CHAPTER ONE
The Eyes of Sibiu

  IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE TREES HAD GROWN MICROPHONES not for broadcasting, but for listening, I was accustomed to a sense of constant scrutiny. I don’t remember feeling particularly conscious of this surveillance any more than usual on that gray Thursday morning of December 21st, 1989. I remember the ice crunching beneath my black boots as I trudged with my parents across the slick walkway. Along with dozens of others, we are heading toward the shopping areas of Piata Mare, Piata Mica, and Balce?cu Street, planning to do some Christmas shopping. My family and I didn’t indulge in paranoia—no matter how justifiable under the Communist dictatorship of Romania—and so the only change that concerned us was the weather, nothing more. “It’s going to snow again,” my father said, nodding toward the low, leaden skies that ushered in the front moving across the vast, white Carpathian Mountains that rose to the south beyond our city. “Maybe a blizzard.”

  The weather had been mild, the cold sun shone in vibrant blue skies, glaring off the snow on the steep, tiled roofs, melting and freezing into silvery icicles, brightening the snow piled along dreary streets. The weather that morning had indeed changed, and what little enthusiasm I was trying to foster for the holiday season languished with the darkening sky.

   The temperature had not yet dropped, so I didn’t bother with a coat—something I was about to regret. I wanted to show off the black sweater my Grandma Irma had knit, my green wool pants, and two items my parents had managed to give me after careful saving: a black knit angora beret—which I thought looked quite flirtatious against my auburn hair—and black leather gloves. Romanian fabrics tended to be gray, gray-and-brown plaid, black, dull checks or stripes, or, occasionally, a few somber shades of blue and green—never any colors that were warm or bright, all sharing a drab ugliness, as if grayness had spread like cholera, entering houses, covering our bodies, taking over lives, and poisoning our minds.
  

   Despite the deprivation in our lives, I considered myself, at age eighteen, quite fashionable, adroit at turning meager materials into designs copied from catalogs sent by my relatives in Germany and smuggled into the country. By Western standards, my clothing may not have been special, but in my city of Sibiu in Transylvania, I stood out—which wasn’t exactly a good thing. Spies were everywhere, eager to report someone who might not be a copy of the ideal citizen, who might not be able to account for certain expenditures, who might have an independent thought. Some people suspected their own parents or siblings or other family members and neighbors as informants, people who’d been lured into spying on locals because of an alleged crime, the sorts of cheating everyone did to try and support their families—such as shopping through the black market.

   Still a teenager, I both wanted attention and feared it as I walked beside my parents that morning. People of all ages, some in clusters, headed toward the town squares in greater numbers than usual—the only clue that might reveal any holiday expectations. An outside observer would assume we were all on a grim march of some kind. There were no decorations, no carols playing from speakers, no gypsy music, no color anywhere, no outward sign of the holiday festivities of the past. For all but a few days out of the year, there was no purpose and no future, and no desire. Compared to the grinding bleakness of everyday life in my country, though, the Christmas season held the only possibility of joy during the whole year. Many people seemed to reach deep down in their souls to rekindle a reason to live. They would covertly sing and dance around a small fir tree, snitched from the forests that were all guarded by government rangers. From the dank, black caves where the miners froze or sweated their lives away, to the plant workers who labored long hours for mere subsistence wages, to the peasants who scraped away at their poorly irrigated plots of land, the Christmas season offered the only gaiety a country burdened with the weight of tyranny could ever have.

  The dark, tired eyes of the Romanian people would brighten a bit during this small break in routine, holidays that allowed Romanians a splinter of hope for a better tomorrow. I saw a wary animation on several faces that morning, but I didn’t know anyone who thought the Christmas season of 1989 would be any different from those of the last five years. We all knew that yesterday people started celebrating Saint Ignatius, the patron saint of soldiers.

