My daughter remembers to this day sharp details of her visit to a communist country when she was four and a half years old. Grandpa was so excited to see her for the first time.
Bewildered
after 23-hour long flights from Atlanta to New York, to London and to
Bucharest, she arrived frazzled, tired, hungry, and thirsty in the Otopeni
Airport of 1985 at the height of the brutal communist regime.
She
remembers the heavily armed security police at the airport, the long passport
lines and the family gathering waiting for us outside of arrivals where the
doors were guarded by police with weapons shouting at everybody to stay
in line and at her for barely stepping out of the waiting line while holding my
hand.
My daddy was
overwhelmed and cried tears of happiness while my daughter was shy and scared
and hid from everybody at first. After the one-hour ride to my hometown, we all
arrived at daddy’s tiny Soviet era apartment which filled quickly with more relatives.
There was no food in the pantry, so we had to ride in my cousin’s ratty Dacia car to
Maita’s village where all the aunts and cousins had prepared food for all of
us. Everything looked foreign to Eileen, but she remembers the fried chicken
and fries floating in grease which she liked.
To deal with
her fear of the unknown, Eileen listened to Michael Jackson’s cassette tape on
her Walkman until the batteries died. Grandpa could not stand seeing his
granddaughter weep, so he left with one of my cousins, daddy’s chess player
partner, and they searched all day until they found Romanian batteries on the
black market. They lasted two hours of play and the acid leaked into the
Walkman and ruined it. Eileen was so upset and still remembers the incident as
music was her passion. She loved Michael Jackson and his album Thriller.
To take her
mind off her ruined Walkman, grandpa and cousin Mircea took us to Lake Snagov
where Eileen swam with grandpa in a wooden box pool built on top of the lake's lily
pad root system. It was built so because the lake was so choked with roots and
other vegetation, some swimmers had become tangled in them and drowned.
The next
day, we took a bus downtown and sat by the water fountain in front of the City
Hall. It was late spring, hot, and the water was inviting. Eileen jumped into
the fountain fully dressed to cool off just like children do in the U.S. It was
a mistake that I quickly rectified but it was too late. A group of men dressed
in dark suits appeared out of nowhere threatening to arrest us all if I did not
control my child. They even threatened her with arrest! The sad part was that
she spoke Romanian fluently, but she had no idea what those mean men were
talking about. Puscarie (jail) was not a word we taught her at
all.
Going to
meet my mamaia (grandma) at the farm was fun for my daughter because she
liked her great-grandma and played at the water pump in the yard with all the
animals underfoot and the clucking hens. Like mother, like daughter, we both
love animals.
I took her
to the creek in the middle of the village where I used to play as a child and
catch fish, frogs, and leeches. She walked right in, fully dressed and started
to play in the water. It was not deep but still teeming with life.
That creek
is no longer there today - it had been diverted around the village because the
local Communist Party decided that it was too expensive to build a solid bridge
over the creek to eventually asphalt the road crossing it.
Eileen
remembers the daily drive for six weeks to the Communist Party resort retreat, passing
by village after village, with homes flanking the highway, thirty miles away
where, as a U.S. citizen, I could buy food for three adults and one child in
U.S. dollars. I did not want daddy to spend all his time daily for six weeks
standing in line just to provide us with food instead of visiting and enjoying
each other’s company.
We took
Eileen to the church where her dad and I got married seven years before and the
marriage house where we received official marriage licenses from the Communist
Party. They did not sanction just the church wedding; we had to do an official
bureaucratic ceremony as well. She played in the beautiful yard and picked a
few wildflowers. Decades after communism fell, that beautiful building was in
terrible need of restoration, surrounded by a garden overcome by weeds and wildflowers.
St. John’s
Orthodox Cathedral, on the other hand, had been restored to its original
splendor and six thousand other churches had been built around the country
since the “fall of communism.” (It did not really fall, it transformed into
globalism, a new form of communism.) The new churches angered the hard-core communists
who supported the vile police state. They wanted to build more communist schools
with the money, not churches.
It amazes me
to this day, four decades later, how many random details my daughter still
remembers from our trip to Romania during communism:
1. She missed her Disney cartoons and Barbie dolls.
2. She was hot everywhere.
3. People were sad and smelled bad.
4. Roads were bumpy and rough.
5. Everything was colored brown.
6. People never smiled.
7. She was scared of men in uniforms with guns who yelled at people.
8. Apartments were so small.
9. She was scared to swim in the very dark Black Sea.
10. She loved playing in Lake Snagov.
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