The wide Bucharest streets were filthy and pitted with holes. The vast palace, larger than Versailles, that Ceauşescu 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 Ceauşescu’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’.