Bucharest Tales, by Lidia Vianu (ed.)

Published in 2014 by Contemporary Literature Press (the online publishing house of the University of Bucharest), Bucharest Tales is part of the New Europe Writers series, the aim of which is to collect stories and poems relating to a particular city (others are Tales from Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Ljubljana).  New Europe Writers’ aim is to ‘capture the spirit of a united Europe.’  Much of the editorial work and translation was carried out by the University’s MA Programme for the Translation of the Contemporary Literary Text.

Editor Lidia Vianu describes Bucharest Tales as ‘a collection of stories and poems about old and new Bucharest, written by Romanian writers of two generations, and by foreigners who have come to know Romania and its capital,’ though while it provides a connecting thread, despite the title Bucharest does not always appear.  The book presents a mix of new voices and well-established writers such as Dan Lungu and Mircea Cărtărescu, and as there are over 50 contributions in about 260 pages most are short.  Some are extracts from longer works, such as Mike Ormsby’s chapters from Never Mind the Balkans, Here’s Romania.  Where appropriate the Romanian and an English translation are presented in parallel.  Contributions were not always originally written in Romanian: quite a few were written in English, and a couple are translated from other languages.

With so many voices there is bound to be a multiplicity of takes on Romania.  If there is an overarching theme it is interrogating past history and the changes it has wrought: these include the meaning of independence, the shift from monarchy to fascism to communism, then capitalism and the EU; and the processes of demolishing and rebuilding both society and the physical structure of the city.  Modernisation is considered a mixed blessing, bringing with it corruption, wide disparities in wealth, heavy traffic, homogeneous buildings with a loss of style, fringe beliefs – in general the atomisation of society.  City life can be surreal, and wry humour used as a coping mechanism.  There is some nostalgia for the old times, when people knew where they were even if they experienced shortages and less personal autonomy.

It is always valuable to be exposed to different perspectives, but Bucharest Tales would have been improved by including more Romanian writing and less by non-Romanians.  The latter may be valid as a depiction of Bucharest, but it does not always have the feel of an insider’s lived experience.  A few of the contributors, judging by their biographical details, have had little connection with Romania, making one wonder to what extent the selection was based on easy availability of material and permission issues.  Even with those qualifications, the prose aspects are generally engaging, though some of the poems feel weak in comparison.  Nearly all the writers included were still alive at the time the anthology was compiled, which reinforces the contemporary feel and Makes Bucharest Tales a useful window on that contradictory city.

București NonStop / Bucharest NonStop

București NonStop, directed by Dan Chișu (2015), intercuts a number of stories over the course of a night, linked very loosely by a small 24-hour convenience shop (the titular NonStop) opposite a block of flats in a dingy part of Bucharest.  The shopkeeper, Achim, watches people drift by, his cynical exterior hiding a compassionate heart.  Unlike in Clerks (1994) the shop is not the focus, though one suspects the influence of the name Quick Stop Groceries in Kevin Smith’s film on NonStop, and Achim’s back-to-front baseball cap echoes that worn by Silent Bob.

The heart of the story is the block itself and a handful of its residents.  A prostitute who wants to leave the city to see her child is driven to one last trick before she goes to the railway station without giving her pimp his 50% cut.  A pair of low-level criminals who scam motorists by staging accidents have to charge their battery before setting off.  A taxi driver who comes to collect the prostitute lends them his cables.  While waiting for her at her appointment he suspects her of intending to skip and phones the intimidating pimp, leading to violence.

A cheating boyfriend tries to get his girl back but cannot get into the building to express his contrition, despite his best efforts; his mobile’s battery has expired and at his wits’ end he begs a reluctant Achim for help.  In her flat the girlfriend is being consoled by, and torn between, two friends, one of whom thinks she should dump him, the other arguing he should be given a second chance.  The errant lover throws stones at her window, but some fall against the window of the flat below in which, the best realised of the strands, an elderly couple bicker, nagging away at old hurts.

