The Devil Never Sleeps (10 page)
Read The Devil Never Sleeps Online
Authors: Andrei Codrescu
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I
am of the school that says life isn't worth beans if something interesting doesn't happen every few hours. This school is ancient: Heraclitus and Sappho both belonged to it, but there is little or no record of it because the school abolished itself many times over the course of history and the Platonists destroyed all references to it. Plato and his gang were from the other school, which maintained that if
anything
interesting happened, it was a disaster bound to alter everything for the worse. The only things that happened, according to them, happened a long time ago and everything after that was anticlimactic.
am of the school that says life isn't worth beans if something interesting doesn't happen every few hours. This school is ancient: Heraclitus and Sappho both belonged to it, but there is little or no record of it because the school abolished itself many times over the course of history and the Platonists destroyed all references to it. Plato and his gang were from the other school, which maintained that if
anything
interesting happened, it was a disaster bound to alter everything for the worse. The only things that happened, according to them, happened a long time ago and everything after that was anticlimactic.
We Heracliteans beat up on the Platonists whenever we see them skulking around the agora: The only drawback after that excitement is that tedium returns. We swing between tedium and terror but have some terrific moments in-between. Take yesterday in Tulsa: I met the manager of a drugstore photo shop who pointed out an old man leaning on a knobby cane before a rack of hunting magazines. “Yesterday,” the photo manager said, “he brought in a stack of 1920s photographs of ballerinas. I asked him about it and he said that he was the artistic director of the Kirov Ballet in the twenties. He lives in one room in a flophouse now with all these pictures and God knows what else.”
The photo manager paused as we both contemplated the awesomeness of
that “God knows what else.” Knobby canes, silk scarves, Trotsky's billetsdoux, brittle locks of hair inside tarnished gold medallions, frayed slippers, crumbling flowers, a whole skeleton perhaps, belonging to the greatest ballerina of all time, the sad nineteen-year-old Lillova who disappeared without a trace one day ⦠. All this time, the old man leaned perfectly still before the magazine rack, as if posing for our fantasies. “He's waiting for his pictures,” the photo manager said, “it will be another two hours but he won't let them out of his sight.” I thought about waiting for two hours too, but I already had my pictures.
that “God knows what else.” Knobby canes, silk scarves, Trotsky's billetsdoux, brittle locks of hair inside tarnished gold medallions, frayed slippers, crumbling flowers, a whole skeleton perhaps, belonging to the greatest ballerina of all time, the sad nineteen-year-old Lillova who disappeared without a trace one day ⦠. All this time, the old man leaned perfectly still before the magazine rack, as if posing for our fantasies. “He's waiting for his pictures,” the photo manager said, “it will be another two hours but he won't let them out of his sight.” I thought about waiting for two hours too, but I already had my pictures.
The Devil in
Eastern Euope, One of
His Ancestral Homes
Eastern Euope, One of
His Ancestral Homes
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ell, it happened again. Everyone on the airplane was speaking Romanian. The blindingly blond Germans in front of me. The two French businessmen with identical crew cuts. The British captain. The Austrian stewardess. The American girls with Bibles returning from having collected souls in Bucharest. The satchel full of souls was under the seat in front of them. How was it possible? If they are speaking Romanian, I told myself reasonably enough, why don't I understand what they are saying? Well, actually, I
did
understand what they were saying, only it was not sensical. They spoke in bursts of poetry, in streams of oddly jumbled words. This happened to me once before when I went to Romania to cover the revolution: I came back hearing people speak sudden words in Romanian, a kind of code stuck by the secret police into the speech patterns of unsuspecting foreigners. Anyway, this time it was different. There is no revolution going on, and the secret police are too busy devouring themselves to bother much with echolalic philology. There were only two possible explanations: There is a little bit of Romanian in every Latin-based language, including English, and my reconditioned ear was picking it up. Or,
every
language is really Romanian and it is only the funny faces that people make which makes it come out in English or French or whatever. I may be speaking Romanian right now, for instance, and it is only your familiarity
with my rhythms that makes you think I'm somewhat understandable. Be that as it may, it was not until I landed in Atlanta that the world reassumed its proper sound. But even if it hadn't, there is really nothing wrong with it. The world could do worse than to speak Romanian: It's a gentle, poetic, and generous language. After a week there, I felt quite inspired. The souls collected by the evangelical girls in the satchels in the seat in front of them babbled to each other in low murmurs. When released, they would doubtlessly teach everyone this dulcet Latin tongue.
