The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  Right away the government set out to block his signal. The young people of Bucharest enjoyed a few weeks of hearing their friend on the VOA Romanian broadcast for two half-hours every day, and then suddenly nothing, static, just noise. It was a crushing loss for young people in Bucharest, and the beginning of even more exciting times.

  It is the way with governments who would like to exercise complete control over the minds of their people, that they are often too easily satisfied in their small victories. It’s true they managed to block the signal reaching Bucharest, but they could not manage to block it all over the country. Services like VOA and Radio Free Europe were aware of the government’s transmission blocks, and were more than willing to build new transmitters at different border areas to try to slip their signal under the block. Soon, very soon in fact, it became known that the signal could be heard in Timisoara, a city very near the border with Yugoslavia. There was a rumour the US had sent a special ship into the Adriatic to blast the signal across. Crazy speculations like these abounded—special ships, special aircraft, livestock with transmitters in their coats. Crazy, impossible ideas, but wonderful fuel for gossip, and a new opportunity for the young in Bucharest.

  Everyone knew someone in Timisoara, and eventually a network was arranged in which reel-to-reel tape recordings of Cescu’s broadcasts were passed around Bucharest. Nicolae’s group would arrange parties just to listen to the latest tape from Timisoara. Naturally, such activity was much more dangerous and risky than just listening to a radio program. A radio signal is the air, but a tape is something physical. A tape is evidence. Whereas, before the signal-block, listening to Cescu was simply a matter of closing the window so the neighbours could not hear; after the block, in the time of the tape network, there were tapes to be transported and hidden. An absolute trust in the network of like-minded friends became the one thing, the only thing. You did not lend the tape to anyone outside the network, and no one outside the network was to be aware of the parties at which the tapes were heard. Many networks existed already to share copies of banned books and pamphlets, and they were all extremely private things, dependent upon everyone in them being known to everyone else from a very young age. Otherwise, it would have been like handing the police evidence about yourself and your friends.

  Among Nicolae’s small group of friends, very few things were taken at all seriously, but this was one. Any disruption of the network caused immense concern with everyone. There was an instance when one of their group misplaced a particularly dangerous book that had been in his possession, a new collection of poems by a poet who had been exiled years before. It had been published by an expat press in Paris, and smuggled into the country by someone’s father. The book was passed through Nicolae’s group in a hurry, and it was hot, not something anyone wanted to hang onto for very long, because it contained plainly anti-government sentiment and no less than a call to arms for the Romanian people against their oppressors. Very poetic, very exciting, but too hot for the time and place. They agreed on a system in which each member of the network would keep the book only three days before passing it on, and once everyone had seen it, they would gather to burn it together. One of a few sad book burnings the friends, by necessity, had to perform over the years.

  When it came time for Ion Lupescu to pass the book on, he was unable to produce it. In fact, it was revealed that he had misplaced it on the very first night he had it, and had been vomiting from nervousness for the two days since. This network was normally not very serious a group of people, the same boys in fact who would toy with the street police after curfew, a few close girlfriends and one or two trusted professors from the university. But this was an ugly scene. Lupescu wept when he finally revealed his error, and Nicolae went so far as to strike him across the face. It was not out of anger that he struck, but fear, a fear they all suddenly felt at the thought of the book being connected to them. A small group walked Lupescu back to his apartment, and set about searching. This was not an easy task, as Lupescu’s parents and grandparents lived in the three small rooms of his apartment with him, and the network did not extend to members of family. There had been too many patriotic public betrayals of family members for any one of the young men to relax their guard at home.

  Two of the group, Paul and Dan, were to distract the older members of the household with some chatter or other, to talk about the football match or some such thing, maybe to talk about some good fresh yogourt that was to be had at Dorobantilor market. These topics were always welcome in Bucharest at that time, and while they talked, Nicolae was to help Ion search the apartment for the book.

  Their immediate assumption was that someone in the family had found the scandalous poetry and hidden it from Lupescu. This might be done for any one of many reasons. As a joke perhaps, though considering the nature of the book, it was not a very funny joke. Perhaps the book had been hidden from Ion out of fear; perhaps his mother had picked it up and, fearing her son would get himself into trouble with such a thing, had secreted it away. Most sickening, of course, was the thought that it had been taken as evidence and was right then in the possession of the authorities who were building a case against the little group of friends.

  In the end, it was none of these. Knowing his friend to be susceptible to exaggeration, Nicolae suspected that rather than actually losing the book, Ion had merely hidden it away from himself through carelessness. He insisted Lupescu show him all the normal hiding places for such things in the apartment. In this time, every house and apartment in Bucharest contained any number of secret compartments and hiding places for the safe storage of whatever needed hiding away—religious icons, the inevitable stash of American dollars, compromising photographs and banned literature.

