The Uninvited Guest (8 page)

Perhaps they even cleared the path for a strange table set made of a metal slab with stones for pieces. Stranger things were brought into Romania in the suitcases of those privileged few who could cross borders with ease. Perhaps this game that haunted Nicolae belonged to an official who was eventually discredited, and it was then confiscated from his apartment along with all his wife's underwear, the television and any good food he had stashed away in the cupboards.

“You are getting a sense of how things worked in Romania, yes?” Nicolae smiles a sad smile and takes a drink from his small bottle of beer. “Probably how things still work if I am right, but who knows? It is no longer my concern. I am no longer Romanian. Now I am a Canadian immigrant from Israel. Nothing to do with Romania any more, except when it is time to return and witness my son getting married.”

Possibly, the police stole some poor man's handmade table set before they put him in a secret camp to spend a few years doing the laundry of hundreds of criminals. It's entirely possible they didn't even know how to play backgammon, these two policemen who possessed such a fine and mysterious set. But there were games they did play very well. Because Nicolae's father was in the Party when it meant something to be in the party, Nicolae had, in fact, little to fear from the regular police. The Securitate were a different matter, but drunk as he was and with a visa in his pocket he chose to ignore the danger.

As young men, Nicolae and his friends would go out into the city at night, walking the streets long past curfew, and crossing into different police zones. They didn't care. They could run fast—they all played handball, some on the under-19 national team, and had the legs of young athletes. Not too many policemen, fat or otherwise, were any match for them on open ground, especially with all the fences to jump and gardens in which to hide. Occasionally, the boys had too much to drink and didn't see the police coming until it was too late. The police played a trick they favoured, approaching curfew breakers in a car without lights on. They would wait until the car was right beside the young drunks, and then they would switch on their headlights and turn across the road to stop them. It was a ridiculous sort of ruse because as soon as the boys noticed a car approaching without lights on, they knew it was the police and away they would go on their legs. But sometimes drunk beyond all sense, and singing, they didn't hear the car approaching. The trick worked well enough on those occasions.

With these young sons of privilege, interaction with police after curfew was little more than a warning, the playing of a game about power. The police wanted the boys to understand that state authority had some control over them, even them, national-level athletes and the sons of Party members. In fact, each side played a little game at night in the quiet streets of Bucharest, both the drunk young men and the police. If the officers suspected the boys were well-connected, and they would have to be to be engaged in such risky behaviour, the police would hold off asking them for identity papers for as long as possible. In that way, they could treat the boys a bit more roughly for a short time. They could push them against the wall and shine torches into their faces. They could order them to be quiet and tap the barrels of their weapons to let them know they meant business. All this the police could do until they discovered who the young men were, but after, they would have to be more polite. So, for the bored and proud officers, there was great advantage in not immediately knowing the names of the drunks they stopped in the streets. And for Nicolae and his friends as well, it was amusing not to volunteer too much information too quickly. Later, of course, Nicolae would not believe dealings with the police were so amusing, but at the time he was just a foolish adolescent with too much time and too little responsibility. He enjoyed the late-night interactions. He especially enjoyed the running away, because he had the young athlete's pure love of running. There was a coolness and a moisture to the air of the city when he was running, a brilliance, and his legs sprang so effortlessly off the stone streets.

The interrogations were amusing as well. It was a little dance they all did at those times, the police shoving the boys around and not asking for their papers until they could think of nothing else to do, and Nicolae and his friends being shoved around, protesting, giggling, attempting, each individually, to walk away while someone else was being questioned. One of the boys, a fearless drunk named Paul, would wait until one of his friends had said something particularly stupid to the officers, making them angry. It was not difficult to make these men angry in the middle of the night. These men were very sensitive to insult, and seemed, in particular, always on the watch for an intellectual slight. The young men knew from experience the favourite question of the police was, “Do you think we are not intelligent?” or some variation—“Do you think we did not also go to school? Do you think you are the only ones who have read the great Russian writers?”