Through all this, Achim is a stable point in the little shop, acting different parts as circumstances require: offering advice, berating or helping those who pass before his window.  As dawn breaks the stories are resolved, for better or worse (with poetic justice in the case of the scammers, reconciliation for the estranged lovers, an act of contrition towards the prostitute by the taxi driver, and an abrupt conclusion to the old couple’s long marriage).  In the final shots the camera looks down on NonStop far below as life continues around it, the new day promising fresh dramas on this small stage.

For some reason the film is billed as a comedy, but while it has its amusing moments the general tone is compassionate but unsentimental.  The one unredeemed character is the pimp, a boorish, bullying, hypocritical family man who abandons a wedding to exercise his power over a helpless woman.  Otherwise, in its unflinching look at characters who have not always behaved well one finds selfishness and sadness, but in some of them also kindness, generosity, and a desire for connection.

The subtitled film is available on Cinepub.

Masquerade/Mascarada (2001)

Masquerade is a 52-minute film directed by Cornel Gheorghiță documenting winter celebrations in Moldova.  Rituals with deep roots in the culture of the region, though echoing rich folk traditions elsewhere in Europe, they celebrate the end of the old year and the promise of rebirth, a reaffirmation of life over the persistence of death.  They provide a sense of control when confronted with the unknown, such as fear the dead wander the earth in the darkest days of the year.  A sensitive narration locates the festival within the broader context of memory, to emphasise the way it offers a thread of continuity which helps to bind local identity.

Villagers dress in outlandish costumes and wear frightening masks that would scare off Death himself.  There are symbolic representations of different types of people and animals, notably the goat and the bear.  Youngsters dress in bear skins, a band plays enthusiastically and loudly.  Drink may be taken (we are told part of this region was once called Bacovia, from the Latin ‘Bacchus’ and ‘via’, ‘the path of Bacchus’).  The procession of young males makes sure to visit the homes of unmarried females.  Everyone has a high old time.

In many places these customs have disappeared in the face of urbanisation, industrialisation and the fragmentation of communities, and when the procession is seen winding through city streets it looks incongruously domesticated: these are profound mysteries that should be confined to the pastoral landscape.  But wherever they are performed, it is possible to see the enthusiastic participation by villagers in pagan festivities elements of which may not have been unfamiliar to the Dacians.  Staid Christianity takes a back seat.

Does this harking back to the past have a future though?  To the urban eye the events can seem unnervingly alien, the energy involved even aggressive (and the slaughter of a pig is disturbing), but one would like to think the enthusiasm of the participants, including the children, is an indication that, however much traditional ways of living are diluted by modernity, these customs will continue for as long as the villages remain populated.

However, it would be interesting for a comparison with the situation now, two decades after Cornel Gheorghiță filmed on the streets of rural Moldova, to see if that is the case.  The musicians and craftsmen all look rather old in the tooth and there is no guarantee their skills will be passed down to a new generation.  One also wonders how these ceremonies are faring elsewhere in the region.

The biggest danger is probably depopulation by young people in search of a better life elsewhere, breaking the cultural chain.  It would be a shame if these traditions were lost, but much of their power comes from the exuberance contrasting with the dullness of routine daily life, and these days such a life is not the inevitability, nor necessarily quite as dull, as it once was.  Whatever the fate of the old practices, this is a beautiful, if stark, film, and a valuable ethnographic record.

The film is available on the Cinepub platform.

Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania, by Mike Ormsby

British expat Mike Ormsby’s Never Mind the Balkans, Here's Romania, copyrighted 2015 (though apparently first published in Bucharest in 2008 and with an acknowledgements page dated 2012, so who knows), consists of a series of vignettes exploring facets of Romanian life.  As a journalist he knows how to get those he meets to open up, and he is always amiable and interested.  A lot of his material results from conversations with cabbies (the taxi being his preferred mode of transport), and his wily self-serving building manager in Bucharest is also a good source of anecdotes.