  Lupescu showed him first the compartment he had fashioned beneath a heavy writing desk in the entranceway to his family apartment. Designed as a small and very narrow drawer beneath the back left-hand corner of the writing surface, the compartment hung from wire runners and could be completely removed and stashed beneath one’s coat in a matter of seconds. In place, it looked exactly like a simple wooden corner support, and in fact Lupescu had built a solid support in the exact same style for the back right-hand corner, as a decoy for his compartment. The false support even contained screw heads on its surface to make it appear permanently secured in place. The great advantage of this spot was the speed and quiet with which things could be hidden away or removed from it. Lupescu insisted it was not possible either his parents or grandparents were aware of this spot, as he had built it while they were away on a seaside holiday years before. The lost book of poetry would just have fit into this tricky drawer, and in fact this had been the spot Lupescu had chosen for it, but it was not there.

  Two other spots, a traditional loose floorboard in the bedroom and a very public inside ledge beneath the stairwell leading to the street, were also empty. Hiding contraband in a public place was also very popular as it could not necessarily be linked to whomever had hidden it away. The disadvantage, of course, was that one often lost one’s contraband. This was the risk one took.

  Lupescu was frantic as he showed Nicolae this last spot, having already conducted this exact search several times himself.

  “You see,” he cried, “someone has the book. It can only be in one of these three places. Someone has found it.”

  “Only these three—nowhere else?”

  “I have only three places. What else do I have to hide?”

  “What about temporary spots? I know when I am reading something I don’t want my father to see, I often put it directly onto the bookshelf in the living room. There is one top corner of the shelf; it has only old German novels my mother bought in Berlin. He has no interest in these, so if I need a spot in a hurry, I slip a book behind these novels. Anything like that?”

  “No,” Lupescu moaned, “my grandparents are constantly rereading everything on the shelves. There is no safe place there.”

  At this moment, Nicolae had an inspire
d memory. He remembered a time he’d spent working with Lupescu in the north. Through a connection he had in the tourist office, Ion had managed to get them both summer employment as tour guides. They took East German and Russian tourists through the monasteries around Suceava, and stayed the entire summer in a hotel in Câmpulung.

  One morning after a night of vodka with the Russians, Nicolae had a need that could not be postponed and he crashed through the bathroom door without knocking. Ion sat on the toilet, reading an Italian fashion magazine given to him as a tip from one of the female comrades. As Nicolae came through the door, intent on the toilet, he caught Ion in a position embarrassing for all men. Ion made a desperate attempt to hide the magazine from Nicolae. It was a standard large book of colour photographs of beautiful Italian models. What clothes they wore in these photos were wonderfully colourful and fashionable, but, in fact, they wore very little. To hide the magazine, Ion slipped it between the toiletry cabinet and the wall. The story of Ion’s fashion magazine had become legend among Nicolae and his friends.

  Nicolae excused himself to the toilet in the Lupescu apartment, and left Ion fretting in the drawing room, listening to Dan and Paul talk about yogourt. Indeed, there was a narrow space between the toiletry cabinet and the wall in this toilet as well, and there was the missing book of inflammatory poems. It had been flung far back into the space, as though in a terrible hurry, and was not readily noticeable from the toilet. Even had Lupescu remembered the possibility of this temporary spot, a spot he obviously used only in the most desperate moments, he might not have been able to see the book back there in the dark on first glance.

  How the book came to rest in this spot, and why Ion forgot flinging it there, Nicolae did not want to know. He slipped the book into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and carried it with him out of the apartment. Only on the street did he open his jacket briefly to show Ion and the others that they had recovered the contraband. When Nicolae mentioned where it had been, Ion’s face at first lost colour and then slowly adopted the shade of undercooked beef. At the time, the friends were all too relieved to spend much effort on embarrassing Ion, but for years afterward, his passion for poetry was often referred to, to his great shame and everyone else’s great delight.

  Because of this episode, the network’s involvement with the tapes of Cescu’s broadcasts was more tightly controlled. Rather then lending them around, the group appointed one person, Nicolae, to keep them safe and he was to bring them to parties and play them there. His preference therefore was to have parties at his own apartment. In that way, he would not have to travel with the tapes. With less than a week to go until he was to escort his wife and young son onto a plane and fly off to Tel Aviv, Nicolae was spending more and more time talking to his two Securitate at the station house in Bucharest. They no longer bothered with an excuse to pick him up on those last days. They were simply waiting for him a block from his office and he would walk with them to the station, the three of them commenting casually on the weather or the price of cigarettes.

  It was a sad time for Nicolae. As much as he desired to leave Romania, to travel the world and eventually see places like Greenwich Village, Brooklyn, the blues clubs of Chicago and Saint Louis, as much as all that was suddenly within his reach, he was leaving behind everyone who had liked him and tolerated his bad behaviour, who had entertained him in his beautiful country made horrible.

