The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  Maria has a distantly related but beloved aunt in Łódź who is an excellent example of the Polish intelligentsia of the Solidarity era—someone who, in Hoffman’s words, “got to live out something that for Western intellectuals of that generation was the great, unlived romance: they made a revolution, or at least were at its vanguard.” Her friends are painters and writers, and her apartment, inside the usual gray and peeling post-Soviet building, was as pristine and meticulously decorated as any Manhattan studio. She has a smooth, bowling-ball bob and is from a small town outside Łódź. She was sent to the city in 1971 to live with her grandmother in order to attend a better secondary school. Her parents wanted to join her, but “it was a closed city after World War II, and they couldn’t get a ‘reason’ or an apartment trade to live there.”

  She made us a lunch of spinach pie, cranberry cheese, and asparagus with béchamel. She set out a pitcher of water with lemon and mint and reminisced about the nationwide general strikes of 1980–81.

  “We all went on strike. It was funny because we were government workers, a different union than the factories, so we would strike in shifts—one hour this room would strike, then the other room would strike. I was on vacation with my young son and pregnant with my daughter. My husband Igor was a judge, and because of the times he was called to Warsaw” while they were away. “The whole country shut down and we didn’t know [where he was]. We went to the store one day and all they had was vinegar! We went to the train station every day” in case her husband returned. “I was listening to Radio Free Europe for news, and now I am an expert about the Israeli kibbutzes since that was the story on the radio.” She laughed. “Everything we learned about the strikes we knew from word of mouth, from other people, from ten million people realizing we all thought the same way.”

  The name “Łódź” means “boat,” and the city flag is literally an image of a boat slapped over a Polish flag. It’s an artificial city, in a way: for hundreds of years it was a hamlet of fewer than three hundred people, until in 1815 the tsar decided it should be an industrial center. Seventy-five years later, seven hundred thousand people lived there.

  We were playing a coffee shop in a renovated deli (very hipster New York, like Arlene’s Grocery), still named Owoce i Warzywa (“Fruits and Vegetables”) in order to save on a new awning. The sound engineer was a hobbyist who used to work at the radio station but was now a civil engineer; after work, he helped out his friends who run the club. He was working on a municipal plan to tear up the railroad station and relocate it underground. The European Union was promoting a plan to run a highspeed train underground from Estonia to Germany, but there was widespread skepticism. The planners had only part of the money, he said, “and people around here are pragmatic. Maybe in twenty years we can sell newspapers and coffee to travelers, but for now? . . . The worst thing they could do is start digging. They would run out of money and it would paralyze the city.”

  III.

  Poor, but They Have Style (Romania)

  While Poland is the poster child for post-1991 integration and success, Romania and Bulgaria are the bêtes noires of Western European protectionists and EU skeptics. At the same time, of course, they are equally the most exoticized and the most romanticized: there is a fantastic idea of Romania as colorfully downtrodden, a nation of (if I may quote the renowned Balkan historian Cher) gypsies, tramps, and thieves, with a history of picturesque corruption and genteel untrustworthiness. As Josip in Zagreb put it, “Bulgarians, they have it really poor. Romanians, they are poor, but they have style.”

  Having retraced my steps from Poland back to Hungary, the road to Romania was eastbound from Budapest, past simple farmland, flooded fields, a pair of mule deer, and a giant concrete soccer ball by the side of the road marking nothing obvious. The village houses were made of thatch with mossy tile in the centers, and all faced the main road. They were accessible by little one-car concrete bridges over thin drainage ditches. I passed a police car with one working headlight and arrived at the Romanian border.

  Crossing the border, I lost one hour to daylight savings time and another to the time zone. “It’s a rental car?” asked the border police, examining my documents—in this part of the world, that includes your “green card,” the car registration. “They are OK with you coming to Romania?”

