by John Degen
Tony hears a bitterness in Petrescu’s voice he didn’t expect. He looks across the aisle at Dragos, who is listening while pretending not to. Not for the first time he notices the young player is fidgeting almost uncontrollably with his hands. Tony had seen this nervous habit in the departures lounge as well. Dragos Petrescu is clearly agitated by the flight, as though the return to Romania terrifies him in some way.
“And do you expect to win the game,” Tony asks the older man, “you know, the game of living?”
“One always expects to win. For me, life is playing. Everything, every game, even the most serious, the most full of consequence can be contested. Perhaps if I’d had more of a choice, my son would not have satisfied his father so well by becoming excellent at his own game. But he is very good at hockey. What can he do about it? Are you very good at anything, Tony?”
Tony takes a slow sip of his own traditional flying drink, double rye and ginger ale, and looks past Nicolae to the dense blackness of the night outside the window.
“So, how did you come to leave Romania?” Tony asks. Across the aisle, the masked Diana sighs heavily again and shifts in her seat.
To enter Israel when Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae did, and more importantly how he did, with a young wife of working age and a son not too many years away from mandatory service in the army, was to be certain of a very difficult time. His visa to leave Romania depended on his being Jewish, but in fact he was not Jewish.
His mother was Jewish by birth but not practice and Nicolae, having been born into the great socialist republic of Romania was officially without religion. But a Jewish mother is a Jewish mother and that made him officially a Jew in the eyes of Israel, which meant he received a visa for himself and for his non-Jewish wife and non-Jewish son. Nicolae and his family were permitted to take very little with them, as there was really no such thing as personal property in the Romania of the day, and even family heirlooms were considered to be cultural treasures of the Revolution.
In the months before their departure, Nicolae was regularly removed from the street by the police and taken to the station for questioning. Every neighbourhood in Bucharest had its own station, responsible for its own small district and population. Nicolae was well acquainted with his local police station from his days as a juvenile delinquent, but this was something different entirely. This was the central station, off Victory Square. This was the home of the state police. Securitate. Invisible men. Nicolae was removed from the street, he was told, for being publicly drunk.
“It is certainly true I was publicly drunk,” Petrescu laughs, “though I doubt they could actually tell. I can drink an entire bottle of vodka and look as fresh as though I’d just had a cup of coffee. Drunkenness was simply the easiest and most common excuse for arrest and detainment.”
Until his departure from Romania, Nicolae still attended his job every day, though he felt very little reason to continue doing work. Many of his very good friends worked with him, and as they were all upset that he would soon be leaving, they made it a point to get him drunk each day before three in the afternoon. So it was that every day of his last months in Bucharest, Nicolae walked home from work completely without legs, and so it was on many of these days he found himself spending some time with the dreaded secret police.
On the first of his series of detainments, Nicolae was placed alone in a large dark room on an upper floor of the downtown station. He had been made to climb at least five flights of stairs, though he couldn’t be sure because of his condition. On his way up the stairs he had concentrated on sounds. There were stories of the unmistakable noise of torture coming through the walls of this station, but all Nicolae heard was the mechanical hum of the ventilation system and the occasional cough or laugh from behind a closed door. The two Securitate pushed him into a hard wooden chair beside a large table, and then left the room. While they were gone, Nicolae twisted in the chair and observed his darkened surroundings.
The room was mostly bare, no wall decor, no windows, just the large wooden table like something designed for feasts or large meetings, and seven identical wooden chairs with no padding on the seats. When he looked down at his own chair he saw markings in the back rails near the seat, dents and rubbing marks, like those made by handcuffs or chains. Nicolae wiped the palms of his hands on his pant legs to remove the sweat that was accumulating there. In one murky corner of the room there was a dark shape, something hulking or piled. Nicolae stood from his chair and took a few tentative steps into the gloom. He expected at any moment for a voice to stop him and leave him sweating and silent on his feet, but the only sound he heard was from his own shoe soles dragging across the wooden floor. As he approached the corner, he found himself laughing low and uncontrolled. There was a small table, a folding table like he himself used for playing bridge with friends, and on the tabletop was a backgammon game, set for fresh play.
Nicolae taps his forehead with a finger. “You could never tell in a police station in Bucharest if what you were seeing at any moment was really what was there, or just something constructed for you to see and wonder about. The police station was a house of games. Games of the mind. Not such nice games like we play.”
The backgammon set was in the same place each time Nicolae was brought into the room. He never saw anyone playing it nor any evidence of play. He imagined the police must have played it on their lunchtime, or in the morning before it was time to interrogate. It looked foreign, not the table sets you would normally see in Romania. It was made of something heavy, like marble or even a slab of steel, and the pieces were actual stones. In Romania, one almost always played table sets from the mountains of Transylvania. Peasants in the mountains would construct wooden box sets out of a light wood, bass or pine—quite thin and with little heft. They would include quick, rural carvings on the outside of the boxes, and the pieces were nothing more than round wooden chips painted red or black.
