And so it appeared, for from early morning to late at night an unending procession of thousands of people, mainly women, filed patiently up the hill to the basilica. The procession never stopped. Contrary to Iozu’s argument, the people looked middle-class. Each person carried a small bottle in which he would collect a year’s supply of holy water at the fountain outside the church. In the coming year they would sprinkle a drop or two upon themselves, on their families, animals, things—on anything which involved the fulfilling of a wish. A drop or two on a sick person to make them better, on a wife or a husband to make them do something or other, on the house to make it lucky. Some were carrying pieces of paper on which a written request is made and presented to the priest.
Iozu said: “It may seem to you indelicate but I have once or twice peeped over someone’s shoulder to read what was written. One I read said: ‘Please see that So-and-so is struck dead; she has gone off with my husband.’ And quite a lot say outright, ‘Get So-and-so out of the flat in such-and-such a street, so that I can have it.’”
Whether he really read this or not, I am sure that Romanian wishes are passionate and cunning. Romania is the country of the vampire legend.
While we were talking, the superb voice of the Patriarch in the Greek chant came out of the microphone in the trees outside the church—a voice powerful, disturbing, sensual and full. It was a life-giving rather than a censorious nasal sound—the note I have always found tyrannous in the Roman rite. Iozu said that the Patriarch was very popular and was known by the nickname of “the-too-happy”. His earthly and assuring noise was followed by the wild, utterly Oriental tenor howl of the Deacon, who might have been howling in the desert or screaming in a saeta in Seville. The two voices played upon each other and their spell was wonderful. And while they chanted the mile-long procession slowly crept into the church and those who came out went round to kiss the walls. It was a hot morning and this is a kissing religion—walls, stones, fountains, innumerable pictures of saints to be kissed. The lip prints are thick on them.
Iozu took me to the new football stadium to show me that Romanians were modern as well as medieval. We saw the new building estates; not very impressive; the gardens were burned up by the sun and neglected. We were driving through a city of trees ; one craves for shade in the autumn as well as the summer. Old Bucharest has a distinctive architectural style—the single-storey house with heavy overhanging eaves and carved porch; many took my mind back to old Lima and Portugal. The dahlias, the roses, the chrysanthemums and michaelmas daisies were flopping in the gardens.
Iozu talked about his life. He was a boy when the war ended, the son of a factory worker. There was confusion when the Romanians changed sides and joined the British and the Russians. The British were not popular because they had bombed the oil-fields and the city continually and Iozu said all the young boys ran wild. He spent wonderful days pulling down polling booths, and the British arrested his father and mother. Iozu then joined the Communist Pioneers and quickly got a good education. He spoke English, French, German and Russian and he had been sent as an interpreter to Scandinavia, Russia and Italy. He was not impressed.
He was keen on joining the Party and when I carelessly said: “It would be to your advantage,” he was indignant. One got no “advantages” from the Party. One was generally worse paid than anyone else. But one learned to be a leader who would guide people out of the morass of backwardness and superstition. He had a very clear idea of the distinction between real leaders, exhibitionists and careerists. He said all Romanians, like himself, were utterly out of sympathy with the Hungarian rising, chiefly (he admitted) for nationalist reasons. Once again, the strongest feeling in all the satellites, except Czechoslovakia, is national. I never saw Iozu smile. He was a Slav, fair, blue-eyed, crop-headed and severe. He tried hard to do his duty and find out everything I did in Bucharest. He nearly went mad when he lost me in the food exhibition.
Iozu left me ; he had to conduct a bus load of Czechs to Budapest. One could tell the difference between the Czech and the Russian bus loads in the dining-room of the hotel. The Czechs were terribly shapeless and ugly and badly dressed; the Russians were stolid and the material of their clothes was very thin and poor. They drank no beer or wine and they waited and waited, until at last the busy, amusing waiters rushed great platters of fried pork chops and chips to them.
My second guide was Apollo. There was nothing of the incipient Party member about Apollo. Dark, handsome in the Italian style, he was always hanging about the girls in the hotel. He knew everybody and was always late. He was the only son of a retired doctor whose wife added to their small pension by teaching history in a secondary school. They sent him money. He had been to Russia and had been a success with the girls there. “They always fall for the southern type,” he said unsmilingly. “Russian men are not interesting to them.” In the meantime Apollo was thinking of getting married to a girl in Bucharest. Their official jobs had given them both pull; and they both were lucky to have a two-roomed flat each.
“That is what is holding up our marriage,” he said. “She won’t give up her flat and I don’t want to give up mine. And then I’m so busy with foreign visitors all summer and autumn that I don’t get time to see much of her till the winter. That is the time for love—the winter, when things are quiet and you can stay inside. It’s too cold to go out, anyway. And then, of course, I may get a job in foreign trade. I want to go on trade delegations to the West. What do you think of that blonde? She’s in the air line office.”
“She’s very pretty,” I said.
“Hi, sweet,” called Apollo to the girl. “This gentleman says he adores you.”
The girl shrugged and went off.
“I know so many,” Apollo said.