ell, it happened again. Everyone on the airplane was speaking Romanian. The blindingly blond Germans in front of me. The two French businessmen with identical crew cuts. The British captain. The Austrian stewardess. The American girls with Bibles returning from having collected souls in Bucharest. The satchel full of souls was under the seat in front of them. How was it possible? If they are speaking Romanian, I told myself reasonably enough, why don't I understand what they are saying? Well, actually, I
did
understand what they were saying, only it was not sensical. They spoke in bursts of poetry, in streams of oddly jumbled words. This happened to me once before when I went to Romania to cover the revolution: I came back hearing people speak sudden words in Romanian, a kind of code stuck by the secret police into the speech patterns of unsuspecting foreigners. Anyway, this time it was different. There is no revolution going on, and the secret police are too busy devouring themselves to bother much with echolalic philology. There were only two possible explanations: There is a little bit of Romanian in every Latin-based language, including English, and my reconditioned ear was picking it up. Or,
every
language is really Romanian and it is only the funny faces that people make which makes it come out in English or French or whatever. I may be speaking Romanian right now, for instance, and it is only your familiarity
with my rhythms that makes you think I'm somewhat understandable. Be that as it may, it was not until I landed in Atlanta that the world reassumed its proper sound. But even if it hadn't, there is really nothing wrong with it. The world could do worse than to speak Romanian: It's a gentle, poetic, and generous language. After a week there, I felt quite inspired. The souls collected by the evangelical girls in the satchels in the seat in front of them babbled to each other in low murmurs. When released, they would doubtlessly teach everyone this dulcet Latin tongue.
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ach of my returns to Romania, since the first, in those heady days of December 1989, has been radically different. I have stayed reasonably the same but my compatriots have not, and to the extent that they have changed, they have granted me a new identity each time.
ach of my returns to Romania, since the first, in those heady days of December 1989, has been radically different. I have stayed reasonably the same but my compatriots have not, and to the extent that they have changed, they have granted me a new identity each time.
That first time, two days after the Ceau
escus were murdered, I went back as a journalist but also as a pilgrim in search of my lost childhood. I'd left at nineteen, in 1965, and I'd come back a grown man. Upon leaving, my mother and I had been made to sign papers renouncing our Romanian citizenship. In 1989, an American, I interviewed scores of people bursting with euphoria, wallowing in rivers of unbound speech after years of silence, caution, and fear. Thanks to the powerful news organizations I was representing, I had access to all the transitional figures of the new powers, as well as to the dissidents basking in the limelight of victory. It didn't take long, a few days at most, to realize that many of the new figures were not so new, and that the victorious dissidents were as divided from each other and from reality as they had always been. Thus, new became “new,” and the revolution became “the revolution.”
escus were murdered, I went back as a journalist but also as a pilgrim in search of my lost childhood. I'd left at nineteen, in 1965, and I'd come back a grown man. Upon leaving, my mother and I had been made to sign papers renouncing our Romanian citizenship. In 1989, an American, I interviewed scores of people bursting with euphoria, wallowing in rivers of unbound speech after years of silence, caution, and fear. Thanks to the powerful news organizations I was representing, I had access to all the transitional figures of the new powers, as well as to the dissidents basking in the limelight of victory. It didn't take long, a few days at most, to realize that many of the new figures were not so new, and that the victorious dissidents were as divided from each other and from reality as they had always been. Thus, new became “new,” and the revolution became “the revolution.”In my birth city of Sibiu, in Transylvania, where buildings were still burning
as we made our way in, I met one of my old high-school friends, Ion V. He was an editor at
Tribuna,
the communist paper, which was then in the process of changing its name, like most institutions in Romania, hoping by this cosmetic maneuver to give an impression of real change. Ion fed me lavishly in his home, and then, at midnight, he drove me through the frozen streets of Sibiu, back to my hotel. On the way, we stopped in front of the building housing
Tribuna.
Ion asked me to wait in the car while he went in to get the next day's edition of the newspaper. I waited alone in his Dacia, hunched low in the front passenger seat, overwhelmed by a not-so-unreasonable fear. My colleagues were all in Bucharest, while the situation in the country was still far from settled. The Ceau
escus were dead but reports of fighting persisted. Authority in Sibiu was uncertain: the army was conducting arrests, looking for “terrorists,” and sporadic shooting was still heard. As I waited for Ion, a man went running as fast as he could past the car, pursued by two civilians with drawn guns. Ion took a very long time. When he returned at last, after more than an hour, he was drawn and tense. He'd had to wait, he said, for the printers to finish the paper. I had the impression, however, that he had been discussing me with his superiors. My paranoid sixth sense told me that I had come very close to being either killed or arrested, and that Ion had been arguing on my behalf. I have never felt more like an exile, an American and a Jew, in my life. Whatever the essence of the argument, I am certain that one side had argued for my extinction on the grounds that the enemy of the moment was the foreigner, in the form of returning émigrés, the CIA, the KGB, and the Western media. Ion, however, was far from sure that he'd “won,” and he advised me to be careful. In the following days, Securitate reorganized along nationalist lines, birthing such entities as “Vatra Romaneasca,” whose stated enemies were, you guessed it, Jews, émigrés, the Western media, foreigners. Ion was clearly a sympathizer, if not a founder, but I was his friend.
