Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  And then, climbing the winding stair on the way up to the musician’s gallery, she shrieked and stumbled quickly backwards.

  ‘My God. The Devil. Up there.’

  The Devil, it turned out, was a snake. On the stone stair, where presumably it was enjoying the relative coolness after the ferocious heat outside. It was a substantial creature, a good 4 feet long, browny-yellow in colour, and probably a European cat snake. Not particularly dangerous to human beings, it nevertheless hissed angrily at being encouraged down the stairs and out of the door with the help of a brushwood broom.

  The countess watched it go with trepidation. She was very shaken. It was a bad omen, she said, having a snake in her church. It had never happened before, and she hoped it would never happen again.

  Afterwards, in a train rattling across the plains towards Romania, Mark and I reflected on the apparent contradiction of a woman who could face, alone, intimidation by a powerful and hostile section of her local community, but who could be so fundamentally unsettled by the symbolism of a snake on a stair.

  Some hours later we were in the Romanian city of Arad, which originally had been a trading centre created by Danube Swabians and Slavs like the Wenckheims and their workers. There’d also been an extensive Jewish population here who’d ended up being accused of keeping the country back in order to serve their own financial interests. These merchants had filled the town centre with extravagant art nouveau façades, which had once been glorious but now vied with each other in decrepitude. In amongst them stood a typical communist-era monument, depicting a cowering Romanian being protected by a strong Russian soldier – a relic that no battling countess had yet found the courage to remove.

  We were house guests again, and once more our hostess met us at the station, but there the similarity with the countess ended. Julia was decidedly new European, a fearsomely intelligent, composed, level-headed twenty-something. Although Romanian, she was studying Finnish at Mark’s university in Budapest, and, with Romania just having joined the EU, it was clear she wasn’t going to be closeted in a mud-walled house in Arad’s back streets for much longer.

  She certainly didn’t conform to most outsiders’ image of a Romanian. The commonly held view in the wider world is unflattering, and dates back to Leigh Fermor’s day. When the author had crossed that very same border as we did, also by train and along the same line, he’d been carrying in his luggage a small pistol given to him by one of the Wenckheims, who had feared for his safety in the barbarous land to the east. No one had given me any weaponry for my journey, but it was plain that a similar nervousness of the neighbours still persisted amongst the Hungarians, and it was hard to cross the border without feeling some of their trepidation. In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy talks of a feeling of helplessness and defencelessness on arriving in Romania, of how ‘everything is frightening here’. It was being frightening, too, in the media back in the UK, which was busy with scare stories about Romanian ruffians pouring into our cities, starting scams and looking for easy mugging victims.

  So why was Romania singled out, amongst all the EU’s new accession countries, for such negative coverage? Fear of the unknown must have played a big part, simply because Romania was that much further away than any other EU member heretofore. It was more primitive, so its people had more to gain from their new freedom to travel, but more significantly it had also had a very difficult extraction from a very repressive regime under the totalitarian Nicolae Ceauescu and his wife Elena, and the West believed that it must still be psychologically scarred. We’d all seen the dreadful scenes of Romanian orphanages on our TV screens, which we took as clear evidence of a primitive society and of the continuity of man’s inhumanity to man, and we’d all read the newspaper stories of political corruption and organized crime. Clearly, Romania was in a bad way.

  As far as its direct neighbour Hungary was concerned, Romania’s negative image had more to do with its controversial history. Border changes at Trianon had deprived Hungary of the huge principality of Transylvania, thereby incarcerating some two million Hungarians in Romanian territory. Those Trianon changes were made on the basis of a majority head-count which had taken Hungary by surprise. For hundreds of years the Hungarian Transylvanians had fought the principality’s wars, erected its churches, built its castles, planned its towns, founded its schools and its universities. Meanwhile the Romanians had clung to its hilltops raising sheep and goats – and more Romanians. And although they were way further down the social ladder than the Hungarians, they had the last laugh because, when it came to the post-war head-count, they outnumbered their supposed rulers by 54 per cent to 32 per cent and therefore got the nod from the decision-makers at Trianon after putting forward a strong case that Transylvania had always been at the core of Romanian nationhood, but had merely been occupied by a foreign power for eight hundred years. From the Hungarian perspective, this was like letting the lunatics take over the asylum, but it was nevertheless democracy in action. In fact, for Transylvania it was democracy way ahead of its time, because up to that moment the region had been one of the most feudal societies in Europe. Mind you, the democratic experiment didn’t last long, so there’s a case for saying that Romania wasn’t ready for Trianon’s forward thinking.