   Those of us hoping to make furtive connections with black marketeers couldn’t reveal any sense of actual excitement or holiday bustle as we headed toward the main shopping areas to buy a few gifts and special foods like butter, walnuts, and honey for a “Turta,” the traditional torte cake eaten on St. Ignatius' Day made of layers rolled thin to represent the swaddling clothes of the Christ Child.

   My family and I would try the government markets first, but there would be very little worth buying. Our renowned Sibiu and “Victory” salamis (made to supply food for the US and British armed forces during WWII) along with high and mid-grade meats were designated for export. Whatever quality goods Romania produced went abroad, while we existed in a state of miserable deprivation.
 

   Five years earlier, life had been less austere. I remember I was thirteen years old when the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu first promoted two big lies: that we needed to combat “obesity” and enable “rational eating.” Ceausescu therefore imposed food rationing. As the basic sources of survival—bread, milk, sugar, butter, potatoes, and meat—became ever more scarce, the rations grew increasingly severe from one year to another, and the lines stretched ever longer. The government broadcast another lie, one that justified the misery of the whole country: things were relatively normal because the rest of the world lived this way as well. But as shortages and lines grew, more and more people realized that wasn’t true.

   Never before had people been forced to wait in such endless lines for a loaf of bread and a pat of butter. My parents woke at 3:00 A.M. to stand in line until 6:00 A.M. to get milk. My mother had started saving eggs to bake a pie that would have to last the family two weeks. Luckily, we still owned a refrigerator with a freezer that worked, though they were almost always empty. The state allowed each individual to buy no more than ten eggs, 500 grams of meat (just over one pound), one liter of cooking oil, and half a kilo of sugar per month.

   The gray, dusty shelves of the state-sponsored grocery stores offered mustard, more mustard, and even more mustard. We could find pickles alongside bottles of artificial cola-colored juices—horrendous—and dark, unrefined soy oil for cooking. The produce section boasted nearly rotten apples. Under refrigeration, there were only “tacâmuri de pui” (chicken wings, gizzards, and claws), cheeses that were mixed with starch or flour, and “Bucure?ti Salami,” consisting of soy, bone meal, and pork lard. Sardines often replaced meat. We could buy ersatz coffee made of corn. Stacked bottles of harsh, sour champagne were almost an insult to festivity. Unrefined biscuits called “varsati” were sold by kilogram.

   Though Ceausescu had outlawed Christmas, its celebration was tolerated to some extent, so one time per year, grocery shops received oranges, bananas and pineapple. On Christmas day, a working day, my parents would rush early in the morning to queue up to buy a kilogram of each delicacy—which, in English, I sometimes mistakenly call delicatessens. But on that gray morning of the twenty-first, the shipment would not have arrived yet. Before my parents needed to be at work and before my school classes would begin, we expected to make our black market connections--somebody who knew somebody who had a supply of what we wanted. At Christmas, people might try to buy almost anything not made in Romania, like women's clothing and blue jeans. Any American brand would cost the equivalent of between $100 and $300 for a new pair of jeans. French and German cosmetics were in great demand as well.

   They also sought electronics from Western Europe or Japan, and any Swiss, German, French, or Belgian chocolates. Currency, gold and other jewelry was traded only on the black market so that it couldn’t be tracked by authorities. Everyone was to declare the jewelry among their possessions, which was limited and carefully regulated, so if you wanted to buy more, the black market was the only way. Owning foreign currency was totally forbidden, particularly U.S. dollars and German DM-Deutsche Marks. People went to jail for transactions of merely a couple of hundred dollars.

   Shoppers also wanted Kent, Marlboro, and Camel cigarettes. Johnny Walker, Ballantine Beer and Teacher’s Whiskey were Romania’s second currency. Everyone bribed medical employees— nurses, doctors, dentists, even the hospital security guards. To get a raise or secure a job, you bribed your boss. Bribing the City Hall administration was the only way to get a permit, approval or avoid fines. You bribed the Militia (Police) to get out of trouble—real, pending, or just imaginary. You bribed your auto shop to get your car fixed, if you were lucky enough to have one. You bribed the manager at your grocery store so that he'd share the good news if they were “getting something,” like fresh meat, sugar, oil or any “delicatessens.” Even if you did shop in approved department stores, you had to bribe certain managers to buy the occasional imported appliance, clothing or other goods.

