In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Fifteen minutes further along lies the Pompeu of the twentieth century.

  In the 1980s, Pripyat – specially built for the workers at the power plant – was a modern town of about 50,000 inhabitants, mostly young families. It was, by Soviet standards, a model town: lots of greenery, good schools, excellent facilities. Then, on 26 April, 1986, everything suddenly stopped. Hundreds of cars and buses were driven to the central square; all of the city's inhabitants had to leave within the hour and none of them moved back. Only very few among them have ever set foot here again.

  In the city we enter, the Soviet era is still in full bloom: the central square with its hammers and sickles, the square buildings, the mottos inscribed above the entrances: ‘Lenin's Party Leads us to the Triumph of Communism’. Between the blocks of flats it is deathly quiet, the snow on all the streets and squares lies untouched, as if in a remote forest. A little fancy fair, ready for the May Day celebrations, is still standing: a rusty Ferris wheel, weathered bumper cars, sheets of canvas on the ground. A little tree is growing out of the floor of the hall of the hotel.

  In the cupboards at the day-care centre, the little shoes still stand neatly in a row, the way they were left behind thirteen years ago. On the floor are two red canisters of toy cars, a box of building blocks, a toy shop, two dolls with plaster in their hair, a shelf of honour bearing the best clay figures of the week. The next room is full of baby beds, with half-decayed sheets and mattresses.

  ‘This must have been an excellent day-care centre,’ Dmytruk says as we walk through the abandoned rooms. ‘Look at all the things they had here. It's almost hard to believe: in those days, every child in this country still went to school, they got a warm meal every afternoon, later they could fall in love with whomever they pleased, Russian, Ukrainian, it didn't matter, we were all brothers and sisters.’ The snow has drifted into the corridors. On the wall is a drawing of the May Day celebration, half finished.

  Night is coming and the air is icy cold. We drive on, through Kopachi, a village buried beneath a layer of soil, past rows of long mounds, a graveyard of houses and barns. Then a medieval darkness falls, the sky is full of stars, here and there we see the blinking of a candle or a kerosene lantern.

  Dmytruk and my interpreter think I should meet old Nikolai Czikolovitch. Nikolai and his wife Anastasia Ivanovna live deep in the woods, in the middle of the restricted zone, in the lee of the plant. They are deeply attached to their smallholding, their chickens, pigs and cows, and after the catastrophe they stubbornly went on living there. Today they are among the 600 or so people who live illegally in the zone.

  Anastasia, wrinkled and bowed, climbs down hastily from the tile stove when we come in; she had already gone to bed. Amid the groves of Chernobyl, it appears, Philemon and Baucis still reside, no radiation seems to touch them, they live on and on like two trees sharing one trunk. They have been together for more than half a century; he was once a tractor driver, she worked all her life at the agricultural collective. After that they received their pension, which these days they use to buy a little soap and tobacco every month, then it's gone. In their poverty, they produce everything themselves. The fireplace is poked up, the cupboards are plundered, home-made vodka, eggs, sausage, pickles and jars of cherries appear on the table, all for the guests.

  We talk back and forth in sign language, take pictures of each other, laugh, sing a song, have another drink, Dmytruk from the ministry of emergency affairs, the interpreter, Nikolai, Anastasia and I, the ikons bless us all, day and night.

  Chapter SIXTY-THREE

  Bucharest

  ‘DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY THIS COUNTRY IS SO MELANCHOLY? I'll tell you: the Rumanians have always seen history in terms of a single person. When you look at old Dutch paintings, usually you see groups: the city militia, people partying, street and village scenes. The Rumanians in their paintings are always quite alone, they are kings or dictators: Prince Michael, King Carol II, Nicolae Ceauşsescu. That dependence on a single person, it's deeply embedded in us. It also provides us with a sense of certainty, even if it's only the certainty of life close to the minimum.

  ‘For us, the academics at the University of Bucharest, the problems started in 1971, after Nicolae and Elena Ceauşsescu visited China. The two of them came back wildly enthusiastic: our country too needed a cultural revolution. Agriculture was to be fundamentally reorganised, old villages had to be torn down, flats had to be built for the farmers, the birth rate was to be raised artificially.

