Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  But after all, I needed a fellowship for the 1974–1975 academic year, and the one I got from IREX required residency in Romania. So I wrote the first draft of my PhD there on my father-in-law’s portable Royal Typewriter, without the benefit of White Out. This meant that I did what the Romanians did when they mistyped something: I used a razor to excise a thin layer of paper with the mistake on it from the surface of the page. This was one of many odd expediencies of life under the brutal Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was the head of state from 1967 until he was overthrown and killed in 1989.

  Romania was then a land of comical fatuities. We had leased a powder blue Renault 6 in Paris for our time behind the Iron Curtain, and by May, seven months in, that car was a pathetic document of the craziness of life under Ceauşescu. It was missing its hood ornament, its gas cap, the word “Renault” in chrome that was once attached to its hatchback, and who knows how many parts from under the hood. (The car was by then in the annoying habit of sputtering to a halt, and could only be revived by my taking the carburetor apart and cleaning the little brass needle with my spit.)

  Why had the car suffered so? Because the Romanians had over time stolen all sorts of bits and pieces of it. Romania then produced its own version of the Renault called the Dacia after the ancient name of that part of the Roman Empire. The reason our car was missing various external parts and probably some internal parts, and maybe even its original tires, was because this Romanian Renault was so poorly made that when Dacia owners spotted a real, French-made Renault, they would come back at night and swap out or steal pieces. Had we stayed for a few years in Romania, we probably would have ended up with a Dacia, all the way down to the engine. The Romanians were clever at that sort of thing and highly motivated.

  The Dacia was itself a document of Communist absurdity. It came in one model and, as I recall, in only two colors: brown and black. Normal people could only get the brown version because black was reserved for the securitate, Romania’s enormous and much-feared secret police. Of course this meant that securitate agents were easily identifiable, although there were other clues. They all lived in close proximity to one another, and insofar as I could tell, they all wore long black leather coats no matter what the weather was. They were hardly secret police. Of course they didn’t need to be secret since they had all the bases covered, and no one, including the Vikans, could get away with anything unless the police let them.

  We were all convinced that the securitate had bugged every chandelier and every telephone in all of Romania. And maybe that was true. So when we spoke in our apartment with our Romanian friends, we covered the phone with a pillow or two and turned on all the water taps and the radio. And we pointed at the chandelier as a way of acknowledging that we knew we were being sneaky and on some level were taking a chance. (Who could do all that listening?) We also assumed we had our own spy at the ready to report on us. In our case, it was a young woman named Alina. She was about our age, namely in her late 20s, a divorcée, and she was very pretty and very friendly. She claimed she taught German somewhere, but if she did, it hardly filled her day. Alina lived in the house we lived in, a grand pre-war house on the very grand Strada Spătarului, near the Armenian church. She was in the basement with her younger brother Puiu, an endearment meaning “little chicken”; Puiu, whose real first name I never got, was a student and he, too, was very friendly and charming.

  The sister and brother had a makeshift kitchen, a bathroom, and some kind of living room down there in the basement with a back entrance. Doamna (“madam”) Gal, a roundish, gray, sweet old widow, lived upstairs with us in the other half of the main floor of the house. Her territory included the main kitchen, a small sitting room with a TV, a bedroom, but no bathroom—which meant she went downstairs to use the bathroom. Doamna Gal also became a close friend, as did her two mutt dogs with American names: “Bobby” and “Lady.”

  Elana and I got what was left: the living room with its Venetian chandelier and enormous ceramic stove that provided heat for much of the house, a bedroom, and the master bath. But we did not get a kitchen. For us the window ledge was our refrigerator and our stove was a two-unit gas hot plate strapped to the top of the bidet in the bathroom. Romanians joked that it took two Communist chickens to make a Communist chicken sandwich, and that was true.

