The ceremony took place in the foundation’s stately main hall where a standing-room-only audience of over two hundred invited luminaries, spanning the range from writers to President Constantinescu’s chief councillor, Zoe Petre, crowded to hear speeches by the country’s chief literary critic (and unsuccessful presidential candidate) Nicolae Manolescu; the dissident poet and my friend, Dorin Tudoran; and the foundation president, Augustin Buzura. The media were out in force, from radio to television and news dailies. The speeches were long and the crowd polite. “Why are speeches so long in this country?” I later asked Buzura. “If they are not, nobody thinks it’s serious,” he said. He was serious.
Carmen Firan, in the hope of lightening up the solemn affair, had engaged the services of a popular satirical rock group called Sarmalele Reci (Cold Stuffed Cabbage). The band was not allowed, however, to perform their repertoire; they were asked to play jazz, which they did very well. The speeches, except for Dorin Tudoran’s warm and personal essay, were over the top in my estimation. They called me “great” so many times I began fantasizing that Romania might be my back door to the Nobel Prize. After the speeches, I sat down to sign books and was attacked by the media. While most people waited patiently in line, the “important” guests broke in quite rudely, often dragging in someone else important I just “had to meet.”
A LITTLE DIGRESSION
The queue is a fundamental microcosm. It is composed of people who have no choice but to wait. In other words, “the people,” as politicians are fond of calling them. The people, in all lands and times, wait. My acquaintances and their acquaintances were all “important” and never worried about the patient folk who gritted their teeth but said nothing. They took it for granted that “the important” had priority. The American in me was embarrassed for the crowd’s eternal patience. Why didn’t anybody raise a fuss? Here was the result of forty years of communism, two decades of fascism, and countless years of masters and serfs: no respect for the rights of the seemingly unconnected. It was no trivial matter. Lines are the historical form of most social activity in Romania. For most of their history, Romanians stood in line for food, for amusement, for news, for recognition. Individually and nationally, Romanians have been the most patient line-standers in Europe. Historically, this patience was rewarded by the abrupt closing of the window just when they got to the front. Others, better “connected,” had gotten there first. Slowly, the idea that fairness is not rewarding must have seeped into the national psyche.
It may seem a lot to make out of an occasion that was after all “mine,” it may even be ungrateful, but nearly thirty years in America have instilled in me a physical allergy at such infringement on humble rights. Ironically, this exacerbated sense of an individual’s worth was a reaction born in Romania, where I seethed throughout my adolescence whenever an official claimed priority by dint of “importance.” For years, I saw red (to coin a phrase) whenever anyone in uniform, from policemen to school principals, stepped on what I believed to be my rights. This attitude continued in America, which is not as free of bullying by uniforms as one might like to think. Until such simple ideas as respect for the line are widely in use, there is little hope for what we glibly call “democracy.” Of course, this may be a European, not an exclusively Romanian problem. Leaving Romania, at the Otopeni Airport, a couple of Frenchmen tried to get right in front of me with their luggage cart. By this time I’d had it, and I really enjoyed telling them to fuck off and wait in line like everybody else.
The “democracy” being invented in Romania is also defined by the new media, which were pushing and shoving to get ahead of itself and of everybody else to get what they wanted, in this case my “attention.” In the service of democracy, the free press was ready to trample everyone. In this respect, at least, Romanian journalists had caught up quickly to their Western counterparts. Foreign forms of rudeness were being imported to supplement the native ones.
THE RESTAURANTS
It is said that Romanians are francophiles and, in one respect, they are. They accord the utmost importance to restaurants, restaurateurs, chefs, and waiters. The very definition of Being Somebody is contingent on having one’s own restaurant, personally knowing the patronul, being known to the waiters. The expensive restaurants and clubs in Bucharest are another microcosm. Owned by well-heeled, well-connected figures with a spotted if not downright shady past, these establishments collect Important Figures just as the IFs collect them.