Ormsby comes across many kind and warm-hearted people and has close friendships, but while he has huge affection for the country he is conscious of its flaws.  He wryly recounts the petty annoyances he experiences every day, finding that often personal respect, and respect for social and legal institutions, are in short supply.  There is selfishness and philistinism, toleration of squalor and discomfort, and a relaxed attitude to animal welfare standards.  Naturally there are plenty of brushes with bureaucracy, shamelessly exhibiting corruption and inefficiency.  Instances of terrible driving crop up regularly.  Ordinary Romanians are fully aware of the defects but cannot see a way to change the situation, so shrug and get on with life as best they can.

On the other hand, Ormsby finds much to admire about the country.  In particular he shows the Carpathians to be breathtakingly beautiful.  He has travelled widely, including stints in Africa, so he does not view Romania from a narrow perspective but rather with a cosmopolitan eye.  Despite his criticisms, it says something for his love of the place that he has stayed on, though he moved from Bucharest to Transylvania where he lives with his Romanian wife.

The tone remains light even when he is clearly exasperated by what he encounters every day, but you sense frustration life is not better this long after 1989.  These snapshots suggest that at least at the time of writing the old mindset still lingered, and while there are hints in the book that things are improving, it is a slow process.  Hopefully in the not too distant future Ormsby’s dispassionate snapshots will read like an historical depiction of a vanished past.

Captives, by Norman Manea

Captives (1970) was Norman Manea’s first novel, written in opaque prose that mirrored the difficulties of coming to terms with everyday reality in a repressive society, and it makes no concessions to the reader.  The novel tracks life in post-war Romania, with its legacy of trauma, omnipresent surveillance and lack of trust, its petty bureaucracy, the fear of falling foul of a regime which considers private life to be its business, the unreliability of surface appearances, and lack of autonomy.  Romania is depicted as a fractured place that had spun from fascism to communism, always at the behest of larger, stronger powers.  Survival means accommodation, even when this entails hypocrisy, an effort unfortunately resulting in psychic damage.  A key motif is the necessity of amnesia to be able to cope with the present.

The narrative is divided into three sections, ‘She’, ‘You’, and ‘I’, and follows three characters who collectively reflect Romania’s recent history and demonstrate the dismissive way the individual is treated.  ‘She’ is Monica Smântănescu, a struggling French and piano teacher frustrated by the rudeness of her clients.  She refers to Handel’s Chaconne in G Major, a piece comprising continuous variations, which symbolises the circular nature of her life and those of others who are trapped and not able to develop.  ‘You’ is the daughter of a Romanian army officer, Captain Zubcu, who fought for the Nazis and returns suffering from PTSD.  He cannot free himself from his experiences, possibly including war crimes, and commits suicide by throwing himself into a vat of liquid metal.  His daughter experiences extreme grief, plus the pain of a broken love affair with the narrator.

‘I’, the narrator, is an engineer looking back on his early political activities, his mind eventually unravelling after fruitlessly attempting to do what is required of him by the state.  There is a suggestion he is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, though this is not made explicit.  He describes his childhood years, and his extreme adherence to the party, his political orthodoxy more to demonstrate a sense of superiority than the result of ideological inclination.  As a member of the Pioneer Organisation he is keen to root out incorrect opinions, particularly his friend Sebastian Caba’s.  Later Caba becomes his boss at the engineering company.

The three sections are not discrete but shift and blend, throwing up connections which may or may not be correct.  The oblique narrative spirals round in addressing social conditions and their psychological impact, forming a hermetic container reflecting airless times that feel damp, grimy and stressful.  We can never be sure who is a reliable narrator and we may read about the same event from differing perspectives.  If people cannot be honest with themselves, how can they be honest with others?  The result is a fracture of personality, reflected in the novel’s style.  Social interactions are low and dishonest and the appropriate response to an absurd situation is absurd behaviour.  Whatever the differences in the three characters’ experiences, they are all captives, both externally through the political repression circumscribing the citizen’s rights, but also internally, by consenting to it.

