Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  In the late evening, as dusk gathered, Ceauşescu would take the short walk from the lodge to the clearing in the forest. Here, away from the petty problems and irritations of his office, deep in the eternal Transylvanian forest, he was in his true element, the element of the hunter. He would chat to the chief forester, then take his seat in the cubicle, laying his favourite Holland and Holland .375 on the window ledge. There was a telephone there in case some emergency demanded his attention. Behind him the forester murmured into a two-way radio, keeping in touch with the watchers in the trees.

  The Leader settled in his chair. Outside, the light was fading, the forest growing grey, seeming to close in. He was in no hurry. He knew well enough that impatience was fatal. The animals must be allowed to take their time. He was a hunter, a man of the forest, after all. If these men had done their work, all would be well. If not …

  He felt the forester’s hand touch his arm. At once he was alert. He gripped the rifle, raised it, working the butt against his shoulder. He listened. There was silence; then a muffled snuffling, the whisper of grass and sticks underfoot. The snuffling became louder, mixed with grunts and the sounds of teeth and claws at work. He hoped the bear was eating where the horseflesh had been put down, next to the water-trough, and hadn’t moved off to one side, which would make the shot trickier. The source of the sound seemed fixed. Slowly he turned the rifle towards it, spreading his elbows on the ledge so that the balance was right.

  He nodded to the forester, who flicked a switch. The clearing was flooded with light. There, 20 yards away, standing on its hind legs, was Ursus arctos: eight foot high, 600 pounds in weight, the remains of the last evening meal it would ever eat gripped in its paws, strings of horsemeat between its teeth, blinded and frozen by 1,000 watts of electric light in its eyes. The bear’s heart was just where a man’s would be. The finger squeezed.

  The trophy

  And then, if everything went to plan, the lights would burn late in the lodge’s dining hall as the boss’s marksmanship was toasted and toasted again. In the morning he would be gone, taking the body of the beast with him to be delivered to the presidential taxidermists. The grates would be brushed, the smashed glasses swept up, the dust sheets spread, the doors locked, the gates to the compound padlocked, a collective sigh of relief heaved. Until next time.

  In the end the hunter became the hunted. Ceauşescu suffered the fate that he himself had meted out to such a remarkable number of dumb beasts (with a smile, Romanians swiftly renamed the Conducator – meaning the Boss or Master – Impuscatus, the Shot One).

  The Castle at Lǎpuşna entered an uncertain phase. When I stayed in the compound in 1990, as a result of some potent string-pulling by Grigore, the place was deserted apart from a caretaker couple. I was quartered with Ioan Varlam in one of the chalets near the lodge, where the caretaker’s wife heated our water in a wood-burning ceramic stove and served a succession of delicious meals. Her husband showed us around, taking a particular pleasure in pointing out the remains of the horse carcasses littered across the clearing where the bears were shot, some of the bones picked clean and dried to a dusty grey, others with scraps of flesh still attached. I was able to wander where I wanted and to fish the stretch of the Gurghui that ran past the compound gates, which was strictly out of bounds to other anglers. The gates were kept locked and casual visitors were brusquely turned away.

  Subsequently, I learned, the Castle was taken over by an English businessman with extensive interests in Romania, and used by him as a holiday home. By the time of my return it was being run by a travel agent from Târgu Mureş, partly as somewhere to entertain her family and friends and partly as a commercial weekend and holiday retreat. She showed us around the inside, laying heavy emphasis on the luxurious authenticity of the fixtures and fittings and the moderateness of her charges, although it wasn’t possible to see a lot because of a power cut. She said the roof was in a poor state and she was having trouble finding the craftsmen to cut and fit the thousands of wooden shingles needed to repair it.

  I asked her if people still came to shoot bears. She said they did, although she had nothing to do with the arrangements, which were made between hunting agents and the Ministry. With the price of a trophy bear carcass at $20,000, hunting had become a significant currency earner for the Romanian government. There were occasional scandals: King Juan Carlos of Spain had caused some outrage by bringing a party that accounted for nine bears (the King himself bagged a pregnant female). The argument for it was always the same: the hunting paid for conservation, and conservation worked because Romania had by far the biggest population of bears in Europe, at around 6,000 … which doesn’t alter the fact that shooting a bear is a horrible thing to do, and the further fact that anyone who regards it as sport has more in common with the late Nicolae Ceauşescu than they might care to admit.

