Phone Conversation with Maria*

A few days ago, I talked to my childhood friend about our shared fifteen years in the same communist apartment block built in a hurry in the 1960s by the communist party regime. The activists were eager to move into that drab concrete and steel building as many villagers and urbanites as possible, farmers whose property they stole and whose homes they demolished, and poor proletarians who had no home of their own as everything of value they had ever owned had been confiscated by the Communist Party for the “good of the people.”

We reminisced about our fifteen years in the same government schools but different classrooms, and what our parents tried to do to help us survive and even in some cases, make our existence better. Her life was much nicer, we did not understand why at the time, but we gathered around her mother’s tiny kitchen as often as she would allow us.

Maria* told me that her dad used to be the communist apparatchik in the factory where he worked. As payment, for reporting on what other workers said during casual conversations at work, and for his efforts to indoctrinate others during daily discussions and weekly mandatory “syndicate” meetings, he received a monthly monetary stipend and rations of food from special stores dedicated to the loyal communist party members and activists.

Not all workers were permitted to be members of the communist club, they had to earn that distinction. And having an unacceptable background that was considered “bourgeois” was not exactly a ringing endorsement for membership in the rarified club of Bolsheviks. It did not take much to be considered “bourgeois,” a larger plot of land, or a nicer home inherited from parents and grandparents who worked hard to build it.

Bolsheviks welcomed snitches and convincing activists like her father who sported grey hair at an early age, making him look more distinguished, like a wise sage who could be trusted. When he died of old age, Maria threw away all his rubbish books he had in his communist activist library.

Maria had a rare rotary dial telephone in her home, something we only dared to dream. Most apartments had to wait 14 years to have a phone installed and bugged. Maria had better and abundant food, nicer clothes, medicine and proper medical care, finer furniture, and a black and white TV long before our parents were able to afford one.

Today, 33 years since the “fall” of communism in Romania, we were able to talk openly about our lives from long ago and laugh about it. That is not something we could have done during the oppressive socialist republic regime.

Another friend who lived on the same fifth floor as my parents did, right across from our apartment door, had a better life than ours as well, thanks to their father, a trucker, who lifted items regularly from whatever shipment he was hauling that day, and brought them home to feed his family. When he had an excess of whatever was in his cargo, he bartered with others. Decades later, his son, with a sweet but toothless grin, was still living in the same apartment with his family and elderly mom.

As kids, we did not understand the implications of why those two families’ lives were better. We just saw more food and we were hungrily envious. Nobody brought food to our door but, as we played games or did our homework in her apartment, sometimes we would get morsels of whatever desserts the lady of the house prepared for her family. The wonderful smells would waft up the concrete block’s stairwell and people knew who was cooking tasty food that day.

My daddy, an honest man to a fault, despised these people who stole to survive. Daddy knew bartering with stolen food was against the law and punishable by long jail sentences, but these people were desperate to keep their families alive any way they could in the absence of welfare. One neighbor went to jail for several years for simple theft at his factory. Daddy always said that he would rather we starve than steal from the oppressive regime that kept us so thin and dependent on their food rejects and bones scraped off meat that the inept communist party economic planners brought to the market daily.

My mom always shook her head in disapproval at how much food Americans squandered each day, not realizing how close to food shortages they are. In the end, the abundant system in this country failed her just as miserably as the communist system in Romania had failed her decades ago. Mom’s favorite phrase for everything not run properly was, “this is a village without dogs.”

 

*This is not her real name