Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Ceauescu’s recent treatment of Hungary’s displaced nationals had so enraged Hungarians in Hungary that some favored going to war with Romania over Transylvania. Ceauescu seemed ready. He had shuttered his embassy in Budapest and evicted Hungary’s Transylvania-based consulate from Romania. So although there was in fact a program in Hungary, with Red Cross funding, to resettle Hungarian refugees, or menekült, from Romania, the Hungarian authorities were necessarily suspicious of anyone associated with Ceauescu territory. Sure, Attila spoke good—if somewhat anachronistic—Hungarian. But so might anyone with no identification and an ulterior motive.

  The door swung open and an older man entered the room. Same drab uniform except for the addition of blue ribbons on the shoulders and a stiff officer’s cap. Attila stood as the man moved behind the desk and sat down beside his poker-faced confederate.

  “Sit,” he told Attila brusquely. “Mr. Ambrus, I’ve been reviewing your application form for a temporary residence permit.”

  He handed Attila a clipboard and asked him to write down his account of how he had arrived in Hungary. Kérem, he added. Please.

  The room’s only exit was the door on the other side of the desk, where the officer across from Attila sat. Attila didn’t know what he’d done that had raised the suspicion of his interrogators, but he had little choice now but to tell the saga of the past few weeks again and hope for the best. He picked up a pencil and wrote down his account while the officials watched. Then he passed the clipboard across the desk. The senior officer read through the pages with a wan smile, then put the clipboard back down and leaned forward on his elbows. “Listen, Comrade,” he said to Attila. “Do you expect us to believe this story?”

  Three

  Attila had been, as he told the immigration officer, “recommended for a team of church painters” along the Hungarian-Romanian border three weeks earlier. Painting churches in the far western reaches of Ceauescu’s Romania was a fast-growing industry in 1988, though neither the Romanian authorities nor their Hungarian counterparts had yet to spot the trend. What qualified a sanctuary for cosmetic repair was not necessity (though often the case could be made) but rather that the house of worship be—as it invariably was—the tallest structure in its border village. Thus, the painters, almost all of them Hungarian and almost none of them painters, could ascend to the steeple for guidance as to which method of flight over the zöld határ, or “green border,” was least likely to result in their death.

  Approximately fifteen thousand Transylvanian Hungarians had made it into Hungary since the beginning of 1988; untold hundreds of others met a dark end trying. Some folded themselves into the trunks of cars and were spirited through the checkpoint; in the winter, some wrapped themselves in white sheets and slipped wraithlike into border-hugging woods; others poured industrial oil all over their bodies and hoped they would float when they hucked themselves into either the Kóŕös River in the western Romanian city of Oradea, the Maros in nearby Arad, or the Tisza in northern Romania, the most circuitous of the three, which twisted first through Ukraine before passing into Hungary. Everyone wanted out. Romania’s most famous Olympian, gymnast Nadia Comaneci, soon added to her training regimen a five-hour crop crawl that ended in Hungary.

  Whatever method was employed, however, scouting had become mandatory. The mad dash through the cornfields between Romania and Hungary had become too fashionable for its own good: Ceauescu had volleyed back with a new law that vegetation along his borders not exceed three feet in height and an order that his already tetchy border guards shoot to kill. In one enlightening 1987 incident, a fleeing twenty-eight-year-old Transylvanian Hungarian was chased by Romanian guards on horseback, who shot and killed him after he had crossed into Hungary.

  Attila Ambrus had already spent what felt like a lifetime running from unsympathetic forces, never getting farther than the next quagmire. In June of 1988 he had returned from the latest, a sixteen-month stint as a slop-cook corporal in the Romanian army, as he’d stated in his immigration interview. What he hadn’t mentioned was that he’d done his military service in the noxious southeastern Romania steel factory town of Galati—like most Romanians with criminal records. While there, Attila was occasionally let out of the kitchen to haul backbreaking railroad ties and, twice, to spend freezing, foodless weeklong stints in a twelve-foot isolation pit for talking back to his commander in Hungarian instead of Romanian. When his tour of duty ended, he boarded a bus for an eight-hour ride north through the rocky, soaring Carpathians to the eastern Transylvania capital of Csíkszereda. When he got out in the shadow of the surrounding green foothills of the Hargita Mountains, Attila found a city so desolate and defeated that he almost didn’t recognize it.

