, in the city of Cluj, renamed Cluj-Napoca by Ceausescu in 1978, and known in the days when it was the regional capital of Hungarian Transylvania as Kolozsvar, I sat at the same table as three young Romanians who at first were very wary of me. It was Sunday lunchtime, and I had the impression that all the city’s beau monde was present. At any rate, the restaurant was full, many of the women were dressed with elegance and everyone who smoked made sure their packet of Kent cigarettes was prominently displayed on their table. The waiter was charming, and appeared to be doing his best to accommodate everyone: conduct, in Romanian circumstances, not merely pleasing but positively heroic.

The three Romanians at my table were a young couple and a slightly older friend. We started to speak when the young woman, who was very pretty, drew out of her bag an old copy of Art and Artists, an English magazine for painters and sculptors. They began to discuss with obvious intensity the advertisements for artists’ materials, and I interrupted them by enquiring whether they spoke English. The ice was broken: they gave me a glass of wine, and soon we were friends.

The young woman was an art student and her husband was an engineer. Their friend was a teacher of mathematics. It was not possible to talk in such surroundings, and so, taking their courage in their hands, they invited me back to their flat.

It was in a once grand fin de siècle building, whose entrance hall was dark and damp and smelt of rotting garbage. The walls were grey with mould and other stains. We had to move quickly, for fear of being seen by the neighbours. In Ceausescu’s Romania, to spy and inform on others was not the work of a few, it was the duty of all. Not to have reported the arrival of a suspicious stranger to the authorities would have been a crime. Therefore we slipped into their flat as quietly and quickly as possible.

The flat itself was pleasant, their small kitchen comfortable and surprisingly well-equipped. The other two rooms, their bedroom and living room, were rather bare, but they were of a good size (the building had obviously once been home to the bourgeoisie) and had magnificent old-fashioned ceramic stoves to warm them, now converted to gas, whose pressure of course was quite insufficient to warm the rooms in the winter. But as a whole the flat was very much better than many I had seen in England, where millions live dingily enough.

In lieu of children, my Romanian friends had a small and sweet fluffy dog called Charlie who, in the course of my visit, ate his master and mistress’s only tomato. When Charlie had to be taken for a walk, I could not go with them, for it would have been dangerous for my hosts to be seen in public in my company. During my visit a neighbour called, and I felt the tension rise. Had she seen my arrival? Was she asking who I was? No, she wanted only to borrow some sugar, which was in very short supply these days. The relief when the front door closed behind her was great, and we were able to resume our conversation.

In these conditions of fear and circumspection, how quickly the bonds of friendship formed! As a foreigner they knew I was free of all possible association with the Securitate, and therefore they were able to speak to me unreservedly. They longed for culture, the kind of genuine culture that was not decreed by the state for the purposes of the state, but was the product of free people trying to give meaning to their lives. Rather touchingly they associated this kind of culture with western Europe, and I grew ashamed of the use (or lack of it) to which so many of our citizens put their freedom, and of their not infrequent disparagement of that very freedom itself. It seems one appreciates only what one does not have.

A discussion broke out between the engineer and the teacher of mathematics about the Hungarian question. The latter maintained that the Hungarians had not been badly treated by the regime, that they had outlets for their culture etc. (As a friend of mine once pointed out, under communism all minorities dance.) The engineer calmly disagreed; he pointed out that the Hungarian language university of Cluj had been closed in 1959, that people with Hungarian names laboured under several disadvantages, that there was less and less teaching in Magyar, and that Hungarians were continuing to leave the country in large numbers for Hungary. The teacher responded with the historical injustices inflicted on the Romanians by the Hungarians, which were, of course, not relevant to the argument, except psychologically. In what he said, in his increasing agitation as his friend countered with what sounded to me like reason, I thought I detected the terrible resurrection of Balkan chauvinism. I was pleased when the subject was changed.

We talked of their humiliation by the communist system. Even the engineer’s work was humiliating. This was not because he was forced to work so hard, but because he had so little work to do. Whether he did it or not made no difference to anybody or anything. Using obsolete methods superseded elsewhere, he made a few mathematical calculations each day, but most of his time at work was, if not free, at least vacant. Thus, young and capable as he was, he was already a kind of pensioner of the state, deep in the slough of mediocrity; the self-respect that comes from doing a worthwhile job properly would never be his, and if he were to demand it he would be highly suspect in the eyes of authority.

Worse still, of course, was the fault line in everyone’s personality that ran between their public and their private persona. To be an honest man in Romania, one had to be a hero; otherwise, one asserted in public what one did not believe and believed what one did not assert. Everyone knew himself to be a hypocrite, and knew that everyone else was a hypocrite too. One lived in inner squalor.