    I was hoping for some chocolate, which I craved like an addict, that day on December 21st. For certain items, chocolate included, we’d look for someone like “Gigi Kent.” His real name might have been George, but “Gigi” was his nickname, and his specialty was his surname, as in Kent cigarettes. This particular fellow was a doorman at the Continental Hotel and wore a uniform. He sold chocolate, soap, peanuts, and cigarettes. If you bought a pack of smokes for ten to twenty dollars, you wouldn’t get arrested, so he was a god to anyone in a hurry for American cigarettes. There was always another side to this sort of god, however.

   Anyone in uniform—policemen, postmen, anyone in security—was likely to meet many people in the course of a day, and so they became potentially valuable to the machinery of state operations. The black market operators were also part of the eyes and ears of authority’s web. Anyone who tried to buy, say, $500 worth of cigarettes from a Gigi Kent could get into instant trouble, big trouble. He or she would be arrested, held by the police or Securitate for intimidation during the night, and by next morning that “customer” would agree to become an informant. If the police determined that the new informant was well connected in his or her place of work or had a sizable social network, he would be “invited” back to the Police or Securitate, and there, in some petty bureaucrat’s office he’d “negotiate” his future “support” for the principles of communism. Your future and that of your family might depend on whether or not they decided that you might prove valuable to them.

   We turned onto Rusciorului Street, hoping for luck, dreading the risk, fearing the consequences of the wrong attitude, the wrong comment being overheard, the wrong vendor turning our names over to the Securitate.

   On the walkway ahead of us, a child was coughing. My mom started coughing as well. I could also hear asthma-stricken people wheezing and coughing up phlegm behind the closed doors in the houses we passed. My mom and I both suffered from bronchitis and asthma due to the cold temperature in our house, at school, and at her work environment. The temperature in all public spaces couldn’t exceed 16 degrees Celsius/63 degrees Fahrenheit. Gas was rationed, and every family was given twenty kilowatts of electricity per month, but temperatures fell far short of anything like comfort. Even if the stoves ran all the time, the gas was stopped, and the National Gas Company introduced pure cold air instead. My parents bought “butelii” gas containers and charcoal to supplement the heat, but even that was inadequate.

   Mom sacrificed her health in a Victory lab where she worked as a technician tasting, smelling, and combining substances for a sweets factory. The vapors there were nearly lethal, the dust and powder, suffocating. Grandma Irma started writing letters in German to the Red Cross to send medication for her granddaughter and daughter-in-law, but nothing came. My mother’s gentle gaze hid her own suffering as she cared for me. My mother Rica was soft and round and her eyes always reminded me of Sophia Loren’s: dark and sparkling, so beautifully outlined by her perfectly shaped eyebrows and long, curled eyelashes. Here I was sick and sicker from one day to another, and my ailing mother was my nurse round-the-clock. I was constantly freezing, and my chest was always inflame. I remember long nights of asthma attacks, when, because of the cold dampness in the house and the mold, I was barely able to breathe. Mother would come into my room those nights, take me in her arms and soothe me until I would fall asleep. In wintertime, people coughed. Not all those people, however, were as fortunate as I to have a kind, loving mother care for them.

    While we walked down Karl Marx Street, our paths intersected two neighbor ladies, but we didn’t dare exchange a Christmas greeting. We nodded, barely smiling. One of the women in a threadbare gray coat eyed my beret and green pants and then murmured something to her companion, most likely critical of my attire, which defied the government-mandated drab, colorless plain clothing code. Clothing that exhibited any semblance of individuality was strictly forbidden—individuality, of course, threatened the communist agenda. The whispers of the women sent a chill up my spine. The once serene and beautiful Romania had become a hellhole where spies listened to every conversation, opened and checked every piece of mail, and every other neighbor became a secret agent and informant for Securitate. Your face could register all the pessimism, sadness and pain you felt, and nobody cared. But if you squinted in defiance or spilled over with excitement or laughed in merriment, someone would notice you and wonder why and start watching you. The homeland that had produced Vlad the Impaler—Dracula’s prototype whose castle sat on the other side of the mountains from Sibiu—had somehow inhabited the soul of our President and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Romania, Tovarasul Nicolae Ceausescu. Tovarasul meant the comrade of comrades, the one most equal among equals—in other words dictator.