After the ceremony, a distinguished company of foundation officials and their important friends, including former Culture Minister Andrei Plesu, artist Tudor Jebeleanu, and feared political columnist Elena Stefoi, gained entry to a splendidly appointed establishment. I had made the faux pas of inviting my childhood friend N.S. and his wife to join the august company. There was no complaint from my gracious hosts. N.S. and wife—he is a poet, she an artist and translator—are quite humble people, but neither their reputation nor their appearance meshed with the group’s. This is not to say that anyone harbored uncharitable impulses: They were cordial. But reservations had been made, the place was inordinately expensive, and the private room where we were seated had been strictly arranged to accommodate the reservation. After some quite serious grumbling by the maître d’, tables were rearranged to fit us all. When everyone was seated, the patronul appeared and started to rage, delivering an extraordinary political speech. From what I was able to ascertain he accused the current administration—of which this crowd was clearly part—of destroying the aesthetic of his restaurant, something that previous governments, including that of the executed couple, had never been guilty of. The company, which began listening with amused twitters to the eccentric patronul, sobered up as he went on, falling into an awkward silence. The man was briefly stopped when a tactful Carmen Firan offered him a copy of my book, which I hastily signed. Unfortunately, he resumed and would have gone on if Andrei Plesu, with the brutal but perfectly appropriate gesture of a man of authority, hadn’t stopped him with these words: “And surely, your wife doesn’t love you either.”
It was the perfect thing. The food was great, the smoke thick, the conversation witty, charged, and as laden with irony and double entendres as an oxen cart filled with Transylvanian hay. But while repartee set the general tone, small fires burst here and there. Dorin Tudoran brought up, with characteristic seriousness, the matter of Securitate and its still-visible shadow. The unresolved murder of Professor loan Coulianou in Chicago by what Dorin and I both believe were officers of Securitate took on the form of a serious argument. The natives preferred to believe that Securitate, for all its vaunted pervasiveness, was an outfit of bumblers and ninnies.
There were other restaurants. The first night, Augustin Buzura and Carmen Firan played host at a sweet, old-fashioned garden restaurant called La Gogoase (At the Doughnuts), owned by the mother of an expatriate who had returned from Chicago to cook (splendidly) the national food. We had stuffed cabbage with mamaliga, mititei, and fabulous supa de peris oare.
Next night, after many drinks and hors d’oeuvres at my friend Denisa Comanescu’s house, we headed (with two other guests of Denisa’s: a Swedish poet and a pretty Romanian translator) to a rendezvous with my friend loan T. Morar at another fancy garden restaurant and club. loan was there with his wife and son, a brilliant young boy who spoke perfect English. He’d told me before to try to come accompanied only by Nardi, my publisher, but as always in these circumstances, my bohemian instincts tend to think such instructions unimportant. I like crowds and enjoy rolling on while picking up playmates. When we all showed up, loan was most gracious and disapproval was, once more, expressed only by the patronul, who made it plain that he didn’t expect so many people. I have no fear of the food sector, but then I’m American, which is to say, I can always go somewhere else. loan is an immensely popular writer and television personality but the patronul cowed him a little nonetheless. loan T. Morar is also an editor at Academia Catavencu, a savagely funny satirical weekl
y that had been the target of SRI (Securitate’s successor) several times. Its offices were bugged, its writers threatened. In addition to unveiling with remarkable candor a myriad of dirty deeds by the mighty and their underlings, Academia Catavencu had also the distinction of stealing the mass readership of the nationalist hate weekly, Romania Mare. What the switch in allegiance showed was that the Romanian masses craved passionate opposition more than ideology. Catavencu combines satire with hard-hitting scandal, while Romania Mare specializes only in scandal and incitement to murder. One might draw here the conclusion that Romanians are closer to the peripatetic Sweikian humor of Catavencu, than to the murderous stupidity of the Iron Guard. But one can argue equally that Romanians are composed of two sides that do not know one another, existing in separate incendiary compartments: a self-deprecating, tolerant side, and a pompous, sentimental one.
