Where'er I May Romanian
Where'er I May Romanian The plane, overbooked, was crawling with irritable travelers. After some seat reshuffling, I squeezed by a burly, hostile-looking man and settled in. I figured on an...
...It was," the man told me, "the happiest day of my life...
...My, how the crowds had cheered, even though the United States had refused to admit Romania to NATO...
...He made me think of certain qualities that I had let slip away: a love of discovery, a reverence for the masters, an unprofes-sionalized dedication to knowledge...
...He worked "for my bread" until 5 o'clock, after which he fed himself fiction, history, and art until he could stay awake no longer...
...At sea, he was permitted to have 40 kilograms of personal material, and 30 of those he reserved for books...
...My seatmate brought back to me the horror of it all, how the dictator and his miserable, murderous wife had suffocated Romanian citizens day and night, in quest of a perfect totalitarianism...
...And where had he been, when news came of the regime's collapse...
...Curious, I decided to attempt conversation: "Kind of cold in here, isn't it...
...Don't people read her because of her political associations...
...Eventually, he informed his captain, who informed the rest of the men...
...So he was in his bunk, fiddling with a shortwave radio, when he heard that the Ceausescus had fled...
...As the plane descended—my friend was, amusingly, a nervous flyer, though he had traveled to the far corners of the globe by ship—I thought of the chestnut "Travel is broadening...
...The man and I wrestled over our shared armrest for about five minutes, until I gave up...
...He had come from Bucharest, and that led to topics Romanian...
...When the drinks cart came around, I heard him say, "Gin and tonic," in an accent I couldn't place...
...I figured on an unpleasant flight...
...Ibegan to pepper him with ques-tions—about Bosnia, Homer, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, American letters (Cheever he admired), the quirks of Communist rule ("You will be disappointed," he confided, sorrowfully, "that Lipat-ti's brother was for 20 years ambassador to France, a pet of the regime...
...Indeed," he answered, and there ensued seven of the most interesting hours I have ever spent...
...Perhaps, but they ought to anyway...
...In time, the dark name of Ceaus-escu came up, and he began—slow-ly at first, then with gusto—to speak of life under communism: its brutality, its abnormality, its terrors large and small...
...Isabel Allende...
...I had forgotten, sort of, how bad it was...
...With her, I could live anywhere...
...I said...
...He had served—and still served—as an electrical engineer aboard ships...
...Jay Nordiinger...
...His big plan, years ago, was to join the merchant marine and escape to America...
...I mentioned Clinton's recent trip to Bucharest...
...He went on at engrossing length about Julio Cortazar, scribbling the names of his books for me on a napkin...
...A bad character, but an enormous literary talent...
...That is, he had read everything, thought about everything, seen (through his voyages) everything...
...But two days before he set sail, he met a woman—Monica, an English teacher—and "suddenly, the prison house was bearable...
...Yes, he knew of him, cherished him, and had at that moment a set of recordings by Lipatti in his duffel bag...
...They murmured and grinned, then laughed and shouted, then wept and sank to their knees...
...Yes," the man said, "but we know we'll get in, and we were overjoyed to see the American president—not the individual, understand, but the idea...
...He had devoted his life to teaching himself languages and traversing the world's great literature...
...In the strangest of all places: the middle of the ocean...
...The Iron Curtain crumbled not 10 years ago, yet the Soviet bloc can seem as distant as the Ottoman Empire...
...How about that buddy of Castro," I asked, "the Hundred Years of Solitude guy...
...He was a particularly keen student of Latin American literature and had translated four or five of the more important novels into Romanian...
...I would start safe, cultural: Dinu Lipatti (a pianist, who died young in 1950...
...He could not believe his ears— thought it was a hoax, or a mistake, or his own hallucination...
...After an hour or so, an astounding fact came clear: He knew everything...
...And so it is—for the British Museum, the Acropolis, and Victoria Falls, sure, but also for encounters with strangers, like Radu Niciporuc, who, for my money, is one of the most extraordinary people alive...
...He was afraid to speak to anyone about it, because "even at sea, they watched you, through their agents...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
