Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  Naturally, there was opposition. The villagers, some of whom were farmers as well as miners, had originally banded together to negotiate good prices for their doomed property, but it wasn’t long before their association became opposed per se to Roia Montana’s would-be buyers, a Toronto-based company called Gabriel Resources. Much of the marshalling of that opposition was done by a whippet-thin ecologist from Switzerland who’d come to live in the village in 2002, and who plainly despised Gabriel Resources and their ilk with every fibre of her intense being. Stephanie had proved particularly good at attracting the attention of the media, and the supposed infamies and calumnies of Gabriel Resources were regularly hung out to dry in the newspapers, sometimes deservedly so. The company may have originally thought they would stroll into Romania with pockets bulging, hand over the cash and take over the concession, but they’d soon found themselves on the back foot. Meanwhile the Romanian government, which a few years earlier would quite happily have taken the money from the angel Gabriel and consigned the village to the mining underworld, was now part of the EU and subject to a whole bundle of new regulations and extra scrutiny, so it was on its best behaviour. The net result was that, many years after drawing up its first plans, Gabriel Resources was still not doing any mining, but instead still being forced to jump through hostile hoops in an increasingly bitter public-relations war.

  This war was mainly being conducted in the nation’s law courts, newspapers and government offices, but its casualties were piling up in the village. Around the main square were baroque and neoclassical façades that dated back to Habsburg days, but some were just façades, the rest of the buildings having crumbled away. And further down the main road every other house was a ruin, many showing the Gabriel Resources plaque that indicated they had been bought by the concession and left to rot. The company wanted to buy every property that lay within the planned development area, but not everyone wanted to sell and that had produced a split in the community between those who thought Gabriel Resources, which was offering 650 jobs, was the future of Roia Montana, and those who thought the company was the enemy. Each side refused to talk to the other and sometimes the fissures even ran within families. Everyone was watching everyone else, and Gabriel’s employees came and went in cars, reluctant to expose themselves to debate on the street. Even the Gabriel Resources visitor centre on the main square, which had various environmental reports, models and details of the resettlement zones being offered to the villagers, was empty of actual human beings when I walked in.

  Adriana refused to go with me into the visitor centre. No doubt it would have classified her as fraternizing with the enemy, and all eyes were undoubtedly watching from the adjacent Soros office. She’d worked for the mine when it had been a state enterprise, so I asked her whether she too had been offered a job by Gabriel Resources.

  ‘They offer, but I no want,’ and she tossed her head, magnificently. ‘I no want to work with, howyousay, hee-po-crits.’

  ‘What about your house?’

  She smouldered. She’d been offered lots of money for that, too, but she would never accept. Never.

  ‘But eet ees very difficul living here. People fight. With words.’

  We ranged around the village, past the churches and down to the Roman mineworkings, and as we walked she told me how she’d been given two years’ redundancy money by the state, money which had nearly all gone. I couldn’t see that Roia Montana had any prospect other than as a mining town, so I started to say something about how she should move her life on instead of getting bitter about her past, but she stopped me, put her hand on my arm, and stared into my eyes.

  ‘You are hungreee,’ she declared, triumphantly, as if hunger explained my appalling lack of backbone.

  I admitted I was.

  ‘Come.’

  She led me up a side track to a small cottage which didn’t have a Gabriel Resources plaque and told me to wait outside. Moments later she reappeared with a key.

  ‘Come.’

  I trailed her down the hill until we reached a small shop, and there I stocked up on bread, cheese and tomatoes. Then Adriana was off again, with me bobbling along in her wake like a water-skier who’d fallen off his skis, but who was reluctant to let go of the rope. This time she led me to an ugly block of flats, incongruous in the mountain valley, set back from the road.

  ‘Miner’s house,’ she said, ‘empty now. For you.’

  And there she installed me, in a three-roomed flat with an untreated parquet floor, a ceramic stove, a bathroom (but no running water) and a chicken run outside the window. We negotiated a fee, settling on an amount that made her eyes grow wide when she realized I was serious, and as soon as she had the money in her hand she vanished.

  It wasn’t the last I saw of Adriana. She reappeared twice more that evening, once to flop into the old miner’s armchair, crying ‘Tired, I am soooo tired.’ And then later to tell me that the water was about to come on for an hour or two. Restricting the water supply was one of the weapons, she said, that the mining company was employing to drive people out of their homes. She, however, was not going anywhere. ‘Not for money, not for no-bod-eee.’

  Rows over forcible resettlement of rural communities are nothing new in Transylvania. In the first years of Romania’s communist era many struggling peasant families were happy to be plucked out of their feudal existences and relocated to blocks of flats on the edges of towns, where they had heat, light, transport, shops and jobs. It looked like progress. But the jobs proved pointless, the shops steadily emptied, there was no sense of community and many learned to regret having left their traditional lives.