This response often came after Nicolae had used a favourite excuse: “We're very sorry comrade officers, but we have been left in charge of a visiting Russian student, a Comrade Raskolnikov, and he has wandered off and become lost.”

The police were concerned that the boys understood how they were not inferiors. Yet the truth, sadly for them, was that in the great People's Republic, in which the lowest was the highest and the very concept of social strata was meant to dissolve, it was still possible for the people's guard to be inferior to stupid, arrogant sons of the Party.

“Ideals are wonderful things, yes, but they rarely transcend the baser human tendencies of envy and jealousy and pride.” Nicolae rubs his eyes and smiles shyly. “Even in bad times, people have the opportunity to act badly. It is shameful, but true.”

The other boys would get the guards talking angrily to one of them in particular, asking their questions, trying to work out whether or not they were insulting him, and Paul would just walk off. His best trick was to slip into the darkness, run a little way down the road and then walk back toward the group, whistling loudly. This drove the police into fits of authority. Paul would come walking back, acting sober but whistling too loudly, and when the police would tell him to get back against the wall, he would play as though he'd never seen the rest of the group in his life.
But
Comrade Officer, I don't know these young criminals at all. You've mistaken me, I was just returning from visiting my girlfriend. I know it is past the curfew, but you understand how women are. When they want it, they want it, and besides, her husband works with you fellows and so is only out at night.

This was really taking things too far, but they were so arrogant, so sure of their positions. Still, the boys paid for it with the odd poke of a nightstick into the ribs, or even sometimes a knee to the groin. It was all just part of the game. Paul suffered on that particular night. He should not have brought wives into it, but he liked to push past the boundaries. He went home with a split lip that night, and a warning not to tell his father how it happened.

That was how it almost always ended. Eventually the police would feel the need to move on and they'd ask for identity papers. Then, on recording names and addresses—addresses they could not help but understand to be those of Party members—they let the boys go with a lecture about responsibility to the state, and the pleasures of not climbing above the general rights of the people for whom the state was originally formed. It would almost always end with false friendliness on both sides, a sort of smiling, winking agreement that a game had been well-played that evening, and until we all meet again.

But there was to be no
until we meet again
when Nicolae was leaving Romania for good. He discovered then that connections in the Party mean very little for admitted traitors to the republic. It took him two years to secure a visa for himself and another year to get visas for his wife and child.

“It was very painful for Dragos's grandfather,” Petrescu explains, “because he was a proud Communist—he is a proud Communist to this day. You will meet him as well. He could not understand his son's need to leave the country, his need to drag half the family from the bosom of their country, even when it was at its worst in the years immediately before 1989.”

In those later years just before the Revolution, Nicolae's father, Razvan Petrescu, managed to be grateful his son and grandson were safely in North America, though it hurt him to know it was their preference, and that they would not be returning to help rebuild the country. But the three years before Nicolae left were terrible for the old man. It was never a secret when someone applied for a visa to emigrate. This information travelled quickly and did swift damage. Where before, his father had walked confidently into his office as Razvan Petrescu, Secretary to the Lithographers Union and original Party member (both Dragos Petrescu's grandfather and grandmother, Nicolae's mother and father, were imprisoned by the Nazis for being members of the Communist Party) suddenly he was “that Petrescu” whose son is stealing from the people by fleeing the country in a time of great need.

The moment Nicolae asked for a visa application at the government office, a special file was opened on him at the police station downtown. And if there was a file for him, there was a file for every member of his family, including his proud Communist parents. To be watched and followed and paid special attention to meant very little to Nicolae, but it was a great and painful shame to his father. It meant large, ugly men in overcoats came to his office and asked his staff questions about him, about what time he came in every morning and when he left in the evenings; if he met with any suspicious-looking people on a regular basis; if perhaps he was having an affair with some young girl who might be an agent of counter-revolution. These men spread rumours about him that had no basis in fact, but which were the standard rumours you always heard about people with family who had left—that their connection to the decadent, Western world had weakened their communist values, and that they had been turned into moles for an eventual capitalistic overthrow. There was a sudden shift of power between old Razvan and the people who worked for him—his authority was destroyed by a thousand whispers and unending lunchtime gossip.