as we made our way in, I met one of my old high-school friends, Ion V. He was an editor at
Tribuna,
the communist paper, which was then in the process of changing its name, like most institutions in Romania, hoping by this cosmetic maneuver to give an impression of real change. Ion fed me lavishly in his home, and then, at midnight, he drove me through the frozen streets of Sibiu, back to my hotel. On the way, we stopped in front of the building housing
Tribuna.
Ion asked me to wait in the car while he went in to get the next day's edition of the newspaper. I waited alone in his Dacia, hunched low in the front passenger seat, overwhelmed by a not-so-unreasonable fear. My colleagues were all in Bucharest, while the situation in the country was still far from settled. The Ceau
escus were dead but reports of fighting persisted. Authority in Sibiu was uncertain: the army was conducting arrests, looking for “terrorists,” and sporadic shooting was still heard. As I waited for Ion, a man went running as fast as he could past the car, pursued by two civilians with drawn guns. Ion took a very long time. When he returned at last, after more than an hour, he was drawn and tense. He'd had to wait, he said, for the printers to finish the paper. I had the impression, however, that he had been discussing me with his superiors. My paranoid sixth sense told me that I had come very close to being either killed or arrested, and that Ion had been arguing on my behalf. I have never felt more like an exile, an American and a Jew, in my life. Whatever the essence of the argument, I am certain that one side had argued for my extinction on the grounds that the enemy of the moment was the foreigner, in the form of returning émigrés, the CIA, the KGB, and the Western media. Ion, however, was far from sure that he'd “won,” and he advised me to be careful. In the following days, Securitate reorganized along nationalist lines, birthing such entities as “Vatra Romaneasca,” whose stated enemies were, you guessed it, Jews, émigrés, the Western media, foreigners. Ion was clearly a sympathizer, if not a founder, but I was his friend.I returned in June of 1990, ostensibly for our twenty-fifth high-school “reunion,” an event that had quotation marks around it from the very beginning. A few days before, the so-called miners of the “new” Iliescu regime had beaten and killed students in University Square in Bucharest, where they had been protesting inside a self-declared “neo-communist free zone.” This event, known as the “mineriada,” lost Romania whatever capital of goodwill it had accrued during the December “revolution,” revealing to the world the true nature of this “revolution,” which had been nothing but a Securitate
coup d'état. After the flood of negative publicity, Romania was desperately in need of good press.
coup d'état. After the flood of negative publicity, Romania was desperately in need of good press.
My reception, this time, was outlandishly generous. On hand to record our high-school gathering were news teams from NPR and ABC's
Nightline
. (This was, of course, a hook for a story on the situation in Romania, not my personal press corps.) Ion handled the details of the “reunion” like a patriotic event. Unfortunately, the “reunion” was able to draw only four of my former colleagues, and their overly cautious spouses. The rest of our classmates, I was told, had either left the country, were unavailable or sick, or had died. This is not inconceivable, because the black-hole decades of the seventies and the eighties had indeed decimated Romanians in that fashion. But of the four remaining colleagues, I recognized only two. I don't have the greatest memory and I didn't harbor much affection for my high-school days or my classmates.
Nightline
. (This was, of course, a hook for a story on the situation in Romania, not my personal press corps.) Ion handled the details of the “reunion” like a patriotic event. Unfortunately, the “reunion” was able to draw only four of my former colleagues, and their overly cautious spouses. The rest of our classmates, I was told, had either left the country, were unavailable or sick, or had died. This is not inconceivable, because the black-hole decades of the seventies and the eighties had indeed decimated Romanians in that fashion. But of the four remaining colleagues, I recognized only two. I don't have the greatest memory and I didn't harbor much affection for my high-school days or my classmates.
I will not go as far as to say that the two unknown ones were clones or replicas, but this conclusion would not have been untenable. Our discussions were political, charged, and barely civil. They were all defenders of Iliescu's brutality against the students. I felt on the other side of a huge gap that resembled, to put it charitably, the gap between students and government in 1968 in America. I had been on the side of students then and I was on the side of students now. My own generation, in Romania, had turned into the establishment, while I'd stayed the course. But this is, as I've said, charitable, because there were darker aspects to the whole business. For our party at the Emperor of the Romans Hotel, my friends had hired a folk band. With all their holiday-dressed families present, the occasion began quite festively. Soon, however, the happy drinking songs turned into nationalist anthems. One by one, the Hungarians and Germans in the hotel restaurant got up and left in protest. But some other tables of Romanians joined in the singing. Once more, I was being exempted. I was, true enough, a Jew, a foreigner, a Western newsman, but I was forgiven. In the name of childhood, of youth, of poetry, of fame, and the national self-interest, I was temporarily granted citizenship.
