Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

— Mircea Cărtărescu —
In 1989 I was thirty-three. I was born in Communism and believed that I would die in Communism
too. I had never left Romania and didn’t even have a passport. I also believed that I would
never travel anywhere abroad. I had not been permitted to apply for a place in the university or
to write a doctoral dissertation. I was a primary school teacher, and my only realistic opportunity
was to move from this job to a pension in due course. We lived in an apartment on the eighth floor
of a block, and there was not a single wall at right angles to another. The world seemed to be frozen
in its unpleasantness and predictability. Communism was reality. Everything else was a fantasy
from American films.
The revolution took us by surprise, and we believed in it. When you find yourself in a crowd of a
million people, who are embracing each other and weeping for joy, you no longer ask who brought
them all together and why. Of all these, thousand were shot and killed. And then Ceaus¸escu was
shot as well: I had really believed him to be immortal.
This was all shown on TV. Actually, it was one continuous film running for several weeks and
providing times of exaltation and despair. And yet, even though everything was completely identifiable,
even though the effects were created at a superficial level, even though the sets were cheap
and the dialogues packed with clichés, even though the strings held in false suspense by the illusionists
were easy to see, we believed in that dream with our eyes open. The revolution was our
soap opera, our syrupy illusion. Even now I cannot forgive myself for having believed in it, for in a
normal world not even children would have believed in it. But I wished too intensely that it might
be true.
In 1990 we entered the free democratic world, without knowing what freedom and democracy are.
After fifty years of fascist and communist dictatorships we were no longer a people, no longer a
community. We were a horde. The communist dictatorship continued under a transparent nickname.
Before that we had been lied to, now they were telling us lies. Before that we were poor, now
we were even poorer. In the university my salary was the equivalent of fifty dollars a month. My
wife was unemployed, and we had a little child. The inflation was dreadful; it ate into us like a bath
of sulphuric acid. Soon we had nothing left at all. But it was not until I had sold my table tennis
racket that I realised what depths we had sunk to.
On a lovely mild autumn day I climbed into the tram for the flea market in Colentina. The tram
was much more densely packed than anyone in the normal world could imagine. The doors were
open during the journey, people were hanging from the straps, standing on the steps and had
climbed onto the bumpers. In fact the tram was covered by a bunch of men and women who
wanted to go to the market.
The nineties, the most miserable years I ever experienced, will always be associated with the flea
market in my mind, to which the trams carried hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of
people from six o’clock in the morning on, all of them wanting to buy and sell items that would
normally be due for the rubbish tip. It is impossible to imagine the dirt and the dust and the scatological
smells that one forced one’s way into, tightly crushed by people from all sides, who were
treading on each other’s feet. On the ground, on crumpled newspapers full of photos of naked
women, lay bent screwdrivers, torn books, bleary-eyed newborn kittens, imitation perfumes, dolls
with their legs torn out, empty ballpoint pen cases, records of folk music, greasy clothes with torn
seams, knives and forks one would never want to eat from, plugs, lamps, bits of wire, nails, old
photos, rotting icons, mechanical tools that were totally unidentifiable and million other objects.
Unshaven creatures were selling these, fat women with covered heads, gypsies, children starved
to a skeleton like those in Biafra. There, in that infernal stream that constantly moved along under
the autumn sky, I – a writer who had already published a number of books, now a university
teacher – spread out the customary newspaper and laid the only item on it that I could sell: my
old and greatly loved table tennis racket, with which I had won several competitions. I was really
hoping not to find a buyer, but there were still two days to go to pay day, and we needed some
bread at least.
