Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Vlad the Impaler.

  Chapter 19

  Grigore’s story

  ONE DAY IN 1986 the Comrades came to call on Grigore in his office. He was then director of Prodcomplex. It was one of the biggest companies in Târgu Mureş, with 3,000 employees, making furniture, carpets, glassware and other household items. ‘Mr Lungu,’ they said, all regretful smiles, ‘you know the rule.’

  Everyone knew the rule. Ceauşescu had decreed that no one who had family living outside Romania could be in charge of a major company. A few years before, Grigore’s younger brother, Toti, his wife, and their infant daughter had left Bucharest to settle in West Germany. Not long afterwards they were joined by the mother of Grigore and Toti.

  Their emigration was perfectly legal. For each Romanian of ethnic German origin permitted to move to the fatherland, Ceauşescu received a bounty of 4,000 deutschmarks. After oil sales it was his chief source of foreign revenue. It was typical of the regime’s mentality and method of operating that, whenever such transactions were completed, any members of the family remaining behind were automatically classified as suspect and penalised.

  Grigore smiled back at the Comrades. It was true that his mother’s side of the family were originally German Schwabs, but Grigore regarded himself as wholly Romanian. So did Dana. The Comrades were not to know that both of them had made a pact, years before, that they would not leave Romania unless their lives there became utterly intolerable. They believed that, eventually, the tragedy that had overtaken their country would end. ‘It is simple,’ Grigore wrote to me. ‘I was convinced that the comedy would finish one day and I wanted to see with my own eyes.’

  Toti’s situation was very different. His wife taught French at a school in Bucharest, hated Romania, and longed to leave. As for his and Grigore’s mother, she thought of herself as being a German in exile, and looked down on Romanians to the extent of trying to forbid her sons to speak Romanian at home. Despite an age difference of ten years, the brothers were very close to each other. Grigore did not try to dissuade Toti from leaving even though he knew there would be consequences for himself. When I asked him about it, the old pain was evident in his face. ‘I was not happy,’ he said. ‘But what can I do? She is my brother.’

  He was summarily removed from his position as director of Prodcomplex and lost the perks that went with it. Grigore’s first inclination was to leave the company altogether. He was a highly trained theoretical and practical engineer, fluent in German and Hungarian and competent in English, with extensive business experience and contacts, both in Romania and abroad. He would have been a prized asset to any company. But then an official at the Ministry had a quiet word in his ear. The rule was the rule, nothing could be done about that. But Prodcomplex was an important company and it needed Grigore. It would be better for everyone, the quiet voice said, if he stayed.

  So he took over a unit within Prodcomplex set up to develop new products and processes. Under Grigore’s leadership it flourished, testing and patenting many original systems. Then in 1989 the Comrades came calling again. They had received letters – anonymous, naturally. Comrade Lungu was in possession of important commercial secrets. His brother and mother were living abroad. What if he decided to join them, taking his secrets with him? Secrets that were the property of Romania would be at risk.

  The Comrades had a proposal. A conference was to be held shortly in Târgu Mureş, to be attended by important figures from the commercial and business sectors. If Mr Lungu were to address the conference and tell the delegates what a great man Ceauşescu was, how Romania had progressed in leaps and bounds under his wise and inspiring direction, how golden was the future shaped by his guiding hand etc etc, then all doubts about his loyalty would be erased. Look, to make it easy, they had even composed his speech for him.

  Grigore addressed the conference. But he delivered his own speech, in which he dwelled at length on the technical detail of the various manufacturing processes he and his team were working on. He failed to mention the Great Leader. ‘They were vairy angry,’ he told me, laughing. ‘But what can they do? And then Ceauşescu is shot.’ Laughter exploded from him.

  With chaos threatening on all sides, the official from the Ministry approached Grigore again. The situation had changed once more. The old rule – many old rules – no longer applied. Democracy beckoned. The free market was coming. Would Mr Lungu care to be reinstated as director of Prodcomplex? ‘I said yes. It was a big mistake. Maybe the biggest mistake I make in my life.’

