A Dog's Life

by Paul Bailey

  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.

  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’.

  A passage in the epilogue of Athene Palace strikes me as especially perceptive:

  I left the Athene Palace at the end of January 1941, knowing that Germany’s bloodless conquest of Romania was as complete as if her armies had trampled the land underfoot and her airplanes bombarded the cities from the skies… Here nobody complained about the ‘end of civilization’ just because Hitler tried to set up a mere one-thousand-year Empire. A people that saw the Roman Empire come and go and saw all sorts of barbarians invade their country, and still survived, does not believe there is a definite end to anything. Such people are instinctively wise in the strange ways of history, which invariably seems to run into compromise, and so they are less afraid than many great nations of the West. The Romanians possess to the highest degree the capacity of receiving the blows of destiny while relaxed. They fall artfully, soft
and loose in every joint and muscle as only those trained in falling can be. The secret of the art of falling is, of course, not to be afraid of falling and the Romanians are not afraid, as Western people are. Long experience in survival has taught them that each fall may result in unforeseen opportunities and that somehow they always get on their feet again.

  Under Cleo’s patient tutelage I began to understand Romanian grammar. A Course in Contemporary Romanian also contains, besides the inevitable lists of nouns and verbs and advice on how to employ them correctly, a selection of poems by the greatest Romanian poets. Thus it was that I discovered Mihai Eminescu, the great Romantic who is regarded as his country’s Keats, and George Bacovia, the melancholy genius whose life was plagued by drink, depression and bouts of madness, but whose poetry has an eerie radiance.

  At school in the 1950s, my English teachers had encouraged me to learn poems by heart. It has been a lifelong practice. With Cleo to correct and improve my pronunciation, I committed one of Eminescu’s poems to memory. ‘Peste Vîrfurí’ (O’er the Treetops) has the poet hearing the sound of a distant horn in the woods where the alder trees are shaking in the evening breeze. The moon appears and the sound fades away and he thinks of soothing death.

  In 1996, I returned to Romania with a group of writers. On the first day I attended a reception in a Bucharest bookshop to celebrate the publication of two of my novels. Cleopatra’s mother was there, and I told her how much I liked her beautiful daughter. A Romanian friend, Irina, asked me to recite ‘Peste Vîrfurí’, which I did. My brief recitation made front page news the next morning. I love the absurdity of it, and a certain sweetness. An Englishman reciting a masterpiece by the national poet seemed to assume more importance than murder or politics. Romanians are overjoyed when foreigners exhibit an interest in their literature – which is little translated, and mostly unknown abroad.

  In Oradea, near the Hungarian border, the mayor welcomed the British and Romanian writers who had come to take part in a three-day seminar. Among those writers was the novelist Jonathan Coe. The mayor had no trouble with ‘Jonathan’, but ‘Coe’ confused him. He hesitated, and then pronounced it ‘Coaie’, to hoots of laughter from all the Romanians. ‘Coaie’ means ‘balls’.

  On that trip, my publisher, Denisa, gave me a copy of the complete works of Bacovia. It’s a treasured book. On those mornings when I was alone in the park with Circe I would mutter his poems under my breath as I threw the ball for her.

  Cleo went back to Bucharest, where she found a job with an American company. She is married now, and hopes to emigrate to Canada with her husband. She sees no future in Romania, which Bacovia encompasses in the exquisite line O, ţară tristă, plină de humor. ‘O, sad country, full of humour.’

  Raskolnikov

  I called him Raskolnikov, after the would-be Superman turned repentant murderer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He was tall and pale, with lank hair and a black beard. He wore a long black overcoat with black trousers and black shoes that had flapping soles. His white shirt was collarless, in the Russian style.

  From a short distance, he looked anguished, his burning dark eyes signalling pain fiercely borne. ‘It’s Raskolnikov to the life,’ I caught myself muttering the first time I saw him coming towards me on Uxbridge Road. I knew I stared at him in amazement. Then, as he passed me and the dog, he began to sing, in a very loud and effeminate voice:

  Step inside, love,

  Let me find you a place

  and stopped abruptly, his frail body shaking with laughter.

  I passed him often that year. He seemed to live on the streets of west London, this vision of blackness and spiritual torment with a passion for a song by Paul McCartney. I sighted him once in the park as he walked determinedly across the grass, laughing fiendishly.

  On those many occasions when our paths crossed, he sang the opening bars of ‘Step Inside, Love’ before the terrible hilarity of his predicament took hold of him. Did he sing only for me, I wondered? Had he detected a kindred, appreciative spirit in the blatantly staring man with the friendly dog? Our lives are composed in part each day of questions that can never be answered.

  The singing Raskolnikov became more and more wasted, lost inside the overcoat he wrapped around him tightly when he burst into song. I noticed him one hot afternoon biting into a hamburger with the ferocity of a wild animal. The meat was spilling out of his mouth and on to his glistening beard.

