The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  We Heracliteans beat up on the Platonists whenever we see them skulking around the agora: The only drawback after that excitement is that tedium returns. We swing between tedium and terror but have some terrific moments in-between. Take yesterday in Tulsa: I met the manager of a drugstore photo shop who pointed out an old man leaning on a knobby cane before a rack of hunting magazines. “Yesterday,” the photo manager said, “he brought in a stack of 1920s photographs of ballerinas. I asked him about it and he said that he was the artistic director of the Kirov Ballet in the twenties. He lives in one room in a flophouse now with all these pictures and God knows what else.”

  The photo manager paused as we both contemplated the awesomeness of that “God knows what else.” Knobby canes, silk scarves, Trotsky’s billetsdoux, brittle locks of hair inside tarnished gold medallions, frayed slippers, crumbling flowers, a whole skeleton perhaps, belonging to the greatest ballerina of all time, the sad nineteen-year-old Lillova who disappeared without a trace one day … . All this time, the old man leaned perfectly still before the magazine rack, as if posing for our fantasies. “He’s waiting for his pictures,” the photo manager said, “it will be another two hours but he won’t let them out of his sight.” I thought about waiting for two hours too, but I already had my pictures.

  Part Three

  The Devil in Eastern Euope, One of His Ancestral Homes

  Romania: The Varkolak

  Well, it happened again. Everyone on the airplane was speaking Romanian. The blindingly blond Germans in front of me. The two French businessmen with identical crew cuts. The British captain. The Austrian stewardess. The American girls with Bibles returning from having collected souls in Bucharest. The satchel full of souls was under the seat in front of them. How was it possible? If they are speaking Romanian, I told myself reasonably enough, why don’t I understand what they are saying? Well, actually, I did understand what they were saying, only it was not sensical. They spoke in bursts of poetry, in streams of oddly jumbled words. This happened to me once before when I went to Romania to cover the revolution: I came back hearing people speak sudden words in Romanian, a kind of code stuck by the secret police into the speech patterns of unsuspecting foreigners. Anyway, this time it was different. There is no revolution going on, and the secret police are too busy devouring themselves to bother much with echolalic philology. There were only two possible explanations: There is a little bit of Romanian in every Latin-based language, including English, and my reconditioned ear was picking it up. Or, every language is really Romanian and it is only the funny faces that people make which makes it come out in English or French or whatever. I may be speaking Romanian right now, for instance, and it is only your familiarity with my rhythms that makes you think I’m somewhat understandable. Be that as it may, it was not until I landed in Atlanta that the world reassumed its proper sound. But even if it hadn’t, there is really nothing wrong with it. The world could do worse than to speak Romanian: It’s a gentle, poetic, and generous language. After a week there, I felt quite inspired. The souls collected by the evangelical girls in the satchels in the seat in front of them babbled to each other in low murmurs. When released, they would doubtlessly teach everyone this dulcet Latin tongue.

  Return to Romania: Notes of a Prodigal Son

  THE FIRST THREE TIMES: 1989, 1990, 1996

  Each of my returns to Romania, since the first, in those heady days of December 1989, has been radically different. I have stayed reasonably the same but my compatriots have not, and to the extent that they have changed, they have granted me a new identity each time.

  That first time, two days after the Ceauescus were murdered, I went back as a journalist but also as a pilgrim in search of my lost childhood. I’d left at nineteen, in 1965, and I’d come back a grown man. Upon leaving, my mother and I had been made to sign papers renouncing our Romanian citizenship. In 1989, an American, I interviewed scores of people bursting with euphoria, wallowing in rivers of unbound speech after years of silence, caution, and fear. Thanks to the powerful news organizations I was representing, I had access to all the transitional figures of the new powers, as well as to the dissidents basking in the limelight of victory. It didn’t take long, a few days at most, to realize that many of the new figures were not so new, and that the victorious dissidents were as divided from each other and from reality as they had always been. Thus, new became “new,” and the revolution became “the revolution.”