Manea’s introduction to the 2015 English translation supplies some background to the novel’s creation.  It was intended as a gauntlet thrown down to the regime: far from embodying the values of the New Socialist Man, his characters would be depicted more realistically as ‘vulnerable, weak, and defeated individuals’, ‘wounded outsiders.’  It is a helplessness reinforced by the use of the passive voice, with agency often difficult to assign, thereby becoming diffuse and externalised.  Manea admits that the experimental form he adopted is challenging and was influenced by the Nouveau Roman (presumably including the emphasis on the fallibility of memory), but justifies it by citing Faulkner’s observation that a writer should be judged by risks taken.  He refers to Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, with ‘additional local ambiguities, corruption, double-talk, and double-dealing.’

Translator Jean Harris’s afterword outlines the challenges she faced, notably the novel’s allusive language to describe ‘unhinged’ characters ‘cut loose from their moorings’, making the meaning sometimes impossible to pin down, and Manea’s tendency to avoid the use of pronouns.  She notes that some things are not said outright but hinted at, such as references to Jews, and survivor guilt influencing behaviour.  Significantly a very young Manea and his family were imprisoned in a concentration camp in Transnistria during the war.

Captives is a difficult read (Manea states he has made minor edits to the new edition for clarity, so heaven knows what the original was like) and it is remarkable the novel passed the censors, so far is it from socialist realism.  There may not have been anything specific the authorities considered subversive, but the cumulative effect is to show an oppressive (in its different senses) world off-kilter and unhealthy, creating alienation in its victims.  In a state that suppressed overt criticism, such indirectly expressed dissident writings were the best those who questioned the legitimacy of the regime’s behaviour could hope for, but Manea transcended the limitations to achieve a memorable, if frequently confusing, work of fiction.

Felicia Simion

Copyright Felicia Simion

Bucharest-based photographer Felicia Simion features in The Royal Photographic Society’s April 2020 Journal ‘In Focus’ section (p. 228), with a photograph of a nativity-themed play (which I notice is slightly cropped) taken in Breb.  It is accompanied by a brief interview discussing her project ethnographies, charting aspects of rural Romanian folklore and customs which are gradually disappearing.

She revealed that the idea arose during her study of cultural anthropology, ethnology and folklore, when she decided she was less interested in the past than in how such customs interact with a changing culture.  The result is a fascinating insight into longstanding traditions while conveying a sense of their fragility in the face of modernity (a tension perhaps exemplified by the child wearing a Scream mask).

Simion has said in interviews elsewhere that the desire to become a photographer originated in her discovery of the Magnum agency at the age of 13.  Although still only in her mid-twenties, she has already produced a wide range of images in both colour and black and white, has gained a huge number of awards, and been widely exhibited and published.  She balances commercial work (book covers, fashion) with documentary and art photography.

As well as in Romania, where the accompanying text on her website describes with affection the village in which she grew up and her relatives living there, she has photographed in France, South America, and surprisingly on the Bluebell Line in Sussex.  Just as easily her camera can turn inwards, as when her body in pregnancy became her subject.  She is comfortable with both realism and fantasy, sometimes photographing herself in colourful body suits which render ordinary locations uncanny, but has a particular talent for portraiture, especially women’s faces.

It’s a shame the RPS could not have afforded Simion more space to showcase her versatility but the piece does include a link to her website, which should widen her audience still further.

 

Update 10 September 2022:

‘Photographer Suffering From Postpartum Depression Uses Her Camera to Find Herself Again [Interview]’

A short interview with Felicia Simion appeared on the My Modern Met website, dated 29 August 2022.  Staff editor Sara Barnes asked her about how photography had performed a healing function in her recovery from postpartum depression.  Feeling alienated from the countryside at home, she took herself off to Iceland for the project which became Rewired (2022) and featured Simion entangled in yards of woolen yarn – red, yellow and blue – a soft warm curved body contrasting with the hard cold angular, but beautiful, terrain.

