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 Iaşi, 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 – coţofana, 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 Ştefan in Iaşi 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 Ştefan, 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 Iureş, 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.