My visit had started badly. An unshaven and stony-faced immigration official leafed slowly through my passport, pausing now and again to re-examine one of the previous pages as if he was searching for a critical piece of evidence in a murder case. Finally, he handed it back with an entire page now heavily decorated in both English and Romanian.
“I have permitted you one week,”
“A week.” I was taken aback. “But, I only want to stay for two or three days.”
“A week.” He stabbed a gloved hand with an air of finality in the direction of my passport. “Seven days. No longer. No less.”
I looked at him dumbfounded, uncertain as to whether he was serious. Clearly, he was. By what mad logic was I required to remain in the country for longer than I wanted? I started to protest, at which point he nodded to one of the black uniformed, black booted security guards with their matching black Rottweilers standing beside the immigration booths who immediately moved forward, one arm cradling an Uzi machine gun, his dog straining at its leash in slavering, red-eyed anticipation. Changing dates was clearly not an option and whether I liked it or not I was to be marooned in Romania for the next seven days. The Securitate, as I was to quickly learn, did not take kindly to being confronted. Indeed, they viewed it with the gravest suspicion. I did the prudent thing, smiled and tried to look pleased before making my way into the customs hall.
I had been booked in at the Athénée Palace Hotel, whose cavernous lobby with cut glass chandeliers suspended from a gilded cherub-romping dome put me in mind of some grand turn-of-the century hotel in Vienna or Salzburg. A creaking birdcage lift took me to my bedroom on the second floor where an outsize Edwardian brass bedstead and crimson velvet curtains confirmed the mood of opulence. From then on however, it was all downhill. A solitary radiator dispensed erratic and lukewarm heat at best, the bedside reading lamp was fitted with a low wattage bulb and two of the dials on the 16-inch Russian TV set were broken, including the volume control. Not that it mattered however. Transmission was limited to three hours during the evening and consisted mainly of military parades, news of Romanian industrial successes and strutting Mussolini-like speeches by the President. A year or so later, I was told by a journalist friend in Greece that the Palace was notorious for being a den of spies during the Cold War with bugged rooms, tapped telephones and call girls trained in espionage by the state security services.
In my increasingly dispirited state I began to think longingly of escaping to the countryside. If I was to be detained at the state’s pleasure for six more days in Ceausescu’s dystopian world, then maybe I could do so in the Transylvania region, reputed to be among the most unspoiled and scenic anywhere in Europe. A writer friend who had travelled in Romania during pre-Ceacescau days had rhapsodised about its mountains and forests, green valleys and flower-filled Alpine meadows. Childhood tales of Count Dracula sallying forth on some toothsome errand from his turreted castle in the Carpathian Mountains tugged at the corners of my mind. It was a region peopled by witches and werewolves and at night the woods resounded to the long drawn out howling of wolves like those in Saki’s The Wolves of Cernocratz. I couldn’t wait.
But this was Romania and travelling in Ceausescu’s proletarian paradise was, as I soon discovered, severely controlled. To do so I would need a permit obtainable only from the state-controlled Travel Bureau. The next morning, I found my way to the Travel Bureau where I was ushered into the office of a middle-aged woman in a severely tailored grey-green uniform with one of the most disagreeable faces I have ever seen. She looked me up and down distastefully as though I was an infectious disease.
“You want to travel to Transylvania?” she demanded in the tone of someone trained in a revisionist Stalin prison camp. She made no attempt to introduce herself but I knew instinctively that her name must be Olga.
I started to explain that I wanted to see something of the Romanian countryside about which I had heard so much along with its wildlife, castles and monasteries. “Perhaps,” I ventured in an attempt to introduce some joie de vivre to a conversation that was becoming distinctly Arctic, “I might even encounter Count Dracula.” It was, I immediately realised, a mistake. I would scarcely have thought it possible but she regarded me with even greater disfavour.
Dracula, she informed me was a bourgeois Western falsehood, fabricated by the West to discredit the hard-won social and industrial achievements of the Romanian people. It was not only a lie but a denigration of their great socialist society. “Romania is not about aristocrats and counts and castles or vampires and werewolves,” she continued icily. “But that is how you like to portray us and make us look like backward and illiterate peasants. Vampires!” She banged a meaty fist onto her desk top. “There is no such thing, either human or animal.”
