by Paul Bailey
I was met at the airport by a young man in a long black leather coat who informed me that I was the guest of the Romanian Writers’ Union. As the week progressed, I began to wonder what crime I had perpetrated in order to attain this dubious honour. The young man told me he was a television playwright. I was not immediately suspicious of this claim since I understood nothing at that time of the curious workings of Romanian television. I would soon discover by switching on the TV in my hotel bedroom that the screen was blank for most of the day, only coming to dreary life at four in the afternoon with the transmission of parliamentary proceedings. I watched Ceauşescu as he droned on and on from the podium for the regulated two hours. Every ten minutes or so, the toadies in the hall afforded him a standing ovation, as if on cue. Here was television drama of a sickening, soporific kind.
The Writers’ Union had booked me into an expensive hotel on the Calea Victoriei – the Street of Victories. A surly individual – the first of many thugs I was to encounter – gave me a form to complete. The playwright assisted me. I was asked to give my father’s date of birth. My father sired me when he was on the brink of old age, dying when I was very young. I had forgotten when he was born, but I guessed it had to be in the 1880s. I wrote 20 April 1888, and the surly receptionist, reading it, looked up and eyed me with contemptuous disbelief. I have always looked younger than my years, and in 1989 I could have passed for someone in his late thirties or early forties. The man with the fixed sneer clearly thought I was having a complicated joke at his expense. It was something to which he wasn’t accustomed.
I was due to meet my interpreter, Lydia, the following morning at nine o’clock. I rose at seven, had breakfast – the waiter, who spoke perfect English, said he was a professional actor – and decided to go for a walk. No sooner had I left the hotel than two tall men in long black leather coats began to trail me. I am in a spy novel, I thought as I pretended not to notice them. There was a side street leading off the square I had wandered into and I chose to run down it to give them the slip. They ran after me, at a discreet pace. I was amused, not frightened. I stopped in front of a bookshop, which was already open. I walked in, and discovered within minutes that all the books on offer were the Collected Speeches of Nicolae Ceauşescu in virtually every language. This was vanity publishing on an unprecented scale. His thoughts, such as they were, could be studied in Bengali, in Sanskrit, in Japanese, as well as in English, French, German and Italian. My leather-coated admirers, protectors – or even, perhaps, assassins – were making a great show of being fascinated by the window display. They kept a few paces behind me as I strolled back to the hotel.
The first thing that Lydia did was to stop me giving money to a gypsy child with an outstretched hand. I met several intellectuals that week, who spoke movingly and illuminatingly about Romania’s terrible misfortunes, whenever they were at a safe distance from a bugging device. On the subject of the gypsies, however, they were almost unanimously hostile. The terminology of racial hatred is unvarying, wherever it’s employed. I’d heard it in childhood when every landlord was called ‘Shylock’, and in my youth with the arrival of the ‘darkies’ in my native south London. But what I was hearing now, and wishing I wasn’t – to the effect that the gypsies were ‘taking the food out of the mouths of decent Romanians’ – differed in one crucial respect. The predictable opinions were issuing from the mouths of people with university degrees, not the uneducated working-class men and women I grew up amongst. The odious villains in power suddenly seemed less responsible for the country’s ills than those Romany scapegoats whose music inspired Bartók, who was born on what is now Romanian soil.
As we drove through the city in Lydia’s tiny, and ubiquitous, Dacia, we passed shops selling cheap cuts of meat or stale bread, outside which long and apparently silent queues had formed. It was a dispiriting sight and one which I shall never forget. When we arrived at the Writers’ Union headquarters, we were greeted by the palest man in the world, whose clothes matched his complexion in paleness. He offered us wine and announced that there was a choice of fish (carp) or chicken for lunch. Writers, I realized, were privileged in this culture, especially if they chose not to criticize the regime. They had husbands, wives and children to consider. I had to ask myself if I would have become a time-server had I been living under a dictatorship. I hoped not. I settled for the chicken.