  There were no locks on any doors, and those clever dogs could open the door to our part of the house and come in any time, day or night, which they did. So did Alina, who especially enjoyed coming to see us while we were still in bed or while one of us was in the bathtub. Every Thursday morning Alina would be visited by a German-Romanian named “Willy,” who drove a beige Mercedes. Willy, whom we never really met, lived in Timişoara, which is in the far west of Romania. When he paid his weekly visit he always delivered a chicken sent by Alina’s mother, who we were told also lived in Timişoara. Elana and I were pretty certain that Willy debriefed Alina on those visits about what the Vikans had been up to that week, which was nothing.

  This spying thing was more than a little nutty. Elana had become friendly with a Hungarian-Romanian scholar of Dostoyevsky named Albert Kovac, who had married a Russian academic. These were extremely nice, talkative people, and we often saw them socially. The Kovacs had a daughter who was about to go to college, in Moscow we hoped, and they sought Elana’s advice on their daughter’s future and lots of other things. But since they were with good reason quite paranoid, these conversations could not take place in our apartment or theirs, even with two pillows over the phone, all the water running, and the radio on full blast.

  And they wouldn’t talk in our car, either, since they believed it was bugged. They would only talk about what they considered sensitive matters when we were outside and far from the car. For instance, we could have a conversation when we were out rowing around in a boat in the middle of Lake Snagov, twenty miles or so north of Bucharest, or when we were standing out in the middle of a plowed field up near the Soviet border. This seemed to me very strange, especially given that the topic was where this kid of theirs should go to college. But that’s the way it was under Ceauşescu.

  And then there was the day, in December 1974, when the securitate descended on us in our half-house on Strada Spătarului. They stepped out of their black Dacias in their black leather coats. I know it was on a Wednesday because Wednesday was when “Nuţia” cleaned our part of the house in exchange for a pack or two of Kent cigarettes that we got cheaply and in abundance from the embassy, explicitly to be used as currency for just such everyday needs. (The Romanians were convinced that under the label of a single magical pack of Kents then in circulation in Bucharest was the promise of a prize—which was, I believe, a Dodge Dart.)

  So when those thugs in leather came into our sitting room, Nuţia hid in the bathroom, petrified, but they never went in. The securitate told us that we had to move out that day because we were capitalists and we were corrupting Doamna Gal by paying her money for the right to stay in that house.

  The US Ambassador intervened and we got a reprieve until March, when we did move out. We moved into a newly built high-rise in the south end of town overlooking the brand new Parcul Tineretului (“Park of the Youth”) with its stubby little trees and its already crumbling sidewalks. To judge from the black Dacias parked in front, a bunch of securitate agents lived there and could keep a good eye on us. What made that second Bucharest home of ours quite creepy was that it was near a huge crematorium that looked like a Byzantine church, and you could set your watch by the black smoke that belched out of that building every day at exactly 3:00 p.m.

  This apartment was new and that meant two things: the elevators never worked and sometimes the water didn’t work either. In the case of no water, we would find an unattended spigot somewhere and fill our reserve gas cans and carry them up six flights. Oddly, everything in this garish new apartment was red: the carpet, the curtains, the furniture, the lampshades, and even the glassware that for some reason came in sets of thirty-six
—far more people than could fit in the apartment. And there were several different colors of red, shading from pink all the way to orange.

  However, we now had our own fancy TV that got great reception and so we could watch Columbo, which the Romanians loved. It had a wire in the back, and all the screws that held the back panel in place were covered over with fresh putty. This suggested to me that we were being listened to and maybe watched from that TV. We also had a really big radio with a blond wood case that was very pretty—though the radio, too, was odd. This was first because a little pink plastic fan was glued to its top and second because it had a list of stations it could receive, and they were all in the Eastern Bloc. This meant from our perch on the 6th floor in the south end of Bucharest we could bring in signals from Krakow, but we somehow could not manage to pull in any stations from Greece that is much closer.