  To most of the world, Transylvania may as well be Timbuktu in a lightning storm, but to Attila it was home. He was born in Fitód, a village of five hundred just outside Csíkszereda, in 1967, the same year Ceauescu ascended to one of the only Communist Party posts he hadn’t yet occupied: president. Attila moved to the city nine years later, the same year the bulldozers started showing up. With forty-eight hours’ notice, four-hundred-year-old churches, homes, and taverns were turned into pet rocks. This was Ceauescu’s economic revitalization plan, which, he said, was going to connect Transylvania to the rest of Romania by turning seven thousand mostly Hungarian villages into 250 supreme agro-industrial complexes. Even translated into archaic Hungarian, the message was clear. He was going to pave paradise and put up a housing block.

  And, to a large degree, that’s what Ceauescu had done. The architectural style of the thirteenth-century all-Hungarian city of thirty thousand had gone from ornate castle to concrete shoebox. But at least when Attila had shipped out for his army duty, there had still seemed to be ways to get by. Now, everywhere Attila looked, hundreds of people were queued up for food or pay they weren’t likely to receive. The Securitate marched through town with machine guns, questioning people at random and clearing the streets by nightfall. If you wanted to end the day at home, you answered their questions in Romanian, which, thanks to his two years in a state-run penal institution, Attila now spoke fluently. Indeed, if you were smart, you were forgetting your Hungarian entirely. Hungarian books were disappearing from the schools, as were the remaining Hungarian-speaking teachers. The Hungarian-language newspapers were ceasing publication. Parents were no longer allowed to give their children Hungarian names, such as Attila. Even the name Csíkszereda was no longer allowed to be uttered; the city went only by its seldom-used Romanian name, Miercurea-Ciuc.

  Attila was planning to stay with his aunt and uncle, who had raised him after his grandmother died when he was nine. But Aunt Ninny and Uncle László no longer felt they could ask their now twelve-year-old daughter to sleep in their bed so cousin Attila could have the couch. Instead, Attila took a cot in a log cabin dormitory provided by the same electrical company—Romania’s only electrical company—that employed his estranged father. Attila had done a brief stint there before being called to the army, and he was rehired as a maintenance man, one of the only gigs available to someone with a Securitate classification as a “class enemy,” or in plain language, a do-no-gooder. Thus began a streak of twelve-hour days digging ditches for electricity poles and occasionally, out of boredom, climbing them, then retiring to his cot by eight o’clock when the lights went out.

  Life was pretty much intolerable but for the fact that within a few weeks he fell in love for the first time with a blue-eyed girl named Katalin, whom he met while hovering thirty feet above her family’s backyard in the city’s rural outskirts. Like Katalin, Attila had also grown up in a tiny neighboring village in which there were no cars, electricity, or running water; six hay bales constituted a bed; bathing was an event that took place once a week in a sawed-off wooden barrel; and the bathroom was a creaky outhouse. In the snowy winters, when the temperature regularly stayed south of negative ten Fahrenheit, they both learned how to hold it in. After so many pent-up years, Attila needed to let it out.
Disregarding the only rule of the land (that you not trust anyone), Attila told Katalin all. She heard about the two-room Fitód home he had shared with his father and grandmother until her death; how much he hated his mother for running out on his family when he was only a year old; how the first and last time he sought comfort from his father was at age four, when he ran to him after being picked on, only to be slapped across the face and called a sissy by Dad.

  Attila also disclosed to Katalin his propensity for mischief. At age seven, he’d been arrested for climbing too high in a tree. He had made a string of vegetable-field pillaging missions to feed the fifty-plus hungry pet rabbits he’d kept in his father’s tiny back lot. And there was his never-exposed method of pilfering the recyclable bottles from behind the city supermarket and re-returning them for lunch money. He had also played hockey for the prestigious boarding school outside town before being expelled for short-circuiting the electricity on exam day. By reputation, he was a regular Transylvanian Dennis the Menace until the summer following his expulsion. Then sixteen, he was caught stealing musical instruments belonging to a popular local wedding band from a basement pub. Attila’s Hungarian name, admitted guilt, and dearth of influential advocates made him easy prey for the authorities. He was held for two months inside the Csíkszereda basement jail, then shipped off for a two-year stay at a juvenile detention facility on the grim Moldavian border. About his time there, he wouldn’t say anything.

