A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (17 page)

Let me go back to Mimi. My mother didn't only witness the eviction from the old quarters, but she herself, together with thousands upon thousands, was a victim of that madness. The orders to destroy the old quarters of downtown Bucharest, like the Uranus neighborhood where she had lived, came from the court, from Ceausescu himself, as did all orders. Although one could never be sure how much Elena had to do with that grandiose, maniacal plan to build a palace pyramid called (and I can't help being ironic here) the House of the People. They were both incredibly vain persons and not very intelligent. Perhaps because of that they believed they were omnipotent. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from some eight thousand old buildings and villas into newly built apartments, gray blocks that you can still see standing today. And they were forbidden to take us along. Just when they needed us most to comfort them for their loss, as Mimi used to lament. You see, she was sad for people, not for her own destiny. That was the kind of person she was. Mimi saw with her own eyes a bulldozer destroying her beloved family home, with its yellow facade and a small garden behind. It was a horrifying scene, a huge metal hand reaching into the house and pulling out debris, like gutting a fish. Even today it's hard for me to recall how she described her feeling of helplessness as she watched the destruction. It caused her physical pain to see that, she said. Imagine it: The whole neighborhood, humans and dogs, standing there and watching, desperate, frightened, and powerless . . . without a single voice of protest.

Soon the old houses were gone, even the old scents. Now it smelled of newly dug soil, of cement and bitumen and dogs' piss. It was dangerous to go to the building site, but they all went there at first. In disbelief, perhaps, as if expecting to wake up from a nightmare. Many dogs died of hunger right away. Without food, vaccinations, and care, they were decimated quickly. They also died from depression, especially the older dogs. Mimi was young and beautiful, and a woman from the outskirts of Bucharest took pity on her. So, I was not born in the street. She always reminded me how privileged we were.

Anyway, my mother was well connected and had a relative who lived close to the court. He told her that the Ceausescus had two pet dogs. This might surprise you, because you know that both Nicolai and Elena came from a village and that peasants have only working animals, not pets. Besides, Nicolai would never have petted a dog because of his mad fear of bacteria that made him change into a new suit every day. This was a kind of posing, though. Tito of Yugoslavia had two white poodles, not to mention the American president, the Queen of England, and other “decadent” characters. If it took pet dogs to be considered posh—so be it! Nicolai had a huge black one called Corbu (the Raven) who, they say, had the military rank of colonel and was driven around in an official car. And our queen, she had a lovely cocker spaniel, whose name escapes me now.

No, no, I'm not exaggerating! I know for sure because once, a very long time ago, our cousin Nicu was taking care of some children on vacation in a little house in the mountains close to the Ceausescus' villa. One beautiful sunny winter's day the children were out playing in the snow when all of a sudden he didn't hear them anymore. There was a total silence. Nicu looked through the window and they were lying on their backs perfectly still, with a huge black dog standing over them. He rushed out and saw the two Ceausescus walking with the cocker spaniel at their heels. A Securitate officer, very elegant in his military uniform, was trailing behind them. Nicu happens to be a Doberman, so he started walking toward Corbu with a murderous look in his eyes. Just then the officer called the dog back. Apparently Corbu was trained to pull down to the ground and hover over anything that moved when the couple was around. Even while telling this story, our brave cousin would shake with rage. So yes, the Ceausescus were snobbish about the breed of their dogs and “walked them” now and then.

Nicu, who obviously belonged to a
nomenclatura
family close to the court, also swore he'd witnessed an interesting scene years later. He was there when it was reported to the royal couple that there were too many dogs roaming free on the streets. Elena laughed. “Thousands of dogs out on the streets? Well, this is really funny,” she allegedly said. “Why not kill them all?” she added, waiving her hand and dismissing the whole issue as a big joke. Her husband, meanwhile, didn't even bother to listen. I wonder what Corbu or her own dog thought about those words? I bet they were as arrogant and mean as she was. That's what you humans say about us, that we acquire the character, even the face, of a master. Although in my long life I've seen that the reverse can also happen.