   Under the “wise and blessed leadership” of Ceausescu, the intellectual elite of Romania were being extinguished. Underground persecutions of professors, teachers, doctors, clerics or politicians, who might even breathe differently than the way it was dictated to them, occurred daily. The Securitate had barged into the homes of some of my parents’ friends and dragged them from between their sheets in the middle of the night. The friends were never heard from again, and their very names had to be forgotten. Anyone who mentioned them risked disappearing as well.

   My father’s cousin, whom I called “Uncle Petre,” was caught swimming across the wide Danube River as he tried to reach Yugoslavia. He was beaten almost to death and sent to the notorious high-security penitentiary, Gherla, and labeled a most dangerous person, a “political detainee.” It was said that the moment you got inside Gherla, there was no way out unless it was with “your legs in front,” meaning dead. My father thought he’d never see his cousin again, but the State released him after a couple of years, and Uncle Petre tried escaping the country twice again, his last attempt successful. By that morning in December of 1989, he’d settled in West Germany in the quite pleasant city of Baden-Baden. My father’s cousins, Maria and Ion, also fled the country, escaping the Communist regime by crossing the border illegally, risking their lives, not once, but many times. I could only vaguely remember their faces, but we had pictures, which I studied in hopes of meeting them someday—when I too got out of this hell that was now my country.

   Partly because of my father’s ties with his relatives in the West, our phone was tapped, our mail not only checked, but confiscated, and my father was taken on a weekly basis from his bed in the middle of the night to be interrogated by the Securitate. The State was highly suspicious of my father for another more important reason: his spirit. He was athletic and muscular, and he exercised every morning from 6:00 to 7:30 A.M. He never called in sick or arrived late to his job with Romanian Airlines. Opinionated, dependable, and hard-working, he was also a natural rebel who could always think of a better way to do things. He created numerous inventions in the world of electronics, two of which served in the control tower of the Sibiu airport. The government could not dominate this man. He refused to become a tovaras, a member of the Communist Party—a comrade. He was a traitor without ever doing anything remotely seditious.

   The government blacklisted our family. Mom, Grandma, and I prayed each night to see my father the following morning, still alive and unharmed. Seeing so much fear, suffering, and despair, I swore to my parents that I would flee the country at the first opportunity. They had raised me to look forward to the future, one befitting an inquisitive, energetic, achiever. I wanted that future.

   My grandparents taught me to read and write by the time I was four years old, and Grandpa took me for endless walks down the streets and through parks, all the while explaining the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. I was usually number one in my class, and every year, I came home at the end of the school year with a hand-made crown of roses in recognition of my achievements, bringing smiles to my family’s dispirited faces.

   My parents found a private, sophisticated tutorial center run by a German lady, whom everybody used to call “Tante,” meaning aunt. She took ten children into her house for up to six hours every day to teach German, French, and English, along with American, British, and German literature. This amazing woman also taught us geometry, algebra, trigonometry chemistry, physics, biology, and zoology. Besides all her diverse academic subjects, Tante also gave us a Spartan education that emphasized and enforced standards for a high moral character, discipline, punctuality, the value of keeping one’s word, and etiquette. I studied with her for seven years, unaware until much later that my parents had paid a great deal of money to give me this unique experience.

   At the age of five, I started gathering my friends in my home and taught them the lessons I was learning from Tante and the information I would read about in the only local Communist newspaper or saw on TVR, the only TV channel available in Romania. I have loved teaching ever since. Seeking the best possible education, I applied to a very specialized high school that emphasized chemistry and math. I was accepted after my entrance exam scores placed me first among 989 applicants.