  “Yes,” I lied, and pulled over to buy the necessary highway vignette, as European countries call the little windshield sticker some of them use to indicate you’ve paid the highway toll. In fact I’d been repeatedly and explicitly warned not to take the rental car into Romania or Bulgaria. “There are gangs stealing German cars and taking them to Albania” I was told, though it was a Vauxhall and surely not one of the more desirable models. But there was no way around it: I couldn’t afford to leave this car in Vienna and rent another, Balkan-cleared junker. I’d just have to be vigilant about the legal details of tolls and speed limits and leave the rest to hope and fate.

  As I exited the shack with my sticker and a handful of slippery, plastic-feeling Romanian currency, I saw a slick-haired, potbellied hustler in a leather jacket eyeing my license plate. “Samsung Galaxy?” he offered, brandishing a phone.

  As an instructive tableau of the spectacular failure of industrial gigantism imposed on an agrarian culture (“the corpses of empire, they stink as nothing else,” says West), the road to Cluj does not disappoint. Herds of long-haired, thus filthy, sheep—this shaggy variety is distinctive to Romania—clustered by a trucking warehouse. The rusted remains of an abandoned nuclear plant, one dirty smokestack still belching, were the stuff of postapocalyptic nightmares. In Romania and Bulgaria, the biggest structures standing are usually the most decrepit. Farther down the road, a demonic blackened dam held back a reservoir. Robert Kaplan noted that while heavy industry created “cruel, ugly things throughout the communist world, factories in Romania seemed to belong to a deeper circle of hell.” The successive Communist regimes of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu were infamous, among many other things, for monstrous red-herring projects—dams, canals, plants—begun not so much in the interest of national development as to provide an object for hard labor. Stalin is said to have casually advised Gheorghiu-Dej to “keep the masses occupied. Give them a big project to do. Have them build a canal or something.”

  The traffic on this pitted two-lane road was clogged and Hobbesian. Cars drafting off one another, bumpers mere feet apart, executed suicidal passing maneuvers past the trucks. I braked abruptly as a horse-drawn cart pulled into my lane. There were pedestrians on the side of the road, too: a man carrying an ax, a grimy pair with bushy black mustaches. A small orange car passed, a decal reading “Street Pirate” pasted in its rear window. One yard was full of shrink-wrapped toilets. The low hills were scarred with ancient, overgrown terraces, the road lined on both sides by flags—the Romanian tricolor and the blue of the European Union.

  Like northern Serbia, this part of Transylvania was controlled by Hungary for many years, and ethnic Hungarians remain a significant population bloc. After World War I and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the memory of a feudal arrangement in which Romanian peasants worked for German and Hungarian landlords led to a nationalist reaction bordering on ethnic cleansing. Ceaușescu had, Kaplan reported, “outlaw[ed] abortions and birth-control devices so the Romanians could out-breed the hated Hungarians” and “forbade Hungarians from giving their children Hungarian names at baptism.” Cluj’s far-right 1990s mayor Gheorghe Funar mandated the exclusive use of the Romanian national colors in such civic improvements as park benches and Christmas lights, and he worked to scrub the Hungarian history of the region from municipal monuments. (He was eventually ousted for allegedly running a massive Ponzi scheme.) Kaplan called the Hungarian–Romanian border, despite lying between nominal allies, “for decades the meanest frontier crossing in Europe . . . scarier than the Berlin Wall.” Eva Hoffman, traveling the same route in the early 1990s, was warned not to enter Romania in a car with Hung
arian plates.

  Along the road from the border to Cluj, I saw just one Hungarian flag, but that was outside a unique town. Most Romanian villages followed a pattern: at the town line stood a naïve painting of a crucifix on wood (Polish villages had Virgin Marys), and a ring of fields and ten-foot cones of hay circled a town center. Driveway bridges crossed the drainage ditches that ran parallel to the road on both sides and led to one- or two-story houses. The houses are decorated with the most distinctive, and stylish, feature of the Romanian countryside: their street-facing fronts are covered in prefab plastic tiles, about the size of a brick, with four diagonal lines rising from the corners to form a slight relief peak. These tiles are arranged in colorful, geometric mosaics and give the main town streets the look of a glossy but homemade quilt.