In fact, there are three species of vampire bats, all of whom suck blood. I had read about them in my guide book the previous evening – the common vampire, the white-winged vampire and the hairy legged vampire. However, I sensed that now was not the moment to embark on a sub-classification of the vampire clan. Especially since Ceausescu was secretly referred to as Vampirescu and the country’s best red wine as Vampire Pinot Noir.
“Fill this in,” she thrust a long form printed in Romanian into my hand.
“But I….”
“If you cannot read our language, one of my assistants will assist you.” She turned away and for next half hour, assisted by a sweetly natured Romanian girl called Ileana, I filled in a form numbering two hundred and fifty questions including a denial that I had never worked for the CIA, MI5, the French Deuxième Bureau, or Mossad.
Olga returned.
“There is a zoo in Bucharest. You can see many of our birds and animals there.”
I took a deep breath. The State could not feed their people. I could only imagine the condition of the zoo’s inmates. I smiled and thanked her.
She took the completed form and gave me a long, hard look as though remembering my features for a missing person’s report. “We know where you are staying,” she said with undisguised menace. “You will be informed if your application is approved.” I had a feeling it never would be.
On my way back, I stopped off at the green and lovely Cismigiu Gardens midway along Boulevard Regina Elisabeta, attractively laid out with lawns bordered by thick chestnut trees and a serpentine lake with rowing boats, surrounded by weeping willows. Two herons, stiff as guardsmen on parade, waited by the edge of a lake with their long, tyrannosaurus-like beaks poised to stab at any prey that came within striking distance. After my encounter with Olga it was deeply, welcomingly soothing and reassuring. Vampiresceau’s writ was absent here. Children played tag and a man and a woman walked across a wooden bridge talking intently, their arms linked. Was this small, green slice of the natural world with its trees and birds, a source of solace in the cruelly repressive world they inhabited? I had no way of knowing but perhaps it was. For Nature, however tenuously we recognise it, is an integral part of us all and our increasing alienation from it comes with a health warning to our well-bring and sanity.
I spent the better part of the next few days wandering through the streets of the city, past the inevitable statues of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Ceausescu. The massive Palace of the People with its one thousand rooms built from Italian marble, each one hung with four outsize crystal chandeliers, rose over the city like a symbol of the megalomaniac dictator Ceausescu had become. I wandered down wide tree-lined boulevards, occasionally stopping to look at the shop windows. Most of them were empty, the few basic goods they had illuminated by naked light bulbs and apart from the sinister black Moskovich limousines used by the party appatchariks, the streets were so empty of traffic that people wandered down the middle of them. Long queues began forming before dawn to buy milk, bread, eggs and sugar and other staples whose prices had risen by over seven hundred per cent in the last year. It was bleakly and mind-numbingly depressing and I told myself that never again would I complain if they ran out of
my favourite brand of coffee at my local supermarket.
And yet Bucharest must have been beautiful once – the Paris of the East as it was known in the 1920’s – with its wide, tree lined boulevards and elegant shops with window displays by Balenciaga and Cardin, the glitter and dash of its fin de siècle cafes, luxurious restaurants and bars. “Nowhere East of Paris, “a well-known Russian émigré count wrote, “was such elegant haute couture and style found, as in Bucharest.” Now all that former grandeur had been replaced by endless drab streets of massive five or six story apartment blocks that corresponded with Ceacesceau’s revolutionary ideology of the perfect proletariat state.
“Everything that is possible to go wrong here has done so under the Great Dictator,” Gheorghe Petrescu, a Romanian poet who I met at the bar of the Athénée Palace, told me. He nodded toward an ornate gilt-framed portrait of a benevolent looking Ceausescu above the entrance to the lobby. “He still believes in the old Stalinist ideology of heavy industry and collectivism, you see.”
“Which obviously doesn’t work?”
