Victory Square (43 page)

“Wouldn’t we all like to know?”

Later, that Libyan rumor would become accepted truth, though in fact none of the snipers was ever caught, and no one could find records of a second Libyan flight landing at Pankov—now Tisa—International.

The same rumor, also unsubstantiated, ran through Romania during the confused days of the revolution and afterward.

Also in chapter thirteen is a lengthy telegram written by the country’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, recounting a meeting with

V L. Musatov, “Deputy Director of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” The text of the telegram is amended from an original “Memorandum of Conversation with the Ambassador of the SRR [Socialist Republic of Romania] in the USSR, I. Bucur,” dated 21 December 1989 and found online at the wonderful Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The original is from Musatov’s perspective, whereas my fictional version is told from the ambassador’s side, but in both reality and fiction, the leaders believed that the Soviet Union, or at least the Warsaw Pact, might be behind the uprisings in their countries.

The gunfight between “terrorists” and soldiers at the Hotel Metropol is also taken from reality, when the “terrorists” shooting into crowds were caught at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Bucharest. They shot from hotel windows, down to the street, and army units fired back. As in my fictional version, they were not captured.

But the most obvious parallel between this story and reality is the trial of the Pankovs in chapter twenty-five. The spoken words of the trial are taken, with few changes, from a translation of the Ceau§es-cus’trial that was published in many papers during late 1989 and early 1990, made available by the United States government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service. I’ve made adjustments for clarity, and to fit into my nameless country’s story, but it’s largely taken from the actual proceedings. My major change, besides the obvious, is the use of prosecution witnesses; there were none in the Ceau§escus’trial.

There are many other parallels. In Romania, it was from the western town of Timi§oara that the revolution first sprang, and the dissident pastor Laszlo Tokes was at the center of its movement. Also, the Timi§oara revolution was subsumed by the more powerful machinations of ex-communists in the capital, Bucharest. The reasons and explanations I give in
Victory Square,
however, are entirely my own.

Even the story of the Russian Fyodor Malevich has a real-life parallel in the swirl of rumors during that period. In the days leading up to the Romanian Revolution, tourist traffic from Russia, entering through the Ukraine, grew abnormally. According to an auto mechanic in the north of the country, one Russian car, carrying four men, broke down on its way to Timi§oara. The Russians brought it to the mechanic, and as he worked on it the man discovered four Romanian officers’uniforms in the trunk.

But as I say,
Victory Square
is fiction.

For those interested in the true story of Romania under communism, along with its violent and sometimes awkward shifts toward democracy, you could do no better than to go to the works of Dennis Deletant, the foremost English-language scholar of Romanian culture and history. I owe a great debt to his efforts, as well as Edward Behr’s breathless account of the Ceau§escus’story,
Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus
(Villard, 1991).

—
O. Steinhauer
Budapest, October 2006