A Writer's World (58 page)

There he rides, indomitable but only just recognizable. He has a jolly greyhound at his heels, and seems to have lately slaughtered a lion. With
his right hand he grasps the reins of his prancing horse, but his left hand is raised exuberantly high above his head: and in it he is holding a wine cup.
‘Nazdrave!’
the Madara Horseman cries to history – ‘Cheers!’ And
‘Nazdrave!’
, down the centuries, this country of wine, pride and suffering has loyally cried back.

They seem to talk a lot about tunnels in Bucharest – tunnels through which licentious aristocrats gained access to their mistresses, tunnels offering escape to dictators, webs of tunnels beneath the lost Jewish quarter – and after a few days in the city I felt as though I was groping through a surrealist labyrinth myself.

Physically there are certainly holes and burrows enough in this capital, much of which feels like one vast building or demolition site. There are the mole-like fetid staircases to the Metro, the gloomy corridors which run Piranesi-like through the Supreme Court, compelling their anxious multitudes towards the dim-lit chambers of their fate, or the narrow lanes of the Lipskani quarter, like Turkish bazaars, where the traffic is squeezed between stalls of jeans, paperbacks and anoraks and the air is opaque with a blend of rock and quavering folk music. And metaphysically there is the maze of puzzle and paradox through which all Bucharest speculations seem to stray. Which is Moldova and which Moldavia? What is the difference between Iron Guardists and Legionnaires? What is the trans-Dneister issue? Who were the Szekels? What used to be called Kronstadt?

When there is light at the end of a Romanian tunnel, it often turns out to be a will-o’-the-wisp. Ask why a building appears to be half-abandoned, and you will be told almost indiscriminately that it has fallen into neglect, was damaged in an earthquake, was knocked about during the revolution or has never been finished. The other day I was given six reasons why I might not enter a particular museum: (1) it was being rebuilt; (2) there had been a robbery in it; (3) an inventory was being conducted; (4) it was
about to be visited by President Mubarak of Egypt; (5) it had lately been visited by President Niazov of Turkmenistan; (6) it was closed.

Raffish but devout, crumbled but still stately, with women tram-drivers smoking on the job and elderly ladies crossing themselves as they brave the downtown maelstrom; with sellers of medicinal roots and peasants in high fur hats; with filmic rogues disappearing conspiratorially down hotel corridors; with sweet small churches to visit and the megalomaniac monuments of Ceausescu to marvel or shudder at; with head-scarved babushkas sweeping leaves, and the cabs of railway locomotives prettied up with lace curtains: exotic despite everything, Bucharest is an everyday performance of everything most headily Balkan, with Latin overtones all its own.

Sometimes the municipal allusions seem to come from another age altogether. One hears of just such unacceptable frontiers and discontented minorities as Chamberlain once discussed with Hitler. Romanian schools have been attacked, somebody assures us in the pages of
Romania
Libera
, by Russian-speakers in Tighina. The fate of all Europe, says somebody else, depends upon the solution of the trans-Dneister issue – ‘the territory east of the Dneister is the ultimate frontier of Latinity!’ One can be a European, we are told by somebody else again, ‘only in the tradition established by Christianity’. I would hardly have been surprised to learn that, rather than an impending President Mubarak or a retreating President Niazov, it was the Sultan of Turkey who was keeping me out of the museum.

On the other hand, here I sit at the dinner table with a jolly crew of acquaintances, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Moldavian Riesling (as against Moldovan, I think), to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band in the chandeliered dining room of the Central House of the Army (1912, architect D. Maimarolu). I have poked my nose with impunity into several such unpromising-sounding bastions of the Bucharest Establishment. At the Writers’ Union, for instance, which I assume to have been for several decades a tribunal of communist orthodoxy, I wandered bemused and unhindered through the accumulated cigar smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confreres. And at the Military Hotel, strolling in, I was befriended without question by a most formidable captain of the Romanian Navy, wearing over his gilded uniform a leather coat like a U-boat commander.

It is a queer mixture of sensations. On the one hand, nearly everybody is welcoming. On the other hand, few seem altogether frank. An insidious suggestion of caution hangs over conversations here, even among bold sea captains, to remind one that many of Ceausescu’s apparatchiks are still running this country and that the conviction of liberty is tentative still. It could hardly be otherwise. Bucharest’s communist despotism was different in kind from those in Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia, Prague or East Berlin. It was a Latin despotism. It was often at odds with the Soviet Union. And its rulers were more like crazed tyrants of the Orient than normal Stalinists.

Even more than historical grievances, Ottoman complexities or the awful example of Yugoslavia down the road, the ghosts of this appalling couple still muffle and muddle the affairs of Bucharest. It is only five years since they were executed; a whole generation grew up under their aegis, and it shows. Time and again young people have said to me: ‘We are learners, we are only beginning.’ They mean, I suppose, that they are only now setting out on the path to join the ordinary world, and I never have the heart to wonder aloud how soon they will get there. This is the city where Ionesco learnt his trade, and I see now that in his plays he was reflecting not only the irrational tragi-comedy of life in general, but the particular topsy-turviness of his native land.

At the time I assumed the fall of the Ceausescus to be something definitive in Romanian history, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the end of dreams and nightmares, the opening of the road to the prosaic. After a few days here I am not so sure. An immense boulevard, still unfurnished (and its myriad fountains dry) forms the central axis of Ceausescu’s notorious new Bucharest. Visually, at least, its architecture seems to me not much worse than the sillier examples of post-modernism in the West, and parts of it are already being humanized by the general bric-à-brac and commotion of city life, so that I can imagine it in another twenty years being essential to the flavour of Bucharest.