On Tuesday morning I attempted to check out of the hotel. I had consumed two bottles of mineral water in my room, and tried to pay for them with Romanian money, of which I had been given an abundance. The surly receptionist would only accept American dollars, Deutschmarks or sterling. He threw the lei back at me as if they were dirt. I offered him my credit card. It was at this point the manager appeared, giving me back my card and assuring me that the water was free. I smiled at my enemy, who glowered.
I flew with Lydia to Suceava, where we were met by a uniformed chauffeur who led us to a government limousine. I was being given the VIP treatment. Lydia warned me not to say anything controversial in the car, because it was certain to be bugged. We passed through villages that Ceauşescu was currently intent on destroying, replacing them with what might be deemed housing estates. Peasants and farmhands stopped and stared as the vast black car – a hated symbol of authority – made its progress along bumpy country roads. We were going to see some of the undoubted marvels of Romanian art – the painted churches of Moldavia. The frescoes, depicting scenes from the life of Christ and his inevitable Passion, are on the outside of the churches and are in a state of almost miraculous preservation. As I stood in wonder, a troop of white ducks waddled past – the same white ducks who were accompanying Christ on the Via Dolorosa in the marvellous fresco, painted by anonymous hands, I was admiring.
The next stop was Iaşi, the capital of Moldavia, where 10,000 Jews were massacred in 1941. I was supposed to give a talk at the university, but this had been cancelled. (On governmental instructions, no less, I was to learn.) I spent the evening with Ştefan, an expert on American literature, and we got happily sozzled in a nearby restaurant thanks to the piles of lei I was carrying.
On Thursday morning I was in Bucharest again, and the surly receptionist was again on duty. He handed me the form to fill in. I reminded him that I had completed it on Sunday. He insisted that I do so once more. I remembered that my father’s supposed date of birth was 20 April 1888, and duly recorded it. My dedicated foe seized the paper from me, but his hopes of chancing on a different date were confounded. I was all smiles.
That Friday was memorable in many ways. In the morning, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, condemned Romania’s bad record on human rights. Dozens of writers and artists who had been invited to meet me at a reception in the British Embassy that evening were suddenly disinvited by telephone. I spent the morning with two translators and my future Romanian publisher, and was picked up by the television dramatist who drove me to the University of Bucharest. On the way, I asked him if there was a gay scene in the capital.
‘By “gay” do you mean “humorous”?’ he replied.
I told him what I meant.
‘We do not have such people in Romania.’
‘There must be some in Central and Eastern Europe,’ I suggested.
‘They are all in Budapest.’
He dropped me by the steps of the university and zoomed off. On arrival at the English department, I informed a woman who is now a friend and likes to be addressed as Micky, that I had come to give a talk to the students. ‘But we were expecting you last Tuesday,’ she said. She made me a cup of tea, then phoned the head of the department, who had gone home for the weekend. The two resourceful teachers rustled up about a hundred students, who plied me with questions on any number of subjects. The authorities had given the department the wrong day for my lecture, knowing perfectly well that I would be out of town. Micky and her boss were breaking the law by allowing me to speak on the Friday. They had no written permission to invite a visitor from abroad in
to the English department, even though the visitor was English. They knew they were taking a serious risk.
There were police cars galore in the streets surrounding the British Embassy. Mrs Arbuthnot, the wife of the ambassador, was laughing at the thought that a mere writer should attract more policemen than she had ever seen. The palest man in the world was at the party. ‘What a pity you couldn’t talk to the students today,’ were his first words to me. The plot was unravelling. ‘Oh, but I did,’ I answered, and I swear he turned paler. ‘What did you talk about?’ he enquired when he had recovered somewhat from the shock. ‘Lots of things,’ I said. ‘Politics, the theatre, sex.’ ‘How many students were there?’ he asked, thinking of those young minds being tainted by Western decadence. ‘A hundred. Perhaps more.’
As he walked away, Rosemary – who worked for the British Council, and spoke fluent, idiomatic Romanian – remarked of the world’s palest man, ‘He’s such a wanker.’ Hearing this, Mrs Arbuthnot laughed even louder. ‘Every room in this building is bugged,’ she explained. ‘I can just see them rushing to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up that word. You’ve really put them in a tizzy.’
