Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Coming back, I was asked again and again: what did I think of the town? Had I noticed the changes? They knew that I had known it in the old days. It seemed they wanted me to confirm that something almost miraculous had occurred, as if I were in a position to file an independent observer’s report approving the new Târgu Mureş.

  Both before and after the collapse of Communism, Romania’s reputation with its neighbours was dark and unsavoury. Throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, I was repeatedly warned against going there at all. The theme was always the same. Terrorised and brutalised by Ceauşescu, Romania had plumbed depths unknown elsewhere. Even in the bad times, the darkest days, my friends told me, we never let the state take over our lives like that. But that Ceauşescu! An animal, a barbarian. And the people! The implication was that they and the little man with the screwed-up face and the mad ideas had somehow deserved each other; that Romanians were genetically inclined towards brutality and criminality.

  Predictions as to my fate varied. I would certainly be robbed, probably beaten, possibly murdered. There would be nothing to eat. There would be no fishing because the rivers had all been poisoned or emptied by poachers. At every turn I would be offered gypsy girls for my pleasure, aged twelve or even younger if I wanted. Or boys. Or both. And all it would cost would be a bottle of lemonade.

  After the Great Plain of Hungary, Romania looked very different. The land rose beyond the border crossing at Oradea into rolling hills cloaked in woods. In the meadows the summer grass cut was in full swing. Beneath the brilliant sun, straw hats and berets were creeping across the pastures like beetles. Scythes flashed, pitch-forks stabbed. Mounds like green warts studded the ground where the sward had been cut. Lines of horse-drawn carts rattled and clip-clopped along the road, almost hidden beneath teetering piles of grass on which the cutters sprawled, hats pulled down, cigarettes glued above stubbly chins. The air was hot and still and heavy with the sweet smell. Cries and snatches of song came from the fields.

  The villages I passed through were conspicuously poor and shabby. Most of their inhabitants seemed to be outside, waiting for something. At first I assumed it must be for a bus, but when one came hardly anyone got on it. It was as if no one had anything better to do than check that nothing was happening.

  The road, compared with those in Hungary, was atrocious. Horse-drawn conveyances decisively outnumbered cars, almost all of which were Romanian Dacias in ruinous condition. The slightest uphill incline was enough to reduce the trucks and buses to little more than trotting speed, their carbon-encrusted rear ends shrouded in blue, black or grey smoke. Petrol stations were very few and far between, each announcing itself well in advance with a mile-long snake of waiting traffic.

  I passed by Cluj, ringed by apartment blocks like pale tombstones, and Turda, squatting in a great cloud of dust and fumes from its cement and chemical factories. The road crossed the Mureş, the principal river of Transylvania, then veered north-east towards Târgu Mureş. In the distance I saw the slim chimney of the fertiliser plant issuing forth its trail of mustard-yellow smoke. I drove past one industrial installation after another: the glass factory, the leather factory, the cement factory. The air carried a pungent combination of chemicals.

  Grigore Lungu, Romania, 1990

  I had an address for a Romanian fly-fisherman, Iuliu Lungu, to whom I had written from England. I hoped very keenly that he was expecting me. I showed the address to a taxi driver who led me into a cluster of dirty white blocks of flats, then stopped and pointed to one. I went in, heart quaking, mounted a dark, evil-smelling staircase, found the door. It was opened by a powerfully built man with short, crinkly grey hair and a pepper-and-salt moustache. ‘Ah, you are here. Do you like football?’ He gestured towards a German-made television in a comfortably furnished sitting room. ‘Romania is playing Ireland. We play good football but I think the Irish will win. They are stronger. I like their manager, Mr Charlton. He is a strong man. You like a beer?’ I nodded. ‘OK, we watch football, have a beer, then we talk about fishing.’ I grasped the glass and sank into a chair, weak with relief.

  Eighteen years later I arrived by aeroplane from Budapest. Grigore – no one called him Iuliu – was waiting for me at the airport. He had thickened out a little, but the grizzled hair, the moustache, the wide nose, the searching, friendly, commanding look, were all just as I remembered. He had already told me on the phone that his wife Dana – with whom I had been great friends – had died of cancer six months before. I said how sorry I was and he nodded. On all the occasions he mentioned her, he never showed a sign of grief. Like Jack Charlton, he is a strong man.