And evening came, and morning came. My racket had already been dulled by millions of eyes,
when finally someone, after weighing it in his hand and hitting a few imaginary celluloid balls
with it, pulled the money from his pocket and went off with it. We folded the newspaper again and
joined the others heading for the way out. Dry leaves were snowing down on us. Wind stirred dust
into our hair. Next to the exit I flipped through a pile of ebonite disks, watched over by a fellow
with a punk haircut. All the money I had received for the table tennis racket went on three records:
“Blonde on Blonde” by Bob Dylan, John Lennon’s “Mind Games” and “The Dark Side of the Moon”
by Pink Floyd. With the records under my arm I went away happily, having forgotten the bread as
well as the fact that we had nothing we could play the records on.
I still own those records to this day. I have never managed to drive out their nasty smell. They
smell of the nineties in Romania, of fear, uncertainty and despair. I have never listened to them.
And then the miners came to Bucharest. Once, twice, thrice – six times altogether. I saw the street
fighting, I saw young, elegant women dragged away by their hair to be beaten and raped in the
staircases of the apartment blocks. I saw how people were tortured simply because they were
wearing glasses. On the streets of this city I heard the most apocalyptic cry of the world: “Death
to the intellectuals!” How sick does a society have to be before it utters such a scream of agony?
I recalled Lautréamont: “All the oceans of the world are not enough to wash away the blood of a
single intellectual.” My parents were on the side of the neo-communists and applauded the miners
in the streets. We argued violently and didn’t speak to each other for a year. This happened in
many Romanian families. It was hell.
A well-known poet, a former dissident, said in those years: “I was happier in the Ceaus¸escu years”.
Ordinary people said: “Things were better then, you had a safe workplace and there was no inflation.”
They had forgotten that they had almost starved to death, no longer recalled the cold of winter,
when water froze in the heaters so that they burst in the apartments. In the same way, the Jews
led into the desert by Moses cried out and regretted leaving Egyptian slavery: “Didst thou lead us
here so that our bones may bleach in the desert? Where are the food pots of yesteryear?”
I began to travel abroad. I spent years in Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Vienna and Stuttgart.
When I saw Manhattan, I wrote a despairing poem. I was at the top of the Empire State Building.
I wept and wrote in a notebook supported on the balustrade. My clothes fluttered in the wind like
banners. Who stole the best years of my life from me? Who made me of no use to the East or to
the West? I was like the Magi from Eliot’s poem: I did not find my place in Romania, but I was
unhappy in the West as well. I could see no way out. The painful transition (to what?) would go
on forever.
Every return to Romania was depressing: now I could see the physical and moral decline even
more clearly. I saw the cracks in the unrenovated buildings, the holes in the asphalt of the streets,
the lies of the politicians and the general corruption better than before, when I had nothing to
compare them with. Now I knew how a human being should live and what a country should be
like.
Only after the year 2000 did things begin to get better. The normality that some take for granted is
a heavenly miracle for us. It is incredible how long we had to fight for a little bit of normality.
Last year I bought a cottage in the forest, north of the city. For the first time in my life I am now
living on the earth and not on one floor or another of a concrete block. I planted a cherry tree in
the garden; it was the first tree I ever planted in the ground. At night I see the star-covered sky for
the first time in my life. And I also thought this year for the first time that real life is starting now,
after fifty years of unhappiness.
Translated by Nelson Wattie
Mircea Cărtărescu, born in Bucharest in 1956 is a poet, writer and literary critic. He has published more than
20 books, which until now have been translated into 15 languages. Cărtărescu is also Professor for Literature at
Bucharest University and a member of the Romanian Writers’ Association, the Pen Club and the “ASPRO Writers’
Union”. His publications have won a number of awards, including the most important literary prize of Romania and
the Acerbi Prize in Italy. His novel “Die Wissenden” [Those Who Know] was published in German by Zsolnay Verlag
(Vienna) in 2007. It is the first part of a trilogy with the general title “Orbitor” in the Romanian original. Cărtărescu’s
short story collection “De ce iubim femeile” was a bestseller in Romania in 2005. The German translation was
published in 2008 by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main). Cărtărescu wrote the present story “ANII FURA I” (The Stolen
Years) especially for “Report”.
55