Nicolae had his own troubles to deal with in those three years. Everything became more difficult. Lines stretched longer; it was no longer possible to sweet-talk the woman behind the deli counter in order to get the secret Hungarian salami stashed out of sight beneath the terrible Romanian stuff. Why should she do favours for Nicolae, who was leaving her and the rest of his Romanian family—all the country, one large family—to go and live in Hollywood?

“This always is what we heard,” Nicolae laughs, “that all emigrants were going to go and live in Hollywood. As though this was the only choice. Who the hell would go and live in Hollywood? Yet this was always the accusation.”

Really, Nicolae was taking his young family to Israel to nearly starve to death over two long years before they found their way to Canada and some comfort and freedom, finally. Nicolae had his troubles. He had a police escort to deal with. Being the son of an original Party member made his leaving that much worse for the state, that much more embarrassing, so some effort was made to make it extra hard on him.

“Perhaps they thought they could change my mind through these intimidations. Perhaps it was like a parent trying to scare his child into behaving, all for his own good.” Nicolae looks at Tony and tips the small empty bottle above his lap, twisting his face in a look of exaggerated pain at its emptiness. He presses the button on his armrest to call an attendant. “But, of course, the more you challenge me, the more I look for my own advantage.”

If you walk just beyond the small suburban settlements around Bet She'an in Israel, where Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae settled with his young family in 1984, you will reach the neatly laid-out groves of blood oranges. There the fruit hangs white from the branches, powdered over completely with a chemical to resist disease and kill insects. The farmers there send dogs to run the fence line and stop those who would pick the fruit without permission. Without the dogs it would be possible to do this, as the plantations are large and widespread. There are high fences of twisted wire, but with holes wide enough to reach an arm through. Therefore, the dogs. To get the fruit, then, it would be necessary to understand the dogs, either to know when they are away from the fences, or to discover what it is that wins their trust. With all animals there is a key to trust; some posture you can take or something you can give them that will get behind their instinct. Nicolae was determined to find this key.

The mistake the farmers made was to release only one dog in each grove. Several dogs and Nicolae would not have been so effective in his thievery, because as he worked on one dog the others would have been at his throat. His technique, and he was quite proud of it, was to confuse the dog. When the dog arrived at the fence and Nicolae was there, it thought it knew the situation. Nicolae was there to take the oranges, and the dog was to stop him. To confuse his foe Nicolae did not take the oranges. Instead, for one week, he just stood and looked at the dog while it barked at him, while it threw the full weight of its huge silver-grey body onto the fence. Nicolae stood at a safe distance, looked at it and smiled. He did not try to speak to it, or approach it. He simply made the dog think twice about why he might be there. He looked at it, and then he picked up his briefcase and walked away.

For three days, it followed him along the fence, snarling and spitting, as he walked away, but on the third day as soon as Nicolae walked away, the dog just stood and watched him go, satisfied with the pattern of things. On the second week, Nicolae made a move on the dog. He had thought to wait until it would not bark at the sight of him, but then decided it would be better the other way. To make a move on the dog while it was barking would confuse the animal more than to do so while it was still. So, one day on the second week, while the dog barked at him, Nicolae walked over to the fence and thrust his arms through. He did not move suddenly, or make any noises. He just strode with purpose to the fence and put his arms through the wide holes. The dog was indeed surprised and, according to the plan, very confused. Nicolae grabbed the dog by the collar and closed his fists tight into the struggling animal's neck. In this way he kept the dog from twisting his head far enough to either side to bite into an arm or hand. He let the snarling beast twist a little, in order to allow him to smell his attacker's flesh on him, and even taste it a little with his lolling tongue, but no biting. In this way, Nicolae held onto the dog for one half-hour exactly.

At first it was very difficult to hold the dog as it pulled away from the fence and was very strong in the back legs. The dog jumped and twisted in its desperate need to bite into Nicolae's arms.