  In my birth city of Sibiu, in Transylvania, where buildings were still burning as we made our way in, I met one of my old high-school friends, Ion V. He was an editor at Tribuna, the communist paper, which was then in the process of changing its name, like most institutions in Romania, hoping by this cosmetic maneuver to give an impression of real change. Ion fed me lavishly in his home, and then, at midnight, he drove me through the frozen streets of Sibiu, back to my hotel. On the way, we stopped in front of the building housing Tribuna. Ion asked me to wait in the car while he went in to get the next day’s edition of the newspaper. I waited alone in his Dacia, hunched low in the front passenger seat, overwhelmed by a not-so-unreasonable fear. My colleagues were all in Bucharest, while the situation in the country was still far from settled. The Ceauescus were dead but reports of fighting persisted. Authority in Sibiu was uncertain: the army was conducting arrests, looking for “terrorists,” and sporadic shooting was still heard. As I waited for Ion, a man went running as fast as he could past the car, pursued by two civilians with drawn guns. Ion took a very long time. When he returned at last, after more than an hour, he was drawn and tense. He’d had to wait, he said, for the printers to finish the paper. I had the impression, however, that he had been discussing me with his superiors. My paranoid sixth sense told me that I had come very close to being either killed or arrested, and that Ion had been arguing on my behalf. I have never felt more like an exile, an American and a Jew, in my life. Whatever the essence of the argument, I am certain that one side had argued for my extinction on the grounds that the enemy of the moment was the foreigner, in the form of returning émigrés, the CIA, the KGB, and the Western media. Ion, however, was far from sure that he’d “won,” and he advised me to be careful. In the following days, Securitate reorganized along nationalist lines, birthing such entities as “Vatra Romaneasca,” whose stated enemies were, you guessed it, Jews, émigrés, the Western media, foreigners. Ion was clearly a sympathizer, if not a founder, but I was his friend.

  I returned in June of 1990, ostensibly for our twenty-fifth high-school “reunion,” an event that had quotation marks around it from the very beginning. A few days before, the so-called miners of the “new” Iliescu regime had beaten and killed students in University Square in Bucharest, where they had been protesting inside a self-declared “neo-communist free zone.” This event, known as the “mineriada,” lost Romania whatever capital of goodwill it had accrued during the December “revolution,” revealing to the world the true nature of this “revolution,” which had been nothing but a Securitate coup d’état. After the flood of negative publicity, Romania was desperately in need of good press.

  My reception, this time, was outlandishly generous. On hand to record our high-school gathering were news teams from NPR and ABC’s Nightline. (This was, of course, a hook for a story on the situation in Romania, not my personal press corps.) Ion handled the details of the “reunion” like a patriotic event. Unfortunately, the “reunion” was able to draw only four of my former colleagues, and their overly cautious spouses. The rest of our classmates, I was told, had either left the country, were unavailable or sick, or had died. This is not inconceivable, because the black-hole decades of the seventies and the eighties had indeed decimated Romanians in that fashion. But of the four remaining colleagues, I recognized only two. I don’t have the greatest memory and I didn’t harbor much affection for my high-school days or my classmates.

  I will not go as far as to say that the two unknown ones were clones or replicas, but this conclusion would
not have been untenable. Our discussions were political, charged, and barely civil. They were all defenders of Iliescu’s brutality against the students. I felt on the other side of a huge gap that resembled, to put it charitably, the gap between students and government in 1968 in America. I had been on the side of students then and I was on the side of students now. My own generation, in Romania, had turned into the establishment, while I’d stayed the course. But this is, as I’ve said, charitable, because there were darker aspects to the whole business. For our party at the Emperor of the Romans Hotel, my friends had hired a folk band. With all their holiday-dressed families present, the occasion began quite festively. Soon, however, the happy drinking songs turned into nationalist anthems. One by one, the Hungarians and Germans in the hotel restaurant got up and left in protest. But some other tables of Romanians joined in the singing. Once more, I was being exempted. I was, true enough, a Jew, a foreigner, a Western newsman, but I was forgiven. In the name of childhood, of youth, of poetry, of fame, and the national self-interest, I was temporarily granted citizenship.