  President Ceauescu didn’t trust self-sufficient rural households because they were more resistant to central control, so towards the end of his rule he declared his intention of flattening seven thousand Transylvanian villages to create giant state farms. When news of the plan leaked out in Budapest, forty thousand people marched on the Romanian embassy, because most of the villages concerned were ethnically Hungarian. Whether it was deliberate policy on his part or not, this targeting of the Hungarians was ultimately to prove fatal for Ceauescu.

  In its early years, the Romanian regime had looked to all the world like a new breed of a more free-thinking communism. Ceauescu, a shoemaker’s apprentice who’d risen through the ranks of the Party, had become its First Secretary in 1965. Initially he’d been popular, distancing himself from the Soviet Union, extracting Romania from the Warsaw Pact, refusing to accept Soviet troops on Romanian soil, and even welcoming American presidents. The world saw him as a bit of a maverick, a man you could do business with, a buffer between the West and the Russian bear. The national economy, too, looked as if it was working, with giant factories erected up and down the country, but productivity figures were increasingly falsified and the annual grain harvest was actually three times smaller than was claimed in official statistics. And while carefully planned socialism may have eliminated destitution, it was unable to produce prosperity, at least not for the general population. Gradually the concentration of power in the hands of the few began to corrupt, conferring great privileges on the higher echelons. To maintain absolute control, these echelons relied increasingly on the secret police, the Securitate, and one in four of the population turned informer.

  It wasn’t safe to think, let alone talk, outside the box. There was no opposition, no raised voices were heard, and all typewriters had to be registered with the authorities, along with a copy of their typefaces. Any conversation with a foreigner had to be reported to the police within twenty-four hours. Anything that differed from the norm was regarded as subversive. Homosexuals were sent to jail, along with a medical student who was discovered studying yoga and the workers in the Brasov tractor factory who’d complained that it was too cold in the factory to work. Pretty girls were not allowed on TV because Elena Ceauescu feared the inflammatory effect they’d have on men, and television broadcasting was reduced to two hours per night, most of it focused on the t
houghts, words and deeds of the Ceauescus. Foreign travel was banned and birth squads spied on pregnant women to prevent abortion.

  Under all these restrictions, Romania became the land of the living dead. The population was just going through the motions within a system that was mean-minded, ugly and self-serving, whose morality was absent and whose only absolute value was its own power. Individuals surrendered their autonomy completely in every part of their existence, even in the privacy of their own bedroom, where they were not meant to practise contraception. Good and bad, right and wrong, were dictated by the state. Even the church, attended by 70 per cent of a population hungry for guidance, effectively followed the state line.

  So bricked-in was this Romanian jail that the news of the loosening of the Soviet grip on the rest of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s completely passed the nation by. There was no circulation of Pravda or Izvestia in Bucharest, so Mikhail Gorbachev’s speeches about glasnost and perestroika were never aired within the country. Complete central control of the media meant that there was not a whiff of liberalization in the press. In the absence of any gradual relaxation of control, as was taking place elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the only possible way out was abrupt revolution. And the spark for that came from the Hungarian connection.

  Although the newly enlarged, post-Trianon Romania had granted its Hungarians, Romanians and Germans the rights to education, justice and public administration in their own language, those rights had been steadily eroded. Even in the 1930s shops that showed non-Romanian signs were taxed, and non-Romanians didn’t get good jobs. For his part, Ceauescu refused to acknowledge the distinctiveness of Romania’s minorities, particularly the 1.4 million Hungarians. His line was that they were part of one nation, created by centuries of living together, and he’d ruled out running a separate Hungarian educational system, replacing it with Hungarian sections within Romanian schools and then eventually phasing them out altogether. Young professional Hungarians were dispersed to jobs in faraway places, so they would not be tempted to conspire, and in 1987 Ceauescu banned outright the import of any publications from Hungary (which was becoming dangerously liberal in his eyes). He followed that with a decree in 1989 that henceforth all place names would be printed only in Romanian.

  In December 1989, an ethnic Hungarian priest called László Tökés in the Transylvanian city of Timioara was summarily ordered to leave his flat to take up a remote rural post where he could do no harm. Tökés had been a persistent and outspoken critic of the regime in his sermons in the city, and he’d found plenty of support in his (mainly Hungarian) congregation, so he’d stood his ground and refused to obey his bishop’s instructions. On 15 December his supporters confronted the militia sent to evict him and a stand-off began. Gradually news of the confrontation spread, and the crowds increased, widening to include Romanians as well as ethnic Hungarians. Illegal songs started to be sung, and the mayor was forced to issue an ultimatum for dispersal. When the deadline passed and the crowds were still growing, the Securitate moved in, firing at will. In the ensuing melee around a hundred protestors were killed, with rumours of many more. But instead of quashing resistance, that brutality only served to fan the flames and soon the entire city was in a state of rebellion. Rumour quickly spread through the rest of the country and, in a nation without an independent press, it was passed by word of mouth, so the death toll was exaggerated at every step.

