Romania's New Darkness
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
LETTER FROM BUCHAREST Romania's New Darkness By Ruth Ellen Gruber Bucharest On Halloween, a beautiful and unseasonably warm fall day, I was bitten by a dog as I strolled past the...
...Both seemed unfazed that he had tried to take a chunk out of my calf...
...Finally, obviously to get rid of me, one of them wrote down the name and number of a woman who, when contacted by the doctor I saw later, denied any knowledge of either the women or the animal in question...
...Her monthly salary, she said, was the equivalent of $30—exactly what I had just paid in a Cluj shop for an astrakhan hat, or approximately what it would cost to fill a car's gas tank...
...Every few minutes "cheerleaders" would give signals and the hall would leap to its feet, as if propelled by springs...
...they intensify the city's pervasive anarchic air of danger and aggressiveness...
...Those were the days of Ceausescu's personality cult...
...Since the heat in many apartment blocks is supplied from centralized heating plants, many who did pay their bills also suffered...
...Like others, she told me many people have a feeling of nostalgia for the Communist past...
...My assailant, a small black canine of indeterminate breed, was being walked on a leash by two young women...
...Idealized portraits of him hung on the sides of buildings, andnewspapers printed paeans andpompous poems in his honor...
...Everyone would clap rhythmically and chant praises of their leader until, with a double-handed motion reminiscent of a baseball umpire, he would cut the crowd off in mid-chant...
...Bucharest is full of dogs, and only a minority are on a leash...
...quaint old ladies feed them pasta, and they are pictured on postcards and calendars...
...The young woman from Cluj described a sense of despair that holds young people in a grip they can't shake...
...For the majority, the full shops are a kind of torment...
...Bucharest boasts some fine restaurants, clubs and cafes, plus a crop of shiny-bright McDonalds...
...Once, in the early '80s, I interviewed a functionary from the Agriculture Ministry and asked him about food shortages...
...Count Dracula...
...Packs of dirty, rough-looking strays roam the streets everywhere, from the fancy downtown boulevards lined with foreign boutiques to the endless rows of drab apartment blocks and the seedy alleyways of small crumbling houses...
...Romanians have lost confidence in themselves and are very pessimistic," he explained...
...In the Athenae Palace Hotel (today turned into a Hilton), the 25-watt bulbs made tiny, circular islands of dim light in the otherwise pitchblack corridors...
...Salespeople wore fur hats and sheepskin vests to keep warm and lit shops with candles...
...The only meat I had found on local shelves was gray, sweaty sausage and bags of frozen chicken feet, wings and backs...
...They nose through piles of rotting garbage, sun themselves in the middle of sidewalks, sit on curbs and in doorways, sleeping, scratching and staring sullenly at passersby...
...she wanted to know...
...It drives me crazy...
...Under Communism, I wanted to see certain goods in the shops, just to see them, to know they were there," said a middle-aged woman...
...But they didn't even find a candle...
...What does it matter...
...A Bucharest friend of mine who works for a company that markets toiletries described the economic situation in terms of his own experience: "Our shampoo sells for two dollars a bottle...
...We don't see where we can go...
...The other day the news came that an entire choir from a provincial Romanian city had sought asylum in Ireland...
...There was no escaping Ceausescu's oppressive presence...
...Tour operators advertise itineraries that combine "Dracula's Castle" with "Ceausescu's Palace"—the enormous pile, still unfinished in 1989, that the Romanian dictator built as testimony to his ego atop a vast razed section of central Bucharest...
...Before I arrived in Bucharest, I spent several days in Cluj-Napoca, the main city of Transylvania, where I attended a conference on the Holocaust at the Jewish Studies Institute of the local university...
...Last month a group of Americans held a Halloween party at Bran Castle...
...It looms like an ugly mountain over broad sterile boulevards lined with blocks of buildings erected at the same time whose facades are already stained and dirty...
...Like the celebrated cats of Rome, they help define the image of the city...
...Only occasional foreign tourists had vampires on their minds when visiting such sites as Bran Castle in Transylvania, which figures in Vlad the Impaler's life story...
...Today the shops are full...
...They say the best people have already left the country...
...A Bucharest museum devoted to Ceausescu displayed gifts heaped on him by foreign leaders...
...Ten years after Ceausescu's overthrow and execution by a firing squad Dracula is a big tourist attraction and the image of the historical Vlad is firmly fused with the fictional black-caped Count...