After dinner – grilled meat, fried potatoes and Cuban rum – the engineer had to catch the night train to Bucharest. I took him to the station and on the way he asked me to send them postcards from around the world, wherever I might be, just to remind them that another life existed, and to make them feel a little less isolated. When we parted at the station, he said something of which I felt unworthy:

‘You have made us feel free for a day.’

His words have often run through my mind since then, together with those of my companion in Tirgu Mures:

‘You laugh, but we did not laugh.’

Behind the simplicity of these words lies a depth of suffering which must never be forgotten, which must always be remembered, to which end I hope this book is a small contribution.

After nearly two weeks, I was coming now towards the end of my time in Romania, and I drove north from Cluj into the remote land called Maramures. The rolling green hills had grassy meadows and pleasant copses of deciduous trees. The farms were not as comprehensively collectivised in Maramures as elsewhere in Romania, and it showed. Elsewhere in the countryside, one saw huge fields, poorly demarcated from their neighbours, either ploughed without care or overgrown with weeds. In some of them one saw large contingents of people who used to be peasants but were now agricultural servants of the state picking potatoes from the field by hand, as if posing for a pre-revolutionary figurative painter with a social conscience.

Everywhere one saw the harvest stacked in the fields, but storage and transport were inadequate, and half of what was produced would surely have rotted there. (This is one of the reasons why figures for production can rise relentlessly in countries like Romania, yet nothing ever appears in the shops.) There were horse-drawn carts as soon as one left the cities, ecologically sound no doubt but insufficient in numbers to compensate for the lack of mechanisation. Not many of the villages had yet been systematised, but not a few contained a little quarter where uniform blocks of apartments – of the same design throughout the country – had been built, in earnest of the Ceausescu dream of a nation living in bugged, ill-lit, cold, waterless yet damp cells, in total dependence on the state for everything they consumed.

Maramures was different. The fields were cared for, they had proper hedges and fences, and the villages were beautifully preserved, each wooden house with a splendidly carved gate and bright painted decorations of stars and flowers that somehow communicated the villagers’ deep love of their world and what it contained. (I was surprised that such a completely subversive outlook, from the regime’s point of view, had been permitted to survive; perhaps Maramures was too remote and insignificant to worry about, at least for the present.) Off the main road, some of the villages had the most beautiful wooden churches, two and a half centuries old and with steeples over a hundred and fifty feet high. The most exquisite of all was in the village of Surdesti, covered in oak shingles, whose dark interior was opened to me by a man who lived in the nearby painted house. How difficult it was in the churchyard, nestling in a little valley between gentle hills, with a nearby stream and ancient trees all around, not to fall prey to the illusion that here was an arcadia, an illusion all the more powerful because of the sordidness of life elsewhere in the country. To be left alone is the whole secret of happiness in a dictatorship.

In the village of Sapinta is the famous Cimitrul vesel, or Merry Cemetery, where a peasant carver, Stan Ion Patras, began his work before the war, carving wooden headstones with a painted scene from the life of the deceased and accompanied by a limerick, not necessarily flattering to the memory of him or her: Avarice – ‘He who sought money to amass could not escape death, alas!’ – and violence – ‘Griga, may you pardoned be, even though you did stab me’ – were not passed over in silence, but peasants who had escaped the village to the world beyond, and become bureaucrats or agronomists, were celebrated too, portrayed in the uniforms of their success, a suit and pork pie hat in the former case, a clinical white coat (with cows in the background) in the latter. Although the cemetery was permitted to exist and its tradition even fostered – Stan Ion Patras had died, but his followers worked on – it would be difficult to conceive of anything more antithetical to the world outlook of Nicolae Dracul (dracul is the word for devil in Romanian) than this cemetery that commemorates the irreducible individuality of men.

I drove across the north-eastern corner of Romania, through the Prislop Pass, into Moldavia, en route giving a lift to a geology student who had just been on a field course in the mountains. His mother was second in command of the party in a judentul, the administrative equivalent of a county, but this did not mean the student was an apologist of the regime, very much the reverse. He spoke with withering contempt – in fractured English – of the bureaucracy, the Party, the ideology, the leadership and its privileges. Yet he talked with tenderness of his mother, who he said was a wonderful person, despite her service (above the call of necessity, surely) to the very evils he had just denounced. What peculiar states of mind this tyranny gave rise to, what dissociative feats of filing in separate compartments of the mind it required!

We stopped for a late lunch at a roadside restaurant famous for its sausage, not available to everyone, but my companion knew how to wheedle it out of the management (mention of his mother helped). I found the sausage distinctly mundane, but the geology student, who was broad and muscular, consumed it with gusto, washing it down with a whole bottle of red wine in about ten minutes without apparent effect.