  When I first came to Târgu Mureş, Grigore was back in charge. By Romanian standards he had rejoined the elite. He had a salary of £70 a week, a spacious flat with a video and two German-made televisions, a new car, a cottage in the country. He had also been readmitted to the town’s inner circle, the ‘Târgu Mureş Mafia’, as he called it, half-humorously. He knew everyone who mattered. He could get petrol when the petrol stations were shut, meat when the shops were empty, beer when the bars were dry. As I found, Grigore was a very useful man to have as a friend.

  What I did not realise then, because he never gave me a hint of it, was that he was under enormous pressure. His big mistake was that, instead of getting out of the state system and grasping one of the business opportunities opening up all around, he spent five years toiling in vain to save a bloated, doomed, industrial dinosaur from going to the wall. Dana also worked at Prodcomplex, and toiled with him. Grigore now admits that they neglected other aspects of life, including their son, young Grigore, who had a troubled adolescence.

  In the end they both got out, and Prodcomplex crumbled. Dana opened a shoe shop in town, which did well for a while. Together she and Grigore looked at other possibilities. In the end they started a small company making furniture moulded from polyurethane. After an uncertain beginning it did well. Grigore oversaw the technical side and shaped the business strategy. Dana did the books. Young Grigore left his difficult times behind, took a university degree in management, and did the legwork. Then Dana, a habitual heavy smoker, developed cancer. She had surgery and treatment, was in remission for a time before the disease came back and killed her.

  She was Grigore’s second wife, he her second husband, and they had forged a strong partnership. When they were together, they never touched or gave each other intimate signs of affection, which at the time struck me as curious. I now think that this was simply their way, that of a couple who had been through much and had been strengthened by it. Grigore talked about her easily enough – how they had built the business, the building of their new house, the progress of her illness. Whatever he felt about his loss, he kept to himself. He gave every appearance of enjoying life, relishing the way in which ‘young’ Grigore was taking the weight off his shoulders, allowing him the time to potter in his garden, to sunbathe on his lawn, to go fishing when he felt like it.

  I missed Dana very much. I still remembered my first evening in their flat. After Grigore and I had watched the football, he went off somewhere and she gave me supper in the kitchen with the other television on, showing the news. There had been a big anti-government demonstration in Bucharest that had been broken up by men with clubs. There was an interview with the student leader of the protest from his hospital bed, where he lay heavily bandaged.

  ‘He is saying that it was a peaceful demonstration, for democracy,’ Dana translated. ‘Then these miners come with big sticks. But they are not miners, they are Securitate, like in the old days. Now this student is beaten up, in hospital and under arrest, just like with Ceauşescu.’

  The scene changed to an office with a large, shiny desk. Behind it, rubbing his hands and smiling shiftily, sat President Iliescu. Dana jabbed her finger angrily at the screen.

  ‘Ah, here is Iliescu, the great democrat. He will now say that this demonstration is not democratic. That the miners are showing the anger of the people. Iliescu is a Communist. He was with Ceauşescu. He does not know the difference between truth and lies.’ Iliescu’s eyes darted away from
the camera. His hands jumped about. ‘He is lying,’ Dana cried, waving her cigarette. ‘This great democrat. We have killed Ceauşescu and now we have him … the same.’

  Grigore came in. She greeted him with a vehement summary of the news. He smiled at her and spoke to her quietly. To me he said that the students were looking for trouble, that they didn’t like the results of the elections because Iliescu had won. ‘Maybe he was a Communist. The same like me. Now I think there are no Communists in Romania.’

  Dana took great, visible pleasure in dusting off her French for my benefit, and engaging me in long, serious conversations about the situation. On the way to the hunting lodge at Lǎpuşna, we stopped for an al fresco lunch in a grove of silver birches close to the River Gurghui. She was wearing a T-shirt over a blue bikini that suited her figure well. I told her I had been reliably informed in Poland that Romanians were so short of food they had been forced to resort to cannibalism. At the time we were eating pork in a wild mushroom sauce with boiled potatoes, and drinking beer.

