On Christmas night, stuck in freezing fog at the Austro-Hungarian border, I had telephoned my best Budapest friend and spoken across an insufferable line, fed with near-worthless forint coins cadged from a friendly guard. ‘Have you heard?’ said Ferenc, ‘Ceaușescu has been assassinated.’ The choice of word seemed odd. ‘Murdered’ wouldn’t do, of course, in the circumstances. ‘Killed’ would have been banal. ‘Executed’ – too correct. And Ferenc always chooses his terms with meticulous care. No, a baroque dictator who was already a prisoner, and an ex-tyrant, had somehow been ‘assassinated’. I took the first of many resolutions not to resort to Transylvanian imagery. Yes, there had been King Vlad, known as the Impaler, reputed to drink blood as well as spill it. Every writer and subeditor in the trade was going to be dusting him off. Still, I found myself wondering just how Ceaușescu had been ‘assassinated’ after his capture. A stake through the heart? I had read that the chief of Ceaușescu’s ghastly Securitate was named General Julian Vlad, but I was determined to make absolutely nothing of it.
A sorry-looking shopfront, which was in one of the radial streets off Calvin Square in Budapest, housed the Alliance of Free Democrats (SDS), Hungary’s main opposition party. It resembled the headquarters of every ‘movement’ I’d ever visited. The stickers and posters in haphazard pattern gave promise of an interior of clanking duplicators, overworked telephones and bearded young men in pullovers. One of the stickers was fresh and blazing with colours – the national colours in fact. It read: TIMIȘOARA=TEMESVAR. To any Hungarian, it summoned an immediate, arresting image. On the plains of Transylvania, near the town the world now knows as Timișoara, the Hungarian patriots of 1848 were scattered and cut down by the Czar’s Cossack levies, lent as a favour to the Austrian emperor. Near Temesvar, as the Hungarians call it, the national poet Sandor Petofi lost his life. At nearby Arad, the thirteen generals who had sided with the 1848 revolution were put to death. Now, under its Romanian name, this lost city so well-watered with patriotic Hungarian gore was again an emblem.
Today, the first day of the post-Ceaușescu era, the office was crowded to the doors with people of every class and category, standing around wearing intense expressions. Most wore buttons reading simply: TEMESVAR. Others displayed the more reflective symbol of two ribbons, one in the Hungarian colours and one in the Romanian, arranged over a black mourning stripe. Nationalists and internationalists, they were all waiting for the Romanian border to be declared open so that they could get to the stricken field of Transylvania and the wounded city of Timișoara. A volunteer convoy was in formation, with taxi drivers, workers, housewives and students offering to donate, or to transport, food and medicine. As so often in the course of the astounding Eastern European revolution of 1989, people seemed to know what to do. And they seemed to know, what’s more, without being told. My companion and I, who continually needed and sought advice and instruction, felt this keenly.
The Romanian Embassy in Budapest, scene of numerous protests (some of them cynically encouraged by the nearly defunct Hungarian Communist Party), had offered exactly the wrong kinds of reassurance. ‘No problem,’ said the greasy officials who had just run up a hand-stitched ‘National Salvation’ banner on the balcony. Had the border, sealed by Ceaușescu, been reopened by his death? ‘No problem.’ (I find these the two least relaxing words in the lingua franca.) Visas were said to be obtainable at the border. Or at the embassy, of course, with a wait on the cold pavement. And there would be a fee. In dollars. In cash. For some reason, we couldn’t give hard currency to these soft, shifty figures, who were still dealing with the public through an insulting grille.
