A Dog's Life (17 page)

(The two Romanian–English dictionaries in my possession were published while Ceau
ş
escu was in power. There are no definitions for ‘penis’, ‘testicles’, ‘vagina’, ‘clitoris’ or ‘homosexual’. The cruder variants are, naturally, absent. Romania was a pure country and its language similarly immaculate and untainted by carnality.)

That December I stayed in a run-down, but once opulent, hotel. A group of Sicilians who had boarded the connecting flight at Zürich were also staying there. They wore striped suits, two-toned shoes and fedoras – a clichéd combination that shrieked out MAFIA. They did business in the hotel lobby. A friend, calling on me, noticed two of them in earnest conversation with a member of the government. There were armed guards in the lobby all day and night, and at six every evening the prostitutes – some in fur coats because of the weather – arrived for work. They looked fit and well-fed, unlike the wasted boys and girls who were attempting to sell their bodies at the Gare du Nord, the central railway station. Like Jo the crossing-sweeper in
Bleak House
, they were subsequently ‘moved on’ – to die out of sight, presumably. They were distressing the tourists with their bulging eyes and skeletal frames: the awful evidence of the AIDS-related illnesses they were suffering.

A whole community of lost and abandoned children was living in the city’s sewers, I learned. Several of these waifs had died the same gruesome death. Overcome by hunger and the need to steal or beg for something to eat, they would emerge from an uplifted manhole and get run over by a car or truck. Since their lives were worthless anyway, and their place of residence illegal, it was generally considered that they were responsible for their own demise. If you ignore the circumstances that led them to the sewers, that point of view makes sense. The drivers were victims, not killers.

I contacted the British Council during my trip and, hearing that George, the Council’s driver, was going to Ia
ş
i, I asked if he could give me a lift in the Land Rover. It was on that long ride across the snow-covered countryside that I made my first serious acquaintance with the language. Andy, a librarian, whose Romanian parents had been English teachers in Rhodesia, taught me the words for the birds and objects we saw on the journey –
co
ţ
ofana
, magpie, being the first. The ebullient George was my delighted tutor as well, of a much more basic vocabulary, which includes
labagiu
, the Romanian for the term Rosemary used to describe the palest man in the world.

I had dinner with
Ş
tefan in Ia
ş
i and another man, a lecturer at the university, joined us. He was tipsy on arrival, and got drunker and drunker as the meal progressed. He revealed, for my benefit I assumed, that he lived in domestic misery, with a wife and daughter who both hated him. It turned out that the house in which I was spending the night was next to his own, so we shared a taxi late in the evening. He had heard me reading from my memoir
An Immaculate Mistake
in Cambridge in 1990 and told me how brave I was to be so open about my homosexuality. Such courage was impossible and unthinkable in Romania, he said. As soon as we were out of the taxi, he made a lunge in my direction, trying to kiss me on the lips. I managed to push him off and say I wasn’t interested. Once inside the house, I discovered there was no key to the lock on my bedroom door. So, absurdly, I secured a chair beneath the door handle, to fend off the bear-like individual who had designs on me. There I was, at the age of fifty-three, behaving as if I were some timid virgin. I could laugh about it in the morning, but I had been scared. I mentioned the incident to
Ş
tefan, who was not surprised. The Securitate had discovered that the man was homosexual many years ago and had threatened him with imprisonment and worse if he didn’t cooperate. They advised him to marry, to ensure that his secret never became common knowledge. The lecturer had been informing on his colleagues for three decades, at least. He was not happy in this task, as his often excessive drinking indicated.

The lecturer’s predicament was not an isolated one. Thousands of people were caught in the Securitate’s wide-ranging trap. In that pure Romania, even the slightest sexual peccadillo could lead to blackmail and humiliation by the police. That notion of a national purity hasn’t died with Communism. It is currently espoused by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the leader of the Far Right opposition party. As if to emphasize the pure nature of the Romanian soul, Tudor always appears in public dressed in white – white suit, white shirt or sweater, white socks, white shoes. Garbed as a wingless angel, Tudor denounces Jews (not many of them left in the Balkans), Gypsies, Turks, and indeed all foreigners. When the television playwright gave outraged expression to ‘We do not have such people in Romania’ he was honouring a dictate from on high. In that iniquitous society it was essential to remind the average men and women of Romania’s moral superiority in an otherwise immoral Europe. This imposed belief had its uses, not least the idea that financial prosperity is the root cause of decadence. Tell that to the poor as they wait in line for meat or bread. If ‘decadent’ is defined as ‘characterized by decay or decline’, then Romania is the most decadent country I have ever visited. And that is part of its fascination for me.