  What happens in such a circumstance, when the subject has not responded to all the previous stimuli and therapy, and instead continues to insist on leaving the country, on betraying the People, what happens is the tempo and focus of the game changes. Once the plane ticket is in hand, and the bags are packed, it is like the moment in backgammon when the two players have managed to safely move all their pieces past the other’s pieces. At this point, it is no longer a struggle, but simply a race. Also, the intensity and quality of the game changes, as in a good endgame of chess when each player has little more than their king, a few pawns and perhaps one meaningful piece. Suddenly, moves are at once more forceful, less subtle, full of ultimate importance. No more room for error. Little hope for a sudden and unexpected reversal of fortune after a blunder. Make a mistake at this stage, and it means the game.

  Nicolae’s two police friends were no longer interested in convincing him to stay. He was leaving; they had accepted that. Their mission had changed, and they were now only interested in limiting the damage he might do from out of the country. There were no more suggestions that Nicolae was robbing his son of a homeland, and that he was unaware of the realities of life in the West. No more lectures about the plight of the blacks in the American south, or the destruction of entire races of North Americans for the sake of expansionist commerce. They had each of them lost and won parts of these little battles over the three previous years of afternoon meetings. Nicolae mostly allowed them to win the debates on ideology, since there was little to gain scoring intellectual points against men with such heavy fists. Occasionally, for his amusement, he would gently question assumptions, make them struggle for answers, but he never took the last word.

  “I understand, Comrade,” he might say, “the American Negro lives in a state of extended economic slavery. They are beaten into a subhuman existence by the cruelties of the profit motive. What I don’t understand is why then are there so few Marxist American Negroes? Why is it we do not cultivate their oppression for our ends in extending the Revolution to the West?”

  They would respond with an inevitable reference to Paul Robeson, as though one very well-paid entertainer sympathetic to Communist ideology could make a difference in a population in love with the idea of one day becoming as well-paid themselves.

  Nicolae would nod and repeat, “Yes, Paul Robeson, I had forgotten,” and they would write something down in his file. But these discussions were now long past. The question was no longer would he leave? but was now what would he do once he had left? It had become important to convince Nicolae that Romania’s control over his life would continue once he had crossed the border for the last time. This last job was one of their specialties and, quite possibly, the thing they did best.

  They succeeded by showing Nicolae a simple photograph and then uttering two small words. Three days before he was to leave, after a short talk about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, one of the officers opened Nicolae’s file, took out an eight-by-ten, black and white photographic print and placed it on the table in front of him. It was a photo of Nicolae, several years younger, on his birthday. He recognized the occasion immediately. In the photo, Nicolae was smiling the shy smile he put on whenever he received gifts. One of the gifts, plainly visible in the shot, was a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  This photo the police placed on the table in front of Nicolae. Then they both stood and left the room. On his way, the last of the two said “Miki, ciao.”

  Photographs are often used as devices for code in wartime and between secret societies. It is simply a matter of predetermined meaning, or a meaning that can be gleaned from one’s understood intent. Imagine a revolutionary group working within a country for the overthrow of the government. Imagine this group works in blind cells who do not know each other, but who are being controlled by a central intelligence and who must be mobilized quickly and with little forewarning. This mobilization message must also be silent so as not to inflame suspicion among the authorities or give them advance warning of a coming strike. This can be accomplished by coding the message within an innocuous photographic image. A picture of a family picnic perhaps, where the order to strike appears as an apple in the centre of the picnic table. No apple means the attack has been called off, but if there is an apple, this is an order of immediate action. The very elements of the image have specific meaning, and if you speak the language of the photograph, the meaning is clear.

  Nicolae’s photo meant, for certain, the police were aware of the Cescu broadcasts and Nicolae’s role in playing them for his small network of friends at parties. The p
hoto, and their final words to him were meant to say we know about the Cescu tapes. All Nicolae’s work to hide the tapes in the special hiding places, all his network’s secrecy and all their pride at being so subversive, these things could be thrown away. None of these things were ever real, because plainly, the Securitate knew of the Cescu tapes.

  But, there was more to be read in the image. It was a photo not just of Nicolae and the tape player, but of him, the tape player and his parents. Certainly there was no Cescu tape being played on the device when the photo was taken. This was taken the day he received the tape player, years before Cescu made his fateful trip to the seaside. Also, it was Nicolae’s practice to keep the existence of the illicit tapes from his parents, as his father would have sniffed treason and his mother would have worried for his safety. Yet, there were his parents in the photo, smiling widely at him with the new tape recorder, the tape recorder they have just given their son, the son who will someday betray his country.

  Here then the police were showing him the subtle consequences of his decisions. Here they were beginning to whisper to him. You know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, and we also know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, but if we want to, we can make them involved. Yes, you are escaping our control, but if you doubt our continued power, please take a look at these two smiling people in the background, and know that you have given us control over them.

  This whispering would visit Nicolae every night until that Christmas morning in 1989 when he woke in his bed in Montreal to the sound of his wife shrieking from the kitchen, “They’ve shot him, the bastard, they’ve killed him and that bitch of a wife as well.” They watched CNN all that day, watched Ceauşescu’s body slump against the wall over and over.