An edited transcript of an address by British novelist Paul Bailey during at Salamanca Writers' Festival, Hobart (1995) in a segment entitled 'Border Crossings'.
At the end of 1988, I received an extraordinary invitation. It was to go to Romania, and I had been invited there – for reasons that I still don't
understand, or want to understand – by the Writers' Union. I said yes, because I was intrigued. I wanted to go there, though I had already heard it
was a kind of hell on earth. But I didn't know what particular kind of hell it was until I reached it.
The first thing that happened to me at Bucharest Airport was that my luggage decided not to make its way up the roller. It kept going to the top,
and then falling back. Other people's suitcases, I noticed, made the last leap, but mine didn't. I'm not a believer in signs, I don't have any truck with
mumbo jumbo – but I remember thinking at the time, that case is trying to tell me something.
I was met outside Customs – which was quite a gruelling experience – by a very handsome man in a long leather coat. He greeted me and said he would take me
to my hotel. On the way he told me that he was a dramatist, and wrote plays for television. The absurdity of this claim didn't strike me for about three
days, when I had become acquainted with Romanian television under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
At the hotel, something else extraordinary happened. It was an extremely luxurious hotel, and for some reason I had anticipated staying in a crumbling ruin.
Not a bit of it. This was a hotel that had been erected
after the earthquake, and was specifically designed for Party workers and foreign visitors. It was luxurious. At the hotel reception I was asked to fill in a form.
Nothing unexpected about that. What was unexpected was that the Romanian authorities wanted to know the date of birth of my father. It so happens
that my father was much older than my mother, and was already getting into old age when he sired me. So I said to the television dramatist,
do they really want to know the date of my father's birth –'cause they're going to be surprised. He said yes, it is essential. So I wrote the date of my
father's birth. He was born in 1884. The man who read this looked at me very quizzically, and I stared back at him.
I was taken to my room, which was luxurious ... and every morning at about three o'clock the telephone in that room would ring. I'd pick it up and there would
be silence at the other end. I suppose they were simply checking to find out that I was still there, though had they just simply notified the hotel reception
they would have known where I was. Or perhaps they were simply trying to intimidate me, and I think that was what they had in mind.
I was told that my interpreter would be at the hotel at 10 o'clock the following morning, so I got up at seven o'clock and took a walk through the streets of Bucharest.
And suddenly found myself in a
novel by John le Carre ... because two men in long leather coats, just like the one the television dramatist was wearing, pursued me. The moment
I left the hotel, there they were. I couldn't believe it, I thought I was taking part in some grisly farce. So I turned the corner, and I did something ...
rather mischievious. I ran. To the corner of the next street. They ran too. And I thought, is this going to go on the entire week of my stay?
But I also noticed something else that morning. As I was strolling along, and watching people queuing patiently for bread in long long queues, I found
two or three bookshops, which I visited. And in those bookshops were not the works of Shakespeare, or the works of Romania's most famous poet, Ionesco, but the
works, the collected works, of
Nicolae Ceaușescu. And in every bookshop there was a photograph of him. Wherever you went Nicolae or Elena or the two combined were looking at you.
I finally met my interpreter, and she said to me, in the street, if you have anything to say, don't say it when we're in a car that is owned by the
government because all the cars are bugged. Be careful in restaurants, all the tables are bugged. Your hotel is bugged. So if I were having any interesting
conversations with myself, and travellers do tend to talk to themselves when they're stuck in the middle of nowwhere, far away from home ... then
they'll have my, probably, extremely personal and mysterious self-communings on tape somewhere.
So the week progressed. It was decided I would have a special treat, and be taken to the painted churches in Moldavia. I went there by plane,
where I took a car driven by another leather-jacketed man and visited these extraordinary painted churches. I don't know if you know about them, but the art
is on the outside of the churches, and somehow, miraculously, they have been preserved for several centuries, and they are quite wonderful. The geese you
see walking along these country lanes, are the same geese on these church walls walking along ... alongside Christ. It's an extraordinary feeling, looking
at Christ on the walls of a church, in surroundings that are mirrored at your back.
Ceaușescu was busy demolishing the villages, hadn't decided to demolish these churches, though since he believed he was God the time for destroying them was probably
not far off.
On my arrival back at Bucharest, I had an opportunity to watch Romanian television. And at about four o'clock every afternoon the television came on.
And who should be on the television but Nicolae Ceaușescu, talking, and talking, and talking – his talk interrupted every few minutes by rapturous
applause. And I thought, what is this television dramatist writing? Because this was the only television programme on television.
Throughout this time, I was trying to work out where I had read about this country before. Because I hadn't read any histories of the country then, I
hadn't read any travel books about Romania, though later when I got back I read Patrick Leigh-Fermor's book Between the Woods and the Water.
