There was not much to do, except to wander about staring at things. On Sunday there was a band and a procession marching to the tomb where Dimitrov is embalmed, guarded by smart goose-stepping soldiers. I wandered into the old and beautiful Nevsky church and found what, in my ignorance, I can only call a cocktail party was going on before the choir, for there was a buffet there and the people were standing about eating cakes, sausages and meat rolls. Since this is the most revered church in Sofia, I feel certain the occasion was religious. The modern cathedral, to which the Russians presented a golden dome, is a garish place, plastered with gaudy mosaics, eloquent of the decline of Christian art into poster-like and sentimental vulgarity.
I shall always remember the clean, leafy, mountainy smell of Sofia, the smell of trees and roses, the idleness of little squares. The strangest moment for me was at sunset. At that hour, when the sky was striped hard red and blue and the mountains violet and sharp beyond the pink roofs of the city, a din would break out of the church near the hotel. The little bells in the two cupolas would be rattled fast and the big bells would make a noise like cow-bells ; an irritable mixture of ding-dong and tin cans, as if some angry priest were trying to get the faithful to come and kiss the glass-protected picture-book images of countless saints. The glass of these pictures, I had noticed, was always covered with the clear imprint of scores of lips so that the saint looked out at one through a cloud of ghostly mouths. Some of which used lipstick.
The whole scene was more like a village scene than something in a city of fine buildings. My friends used to say: “They used to call this the cockpit of Europe, the home of assassinations, wars and massacres.” It wasn’t all our fault. You all muscled in on our politics—the Russians and Germans trying to get to the Bosphorus, the British and French trying to stop them. We are peaceful now. We’ve reformed.
I hope we all have. My friend who translated Shelley said his one idea in life was not to take foreign writers around—not unless they liked country life as he did. Going up to the mountains lazing in the sun, climbing, fishing, and sitting up half the night drinking gallons of wine and singing—being a real Bulgarian, he said, was his idea of happiness.
I was sad to fly off one evening to Romania.
6
Romania
Romania annoys from the beginning. With Czecho-Slovakia it is the most rigid of the satellite states. The visitor is obliged to have a guide, the guide dogs your every step. He waits for you to come out of your bedroom in the morning. He bores you all day. He is informative, of course, but humourless, inclined to lecture and is knowing. The relative freedom of Bulgaria has gone; in any case, the Romanians despise the Bulgarians. I could not escape the impression that smooth hypocrisy and a reactionary state of mind are endemic. It is a large, rich country afloat on oil.
In their moves towards contact with the West, each of the satellites has its own methods. The Romanians had decided at this time to open a night club in Bucharest.
“Tell people to come here. We have good hotels, good main roads, good food and wonderful scenery.” (This is true.) “And, next year, we shall have a night club,” the officials say.
“That’s a good idea,” you say. “The Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, even the Bulgarians, have night clubs.”
“Here, in Bucharest, no! But the policy has changed. We are going to have one. Just one,” the officials say severely in the manner of people making discreet arrangements with sin on reformed lines, with guarantees.
Before the war Bucharest had been a city of pleasure and easy acquaintance. To the French it was a Ruritanian Paris in a hot climate, for the sedulous Romanians had created copies of the Champs-Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe, a Bois de Boulogne with winding lakes that might have been the waterside of the Seine. There were deeply shaded avenues, there were boulevards, there were cafés in the open. There were innumerable clever Romanian writers, painters, sculptors and musicians who had all been to Paris. Other nations had other views. The late Queen Mary, at a moment of crisis in the history of the British monarchy, clearly spoke of Romania as the synonym for deplorable scandal. The career of King Carol was a byword. Hungarians regarded Bucharest as a Montmartre blown up to city-size and Bulgarians crossed the frontier with the feeling that they were going to perdition. It seemed only too natural that the city should be the home of Dr. Voronoff and the monkey gland and that notorious international septuagenarians should go there to have a grafting and renew their youth. Smooth, clever, sophisticated, masters in the art of assimilating foreign chic and culture, especially French, the Romanians made Europeans goggle at their intelligent pliancy.