Despite cutting an isolated figure, dwarfed by her surroundings, she says the act of tying herself to the bleak landscape made her feel alive.  It was a healing experience, though one might characterise it more as shock therapy, the uncomfortable act of physically linking herself to the natural world acting to refresh her relationship with it.  It may not be the sort of treatment that is for everyone, but it worked for her, and resulted in a memorable set of images.

Asked to describe her work, she replied it is ‘Eclectic. Real and surreal at the same time,’ and Rewired, the title of which says it all, accurately fulfils that description.  She mentioned at the end that her next project will concern environmental issues in a southern Romanian village, proof that she is once again at home in the countryside of her homeland after her sojourn in a place that could not be more different.

Simion talks about Rewired on her website.  She is also running a project in which she invites others who are suffering or have suffered from postpartum depression to get in touch in order to share their experiences.

https://feliciasimionphotography.com/wp/

Train to Trieste, by Domnica Radulescu

Domnica Radulescu’s 2008 Train to Trieste is an example of the genre dealing with life in communist Romania and emigrating to escape it, allowing comparisons to be made with both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective: other examples are Herta Müller’s The Passport, Roxanne Veletzos’s The Girl They Left Behind, and Ioana Pârvulescu’s short story ‘A Voice’.  Train to Trieste charts the life of Mona Maria Manoliu as she grows up in Romania, moves to Chicago in her twenties, then in a short final section returns to Romania two decades later to seek answers to old questions – and receives a remarkable surprise.

Living in Bucharest with her parents, teenage Mona spends her holidays in the Carpathian city of Brașov with her aunt, uncle and cousins, and at the age of 17, in 1977, falls in love with the enigmatic and older Mihai, whom she sees on her visits.  He disapproves of her anti-regime sentiments, and starts wearing a leather jacket, a garment favoured by the Securitate; then she is warned by another woman to be careful of him as he has links to the secret police.  She wonders to what extent she can trust him.

Her father, a university lecturer, is part of a dissident group, which makes life increasingly difficult for him, and for Mona, as family members too are treated with suspicion.  People are having ‘accidents’ in the street, her father is arrested and beaten, then demoted, and she herself is routinely followed and has a frightening encounter with a menacing government goon.  Following her love for literature she uses the British and American libraries in Bucharest, further casting her loyalty in doubt.

In her early twenties life has become so difficult that Mona’s family decide she should leave Romania.  She escapes via Belgrade to Trieste, then on to Chicago as part of a sponsorship programme, helped by incredibly kind and selfless people along the way.  Her journey to Chicago mirrors that of Radulescu’s own in 1983, and is a similar trajectory to Veletzos, who was born in Bucharest and moved to California as a young woman.  Mona does not say goodbye to Mihai, but he had been such a significant part of her life that she is shocked to hear later that he was killed on Christmas Day 1989, shot by a random bullet in the street.

In Chicago Mona makes a life for herself, putting her Romanian past behind her.  She works hard, gets married, has children, gets divorced, takes degrees, her parents join her, she moves to Indiana to take a teaching job, Ceaușescu is overthrown, her beloved father dies.  She decides to visit Romania after a gap of twenty years, both vicariously for her father, who never really took to America and longed to return to the old country one last time, and on her own account, to find answers to nagging questions about the past.

Despite the book’s title she does not take the train to Trieste when leaving Romania because the chance of detection is too high, rather hitching a ride with an Italian in his little Fiat and passing as his wife.  On her return trip, though, she does take the train, but in the opposite direction.  Her visit enables her to clear up mysteries about her father, Mihai, other people in their circle, and her escape, in a lengthy and rather clumsily presented conversation with an old friend of Mihai’s.  The poignant ending promises the opening of a new chapter, and the final integration of her Romanian and American identities.

It is impossible to tell the extent to which we are reading a novel or autobiography, or something in between.  The early sections feel fictional, but once Mona moves to America the writing takes on the character of memoir; or perhaps it always had that character, but life under Ceaușescu was so strange it is bound to feel like fiction to an outsider.  She conveys the political situation and what everyday life was like in Bucharest and Brașov in the 1970s and ’80s, but the writing is particularly vivid when describing family life and the beauty of the Carpathians.