As the ten cars, one truck and one taxi that together comprised the Hungarian dissident convoy prepared to set off, I got an idea of how excited and intimidated they were by the whole idea of Transylvania. We got a short and cautionary talk from Tibor Vidos, an SDS organizer, who specialized in taking the romance out of things. ‘There’s to be no driving at night once we cross the border…We pick up the blood supplies before we meet at the checkpoint… No car is to pick up hitchhikers, however innocent-looking they are. Secu men have been taking lifts and getting out while leaving plastic bombs behind… ’ Carrying blood to Transylvania? No, too glib an image and indecent in the context. Dismissing Dracula once more, I went for a swift meal with Miklos Haraszti, author of The Velvet Prison, a book which relates the trials of writers and intellectuals in the ‘goulash archipelago’. He had been to Timișoara/Temesvar years before, to see the now-famous Father Laszlo Tokes, and had been detained and tortured by the Secu. Haraszti comes from Leninist stock; his Jewish watchmaker parents left Hungary for Palestine in order to escape fascism, but quit Palestine in 1948 – the year of the proclamation of Israel – in order to come back to a people’s republic. His own disillusionment had taken him through Maoism before fetching him up with the majority of Budapest’s ‘urbanist’ intellectuals into the ranks of the liberal SDS.
Haraszti told us of something that had just happened to the convoy in front of ours. ‘One of the volunteers was pulled from his car, not by the Secu but by the Romanian crowd. They said he looked like an Arab, and that Arab terrorists had been helping Ceaușescu’s gangs.’ This was an instance of the grande peur that infected Romania in those days, and that was to poison the inaugural moments of the revolution. Not a single Arab corpse was found, nor a single prisoner taken. Yet the presence of Libyans, Syrians, Palestinians in the degraded ranks of the Secu was something that ‘everybody knew’. The cream of the jest, as Haraszti went on to say, was that the ‘Arab-looking’ volunteer seemed exotic in appearance because he was a Budapest Jew. ‘One of the few New Leftists we still have. He probably does sympathize with the PLO.’ Nobody knew what had become of this hapless comrade, because the convoy had been too scared to stop. As we concluded our meal, the waiter brought us the last of several predictions about the time at which Hungarian TV would transmit video pictures of the Ceaușescus’ execution. At that stage, excited rumour was calling for an actual sequence of the bullets hitting the couple. Neither he nor his customers could wait for the event. I vaguely recalled seeing television pictures of the dead General Kessem after a coup in Iraq in the colonial fifties, but couldn’t otherwise think of a precedent for a prime-time ‘assassination’ of a fallen leader. ‘The genius of the Carpathians’, as Ceaușescu characterized himself, hogged the stage until the very last.
I describe this hesitation on the border of Transylvania because it shows, even in small details, the way that Hungarians felt Romania to be inpartibus infidelium. Romania is much larger than Hungary, by virtue of having absorbed so much of it, and Ceaușescu was the perfect ogre neighbour from the point of view of the regime. Not only did he run a terrifying, hermetic police state, the weight of which was felt disproportionately by the Hungarian-speaking minority, but he flaunted a mad, grandiose, population-growth policy, which overtopped the megalomania of Mussolini. And, as he raved from his balcony, it seemed to ordinary Hungarians that the Bucharest crowd supported him, at least passively and at least in his ‘Greater Romania’ fantasy. I asked Haraszti if this had made him feel nationalist in turn. ‘The fact that the Romanian revolution was started by Hungarians,’ he said firmly, ‘is a miracle.’ Almost at a blow, the mutual xenophobia had been dispelled. Neither regime could ever again easily mobilize or distract its people by fear of the other. This is no small issue for Hungarian democrats, who remember that their country took the Axis side in the stupid, vainglorious hope of ‘redeeming’ lost Magyar territory, and instead lost most of its Jews and decades of its history as well as its national honour.
As the convoy got on the move, and as people were allocating and being allocated their tasks and their cars, I was brought the news that Queen Elizabeth II had rescinded her award of the Order of the Bath to Nicolae Ceaușescu. There were polite Hungarians who felt that I might wish to know this, and who added that the decision was taken not a minute too soon. Bloody hell, I think, it’s like Chesterton’s definition of journalism – telling the public that Lord X is dead when the public didn’t know that Lord X had ever been alive. I’m sure most people didn’t know that Ceaușescu was sporting a Windsor honour. And, by the way, for what was the Order bestowed? The brute got ‘most favoured nation’ status from the United States, the Order of Lenin from Moscow, the moist thanks of international bankers for exporting all his people’s food, pay-offs from Israel and the Arab League and solidarity from Beijing. He was the perfect postmodern despot – a market Stalinist.