  Hungaro-Romanian relations still haven’t recovered from the loss of Transylvania. Back in Budapest I’d had a conversation with a tourist guide who’d stated, quite matter of factly, that Romanians and Hungarians hated each other. Transylvanians were the guest workers of Budapest, she’d added, and they were lazy and dishonest.

  Now that I was in Arad, I voiced some of these concerns to a woman who spoke practically unaccented English, as well as Serbian, French, Italian, Finnish and of course Romanian, so not much evidence of laziness there. Julia wore her formidable intelligence lightly. She plainly possessed a forensic mind that in a more arrogant society would probably have produced a withering personality, but not in Romania, where mental capacity per se wasn’t yet highly prized.

  ‘I don’t consider myself dangerous,’ she said, on my mention of Leigh Fermor’s gun. ‘And neither is Romania. I’ve hitch-hiked all over. As for dishonesty, we have plenty of that, but it is out there in the open for all to see. Hungary has dishonesty just as bad as us, but theirs is hidden away.’

  As in Hungary, the swift succession of systems of governance – monarchy, dictatorship, revolution, communism, revolution, democracy – had each brought a new set of rules in their handbags. Romania became like a child being passed through several sets of parents, each of different degrees of strictness with different views of elbows on the table, smacking, frequency of bath, etc. So now, having had the last set of parents forcibly removed by social services, it was out on the street with the other teenagers, and it didn’t quite know how to behave.

  But Julia was patriotic, and she didn’t appreciate the way the British newspapers had labelled Romania as ‘primitive’. She believed that the education she’d had in Romanian schools was better than the equivalent in Hungary. ‘Over there they have to concentrate on Hungarian identity, language and history. We get a much bigger picture.’

  Sitting in the front room of the small family house in a pot-holed back street of Arad, I could see both the primitive and the bigger picture. The original house was single-storey and mud-walled and had just two rooms, although Julia’s parents had added to it. In the back lived Julia’s grandmother, who kept pigs and chickens and worked a vegetable garden and orchard which were so productive that she got upset if the family actually bought any food in the shops. And yet in one of the two original rooms in the front, Julia had her computer with broadband Internet, from where she communicated with the world, notably her boyfriend, who was a Serbian doctor presently working in Africa.

  She was an only child, born during Romania’s darkest times, when contraception and abortion had been banned by Ceauescu. He’d wanted the population of twenty-three million to increase t
o thirty million by the year 2000, to boost the strength of the nation. So at around the time of her birth he had declared the foetus to be ‘the socialist property of the whole society. Giving birth is a patriotic duty … those who refuse to have children are deserters’. And yet, on the surface of it, there couldn’t have been a worse time in which to bring a child into the world. There was so little food in the shops it had become hard to feed oneself, let alone one’s offspring, and Julia’s parents had had to go out after dark to try to buy formula milk on the black market. As for the local jobs, they were often a sham. Her uncle had gone to work every day in a giant power station built on the edge of the town, but merely to turn the electricity on in the morning and turn it off in the evening, because the power station had never been properly operational.

  Julia pooh-poohed the idea, commonly held in Hungary, that Hungarians and Romanians were at each others’ throats in modern Romania. Her father was a Hungarian Romanian and her mother a Romanian Romanian, a mix which was nothing unusual in her home town. But over the border in Hungary her part-Hungarian parentage cut no ice with immigration, where she would be ‘treated like scum, alongside Indians and Chinese’ whenever she went to renew her student visa.