Even the vast palace which crowns it is becoming familiar, if hardly homely. Its scale and ugliness are inexpungible. If you can imagine the impact of the Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome magnified twenty or thirty times, you can have some idea of the clout of the Parliament Palace (né Palace of the People,
i
.
e
. Palace of the Ceausescus). In living space it is surpassed in size only by the Pentagon; in sheer volume only by a rocket assembly hangar at Cape Canaveral.

It isn’t finished either, yet tourists go there, conferences are held in its immense salons, and both houses of parliament are expected to move in one day. In 1990 the revengeful mob burst in here and slashed the very carpets in their hate and triumph: yesterday what most seemed to interest my cicerone was the fact that the curtains had been made by nuns. When I left the building I noticed, curled up outside the ceremonial doors, an elderly dog snoozing in the chill sunshine.

So to the stranger’s eye, at least, Ceausescu’s follies have become organic to the place. Perhaps it is the nature of Bucharest to absorb everything, simply adding even the wildest excess to its historical repertoire. I walked directly from the Parliament Palace to the Patriarchal Cathedral, a lovely little building on a hill near by, shimmering with the silver and lamplight of Orthodox Christianity. In it I found a long stream of pilgrims standing in line to kiss the sacred icons. At the head of this patient queue a tall twitchy priest sprinkled the faithful with holy water, and erratically among them a mad-woman straight from the Bible paraplegically staggered, occasionally patted on the shoulder by sympathetic Christians.

Was I really in twentieth-century Europe, I marvelled as I emerged from the holy half-light? It will be a long time, I fear, before the young people of Bucharest join the rest of us, before the curtain goes down on this civic theatre of the absurd.

In 1992, when the communist regime came to an end, there were only fifty cars in the capital, Tirana, and pictures of Skanderbeg Square, the heart of the city, showed it all but empty, with only a few disciplined pedestrians crossing its enormous ceremonial space. By the time I got there in 1996 40,000 cars swarmed the Tirana streets (a third of them Mercedes, almost
all of them second-hand, most of them stolen in Germany) and Skanderbeg Square was a sort of maelstrom. It contained a mosque, a clock-tower, a museum, a cultural centre, a functional-modernist hotel, a national bank, a fountain or two, sundry Italianate government offices, dozens of street stalls, an equestrian statue of the eponymous fifteenth-century hero Skanderbeg and two extremely noisy funfairs. Countless men of all ages wandered around offering black-market exchange rates. Innumerable children rode the funfair rides. Around the edges of the place scores of cafés were in a perpetual kind of frenzy, and round the back an immense street market pullulated in a welter of fish-stalls, butcheries, vegetable carts and stacks of old bicycles. It was rather as though the great square of Marrakesh had been worked over successively by Ataturk, Mussolini and Stalin, and then handed over to the management of the Tivoli gardens at Copenhagen.

In the evening the entire population of Tirana seemed to emerge for the twilight
passeggiata
, strolling up and down the main avenue, sitting on the edges of fountains, milling about the funfairs, wandering haphazardly across the highways apparently under the impression that there were still only fifty cars in the city. The noise then seemed to me a supremely Albanian noise – the hooting horns of a thousand newly acquired and uncertainly driven automobiles, the whistles of distraught traffic cops and the deafening beat of mingled rap, rock and Balkan folk-music. I loved the louche insouciance of it all, ever-ready smiles from the citizenry, inescapable suggestions of roguery, the immense hum over everything, the quirks and surprises. Sometimes I felt a small dry kiss on my arm and turned to find a gypsy child irresistibly importuning me for cash. When I testily shooed off a young man in T-shirt and jeans, supposing him to be yet another currency tout, he shyly introduced himself as one of the President’s bodyguards, trying to warn me away from the Presidential front gate.

I walked one night into the huge pyramidical structure which had been designed to be a museum of Enver Hoxha – in his own lifetime! – and was now converted to more secular uses. It was strikingly lit up after dark, and swarmed all around by crowds of idlers, up and down its ceremonial steps, in and out of its basement café, eating ice-creams and loudly talking. Irrepressible urchins climbed its smooth concrete buttresses in order to slide down again. What should I find in the main hall of this tumultuous building, this hilariously discredited monument of egotism, but four young people exquisitely performing Ravel’s string quartet?

Poor old Hoxha! What would he think? Ogre though he was, I rather regretted his posthumous elimination from Tirana. For most foreigners, after all, he was Albanian No. 1. I did visit his house, in the formerly sealed-off official quarter known as The Block – a respectable suburban-style part of town from which, in Hoxha’s day, ordinary citizens had been entirely banned. Even in 1996, as I wandered the tyrant’s garden paths I was followed always by an armed guard, and when I stooped to pick a flower from a bed of Michaelmas daisies I thought I heard behind me (although perhaps I was fantasizing) the click of a safety-catch. Was it OK for me to take a flower? I asked the young man over my shoulder, just in case; but instead of shooting me he had an expansive gesture of permission. Take the lot, he seemed to be saying. They were only Friend Enver’s.

I wished Hoxha’s museum were still his museum, and in particular I wished that his immense bronze statue still stood in Skanderbeg Square (where its plinth did remain, beside one of those funfairs, and was tottered over by enterprising infants in need of parental guidance). So I was excited when somebody told me that the statue still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had originally been cast. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. Like most Albanian factories the Monuments Factory had gone out of business, but a watchman directed us to a windowless warehouse apparently sealed off for ever. ‘Enver’s in there,’ he said.

We circled this gloomy mausoleum searching for keyholes to look through or doors to peer under, and in the end I found a spyhole between the bricks. There Enver was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed like something not very interesting in Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the forefront of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. ‘I pissed on it,’ he complacently recalled, and you can’t get more positive than that.