We continued on our way, and he asked me whether I should like to meet a friend of his, the gynaecologist in a small town on the way to Iasi. Certainly, I said; gynaecologists were in the front line of Ceausescu’s assault on the people.

We reached the town in the dark. The gynaecologist lived in an ordinary flat, crowded with cheap furniture and ornaments. His wife was ill in the bedroom, but he welcomed us all the same, after removing the telephone from the living room. With some ceremony, he placed a full bottle of Scotch (payment for an operation) on the table and we began to drink it. I hoped that he might grow indiscreet about his work, but he was conspicuously silent on the subject – especially considering I was a fellow doctor – except to say that he did his best for his patients in the circumstances. More than this he would not say. If it were true that gynaecologists examined women monthly at the behest of the state to ensure they were using no artificial means to prevent conception, so that there should be twenty-five million Romanians by Ceausescu’s 75th birthday and thirty million by the year 2000, it was not something they would readily wish to confess to a foreigner at a first meeting. When my inquiries were turned aside, I inquired no further.

We finished the bottle of Scotch and then the hard stuff was produced: absolute alcohol with a few wild raspberries thrown in to give it colour and, if drunk with the tongue of faith, a little flavour. By now conversation had degenerated into slurred protestations of eternal friendship, and I thought it wisest to pour my share of the raspberry alcohol into the pot plants, which I hope did not suffer unduly as a consequence. The student of geology was soon very drunk indeed, and when he tried to stand up it was as though there were a large but invisible hand pushing him back down into the chair.

The gynaecologist rang the local hotel to ask for two beds for us, since we were in no condition to continue our journey. This was not a town where tourists stayed, and he tried to sound casual when he mentioned that one of the beds was for an English doctor.

About an hour later the hotel called back to ask where we were. They were tired of waiting and said they would lock the front door soon.

The student was stood up with difficulty, the gynaecologist and I acting as scaffolding. We staggered down the stairs, into the street, and several hundred yards to the hotel. The gynaecologist wished us goodnight and said he would meet us for breakfast. It transpired that it was not just the hotel staff who had been waiting for us. Two men with rodent-like faces were seated in the office: Securitate agents. I handed them my passport in my best amiable idiot manner, as though I hadn’t the faintest idea who they were or why they were interested in me. They looked through my passport as though they expected to find pornographic pictures in it. They noted its number and then turned to the student, asking for his identity documents. They asked him a few questions but he was so drunk that he threw caution to the winds and told them what he thought of them in no uncertain manner, and almost spat at them as he swayed before them. (Perhaps the importance of his mother in the Party fortified him as much as the alcohol.) For the moment, at any rate, there were no consequences of this defiance.

The receptionist asked for our money. The student was charged 18 lei; I was charged 512 lei.

Once in his room my companion punched the walls, not lightly but with his full and considerable strength, so that the plaster flaked off and his knuckles bled. By this time, he was too drunk for speech, and I was unable to guess whether his punches represented a show of bravado or a realisation of what he had done in offending the Securitate.

Next morning, he looked considerably fresher than I felt. The bottle of wine and the bottle of spirits he had drunk left him with no ill-effects.

We continued our journey. In the next town, I tried to buy some petrol, but the woman at the garage said there was none. By chance, the student saw his mother’s car parked outside the town’s Party headquarters and he said he would ask for her help. He ran into the headquarters and after a few minutes emerged with his mother, dressed smartly in the communist fashion, in a green and cream check suit of greater durability than elegance, and a beehive hairdo. We shook hands and her son explained that she had ordered the garage by telephone to release thirty litres of petrol to me. We returned to the garage where, looking sullen and defeated, the attendant delivered thirty litres as ordered, for which I paid in lei, thus reducing the cost to me by 80 per cent.

So this was how the dialectic worked in Romania. Thesis: there is no petrol. Antithesis: an order from the Party to deliver it. Synthesis: thirty litres.

I had qualms about accepting the Party’s bounty, of course, as though in doing so I were demeaning myself. This was the way the Party produced a psychology of complicity: by extending favours to evade the multitude of frustrations it created itself. At the first hint of an inconvenience, I had caved in and accepted such a favour. How, then, could I blame people who had experienced a lifetime of such inconveniences (and incomparably worse than inconveniences) for their failure to protest, for their seeming acquiescence in the monstrous system of privilege whose pillars were monopoly, incompetence inefficiency and corruption?

At Bucharest airport my name was entered into a computer and I was asked to step aside. The police took my passport and my baggage was searched for a second time. Though I was treated politely, they looked at me with feral eyes.

It was half an hour before they returned my passport. Far from being nervous, I was elated, though I remained calm. To have been suspected of anti-state crime by the Securitate was the highest, the only compliment they could have paid me.