  His truncated rendering of ‘Step Inside, Love’ on the last morning we passed one another was as manic as ever. His eyes, I imagined, were fixed on the death that was obviously awaiting him, just as the inevitable braying laugh was meant for the Grim Reaper. London’s bustling Uxbridge Road – with its population of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Turks, Indians, Arabs and Armenians – was now his Styx, and his expected Charon was around the corner, ready to ferry him across. He was openly dying, with a forced, final energy.

  Raskolnikov had been a pretty youth, I learned, but when I encountered him he was already suffering from an AIDS-related illness. Other people, I discovered, thought he resembled Jesus Christ. Yet I was in the habit of calling him Raskolnikov, and so he remains for me.

  Roman Artichokes

  Some years ago I was invited to review a book by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende about the aphrodisiac qualities of everyday food. The mistress of hothouse prose was writing from personal experience – every recipe had been kitchen-tested, so to speak – when she informed her panting readership that even the humblest vegetable has powers to excite the jaded or worn-out libido. The potency of the potato – the prime source of vodka – was no surprise to me, and I could accept that the guava and the avocado pear have properties that might lead the unwary up otherwise ignored garden paths. But it was her gushing recommendation of the globe artichoke that disconcerted me, and called to mind an unforgettable evening in Rome – a windy evening, with a windier night to follow.

  I had been commissioned to write and present a radio documentary about the life and work of Leonardo Sciascia, the great Sicilian writer who had died the previous year. Just before leaving for Palermo, via Rome, I had broken my tibia (a bone above the ankle) while running alongside Circe in the park. As a consequence, my right leg was in plaster and I could walk only with the aid of crutches. Jeremy accompanied me. We were making our way to the taxi rank at Rome airport when two nuns passed us at a gallop, one of them stopping briefly to trip me up with her black-booted right foot. I fell to the ground, shouting ‘Fica ’ after her. Roman nuns are a curiously charmless bunch, but I had never anticipated that they would stoop to injuring a cripple. Perhaps, I wondered later, the loathsome duo were mafiosi in drag. It’s hard to tell what sex they are at times, since nuns in the Italian south are very circumspect when it comes to taking a razor to their facial hair. The husband of these brides of Christ is full of advice on other, more spiritual, concerns, but he seldom counsels them to have a shave.

  We were in Rome for a couple of days, during which I interviewed Francesco Rosi, whose fine, intelligent movies – Salvatore Giuliano, which deals with the doomed life of the legendary Sicilian bandit, and La Tregua (The Truce), based on Primo Levi’s account of his flight from Auschwitz – are little known outside his own country. We spent a day in Ravello, where I talked to Gore Vidal in the garden of his luxurious villa. Seeing me hobbling towards him, he exclaimed, ‘Don’t tell me. You gave Joyce Carol Oates a bad review, and she threw the full weight of her a hundred and ten pounds on to you.’ He talked lyrically about Sciascia for more than an hour, without remembering a single title of his many books. Earlier that autumn afternoon, Jeremy and I and the producer of the programme, Noah Richler, had lunch at the wonderful little restaurant Cumpa Cosima, owned and managed by the enchanting Signora Netta, whom I had met some years before when Vanni and I had dined at Cumpa Cosima every night for a week. On returning to London, I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph in which I described the food – the succulent roast lamb; the exquisite
crespellini, which are pancakes filled with spinach – and lauded the unbelievably modest cost of everything on the carefully balanced menu. As a result, well-heeled British tourists, resident for the summer in places like Positano, negotiated the dangerously narrow roads leading up to Ravello from Amalfi in their hired cars in order to eat well and save money. And now, serving us lunch, Netta thanked me profusely and pointed to my article, which was on the wall, behind glass and framed. The meal was on the house, and we left in a glow, promising to return.

  Our time in Palermo was memorable for three things. On the first evening, Jeremy, Noah and I went by taxi to dine at a restaurant a knowledgeable Italian friend had recommended. The driver seemed loath to enter the piazza I had asked him to take us to, and we soon learned the reason for his apprehensiveness. As he drove into the square, the door of the restaurant flew open and a man rushed out, followed by another who shot him at close range. The taxi driver backed his vehicle out of danger with astonishing speed, and the three of us enjoyed ourselves at a quieter establishment.

  It was while Noah and I were wandering around the Public Record Office – a favourite haunt of Sciascia’s – that I noticed a cat making a path through the piles of yellowed ledgers that were scattered over the floor. (The shelves had been groaningly full for decades.) ‘What’s the cat for?’ I enquired of the curator, who replied, matter-of-factly, ‘To kill the mice and rats who destroy these precious documents.’ The history of Palermo, I realized, is there for rodents to devour, and future historians of the city would have to thank a scraggy tabby (and his successors) for preserving it from their nibbling molars.