  We took the same road into Târgu Mureş. The smoke coming from the fertiliser plant chimney was now white rather than purulent yellow. ‘Is EU money,’ Grigore said. ‘They make cleaner. But we don’t want this factory. I think it will close soon.’ Most of the others – the leather factory, the glass factory, the cement factory – had already gone. Their sites were occupied by new houses, supermarkets, and palaces of glass and steel displaying burnished ranks of Mercedes, Toyotas, Land Cruisers, and Nissan 4x4s like the one Grigore himself was driving.

  Most of the cars forming the unbroken streams of traffic were newish, the occasional vintage Dacia standing out like an off-colour joke at a smart dinner party. We crawled into the main square. The smoky glass walls of the Mureş Mall shopping centre rose to our left, watched over with an expression of kindly interest by Colonel Sanders. Opposite was the spanking new headquarters of the Finance Ministry. Next to it was an incongruous relic of the past, the not-at-all Grand Hotel, which looked as if it had recently been shaken by a violent earth tremor and might fall down at any moment. Grigore jerked his head at it disapprovingly. ‘Is bad name. I think they will destroy soon.’

  The centre of town had been transformed almost beyond recognition. All the dark little food and clothes shops that I remembered had been banished, replaced by a rash of banks, mobile phone shops, bars, restaurants, cafés, even a casino. The grass in the central garden was being strimmed and bedding plants were being put out. The pervasive shabbiness of two decades before had simply been blown away. Girls in sunglasses, swinging smart leather bags, sauntered along with their boyfriends. Men in sharply cut suits hastened between banks, briefcases at the ready, talking urgently into their phones. Groups of friends sipped cappuccino in the open-air cafés or sat on benches licking ice-creams. I could have been anywhere in Europe where people were out enjoying the sunshine.

  Three or four years before, Grigore and Dana had moved from their flat to a new house in a street that ran along the side of the Catholic cemetery not far from the castle. It was spacious and extremely comfortable, but a modest affair compared with the balconied, turreted, gated mansions in blue and pink and sunflower yellow that kept it company. Grigore told me that the cost of building land in Târgu Mureş had risen twenty-fold in the past eight years.

  So it was easy to give people the answer they wanted. How had the town changed? The answer was that it didn’t look, smell or sound like the same place. They were pleased by my astonishment, and tended to take my approval for granted. I think they were aware that, as a foreigner, passing through and not able to speak the language, I was not in any position to seek out other answers.

  Back in the 1980s Grigore had made a deal that enabled him to build a wooden holiday house in the country. The cabana, as he called it, stood on the edge of the village of Bistra Mureşului, about an hour’s drive north-east of Târgu Mureş. Like most Transylvanian villages it was an untidy, attenuated affair, strung out over four miles along a road which ran beside a stream called the Bistra, and began where the stream joined the Mureş, hence its name.

  The cabana had an orchard in front of it and rolling pastures behind, and I thought it was one of the most magical places I had ever been. The orchard was bright with cherries; you could fill a basket in minutes. Beyond the orchard, plots of maize, vegetables, tomatoes and fruit, stockaded against wild boar a
nd deer, were tucked behind every house. Meadows thick with grass and brushed with drifts of wildflowers rose either side of the village. Ahead, folded against the course of the stream like two rucked green blankets, were the first ridges of the Cǎliman Mountains, one of the several Romanian subdivisions of the Carpathians. Their lower slopes were cloaked in beech, oak and hazel, broken here and there by grassy banks where speedwell, spiky spotted orchis and yellow and purple pansies grew. Higher up, the deciduous woods gave way to pine and spruce, and the ridges merged into one smoky blue haze.

  At dawn each morning the long-horned cattle were driven out into the fields along a track that ran behind the cabana. The cows had big bells around their loose-skinned necks. As the first light stole into the valley, the clanging of the bells mingled with the scraping of hooves against the stones and the sleepy, irritable curses of the boys and girls in charge of the beasts. At dusk or even later, the cattle returned. The bells rang the same tones, but now the accompanying shouts were animated and cheerful at the thought of the day’s toil being almost done.