But the game in the station was something else entirely, an alien-looking thing, something confiscated perhaps. At that time in Romania, in the late 1970s, it was possible to travel from Romania if you knew the right people and had the right job—if you were in, or connected to, the Party. And everyone who travelled brought back some little thing, sometimes many little things. There was always something tucked away in the suitcase. At the border it was only a matter of packing cigarettes, a small cheese or fine chocolates on the very top of the suitcase, some small gift for the border guards, and everything else in the case made it through safely. It was a game in itself to discover the desires of certain border guards.
The very best players at contraband kept lists of the likes and dislikes of all the customs men at Otopeni Airport, and at the rail borders. They kept work schedules and knew when vacations were due. In this way, they could be certain of who would be greeting them on their return to Romania, and what little token to pack on the top of the clothes in the suitcase. Nicolae knew of one fellow who had no interest in the traditional bribes—the cigarettes, cigars, cheeses or chocolates. And he wanted nothing for a woman. He was a very successful bachelor and never had to bother with winning the attentions of ladies. All this man wanted was fishing tackle.
This particular border guard fished in every spare moment. When he was not at Otopeni, opening the suitcases of visiting dignitaries, thumbing through their underwear for state secrets, he was at one of the many lakes in Bucharest. He fished for carp, mostly, and also brown trout, though these were quite rare in the city. To get past this man was a simple matter of visiting a sporting goods store on your travels and picking up the most extravagant and ridiculous looking piece of fishing tackle you could find. You would do well to buy some spare fishing line as well, and a few plain hooks; but some colourful piece of fish silliness was a certain free pass back into the country. Something from Finland was best, shaped like a fish and painted like no fish in nature, something with feathers and beads and parts that flutter or twirl in the water.
“I’m not sure if th
is man ever used any of this crazy Finnish tackle—he was always just as pleased to see the line and plain hooks—but he was certainly amused by it.”
In fact, this guard’s crazy foreign fishing tackle fed that significant and mysterious national pride all border officials seem to possess. He looked at these strange and wonderful lures as evidence of Western decadence and the futility of the capitalist system. “Look at this ridiculous contraption,” he could be heard to say. “What self-respecting fish would ever try to eat this thing with its feathers and beads and funny noises? Maybe Finnish fish need to be amused before they are caught, but a good Romanian carp wants just a bug on a hook.” Nevertheless, an absurd Finnish piece of tackle, some cheap line and plain hooks cleared the path for, no doubt, hundreds of kilos of contraband chocolate from Geneva, or cigars from Amsterdam, Camembert from Paris, or prosciutto from Rome.
Perhaps they even cleared the path for a strange table set made of a metal slab with stones for pieces. Stranger things were brought into Romania in the suitcases of those privileged few who could cross borders with ease. Perhaps this game that haunted Nicolae belonged to an official who was eventually discredited, and it was then confiscated from his apartment along with all his wife’s underwear, the television and any good food he had stashed away in the cupboards.
“You are getting a sense of how things worked in Romania, yes?” Nicolae smiles a sad smile and takes a drink from his small bottle of beer. “Probably how things still work if I am right, but who knows? It is no longer my concern. I am no longer Romanian. Now I am a Canadian immigrant from Israel. Nothing to do with Romania any more, except when it is time to return and witness my son getting married.”
Possibly, the police stole some poor man’s handmade table set before they put him in a secret camp to spend a few years doing the laundry of hundreds of criminals. It’s entirely possible they didn’t even know how to play backgammon, these two policemen who possessed such a fine and mysterious set. But there were games they did play very well. Because Nicolae’s father was in the Party when it meant something to be in the party, Nicolae had, in fact, little to fear from the regular police. The Securitate were a different matter, but drunk as he was and with a visa in his pocket he chose to ignore the danger.
As young men, Nicolae and his friends would go out into the city at night, walking the streets long past curfew, and crossing into different police zones. They didn’t care. They could run fast—they all played handball, some on the under-19 national team, and had the legs of young athletes. Not too many policemen, fat or otherwise, were any match for them on open ground, especially with all the fences to jump and gardens in which to hide. Occasionally, the boys had too much to drink and didn’t see the police coming until it was too late. The police played a trick they favoured, approaching curfew breakers in a car without lights on. They would wait until the car was right beside the young drunks, and then they would switch on their headlights and turn across the road to stop them. It was a ridiculous sort of ruse because as soon as the boys noticed a car approaching without lights on, they knew it was the police and away they would go on their legs. But sometimes drunk beyond all sense, and singing, they didn’t hear the car approaching. The trick worked well enough on those occasions.