The Romanians claim to be the true descendants of the Romans. They have indeed the outward gravity of Latin peoples and they can certainly be said to have inherited the worldliness of the Roman decadence and the need to assimilate rather than to originate, though they produce good novelists and playwrights. And then the tie with France, which had lasted for more than a century, began to fail. France had taught revolutionaries and intellectuals ever since the days of Michelet; the intellectual life of Bucharest was French-formed and Italian-tinted. The hot and cold relationship with the Russians, who were on their northern frontier, became more intense: the attraction of Germany too powerful. Nazism in the form of the Iron Guard appeared. Anti-Semitism—always and still a powerful force in Romania—followed. When the war came, the Romanians, in whose racial mixture the Italianate-Slav predominates, changed sides towards the end of the fighting; the puritanic Russians who had liberated them once before in their history took over and the light of the night clubs went out. The byword of Europe became the most conventional and rigid of the Communist states.
It still is. Unique among the satellites, Romania has known no real change in the Party leadership since the foundation of the régime. The “events” of 1956 in Hungary, changed nothing. The government kept a stern eye on their large Hungarian minority and the watchfulness alone was enough to prevent any liberalising notions from seeping in. The two countries, despite enthusiastic official visits, have a lot of past and temperamental differences to live down. Russian domination has, at any rate, kept the Balkans quiet. I always listen with special attention to the observations of foreign Communists about one another and I have discovered only two main foreign opinions about Romania: (l) that the regimé is severe and restrictive because of the racial diversity of the country and because of the long influence of the corruption of the past, and (2) the opposite view— that the régime is simply the old Fascist Iron Guard under another name and a corrupt survival of Stalinism. In the last two years it is said that the Russians have told the Romanians to relax. One is told that this is happening. I did not notice it, but Bucharest is clearly cut out to be a city of talk and pleasure.
For there is nothing grim on the surface of life in Romania ; indeed it is all lazy, Latin and engaging. I was not in the country long enough to test thoroughly the accuracy of the criticisms made by foreign Communists. Two political facts I can confidently record: that forced labour camps still existed in Romania in 1960; that anti-Semitism is strong. I know one Polish Communist who got into very serious high-level trouble in Warsaw for criticising Romanian conditions in a Warsaw paper.
Against one’s hostile impressions one has to put one or two remarkable achievements. The State has built and is running one of the largest and best printing works in Europe ; it does a considerable amount of printing for the Soviet Union. The State also operates a huge new mass production clothing and stocking factory, equipped with the latest Czech and East German machinery. This factory clothes pretty well all Romania and although most of the clothing is drab, and without style, the better qualities are very presentable. This factory is like any modern welfare corporation; it looks after every detail of the lives of its thousands of employees from cradle to grave. While the machines knit the stockings and the knives slice out dozens of coats, jackets and pairs of trousers at a blow, the children of the workers are being looked a
fter in cheerful crèches, schools and playgrounds. The children are prettily dressed.
There are photographs of the old factory on this site to show what progress has been made; and it is repellent in these old pictures to see the workers filing up to get their pay from overseers who wear uniform and the armed police on guard. At least that has gone. The disadvantages of life in this modern beehive, with its concert halls, hospitals and canteens, is that there is theoretical but not real freedom to leave it for another job. To change is possible but difficult. Obviously for those who like mass life and have no other choice this place is good.
One is continually told that the State has developed other things which had been neglected ; that the oil-fields, for example, badly damaged in the last war, have been brought up to date. The shops in the Callea Victorei, once the Rue de la Paix of Bucharest, must be far below the old standard, for there are no rich nor even moderately well-off people to buy anything; but the shop windows are dressed with a good deal of art and are more attractive to look at than the windows of Prague. There was an Exhibition of consumer goods going on and the tweeds and textiles were attractive; the tinned foods, wines and cheeses were excellent and the Exhibition was arranged with taste and was packed out by well-dressed people. My guide was proud to point out the displays of optical instruments—a new industry, he said. Handicrafts, always very important in this country, thrive and are more interesting here than elsewhere in eastern Europe.