MONEY & GOODS
All the exclusive eateries charged American prices: Each tab for these meals came to several hundred dollars, which in Romania is plain obscene. A tenured university professor makes $150 a month, while a skilled working man can count on about $30. How anyone survives is a mystery. The prices on the free markets in Bucharest are very high, as are the prices for clothes and shoes. Yet the city had plenty of elegant people, and all the restaurants were full. On the boulevards of Bucharest, once trafficked exclusively by the locally made Dacia cars, there were plenty of Oldsmobiles, Jeeps, and BMWs. Armani-suited young men with cellular phones and rail-thin model-type girlfriends swarmed the Calea Victoriei, the still-elegant though grimy main street, where the casinos and the Western-style shops are. It would be all too easy to call all these types “the new Mafia,” or “the new businessmen,” depending on your tolerance, but many of them seemed to be just stylish young students. I thought about stopping one couple to ask them in detail the price of their duds, hoping to analyze the data in the manner of Guy Davenport’s in-depth look at the famous painting American Gothic. I didn’t have the nerve, but the mystery preoccupied me.
I got an unexpected clue when I saw the Cultural Foundation budget lying on Augustin Buzura’s desk while I was giving a phone interview in his office. It was ridiculously small. The gala night’s meal would have cost about half of the annual budget. Yet the foundation was well staffed by bright, multilingual women and men, and it employed several chauffeurs with well-maintained cars. The explanation I was given was that the foundation budget came from the Ministry of the Exterior and that it was subject to supplemental funds when needed. Augustin Buzura was also a tireless fundraiser who personally solicited businesses for aid. While this explained how the foundation got by, everyone else, it seemed, had access to supplemental funds that were more mysterious. Given that a professional’s average monthly salary was about fifty dollars per month, it was hard to see how my friends survived. I glimpsed the existence of a vast underground economy, the presence of unspoken budgets, possible through an immensely complicated web of personal connections. The country’s elites were linked and the links had been created, enforced, and reinforced in the very restaurants of the powerful patronii.
The existence of this underground must be plain as day to anyone involved, but to me it was shocking. I am not naive. The underground economies of Eastern Europe and Russia have been well documented by both the local press and international media. I knew that the most obvious new capitalists were smart old communists who transferred state property to private use. But I’d believed, on the basis of the lofty ideas about “democracy” being debated in the better forums, that the nation was honestly striving to build a civil society based on frank and open exchange. The former dissidents, now in positions of responsibility, had been the keepers of a moral discourse of such purity it shamed those of us in the West who, like most people, try to get by as best we can. Recall Václav Havel’s extraordinary speech to both houses of Congress in 1993. He mentioned God, integrity, philosophers, and Western civilization, notions so alien to our political discourse, it made the worst cynics weep. And yet here were people, not quite Havels but still, who were plainly part of a modus vivendi that belied such loftiness. From their inability to wait in line to their paper budgets, the keepers of the moral discourse played the game.
My new vision of the underground was that it was total. There was no one in the whole country who was not somehow involved. How could they survive otherwise? The stated paper earnings of most people were below subsistence levels.
So radical a vision can be rightly called paranoiac if I hadn’t had plenty of occasions to see the banal reality of much of my previous paranoias. When I’d called “the revolution” a coup d’état there were still plenty of believers. When I suspected my old high-school chums of secret connections, I’d had little proof. Later, they admitted it freely. But my paranoia is not the point. As I was to find out, paranoias much greater than mine flourished in the minds of most individuals I encountered, including, to my regret, some of my very best friends. I would be committing hubris to think that my paranoias are somehow more realistic than theirs. Still, the paranoia of an outsider and the tissue of paranoias that make up the psychic life of a nation are quite different things.
LEONARD OPREA (NARDI)
The exhausting round of galas and festivities in Bucharest would have quickly taken its toll if it hadn’t been for the sweet madness of Nardi who, while paranoid like most Romanians, acted as if he were entirely free to speak his mind. Nardi crossed himself every time we passed a church but had a Jewish grandmother and a Jewish wife, and was, on top of everything, interested in Indian spirituality and the occult. This was by no means unique: A staggering amount of superstition possessed every Romanian in some form. Forty years of dialectical Marxism had done no more than to create believers in astrology, amulets, and the occult.