  ‘Back then we didn't have all that many material worries, it was more the moral pressure we lived under. For example: I once quoted Marx during a meeting. That was a real blunder: we were allowed to quote only from the collected works of Ceauşsescu. When I walked out of the room, a colleague came up to me. He shouted loudly, so everyone could hear: “Cezar Tabarcea, why were you drinking again before you came here?” That man saved me. Because, after doing that, he could write in his report to the Securitate: “Cezar Tabarcea came to the meeting drunk, and did not realise the inappropriateness of his comments.” That, in the situation of the day, was a very great favour.

  ‘Yes, we all went through a great deal together at the institute. Of course we always taught the mandatory subjects, but we were able to insert our own irony in the margins, and the students never failed to pick up on that.

  ‘The revolution of December 1989 was not unexpected. Why do I say that? Purely on the basis of my own feelings. That autumn, I suddenly sensed a great excitement among my students. And then came the Christmas holidays. They always start here in the middle of the week, and the students usually begin going home the weekend before. So I was used to presiding over almost empty classrooms during those last few days. That last Wednesday, I was actually hoping I wouldn't have to give a lecture. But to my utter amazement the auditorium was packed to the brim. Between passages of my lecture on grammar, I wondered aloud what was going on. After the lecture a student came up to me and said: “Are you with us?” I said: “You all know that my existence revolves exclusively around every one of you, so I'm afraid I don't understand your question.” Then they all came up and stood around me and sang to me. That was on 20 December, three days after the massacre at Timişsoara. There was a Hungarian preacher there, László Tökés, who had stood up for the rights of the Hungarian minority. When the Securitate tried to close down his church by force, a revolt broke out. The Securitate shot and killed dozens of demonstrators. Everyone was furious – and maybe that was the idea. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that certain elements within the Securitate were deliberately trying to bring about Ceauşsescu's fall.

  ‘That same afternoon I was to give my final lecture of the term, and again I was hoping no one would turn up. But once more, the auditorium was full. Outside, it had begun to snow. The students came with tea and sweets, they started singing Christmas songs, which is the tradition here. After that we all listened to Radio Free Europe, and we all wept over Timişsoara. When my students left I made them go out in small groups, there was a ban on public gatherings, we had to be very careful.

  ‘Then, the next morning, something interesting happened: the heating in our flat, which had been shut down for weeks because of an energy shortage, was suddenly working again. There was even hot water, and my wife began washing clothes right away. I sat there watching TV, the Bulgarian channel, because all kinds of things were going on there as well. I remember complaining: “The rest of Eastern Europe is up in arms, but there's nothing going on here!”

  ‘A little later, though, it started happening here too: a big crowd had been assembled at the central-committee building for the traditional cheering of Ceauşsescu, and all of a sudden thousands of voices began chanting “Ti-mi-şsoa-ra”. I couldn't believe my ears, it was all being broadcast live on our own Rumanian television. Nothing of the kind had ever been seen before. People shouted: “Ceauşsescu, we are the people!” and “Down with the murderers!” We saw Ceauşsescu looking around in disbelief, he
was speechless, and finally a security man pulled him in from the balcony. Then the screen went blank. Total chaos had broken out in the square.

  ‘We went down there. My wife got into an argument with a policeman, and he began to cry, saying: “Madam, my daughter is out there in that crowd!” Later we all went to the state television complex, the tanks had their guns aimed at the crowd. I still remember clearly how, at a certain point, a soldier took off his helmet and threw it on the ground. The tanks turned their guns away from the crowd. The people started climbing onto the tanks, giving the soldiers tea and bread. It was all very emotional. The next day, on Friday, it was announced that the Ceauşsescus had fled. They were captured the next morning, and executed on 25 December. For years I had dreamed of being able to shoot that man, I hated him so much, but when it finally came down to it … On TV they looked like two homeless people who had been put up against the wall. You almost felt sorry for them, part of the videotape was edited out as well. It was very intense, they were in a huge panic, you could see that, they were also very much together in those last hours, they talked to each other very personally.