Interestingly enough, and very unusually so, if I may add, Elena's remark was not taken as a command but rather as just that, a remark. Someone in the court, either very clever or very cunning, decided that people in Bucharest were shaken enough after being evicted, and that it could have been dangerous to upset them even further by exterminating dogs. It must have been an experienced courtier to realize that an additional blow like that could shift the delicate balance between the oppressed and the oppressors. The totalitarian power structure resembles a house of cards. You should be very careful when you try to remove a single card, that we all know. But, oddly enough, it's hardest to remove a card from the very top—then it's called a coup d'état. This is exactly what happened some years later, right? In other words, there was no need to demonstrate power at that particular moment. Imagine, thousands of dogs lying dead in streets, killed with rat poison, and not enough rubbish trucks and manpower to collect them: the unbearable stink, not to mention the danger of an epidemic. Plus, there were all those foreign correspondents to consider; the whole world would have known about Ceausescu's cruelty to animals. It was used to his cruelty to people. The Ceausescu regime was a murderous one, but it didn't give its enemies the pleasure of seeing it demonstrated on dogs!

So we lived on.

Well, I also happen to know the story about how dogs were saved. Yes, there is some advantage to being old, if your brain doesn't turn into pudding. It was told by a director or a manager of a rubbish removal company. Today he would be called a CEO, which is a funny title when connected with rubbish, you have to admit! One day Comrade So-and-so was called to the ministry of police (everything had to do with police in those days). Naturally, he believed that he had done something wrong. In Ceausescu's Romania one had to consider such a possibility, because the rules were decided by one person alone—Ceausescu himself—and therefore arbitrary. And how arbitrary! For example, it was notorious that Nicolai had some digestion problems. Therefore his “morning decisions,” as they were called among courtiers, were—so to speak—softer than the afternoon or evening ones. It was also well-known (at least, it was an urban myth) that his cook was instructed to put a small amount of laxative into his meal if he needed to be “mollified” before an important decision had to be made. Servants actually had an important role in our history; if you only think how someone's destiny depended on Ceausescu's indigestion!

So this CEO of the rubbish removal company turns up at the ministry, his knees going weak as he enters the office of the minister. But the minister, an old pal, hugs him reassuringly. On the other hand, they would do that even before stabbing you in the back. Only after a couple of French cognacs (someone's bribe, he was sure) does our garbage man come to his senses and realize that the minister really has summoned him for a so-called consultation. Since he knows only too well that this could be a method of handing over responsibility for a problem, he's not completely relaxed, is he?

Finally, the minister asks him what it would take to clean the city streets of dogs. The rubbish removal man gives the question some quick, serious evaluation. He knows which direction the wind blows in, but that's not difficult, because it always blows from the same direction. From the minister's tone of voice he notices that “cleaning” the city of dogs is not formulated as an order (the minister could have simply said: “Kill them”), which gives him room to maneuver. “Well, it would certainly take a lot of work,” the rubbish removal man says. “Plus, it wouldn't
look
nice.” He's well aware that some decisions in his job are taken according to how nice or not nice the result would appear. Not inside the country, but to foreigners, to the enemies, and they are many. “There was a lot of negative publicity abroad because of the demolition of parts of the old town, so why risk more of it,” he adds cautiously. “Also, there are a lot of animal lovers out there who would go berserk.”

The minister looks at him without moving a muscle. “Mikhail,” he says, feeling secure enough to switch to the minister's first name now, “all I'm saying is that it could be done, dogs could be exterminated. My men—with the help of the army, of course—could gather the carcasses and burn them within a week. But you should be aware that this operation is a sensitive one. All this would be very, very visible!” He sees the impact of his words on Mikhail's face, which starts to crease into a grimace that looks faintly like a smile. “Perhaps it's better to let nature take its course,” our man finally concludes, thinking of food shortages for people, never mind dogs. Upon hearing that euphemism for starvation, Mikhail's face lights up.
“Let nature take its course,”
he repeats, excited, as if this banal phrase were some kind of wisdom bestowed upon him by god almighty. As he exits the office, the minister hugs the rubbish removal man once more, this time cordially. Because, you understand, the minister didn't care at all for the destiny of our canine species. He wanted the easiest way out for himself.

