On the night of the “launching” the room at the Student Cultural Center was filled with a chosen group of people. The only reason some of my old friends came was that Nardi, suspecting the Euphorion gang of elitism, had contacted the newspaper and the television station on his own. Word had barely gotten out. It hadn’t been the group’s intention to make this an open forum. When I found this out, I objected most strenuously. “My books,” I said, “should be read by everyone. Besides, my friend Nardi here needs to make a buck to recoup his costs. Everyone you invited is getting free books.” “Point well taken,” exclaimed the director of the Student Center, Constantin Chiriac, “we could have leafleted the union halls and gotten thousands, but we wanted to keep it classy.”
To understand just how twisted this reasoning was, you must know that “the masses,” in whose name the communists had created their own elite, enjoy no more prestige in the post-communist era than they ever did. Opposition intellectuals who took up politics after “the revolution,” who’d had to address the masses, did so against their deepest instincts. The contempt translated into the polls, hence the longevity of Iliescu’s standstill government. Nicolae Manolescu, one of Romania’s best critical thinkers, told me that a journalist had once come to interview him without having read any of his books. Imagine. The poor journalist. No wonder Manolescu lost so badly at the polls: Only ten voters had read his books.
Nonetheless, the evening was “a success,” as my friends ceaselessly assured me. No matter what happened, how much psychological uneasiness had been produced, the main thing was to be “a success.” The impulse to endow all events, even catastrophes, with a positive spin, is an unfortunate human, not uniquely Romanian, desire. The evening was not a catastrophe, but what did the “success” consist of? It consisted, no doubt, of a genius talk by the sage of Sibiu, the poet and translator Mircea Ivanescu. Wrapped like a cocoon in a silver-haired aura of civility, with Coke-bottom glasses that make his eyes look infinitely deep, Ivanescu, the translator into Romanian of James Joyce and Robert Musil, is the very heart of erudite civilization.
Listening to Ivanescu spin his weave of commentary on the margin of my poor poems, I had the absolute sense of the greatness of Romanian culture. Just as I had previously visioned (not en-visioned) the total underground of the Romanian economy, I now saw into its murky depths the ingot of pure gold that would save them all. Here was a man, a genius, but, perhaps more important, a scholar, for whom the life of the mind was absolute. The life of his body was as incidental as it is for any saint, because he emanated a simplicity of love that transcended matter. I could provide here the details of his life to prove this assertion, but it is wholly unnecessary. Saints are knowable directly, and if the facts support their sainthood, as they inevitably will, it’s only because the pope’s bureaucracy demands them. Believe me: Ivanescu is a saint. His living among the citizens of Sibiu, including the Euphorionites, is what makes it possible for them to be equal participants in European culture. I say this knowing full well that there are others like him in Romania, prima facie evidence of moral certainty. This would be a sordid story without them.
MY FRIENDS, THE FOURTH TIME AROUND
Titi was bursting with enthusiasm: after his unsuccessful run for mayor of Sibiu, he’d gone full tilt into business. He had built a commodity exchange, which he was dying to show me.
The Sibiu Commodity Exchange was a new building near the train station. It was airy and modern, with a wide marble staircase leading to an open meeting room. Titi employed twenty-five brokers with gleaming new computers. Four hundred companies were listed on the exchange. The exchange had opened just the past week, on 12 July 1997. On the desk in his spacious office with wall-sized windows overlooking the ancient spires of Sibiu was a stack of newspapers headlining the event.
“Unfortunately,” Titi sighed, “your President Clinton stole the first page.”
Not completely. News of Titi’s exchange was just below the photograph of an open-mouth Clinton captured in midspeech and a toothy Emil Constantinescu caught, one supposes, in midthanks. “The First Futures Trading in Romania Organized on the Occasion of the Exchange’s Official Opening!” trumpeted Tribuna.
I asked Titi how he’d managed this capitalistic coup. He was a trained veterinarian, a manager until 1989 of a pig farm. He told me an astonishing story. He had put an ad in a New York émigré newspaper seeking financial advice for the founding of a bank. A man of local origin, named Thomas Curtean, answered. Mr. Curtean was guru to numerous American financial institutions. He had written several primary texts about the functioning of brokerage institutions. He was also getting on in age, was nostalgic for his birthplace, and intended to buy, for sentimental reasons, the house where his parents were born. Titi and Curtean struck up a friendship that resulted in Curtean moving into Titi’s house for several months and creating the exchange. Curtean trained Titi’s brokers gratis, a job for which he normally charged hundreds of thousands of dollars, and supervised every aspect of the enterprise until it began to function.
“What are the laws regarding exchanges?” I asked.
“That’s the beauty of it!” shouted Titi. “There aren’t any!”
And, of course, since there weren’t any, they would be written on the basis of a fait accompli. Titi was writing the laws. He was rightly proud of his initiative and full of enthusiasm for what his attitude portended. It meant that anyone with the nerve to seize the initiative (and with the necessary connections, naturally) could make a bundle in Romania. In this respect, Romania is where Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic were seven years ago.
