A Dog's Life(43)

In September 1989, I gave a dinner party for Antoinette Ralian, who had been granted a visa to study at the Bodleian in Oxford. She was Iris Murdoch’s translator, and had also translated D. H. Lawrence. Under the Ceauşescus, the sexual act was outlawed in literature (the rampant Elena, who had her pick of the bodyguards, didn’t like to think of others enjoying themselves) and Antoinette had serious problems rendering the wrestling scene in Women in Love into allusive Romanian. Over dinner, we talked of the liberty such countries as Hungary and Poland were about to achieve, and Antoinette became tearful. ‘It could never happen in Romania,’ she sighed.

But it could, and it did, after a terrible fashion, that very Christmas, when the crowds in Timişoara and Bucharest defied the police and the army and heckled the perplexed dictator as he tried, and failed, to placate his once docile and frightened people from the balcony of the parliament building. Elena and Nicolae went into hiding, but were captured, put on farcical trial, and shot. One of their self-appointed ‘judges’ would kill himself two months later.

It was then that something of the corruption and wickedness that had prevailed in Romania for more than a decade was revealed to the civilized world. The orphanages into which AIDS-infected and unwanted children had been dumped and the mental institutions where rational dissidents were receiving ‘treatment’ were opened up for inspection. These horrors were unique to Romania. Elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, those defying the status quo were sentenced to imprisonment. The idea of the insane asylum as a place of detention, where the disease of speaking the truth can be diagnosed and cured, is entirely fitting for the culture that produced Dadaism and the absurdist drama of Eugène Ionesco.

After that hectic week in March 1989, I decided that Ionesco, far from being an absurdist, was in fact a realist. Plays like The Chairs and, especially, Rhinoceros presage the nightmares and deceits of Ceauşescu’s Romania. I reread Ionesco with a renewed sense of his brilliance and prescience. I recalled how the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, posing as a committed socialist, attacked the dramatist for being apolitical, taking him to flippant task for his pessimism. Yet it’s Ionesco who endures, and his refusal to espouse the immovable doctrines of Right and Left seems wholly humane in the context of Romanian history from 1930 to 1989. And, alas, beyond.

I returned to Bucharest in the winter of 1992, the third anniversary of the so-called revolution. I write ‘so-called’ because that’s the expression everyone I met was using. No one believed that it was a genuine uprising. There were rumours that the protests in Timişoara had been masterminded by the Russians and the downfall of the latterday Macbeths planned within the party. It was viciously cold in the city, and although there was inviting and nutritious food in the shops only a tiny minority could afford the luxury of smoked salmon or fillet steak or noisettes of lamb. The books were different, too. In the Communist era it was impossible to buy unashamedly popular fiction, but now the works of Jackie Collins, Barbara Cartland, Jack Higgins and Danielle Steel, among others, were there beside the established classics. During my visit, Antoinette was busy translating a novel by someone called Sandra Brown (a name of such ordinariness that it has to be made up) for one of the new commercial publishing houses that had appeared almost overnight in January 1990. She was earning more money than she had ever been paid by the official state publishers, but at a spiritual cost. ‘There aren’t too many ways of saying “fuck” in Romanian,’ she observed sadly.

(The two Romanian–English dictionaries in my possession were published while Ceauşescu 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.