  Both her parents were teachers and avid readers. Over lunch her mother, fluttery, pretty and birdlike, wanted to know what we thought of Philip Roth and Iris Murdoch, while hovering anxiously with a bottle of granny’s homemade tuica (plum brandy). The whole street knew that the household had international visitors, and they would want to know how it had gone, and to hear that every mouthful had been eaten up.

  We went out that night with her Ivy League friends, half a dozen other twenty-somethings who’d been, like Julia, high achievers in Arad’s schools. They spoke fluent English, making fun of one another if ever anyone messed up an ‘if’ clause, and were warily eyeing future careers. Amongst them was the dreadlocked football fan who’d been raised by his grandparents after his mother walked out; the quiet one whose sister did nude modelling on the Internet, while he took the photographs; the mayor’s son who wanted to be a theatre director; and the engineering student who’d just landed his first job making railway carriages. As a group they were surprisingly lacking in cynicism, given that they’d been born into an era where anyone who didn’t steal from the state was effectively stealing from his family. And in a country that was being pilloried in the European press.

  They were also surprisingly unmaterialistic given that they had entered their teenage years in a post-communist free-for-all, when men with money could get away with murder, and regularly did. Somewhere along the line they’d clung on to some kind of integrity and had avoided falling into Mark’s value vacuum. Most were holding to the hope that they might, eventually, find good jobs in Romania, and not have to travel the world to find the life they wanted. They believed that their generation could make something of their home country, and that intelligence like theirs would be put to good use. In the meantime, they said, there needed to be a banner on the Romanian border which read ‘Eventually, Everything Will Work’.

  18

  Romania: Regime Change and

  the Politics of Gold

  Despite not having a pistol, I hadn’t arrived in Romania completely defenceless. In my rucksack was a device called a Dazzer, a lump of high-technology plastic which would emit a high-frequency sound that humans couldn’t hear. I’d had word that a walker in Romania had nothing to fear from people, but the same didn’t necessarily apply to their dogs, and an Englishwoman had recently been badly mauled after setting off alone into the hills. My walking began, however, where it was the people who were at each other’s throats.

  Parting from Mark and Julia in Arad, I’d caught a rattling train eastwards along the Mures valley. Leigh Fermor had dawdled through this same valley seventy-five years before, a welcome house guest wherever he went. He’d gone shooting with a blue-blooded Tibor, had attended the funeral of a countess’s mother, drunk whisky with a Teleki count, swum in the river with an eccentric István and had a romp in the hay with a local girl. It was in the Mures valley that he’d eventually fallen in love with Angela/Xenia, and borrowed a car for a romantic, whirlwind tour of Transylvania. In the book, he’d written István into the car, too, but from my Budapest contacts I’d learned that that was not strictly true; he and Angela had been alone, but he was protecting a lady’s reputation.

  I didn’t find an Angela of my own in the Mures valley, but I did meet a raven-haired Adriana in the gold mining village of Roia Montana, some distance north of the river.

  Roia Montana is in the foothills of the Apuseni mountains, a straggle of a community strung like barbed wire up a high valley surrounded by the scars of centuries of prospecting, and Adriana was one of its most noticeable human features. A thirty-something geologist, her brown eyes burned with passion and her cheeks were rouged by an outdoor existence. Her mane of flowing hair needed more care than it got, and she had the unselfconsciously athletic stride of someone who did a man’s job in a man’s world. God knows the impact she would have had on the community if she’d ever appeared in a mini-skirt, low-cut top and high heels. The gold would have erupted out of the mountain on its own accord.

  I first met this goddess of geology in the office of the Soros Foundation’s information centre in the main square of the mining village. The Foundation was a newcomer to Roia Montana, come ostensibly to keep an eye on a controversy over the settlement’s future which was being debated at a national level – a controversy which was driving wedges through local families. They were there to ensure citizens’ rights were being respected, the Soros people said, although I wasn’t entirely convinced that their motivation was completely altruistic; George Soros has a history of snapping up ailing mineworkings for bargain prices, so he could just have been biding his time.