Mona is not impressed with post-Ceaușescu Romania, expressing the disappointment shared by those who, like her father, had opposed the communist regime, at how little had changed in the years following.  But while she has a good life in America, she also retains a certain ambivalence towards her adopted homeland.  This is symbolised in the references to food: the tastiness of Romanian home cooking versus the terrible quality of mass-produced food in the land of McDonald’s.

A key moment in the novel is writing a competition essay at the age of ten on why she loves her country.  Mona thinks about the melancholic longing expressed in the supposedly untranslatable word dor, a more profound emotion than nostalgia and part of the way Romanians define themselves.  Her essay conveys how she would feel should she lose her country by imagining the lost past she has heard about from her father (suitably edited for an official audience).  Sentiments clearly chiming with the judges, she wins first prize.  She may not think much about the word in America, but it is there, inside her.  In a sense, despite moving across the Atlantic she never leaves Romania at all.

Blandford’s Painting Book of National Costumes

At some point in the 1950s the London publisher Blandford issued a series of colouring books devoted to European national costume (North-West, Southern, Central, and South-East Europe).  Each country has a coloured picture of a couple in traditional dress on one page, accompanied by some text describing the costumes, and opposite it a black-and-white version of the same picture the reader can colour in.  The books are unpriced but my two examples have 2/- (10p) in pencil on the cover.

Book no. 4, South-East Europe, was illustrated by S Horne Shepherd.  It comprises Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Sardinia and Turkey.  The Romanian picture is unusual in having a child with the man and woman, most only featuring adults.  The descriptions are rich in stereotype – the Romanian girl likes to run about barefoot in summer, the Bulgarian man is armed to the teeth with a long dagger, a pair of old pistols and ‘an ancient flintlock muzzle loader.’  There is nothing political of course, and the map on the back of the fourth book is based on the 1938 configuration of countries, showing Germany as a single entity.

The emphasis is very much on the peasant picturesque and it seems unlikely that by the 1950s costumes like those depicted in the books would have been much seen outside festivals.  The drawings play to an agrarian image of life in Continental Europe which may have shaped the attitudes of British children but was removed from the reality.  They evoke a place of bucolic contentment where little girls run about barefoot; exotic and colourful in contrast to grey post-war Britain.

Dear Comrade Novák, by Silvia Hildebrandt

Silvia Hildebrandt’s 2018 novel Dear Comrade Novák follows the careers during the 1980s of two young men (and to a much lesser an extent a young woman) who grow up in the same village in western Romania.  In 1979, teenagers Attila and Tiberius are best friends.  Novák Attila, brought up in a warm family, is an ethnic Hungarian, which makes him a second-class citizen; worse, he is gay in a country where homosexuality is a criminal act severely punished.  Romanian Tiberius Nicolescu is the son of a Securitate officer, and his family is as rigid as that suggests.  Gypsy Viorica is a member of a caste despised by everybody else, and despite being secretly in love with Tiberius has been promised in an arranged marriage since the age of 4.

The novel opens on the 1 December 1989 with Attila interrogating Tiberius to the strains of Ravel’s Bolero and Tiberius mocking Attila.  We know something they do not: that the Socialist Republic of Romania has less than a month left; and we wonder quite how these characters came to this situation.  The answer lies both in the complexities of their relationship and the complexities of life under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule.

At school, Attila has an affair with his teacher, who is a member of an underground anti-government movement called White Winter.  When the teacher is murdered by the Securitate, Attila is terrified he will be arrested, and Tiberius suggests he joins the Securitate himself as the best cover.  Tiberius joins the army, and while Attila reaches the rank of general – a significant feat for a Hungarian – by dint of his ruthlessness, Tiberius has a middling career and only achieves the rank of captain.  Tiberius harbours a sense of injustice that Attila has done so much better than he has, in a job Attila fell into by accident.