I drove a hundred miles from Bucharest into the Carpathians. The mountain resorts have excellent modern hotels. One eats delicious food; one drinks good wine. One is astonished by the beauty of the women which comes from the lucky mixture of Mediterranean and Slavonic types: the dark-haired, white-skinned Italian women, the full, fair-haired and blue-eyed Slavonic girls who have lost the hardness of the Slav and are soft and southern. Romania has the southern ease and, I have no doubt, the profound southern respect for custom.
Two small and contrasting incidents stick in my mind. The Romanians have not driven off the beggars. I saw many in Bucharest. Some bent or ragged old woman or man would come into one of those hot, cushioned cafés in the Bid. N. Bălecescu and murmur at every table. In the old tradition of Latin charity every customer went to some trouble to dig a note or a coin out of his pocket for them. The beggars were never refused, nor did they harry, whine or explain. Both parties knew their immemorial roles and with lazy impersonality stuck to the ritual. Romanian Communism is an improvement on Franco’s Fascism in this respect; unlike the Spaniards, the Romanians have not carted the beggars out of the capitals so that visitors shall not see them.
But where there is lazy convention, there is also bound to be tyranny. The other incident is not flattering to the Romanian state in its present obdurate frame of mind. When I was leaving Bucharest my bag was, of course, opened by the Customs. On top of my things was a letter I had received from my wife. The Customs officer pounced on it.
“What is this?” he said. “You can’t take this out of the country.”
“Why not?”
“It is forbidden to take correspondence abroad.”
My guide helped me out and the officer shrugged his shoulders dubiously and let the matter go.
“You see,” Apollo said. (He was called Apollo.) “He thought you had written the letter. Some Romanians try to get their letters posted abroad, in order to save money on the postage. It is cheating the Post Office and we have to stop it.”
This farcical lie was blandly spoken. When I said the motive was obviously political, he swore that it was not. Apollo had always been bland and impenetrable. What he discreetly did not tell me was that letters sent abroad have to be taken personally by the writer to the Post Office and handed in—at any rate until recently— unsealed. I shall have more to say about my guides in Bucharest.
I did not intend to have a guide there. The difficulties of the language itself are not as severe as they are, say, in Bulgaria or Hungary, for Romanian is a Latin tongue and to anyone who knows Spanish or Italian, a certain amount gets through. In any case, large numbers of people speak French—I found, for example, French-speaking shoeblacks. But a guide was waiting for me at the airport with a large car and a programme. I gave in. My first guide was a fair, patient, severe young man of twenty-six, more Slav than Italian. His name was Iozu.
The sky was soft blue, the air sweet and lazy. At midday at the end of November it was hot. The soft heat came in dusty lungfuls out of the side streets and down the boulevards. One walked under trees. Little chrysanthemums were planted round each one. The vermilion trams, narrow and German-looking, went fast down the boulevard, where motor traffic is light. One has the impression here that one is on a film set or in the middle of exhibition architecture that has not lasted. This may be because Bucharest was severely damaged during the war—the R.A.F. had not only concentrated on the oil wells at Ploesti, but had bombarded the city; one bomb destroyed the opera house—but the fact is that a lot of the high blocks of flats and offices were put up in the racketeering period between the wars in the fever to be “modern” too quick. It was a period of poor workmanship and gloss; now the plaster had dropped off the façades, yards at a time; shutters had jammed or rusted; no paint had been put on for years.
The older buildings of Bucharest are in a much better state than those put up in this period; and the new buildings going up now look very good. I minded official architecture much less here than in any of the other Communist countries; the Romanians have the Italian sense of style, show and placing and the Italian feeling for life on the surface. Bucharest was celebrating its five hundredth anniversary this year and so the stress on building, on encouraging the Romanian styles and on cleaning up was very strong. There has always been a marked feeling in the country for folk and regional things—no question here of the artificial encouragement of handicrafts ; they have always been very important in life and the economy—and there were a number of open-air, patio-type cafés with thatched loggias in the main boulevards which added to the air of Exhibition.