The CEO was right; dogs died in silence and no bad publicity was created. Anyway, much bigger political issues soon arose. Madame Ceausescu had no time to think about dogs any longer, or of anything else, for that matter. A couple of years after this incident, her time was up. Truth be said, after being abducted, an improvised show trial was organized and they both were shot like a couple of old beggars. Ceausescu went down in history as a dictator, and most people here think that they both got what they deserved. I would have wanted to see them tried, real and proper. But that wasn't to be. Romanians are foxy people; why complicate things with a trial? Why risk that the mad pair might say something unpleasant about others who had executed their orders and remained alive and kicking, as born-again “democrats”?

Soon the “let nature take its course” approach took another direction, one unpredicted by our garbage man, the minister, or anyone else. Living without any control, dogs started to multiply. In some two decades, from a mere few thousand, we grew to a few
hundred
thousand. The turbulence society was going through was called a revolution, though it would be more accurate to describe it, as I already pointed out, as a political coup. The best organized forces, such as the Securitate, the police, and the military, assumed power. Nobody cared about dogs.

It was only about a decade later, in 2001, if I remember rightly, that dogs became the center of attention. By that time we really had become visible, and a new, modern generation of Romanians who barely remembered anything about life under Communism became worried about animal rights. Imagine! Not people's rights but animals' rights! They pleaded for shelters, medicine, vaccination, and sterilization, all the right things, of course. In spite of homeless people, jobless people, hungry people on our streets, so many children begging that you could not walk freely, children who lived in a sewage system not even like dogs, but like underdogs. Frankly, as much as I was impressed by these dog lovers, I was puzzled as well. Then a certain animal benefactor, a French lady and former famous actress named Brigitte Bardot, who had allegedly been a great sex symbol in the ancient time of the sixties, responded to their pleas. And she still held power over the media. It was big news. She even visited Bucharest, met the mayor, and donated money. I still remember how newspapers reported it: “Ms. Bardot has agreed to donate more than $140,000 over two years for a mass sterilization and adoption program for the city's strays, estimated to number 300,000 . . . For his part, the mayor of Bucharest, Traian Basescu, has agreed to kill only dangerous, old, or terminally ill dogs . . . Mr. Basescu had earlier insisted that the dogs . . . must be exterminated.”

Well, what can I tell you? There was no intention to “exterminate” the dogs in the first place. Afterward, that lady's money went to a few shelters, a few sterilizations—you can recognize these dogs by yellow tags they wear on one ear—and that was that. Most of it just disappeared, as usual.

Listen, I have a nice detail for your dog story. In the spring of 2008, city authorities cleared all the stray dogs out of the way so that foreign politicians coming to the NATO summit could pass undisturbed from the airports to the House of the People, where the summit was held. All the existing shelters were apparently filled with these dogs. You see, typically, our authorities only act when pressured from outside.

“It's one of these bittersweet tales,” you remark. Bitter, yes, but not sweet. I remember times when Ceausescu's police would clear all “suspicious elements” of your own species from the streets; now they are down to clearing away dogs. Strange, very strange.

No doubt, this represents progress. This is the twenty-first century; we are in the European Union. Except that all Romanians ever cared about was appearance, not a solution! I'd say that Romania hasn't changed much in that respect. The “dog problem” hasn't been solved, if stray dogs ever really were a problem for the people of Bucharest, which nowadays I doubt more and more. You rightly observe that not much was done about dogs except when foreigners got involved. This, however, brings us to the beginning of this conversation. You've listened patiently to such a long monologue from an old fool and received no real explanation. But if you look around, what else can you see besides stray dogs and clogged traffic? You see, again, old, beautiful (even if decrepit) villas being demolished to make room for new buildings of steel and glass—for foreign banks and corporations, like in Shanghai or Singapore. For new masters, who no longer rule by fear but by greed.