  She laughed, then her face became grave again. ‘Vous devez être plus sérieux, Tom. Pour nous, c’est une affaire à prendre très sérieusement. Pour vous, pour les autres pays de l’Europe, la Roumanie est un pays de barbarisme.’

  I made the mistake of mentioning the assault on the students in Bucharest that had aroused her to such fury on the night of my arrival. The fury returned, this time aimed at me. This was a matter for Romanians. Who was I to condemn them? Had they not got rid of Ceauşescu? Did I know what Ceauşescu was like then? What life was like? No, I did not. Had there not been sacrifices … many sacrifices? Did not Romania deserve a chance?

  Of course, I replied hastily. It was just that some people in the West suspected that Romania’s democracy was a façade. That choice of word was another mistake. Dana’s cigarette danced under my nose. ‘Qu’est ce que vous pouvez comprendre de ces événements? Vous ne savez rien de … de … de …’ She banged her fist on the table as she searched for the word. ‘… du cauchemar de la Roumanie. Vous, vous … ah!’ She turned away in disgust at my ignorance.

  Two other couples had joined us for lunch. Grigore sat at the far end of the table talking conspiratorially to the two husbands and dispensing glasses of his home-made tuicǎ. One of the wives murmured something to Dana who turned back to me. She pointed at the river. ‘What about a swim?’ she suggested.

  ‘Non, non, je n’ai pas de …’ I pointed at young Grigore’s swimming trunks.

  ‘Ça ne fait rien. Tu peux nager nu.’

  I could feel my face going red. ‘Non, merci. Je suis heureux de rester ici.’ She laughed at me in delight and said something to the other women. The news spread and the whole table burst into hilarity at my so-English reserve.

  Dana would often denounce the iniquities of the past, but if anyone dared extend criticism of the regime to the country itself, or to its people, she would turn on them in a flash. Neither she nor anyone else would talk about the complicity Ceauşescu and the Party had deliberately nurtured between themselves and the people, the way in which this had worked its way throughout society and corrupted all other relationships. Family members had spied and informed on other family members, friends on friends, colleagues on colleagues. Almost everyone had, to a greater or lesser degree, been implicated in actions and events of which they had cause to be ashamed.

  There was an unspoken collective agreement that these matters should not be discussed. Everyone, including Grigore and Dana, was doing their best to disassociate themselves from certain aspects of the past. One way, useful when dealing with an inquisitive outsider, was to classify the whole experience using the word Dana had used: un cauchemar … a nightmare … as if an entire country and its people had been forcibly transported into a parallel reality beyond the understanding of non-Romanians.

  On the last night of my return visit, I reminded Grigore of what Dana had said all those years before: that as an outside I could not begin to understand the Ceauşescu nightmare. We were having dinner at the smartest restaurant in town, its smartness reflected not in the food – which was ordinary enough – but in the service, which was remarkably slow, and the conspicuous affluence of the other diners. The lamp-lit setting, among trees in a garden, the atmosphere of ease and money, the pop of corks, the swish of the waitresses – all might have been choreographed to show the gulf between present and past.

  ‘It is true, what Dana say, that it is not possible for you to understand what it was like then.’ Grigore’s face was furrowed by the effort to find words; and, perhaps, by the weight of the subject. ‘Also how it could happen here. How we could let it happen.’

  We changed the subject and talked about fishing for some time. In a few days Grigore and a friend would be driving to Germany to pick up Toti on their way to Lapland for their annual month-long fishing trip. Grigore was looking forward with relish to the enormous numbers of trout and grayling they would catch.

  Later he returned, briefly, to the past. ‘You want to know how this could happen? I tell you. It was a combination. Force and …’ it took him some time to find the word ‘… anxiety. That is how they ruled us.’

  Chapter 20

  Delta

  ON THE FARTHEST edge of Europe, the river that runs through so much of the continent’s history comes to its quiet, diffuse end. The most dazzling of the Danube’s many historians, Claudio Magris, sees the delta as ‘one great dissolution … a great death … a death that is also incessant regeneration.’