  View from Bistra Mureşului

  Most of the able-bodied younger people of Bistra Mureşului either worked for the Forestry or had jobs in the factories in the nearest town, Reghin. When they got home in the evening they were expected to turn out into the fields to help those left behind, who worked all day. At the weekends everyone worked. Toil was the dominant motif of life. People were bent, almost literally, under its weight. But in the context of Ceauşescu’s Romania, they were lucky and they knew it. They had land on which to grow food crops, cows to milk, chickens for eggs. The exchange – which required them to give up most of their daylight hours to work – seemed a harsh one to me. But they, looking around at what was happening elsewhere, considered themselves blessed.

  Carved door Bistra, Mureşului

  The homesteads were generally rectangular, with living quarters set at right angles to the road and screened from it by a high fence with an arched gate, often decorated with carvings of diamond patterns or sunflowers or swags of leaves and bunches of grapes. A few of the houses were built of wood but most of coarse building blocks with a coloured wash. The barns, woodstores and other outbuildings, though, were invariably wooden, with roofs of pine shingles or tin. Everyone kept chickens and geese, and almost every family had at least one cow and one horse. The yards were plastered in dung and strewn with piles of rubbish and rusting machinery, but each had its flower-bed planted with roses, tulips and camellias.

  When I was first there, none of the homes had running water. Much of the village’s social life was generated by the business of drawing and carrying water and by the washing of clothes, which was done in the stream. Most people had electricity by then, but hardly anyone had a TV. One of those with both was Mr Floria, who had provided the land for Grigore’s cabana and had made the arrangements.

  Mr Floria was the big man in Bistra Mureşului. He managed the timber company, with 200 men beneath him, and was the major landowner. His homestead was oblong and had two dwellings on opposite sides of the yard, one for him and his wife, the other for one of his sons and his family. Along the side facing the gate were a cowshed, a hay-barn, a woodstore and a dark cubicle housing a stinking earth closet into which I ventured once and never again. A track ran down between the shit-house and Mr and Mrs Floria’s bungalow to their vegetable plots and fields.

  She was a stout, smiling woman, who always wore a cheap print dress, with or without an apron, and stout boots or shoes. She laboured from dawn to dusk about the house or in the fields, often accompanied by her daughter-in-law, who was equally stout. In fact, all the Florias were conspicuously well rounded. They ate enthusiastically, their favourite food being lumps of pork fat with the whiskery skin still attached.

  Mr Floria himself was shaped rather like a bale of hay, with massive forearms and a mighty paunch. He always wore a ragged, wide-brimmed straw hat, and emanated a calm, peasant canniness. He was unhurried in his movements, his speech careful and courteous, his authority immediate and impressive. He was a keen-eyed shot and a deadly catcher of trout, and in the way powerful men from different spheres often gravitate together, he and Grigore had become great chums. Dishes of stew and bowls of eggs, milk and fruit were forever being delivered to the cabana by Mrs Floria or one or other of her grandchildren. One evening during the 1990 World Cup, England were playing Belgium and I was summoned to sit before the Floria television and plied with pork fat and many glasses of their homemade plum and bilberry tuicǎ. The match went to extra time, and it was after midnight when I made an unsteady way back to my bed, under a starry sky, with nightingales singing somewhere.

  Two decades had taken their toll on Mr Floria. The occasion for our reunion was another football match – Spain against Russia, Euro 2008 – and this time Grigore was with me. Mrs Floria seemed much the same, down to her print dress. She remembered me and grinned and said something to Grigore. ‘He say’ – Grigore waged a losing battle with gender in English – ‘you look older. But OK.’ Mr Floria was laid out on a bed in the middle of the living room, in front of the TV. He looked like one of those whales that, for reasons not understood by naturalists, strand themselves on beaches: vast and helpless. When he turned sideways to shake hands with Grigore, his great stomach spilled across the sheet from his open pyjama jacket. He had had a stroke a couple of years before and his speech was slurred and abrupt. ‘She speak not so good,’ Grigore said. ‘But this’ – he tapped his head – ‘is still good.’