Viorica has a miserable marriage to a violent drunken bully, her life one of lost teeth and miscarriages, until she runs away to Timișoara and meets up with Tiberius and Attila again, and Attila’s sister Ánná who is in a relationship with Tiberius.  But their ways part, with Tiberius marrying a relative of Ceaușescu, until the tide of revolution brings them all together once more, though not in a way they would have predicted.  At the end they find themselves on the right side of history, but that does not guarantee a happy ending.

This is a novel full of secrets, individuals not knowing who to trust, and having to live a hidden life politically and sexually.  We see Tiberius and Attila become cynical, and Attila’s shocking indifference to life as he becomes the regime’s executioner with the fearsome nickname Attila the Hun, hypocritically hunting homosexuals (supposedly a decadent western vice unknown in Romania) while he cruises gay bars and has casual sex.

There are conflicts between political, ethnic, sexual identities, with the state denying that there is any such thing as a private life.  Family is no defence: Tiberius’s father does not care whether he sacrifices Attila or his son in order to curry favour with Ceaușescu.  Attila even finds his lover, for whom he has a deep passion, is a plant spying on him.  When saying or doing the wrong thing can get you into trouble, people keep their heads down to survive in a country characterised by shortages, repression and a dearth of civic virtue.

Just as individuals have to hide their authentic selves, the regime is good at concealing inconvenient truths, a failure to confront reality which can only hasten its downfall.  When the accident at Chernobyl occurs it is considered unimportant.  When instances of AIDS begin to show up among Romanian men it is treated as a dirty secret, and Attila shows just how efficient he can be in keeping the problem hidden.

Unfortunately ignorance is the worst possible way to deal with problems, and unsurprisingly Attila finds his lifestyle has left him infected too.  Eventually the political situation cannot be kept from the people, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989 is a clear sign that massive change in the Eastern Bloc is possible.

The novel races to a climax, showing the buildup of opposition in Timișoara and the final days of the regime.  These are gripping events vividly described.  Hildebrandt indicates that the uprising in Bucharest, far from being spontaneous, was to a large extent orchestrated by the army.  Rather than a popular revolution, it was a coup, though the spontaneous protests in Timișoara take Tiberius by surprise because they are not part of the White Winter plan.

And what of Attila and Tiberius, sparring over the interrogation table at the opening of the novel a few weeks before?  In the end friendship wins despite the different paths their lives have taken, as they are reconciled and drive to Bucharest to participate in the overthrow of the dictator.  They go to Palace Square on 21 December for Ceaușescu’s final speech, but Attila has little time left as disease wastes his body.

Unfortunately, as the crowed surges forward in excitement and Ceaușescu flees, Attila, bleeding from the mouth, is mistaken for a strigoi by the crowd and shot, dying in Tiberius’s arms.  Tiberius participates in the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu on Christmas Day (despite being related by marriage which fortunately nobody seems to remember) and is pallbearer to Attila back in the village.

The strigoi reference jars (as occasionally does the novel’s awkward translation) but, being part of the political apparatus, Attila in a sense is a vampire battening on the Romanian people, his privileges bought at their expense.  As a member of the Securitate the transition was never likely to end well for him.  Pregnant Viorica, dead in the massacre at Timișoara, becomes a symbol of the sacrifice made by ordinary people in 1989.  Only Tiberius is left to confront the new world made possible once Ceaușescu has left the stage.

Sun Alley, by Cecilia Ştefănescu

Cecilia Ştefănescu’s Intrarea soarelui (2008), published in English as Sun Alley (Istros Books, 2013), is an enigmatic novel tracing the relationship of Emilia and Sorin, generally known as Emi and Sal.  The story is told from Sal’s perspective, though there are hints he may not be a reliable narrator.  Childhood friends on the cusp of puberty – not quite platonic yet not fully sexual, apart from some fumbling Sal initiates – they bond then undergo the vicissitudes of painful separation, and reacquaintance in adulthood, by which time they are married to other people and Sal and his wife have twin daughters.  Their extra-marital affair naturally brings complications when their spouses find out.