Apollo spoke no English. His French was excellent. He had never been to France.
One got bored by taking foreigners round the Pioneer school, the Print Works, the clothing factory (he said), and foreigners were funny. The British didn’t want to see much but wanted to go into one or two things deeply. They were dull. The Americans wanted to go everywhere, talked of nothing but dollars and their women got drunk on whisky. The Germans were rude. The worst were the French. They were fantastically mean. They astonished the waiters by asking them to save their table napkins for the next meal, and to keep the unfinished bottles of wine for them. The waiters rushed to the kitchens and shouted with laughter. “No one drinks less than a whole bottle of wine in Romania,” he said.
Apollo lectured me on the excellence of everything in Communist Romania; he was wonderfully conceited, efficient and incapable of discussion. For example, one day I asked him what would happen if he overdrew his account at the bank. He said he had no bank account. He had never heard of cheque books. He said there were no private bank accounts and all savings had been confiscated when the Communists took over. He said he was paid in cash and kept his money in a drawer at home.
“Aren’t you afraid it might be stolen?”
“There are no thieves in Romania,” he said. “Under Communism there is no stealing, no burglary, no gangster life, as there is in the West. There would be no point in it. Look,” he said, picking up a newspaper. “There are no reports of crime.”
“Perhaps they are suppressed for political reasons.”
“There is no crime, but if there were, to publish reports would only encourage the criminals and make the public morbid,” he said. If he saved money he put it in the savings bank. Apollo was superficially well-educated. He was intelligent about the very fine Grecos in the Royal Palace, now the National Gallery. He told me about books and he was good on modern literature, and proud of the tradition of Romanian folk tales. He knew his country thoroughly and did his job perfectly. We went one night to hear Don Pasquale—to our disappointment we could not get into the grand Opera House—and he was displeased because he had shown me a poor performance. In music Bucharest has high standards.
Bucharest has a peculiar distinction among
the world’s capitals. I have already mentioned the Methuselah complex. The Romanians desire to live for ever. They loathe old age. For fifty years they have had the handsomely endowed Parhon Institute for Geriatrics. At present it is run by a remarkable woman doctor, Dr. Asian, whose researches are well known in Europe and the United States. She is a busy and most engaging woman who looks a young forty—but, as she proudly says, she is much older—who works sixteen hours a day, loves conversation and showing off her extraordinary troupe of old men and women whose infirmities she has cured and who enjoy a surprising rejuvenation. They march into her office headed by the celebrated Parseh Margosian, aged a hundred and twelve, a man with a hand grip of iron, a commanding eye, a neck as smooth as a baby’s, new-grown hair on his rugged head. Once in a state of physical and mental decay, he can now chatter in the seven Eastern languages he was brought up in, and strides about manfully. There is a lively tailor who has returned to his trade at seventy-six, after paralysis; he is now growing black hair.
One frightening fellow of eighty, a one-time gymnasium instructor, did a handstand on the table beside me. Another ancient has lately married a young thing in her sixties and reproaches her only for having passed the age of child-bearing and so has failed, in Congreve’s phrase, to crown their endeavours. A lady in her seventies, an opera singer, who had lost her voice and become a physical wreck, sang an Aria at the top of her voice and was asked not to go “all out”. I came away with a mangled hand—the hand grip is the vanity of great age.
Apollo, aged twenty-five, was with me. Dr. Asian told him old age begins when you are born and that injections of procaine would do him good. Giving me a sharp look, she said I would recover an optimistic outlook on life and improve my memory. One feels younger after listening to Dr. Asian. Perhaps she is a splendid Romanian sorceress, reborn in science.
Apollo told me he had ampoules of procaine in his flat and was waiting for the first signs of failing powers. Perhaps next year . . . Perhaps before the next trip to Russia ... He will be twenty-six, a critical age. The clinic is a mixture of laboratory, hospital and old folks’ home. The old people have charming rooms and sit about reading to each other or listening to the wireless. It reminded me of a very fine home for the aged that I had seen in Connecticut.
The Carpati organisation—the State Tourist Agency— who are anxious to get people from the West to go to Romania and do, in fact, get a number of German, French and American tourists, told Apollo to take me to Orasul-Stalin (late Brasov) up in the southern Carpathians, here called the Transylvanian Alps. If I had had time I would have gone further north to the Lacul Rosu, with its strange lake on which one sails over the tree-tops of a petrified forest; and then westward to towns like Cluz and Oradea. The mountain and forest scenery was upholstered in greenery.
Before leaving Bucharest I had visited the remarkable outdoor museum called The Romanian Village, an enterprise already flourishing before World War II, because here close to the lake are examples of peasant house-building from all the regions of Transylvania. Essentially, the Romanians are decorators. There is something oriental in the architecture of their houses and the decorative taste appears in carving, in their murals, in the wooden-slatted roofs of their farm buildings and cottages, and in the high wooden steeples of their churches which shot up like the long necks of storks with wings outspread over the nest.