After the reception, I went back to the flat Rosemary rented. There were five of us – a Romanian actor and his girlfriend, and a dissident poet whose hangdog expression haunted me for years. Nearly a decade later, I learned that he had been blackmailed into working for the Securitate, the secret police. A police car followed the taxi we were in, and remained outside the apartment until three in the morning. It followed me back to the hotel.
I checked out of the Intercontinental on Sunday morning. I thanked the surly receptionist for his interesting contribution to my happy stay. Rosemary came with me to the airport. A police car was again in attendance.
I was reunited with Circe on Monday. She was stand-offish for the first few minutes, reminding me with her soulful eyes that I had abandoned her. We were barely home before she was barking to go to the park. I obeyed her loud commands, and was eventually forgiven.
One of my new friends had related a wonderfully funny and sinister story during that eventful, surreal week. It seemed that a British politician, David Steel, had presented the Ceauşescus with a black Labrador puppy named Winston. Once in Romania, the dog was renamed Comrade Corbul (‘corb’ means ‘raven’, and can mean ‘vulture’) and made a member of the Communist party. He grew into a sleek and lively animal, because of the varied diet on which he was reared. No cheap cuts for him. My friend was waiting at the traffic lights on Calea Victoriei when a state limousine drew up in front of him. A uniformed chauffeur was, as ever, in the front seat, but it was the figure on the back seat that startled him. There was Comrade Corbul, with a ribboned medal on his chest, perched in lonely splendour, the grandest of political animals. ‘I laughed at the sight, but then I choked on my laughter.’
In September 1989, I gave a dinner party for Antoinette Ralian, who had been granted a visa to study at the Bodleian in Oxford. She was Iris Murdoch’s translator, and had also translated D. H. Lawrence. Under the Ceauşescus, the sexual act was outlawed in literature (the rampant Elena, who had her pick of the bodyguards, didn’t like to think of others enjoying themselves) and Antoinette had serious problems rendering the wrestling scene in Women in Love into allusive Romanian. Over dinner, we talked of the liberty such countries as Hungary and Poland were about to achieve, and Antoinette became tearful. ‘It could never happen in Romania,’ she sighed.
But it could, and it did, after a terrible fashion, that very Christmas, when the crowds in Timişoara and Bucharest defied the police and the army and heckled the perplexed dictator as he tried, and failed, to placate his once docile and frightened people from the balcony of the parliament building. Elena and Nicolae went into hiding, but were captured, put on farcical trial, and shot. One of their self-appointed ‘judges’ would kill himself two months later.
It was then that something of the corruption and wickedness that had prevailed in Romania for more than a decade was revealed to the civilized world. The orphanages into which AIDS-infected and unwanted children had been dumped and the mental institutions where rational dissidents were receiving ‘treatment’ were opened up for inspection. These horrors were unique to Romania. Elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, those defying the status quo were sentenced to imprisonment. The idea of the insane asylum as a place of detention, where the disease of speaking the truth can be diagnosed and cured, is entirely fitting for the culture that produced Dadaism and the absurdist drama of Eugène Ionesco.
After that hectic week in March 1989, I decided that Ionesco, far from being an absurdist, was in fact a realist. Plays like The Chairs and, especially, Rhinoceros presage the nightmares and deceits of Ceauşescu’s Romania. I reread Ionesco with a renewed sense of his brilliance and prescience. I recalled how the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, posing as a committed socialist, attacked the dramatist for being apolitical, taking him to flippant task for his pessimism. Yet it’s Ionesco who endures, and his refusal to espouse the immovable doctrines of Right and Left seems wholly humane in the context of Romanian history from 1930 to 1989. And, alas, beyond.
