Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

Almost done with The Hundred Days, a novel about the last months of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.  I read it of course with my recent trip in mind, hoping to gain perspective on this country which seems so far away from the world seen from a North American perspective, invisible like Bulgaria and Montenegro.

The novel paints a bleak picture, playing up the gray monotony of the apartment blocks thrown up on the perimeter of Bucharest, like rings around Saturn the author says.  It paints, too, a picture of life under a security state, an oxymoron of stunning power.

Overall, it portrays a country torn by admiration for collective values, fear of the state’s surveillance and pushed down by material lack, a country with little confidence and little sense of itself.

Lay this image against what I saw.  Nicoleta’s town of Mihailesti has many, perhaps most, of its citizens living in what we would call severe poverty.  Yet, the emphasis seems not on lack but on abundance:  family, extended family, neighbors, the food they have–not what they don’t have.  In two evening meals and a few conversations with Nicoleta I did not learn what their dreams are, though Nicoleta clearly wants family, wants to have what she already has.

The assistant manager at the Best Western, his dream was to come to America, saw Romania as lacking, in beauty, in wonderfulness, in those things he sees in the U.S.  There were in the time of Ceausescu many who wanted to leave Romania and paid a terrible price when trying to do so, so his dream is not unusual, I imagine.

Romania is a country in need of discovery.  Its own citizens need to discover it; its intriguing and deep past; its fertile farm lands; its picturesque Carpathians; its Black Sea shore in the Slavic influenced Dobruja region.  This is a country of which a person can be proud and a place that has rich possibilities.

I’m not saying what I want to here.  I’ll try again. Later.