  ‘In hindsight, it was all a big mistake. That trial, those accusations, “genocide” – legally speaking, it was complete nonsense. No, I would have condemned them without wasting a bullet. I would have forced them to listen endlessly to classical music, to look at wonderful paintings, to drive around in today's colourful Bucharest. They would never have survived that.

  ‘What this country needs to do is to start believing in its own possibilities. After 1990, I was able to do a great many things that had been impossible for most of my life. I am fifty-eight now, and I'm still making up for lost time. I believe that one is obliged to do the things one is able to do. I worked with students for thirty-five years, and they kept me young. Without my students, I am nothing. I love them, they support me, they stand around me like a fortress, and someday they will take my place. They are my life.’

  I dream of complete disaster. Passing through a railway bridge, a big dredging machine has collided with a high-tension electricity pylon. A train is coming, a blue train with an old-fashioned electric 1100 engine. It thunders right past the red signal, it just keeps barrelling along, I see it happening right in front of me. The train is falling off the bridge. ‘There we go, another carriage bites the dust!’ the people around me are cheering. The brakes shriek, everything goes skidding down the rails.

  The train from Kiev to Bucharest has stopped for a signal. It is 3 a.m., the carriage sighs and breathes, a snowplough approaches, then the engine starts up again. Outside I see a huge white figure on a pedestal, probably an overlooked Lenin. Then we creep on through a landscape lit by stars. The electricity is out almost everywhere at this time of day. Every once in a while a flickering yellowish light appears from behind a window, a sleeping village, almost unchanged since 1880, 1917, 1989.

  When I wake up later, it has begun to get light. We have stopped again. Barbed wire, watchtowers to the left and right, beside the train shivering soldiers with Kalashnikovs. Ukraine and Rumania are among the poorest countries in Europe, but their borders are guarded like gold. A female guard dutifully copies every syllable from my passport, up to and including the mysterious ‘Burg. van Amsterdam’. And there it comes: I am not in possession of the appropriate visa. She looks at me archly, but in her mind the proper order of things has been disturbed. She makes me unpack my bag. ‘Aha, computer, export!’ ‘Aha, antique, export!’ (this in respect of an old Russian banknote). ‘Aha, hundred dollar!’ The train is standing still, the delay is increasing. The day before yesterday I read in the Kyjiv Post that the flight of capital out of Russia currently totals $2.9 billion a month. It was from Ukraine that the former prime minister, Pavlo Lazarenko, supposedly siphoned away $700 million. ‘Aha, again hundred dollar!’

  Later we roll along the border with Subcarpathia, otherwise known as Ruthenia, the latest addition to a whole row of countries in the making. The snow eases up. I see wooden houses, women in bright headscarves at a market, two horses wearing plumes and pulling a festively decorated cart. In a brown field beside a tin warehouse, twenty-two little boys are running after a soccer ball. Damn, that's right, this is just a normal Saturday afternoon.

  Bucharest is a city of more than 2 million inhabitants, with an estimated 300,000 stray dogs. You see dogs everywhere, alone or in packs: along the roads and in the back streets, around the few antique churches, in front of the former dictator Ceauşsescu's mad-hatter's palace and between the shrubs in Ghencea cemetery, where everyone arrives in the end. In the houses of prayer the incense wafts, the singing rises up, this Sunday is the day the food is blessed, with candles, loaves of bread and bottles of Coca-Cola.

  There are dozens of coffins on sale beside the cemetery gate. Every fifteen minutes another family comes in by cart or by car, the bell-ringer leans into the ropes, priests, gravediggers and beggars come rushing up.

  I watch as Grigore Pragomir (b.1909) is buried, as his open coffin is slid from a dented blue van, as one of his grandsons walks around paying everyone from a big bundle of banknotes, as Grigore is pulled along on a squeaky cart by two boys with cigarettes between their lips, as the cross with his name on it slowly disappears among the headstones.