“No.” He regarded me thoughtfully like a teacher dealing with a particularly dim-witted pupil. “Before Ceausescu we were the second largest food producer in Europe after France. Now thanks to his crazy, unworkable industrialisation projects our economy is in shreds and many of our people are starving. If by some miracle you find some cheese or a tin of coffee in the market, then it’s your talking point for the week.”
He grimaced and ordered us more drinks. “Factory production is all that matters to him and that means increasing the workforce by expanding the population. So, he created the Baby Police.”
I looked him, unsure of I had heard correctly and he permitted himself a joyless smile.
“Yes, the Baby Police. It is their job to prevent married women from using contraceptives, or having abortions. At any time, whether it’s at home or at the office or a factory, they are at liberty to make gynaecological examination of a married woman under the age of forty.”
He finished his drink and made to depart. “I am sorry you should see our country as it is now,” he said sadly. “There is much in it that is good. I hope maybe for you to come back when these times are over.”
Petrescu’s comments set me wondering and the next morning on my way to the Cismigiu Gardens. I considered what he had told me. In a totalitarian society such as Romania, a wrong word, a small joke was enough to send you to the Bad Place, as the prisons were commonly known. But Petrescu had been unusually frank in expressing his views and I found myself wondering whether he might not be a government informer, tasked with finding out the views and sympathies of visitors from the West. That was the trouble with Romania, I thought. Even after only three days in the country I was becoming paranoid and I reminded myself of the old Woody Allen joke: It’s not that I’m paranoid. I just know they’re out to get me,”
It had started to snow. Large flakes spun lazily from a leaden sky, settling on the pavement and cloaking the buildings with their familiar illusion of serenity and peace. I turned a corner and started down the Calle Victorei. It was then that I encountered the bear.
It was dancing in front of a small crowd of people, mostly children. Two gypsies took turns to control its movements by means of a long metal chain attached to a ring through its nose. After two or three minutes, the music stopped and the animal began to sway backwards and sideways bobbing its head up and down and swaying from foot to foot – stereotype symptoms that I knew to be associated with acute mental breakdown due to its captivity and confinement.
A year or so later, a woman working at a bear rescue sanctuary at Epirus in northern Greece explained to me how young cubs, captured from the wild to become dancing bears, have their claws removed and their teeth smashed out with a hammer. They are forced to stand on sheets of glowing hot metal where, in order to escape the pain, they alternatively lift up one paw and then another. The process is repeated until the animals automatically begin to raise their paws to ‘dance.’ As the bears get older the trainers keep them under control by putting rings through the bears’ highly sensitive noses and jaws. No anaesthetic is used for this painful process.
I continued to watch with a mounting sensation of anger, disgust and pity. At one point, I crossed over to within a few yards of the keeper and raised my hand in a gesture of disapproval. He beamed at me and waved back. Frustrated and angry at my own inadequacy I realised there was almost nothing I could do. Remonstrate with the watching crowd, most of whom were now in any case drifting away as the snow intensified? Complain to the Ministry of Environment? There wasn’t one. File a complaint with the Tourist Board? I could imagine Olga’s expression.
When four years later the Romanian people, goaded beyond endurance finally rebelled and went to the barricades, Ceausescu and his wife fled the capital but were arrested at the small border town of Timisoara. There, after a brief drum-head court martial, they were dragged from the police station to face a firing squad in a snow-filled courtyard on Christmas Day 1989. I heard of the news at a friend’s house in Athens. “But you are our children,” Elena Ceausescu was said to have implored the soldiers, stretching out her hands towards them, as they raised their rifles.
At that moment, however it was the image of the bear with a chain threaded through its nose and snowflakes melting on its dark brown fur whilst it danced unsteadily to a rag-time tune on the Calle Victoriei that I found myself remembering.
ZAMBEZI DREAMING
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
- Auguries of Innocence. William Blake
There are places which you know, without any special feeling of loss or regret, that you will never go back to and others that you recall and long to return to with almost aching nostalgia. For me the Zambezi Valley is one of these. I hadn’t been back to this remote and, in places, still unchartered wilderness, for nearly six years and needed no second thoughts in accepting the chance to spend a few days there. Together with Adam, my grandson, his erstwhile girl-friend and a genial Zimbabwe-born Austrian, Haus, we had negotiated the winding road down the escarpment – an endlessly lurking death trap along which bonus-seeking truck drivers, high on drugs, from the copper mines in Zambia propel their over laden heavy-haulage trucks with complete disregard for the lives and limbs of others. Only Haus’s considerable driving skills had ensured our arrival.