Titi’s enthusiasm was infectious. In addition to the exchange, he owned a factory for manufacturing meat products and had built a splendid set of apartments for lease to wealthy businessmen or consular residents. He hadn’t given up his dream of a ski resort in the mountain village of Saliste and was bubbling with all kinds of other entrepreneurial ideas.
The gleaming new building of the Commodity Exchange contrasted most glaringly with the shabbiness of Sibiu’s ancient historical district. Sibiu, a medieval city, is one of the jewels of Europe in terms of its architecture, history, and importance. Cornel Lungu, the director of the Bruckenthal Historical Museum, explained that no effort was being made either to preserve or to renovate the old city. There was a lack of political will, despite the fact that tourism, just trickling now, could revive the local economy.
Titi showed none of his characteristic enthusiasm when I asked him about it. The sorry state of the municipality was the fault of local government, he said, which refused to sell the historical buildings to private investors. Only such investors, backed by laws concerning preservation, could save the city. It was amazing to hear such resolute market ideas: Had so much time passed since 1989 when he’d been the director of a collectivist enterprise?
The business of Sibiu’s crumbling architecture and the necessity to save it preoccupied me for the next two days. I brought up the problem with everyone, including my old friend Ion V, who was still an editor at Tribuna but seemed depressed. While his friend Titi was getting quickly rich, Ion had remained in place. He suggested the formation of a Codrescu Foundation to see to the old city’s revival. This was more than my fragile ego could stand, and I was not about to lend myself to his sagging career.
Just how precarious Ion’s standing in town was became evident after the “launching” of my book. Hoping to see all my old and new friends in one place, I suggested that we go eat and drink together. Here, however, I came up against the reality of Romania.
“If V. comes,” one of the Euphorion editors said, “none of us will.”
“But he’s my friend,” I insisted. “Can you tell me why?”
He did. It was a sordid story that had all the earmarks of gossip and no hard facts.
“Well, then,” I told him, “I don’t care if you come.”
Meanwhile, Ion left mysteriously and promised to join us in the restaurant.
“We will go with you,” said the Euphorion man, “but when V. comes we are all going to get up and leave.”
The restaurant was of the patronul club variety, an immense space with linen tablecloths and a mirrored stage. The group ordered drinks and food, and we fell into an intense argument about past and present.
“Why don’t you bring all your suspicions into the open?” I asked. “How long can you go on suspecting and hating people? It is paralyzing. Nothing can go on unless you forgive.”
It wasn’t so easy, they explained. “The formers” still had power, they were the newly rich and the still-powerful. To go against them was to risk persecution, just as in the old days. Better to devote oneself to rigorous intellectual activity, restrict oneself nobly to culture.
“But this is simply defeatism,” I cried, with indignant American righteousness, “the press is free. You have the right to speak out. And if you really hate somebody, you can always hire a goon to break their legs.”
During our discussion, and unbeknownst to me, a slew of strippers had appeared on the mirrored stage, courtesy of the patronul, who wished to maintain harmony and high-mindedness in his establishment. The only one who noticed the girls was also the only woman at the table, lustin Panta’s young girlfriend. She watched in fascinated silence, as the men thrashed in the cauldron of their anxieties.
PRESCRIPTIONS
“And what,” bellowed the drunken Costica, “is the answer?”
“First,” replied the equally drunk American-Romanian poet, “The currency must be changed to reflect reality. The lion (leu) must be replaced by the mosquito (tintarul)! Second, volunteer brigades of conflict-resolution counselors must descend on this country at once. And third, Prozac in the water!”
“All doable!” shouted the can-do Costica, causing the banquet table to jump and take a sudden leap across an invisible barrier, “but we cannot change the lion into a mosquito overnight!”
“Even if the facts require it?”
“Especially if the facts require it!”
This was progress. Originally, facts just simply didn’t matter. Now they did because they had to be defied. Viva el progresso!
Ion V. never showed up.
THE DREAM
My last night in Romania I dreamt that I was traveling on a narrow road between two crumbling, ancient walls. These walls were extremely close together, but the road between them was cozy, fast, and soft. Traveling with me along this road were all the country’s fat cats, intelligentsia, and nomenclatura together. People outside the walls had no idea that this road existed. When I emerged outside, I told several people casually that I’d just gotten off the underground road. They shrugged uncomprehending. I even pointed out to them the place in the wall where one could enter, but still they did not believe me. And yet the road exists. I knew it in my dream and I know it now. Romania is a country tunneled through and through by the cushy underground road, which is how anybody who’s anybody gets from one point to another. The rest of the folk, the so-called people, stand in line in the hot sun, scratching their heads. They know that something’s wrong, but they can’t quite identify the rumbling sound under their feet and all around them. They are waiting in line for NATO to do something.