Departure was announced for two in the morning, so that all night-time driving could be done on Hungarian territory, and everyone was ready to move out on time, and did move out, without being told. Our car was the property of a man who normally drove a beer-truck, and looked like it, and drove like it (the image of the SDS as an intellectual and elitist party is misleading). The freezing fog had thickened. At first light, after frequent stops and regroupings, and a detour for the blood pickup at the border town of Gyula, all the cars met again at the border-point. Here people started to get nervous. It would have been a good thing to have had a leader or a commander. We knew that the previous convoy had been shot up and had lost one of its Bohemian-looking members to the liberated populace.
The Romanian border guards were in the very act of revisionism when we turned up. A large blank space on the wall spoke eloquently of yesterday’s Conducator, as Ceaușescu got himself called, and various party and state emblems were being hurriedly junked. Still, the place wore the dismal, dingy aspect of a little machine for the imposition of petty authority. Everything from the lavatories to the waiting room was designed for insult, delay and humiliation, and there was no one-day, quick-change cosmetic to disguise the fact. The unctuous, ingratiating faces of the guards who were ‘making nice’ for the first time in their lives, only reinforced the impression they were trying to dispel. Eager to please, they overdid their hatred of the Secu to whom they had deferred the day before. They even suggested that we not proceed. ‘They are firing from cars. There is no law, no authority.’ Without orders, they had no idea what to do. When I said, quite absurdly and untruthfully, that I was given ‘clear instructions’ from the capital that visas were free of charge today, they gladly waived the fee. There was a pathetic relief in the gesture of acquiescence.
Quitting the stranded, irrelevant guardhouse, and holding perhaps the last stamps that read ‘Socialist Republic of Romania’, we fell back a few decades. The Hungarian town of Gyula had amenities, as Americans say. Shops and telephones, restaurants, street lamps. Across the border there were herds of pigs and geese, horse-drawn wagons and wayside hovels. The first cars to be seen were waiting in an abject queue, not because of the upheaval but because today was the day when the exiguous petrol ration was issued. The people at the side of the road looked like caricatures of Eastern European misery, in their shapeless bundles of coats and scarves. But there was a palpable lift in the atmosphere even so, because every person raised a hand in a V-salute at the sight of the Hungarian flag (or was it our reassuring Red Cross?). These villages had been the targets for ‘systematization’, perhaps the nastiest political neologism since ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia, and were saved from bulldozers and unheated tower blocks where the water pressure sometimes got as far as the first floor, and where the official cultural activity was praise for the Conducator and the denunciation of fellow sufferers.
At the city of Arad, our first major stop, we found what we were to find everywhere, which was that the centre of activity had shifted to the gates of the hospital. The Conducator’s cops had been vicious and thorough in their last stand, whether from panic or from sheer professional pride it is hard to say.
In the street an army lorry screamed to a halt and I heard the sound of boots hitting tarmac. This forbidding noise heralded a squad of uncertain young soldiers, steel casques reassuringly askew, who held up traffic with large gestures before entering the crowd and fraternizing. In the Romanian attitude to the army there was something of the Stockholm syndrome. The soldiery had changed sides at the last minute, and some of the brass (including the excellent-sounding General Militarescu) had been in touch with Party dissidents when it was dangerous to do so. Thus there was a popular willingness to smile, to repress unease, to cry, ‘Army and People’. It became an article of faith that the soldiers who had fired on crowds on Christmas Eve were not really soldiers at all, but Secu devils in disguise. To have armed men on your side at long last, for whatever reason, seemed worth the sacrifice of pride. So the classic photograph became that of old women handing scarce food and drink to tank crews. Which indeed happened, showing in the oddest way that Brecht was right when he said that every tank had a mechanical weakness – its driver.