  Magris addresses the problem facing any writer who tries to convey a sense of this place: ‘the inadequacies of our perceptions, our senses atrophied by the millennia … our antique severance from the flow of life’. ‘The immense chorus of the delta,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘is to our ears only a murmur, a voice we cannot catch, a whisper of life which vanishes unheard.’

  The camera has its own inadequacies. You can record views of channels of water, walls of reeds, lines of willows, a heron or a cormorant standing guard on a branch, pelicans turning like coins against the sky, old boats blackened with pitch, a sunset, a mist-laden dawn. But the lens keeps missing the point. The geography of the delta, its relentless, uncompromising flatness, conspires against the eye as well as against language. You see the channel and the reeds or trees that confine it, nothing beyond. The prospect broadens as you enter one of the lakes, but the detail dissolves and you are left with flat water, beds of lilies, clods of weed, the grey reed line around the edge, trees smudged against it, everything flattened by the conquering immensity of the sky.

  The essence of the delta is contained both in the illusion of infinity and in its fine details. Only the mind can encompass both. It is like a vast musical structure – Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, perhaps, or Brahms’s Handel Variations – built on a small, simple theme. In the delta’s case, it is the theme of water. Like us, it is 90 per cent water. Its major channels are its arteries, the connecting arms its veins, the multitude of creeks and ditches its capillaries, the marsh and reedbeds its tissue.

  How wonderful it would be to glide bird-like over it, maintaining a flight path over extended distances with no more than an occasional wing-beat, changing direction at will. But even then you would only skim the surface. You would probably miss the boar, otters, mink, ermine, hares, wild cats and other animals of the reed islands and marshes and thickets. You would spot the big, less shy birds – eagles, herons, pelicans, cormorants – as well as the waterfowl, but you would be lucky to catch a glimpse of the more self-effacing among the 180 resident species, such as the rail, the marsh harrier or the bittern. Closer to the water you might see a spray of little roach escaping from a pike, but for the rest of the fish species – carp, zander, catfish, the very occasional sturgeon – you would have to take their concealed presence on trust.

  Then there are the people. They are certainly visible, but their lives would be more unknowable than those of the sturgeon or the sea eagle; unless, that is, you were prepared to stop
for good and learn not just the languages (Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian to start with), but also how to live on a floating island of reed, how to lay nets across the feeding paths of fish, how to track boar, how to tell a red-breasted goose from a white-fronted one before shooting it.

  For Magris, this insoluble problem was illustrated by a momentary encounter with a Lipovan fisherman, Kovaliov Dan, and by the sighting of a young man he calls Nikolai, who gets off a boat and smiles shyly as a girl kisses him on shore. To justify its existence, Magris says, the book ought to be able to tell their stories. But it cannot, so it falls back on ‘summaries, on a precis of conquests and the fall of empires, anecdotes from the Council Chamber, conversations at court or in Parnassus, the minutes in international commissions’.

  In other words, the writer – always inadequate, always missing most, and the best part, of any story – is reduced to a condition of more-than-usual helplessness by the Danube Delta. On the other hand, it’s a long way to go and not even try …

  Arriving in June 2008, I was 30 years or so too late. I had carried a picture of the delta in my mind for a long time. In this picture I lodged in a shack on one of the plaurs, the islands of living and dead reed. I was looked after by a Lipovan boatman, one of the blue-eyed, blond-haired, bushy-bearded race of Old Believers who had migrated south from Russia nearly 300 years before to escape the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  Danube boat – old style

  Conditions in the imagined shack were very basic. There were bugs, and mosquitoes as big as bats. At dawn, perhaps even earlier, we would push off across the still, black water in a pitch-blackened, sharp-nosed boat redolent of fish, smeared with dried slime and blood and spangled with scales. We would creep over the black water, along channels and across lagoons, until we reached the spot where the carp, the pike or the catfish – I was not choosy – lurked. It was a silent journey, apart from the dipping of the boatman’s oars, the purling of the water against the boat, the rustle of stirring reed-heads, the croaking of frogs, the call of cuckoos and the bustle of ducks and coots.