...The doctor told me not to worry, since the wound was superficial and the dog had been on a leash...
...Two or three years ago, people talked about light at the end of the tunnel...
...We came to Dracula's Castle but no one was home," I once read in the Bran guestbook...
...Unemployment is high, the inflation rate mounting, and the local leu has dropped precipitously against Western currencies...
...The goods are there, but I can't buy anything...
...The people simply can't afford it...
...In August and October, the government auctioned off hundreds of Ceausescu's personal items, including many of the gifts from foreign VIPs...
...His bloodthirsty career and family name, Dracul, inspired Bram Stoker's creation of his fictional vampire...
...They simply shrugged and walked on...
...With my jeans leg rolled up, I followed after them awkwardly for several blocks...
...There are no shortages in Romania," he told me, straight-faced, looking vaguely in the direction of my eyes...
...The Romanian darkness was special, thick, stygian...
...The palace, now used by Parliament and boasting a restaurant, is a major tourist stop and a popular backdrop for souvenir photos...
...The conference included a visit to a stark, isolated memorial in the windswept Transylvanian uplands commemorating more than 100 Jews from a village who had been murdered en masse...
...I vividly recall the "swishswish" sound of the Bucharest street as groups of people, almost invisible in their dark clothing, walked in the gloom and talked, it seemed, in whispers...
...My first visits were as a reporter during the Communist era, when Nicolae Ceausescu's megalomaniacal regime squeezed the country to the point where there was scarcely any electricity or heat and precious little in the shops...
...We simply don't have a future," she said...
...They went on for hours before packed audiences...
...While they claimed the dog had been vaccinated, neither would give me her name or phone number...
...I remember walking at night in downtown Bucharest during Christmas 1978 and literally being unable to see my hand held up before my face...
...Ceausescu has been imbued with a somewhat similar mythic status...
...One of them was a big black Buick given to him by President Richard M. Nixon...
...Now, people complain, no rules exist...
...Last year," an American musician friend who spends time in Romania told me, "they killed an Australian tourist...
...Not far away, I bought a carved wooden figure of Vlad the Impaler in full medieval regalia that was simply labeled "Dracula...
...But feral cats amid ancient ruins add to Rome's charm...
...But the Dracula horror story itself was virtually unknown in Romania a decade ago...
...The rest of the world seemed very far away: When Soviet Party chief Yuri V Andropov died, the main television news broadcast carried the report as a one-line brief, after 10 or 12 minutes devoted to agriculture production and Ceausescu's daily doings...
...Nevertheless, I began a series of antirabies injections...
...But the shops and lights are largely a veneer...
...Despite the hardships, the repression, the constant secret police surveillance, life under Ceausescu was, as she put it, "safe" as long as you followed the rules...
...They knew they wouldn't starve," she said...
...The government is tainted by corruption, inefficiency and infighting...
...Perhaps there were delays in distribution...
...And it featured composite paintings representing him as the culmination of a long line of Romanian national heroes, among them Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for The New Leader, based in Italy...
...Psychological attitudes here are really a problem," the social worker said...
...Afterward, I got into conversation with a young journalist from a local newspaper...
...I've been coming here, on and off, for more than 20 years, and I have never felt comfortable...
...Today there is plenty to buy in Romanian shops and open markets...
...LETTER FROM BUCHAREST Romania's New Darkness By Ruth Ellen Gruber Bucharest On Halloween, a beautiful and unseasonably warm fall day, I was bitten by a dog as I strolled past the Continental Hotel in the heart of Romania's capital...
...Horses and carts still ply country roads, and many farmers can be seen tilling the rich earth with horse- or ox-drawn plows...
...Why should we remember massacres and things that happened more than 50 years ago, when we here today don't have enough to eat...
...I attended several of his speeches...
...Atnight the glowing store windows and neon signs make the city seem attractive and alive...
...People had jobs, they had homes, they could raise a family...
...In Bucharest, an acquaintance of mine involved in social work agreed...
...Many, if not most, Romanians have little hope of being able to purchase much of what is on display...
...People say they are ashamed to be Romanian...
...Winter is the best refrigerator," was one of the slogans, with families keeping their perishables on balconies and windowsills...
...There is a huge and growing gap between the tiny elite who drive fancy cars and shop in Benetton and the vast majority of ordinary citizens...
...Feral dogs in Bucharest do the reverse...
...A cold snap in October left hundreds of thousands of city dwellers without heat because they couldn't afford to pay their bills...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 13