  The government declared a state of emergency in Transylvania. Ceauescu decided to assert his authority and condemn the uprising via a televised rally to be held outside the Central Committee building in Bucharest, and he ordered tens of thousands of supposedly loyal factory workers to be bussed in to make up the crowd. Standing on the building’s balcony, he then embarked on a long speech about the achievements of his regime. The rally was broadcast live, so the whole nation became aware of the small disturbance in the crowd at the same time as Ceauescu did; everyone heard the shouted insults and saw the president’s sudden bewilderment at being interrupted. He tried to regain control in the manner of an angry schoolteacher – ‘Sit quiet in your places’ – but the anger of the crowd was increasing, as was the president’s loss of face. Eventually, in full view of the cameras, he and his wife were ushered back inside the building, pursued by jeers and whistles.

  A riot ensued, during which the Securitate hosed the crowd with bullets, but nobody ran away. Helicopters and tanks were deployed, but still the crowds stood their ground, despite indiscriminate killing. And when the army refused to fire on the general public any more, sickened by what they’d seen, the Securitate turned their guns on the soldiers. For the next couple of days guerrilla war raged through the city, army against Securitate, with the latter occupying any available building and shooting randomly at passersby.

  Fearing for their own safety, Ceauescu and his wife escaped from Bucharest in a helicopter, but the military closed the national airspace and forced the pilot to land. The couple were seized by the army, put on trial in front of a hastily convened tribunal and condemned to death, with the sentence carried out there and then, on national TV. The final lingering image of the dead face of the formerly omnipotent leader is something that all Romanians over a certain age will never forget. Freedom had come to them quite unexpectedly, popping out of the barrel of a gun.

  The aftermath of revolution was strangely silent. A lifetime of lack of initiative meant that nobody quite knew what to do next. There had been no organized (or even disorganized) opposition when Ceauescu had been in power, so no natural leader emerged from the rubble. How to create a workable democracy after nearly fifty years during which a totalitarian party had monopolized all public space, even the church, was bound to be a huge problem. People had reacted instinctively against Ceauescu, and now they were dazed at what they’d just done. They’d got completely out of the habit of making their own decisions, so eventually, once they’d toured Ceauescu’s obscenely opulent palaces and cut the communist coat of arms out of the national flags, they went home to await further instructions. From someone, anyone, because that was what they had always done.

  Some weeks later they raised no objection when most of the old Party sheepishly reassembled itself in the shape of the emotively titled National Salvation Front.

  Given the nation’s history, it was too much to expect instant democracy. Ruled variously by Romans, Byzantines, Habsburgs, Russians and totalitarians, Romania had no pattern of self-government to fall back on, no ancient formula for peace and prosperity. Its pre-war monarchy had been conjured up out of German-speaking Hohenzollerns from way upriver, and although King Michael had expressed his willingness, and had returned briefly in 1990, he was expelled after just twelve hours. Despite the downfall of Ceauescu, many Romanians still clung to communist concepts like subsidized prices and jobs for all in nationalized industries. Opinion polls carried out in the 1990s found that 70 per cent still believed that income levels should be equal across all layers of society and that industry should remain nationalized. The heartland of that change-nothing opinion was the neo-urbanites, the worker-peasants, the people who had been uprooted from their traditional communities and moved to cities to work for large industries. That move had effectively confiscated their self-determination, removed them from their social networks and forced them to look to the state to guide and provide, so it was no use telling them to stand on their own two feet in a new, capitalist world.

  Across the nation there was a reluctance to accept change, as there always is in any nation on the globe. But there was one region whose culture hadn’t changed for effectively hundreds of years: the self-sufficient Transylvanian countryside, where I was headed next. It was to have been Ceauescu’s next project, but fortunately he’d been blown away before he could do too much damage.

  19

  Walking in Transylvania:

  the Apuseni Mountains

  Albac was deliciously chilly in the early morning. It was the first time I’d felt cold in many weeks, and I’d forgotten ho
w energizing the cold could be. A tentative sun was beginning to squeeze its way down the tight valley between the steep flanks of the Apuseni mountains, producing steam from whatever it touched. It plucked the newly galvanized needle of Albac’s church out of its conifer-shrouded obscurity, twiddled the biblical spike between thumb and forefinger and buffed it up so that it looked like newly minted tinfoil. Then, feeling its way towards me like a blind man reading braille, the first rays flickered lovingly over village eaves carved with stars, flowers and birds, and rippled on downwards, caressing immaculately stacked walls of firewood whose presence was as comforting to their owners as money in the bank. But then, having shown such admirable restraint, it went and spoiled everything by splashing its rays wantonly and indiscriminately across crudely painted breeze-block walls up and down the main street.

  Old men in black felt hats were standing at Albac’s main intersection, chain-smoking, waiting for nothing, and eyeing the slow assembly of an impromptu market of essential supplies for anyone heading for the uplands – a market that mainly consisted of peppers, tomatoes and gas cylinders. Most of the traffic that passed the intersection either jingled or barked, but the occasional angular Dacia (actually a Renault but in a style long since forgotten anywhere further west) lurched indecisively through, trailing a bronchial splutter. It was followed at a distance by the morning bread van, making slow progress because of its need to stop outside each and every one of those open doorways marked by piles of beer crates: the shops.