The beer-truck chauffeur, who seemed a stranger to exhaustion, had had the idea of stuffing his back seat with bales of Hungarian newspapers, including the daily organ of the Communist Party he despised. To stand in the streets of Arad and hand out free copies of yesterday’s Budapest editions was to court instant popularity. Every hand reached for a copy, probably because a good deal of Hungarian is spoken in these parts and probably because there hadn’t been any newspapers for days, but also and undoubtedly because the front page bore the death masks of Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. Watching people rivet themselves to this photo-exclusive, I again fought down the impulse to Transylvanian cliché. They had to see the dead monster, had to know he was dead. The Ceaușescus’ ‘trial’ had been a shabby, panicky business with unpleasantly Freudian overtones (Elena: ‘I was a mother to you all.’ BANG!), conducted by a tribunal, which feebly refused to show its members’ faces; but their execution had a galvanic effect on the morale of Transylvania and a correspondingly lowering effect on the fighting spirit of the Secu.
All had been festivity on the way to Arad, and as we left we met bystanders who were happy and eager to point the way to Timișoara. Wayside saluting and waving seemed inexhaustible. It was like being in Orwell’s Barcelona, or in Portugal in 1974, or even like being on the skirts of a liberating army. But everything changed as we approached Timișoara. There were fewer people on the roads, and they seemed less keen and animated. As we found the outlying bits of the town, we noticed that our salutes were not returned. All the window-glass in the city seemed to have gone. Except for some flags with the now famous hole cut in the centre (a borrowing from Budapest in 1956), there were no signs of anything except shell-shocked, sullen wretchedness. I felt almost cheated. Here was the town of the resistance, of the revolutionary epicentre; the town that had lived up to 1848 – and won this time. Where were the garlands, the proud slogans, the maidens in national dress, the gnarled old men with fierce tears in their eyes?
How could I have been so romantic and vulgar? Timișoara was the scene not of a triumph but of an atrocity – a sort of distillate of twentieth-century horrors. The inhabitants had been strafed from the air like the people of Guernica. They had been shot down in heaps like the victims of Babi Yar, and buried like refuse in mass graves in the forest on the pattern of Katyn. Many had been raped and mutilated like the villagers of My Lai. Before he left on a state visit to, of all places, Iran, Ceaușescu had given explicit orders that the city be punished. This was his Lidice; his Ouradour. At least the people who had been through such a digest and synopsis of horror could tell themselves that they were the last carnage of the last European dictator. But this obviously was not much of a consolation on the day after.
Again, it was at the hospital that everybody gathered. Timișoara is a superficially uninteresting town with a dull, routine Stalinist design. The box-like buildings even have generic names stencilled on the outside: ‘Hotel’, ‘Restaurant’, ‘Cultural Centre’. It was a surprise to learn that the fateful, desperate demonstration in support of Father Tokes had taken place in Opera Square, because Timișoara doesn’t look as if it rates an Opera House. Opera Square, on the other hand, doesn’t disappoint your imagination of what a Transylvanian provincial city might boast after twenty-five years of philistine despotism. What a terrible place to die, I thought grotesquely, especially if you feared you might be doing it for nothing. On the other hand, a perfect place for concluding that you had little or nothing to lose.
We entered the hospital, and were led through a morgue which perfectly misrepresented the proportions of casualties. It contained one third civilians, one third soldiers and one third Secu men. I had come this far to see my first dead secret policeman – a great twentieth-century experience and only partly an anticlimax. He lay in his scruffy black livery, balding but thickly furred like some once vigorous animal, and looked alarmingly intact, with no outward mark of whatever violence had taken him. One of his companions, however, had been got at by the crowd and given a thorough kicking – the more thorough, by the look of it, out of frustration at the fact that he was dead. There was a pure hatred in the way that people spoke of the fallen regime and its servants. ‘Our first happy Christmas,’ said Dr Istvan Balos, without affectation, when I asked him for a reaction to the shooting of the Ceaușescus. Caligula once said that he wished the Roman mob had only one head so that he might decapitate them all at one stroke. The Romanian crowd wished only that the Ceaușescus had had a million lives so that everyone could have a turn at killing them.
Just before I left New York for Eastern Europe, I had been talking and drinking with Zdeněk Urbánek, original signatory of Charter 77, friend of Václav Havel and Czech translator of Shakespeare. Most of our conversation concerned the problem of vengeance, and the argument over amnesty and prosecution in newly emancipated Prague. Urbánek took the view that there should be no retribution, and his analogy was from Rome also. Remember, he said, that Julius Caesar is called Julius Caesar even though the eponymous character disappears after a few scenes and about fifteen minutes. ‘But after he is murdered his influence remains over everything, pervading everything. That is the result of blood and the effect of revenge.’