Throughout my first trip to Romania, there was a curfew every evening from seven-thirty onwards. Theatrical performances began at around five o’clock. I remember a production of
The Taming of the Shrew
which reduced the packed audience to helpless laughter. I have never regarded the play as particularly funny, so I asked Rosemary, who was sitting beside me, why everyone was laughing. She replied that the actors were improvising when they saw fit, sneaking in sarcastic asides that clearly referred to their hated leader and his unlovely spouse. There must have been a surfeit of these asides for the laughter, often accompanied by spontaneous applause, was fairly constant.

In December 1999, the theatres opened at seven or eight. I sat through a performance of
Richard III
, starring a mesmeric actor named Marcel Iure
ş
, that almost made me forget I was freezing. There was no heating in the theatre, and no bar either. The apartments of friends were similarly chilly, with everybody present huddled around a single electric fire or oil-fuelled stove that gave out very little heat.

The wide Bucharest streets were filthy and pitted with holes. The vast palace, larger than Versailles, that Ceau
ş
escu had built to his own glory, stood unoccupied. I had been granted a tour of the monstrous piece of kitsch as an honoured guest of the Writers’ Union. Sceptics, in unbugged open spaces, had revealed that whole areas of the city had been felled to accommodate Ceau
ş
escu’s folly and the long avenue leading up to it. It wasn’t only houses and business premises and hotels that were destroyed. Orthodox churches disappeared, too, and an irreplaceable, centuries-old mosque.

The antique shops in the wealthy heart of Bucharest were selling icons – some of considerable beauty – in their hundreds. Where had they come from? The answer was as simple as it was painful. The icons had been owned, and hidden, by devout families, who had prayed before them over many generations. They were on sale now, at exorbitant prices, because their former owners had to eat and needed money to do so. The dealers bought the icons from these newly impoverished men and women – who used to be able to afford cheap cuts and stale bread – for risibly small amounts of
lei
. The icons were not on sale in Romanian currency, of course. I picked up a tiny icon of St Nicholas that appealed to me and wondered what it cost. On hearing that I could have it for three thousand American dollars, I suddenly decided it didn’t appeal to me that much.

There were other, visible casualties of the country’s surreal economy, in the pathetic shape of the stray dogs who were roaming the icy city in search of scraps. They couldn’t be sold, like the icons, merely abandoned. The one-time pets had become too expensive to support and had been thrown out or dumped from cars to fend for themselves. I thought of Circe, at home in London in Jeremy’s fond care, as yet another mangy, half-starved dog limped or padded past.

It had been impossible during the Communist years to buy bananas in Romania. Only the older people – and those who had been allowed out of the country – remembered their appearance and taste. The arrival of the banana early in 1990 inspired a joke I heard many times. It runs like this: One thing has changed in Bucharest, and one thing hasn’t. You can now buy bananas, but the trams are still full to overflowing. A man purchases three loose bananas – one for him, one for his wife, and one for his son. He has to travel home by tram and is worried that the precious fruit will be squashed. He places a banana in each of the side pockets of his jacket and the third in the back pocket of his trousers. He boards the tram, and very soon he is surrounded by fellow passengers, jammed tight against them. He realizes his already ripe bananas are suffering the fate he anticipated, and puts his hand behind him to test the condition of the one in his back pocket. To his relief, he finds it reassuringly hard, and decides to keep a firm grip on it for the rest of the journey. Many stops later, he feels a pat on his shoulder and turns his head to see a man smiling at him. The man says, very politely, ‘Excuse me, but do you think you could let go of my penis? I have to get off here.’

