G133: What Have We Done (14 page)

A stony lane curls its way up the valley alongside the stream, with willows and cherries in blossom the length of it. Here and there are tiny poor farms. The wild and its threat are not far away. It is called the Tatar Valley, a name which suggests that, as an impoverished valley on the very edge of things, it was somewhere for the poor, marginalised sub-groups of the Tatars, not good enough for Romanians. Over the poultry runs, single, tattered chicken wings hang from willow sprigs to keep the hawks away.

Little strips of meadow are slipped into the foot of the valley. Most of the ground is too steep to plough or dig, so steep, one farmer told us as we passed, that the upper plough horse would always be tumbling down over the other if you tried. The forest is a solid wall above the lowest few yards of the valley, full of oaks and new beeches, their leaves alight with spring green. High cherry trees were blazing like lanterns among them. Thrushes and blackbirds sang in the shadows. Pied wagtails dipped and bobbed on the river stones. It is bear and wolf country. Three years ago, one winter night, 150 sheep and eight dogs were killed by a pack of three wolves about fifteen miles from here, outside Rona de Jos. Teo was carrying a pepper spray in his pocket, more for the dogs than anything else. ‘I have been bitten too often in places like this.’

We asked at the little houses for Mărtinuc’s family. ‘Yes, further up’ – that waving, flicking hand gesture meaning ‘not here, up there, further away’.

Finally we came to the place where they said Mărtinuc’s daughter lived. Three dogs on chains guarded it from any approach. Each dog had worn to dust the ground within the reach of its chain. A tiny
cabin, scarcely a house, stood a yard or two inside the fence and gate, with a ragged broken henhouse and pig house beside it. A haystack stood in the yard and chickens picked around the straw. There was no spot of level ground. Five yards from the door of the house, the wall of the valley rose into the forest. Washing hung on a line attached to a cherry tree.

It was a beautiful corner but no one would live here unless they had to. And thinking of those lovely level square metres of land by the river, where a family could spread itself in ease, and with the knowledge that whatever they planted would grow in the alluvium on which they lived, you might well feel that envy and hatred was inseparable from being stuck up here in the beauty of this hard and impoverished place.

We stood at the gate and a middle-aged woman came out of the house, short-sleeved shirt, strong arms, an unquestionable presence about her, and we began talking. She was Ioana Grad, Mărtinuc’s daughter, married to Ioan Vlad who was away this afternoon working on the railway. Her son-in-law was on the far side of the yard, clipping the wool from an old ewe, with his wife and baby daughter beside him. He saw us, stood up and slowly walked over, the pair of longbladed cutters in his hand, held out in front of him, the blade upright, his fist around the handle resting on his thigh, his eyes under a peaked forage cap intently fixed on us as we stood there outside the yard, talking to the woman across the gate, not crossing the all-important boundary. The last words of this family to Ileana Pașca were in my mind. There is no mistaking the big, swinging, self-establishing manner of a fighting man and we reacted as animals do in these circumstances, looking down and away, no meeting of those eyes, no encounter with the cloud of defensive, frightened aggression he was emitting, nor with the cutting blades held out in front of his thigh.

We talked about the EU, how no grants were available for farmers with less than fifty sheep, or farms as tiny as theirs; about the valley, their goats, the weather and the bears. ‘Is that why you are here?’ Ioana asked. ‘Because Ioan was bitten by the bear?’ ‘Ah yes,’ I said,
‘because of that.’ And with this talk the air of threat and distance started to shrink away. The son-in-law Stefan lowered his blade and Ioana asked us into the house. She had just baked an apple cake. Would we have coffee?

We sat beneath a small Day-Glo icon of the Holy Family at a table two feet square, covered in a plastic lace cloth. There were geraniums in pots growing in the window. They had tried to grow medicinal herbs here, but the plants had never thrived. They had made thirty carts of hay on the high meadows last summer and brought them down on sleds over the snow in the winter. They felt they had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Unlike other, richer families from these valleys, they don’t have the resources to go west within the EU to earn the sort of wages that can buy cars, build new houses and change lives. ‘But you want to know about Ioan and the bear?’

It was 1991, the fourteenth of September, the Day of the Holy Cross. At ten in the morning, Ioan Vlad was looking after the cows only a few yards from the farm on the edge of the forest when a bear ran out between them. After Ioan hit it with a stick the bear put a thumb into Ioan’s mouth and grasped his face with his other claws. ‘With that one hand the bear broke all the bones in Ioan’s face. He did not pull his face out but he broke it all,’ his wife said.

Ioan, as they were fighting, with a presence of mind it is difficult to imagine, put two of his own fingers in the bear’s nostrils so that it couldn’t breathe. The bear dropped him and ran away. Ioan was screaming with pain and the neighbours came running from farther up and down the valley. His head was soon swollen to the size of a melon and they carried him down to the village, past the Pașcas’ house to a place beyond the river where there was a telephone and an ambulance that could take him to hospital. ‘All his body was torn because the bear had played with him. In Cluj, he had seventy-two operations on his face and still now he cannot eat easily because some of the bones in his head are still loose. And one of his eyes can no longer have any tears.’

Is that why they have so many dogs chained up around the edge of
their place? ‘Well, for Gypsy thieves, for foxes, for wolves, for hawks. You never know. For bears. For strangers. For our enemies.’ Then looking out of the open door, to the lane and the stream and the steep far wall of the valley, filling the space of the doorway, no more than twenty yards away, ‘Do you know how much I like to talk like this?’

Ioan returned from work, one half of his face visibly slumped and broken. ‘Everything you see on my face was down,’ he said. ‘You could see the other side of this eye. And this is the eye from which tears will not come now.’

While Stefan and his wife Maria returned to clipping the urine-coloured wool from the old sheep, Ioan took me to see his cow and as he talked he held her lip tenderly and sweetly between the fingers of his hand. ‘She is a lovely creature, isn’t she?’ he said.

Such gentleness and such intimacy in a world where violence seems as natural as the blossom on a springtime tree. If Homer made the
Iliad
from such a row, he also knew that there is no boundary between violence and love, that the two coexist in the same hand, the same face, the same slip of contested territory. It is not that these valleys are particularly violent places; only that in such a deeply corrupt society, with government ministers and officials siphoning off subsidies meant for farmers, dodgy bank deals, the abuse of power by local bigwigs, magistrates, the police and even the postmen, all living in a culture of mutual scavenging, taking whatever their power will allow them to take, violence is the resort of the dispossessed. That is true whether it is the bear threatened in his diminishing forest or the poor marginal farmers for whom flat and fertile land at the foot of the valley looks like a paradise of riches. Was it so inconceivable, in this place high up in the valley of Tătarului, that you might attack and kill another man you hated because he owned something which you thought was yours? Would you not feel justified in killing him because his ownership of that land itself felt like a kind of murder? It is a logic of claim and revenge that Achilles would have understood. It is what happens in a place where revenge is the only justice.