  Katalin, then nineteen, was working as a tailor in a knitting factory, but whenever possible, she and Attila would skip work and go to his aunt and uncle’s apartment, hoping to find no one home. Thanks to those afternoons and Ceauescu’s ban on contraceptives, Katalin was soon pregnant. After hearing the news that he was to become a father, Attila offered Katalin the ring his grandmother had given him before she died, and asked her to marry him. Life wouldn’t be easy, he told her. With the heft of his Securitate file, his chances of earning a livable wage were about as good as his being named a member of his favorite band, AC/DC. But he wanted a real family and told her he would find a way. Katalin accepted. But then without warning a few weeks later, she returned Attila’s ring. She wasn’t ready to be married, she told him. Against Attila’s wishes, and at risk of arrest, she aborted their child in a cornfield, and with it Attila’s last hope of salvaging a future for himself in Romania.

  That summer Romanian television broadcast only two hours a day, one of which was devoted to hagiographies of Ceauescu, “the most beloved son of his people,” who mailed himself forged seventieth-birthday cards from England’s Queen Elizabeth and Spain’s King Carlos, then published them in the Romanian papers. But the Hungarian government had recently erected a gigantic broadcasting tower near the Romanian border so that those with illegal radios in Transylvania could get information from the freer world. Attila borrowed what money he could from his uncle László and managed to procure the use of a radio. During his workdays, he made sure to find an electrical glitch in a remote location where he could tune in. On the newscasts were reports of the successful Moscow nuclear disarmament meetings between U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and even—aha!—the growing international support for the Hungarians in Transylvania. In August 1988 the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill halting all economic benefits and trade with Romania and specifically condemning Ceauescu for his human rights violations against the Hungarian minority. Even PLO leader Yasir Arafat’s top deputy condemned Ceauescu, saying his treatment of Transylvania’s Hungarians “undermined Romania’s credibility.” But there were no lessons or hints over the airwaves on how to get out.

  On the morning of Friday, September 23, 1988, Attila left his dormitory and went to the cinder-block apartment where he’d done much of his growing up. He told his uncle László he needed to speak to him alone. Securitate informants were known to be crawling all over the building; László had recently been called to the city office and cited for singing a Hungarian folk song in his living room. László asked his wife to put on a record for the enjoyment of anyone who might be listening and went with his nephew into the cramped rectangular kitchen.

  Before Attila could start, he heard Ninny crying in the other room. She liked their record collection but she had a feeling what the music signified that morning.

  “I have to leave,” Attila whispered to his uncle.

  “I know,” László mouthed, nodding slowly. “I know.” He and Ninny had just spoken about the eventuality; they knew about Katalin and they knew their nephew. And as much as it hurt to acknowledge, they also knew that Attila’s chances of staying out of jail, or even alive, were probably just as bad if he remained in Romania as they were if he attempted an escape. It was time to let him go. “Do you have something arranged?” László asked.

  “I was recommended for a team of church painters,” Attila said, “through Csibi”—his mother’s brother, János Csibi, who still lived nearby and always had his ear to the ground.

  László opened a junk drawer and fumbled through a stack of black-and-white family photographs. “Take these,” he said to Attila, trying to hold back his tears. He was a small man, and when he wrapped his arms around the nephew he considered a son, they reached around his midsection. “You’re going to make it,” László said, hardly sure.

  Attila hugged him back, remembering the Sunday dinners after which Ninny would give him a candy, how proud his relatives had been when he earned a hockey scholarship to the boarding school outside town, all the times they’d picked him up from the hospital with broken bones and concussions and bused three hours to visit him at the juvenile detention center. “If I don’t see you,” Attila said, “thanks for everything you and Ninny have done for me.”