  Later Grigore was scornful about the travel agent and her sales pitch. ‘He did not impression me,’ he said. ‘She’, I corrected him. ‘She. She is not having the proper respect for that place. It should not be used for holidays. And he have not enough money to make it right. She.’

  It was late evening by the time we left. The bouncing, crumbling road back to Reghin took us past several sites where low, windowless, whitewashed buildings were arranged in rows in a manner reminiscent of a prison camp. They were intensive farming units, for pigs and chickens. All the time I was in Romania I never saw a pig in the open (pretty much the same applied elsewhere in eastern Europe). They are all imprisoned in the dark, either upright, their heads clamped in bars to stop them biting each other; or, in the case of sows weaning piglets, on their sides, unable to get up. Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovakians and Hungarians eat a great deal of pig meat themselves and, with the help of EU investment funds, foreign companies (principally the American hog giant, Smithfield), have been busy snapping up industrial farms wherever possible, to take advantage of minimal welfare standards.

  I attempted to interest Calin in the issue of animal suffering. He said it was important to protect the wild animals, to keep the rivers clean, to clamp down on poaching and pollution. But the notion of being concerned about the treatment of pigs and poultry clearly struck him as absurd.

  Chapter 18

  What’s in a name?

  TO ALMOST HALF its population, and indeed to an entire nation, Târgu Mureş is not Târgu Mureş at all but Marosvásárhely, which in Hungarian means market town on the River Maros (Mureş). Historically it is the cultural and economic capital of the Székely region, the Szeklers being a Hungarian people who settled this remote enclave of the Carpathian basin a thousand years ago. Isolated from the main Hungarian centres of population, they were charged by the Kings of Hungary with the defence of the eastern borderlands against assorted invaders: Bulgars, Cumans, Tartars, finally Turks. In return they were granted privileged social status, exemption from taxes, and near autonomy.

  Over time they came to regard themselves as the ‘true’ Hungarians, their sense of nationhood strengthened by their geographical separation from court and, later, parliament, and by the proximity of the Romanians, whom they despised. To this day, the Szeklers continue to constitute a majority in the region. But in Târgu Mureş they are outnumbered by Romanians, largely due to Ceauşescu’s policy of enforced settlement of Romanian workers there. Politically, the Hungarians have lost the town. Spiritually, they continue to regard it as theirs.

  In March 1990 – less than three months after Ceauşescu’s overthrow, and three months before I arrived there – long-standing tensions between the two communities in Târgu Mureş exploded into violence. There were pitched battles outside the cathedral in the main square in which several people – most of them Hungarians – were killed and 300 or so were injured. Two distinct accounts of the trouble were heard. The Hungarian version was that Romanian ultra-nationalist groups bussed in hired thugs masquerading as miners, with orders to smash peaceful Hungarian protests against decades of oppression. The Romanians m
aintained that their neighbours were trying to exploit the general collapse of central control to press demands amounting to de facto autonomy within Transylvania, and that the people had spontaneously risen to defend their town.

  The tendency of the BBC World Service to favour the Hungarian version outraged the many educated Romanians who listened to it. As a result I – a visiting Englishman then working for the BBC – found myself being harangued at every opportunity about what really happened on those two nights of bloodshed, and about the arrogance of Hungarians in general, their disdain for Romanian culture and history, their inability to accept that they had twice lost Transylvania by backing the Germans in world wars, and that they were never going to get it back.

  Many of these harangues were delivered by Grigore’s wife, Dana. She was small and slender, with a Gallic look about her, her brown hair cut short and parted like a boy’s. Her dark-eyed face was lined, her teeth and fingers yellowed with nicotine. Although her habitual expression was sombre, she had a ready sense of humour which responded best to the comedy of mischance and misfortune. Before she laughed she would duck her head forward, then jerk it back, mouth open, eyes shining.