As I watched an ancient episode of
Dallas
in my hotel room, I felt curious to know how the television playwright was faring. The next day I enquired after him and received a derisive guffaw as response. I learned that he’d worked for the Securitate and was no longer around. His skills as a dramatist had yet to be tested.

I immersed myself, as best I could in London, in Romanian culture and history. Kitty’s father had worked for Shell in Romania from 1946 to 1948, when the country became part of the Soviet bloc, and she gave me some of his books after his death. Among these is the only English translation of Ion Creanga’s
Recollections
, published in 1930. This memoir, and the wonderful fairy tales that accompany it, appeared in 1890 and 1892, and is regarded as the first substantial prose work in the language. (It is important to understand that there was no
written
Romanian until the early years of the nineteenth century.)
Recollections
describes what it was like to grow up in a Moldavian peasant family in a superstitious society totally cut off from the changing world. Such communities, smaller in number, continue to exist in the more remote areas of the countryside.

I read R. W. Seton-Watson’s magisterial
A History of the Roumanians
, in which I encountered such diverse, and bloodthirsty, national heroes as Vlad the Impaler, Michael the Brave and Romania’s very own Peter the Great. But it is
Athene Palace
by Countess Waldeck – an American journalist despite the title – that offers the most acute insights into the Romanian character. She stayed in the hotel (its proper name is Athénée) from the summer of 1940 until the end of January 1941, when the Germans were dictating every move of General Antonescu’s government. She watched its capitulation to the Nazis from a position of privilege, having befriended every important person in the capital, including a pair of priapic old aristocrats – one resembling a ‘sick greyhound’ – who primed her with gossip both sexual and political. It’s the greyhound who confesses that, although he is anti-Semitic, he would rather do business with Jews because ‘no Romanian trusts another Romanian’.

A passage in the epilogue of
Athene Palace
strikes me as especially perceptive:

I left the Athene Palace at the end of January 1941, knowing that Germany’s bloodless conquest of Romania was as complete as if her armies had trampled the land underfoot and her airplanes bombarded the cities from the skies… Here nobody complained about the ‘end of civilization’ just because Hitler tried to set up a mere one-thousand-year Empire. A people that saw the Roman Empire come and go and saw all sorts of barbarians invade their country, and still survived, does not believe there is a definite end to anything. Such people are instinctively wise in the strange ways of history, which invariably seems to run into compromise, and so they are less afraid than many great nations of the West. The Romanians possess to the highest degree the capacity of receiving the blows of destiny while relaxed. They fall artfully, soft and loose in every joint and muscle as only those trained in falling can be. The secret of the art of falling is, of course, not to be afraid of falling and the Romanians are not afraid, as Western people are. Long experience in survival has taught them that each fall may result in unforeseen opportunities and that somehow they always get on their feet again.

Under Cleo’s patient tutelage I began to understand Romanian grammar.
A Course in Contemporary Romanian
also contains, besides the inevitable lists of nouns and verbs and advice on how to employ them correctly, a selection of poems by the greatest Romanian poets. Thus it was that I discovered Mihai Eminescu, the great Romantic who is regarded as his country’s Keats, and George Bacovia, the melancholy genius whose life was plagued by drink, depression and bouts of madness, but whose poetry has an eerie radiance.

At school in the 1950s, my English teachers had encouraged me to learn poems by heart. It has been a lifelong practice. With Cleo to correct and improve my pronunciation, I committed one of Eminescu’s poems to memory. ‘Peste Vîrfurí’ (O’er the Treetops) has the poet hearing the sound of a distant horn in the woods where the alder trees are shaking in the evening breeze. The moon appears and the sound fades away and he thinks of soothing death.

In 1996, I returned to Romania with a group of writers. On the first day I attended a reception in a Bucharest bookshop to celebrate the publication of two of my novels. Cleopatra’s mother was there, and I told her how much I liked her beautiful daughter. A Romanian friend, Irina, asked me to recite ‘Peste Vîrfurí’, which I did. My brief recitation made front page news the next morning. I love the absurdity of it, and a certain sweetness. An Englishman reciting a masterpiece by the national poet seemed to assume more importance than murder or politics. Romanians are overjoyed when foreigners exhibit an interest in their literature – which is little translated, and mostly unknown abroad.