DOGS
At a party given by a Western advertising firm in a palace near Bucharest, among the tables laden with food and the sounds of an orchestra, the nouveaux riches mingled with politicos and writers. A group of us, which included two academicians who had landed on their feet throughout several changes of regime, their elegant young secretaries, and Radu Florescu, author of a book on Dracula, were taken across a field and shown the broken stones of a church demolished by Ceauescu. It had been carted secretly and hidden here by cover of night. However, these sacred relics were not safe yet: some nouveaux riches were stealing the stones to bury them in the foundations of their new houses. Across the same field, lying on his back, was the huge statue of Lenin torn from its pedestal at the center of Bucharest. Under him was the slightly smaller statue of Petru Groza, Romania’s first communist prime minister. Some of the irreverent young climbed on top of Lenin for pictures. Here was the new Romania: surreal, absurd, ironic, elegant, and still awed by the recent past. The Writers’ Union, once the country’s chief center of dissidence, is surviving on the profits of a casino it runs on a fashionable boulevard. The fashionable boulevards, as well as the side streets, are overrun by gentle dogs that became homeless during Ceauescu’s orgy of demolition in the eighties. Originally, the homeless dogs had been marked for destruction but the citizens protested. A Swiss animal rights group is now sterilizing them and letting them run free. The people of Bucharest feed them. No one knows how many wild dogs run the streets, but estimates range from forty to one hundred thousand. Truly wild dogs befriend pets safely ensconced behind fences: The sight of two or three wild dogs lying on the sidewalk outside a gate fraternizing with the dogs inside is quite common. When the pampered pets are taken for a walk by their owners, the wild friends trail behind with an air of pride meant to telegraph to the truly homeless dogs hidden in the bushes that they have a family, even if it’s a tenuous, temporary one. This self-appointed second column of self-deluded dogs resembles nothing more than the masses of Romanian people who believe that Europe will eventually accept them into the Union, if only they had that general air of belonging.
Not all the wild dogs were as agreeable as the friends of the pets. One night, returning to the eerie Elizabetha Palace with Nardi, we ran into a pack of canines living in the woods adjoining the Museum of the Peasant. Facing the growling pack, I had an inexplicable flashback to a time when I hadn’t even been born, namely the 1930s when groups of drunken fascists would accost innocent citizens, looking for Jews to beat up. I faced the dogs firmly and said, quite incongruously: “This is 1997! You can’t just bite us!” Amazingly, they obeyed, retreating into the bushes. To this day, I am convinced that these were indeed fascists and that, in the country where the werewolf originated, such transformations are not all that unusual.
At the beginning of my visit, a woman from radio fought with one from TV over an interview with me. And two other TV stations waited outside, while paparazzi flashed. To the question, “How do you find Romania now?” I answered, “Like a cat caught in a door, halfway in and halfway out.” I didn’t know about the dogs yet.
The Berlin Mall
I spent a whole month in Prague observing the decade-old consuming appetites of post-communism. The Berlin Wall is becoming the Berlin Mall and there is no stopping it. I have observed the Czechs begin to submit slowly but willingly to the lures of advertising, the seduction of credit, and the pleasures of carting home objects they never knew they needed and that they have little use for. The victory of capitalism began in 1989 with the occupation of Prague’s most significant corners by Coca Cola and McDonald’s, our advance guard companies in all new markets. These companies underwent favorable mutations in the new territories because, unlike their American counterparts, they are the height of fashion. Young Czechs find it chic to be seen at McDonald’s eating french fries that cost twice as much as the local equivalent. McDonald’s is not cheap because, like blue jeans, it is still more of a religion than a restaurant, signifying membership in the (capitalist) future. Coca Cola has, of course, staked the skies and there is no looking up without seeing the logo. The skies in this case begin at the very top of your head because every café umbrella is Coke-scripted. Local attempts at capitalism are thriving, though the most successful ones distribute American or Asian clothes and electronics and serve purely as outlets for the raging river of goods flowing from across the ocean. To Czechs (and to Europeans in general) style is everything, so you won’t quite find the ease of Wal-Mart here because shopping hasn’t yet become relaxation. To be observed shopping, to display your purchases, and to gloat over your possessions is part of the experience. The quintessential symbol of all these qualities is the cell phone, or should I say The Cell Phone in capital
letters. Eastern Europeans have taken to the Cell Phone with the fervor that must have attended their religious conversions in history. To be slim, tailored, freshly barbered or coiffed, walking under the Coca Cola skies on your way to McDonald’s, with the Cell Phone glued to your ear, speaking to your friends, is the Peak of Glam (as in Glamour). And what you are talking about to your friends or (best of all) to your country cousins is the fact that you are walking under the Coca Cola skies freshly barbered or coiffed on your way to … etc. Most likely you will be talking about this with other Cell Phone holders walking under similar Coke skies to … etc. And when you meet your date for the evening, she or he will be also holding a Cell Phone and you will munch your fries and drink your Coke while continuing to speak to others as fortunate as you (or not). The trouble is that not everyone is as fortunate as the Cell Phoners. In fact, few people can afford a cell phone, or even fries. The living wage in the Czech Republic is about one-twentieth that of Americans. A doctor makes about a hundred dollars a month, so you can be sure that such status symbols are the result of sacrifice and hard work. People on pensions can’t even dream of such conveniences (if this is what they are) and you can see them scurrying to cheap markets holding plastic bags inscribed with advertising for things they will never have.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 12