  The third time I returned, in the spring of 1996, was to scout locations for a movie based on my mother’s life, and to receive the literature prize of the Romanian Cultural Foundation. With me was Ted Thomas, my cowriter and director. We had hoped to make this a low-key visit, but fate intervened once more to make the visit timely. The prize-giving ceremony was in itself a political event, because the foundation prizes were all given to émigrés who had made names for themselves abroad. President Iliescu was conspicuously absent but former prime minister Petre Roman, now an opposition leader, was just as conspicuously present. Clearly, two competing political realities had begun to coexist. The strongly pro-Western faction led by Roman was making a stand against Iliescu’s pro-Russian gorbachovists.

  It appeared that I was doomed to return at historical moments. Of course, I’d missed numerous “historical” moments, but this one was, as it turns out, genuine, sans quotes. The most important election since 1989 was in progress. In the Bucharest apartment of my friends Denisa Comanescu and Nae Prelipceanu, I watched as their friend Victor Cioarba won the mayoralty of Bucharest against Iliescu’s candidate, the tennis player Ilie Nastase. This was a referendum on Iliescu and it signaled the end of the crypto-communist status quo in Romania. Cioarba subsequently became prime minister in the Constantinescu cabinet, the first noncommunist, freely elected post-December Romanian government.

  The day of the evening when we watched the returns on television, Ted and I had gone to polling places to watch the voting. The feeling in the country, even among that class of “average” people I had some contact with, mainly taxi drivers and voters at the polls, was one of cautious optimism. Romanians are effusive people, but even their greatest enthusiasms are tempered by an intrinsic knowledge of history, which has been rarely kind to them. The tension between the hopefulness necessary for going on and the organic knowledge of historical failure resolves itself in black humor and irony. Those qualities are the ingredients of survival, straws to cling to after the inevitable disappointments. Still, I felt a genuine belief that the new pro-Western leaders would alleviate the miserable economy with its insane inflationary spiral. The appropriate joke was that a man waits for his date in a coffee shop. She is late. When she appears, he says: “I’ve been waiting for you since coffee was two thousand lei.”

  My friends in Sibiu were quite crestfallen after the elections. One of them, Titi Ancuta, had actually run for mayor of that city on the neo-communist ticket and had been soundly defeated. The election had also been a rejection of the nationalist ideology that animated Ion V. and his shadow friends. Without Iliescu, the nationalist side was lost. This time, my stay at the Emperor of the Romans was marked mainly by sincere questions from my friends about business opportunities. Titi wondered about the marketing of a ski resort. My friends’ depression about the waning nationalist cause had not lasted long because it’d been mainly political rhetoric, useful for holding on to the power they had accumulated during Ceauescu’s own brand of national-socialism. With renewed energy, Titi and the others were making a quick study of the rhetoric of business before throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the inevitable enterprise that now went by the name of “capitalism.” My friends were, happily for them, a little slower and more wary than some of the hard-core Ceauescu “formers” who had been weathering the transition in Bucharest by stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down and “investing” it in scores of new businesses, including nightclubs, restaurants, strip joints, car dealerships, and property abroad. I didn’t quite know the dimensions of this at the time. This discovery was reserved for my fourth visit.

  THE FOURTH TIME (DIMENSION): 1997

  My fourth visit resembled none of the others. This time, I was treated like returning royalty, the full-court press accorded the prodigal son. Romania had turned officially West. A massive effort to secure entrance into NATO had given the country a new public image that resulted in numerous recognitions, though the invitation to join NATO was not among them. The Constantinescu government appeared on the verge of genuine economic reform. Thieving officials of the Iliescu regime, with their Securitate shadows, were being indicted, prosecuted, and jailed. An acute panic appeared to possess the newly rich class of communists-turned-capitalists who’d started using their ill-gotten gains too brashly. I am still using qualifiers here because, despite the observers’ hopes that Romania may finally be exiting its eternal quotation marks, this is just wishful thinking. One may consider these quotation marks as a set of permanent historical handcuffs or leg chains.