The thing to do at this time of year in these cafés was to drink “Must”, the new season’s juice of the grape. You drink it out of a heavy painted mug and you eat perhaps one of those large peppers that look like hard tomatoes, and set the mouth on fire; or pickled cucumbers, sausage or some savoury Greek mess done up in vine leaves. While people in the north of Europe are shivering in late November, in Bucharest you can still sit out in the evenings and the only winter sign is the sight of hot doughnuts being ladled out of their tanks of syrup from stalls or windows in the street.
My second guide, Apollo, was not very keen on sitting around drinking Must. He preferred standing at the chest-high tables of the modern Espressos because it was easier to fall into conversation with girls—but my first day was not Apollo’s; it was Iozu’s and Iozu’s mind was bent on politics. He was a dour young man with an ulcered stomach who was going to join the Party next year.
We went off to the older parts of the flat city. Bucharest lies on the grain-bearing plain, which, in the nineteenth century, had been third in the grain-bearing places of the world, before the Argentine and the United States had vastly surpassed it. Five hundred years ago the city began around the inns attached to one or two Orthodox monasteries, and it has spread out very much like a traveller’s encampment or a rich and crowded market ever since. There must have been money in Bucharest at one time; it must have been a dealer’s, speculator’s city, enlarged by feudal fortunes. The oil industry must have brought great wealth to it.
It retains the air of a bazaar where rich and poor jostle along together; the steady middle-class appearance of Prague, a middle class disguised in proletarian clothes, is something clearly alien to Bucharest and, in consequence, the sights and contrasts of the street are more interesting. Not only that, the Romanians exhibit themselves well. There was a very fine historical exhibition which really did give a vivid notion of the city’s growth stage by stage ; the social-politica
l side of it showed a far keener sense of history than I had expected. It was not unbearably tendentious. The photographs and relics of the important pre-war rising, strikes, riots and repressions were admirably done. They brought home the fact which the tourist is apt to forget, as he also does in Spain, that picturesque peasant life had its terrible side— there was a peasant rising in 1907—and that life for the industrial worker in a country that had not outgrown the feudal ethos was hell.
The liveliest part of Bucharest is down by the market. Here the famous gypsy flower-sellers sit, long rows of stalwarts behind their great baskets of flowers. They were one of the vivid splashes of colour in the place; on the opposite side of the street is the confusion of the fruit and vegetable stalls. Thousands swarm among them. A good deal of private trade survives here. The peasants with their high-crowned fleece hats, the women in their coloured scarves fight their way into the mêlée. The life of the market-bazaar is far from having vanished in this city. At seven or eight in the evening the celebrated Lipscana Street—so called because it sells what are called Leipzig goods, mainly clothing—is so packed with people that one can hardly walk down it. All the cities of southern Europe have the habit of living outside in dense crowds.
It was the day of St. Demetrius, an important day for Bucharest and the Orthodox Church. We climbed the long hill from the flower market in the Piata to the great ugly church where the Patriarch would be chanting. Iozu, who was going to join the Party next year, was torn in two by the feast. He was fervent for the local customs of his city ; he was pleased to be able to boast that the Orthodox Church had never been a stumbling block to the Party and that it had never become involved obstructively in politics in the manner of the Roman Catholic Church. The Orthodox appears to be a less rigid confession. Its priests can marry; they can be divorced. It has been simple to deal with the Orthodox Church because it had lost most of its income from its once large estates in the land reforms before the war; and it was easy for Iozu to admire the Patriarch because he co-operates with the Party. And although the Party reorganised the Church, when it came to power, the new organisation closely resembled the old. The Party has recognised that the huge peasant population of Romania is solidly pious and that they will be slow to budge from their beliefs.
Foreign Faces Page 10