I returned to Bucharest in the winter of 1992, the third anniversary of the so-called revolution. I write ‘so-called’ because that’s the expression everyone I met was using. No one believed that it was a genuine uprising. There were rumours that the protests in Timişoara had been masterminded by the Russians and the downfall of the latterday Macbeths planned within the party. It was viciously cold in the city, and although there was inviting and nutritious food in the shops only a tiny minority could afford the luxury of smoked salmon or fillet steak or noisettes of lamb. The books were different, too. In the Communist era it was impossible to buy unashamedly popular fiction, but now the works of Jackie Collins, Barbara Cartland, Jack Higgins and Danielle Steel, among others, were there beside the established classics. During my visit, Antoinette was busy translating a novel by someone called Sandra Brown (a name of such ordinariness that it has to be made up) for one of the new commercial publishing houses that had appeared almost overnight in January 1990. She was earning more money than she had ever been paid by the official state publishers, but at a spiritual cost. ‘There aren’t too many ways of saying “fuck” in Romanian,’ she observed sadly.
(The two Romanian–English dictionaries in my possession were published while Ceauşescu was in power. There are no definitions for ‘penis’, ‘testicles’, ‘vagina’, ‘clitoris’ or ‘homosexual’. The cruder variants are, naturally, absent. Romania was a pure country and its language similarly immaculate and untainted by carnality.)
That December I stayed in a run-down, but once opulent, hotel. A group of Sicilians who had boarded the connecting flight at Zürich were also staying there. They wore striped suits, two-toned shoes and fedoras – a clichéd combination that shrieked out MAFIA. They did business in the hotel lobby. A friend, calling on me, noticed two of them in earnest conversation with a member of the government. There were armed guards in the lobby all day and night, and at six every evening the prostitutes – some in fur coats because of the weather – arrived for work. They looked fit and well-fed, unlike the wasted boys and girls who were attempting to sell their bodies at the Gare du Nord, the central railway station. Like Jo the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, they were subsequently ‘moved on’ – to die out of sight, presumably. They were distressing the tourists with their bulging eyes and skeletal frames: the awful evidence of the AIDS-related illnesses they were suffering.
A whole community of lost and abandoned children was living in the city’s sewers, I learned. Several of these waifs had died the same gruesome death. Overcome by hunger and the need to steal or beg for something to eat, they would emerge from an uplifted manhole and get run over by a car or truck. Since their lives were worthless anyway, and their place of residence illegal, it was generally considered that they were responsible for their own demise. If you ignore the circumstances that led them to
the sewers, that point of view makes sense. The drivers were victims, not killers.
I contacted the British Council during my trip and, hearing that George, the Council’s driver, was going to Iaşi, I asked if he could give me a lift in the Land Rover. It was on that long ride across the snow-covered countryside that I made my first serious acquaintance with the language. Andy, a librarian, whose Romanian parents had been English teachers in Rhodesia, taught me the words for the birds and objects we saw on the journey – coţofana, magpie, being the first. The ebullient George was my delighted tutor as well, of a much more basic vocabulary, which includes labagiu, the Romanian for the term Rosemary used to describe the palest man in the world.
I had dinner with Ştefan in Iaşi and another man, a lecturer at the university, joined us. He was tipsy on arrival, and got drunker and drunker as the meal progressed. He revealed, for my benefit I assumed, that he lived in domestic misery, with a wife and daughter who both hated him. It turned out that the house in which I was spending the night was next to his own, so we shared a taxi late in the evening. He had heard me reading from my memoir An Immaculate Mistake in Cambridge in 1990 and told me how brave I was to be so open about my homosexuality. Such courage was impossible and unthinkable in Romania, he said. As soon as we were out of the taxi, he made a lunge in my direction, trying to kiss me on the lips. I managed to push him off and say I wasn’t interested. Once inside the house, I discovered there was no key to the lock on my bedroom door. So, absurdly, I secured a chair beneath the door handle, to fend off the bear-like individual who had designs on me. There I was, at the age of fifty-three, behaving as if I were some timid virgin. I could laugh about it in the morning, but I had been scared. I mentioned the incident to Ştefan, who was not surprised. The Securitate had discovered that the man was homosexual many years ago and had threatened him with imprisonment and worse if he didn’t cooperate. They advised him to marry, to ensure that his secret never became common knowledge. The lecturer had been informing on his colleagues for three decades, at least. He was not happy in this task, as his often excessive drinking indicated.