The third time I returned, in the spring of 1996, was to scout locations for a movie based on my mother's life, and to receive the literature prize of the Romanian Cultural Foundation. With me was Ted Thomas, my cowriter and director. We had hoped to make this a low-key visit, but fate intervened once more to make the visit timely. The prize-giving ceremony was in itself
a political event, because the foundation prizes were all given to émigrés who had made names for themselves abroad. President Iliescu was conspicuously absent but former prime minister Petre Roman, now an opposition leader, was just as conspicuously present. Clearly, two competing political realities had begun to coexist. The strongly pro-Western faction led by Roman was making a stand against Iliescu's pro-Russian gorbachovists.
a political event, because the foundation prizes were all given to émigrés who had made names for themselves abroad. President Iliescu was conspicuously absent but former prime minister Petre Roman, now an opposition leader, was just as conspicuously present. Clearly, two competing political realities had begun to coexist. The strongly pro-Western faction led by Roman was making a stand against Iliescu's pro-Russian gorbachovists.
It appeared that I was doomed to return at historical moments. Of course, I'd missed numerous “historical” moments, but this one was, as it turns out, genuine, sans quotes. The most important election since 1989 was in progress. In the Bucharest apartment of my friends Denisa Comanescu and Nae Prelipceanu, I watched as their friend Victor Cioarba won the mayoralty of Bucharest against Iliescu's candidate, the tennis player Ilie Nastase. This was a referendum on Iliescu and it signaled the end of the crypto-communist status quo in Romania. Cioarba subsequently became prime minister in the Constantinescu cabinet, the first noncommunist, freely elected post-December Romanian government.
The day of the evening when we watched the returns on television, Ted and I had gone to polling places to watch the voting. The feeling in the country, even among that class of “average” people I had some contact with, mainly taxi drivers and voters at the polls, was one of cautious optimism. Romanians are effusive people, but even their greatest enthusiasms are tempered by an intrinsic knowledge of history, which has been rarely kind to them. The tension between the hopefulness necessary for going on and the organic knowledge of historical failure resolves itself in black humor and irony. Those qualities are the ingredients of survival, straws to cling to after the inevitable disappointments. Still, I felt a genuine belief that the new pro-Western leaders would alleviate the miserable economy with its insane inflationary spiral. The appropriate joke was that a man waits for his date in a coffee shop. She is late. When she appears, he says: “I've been waiting for you since coffee was two thousand lei.”
My friends in Sibiu were quite crestfallen after the elections. One of them, Titi Ancuta, had actually run for mayor of that city on the neo-communist ticket and had been soundly defeated. The election had also been a rejection of the nationalist ideology that animated Ion V. and his shadow friends. Without Iliescu, the nationalist side was lost. This time, my stay at the Emperor of the Romans was marked mainly by sincere questions from my friends about business opportunities. Titi wondered about the marketing of
a ski resort. My friends' depression about the waning nationalist cause had not lasted long because it'd been mainly political rhetoric, useful for holding on to the power they had accumulated during Ceau
escu's own brand of national-socialism. With renewed energy, Titi and the others were making a quick study of the rhetoric of business before throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the inevitable enterprise that now went by the name of “capitalism.” My friends were, happily for them, a little slower and more wary than some of the hard-core Ceau
escu “formers” who had been weathering the transition in Bucharest by stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and “investing” it in scores of new businesses, including nightclubs, restaurants, strip joints, car dealerships, and property abroad. I didn't quite know the dimensions of this at the time. This discovery was reserved for my fourth visit.
a ski resort. My friends' depression about the waning nationalist cause had not lasted long because it'd been mainly political rhetoric, useful for holding on to the power they had accumulated during Ceau
escu's own brand of national-socialism. With renewed energy, Titi and the others were making a quick study of the rhetoric of business before throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the inevitable enterprise that now went by the name of “capitalism.” My friends were, happily for them, a little slower and more wary than some of the hard-core Ceauescu “formers” who had been weathering the transition in Bucharest by stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and “investing” it in scores of new businesses, including nightclubs, restaurants, strip joints, car dealerships, and property abroad. I didn't quite know the dimensions of this at the time. This discovery was reserved for my fourth visit.Other books
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