In Nardi’s case, all this took on the form of continual questioning and an earnest enthusiasm for the life of the mind. While quite merciless in his appraisal of people, including some of our good friends, he assumed the presence of a higher reality in everyone and everything. The realistic level at which he operated was mitigated by an insane generosity and genuine love for fellow beings. Nardi’s generosity was only proportionally greater than that of most Romanians, who exhibit a syndrome I once called “aggressive hospitality.” The idea is to make continual gifts to friends and strangers, pick up every restaurant tab, give unlimited time and attention, and proffer any service whether possible or impossible. The fervor of this national mania may have equivalents only in the potlatch cultures of some Native Americans, but in those cultures there is at least the reasonable certainty that the beneficiaries of the exchange will eventually reciprocate. No such certainty attends the suicidal generosity of Romanians and, of all Romanians, Nardi’s was the greatest. He fought to pay for everything, made me gifts of his most cherished possessions, and would have jumped off a cliff if he’d thought it would please me. This attitude was wholly bothersome to me until I understood, in Sibiu, that he couldn’t help it.
SIBIU, THE FOURTH TIME AROUND
My hosts this time were not my high-school chums who had been relegated, because of local cultural politics, to playing second fiddle. The highly intellectual group that organized my books’ “launching” in Sibiu consisted of the poets and artist editors of Euphorion, a smartly produced review of literature. Iustin Panta, Dumitru Chioaru, and Mircea Stanescu met me in the lobby of the Imparatul Romanilor, where I was already something of a celebrity. Mrs. Ionescu, the desk manager, was, as it turned out, a reader. She had consumed all my previously published work and was overjoyed when I presented her with signed copies of the new books. (By morning, she’d read everything, and got no sleep at all.) The Euphorion group may not have read as much as Mrs. Ionescu, but they came prepared with a tape recorder and notes.
The Emperor of the Romans Hotel, once a prewar Austrian style nightspot, was the very place where, my mother told me, my father had “wasted his youth on women and cards.” The apple doesn’t fall fa
r from the tree, but the hotel in its present incarnation offered no such opportunities. Still, it was an elegant old place. The windows looked over the magical rooftops of Sibiu with their “sleepy eyes,” and the current owner had renovated pleasantly but not excessively. The restaurant below had been the scene of my friends’ past nationalist excess but was now full of German tourists who came in great numbers, though not nearly equal to the numbers of native Germans who’d emigrated from Sibiu after the “revolution.”
My interviewers had one essential question. Was it possible for a Romanian artist-thinker to contribute coherently to the intellectual dialogue of the West? Have no fear, my friends, I told them. This was the most important thing I told them, though I continued. Have no fear, I said, of speaking your ideas into the vast din that is now the West’s babble of discourses. Who you are and what you represent are sorely needed in a world soon to be possessed by a virtuality that makes surrealism a poor source of imagination. There is a place for you by virtue of your desire to participate and by the immense native talent that you have fed on. I cited the examples of Eugen Ionescu (no relation to the desk manager), E. M. Cioran, and Mircea Eliade, who had shaped substantial areas of Western discourse after the war. These writers, I said, brought to the table exactly what you might: the reservoir of an intellectual tradition that is still fresh. I meant these things. At the same time, they hinged on a heavy contingency, namely the business of “who you are and what you represent.” Had I brought into play all I’d been thinking about the self-representations of current Romanians, I might have half offended them. I say “half,” because the Euphorionites were not naive. They knew that their essays were rooted in the dilemmas of a society at odds with itself, a moral swamp from which “les fleurs du mal,” if they were to take sublime forms, had to be obtained at the price of a new integrity. They knew also, or I hoped they did, that the moral contradictions embodied by such of their predecessors as Eliade and Cioran, were no longer tolerable. Cioran and Eliade had been fascists in their youth and, while Cioran had rejected this ideology resolutely, Eliade never had. Did they know this? And if they did, what did it mean to them?
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 11