As children they live close to each other in Bucharest, Sal in the titular Sun Alley.  The time seems to be the 1980s, though there is little sense of the political situation.  These could be kids anywhere, with the same interests as those in other cities in other countries at that time: Sal is part of a gang of boys who play football and mess around.  By the time they reach adulthood, Emi and Sal are living in a post-communist society, but they are as locked into their mutual roles as they ever were.

The children try to keep their relationship secret from Sal’s friends and parents, as if that is possible, but it does mean secrecy becomes an integral part of their feelings for each other.  Sal first meets Emi when she is in the middle of cutting pictures out of magazines, careless of the owner’s feelings.  And so it proves in her attitude to males, as Sal learns as an adult that not only did she have sex with Sal’s friend Harry, albeit at Harry’s insistence, but may have done with other friends of his, and also with her husband’s brother.  Curiously when these episodes occur Sal loses consciousness, so at some level he may intuit what is happening, even if in some kind of altered state.  It is the sort of novel that refuses to spell such things out, leaving interpretations open.

Early on the reader realises this is not going to be an ordinary coming-of-age story because there is a dreamlike quality to much of the book and the narrative thread is often difficult to follow.  For example, on his way to see Emi, Sal is caught in a shower and shelters in Harry’s building.  Going into the basement he finds the corpse of a beautiful young woman, and ghoulishly cuts off her finger bearing a gemstone ring on it.  Naturally he wants to share the secret with Emi and gives her the ring, which as an adult she wears.  Who the corpse is, and why she is laid out in the basement, are unresolved matters.  If not for the ring she might never have existed outside Sal’s imagination.

Later Sal persuades Emi to run away as his family is moving to another district and they will be separated.  After various misadventures they find refuge in the garden shed of an old man who lives alone, and he gives them food, until Sal’s parents and the police arrive to take them home.  Sal’s ability to persuade Emi, verging on controlling behaviour, appears to continue into adulthood, with Emi the emotionally frailer of the two.  Sal’s family do move, which seems to put an end to the friendship, until they meet again by chance twenty years later.

The novel shifts timeframes in a complex elliptical patterning from childhood to adulthood and back again.  In fact it is possible the child and adult versions overlap, the youngsters eavesdropping on their adult selves, or adults with similar preoccupations to those they will have at the same age.  Or does Sal have precognitive visions?  There is a hint the body in the basement is Emi in the future, yet it seems she dies in an hotel room, and the ring Sal steals from the body is real enough.  In hospital, the young Sal meets another patient who calls herself ‘Mary Jane’, but may be a vision of a future Emi after a suicide attempt.  Sal recounts the tragic love of Tristan and Isolde to Emi, and says of Tristan he ‘has a special capacity: that of seeing things that others don’t see.’  He might be talking about himself.  Yet paradoxically he fails to see what is in front of his eyes, most notably at the end when he thinks Emi is sleeping on the hotel bed, though it is clear she is dead.

Ştefănescu has a good sense of the physicality of love, especially young love, and the thin line between consent and coercion.  When the action moves to the adult Sal and Emi it feels pedestrian by contrast.  She explores a variety of themes in an assured manner: the pleasures and insecurities of adolescent love; how early hopes can be unfulfilled; the pain of betrayal by those we thought we could rely on but who prove untrustworthy; the attempt to balance our commitments and our desires, and the selfish nature of the latter.

Contemplating the destructive nature of Sal and Emi’s bond, the reader wonders if this is love or rather co-dependency, willing to sacrifice the happiness of others for their own but with Emi not strong enough to rise to the challenge.  At the end they are left with each other, Sal experiencing visions of people who are not present.  The pair are in the hotel room, and after stripping Emi when she is clearly dead Sal finds her breasts ‘flaccid, lifeless flesh.  He shivered and swung round to ask his friends for help, but they had left.  Most likely, they had had enough of the charade, were sick of all the pretence and lies.’  And who could blame them?