With these young sons of privilege, interaction with police after curfew was little more than a warning, the playing of a game about power. The police wanted the boys to understand that state authority had some control over them, even them, national-level athletes and the sons of Party members. In fact, each side played a little game at night in the quiet streets of Bucharest, both the drunk young men and the police. If the officers suspected the boys were well-connected, and they would have to be to be engaged in such risky behaviour, the police would hold off asking them for identity papers for as long as possible. In that way, they could treat the boys a bit more roughly for a short time. They could push them against the wall and shine torches into their faces. They could order them to be quiet and tap the barrels of their weapons to let them know they meant business. All this the police could do until they discovered who the young men were, but after, they would have to be more polite. So, for the bored and proud officers, there was great advantage in not immediately knowing the names of the drunks they stopped in the streets. And for Nicolae and his friends as well, it was amusing not to volunteer too much information too quickly. Later, of course, Nicolae would not believe dealings with the police were so amusing, but at the time he was just a foolish adolescent with too much time and too little responsibility. He enjoyed the late-night interactions. He especially enjoyed the running away, because he had the young athlete’s pure love of running. There was a coolness and a moisture to the air of the city when he was running, a brilliance, and his legs sprang so effortlessly off the stone streets.
The interrogations were amusing as well. It was a little dance they all did at those times, the police shoving the boys around and not asking for their papers until they could think of nothing else to do, and Nicolae and his friends being shoved around, protesting, giggling, attempting, each individually, to walk away while someone else was being questioned. One of the boys, a fearless drunk named Paul, would wait until one of his friends had said something particularly stupid to the officers, making them angry. It was not difficult to make these men angry in the middle of the night. These men were very sensitive to insult, and seemed, in particular, always on the watch for an intellectual slight. The young men knew from experience the favourite question of the police was, “Do you think we are not intelligent?” or some variation—“Do you think we did not also go to school? Do you think you are the only ones who have read the great Russian writers?”
This response often came after Nicolae had used a favourite excuse: “We’re very sorry comrade officers, but we have been left in charge of a visiting Russian student, a Comrade Raskolnikov, and he has wandered off and become lost.”
The police were concerned that the boys understood how they were not inferiors. Yet the truth, sadly for them, was that in the great People’s Republic, in which the lowest was the highest and the very concept of social strata was meant to dissolve, it was still possible for the people’s guard to be inferior to stupid, arrogant sons of the Party.
“Ideals are wonderful things, yes, but they rarely transcend the baser human tendencies of envy and jealousy and pride.” Nicolae rubs his eyes and smiles shyly. “Even in bad times, people have the opportunity to act badly. It is shameful, but true.”
The other boys would get the guards talking angrily to one of them in particular, asking their questions, trying to work out whether or not they were insulting him, and Paul would just walk off. His best trick was to slip into the darkness, run a little way down the road and then walk back toward the group, whistling loudly. This drove the police into fits of authority. Paul would come walking back, acting sober but whistling too loudly, and when the police would tell him to get back against the wall, he would play as though he’d never seen the rest of the group in his life. But Comrade Officer, I don’t know these young criminals at all. You’ve mistaken me, I was just returning from visiting my girlfriend. I know it is past the curfew, but you understand how women are. When they want it, they want it, and besides, her husband works with you fellows and so is only out at night.
This was really taking things too far, but they were so arrogant, so sure of their positions. Still, the boys paid for it with the odd poke of a nightstick into the ribs, or even sometimes a knee to the groin. It was all just part of the game. Paul suffered on that particular night. He should not have brought wives into it, but he liked to push past the boundaries. He went home with a split lip that night, and a warning not to tell his father how it happened.
That was how it almost always ended. Eventually the police would feel the need to move on and they’d ask for identity papers. Then, on recording names and addresses—addresses they could not help but understand to be those of Party members—they let the boys go wi
th a lecture about responsibility to the state, and the pleasures of not climbing above the general rights of the people for whom the state was originally formed. It would almost always end with false friendliness on both sides, a sort of smiling, winking agreement that a game had been well-played that evening, and until we all meet again.
But there was to be no until we meet again when Nicolae was leaving Romania for good. He discovered then that connections in the Party mean very little for admitted traitors to the republic. It took him two years to secure a visa for himself and another year to get visas for his wife and child.
“It was very painful for Dragos’s grandfather,” Petrescu explains, “because he was a proud Communist—he is a proud Communist to this day. You will meet him as well. He could not understand his son’s need to leave the country, his need to drag half the family from the bosom of their country, even when it was at its worst in the years immediately before 1989.”
In those later years just before the Revolution, Nicolae’s father, Razvan Petrescu, managed to be grateful his son and grandson were safely in North America, though it hurt him to know it was their preference, and that they would not be returning to help rebuild the country. But the three years before Nicolae left were terrible for the old man. It was never a secret when someone applied for a visa to emigrate. This information travelled quickly and did swift damage. Where before, his father had walked confidently into his office as Razvan Petrescu, Secretary to the Lithographers Union and original Party member (both Dragos Petrescu’s grandfather and grandmother, Nicolae’s mother and father, were imprisoned by the Nazis for being members of the Communist Party) suddenly he was “that Petrescu” whose son is stealing from the people by fleeing the country in a time of great need.