  “Drop a postcard,” László said, starting to cry. “Tell me something about the city. Just remember not to sign it.”

  “I promise,” Attila said, without a tear. He was on a bus that afternoon.

  The village of Curtici, an agricultural hamlet just a little more than half a mile from the Hungarian border, had lost its bucolic feel in the past few years, since it found itself inside the “exclusion zone,” the five-mile pad on the western edge of Romania that Ceauescu had declared off-limits to nonresidents without special permits. Uniformed soldiers were everywhere. Citizens could be asked to show their IDs getting on or off a bus or train, and—particularly if their names were Hungarian—they had to be prepared for an unexplained detention or, if they weren’t well-practiced sycophants, arrest.

  Attila phoned the church when he got close. The priest told him nervously that the paint crew he had been expecting had left suddenly for Arad, a larger hub city twenty-five miles east—nowhere near the border. When Attila found them there a few days later, he heard the full story.

  Over the previous few weeks, while touching up another Curtici chapel, the five-man team had befriended the local border guards. One day two of the painters brought some drinks to the least belligerent of the sentinels and asked if they were hungry, because the painters were going to start a barbecue. The guards, who weren’t exactly living like voivodes themselves, were grateful. All that was needed, the Hungarians told them, was some wood for the fire. Could they help gather a few sticks, since the paint crew wasn’t allowed in the fields? The guards obliged, set down their rifles, and headed for a patch of trees. At that moment, two of the painters made their break. They grabbed the guards’ weapons and sprinted into the field toward Hungary. As far as the others knew, they had made it.

  It had been exhilarating but also posed a difficult question for the rest of them: now what were they going to do? There weren’t many more churches in the area that hadn’t already been solicited by an exterior design team, and it didn’t take an advanced degree to understand that the border guards would henceforth be leery of itinerant Hungarian church painters. But since three weeks’ painting experience was still the group’s most marketable skill, they hustled a job touching up the towering early-nineteenth-century
Hungarian cathedral in the center of Arad, where they could regroup.

  For the next four weeks, Attila lived in a tiny two-room apartment with the crew. They spent their days painting in silence and their nights drawing up escape plans in silence.

  On October 6 Attila was watching from one of the top spires of the church as a Hungarian parade marched down the boulevard in commemoration of the lives of thirteen Hungarian generals who helped lead the 1848 uprising against the ruling Hapsburgs. The revolt had been part of what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then called the “Springtime of the People,” as uprisings swept fadlike through France, Germany, and Italy. Several of the Hungarian leaders had been executed in Arad. As Attila looked on, a group of Romanians stormed the parade, throwing rocks at the marchers and screaming, “Hungarians, go home!” He resolved once more that he was prepared to die in order to get out of Romania. It was his twenty-first birthday.

  Three days later he put on all the clothes he owned: sneakers, a pair of pants under his overalls, a white T-shirt, and a sweater. His knife went where he normally kept it, in his sock. Instead of reporting for work, he caught the tram to the Arad train station. He took the train west to the end of the line and got out at a town he hoped was close to the border. Securitate men were all over the station. If they asked him for ID or where he was going, he had two options: he could show them nothing, or he could tell them nothing, and in either case he would be finished. As he approached the exit, he kept himself positioned neither too close nor too far from the clusters of people heading for the doors. When the crucial moment came, he looked one of the guards in the eye, nodded, and said, “Buna dimineata!”—Good morning—in formal, unaccented Romanian and kept walking. He was not stopped.

  As the sun rose on its westward arc toward Hungary, Attila slipped into the cornfields behind the station, crouching and crawling in search of the border. It took until the following day before he could see in the distance the checkpoint on the international cargo train route. The air was hot and there was nowhere to find shade. The pollinated fields made his mouth feel like a receptacle for gauze. He shed his sweater and shirt and lay low to keep out of sight of the wooden tower about 110 yards ahead, hoping the dogs wouldn’t catch wind of his armpits. When each train passed, he carefully noted the time, direction, and speed and repeated the numbers over and over so he wouldn’t forget. He slept in the field for one more night, hoping to catch the next day’s slow-moving ten-fifteener.