A Volunteer in Romaina (Gatekeepers to the West)

Joyce Hall Williams

STREETS OF BUCHAREST


Welcome to our home. It's easy to find. You just get someone to point out the American Embassy and walk around its high, spiked fence, past the paid Israeli guards, and on around to the back. You must cross a winding side street. Directly in front of you is a small shop. Its meager stock is mostly snacks, some eggs and produce, cheeses, candy bars, sugar in a paper sack . . . items like that.

Cross the street to turn left in front of the shop and immediately you will come to a large cavernous opening that is too empty to be a lobby. There is a lift there which you can use to take five stages up, or to the fifth floor, or you may, like me, prefer to use the stairs. (The lift is rickety and often stalls.)

You'll likely see no one. If you do, don't try to smile an American hello, because whoever it is will studiously ignore you and observe only the floor. Even two years after the Revolution, informers still dwell among us.

Ours is a one-room flat, so there's no need to show you around. What you see is what there is. We have moved from the Continental Hotel to avoid storing our belongings while we are out of the city. Bathroom and kitchenette to the left, sitting room by day and bedroom by night is just ahead.

I am standing by one of two large windows, offering bread crumbs to a restless dove who resides in the window box outside. I talk to him softly and he turns his beady eye to look at me. Lately, he has begun to eat from my hand. I am comfortable in my home of ragged elegance.

This swarthy young man with me is DaniEL, pronounced with a heavy last syllable, a frequent visitor and our landlord. There was a time when the late dictator was in power and DaniEL sat astride a purring BMW, a member of the dictator's elite, advance guard. DaniEL is now much attracted to Capitalism. As he points out, there's not that much difference: in Communism, man takes advantage of man, and in Capitalism, it's the reverse.

Daniel's boss had every intention of making another Paris of Bucharest by remodeling most of the city by the end of 1990. All those dreams were shattered with his assassination, and now hundreds of huge, unfinished buildings loom in leering emptiness, particularly in the southern part of the city. Today, the question regarding flats in Bucharest is not how much but where.

I require a place to live? DaniEL will move his mother in with him so I can have her place. Fifth floor is good, safe from the thieving gypsies. He will let me have it because he likes Americans so much; I will pay in dollars?

If I need Romanian lei for shopping, he will sell them to me. As a favor. On the streets, I will be cheated. Someone will sell to me a roll of newspaper cut to the size of 100-lei notes but with only one such wrapped around the outside. Before I can examine it, someone else will shout "politisti" and my hard currency will vanish with the crooks.

His mother's flat is plenty big, eh? He has doubled its appearance with the use of one, completely mirrored wall, and the couch grudgingly lets out to become a lumpy bed. Too lumpy? That can be fixed. DaniEL will fold underneath the bottom sheet (he allows me two clean ones every third week) a blanket. The top sheet has a pocket in it, European style, into which I can stuff the blanket, or a coat, when I feel cold. If, however, the apartment is warm, and I need only the sheet, I must take care not to hang my foot in the pocket. This, though, is an improvement over the square, stiffly starched sheets at the hotel, one overlapping the other and demanding cautious sleeping if one-half of the body is not to be exposed to the chill.