  The problem at Roia Montana was the gold, a metal that has always tended to bring out the worst in people. There’s a lot of it in Transylvania, and it was Transylvanian gold that first encouraged the Romans to pioneer their difficult route through the Iron Gate and to incorporate the territory into their empire. The Romans had mined 165 tons at Roia Montana before the imperial withdrawal, and some of the Roman workings were still there, still in use until very recently. In fact the gold mine could have become a key piece of archaeological evidence in the debate over who had the historical high ground in claiming Transylvania as their own, Hungary or Romania.

  The back-story to that ownership debate (and a lot of regional conflict) runs thus. The Romanians maintain that Transylvania was inhabited from prehistoric times by a tribe called the Dacians, who’d started (amongst other things) the mines at Roia Montana. This tribe had then combined with the Roman occupiers to create Daco Romans, ‘more Roman than the Romans themselves’. They were billed as direct ancestors of modern Romanians and standard-bearers of Latin civilization in the East. This ‘continuity theory’ thus directly links today’s Romanians with prehistoric inhabitants of the region.

  Meanwhile the Hungarians maintain that when Attila the Hun came sweeping through, eight hundred years ago (Hussar!), Transylvania was effectively empty of everything except a few disorganized nomads, having been abandoned by the Romans, ravaged by the Tartars and pillaged by the Byzantines. Nobody wanted it so the Huns took it over, and eventually it became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During this period, the more menial tasks in the principality were done by wandering Ruthenians, Vlachs and Pechenegs whose descendants eventually outnumbered their masters and called themselves Romanians. Thus the Hungarians are sceptical about the continuity theory and believe the very identity ‘Romanian’ to be a fabrication. They point to the fact that up until 1848 the Habsburgs acknowledged only three nationalities in Transylvania: the nobility, German-origin Saxons and Hungarian-speaking Székely, all of whom had arrived in the previous thousand years, and all of whom had comparative autonomy. There was no mention of any Romanians, or even of any Dacians.

  A gold mine like tha
t at Roia Montana, worked from the earliest times, could have produced conclusive evidence for or against the continuity theory, particularly because a hundred archaeologists had just been crawling all over the site as a condition of the new mining concession. All civilizations have been greedy for gold, and theoretically any dominant cultures in Transylvania would have left traces here for them to decipher, but the archaeologists could find only sketchy prehistoric diggings. The Roman mineworkings were extensive, as were signs of immigrant German mining thereafter and of course of renewed activity in Austro-Hungarian times. But they couldn’t identify anything specifically Dacian in between.

  However, there couldn’t have been a more convincing piece of evidence for the continuity theory than Adriana. Born and bred in Roia Montana, she was completely Latin, straight off the back of a Vespa in Sorrento. Hair-tossingly impetuous, moody, good-looking and presumptuous, she met my eyes across the room of the Soros Foundation and decided there and then that she would take me in hand, show me what I needed to see and find me somewhere to sleep.

  I got my briefing on the argument raging around Roia Montana as we strode around the hamlet. Until the previous year, the mine, with its staggering 600 kilometres of tunnels and galleries, had been run by the state. During the communist era it had employed 1,000 people, or around 60 per cent of the working population of a community of 3,800, but gradually it had become less and less economic, until eventually there were just 380 mineworkers left in a community that had dwindled to 1,000. On Romania’s accession to the EU, it closed with a bump. Meanwhile several outside enterprises had become interested in buying it up, because there was still plenty of gold left under the ground. Getting it out efficiently was just a matter of outside investment and deploying new technology, both elements that had just been made a whole lot easier by EU membership. That technology, however, would involve giant opencast mining which would remove the mountain tops, sweep away a lot of the existing village houses, and produce 13 million tons of ore a year, which would make it the biggest gold mine in Europe. However, the process of separation of gold from ore would require huge quantities of cyanide (the accepted method in gold mining) and the tailings pond would fill a whole valley next door.