  On her father’s side, Dana’s family originated in France. Her mother came from a Romanian family long established in Transylvania, at least seven of whom had been Greek Orthodox priests. Back in Habsburg days one of these priestly forbears had refused to obey orders from Budapest to conduct school teaching in Hungarian only, and had been hanged for his defiance.

  Dana’s family history and her Romanian blood had moulded a strong cultural antagonism towards the Hungarians. But that was nothing compared with the implacable, unforgiving hatred she harboured for Ceauşescu and his regime. Her father, a lawyer, had spent nine years in a labour camp in the 1950s for the crime of having belonged to the National Liberal Party before it was purged. Grigore freely admitted to having been a Communist Party activist in his youth and to having kept his membership thereafter for reasons of expediency. When I asked Dana if she had ever been a member, a whole history of suffering and hatred was written in the quick, angry shake of her head.

  She lectured me frequently and at length about the fearsome complexities of Transylvanian history. We talked in French, which she spoke better than me, although hers was rusty from long disuse. Sometimes my head would reel from the strain of trying to grasp how the Daco-Roman people had come to co-exist with the Hungarian usurpers. (This, of course, was the official Romanian version, in which the Roman Emperor Trajan’s occupying force had become assimilated into the aboriginal Dacian stock.) One of her favourite themes was the brutality of Magyarisation under Habsburg rule, which trampled on Romanian culture and demanded that everyone take a Hungarian name.

  Grigore tended to keep out of these discussions. He employed many Hungarians at the factory he managed; he said they were generally good workers, and he claimed to have a number of Hungarian friends. He was aware, I think, that the persistent beating of the Romanian drum in my ear might be counter-productive. Typically, he devised a more subtle means of education.

  István Horváth was a Hungarian manager with Grigore’s company. He had a stringy, undernourished appearance, a dark, suffering countenance, lank black hair, and a shaggy moustache that he was forever twisting and tugging. He smoked incessantly and seemed to throb and twitch with resentment at the hand fate had dealt him. He was an educated man – we too communicated in French – and a capable manager, Grigore said, but not much liked by the workers.

  For István, to be Hungarian in Romanian Transylvania was to be a victim. His disdain for Romanians and their culture was absolute. The notion that his ten-year-old daughter should be taught in a Romanian school, or have to mix with Romanians in any way, was abhorrent to him. His view was that history and Hungary’s enemies had conspired to steal Transylvania from its rightful inheritors. The Romanians were interlopers, peasants, barbarians, capable only of ruining the treasure that had dropped into their lap. But István was determined that Hungary’s spiritual ownership would be defended to the last. ‘Arise Hungarians’ had been Petöfi’s cry, and István had answered it. He had been on the streets during the riots that spring and he knew what had happened, which was that the barbarians had attempted to terrorise the superior race. (Grigore, he pointed out, was on a business trip to Italy at the time.)

  He had another passion, which was more sympathetic, although, on occasions, tiresome. Denied freedom in the city, István found it instead in the mountains. Here, in climbing boots, alpenstock in hand, he could breathe the pure air, stride by the lakes, share the crests with the chamois, be looked down on only by the eagle. In the mountains István need bow to no one.

  His particular affinity was with the Retezat Mountains, which form part of the last great massif of the Carpathians that extends from the Iron Gates in the west to the valley of the Siret in the east. Only the peaks of the Tatras are higher than those of Retezat, Cibin and Fǎgarǎş, which together constitute a mighty 200-mile-long barrier, hemming in the north of the Danube plain and facing down the rugged mountains of Bulgaria on the other side.

  Up to the tree line, at around 6,000 feet, these southern peaks are characteristically Carpathian, swathed in forests and split by valleys containing tumbling streams. But above that line they have a grandeur of their own. Sharp, bare schists bound by looping ridges rise from great screes jumbled with lichen-covered boulders. There are meadows spotted with huge stones, in whose lee orchids and saxifrages burst forth in the brief period when the snow has melted. In the shallow bowls between the outcrops are Alpine lakes, which sparkle like sapphires when the sun is out, and frown granite-grey under cloud.