  Unlike the elegant Strada Spătarului neighborhood, the area we were now in was sparsely populated and rough, not because of criminals running around, but because of the dogs. These were mean, scrawny dogs that ran around Parcul Tineretului, and if you weren’t careful, they would sneak up on you with the clear intention of biting. I recall the time I had to run to the car and get up on the hood until they skulked away.

  I VIVIDLY RECALL A BEAUTIFUL MAY DAY in one of the most unlikely places I thought I’d ever be: a stone farmhouse in northern Romania, near what was then the Soviet border. It had thick walls with two windows facing south. Elana and I were having breakfast with the farmer and his wife and a man who was standing nearby with a saxophone. I had been sailing toward Byzantium by that time for five years and, if there was a moment when I knew I had arrived, it was then. At that breakfast of tomatoes, cucumbers, salami, a feta-like Romanian cheese, a few huge spring onions, and a shot of ţuică. Ţuică is a bad idea in the evening, but it’s a really bad idea in the bright sunlight of the morning. Ţuică is a powerful Romanian moonshine made from plums, and I suppose that if it were French, it might be magical and mellow, but this was Romania—Communist Romania—and this evil drink was harsh and had the makings of a bad dream. It was clear and warm and had pepper in it.

  Our host, who was clearly as drunk as the saxophone player next to him, asked us if we had children and we said no. He asked us how long we had been married, and we said four years. And that’s when we raised our glasses of ţuică and toasted, at his insistence, to our forthcoming family. I suspected where the conversation was going, because the idea of family was top of mind that morning. He, the father of the bride, and the drunken crowd outside those stone walls were in the fading hours of a wedding party that had started the night before. And now, we were new members of the wedding revelry, and because they were tired and hung over, we were the source of new energy and a good excuse for another shot or two of ţuică.

  We had put off our trip to Bucovina in the northeastern part of Romania until the second half of May because we knew the weather would be good. And it was. This is where the Carpathians are low and grass-covered, and there are lots of sheep. In those days shepherds made their shoes on the spot by wrapping their feet in sheets of leather and then using strips of leather to bind the wrapping in place. It took some real skill and was amazing to watch.

  This is also a place where all the blouses women wore were handmade; they were locally distinctive and individually decorated, and this is what we were most interested in buying. The trouble was, these shepherd families were very proud, with none of the cynicism of Bucharest Romanians. They would not accept our Kent cigarettes in exchange for something we wanted, and the very the idea that they would sell something seemed pretty foreign to them. While we were able finally to buy two magnificent handmade blouses, this meant long conversations over ţuică and slanina, which is their version of prosciutto, but could easily be mistaken for raw bacon, because it is. There were few cars, no tourists, and a pace and texture of agricultural and religious life that was, I assumed, as close to medieval Byzantium as one could find anywhere.

  Bucovina is a small region five hours drive north of Bucharest; it is now divided between Romania and Ukraine. The Romanian half is renowned not so much for its blouses but because it is there that Romania has in abundance what no other part of the Christian world has: churches painted on the outside. They date mostly to the 16th and 17th centuries, are generally small, and are often set in monasteries. (The Church and Ceauşescu had come to a modus vivendi and so the country’s religious monuments were well maintained.) The most famous among these painted churches is in Voroneţ, and it is called the “Sistine Chapel of the East,” though only by Romanians. But they have a powerful case. The west facade of this tiny church is covered with a stunningly beautiful fresco of the Last Judgment that was painted in 1547, six years after Michelangelo finished his version of the Last Judgment on the west wall of the Sistine Chapel. Both are dominated by powerful blues, and both are masterpieces, one of the Catholic Renaissance and the other of timeless Eastern Orthodoxy.

  And I have a preference. For me, Michelangelo was a master of the heroic seeable; by contrast, the anonymous artist of Voroneţ was a master of the divine un-seeable. Standing before that fresco on that spring day in 1975, I felt transported in the way that I felt transported upon entering Chartres for the first time.