All that was now safely behind us however and once again, I raised my glass surreptitiously towards him as, drinks in hand, we watched the afterglow of the sun disappearing behind the Zambian escarpment leaving a residual glow of amber and gold on the slowly moving river. Frogs croaked in an uneven, guttural chorus, there was the admonitory whine of a mosquito and from downstream a pair of fish eagles called to one another in wild, piercing high-voltage screams that, for me, are amongst the most evocative and thrilling sounds in Africa.
That night I went to bed early, lulled into a dreamless sleep by the far away calls of hyenas and was woken shortly before six by Adam, bearing a mug of steaming black coffee.
“Come and look at this,” he said without preamble and I dutifully followed him out of the tent.
Dawn was stealing up over the Zambezi escarpment, rimming the sky with lengthening bars of salmon, rose pink and riotously flaming red. In the imperceptibly changing light the valley was hushed and very beautiful. Three great white egrets, their long necks stretched out, their bodies inclined slowly forward flew leisurely down the river in V-formation and from somewhere nearby came the abrupt bark of a bushbuck. The light, the solitude and the slowly stirring life around us was like stepping back in time, cleansed of cities, crowds and neon-rise. A supremely man-less world.
Days spent on the Zambezi are as close to perfection as it gets. The slow lapse of time, the delicious lazy peace enhanced by the infinitesimal lap of water against the boat to the accompanime
nt of the occasional muffled plop of a surfacing hippo guarding his pod, is sheer unalloyed pleasure. Cobalt blue malachite kingfishers swooped across the water like tiny avian jets and great trees – the jacalberry and the tall, feathery topped mottled fever tree – crowded the river banks cloaked in dense, vibrantly green vegetation. It was the old eternal Africa with occasional glimpses of mud and grass huts, smoke curling lazily from fires and children waving a greeting. Both Adam and Haus were avid fishermen and during the long drive from Harare I had listened to wide-ranging discussions concerning line strengths, types of lures, the complexities of mid-river current drift and the importance of fly selection – black, brown and dark-red colours for early mornings with greens, yellows and chartreuse pinks for mid-day. Occasionally they would break off to explain to me exactly why and how all this mattered and I would listen politely but my heart was never really in it.
That said, there is something marvellously peaceful and restorative about sitting in a boat with fishermen. It has many of the features of watching a village cricket match in England on a long, balmy summer afternoon. There is the same unhurried pace and lack of urgency, the same almost religious sense of devotion to ritual. Nothing much happens for long stretches of time. Mid-morning becomes noon and noon imperceptibly turns to mid-afternoon. Occasionally, this semi-comatose is broken by a stifled appeal – “How’s that?” or “Nearly had him.”And then silence descends for a few more hours. By which time it is getting dark and the rites are suspended until the following day. That in a nutshell is fishing and now that I have participated in it, however passively, I am completely smitten - hook, line and sinker.
Silence, like slowness, is becoming lost in our world. Next time you travel by train or on the underground, look around you at the faces of your fellow passengers hunched over their tablet or iPhone and staring intently into the screen as though waiting for it to reveal secrets from another world. Virtual reality has replaced contemplation. Recently, I read of a study conducted in Japan and the United States that showed smartphone users experience anxiety and distress when they fail to receive memos or communiqués. Imagine it!Your whole life put on hold through lack of a tiny bleep. But for millions, it is an addiction that literally consumes their lives. In Britain alone, smart phone users spend a minimum of three hours a day on the internet, whilst in a recent poll ten per cent of those asked, said that they checked on it whilst having sex. Once young couples on their first dates used to gaze raptly into each other’s eyes. Now they wordlessly share their mobile screens. What does this say about our lives that we have allowed ourselves to become so dependent on Internet browsing?
Somewhere East of Eden Page 11