  Grigore had appointed István to guide me on an expedition to Retezat. It had an unpromising start. It was teeming with rain when I arrived at István’s flat, which comprised two rooms of a crumbling, single-storey house in one of Târgu Mureş’s less favoured back streets. He had already warned me at some length of the dangers the mountains could pose to the inexperienced in severe weather, and I rather assumed that we would now confirm the cancellation of the trip. But István was ready, with a rucksack almost as tall as himself.

  ‘Pas de problème,’ he said airily when I asked him for the third time if it would be safe to go. ‘Ici il pleut. Mais en Retezat, qui sait?’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘Nous verrons.’ He picked up his rucksack, gasping with the effort. It seemed excessively large and full for what was planned as a two-day trip.

  István with wife and daughter

  The explanation appeared – István’s wife and daughter. Would I mind if they came too? Of course not, I replied after a moment. István was delighted. His wife, he assured me, spoke excellent English and would be a great help in conversation. Mollified, I repeated to her, in English, what István had just said. She registered incomprehension. I tried again. She shook her head emphatically and said: ‘No Engleesh.’

  Heavily laden, we set off in my car through the pounding rain. István lit a cigarette and I opened the window a couple of inches to let the smoke out. István’s wife leaned forward from the back seat and muttered in his ear. He asked me if I would shut the window as she was very sensitive to the cold. I did so, and asked him if he would mind not smoking in the car.

  For almost all of the long drive south-west István held forth on the Transylvanian/Hungarian/Romanian question. Initially I tried to challenge some of his assertions, but I was brushed aside. At one point I asked him if it was really desirable that his daughter could speak no Romanian, had no Romanian friends, and was forbidden to learn anything about the country in which she had lived her whole life. István shook his head good-naturedly.

  ‘Mais, Tom, vous ne comprenez pas. Elle est Hongroise, pas Roumaine.’

  We followed the valley of the Mureş, through Alba Iulia and past Sebeş, until we reached the confluence with the principal river of Retezat, the Riul Mare. The weather had cleared to some degree; the mountains ahead formed a dark, massive barrier, their
tops lost in the cloud. We made for them, passing close to Sarmizegetusa, the mountain capital of the kingdom founded by the Dacian conqueror Decebalus. István had no interest in its stirring history. He maintained that the Dacians never existed, that the land was empty when the Magyars arrived, and that it was only much later that primitive men dressed in sheepskins – the advance guard of the Romanian horde – had infiltrated from the south-east.

  We drove up the valley of the Riul Mare. The stream was wretchedly shrunken, and after some miles the reason became apparent. Blocking the narrow defile through which it flowed was a gigantic plug of earth and rocks, the Riul Mare dam. We approached it behind a string of dust-shrouded earth-movers which were shuddering up the twisting road to dump their loads at the tops. The hillsides all around were torn and gashed where the soil and rock had been ripped away. Abandoned machinery and wrecked vehicles littered the slopes.

  The road ran up one side of the ravine, then crossed the dam. I dodged between thundering diggers and trucks, feeling the car’s wheels slip on the pebbles and sticky mud, trying to avert my eyes from the dizzying drops to the river on one side of the dam and the lake on the other. István entertained me with an account of how a lorry carrying 30 dam workers had slipped off the road. ‘Trois cents mètres,’ he said with relish, pointing down.

  He had arranged for us to stay at a hostel overlooking the lake. Two fierce-looking cocks and a pair of abundantly wattled turkeys were competing for position on a dungheap at the side of the building as we arrived. The turkeys spotted us and high-stepped towards the car, scarlet dewlaps flapping. István’s daughter cringed in terror and burst into tears. An old man appeared and shooed the birds away. He greeted us with wild enthusiasm, as if we were the first humans to come this way for many a year. His face was silvered with stubble and his yellow eyes were reddened by webs of broken blood vessels. He ushered István and me into a downstairs room, one corner of which was filled by a wood-burning stove emitting terrific heat. A fat old woman with matted, straggling grey hair sat opposite the stove, looking like a toad. The room stank of sweat, cooking and alcohol.