   As I walked alongside my parents that morning in December, avoiding the eyes of strangers, I considered my homework assignments due that day, given on aged, yellow pieces of paper. It would be an Armageddon year, I thought, anticipating my college applications and exams. I had no idea how accurate my prophecy would be.

   We were only a few blocks from the entrance to the Piata. My parents and I had loved the flowers that used to bloom in spring and summer alongside the benches where people would rest during their long walks from one end of Balce?cu Street to the other. Those lovely flowers had not bloomed for several years. The architecture, even under the sad neglect of Communism, still enchanted me, however. Charming Medieval buildings set alongside elegant Baroque structures. Gothic spires emerged from fourth floor roofs atop third and second stories that reached back through time, merging into Renaissance foundations with Romanesque archways. Layer upon layer of history. The imposing Piata Mare, or The Large Square, began as a bustling grain market in the early 1400s. Public meetings, beheadings, hangings took place here. Between 1724 and 1757 “crazy people” who troubled the town during the night were thrown into cages here.

   The square still kept its famous “eyes.” Attic windows, instead of having pointed gables above them, simply peeped out of a smooth rise in the roof, a slit that took on the uncanny structure of an eyelid that seemed to hang over a dark recessed window. It looked as if monstrous black unblinking human eyes, sometimes five to a single stretch of tiled roof, were always watching. With Ceausescu in power, this felt especially disturbing and eerie. They saw you, but you had no idea what or who was hiding behind those haunting windows.

    A thirteenth century Council Tower divided the large square from a small one. Piata Mica, the small square, featured similar architecture, but seemed almost cozy by comparison. What passed for fashion could be found here. As we approached, I could see one of the slanted roofs, which also had an “eye” in the middle. Snow covered the “lid” and icicles hung from its eave like hoary, defeated eyelashes. It looked weird, diabolic. “Old Frosty Man,” the gift-giving figure enthroned in the Communist coup against Saint Nicholas, had such an eye if you looked past government veneers of “normalcy.”

   The wind picked up, and it started to snow again. I could feel it melting in my hair, dampening my face. A cold white shawl settled on the shoulders of my sweater. The snowflakes danced in lazy flurries, reminding me not of a Christmas carol but of the delicately insinuating opening adagio of Ravel’s “Bolero.” A fragile moment of beauty and simple perfection. I didn’t expect the sudden crescendo.

   A loud popping erupted. Ahead of us, people screamed near the entrance to the square. From above, a volley of gunfire. Bullets zinged past me. Children clung for their lives to their parents’ bodies. A bus-length away, people fell, and blood splattered into red drops on the fresh white powder. Chaos. Desperation. My father’s arm crashed against my back and I dived, hitting the ice and cobblestones in the street.

   I am terrified shitless.

CHAPTER TWO
The Day after St. Ignatius Holiday

   STEADY RIFLE VOLLEYS AND RANDOM GUNFIRE sent bullets whistling above me, and I tried to flatten myself against the snow and ice that thinly covered the cobbles. Ricochets shrilled off posts and the trunks of bare trees. I ate snow. I breathed snow, my nose and lips freezing. Time froze in the hour glass as well, each grain as slow-moving as a glacier.

   I didn’t dare raise my head, even to see where the snipers hid or if they were advancing. From all along Balce?cu Street, I could hear adults and children screaming. People shrieked, shouted out prayers, swore, questioned, wailed.

   “God save us!”

   “Where are these bastards?”

   “EVA!…Eva? EVA?…Oh, my god!”

   Boots pounded the snow. My heart thundered so fiercely, I thought it would bang its way out of my chest. I was numb, panting, and hysterically scared. My breath escaped in white puffs, revealing my position and the life still inside me. The snowfall intensified, powdering me as if I were slowly fading away into the whiteness.

   Something cold clamped my gloved right hand. I raised my head just enough to look toward...