  Elana and I had stayed the previous night in a tiny nun’s cell at the back of the beautiful white cloister of the Agapia Monastery, just over a mile from that farmhouse with the thick walls and the wedding party. We had taken a walk up into the forest of fir trees just above the monastery that afternoon, and discovered there, in “Old Agapia,” a small church with a service in progress. We entered the dark pronaos (porch), lit only by memorial candles set in metals trays, and immediately were offered colivă by an old woman dressed in black and wearing a head scarf. Colivă, which is boiled wheat sweetened with honey, raisins, and cinnamon, is offered in memory of the dead, and this typically happens on Saturday, the day Jesus lay in the tomb. That lady in black didn’t ask us if we wanted some of this sweet boiled wheat; she just thrust it toward us. This was my first encounter with colivă, as that Saturday night would be my first sleepover in an Orthodox monastery, and the next morning would be my first experience of a traditional Orthodox wedding.

  It was chilly and damp that night, and I tried to dry out the quilts of the little bed we shared by holding them against the wood stove that was very hard to get fired since the wood, too, was damp. I finally retrieved our Chinese toilet paper from the car to use for kindling. We had just returned from a wonderful dinner on the terrace of a large, chalet-like restaurant, Hanul Agapia, a short walk from the monastery. We sat on the terrace because all the tables inside were preset for an enormous wedding party.

  While we ate, two buses arrived, and the bride and groom got out first. The occupants of the groom’s bus then gathered on one side of the street and the occupants of the bride’s bus on the other as the two bus drivers let the air out of the tires. I took that to mean this was going to be a long and serious celebration.

  The next morning we saw the bride and groom and some occupants of the two buses sprawled out on the hillside beside the restaurant. The buses were gone. At a little general store nearby, we picked up some East German tomato juice, which was the best you could get, and some more Chinese toilet paper. When we opened the hatchback of our car, suddenly, the bride and groom and the bride’s mother were right there behind us. They had seen the international sticker for France, “F,” on the back of the car and jokingly asked if they could come along with us to Paris for their honeymoon. I took that to mean that they did not think we were undercover securitate.

  What the groom really wanted was a ride for his drunken new wife and his drunken new mother-in-law back to a farmhouse a mile down the road. And we were off, soon turning left into a large walled courtyard in front of the bride’s father’s farmhouse where we were greeted in the most joyous fashion by the drunken wedding party and then escorted into the house for breakfast by the sa
xophonist playing some raucous Romanian folk song.

  THE LARGEST GATHERING OF ROMANIANS that I saw that entire year was at the Patriarchal Cathedral on Saturday night at midnight, May 3rd, exactly two weeks before that night of the wedding in the Agapia Monastery. It was another Byzantine first, and it left me with a powerful visual memory.

  It was the Saturday of Orthodox Easter. The cathedral and the grounds of the cathedral were packed with Orthodox believers. The celebratory moment is called “Holy Fire,” a sacred ritual going back to the 4th century that gives collective expression to the Resurrection of Christ at the stroke of midnight. A candle flame enters the darkened, crowded nave from behind the icon screen, and is gradually passed to the entire congregation who carry small candles. Then the congregation goes outside to walk around the cathedral three times. Someone gave me a candle; I received the flame and joined the procession.

  Patriarch Justinian took up his position on the steps of the enormous west porch of the cathedral, and before the klieg lights of Romanian television, he shouted a short phrase that has been shouted in just that manner and at just that moment in the Orthodox Easter celebrations for centuries: “THE LORD IS RESURRECTED.” And we all responded in unison: ADEVĂRAT A ÎNVIAT—“HE IS TRULY RESURRECTED.” This was repeated several times.

  The couple next to me advised me to take care to keep my candle lit so that I could light a candle with it in my home; they said this would bring a blessing to both my home and my family for the year ahead. I made it back to our high-rise with my candle still lit, and from the 6th floor, in a city with minimal public lighting, I watched tiny flames spread out from the Patriarchal Cathedral of Communist Romania in all directions. This is an image and a feeling I will never forget.