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Romania, 1994

Romania, 1994 To Bucharest On my way to Romania, I changed planes at the Frankfurt airport, outpost of the Western empire. All flights to Eastern Europe go out from the airport’s shabbiest, oldest wing. Through it pass the barbarians: Romanians, Hungarians, Chinese, Africans. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Han Solo come toward me in the company of a few weird characters, robots, gorillas, or men dressed in the uniform of the Ruritanian Guards. The grim hallways, an anticipation of the grimness that lies beyond them, resonated with harsh-sounding languages, like dogs furiously barking. Romania, 1994 179 In Vienna, where the plane landed briefly, most passengers got off. All that was left on the plane was a handful of people, down-trodden, bad-smelling, big-bellied, goldtoothed . They were mostly men, and about ten of them had the unmistakable look of former Securitate members. Only one of them spoke English. He wore a cowboy hat and spoke for the whole group. The rest were proud of their linguistic ignorance. They delegated their cowboy to tell the American flight attendant that “just speaking one language, for example, Romanian, is much better,” and they all watched her reaction with an air of shrewd superiority. To prove their point, they cracked crude jokes about her in Romanian. At Otopeni airport, they were met by a group of medalled officers, and a few recruits with shaved heads to lug the luggage. The man with the hat, impatient at the slow-moving luggage conveyor belt, waved his hands, and rhythmically shouted, “hai, hai!” A VIP van whisked them away. I walked out behind them with a knot in my stomach. It was my first time back since 1986. First impressions. A dilapidated taxi took me into Bucharest. The engine stalled twice on the highway, and I worried that I would be stranded in the grayish dun landscape . Fall is the best season in Bucharest because it isn’t icy, wet, muddy, slippery, dusty, or melting. The rust-colored chestnut trees make Bucharest look like an Eastern European Paris. But from out of my taxi window, all is unrecognizable. Gray, dusky, and bare as if two natural disasters had happened at once: a tornado and a dust storm. The majestic trees were torn down, and the dirt accumulated in heaps that couldn’t be swept away by any wind. My throat started to scratch. The taxi driver told me I should not worry. I had a case of the “fumes.” Thousands of cars have invaded the city, most of them in bad repair. He ought to know. The traffic is crowded, the drivers irascible; they drive fast and brake hard. Someone scrapes another car. The traffic stops, two hulks get out of one car and rough up the driver of the other car. Then they get back into their own car and drive on. The streets of Bucharest are crowded with Dickensian children and gypsies: barefooted , in rags, with dirty faces, smoking, leaning against house corners in a stupor, asleep on benches, prowling, and begging. Like Fagin’s band in Oliver Twist. A threeyear -old is smoking a cigarette; a passer-by upbraids a woman who may be the kid’s grandmother. To show that she knows about discipline, she snatches the cigarette away from him. The kid cries, slaps her, and kicks her in the stomach. We drive by rows of decayed, dilapidated buildings. But their original beauty is neither completely effaced nor completely defaced. Bucharest is a medley of architectural styles. Art Deco, Bauhaus, Hausmannian, Near-Eastern. All buildings are in a state of disrepair; it’s a bit like driving through the depressed downtowns of big American cities. Or Havana. Or Beirut. Ruins and potholes. Someone said that when it rained you could go around in a boat. Bucharest is now a big slum. 180 Memoirs of a Publishing Scoundrel Downtown Indianapolis when I first arrived in 1977 was not much different except that it seemed emptier. The country looks like a vast apartment that has just been ransacked by the Securitate and left in shambles. Heaps of junk, piles of garbage, stones, earth, broken pipes, and other machinery. Broken-down cars and trucks are everywhere, and there are always people under them repairing them, or around them, talking about the needed repairs, consulting with glee for hours on end. This must be the Romanian counter-part...