  The one “Hungarian” town was made up of a string of half-built nouveau mansions with triple-canopied roofs and gaudy turrets in the baroque Hungarian style. Some, still without a finished exterior, were visibly built in layers—a few feet of concrete blocks, followed by a few feet of bricks, as if the contractor had bought as many materials as he could while he had the money, then left off work until he could come up with some more cash. Some of the cupolas, also triple-lobed, were covered in shiny aluminum. One was topped, like a kind of minaret or weathervane, with a silver BMW hood ornament. I saw more of these insta-villages of Hungarian-style McMansions farther south, on the way back to Szeged. I wondered—and was unable to find anyone to confirm or deny this—if these are settlement attempts by rich Hungarians, flush with EU money, to push back against anti-Hungarian sentiment with flashy displays of means, if not taste.

  In any case, the dull Pannonian plain mercifully ended as the road followed a river and a train up into the hills. I abandoned notions of a trackless Transylvanian woods: these hills have been deforested for some time. Elderly people sat outside the gates of their houses, canes akimbo. The older generation was picturesque and well-dressed—the women in black kerchiefs and wide skirts, the men in suit jackets over cardigans and flat leather caps. Those under forty tended more toward the ubiquitous Adidas tracksuit (for the men) and tight, pre-ripped jeans and puffy white parkas (for the women). Teenage boys seemed to have a taste for the shaved-on-the-sides pompadour.

  I was mildly surprised to find Cluj a lovely, prosperous-looking city, a university town with a familiar, British-style high street—there was a Vodafone shop what seemed like every hundred yards, a string of cafés, a KPMG office, takeout coffee, joggers. Hoffman exulted that it was “unmistakably European in a way that surprises me—recognizable, beautiful Europe, in this far region of the world!” The buildings in the colorful “little Vienna” style surrounded a small central square dominated by a Hungarian-Gothic sculpture of the fifteenth-century king Matthias Corvinus. (The pedestal used to include “of Hungary” after the king’s name, but those two words were removed by Funar.) Transylvania and western Ukraine were the easternmost outposts of Western European culture for much of the last millennium, with all the shared artistic and intellectual experience that implies.

  Cluj also constituted the northeastern frontier of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, after the Dacian conquest by Trajan. (It was officially renamed “Cluj-Napoca” in the 1970s to accentuate the connection to Napoca, the Roman town which once stood there.) When, in the 270s a.d., as Gibbon relates, Aurelian withdrew Roman forces from Dacia to the old boundary on the south bank of the Danube, he brought most of the Romanized Dacians with him to the denuded but still fertile region and left the north bank to the Goths and Vandals. He renamed the south bank “Dacia” to soften the loss of territory. Some, though, stayed behind: “The old country of that name detained, however, a considerable number of its inhabitants, who dreaded exile more than a Gothic master. These degenerate Romans continued to serve the empire, whose allegiance they had renounced by introducing among their conquerors the first notions of agriculture, the useful arts, and the conveniences of civilised life. An intercourse of commerce and language was gradually established between the opposite banks of the Danube; and after Dacia became an independent state, it often proved the firmest barrier of empire against the invasion of the savages of the North.” In a note, Gibbon added, “The Walachians1 still preserve many traces of the Latin language, and have boasted, in every age, of their Roman descent.”

  A term for the people living north of the Danube and south of the Carpathians. The name itself confirms this history, deriving from walha, which was used by Germanic peoples to refer to Romance-speaking neighbors (see also Wales and Cornwall).

  Though the area was Roman for less than two centuries, the heritage is cherished—not least in the blessedly comprehensible Romanian language, a familiar Romance relative of Italian, with some Slavic borrowings. With a couple of semesters of college Italian and some pan-Slavic pidgin, I could read a menu on day one. In addition, Romania, like Russia, was historically Francophile, and “mersi” is widely used in both Romania and Bulgaria for “thanks.” But so are some archaic Latinisms, like “servus”—essentially, “at your service.” (Latin remained the administrative lingua franca for the Kingdom of Hungary, including parts of modern Romania, until 1844.) A stylized statue of a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus stands atop a short pillar in the pedestrian mall. Similar statues, wrote Simon Winder, were gifted to Romanian cities by Mussolini to solicit a potential alliance based on notional historic ties. “A Latin island in a Slavic sea” goes the nationalist trope.2

  Historian John Lukacs said that Romanians “have something mock Latin about them . . . reminiscent of the mock-European quality of the Argentinians.”