The elevated sentiments of Prague and Bratislava were alarmingly remote from the Timișoara morgue. On a slab neighbouring that of the brutish-looking Secu man lay a dead young soldier, his eyes wide open and very blue, and on adjacent tables were two older civilians – man and wife, we were told – who had worked at the hospital. Their corpses were being processed in some ghastly way that involved the stench of formaldehyde. If it hadn’t been for this stench, in fact, I might have been spared the moment I had in the corridor outside. My nostrils only started to wrinkle just as I felt my soles getting sticky, and the smell of drying blood hit me precisely as I realized what was gumming up my feet. A bloodbath has taken place here, I thought. A fucking bloodbath. All these people, killed like rats after leading such miserable, chivvied existences. Lifeblood on my shoes.
‘We have given the Secu another twenty-four hours to give up,’ said Dr Balos, ‘after which they are subject to a popular tribunal and a summary verdict.’ As he was announcing this he dropped his voice. ‘Do you see that man there?’ – he indicated a tall and rather handsome man in a hospital housecoat who was talking easily with colleagues – ‘He’s one of them. We can do nothing now, because there is no law. But soon… ‘ He spoke as if he was still living under occupation or dictatorship.
There appeared to be a delayed reaction in the Romanian psyche. It took the form of believing not every rumour, but every rumour that had the morbid odour of pessimism or foreboding. This was where Caesar had his posthumous revenge. There were no apparitions exactly, but an unusual number of people said that they thought the trial video was a fake, the corpses phoney, the ‘live’ Ceaușescu a double. In his madness, it seems Ceaușescu had commissioned a few doubles for purposes of security (or perhaps of perverted vanity or repressed self-hatred). This is only a step away from having food-tasters and granting audiences while perched on the can, but it wasn’t hard to believe about the Conducator. I began to soften in my anti-Dracula resolve when I learned from Transylvanian historians that Ceaușescu had forbidden all mention of the Bram Stoker book or the legend. The idea that he still walked seemed implicit in his entire cult of death and in the haunting effect of his undead minions.
In Budapest, Miklos Haraszti had spoken with approval of the decision to kill the Ceaușescus and with enthusiasm of the proposal to ban the Communist Party. ‘It proves that it’s a real revolution,’ he said decisively, adding after a pause, ‘in the dirty sense as well.’ As Ryszard Kapuściński once remarked, ‘Hunger revolutions are the worst.’ The people of Romania and especially of Transylvania were starved in every sense of the term. Kept on short rations, kept in the dark, in the cold, kept from anything that could be called culture, screaming with boredom and groaning with humiliation; forced to applaud a mad gargoyle for whom they felt puke-making hatred. In Timișoara one could see all the bitterness and futility as well as all the grandeur of a hunger revolution. One could also get premonitions of the disagreeable things that lay ahead for the country – the crowd-pleasing decision to restore capital punishment, the hasty ban on the Communist Party (the only such ban in the 1989 European revolution), the evasive answers on the make-up and origin of the Council of National Salvation, the awkward hysteria about the body count, the ambivalence about the place of the army in politics. People were – are – hopelessly rattled and furious and confused.
I had had the vague idea of finding out the true body count of the Timișoara massacre, because cynical reporters were already saying that there ‘hadn’t really been all that many’ casualties. Nettled at this, many citizens of the town were staunchly reiterating unbelievable death tolls. I sickened of the task, not just because of the stench of blood around the morgue but because it seemed vile to be disputing the statistics of something evidently awful and sacrificial. It gave one the same rather creepy feeling that is engendered by an argument with Holocaust revisionists about Dresden or Auschwitz. I cleaned the soles of my shoes, remembered the packets of Hungarian coffee sugar I had pocketed on leaving Budapest, distributed them to some ecstatic and unbelieving children and made ready to leave the hospital. In the reception area, patients were sitting dully watching the television. All that could be seen on it was a test card. But they sat passive and fascinated, gazing at the flickering, improvised logo that read: Romania Libera.