  Romania can be seen now as the contentious space of a number of microcosms. The most obvious microcosm greets the visitor at Otopeni Airport, a Ceauescu-era showpiece in the bad taste of the megalomaniac, who nearly bankrupted the country building horrid monuments to himself. There is no difficulty in entering the country now because visas and searches have been dispensed with. On exiting, however, one runs into a variety of unwholesome practices. Romanian money cannot be returned without an exchange slip, and then at considerable depreciation. The two coffeehouses where it is possible to spend the remainder of one’s worthless lei charge five dollars a cup of coffee, which at 7,000 lei for a dollar amounts to a sack full of lei. The customs officers, with the same dour looks they’ve worn since their boss was snuffed, check the contents of suitcases and object mightily to baubles they choose to call “the national patrimony.” Unless, of course, a bribe is quickly proffered. Otopeni is a bad gateway to the country, proof that public relations is in its infancy if it exists at all. Another explanation is that the border police are owned by one of the many opposition parties that make up the legislature. This one happens to be of the old stripe.

  I was no casual visitor. A chauffeured van belonging to the foundation waited for me, as did three distinguished writers I am very fond of: the foundation president, Augustin Buzura, a revered Romanian novelist whose texts are in every high-school book; his assistant, the poet and novelist Carmen Firan, a spirited and beautiful woman with a long career of political public relations; and my wonderfully crazy publisher, Leonard Oprea (Nardi), whose unleashed style may be the freest form of foolishness in contemporary Romania.

  I was quartered at the Elizabetha Palace, where the resignation of King Michael took place in 1947 under pressure from the Soviet-installed puppet communist government. The Elizabetha Palace, like Otopeni Airport, was another microcosm. Situated in a huge park next to the Museum of the Peasant, it had been built in the 1920s for the sad Princess Elizabetha who didn’t speak a word of Romanian, wept a lot, and wrote bad poetry. The proportions were all wrong: Vast rooms with curved ceilings and flagstone floors ended in immense doors carved with royal crests that gave unto other immense rooms and empty courtyards. The staff, invisible most of the time, clustered in dark side rooms with cell phones. “The boys” were not exactly waiters but they did bring coffee when requested, forgetting the sugar for which they had to run k
ilometers down the halls. After bringing the sugar, they ran back the same distance to bring spoons. The telephone did a crazy dance of lights, which, according to the operator, “just happened.” In the not-so-distant past, the palace had been some sort of top secret meeting place for the high ranks. Now, it appeared I was the only guest, but later I did see some rather disoriented Americans having meetings with local businessmen in various salons. Deer and peacocks grazed in the park outside the window.

  The official function that was the purpose of my visit centered around the launching of my book of selected poems called Alien Candor, as well as the publication in Romanian of my book about the “revolution,” The Hole in the Flag. The poems had been published by the Romanian Cultural Foundation in a deluxe bilingual edition, with a rapidity that was certainly novel in Romania. Under Augustin Buzura’s friendly but firm pressure, my translator, the poet Ioana Ieronim, had put into Romanian over two hundred difficult poems in less than four weeks. The book editor, Carmen Firan, had worked days and nights for two weeks to finish the book. The reason for such haste had been to create a volume in honor of my fiftieth year, and because I was already in Prague and could easily come to Romania, thus saving the foundation plane fare. There was another reason, having to do with the political necessity of showing the West the friendliest possible face. I am not exaggerating my importance here, for the simple reason that Romania has few well-known names in the United States. Ilie Nastase had been compromised by his association with Iliescu. Nadia Comaneci had made a big fool of herself when she’d defected to America on the eve of the “revolution.” Other exports were known only in high art circles, people like Andrei Serban and Liviu Ciulei, world-class theater directors. That left me, with an audience of twelve million people on National Public Radio. This was realpolitik, perfectly understandable. But there was also genuine concern for what Buzura called “the reintegration of true cultural values,” which is a nearly transcendent concern, and which resounds to the credit of Romania’s cultural stature. Despite the cynicism, the poverty, and the politics, Romanians are lovers of art and literature. It may be impossible (and unnecessary) to separate art from politics in a country where national consciousness has been forged by poets for the last three centuries. This was the reason also why the publication of a handsome volume of poetry counted more than the publication of my (still-dangerous) political memoir, The Hole in the Flag, or of my essay, “The Disappearance of the Outside,” which had appeared the previous year.