Romania after the fall

By Chris Sullivan

In my twenty-two year-old mind, Romania had been little more than a gray country filled with gray people. I had seen pictures, mostly of old women in bread lines and soot-blackened men posed in front of mines and factories, but it wasn't a real place. Only two facts about Romania had ever stuck with me. One: that was where Dracula was from, and, two: it had a communist dictator during those decades when we were and weren't at war with half of the world.

In 1999, I traveled to Satu Mare, a city of 80,000 people in the northwest corner of Romania. My girlfriend, Hope, had joined the Peace Corps, and I was making my first trip to see the place that she had come to call her home.

After Hope received her assignment, I began reading Romanian history. I was startled by the stories of the Ceaucescus megalomania as well as by their secret police, the Securitate, and the way neighbor was turned against neighbor in one of the largest instances of state-sanctioned paranoia the world has ever known. After I arrived, Hope filled in a few more details and took me on a walking tour of her new city. Heading toward the city center from her apartment, one building dominated the horizon.

The central planning building rises like a jumbled mass of half-finished construction projects piled one on top of the other. The bottom half is shaped like a rectangle, but above the sixth floor, juts and zigzags appear, along with what look to be doors opening out into empty space. The Peace Corps volunteers call it the "Darth Vader" building since, from certain angles, the top floors possess a passing resemblance to the helmet worn by Luke Skywalker's father. The Vader building can be seen from almost anywhere in town, which was the idea when Ceausescu's engineers built it. In a humorous twist of fate, this monument to totalitarianism is now home to several of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) entrusted with the unenviable task of rebuilding Romania's economy. Hope spent two days a week on the eighth floor helping one of them learn the ins and outs of grant applications.

Darth Vader dominates one corner of a concrete-covered square. A dozen gray block apartment buildings form the border on three sides. I learned the original plan for Satu Mare was to tear down the old city and create a grid of concrete slabs. This square and these buildings were meant to be phase one of a planner's vision for a new Satu Mare.

A river held back by concrete dikes forms the fourth side of the square. The walls holding back the water are in disrepair and are covered with withered trees and brush. Teenage drug addicts lie in the brown grass and sniff paint thinner out of plastic bags, paint thinner being one of the few affordable addictions available.

During Ceausescu's reign, various ranking party members would visit Satu Mare to make speeches from one of the Vader balconies. It must have been quite a sight, thousands of people packed into the square, listening to a mid-level communist bureaucrat exhorting them to work harder while simultaneously extolling the virtues of tearing down their homes.

However, walking just three blocks north, I encountered the concrete square's polar opposite. Here, well-preserved gothic buildings line a space as old as the city itself, complete with as much green as the other square has gray. Traffic buzzes by at a frantic pace. I witnessed two occasions where wedding parties zoomed around the square honking their horns. Both times, the bride stood up through a sunroof and accepted the cheers and congratulations of the people on the sidewalks.

A well-manicured lawn sits in the square's center. A fountain runs along one side, and a monument to Romania's soldiers serves as a de facto meeting space for the town's teenagers and its elderly, groups that eye each other uncomfortably. During the handful of times I walked through this little park, it was filled with people. In stark contrast, the gray square three blocks away was filled only with the echoes of the few footsteps that rang off the gray slab buildings.

My girlfriend threw a party three days into my trip so I could meet her new friends and co-workers. The Americans were nice, but I was most interested in talking to the Romanians. One in particular seemed most interested in talking with me. His name was Bogdan. He and Hope worked together at one of the NGOs. Like many Romanian men, Bogdan was a chauvinist and referred to Hope as his "employee.” They were, in fact, equals, except when proposals were due, in which case Bogdan answered to Hope. But she had become acclimated to this aspect of Romanian culture and while she wasn't thrilled by it, her job was to help improve local business, not set the sex relations clock forward to Eastern Standard Time.

Bogdan and I found a common interest almost immediately, one that I've found to be of great help in any conversational lull with a European: soccer. He was disappointed in the performance of Satu Mare's professional team, a squad akin to one of our minor league baseball teams. He lamented the poor coaching and the laziness of some of the players. He sounded like any Mets' fan I might meet in a bar here in New York.

"It is true, you know," he said to me after we'd spent twenty minutes exploring the soccer avenue of conversation.

"What's true?" I asked.

"The stories you have heard," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, "about everyone spying on everyone else. My family and I, we did not, but for many it was the only way. I do not blame them, but that is why we have no trust now."

Hope had told me that this was common, this “everyone else was in on it but us" mentality. It is a culture of selective amnesia, especially given the fact that records clearly show that a vast majority of Romania's citizens, at some point, either willfully participated or were forced to become involved in the information-gathering processes of the Securitate. But people have repeated this little mantra so often that they have come to believe it. It is as if someone has smashed all the mirrors in this country, so that today, like their most famous celebrity export, Romanians have lost the ability to see their own reflection.

“Even the people in this room,” continued Bogdan, “there are things I could tell you about them.”

I tried to get more details out of him, but Bogdan had obviously moved on to somewhere deep within his memory. He was very quiet and far from the loud, opinionated sports fan with whom I had been speaking just a few minutes earlier.

I noticed that Hope's Khrushchev-era refrigerator was fast emptying of the night's drink of choice, Ursus, “the beer of kings.” I volunteered to go to the piazza to buy more, and, hoping to spark more conversation, asked Bogdan for help in carrying it back. I made sure he saw me flipping through my small stack of lei, the brightly-colored, inflation prone national currency, so he would know that he would not be asked to pay.

As we walked, Bogdan slowly returned to the vein of our earlier talk. He told me more about life under Ceaucescu, but he kept his voice low, as if the shadows were taking notes. He told me how the revolution had been co-opted by many of Ceaucescu's closest advisors, about how it wasn't really a revolution at all. He punctuated every sentence with a quiet laugh and a shake of his head.

We found an open kiosk at the south end of the piazza. In many parts of Romania, you can only buy a bottle of beer if you turn in an empty bottle, which I found to be an interesting, and highly effective, take on recycling. Luckily, Bogdan and I had brought twelve bottles from the party and were able to get as many full bottles in return. As we walked back, Bogdan became quiet again. I asked him about his work.

"It is good," he said. "We are able to help this city and the people. Hopefully, soon, Romanian business will be strong. And, hopefully, soon, Satu Mare will be at the forefront of that business movement. That day will mean great things for us. I look forward to that very much."

Lowering his voice again, he said, "But if I could go to America, I would."

If I could go to America, I would. The lights of the Darth Vader building appeared over the top of Hope's apartment complex. Bogdan bit his lower lip and picked up his pace. He walked back inside several paces ahead of me. The party was still going strong. After a few minutes, Bogdan awkwardly migrated to another conversation. He didn't say another word to me the rest of the night. By 1 a.m., everyone had gone home.