Hour after hour we drove under the yellow acacias northwards from Bucharest across the flat Romanian plain. For miles the road was lined by whitewashed wooden fences and behind them were occasional settlements of wooden cabins. It was peasant country. Scores of little carts, loaded with wood, bricks, rushes or sacks of potatoes were being drawn by ponies. The peasant families sat on top of the load, the men in their fez-like hats of brown sheepskin, the women in their head scarves. Industrial workers around Ploesti, where the oil-fields are, have given up the sheepskin hat and are taking to cloth caps and berets.
Apollo quickly pointed out the modern derricks that had replaced the old ones in the oil-fields. They add an iron melancholy to the flat landscape of pale, burned grasses. Ploesti itself was badly bombed in the war and is a shabby, crowded town. Now the road began to rise into the mountains and we drove above the pretty Prahova river, passing the mountain sawmills, the cement works, the paper mills in the gorges, and then into the wilder, fir-forested heights. Little towns of holiday villas appeared and higher up were brilliant patches of Alpine pasture. The things that caught my eye continually were the almost mosque-like villas. One was in the heart of Romania.
Up here was the fantastic Hohenzollern castle, an appalling pile of nineteenth-century rococo in the worst German taste. The pomp, the excreted extravagance of chocolate-coloured wood carving in this gloomy pseudo-fortress is worth looking at. It tells one everything about Germanic royalty in the nineteenth century—its congested arrogance, its comic medievalism, its ludicrous pomp, half-martial, half-sickly, fanciful and childish. One is shown the little desk at which the Prime Minister had to stand as he waited for the seated King to sign the documents. All one can say is that they had a superb, eagle’s view of the Carpathian peaks, as they dipped their pens. How any human being walked about in safety is a wonder, for the floors of the Palace are like glass. We were given slippers and, with a couple of pretty French-speaking girls who were our guides, we slid about giggling.
“What can one do with a place like this?” they said, skating hilariously down the corridors in their flannel slippers. “It is hopeless as a retreat for writers, a library, a rest house for workers. Perhaps we ought to have a psychiatrists’ conference here, to discuss suicide and nightmare.”
Charabanc loads of people from Bucharest come up to gape and laugh at the monstrosity and to ramble up the mountain paths.
Like all historic monuments in this country, this is impeccably well kept.
Orasul-Stalin (late Brasov) is made of an old medieval town and a modern industrial one in the tractor and lorry-building trade. The industry was set up by the Germans during the war ; since then the Romanians have enlarged it and built a workers’ community near it. The whole mountain region is a place of hotels and Orasul-Stalin has the park-like attraction of a nineteenth-century spa. Here the Carpathians are tamed ; the hunting grounds where, if you are lucky, you see the bear, the roebuck and the wolves are further north where one approaches the Ukraine. Rich West Germans hunt there still.
There is a luxury hotel at Orasul-Stalin, where one dines well, to the noise of a jazz band, and people dance, but it was almost empty when we were there. We had more amusement round the corner in the crowded cafeteria where a cheerful crowd were eating delicious food and drinking their slivowicz and zwiecke, a neat, plum spirit that smells and tastes like Dettol ; even better there was one of those cellar cafés which are common in the region, packed out with workers who eat and drink generously. Winters are hard here; for nearly half the year north-east winds come fiercely down from Russia, and people dive underground into these clean, light places, which are warmed by the lovely tiled stoves of the country. They stand like ornate private shrines in the rooms. Pretty well the whole of Romania is heated by natural gas that is piped down from the mountains.
I have often complained of the defects of service in the cafés, bars, hotels of eastern Europe; in Romania one cannot make this criticism. In the smart places or in the popular ones, like these hot cellar cafés, the attention is quick and cheerful. Tips were always refused. Conversation roared in the cellar. Apollo amused himself by picking out the Hungarians, who are a majority in this region; we talked about mural paintings in the village churches, the wonders of natural gas, the general prosperity of Romania. We wandered about the gay, crowded streets until the night fogs came down. The chauffeur had supper with us, but as he did not speak French I got nothing out of him. Even Apollo complained that he would not talk. For days he had been a silent man, worrying about his batteries.
I had arrived in Romania from Bulgaria. One flies over the Balk
an and then over the sad fens and puddled lagoons of the Danube. The little plane was a day late; it was grounded in Sofia, all planes were grounded, because Khruschev was flying back to Moscow after a secret visit to Bucharest. Foreign diplomats discovered he had been there for a week only when they opened their newspapers the day after he left. Apollo told me it was easy for politicians to get in and out of the city without being observed, for they live out by the lake which adjoins the airport. An official need never go into the heart of the capital.
After poor, primitive, energetic Bulgaria, I was struck by the sophistication and comparative wealth of the Romanians. I was once more in a country nearer to western Europe, although like Bulgaria it too had lived for three hundred years under the overlordship of the Turks. But the Turks had oppressed the Romanians less; they had ruled through the Romanian boyars or small nobility. After the First World War Romania became immensely enlarged and even over-sized, at Hungarian expense, which has left serious minority problems. Romanians are by tradition authoritarian and harsh rulers.
Foreign Faces Page 11