  In the intervening years Grigore’s cabana had been fitted with a new kitchen, complete with gas cooker, a shower, and a flush lavatory. The next day he had to go off somewhere. I was happy to be left on my own. I wanted to explore the village, to see how the wind of change that had swept through Târgu Mureş was blowing out here.

  It had grown, extending its already considerable length by several hundred yards up the valley, and – more hesitantly – spreading into the meadows by the stream. Holiday homes in pseudo-Alpine style, with wooden verandahs and balconies and decorative brickwork, had sprouted wherever a drive could be laid. A drainage pipe was being installed along a trench dug in haphazard fashion down the side of the road. The road itself was gradually being asphalted from the far end, although most of it was still unmade and plentifully pot-holed. As before, the verges were shaded by almond and walnut trees, and every few hundred yards there was a miniature wooden pavilion with seats, for travellers to shelter from sun or rain or old people to sit and exchange the news and watch the world go by.

  Cars and motor-scooters had largely replaced horses and carts. The grass in some of the meadows was being cut, but by machine rather than scythe. The vegetable plots, the blocks of maize and potatoes, the vineyards, orchards and little plantations of fir trees, were carefully tended, and there were still plenty of villagers at work in the open. At dusk the cattle came clanking up the road, the animals peeling off to be led into their barns for the night. The yards were as ramshackle as ever, each pecked over by its resident fowls, each with its stack of wood and fodder. Some of the decorated gateways I had photographed before had been replaced by ugly, functional metal ones, but many survived, continuing to offer simple messages of welcome to the passer-by.

  Bistra Mureşului remained, unmistakably, a working village: unkempt, wholly unsmart, very much alive. But the sense of its being wholly occupied in a ceaseless struggle for survival had gone. People worked, but they also sat around, sauntered, loitered – quite a number of them in a place of pleasure quite unimaginable in the old days, the Bar Nirvana. When I ventured an expression of mild regret at the passing of the scythes, the carts and the peace, Grigore’s answer echoed Józef Jeleński’s in Myślenice: ‘Why will people work all day in the fields to grow food when they can buy it in the supermarket?’ I realised I didn’t have an answer.

  Chapter 17

  Two streams and a castle

  THE EPOCA CEAUŞESCU, as Grigore called it, had ended with amazing speed i
n December 1989. On Christmas Day the blood-streaked bodies of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were shown on television, looking like a pair of old, unwanted dolls. When I arrived in Târgu Mureş a few months later, the journalistic consensus outside Romania was that the country was still reeling from shock and in a perilous state of economic and political instability. Without letting me know it, Grigore was anxious that I shouldn’t get the wrong idea about how bad things were, or the direction in which they were going. He himself – again unknown to me – was stretched almost to breaking point by the situation. So he took the precaution of appointing a minder to keep me on track.

  Ioan Varlam was older than Grigore, and had recently retired at the end of a long career spent servicing refrigeration equipment on board Romania’s fishing fleet. In the course of it he had sailed the oceans of the world and visited almost every port, acquiring reasonably fluent French, German and Italian, passable English, and a mariner’s smattering of Russian, Polish, Greek, Bulgarian and Japanese. He was agreeable enough in moderate doses, but combined a slightly servile manner with a deep sense of injury at the hand fate had dealt him. Symbols of affluence – such as Grigore’s cabana or the sight of a new car – would suddenly set off outbursts of bitterness at his exclusion from this brave new world. Despite his ten languages, it had all come too late for him. While men like Grigore were poised to flourish, all Ioan had were his shabby flat and his measly merchant navy pension.

  His main task with me was to counter the false propaganda I had been fed on my travels. His discourse was relentlessly educational. He presented recent Romanian history in a series of simple tableaux. Ceauşescu was a madman and had been got rid of. Tyranny had been replaced by democracy. The Securitate were no more. Those who said that the elections – won by the ex-Communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu – were a fraud were malcontents and troublemakers. Claims that people didn’t have enough to eat were false: food and petrol shortages were caused by administrative incompetence. The revolution had brought light in place of darkness. It had shown the world that the real instincts of Romanians were democratic and libertarian (although still requiring a firm hand on the tiller); that Romania was ready to take its rightful place in the community of free nations.