The Writers’ union had booked me into an expensive hotel on the Calea Victoriei – the Street of Victories. A surly individual – the first of many thugs I was to encounter – gave me a form to complete. The playwright assisted me. I was asked to give my father’s date of birth. My father sired me when he was on the brink of old age, dying when I was very young. I had forgotten when he was born, but I guessed it had to be in the 1880s. I wrote 20 April 1888, and the surly receptionist, reading it, looked up and eyed me with contemptuous disbelief. I have always looked younger than my years, and in 1989 I could have passed for someone in his late thirties or early forties. The man with the fixed sneer clearly thought I was having a complicated joke at his expense. It was something to which he wasn’t accustomed.
I was due to meet my interpreter, Lydia, the following morning at nine o’clock. I rose at seven, had breakfast – the waiter, who spoke perfect English, said he was a professional actor – and decided to go for a walk. No sooner had I left the hotel than two tall men in long black leather coats began to trail me. I am in a spy novel, I thought as I pretended not to notice them. There was a side street leading off the square I had wandered into and I chose to run down it to give them the slip. They ran after me, at a discreet pace. I was amused, not frightened. I stopped in front of a bookshop, which was already open. I walked in, and discovered within minutes that all the books on offer were the Collected Speeches of Nicolae Ceauşescu in virtually every language. This was vanity publishing on an unprecented scale. His thoughts, such as they were, could be studied in Bengali, in Sanskrit, in Japanese, as well as in English, French, German and Italian. My leather-coated admirers, protectors – or even, perhaps, assassins – were making a great show of being fascinated by the window display. They kept a few paces behind me as I strolled back to the hotel.
The first thing that Lydia did was to stop me giving money to a gypsy child with an outstretched hand. I met several intellectuals that week, who spoke movingly and illuminatingly about Romania’s terrible misfortunes, whenever they were at a safe distance from a bugging device. On the subject of the gypsies, however, they were almost unanimously hostile. The terminology of racial hatred is unvarying, wherever it’s employed. I’d heard it in childhood when every landlord was called ‘Shylock’, and in my youth with the arrival of the ‘darkies’ in my native south London. But what I was hearing now, and wishing I wasn’t – to the effect that the gypsies were ‘taking the food out of the mouths of decent Romanians’ – differed in one crucial respect. The predictable opinions were issuing from the mouths of people with university degrees, not the uneducated working-class men and women I grew up amongst. The odious villains in power suddenly seemed less responsible for the country’s ills than those Romany scapegoats whose music inspired Bartók, who was born on what is now Romanian soil.
As we drove through the city in Lydia’s tiny, and ubiquitous, Dacia, we passed shops selling cheap cuts of meat or stale bread, outside which long and apparently silent queues had formed. It was a dispiriting sight and one which I shall never forget. When we arrived at the Writers’ union headquarters, we were greeted by the palest man in the world, whose clothes matched his complexion in paleness. He offered us wine and announced that there was a choice of fish (carp) or chicken for lunch. Writers, I realized, were privileged in this culture, especially if they chose not to criticize the regime. They had husbands, wives and children to consider. I had to ask myself if I would have become a time-server had I been living under a dictatorship. I hoped not. I settled for the chicken.
On Tuesday morning I attempted to check out of the hotel. I had consumed two bottles of mineral water in my room, and tried to pay for them with Romanian money, of which I had been given an abundance. The surly receptionist would only accept American dollars, Deutschmarks or sterling. He threw the lei back at me as if they were dirt. I offered him my credit card. It was at this point the manager appeared, giving me back my card and assuring me that the water was free. I smiled at my enemy, who glowered.
I flew with Lydia to Suceava, where we were met by a uniformed chauffeur who led us to a government limousine. I was being given the VIP treatment. Lydia warned me not to say anything controversial in the car, because it was certain to be bugged. We passed through villages that Ceauşescu was currently intent on destroying, replacing them with what might be deemed housing estates. Peasants and farmhands stopped and stared as the vast black car – a hated symbol of authority – made its progress along bumpy country roads. We were going to see some of the undoubted marvels of Romanian art – the painted churches of Moldavia. The frescoes, depicting scenes from the life of Christ and his inevitable Passion, are on the outside of the churches and are in a state of almost miraculous preservation. As I stood in wonder, a troop of white ducks waddled past – the same white ducks who were accompanying Christ on the Via Dolorosa in the marvellous fresco, painted by anonymous hands, I was admiring.