  At the grave of Nicolae Ceauşsescu – a mound of earth, a small head-stone with his portrait, five withered bouquets – three visitors are standing around. ‘You see that? They buried him crossways!’ one man says. ‘His feet aren't pointing east, they buried him like a witch. Until he's put back straight, things will keep going badly with this country.’ ‘No, no,’ a wizened female beggar cackles. ‘His grave is full of stones. He's not dead at all. At his execution, all they did was drug him, he flew off to be with his friend Gaddafi. He lives in a lovely palace there, I saw a picture of it in the paper.’ ‘Nonsense,’ a prim lady in black mumbles. ‘He had to die, it couldn't be any other way in a country like ours, with such a history of murder and bloodshed!’ ‘That's right,’ the man says, ‘but it wasn't a pretty sight.’ ‘Go to the devil!’ the dwarf-woman shouts. ‘And Nicu, his son, isn't dead either. He lives with his father. But she is dead!’

  She escorts us to the grave of the former First Lady, another mound of earth marked with nothing but a dirty little wooden cross. Two dogs come staggering by, still stuck together after mating. At the gate the bell is tolling for Floarea Ene (b.1947), who is being brought in on the bed of a little red truck. The dogs and beggars come rushing up again. Her four daughters are sitting beside the coffin, caressing her face, one of them weeps inconsolably:‘Mama, mama!'While she is being lifted down, the mobile phone belonging to one of her sons starts ringing. Then Floarea is lifted onto the cart as well, it is time for her to go with the boys with the cigarettes, there is nothing else for it.

  People in this country are wild about magical events, preferably accompanied by lots of death and doom, because after that, reality always comes as something of a relief. This morning a Sunday paper opened with the headline: ‘Professor Virgil Hincu predicts major earthquake in Bucharest on 15 January!’ A magician in the city claims to have found a remedy for cancer. People have lined up in front of his door, holding bottles, because the elixir must be ‘refreshed’ every week. Stories still circulate about the Securitate, rumours full of secret prisons and tunnel complexes where the Ceauşsescus still reign supreme.

  Above ground, however, little remains of their intellectual heritage. In the national library, for example, I searched fruitlessly for Omagiu (Homages), a quaint volume consisting only of foreign accolades addressed to Ceauşsescu and distributed around the country in hundreds of thousands of copies in honour of his sixtieth birthday. But like the dozens of works by the great leader himself and his spouse, it is nowhere to be found.

  What did Europe think of this dictator, who let dissidents waste away in their cells by the hundreds? Much later, in the unsurpassed library of the University of Amsterdam, I stumble upon a copy of Omagiu. It co
ntains a succession of phrases like ‘appreciation for the enormous contributions of Nicolae Ceauşsescu’, ‘the welfare of country and people’, ‘unflagging efforts’ and ‘peace and cooperation among the peoples’. Signed by, among others, President Jimmy Carter, King Juan Carlos, King Carl Gustav and Holland's Prince Bernhard – ‘With the fondest of memories’. The compilation contains cheerful photos with Tito (1969), Emperor Bokassa (1972), King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola (1972), President and Mrs Pat Nixon (1970), Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (1973), and many other heads of state. Nixon is quoted:‘Because of his profound understanding of the most important world issues, President Ceauşsescu can make a major contribution to solving the most urgent problems facing humanity.’ As a professor at the University of Bucharest, Elena received honorary doctorates and other commendations from institutions including the New York Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Chemistry in London.

  The son of a farmer, Ceauşsescu was one of Europe's most popular leaders in the late 1970s. Like Gomulka in Poland he was seen as a left-wing nationalist, and always maintained a certain distance from the Soviet Union. Within the Warsaw Pact he regularly caused commotion by doing things like recognising the state of Israel and condemning the intervention in Czechoslovakia. But unlike Dubžcek in Czechoslovakia, he never really challenged the system. This allowed him to maintain a skilful balance between Moscow, Peking and the West.

  Within Rumania itself he ruled like a European Mao Tse-tung. In the 1970s, the economy began encountering the same problems faced by other communist states. The nation's industry was pronouncedly obsolete, the enormous oil refineries worked at only ten per cent of their capacity, and as a result of its collectivisation the agricultural production of Rumania – once a breadbasket of Central Europe – was waning fast. In 1981 the country even began to ration bread.