  The territory converted to the Eastern rite church in the ninth century, while a part of the Bulgarian empire under Boris I. It was Easter Sunday in the Roman Catholic world, so I’d been unable to book a show in Catholic Hungary. In Cluj, as people were eager to clarify, “we’re Orthodox,” and Orthodox Easter, following the Julian calendar, fell later in the month. The churches were nonetheless full—of Hungarians, I suppose. I entered one that was dark and draped with chandeliers, and decorated with carved filigree (and, for some reason, a painted Masonic Eye of Providence). A men’s choir sang in low harmony.

  Alex and Alex met me at the bar where I’d be performing, just off Piața Unirii (Unification Square, renamed by Funar as a pointed reminder of the unification of the region with Romania). The Alexes were part of a small group of college-age guys who had taken over management of the bar a little over a year earlier, with the idea of building a punk scene. Alex One, dark and sharp-featured, was a junior in college. In addition to bartending at the club, he had moved into an apartment upstairs two months ago. He wasn’t entirely thrilled with the arrangement, though. When you live above the bar where you work, sometimes it’s hard to get, let’s say, breadth and depth in your life. “Some days,” he said, “I’m never leaving this building.” The flat was secured with a small padlock. The kitchen faucet had stopped working after he broke off the handle. I asked him if I could use the washer. Sure, he said, though he didn’t have laundry detergent and didn’t know how it worked—he’d never used it. (Dish soap, I discovered, is an acceptable alternative in a pinch.)

  It’s a charming town, I told him.

  “Well, I could show you the bad neighborhoods,” he said. “But this part of town, yes. Cluj and Timișoara are probably the more beautiful Romanian cities. Their old towns were preserved. Not like Bucharest, which was completely leveled and rebuilt.” Alex Two had been a work/travel lifeguard in Ohio. “People there were Catholic and conservative,” he said approvingly. “They respect authority. It was great!” Paul, who booked the place, doubled as a tour manager, and we compared notes on border crossings. His bands don’t even bother with Croatia, he said; the border guards are sticklers for what is called the “ATA paper,” the equivalent of a work permit, which costs about a hundred euros.

  The soundman Sergio was Catholic, thus missing his Easter “vacation” and not a little rese
ntful about it. He played cajón, of all things, with the opening act, alongside an acoustic guitarist and a singer in a Wasted Youth T-shirt. By showtime, he’d relaxed a little and told me he worked as a geologist for building and roads projects. A civil engineer, I clarified. “Yes, a civil engineer. Five years ago, we were turning down work in Bucharest because there was so much here. Now we would go anywhere!”

  It was a late club. Maybe it was a late town. Sergio’s opening act was due to go on at eleven p.m. on this Easter Sunday, and Alex One worried aloud whether people would know the show was starting so early.

  The next day I headed south into the Romanian heartland, over a ridge through a thick, obliterating cloud, then down into a wide valley walled with hills denuded by and speckled with sheep. Roadside vendors in one village sold blown glass on folding tables set up every hundred yards, like a head shop’s display of distended bongs. These were dirt-road towns where old men stood around, shadowed by stray dogs ranging in temperament from wolfish to craven. Between villages, hitchhikers and police traded stations beneath the ubiquitous storks’ nests. One village had a brilliant church shining in brass, brick, and copper. Outside the next, a monstrous doughnut of trash, tended by a bulldozer, slumped slovenly around a central fire. As I turned west, I began to pass castle ruins of medieval Hungarian provenance, a fortress church, fuchsia and lime houses tucked in between irregular mountains. A donkey cart slouched past men dismantling a roof. Driving conditions, I pondered while stuck behind trucks and flinching at kamikaze passing maneuvers, go a long way toward determining my opinion of a country. Traffic manners have emotional consequences.