Sample:
Trees sprayed over with green paint to look fresh, fields filled with truckloads of frozen vegetables to look rich from the distance, whenever the Leader drove past them during his visits. Three hours of TV broadcasts per day Static noise before and after, not really disturbing anyone due to the power cuts immersing the streets into darkness. After school, studying at the light of a kerosene lamp. Helping parents with queuing for food rations. Crowded desolation of concrete deserts, filled with communist block flats Megalomaniacal industrial monsters exhaling into many layers of the atmosphere, but incapable of producing even a simple bookshelf that would not collapse within hours in a kid s room. Learning languages, so that during evenings spent in the dark, could listen to a battery-powered radio, to voices of foreign stations airing fascinating and dangerous truths Ears, too many of them, like living inside a Bosch painting, listening out for any accidental voicing of free thought.
Then the Romanian Revolution of 1989 - mentalities remained though, nationalism survived and flourished, leading to an ethnic pogrom just few months after the Revolution Even in 2006, people voted a WW2 fascist Romanian dictator into the Top 10 of great Romanians Corruption soared to unimaginable heights, old cliques took over new circles of power Even now, on the eve of joining the EU, there is only some hope that people will eventually, decades after the Change, enjoy the decent existence they were dreaming of...
All this, recorded by the senses of a Hungarian ethnic, a child during Ceausescu’s 70s, a teenager during the Romanian 80s, then a young adult in the post-Revolutionary 90s and a visiting émigré in the first years of the new Millennium
The author, having experienced the old and the new, that East and this West, including the schizoid Romanian version of the latter, takes the reader on a journey of observant personal glimpses into a surreal world, riddled with absurd paradoxes and dark undertones. Ghosts of the communist past, once in possession of powerful bodies, still shape that country s present and future with mighty, resilient mindsets and ideas
PORTRAIT
First, there was one ear.
Just the one, due to laws of optics that not even the absolute powers of the Party could alter. One visible ear, attached to a reasonably normal head with a face, the ubiquitous face, captured by some photographer's lens from a semi-frontal viewpoint, rendering the portrait benevolent, almost fatherly.
The portrait... which hung on the walls of every office and every classroom, hovering with that fatherly smile in the peripheral vision of pupils who stared at mostly terrestrial, sometimes hellish and very, very rarely heavenly things unfolding on or in front of the imposing blackboard. The portrait... which smiled at us as we opened any of our battered, often almost disintegrating schoolbooks, those books handed out at the start of the school year in a storage room filled with huge piles of amorphous-looking cellulose, where the smell of mould and fungi and rot in our very young minds helped create the mental image of not a fountain but a very, very old well of knowledge.
One of the key tasks in the first few minutes of owning that year's schoolbooks was to check the portrait. Not for any change in the smile or benevolence of the person immortalised on it, nor for any change in the age of that person stuck in a frozen moment ever since the heavily retouched shot exited in the 1960s some very central, very important photolab of the Party. The check had to be quick, then and there, to make sure nothing happened to the portrait on the often most intact page of the crumbling books.
Has anybody drawn anything on it, somehow, some time during the book's previous Autumn-to-Summer lifecycle spent with spreading spores of knowledge (or just ideologically altered lies) to its previous owner, was it altered during its Summer hibernation in the mouldy storage rooms - and somehow this has gone unnoticed? Had it been damaged, torn intentionally or otherwise? Or materialist-dialectic Heaven forbid, is it missing ? If yes, then report it immediately and get a replacement - so that one does not get accused with that unspeakable act of subversive vandalism, which had scary consequences.
But after a Summer spent by the stoic river, usually far from dangerous ears and mostly facing the sky packed to bursting point with ideology-free sunshine, there came one Autumn when the mouldy and rat-piss smelling room, that source of all the new school year's certain angst and possible revelations, turned out to hold piles upon piles of previously unimaginable surprises.
Some books were new, some survived Summer hibernation again as collections of pages held together by just the cohesion force of the thoughts therein - but all now came with a change beyond our imagination. The untouchable portraits changed in the small pile of new books. It was also replaced in the old books
It had two ears.
Two ears on a fully frontal portrait of an alien-looking creature, the result of a new photo shoot which came 20-odd years after the first one. Two ears on a bizarre combination between the result of photochemical processes leading to non-ideological silver crystals, which could faithfully only depict that much aged man in front of the lens and the results of a heavy retouching job.
It represented perfection, which had to mean, obviously, two ears untouched by the laws of optics - in every book, on every wall. The monumental cost of reprints, replacements of zillions of framed benevolent portraits in every possible size did not matter, showing unequivocally and symbolically just what bionic arms could the Regime flex when it wished to alter appearances of any kind.
Watched from a distance that does not reveal the heavy retouching, behold - a flawless portrait of a flawless man, the immaculate Leader, who shaped and will forever shape an equally flawless, model society.
Not just more ears for overhearing dangerous thoughts voiced by careless, unsuspecting people, but also an illustration of the desperate strive to sustain a fake image of a darker reality and latter strive surviving very much to this day in the new Romania.
HOME
My home town, Marosvasarhely a medieval city, former capital of Transylvania, comfortably resting in the valley of river Maros, in just one of the many valleys which spread themselves on the map like half-open protecting hands so often not protecting enough, but at least able to soften the sounds of thunderstorms and too numerous battles into a gentle rumble that used to travel with and reverberate along the many rivers of that bruised land
It had seen very turbulent and often blood-red waters flow from the mountains, pass under its walls and when not enjoying its occasional, well-deserved contemplative rest by the river, was busy withstanding many unpredictable howling storms brought to that valley by Nature and Man over the centuries
The old city walls are still standing, layers of the more recent past expanding around it in all directions. Old graveyards on the high hills, villas of old and new aristocracy the multi-coloured mixture of stone and bricks and inevitably, concrete having flown from those heights, like some artificial lava flow spanning and changing over many centuries and many miles, some parts of it coagulating into a glorious historical city centre and, having left there most of its colours to decorate it, the remaining grey concrete flow continuing further down, following the river Maros, gradually aging and sedimenting into monochrome deserts of communist blockflats then, just before completely settling, expiring, its edges finally solidify into the shape of a monstrous chemical plant on the edge of the city beyond which, the untouched green land lies next to the river, the two of them reminiscing over the more distant centuries certainly only they can remember.
My home on the edge of the historic city centre, enduring without complaints since the 1840s the regimes and changes history brought around it, comfortably resting its back against the hill which suddenly rises steeply, stopping for short rests allowing other layers of houses on higher ground to be built. There was also the river, just a few minutes walk away, a place where suddenly the multicoloured noise of the city changed to green stillness.
All this, sitting pretty much right in the middle of Transylvania, where eminently non-fictional creatures have been spilling and consuming blood for too many centuries, in broad daylight, unfortunately totally immune to garlic, casting onto those hills and plains of ever-changing colour very long and dense shadows which persist to this day in political life, in the ethnic tensions arising from the still surviving echoes of annexing the formerly Hungarian territory to Romania and in the collective psyche only in the last few years freed from the most recent non-fictional, demented, but so calculated Evil.