I was astonished that he managed in the 1930's to walk across the country, and whevener he was feeling a bit put out, would always manage to find a stately
home for him to visit, and a change of clothes – and even, dinner jackets. A vanished world, indeed. Anyway ... the author who came to mind was not a
naturalistic, realistic author at all, it was one of the great absurdists of the twentieth century: Eugene Ionesco, who in fact wrote in French which was his
first language. He lived in Paris as a child, then his father took him to Romania where he spent the most unhappy time of his life. But I suddenly
realised that plays that I had watched in London theatres, and simply believed were absurdist dramas were in fact something very close to reality. Because
Ionesco predicted somebody like Ceaușescu coming along. He predicted a country where the dictator's photograph was everywhere. The only place you
couldn't find Ceaușescu's photograph was in the lavatory. But you could find it on gramaphone records – dates me, doesn't it: LP's – of Romanian folk songs,
because on the covers of these LP's were photographs, drawings and photographs combined, of Nicolae and Elena – in Heaven. On clouds. Looking down, at the
brave Romanian peasants – including smiling girls and boys – who were all looking up gratefully.
I'll bring this little series of reminiscences to an end in a moment, but I'd like to describe my penultimate day, that first time I went to Romania. I had
assumed all week that I was going to talk to the students at the university. And the television dramatist – whom I subsequently learned was a fully-fledged
member of the Securitate – which I could have guessed myself – actually gave me one wonderful piece of information which I shall treasure to my dying day.
He said at one point, you know we have no homosexuals in Romania, we are not a decadent country! Are you telling me there are no homosexuals in Eastern
Europe, I said? He said, yes: they are all in Budapest! The Hungarians are the decadent people over here, they allow this to go on – but not us,
we do not have them, he said. Of course I went to the theatre practically every night, I could see that there were certain members of these acting troupes
who were not as straight as a die but I did not voice that opinion.
It was interesting seeing these productions of Shakespeare. During 'The Taming of the Shrew', arguably one of the unfunniest plays that Shakespeare wrote,
the audience was helpless with laughter. I asked the friend next to me why they were laughing, and she said well they've sneaked in jokes about the
Ceaușescus.
So on my last day there I was due to talk at the university. The leather-coated dramatist took me to the university and left me there. The Head of
the English Department had gone away for the weekend, and her assistant said but we were expecting you last Monday: we waited all afternoon.
And I suddenly realised, they're playing little tricks with me. So, I said, I have no intention of leaving this place, I'm going to stay here. Miraculously, she managed
to trace the Head of the Department, who rustled up a hundred students, and we spent a rapturously happy afternoon talking about the state of the English
theatre, about Mrs Thatcher, about the Royal family, about life in Britain – and not a word was said about life in Romania, because they didn't dare say
anything about it since of course the auditorium was bugged. This was all set up. That very day, Geoffrey Howe, our then foreign minister, had made a speech to
the United Nations condemning Romania's record on human rights. And that very evening there was going to be a reception at the British Embassy for me;
they'd invited several writers including a very fine poet who at that time was under house arrest.
When I arrived at the Embassy that night, the Ambassador's wife said, what a wonderful evening, we've never had so many police here before, they're surrounding
the place. You should feel honoured. A rather sinister man I had met in the Writer's Union earlier that week asked me when I went in, what would you
like to drink? Beer or wine? We have fish and chicken on the menu today, which would you prefer? The people were queuing in the street for bread, but this
was the Writer's Union, some writers within that culture were having it pretty easy. Anyway, that evening the sinister man came up to me, oh what a pity
it was that you couldn't get to talk at the university this afternoon. And I said, Oh but I did speak at the university this afternoon. And he drew back in
something like horror. Did you really? he asked. I said, oh yes, for about two or three hours. What did you speak about? Oh, everything you could think of. And added sex
to the list of subjects.
That night, I went back to the house of an English friend who was living there. Also visiting were an unpublished Romanian writer and an unemployed Romanian actor.
I talked
about my brief and inglorious career in the theatre, and I mentioned that I'd played Denis in 'As You Like It' at Stratford, and Lovel in 'Richard the Third' in
the same season. Not surprisingly, the actor had never heard of these two characters, because they're very small parts. But I then told him that when I was young I'd
had an ambition to play Hamlet in 'Richard the Second', and that my audition speech throughout my career was the very last soliloquy of 'Richard
the Second'. Then something quite extraordinary happened. His girlfriend, who spoke very good English, said, he wants to perform that last soliloquy for you, because
that happens to be his special piece too. We're accustomed in the West for Richard always to be played as a bit of a milksop, wasting away rather aesthetically, and
romantically. But this man got up and he gave what I can only describe as a full-blooded interpretation of the role. I found it deeply moving to
have real actors in the same room performing this great speech, with such urgency.
I'll end by saying that as I left the country, I made very good friends there, one a translator who under the old regime was translating DH Lawrence,
though she had to tone down the wrestling scene in Women in Love. Now to earn a crust – and everyone's very conscious there of needing to make
enough money to survive – she's translating the likes of Sandra Brown who I'd never heard of and even, God forbid, Jackie Collins. Though she said she
can translate a Jackie Collins in three days. As I left, these people said: we'e never going to have freedom. I've been back since and they still don't
have it, because all the people who propped up those two midgets – midgets in every sense – who were illiterate, and who kept a court that would rival
the court of Nero in its horror, have now been replaced by people calling themselves democrats, who really don't have the first idea of what democracy
is. So it's still a painful and unhappy country. But in a strange way I'm very glad I've become acquainted with it, because it's told me a lot about
the way the world goes. And the way the world shouldn't go. And that Eugene Ionesco is a genius. Thank you!