I realized with a start that I had almost dozed off. It was New Year's Eve, the last night of 1989, and the dawn would bring what was popularly thought of as the last decade of the millennium. But the sight out the window remained a glimpse of the fifteenth century. The only intrusion of the modern age visible in the evening departure from Timisoara had been the occasional military vehicle glimpsed on snowpacked roads and the rare electric cables snaking above the trees. Then those slim talismans had disappeared and there were only the villages, the oil lamps, the cold, and an occasional rubber-wheeled cart, pulled by horses who seemed more bone than flesh, guided by men hidden in dark wool. Then even the village streets were empty as the train rushed through, stopping nowhere. I realized that some of the villages were totally dark, even though it was not yet ten P.m., and leaning closer, wiping frost from the glass, I saw that the village we were passing now was deadbuildings bulldozed, stone walls demolished, farm homes tumbled down.
“Systematization,” whispered Radu Fortuna, who had appeared silently next to me in the aisle. He was chewing on an onion.
I did not ask for clarification, but our guide and liaison smiled and provided it. “Ceausescu wanted to destroy the old. He break down villages, move thousands of peoples to city places like Victory of Socialism Boulevard in Bucharest . . . kilometers and kilometers of tall apartment buildings. Only buildings, they not finished when he tear down and move peoples there. No heat. No water. No electricity . . . he sell electricity to other countries, you see. So village peoples, they have little house out here, be in family three, maybe four hundreds of years, but now live on ninth floor of bad brick building in strange city . . . no windows, cold wind blow in. Have to carry water a mile, then carry up nine flights of stairs.”
He took a deep bite of the onion and nodded as if satisfied. “Systematization.” He moved on down the smoky aisle.
The mountains passed in the night. I began to doze again . . . I had slept little the night before, dreamlessly or otherwise, and I had not slept on the plane the night before that . . . but awoke with a start to find that the Professor Emeritus had taken the seat next to me.
“No goddamn heat,” he whispered, tugging his muffler tighter. “You'd think with all these goddamn peasant bodies and goats and chickens and what have you in this socalled firstclass car, that they'd generate some body heat in here, but it's as cold as Madame Ceausescu’s dear dead tit.”
I blinked at the simile.
“Actually,” said Dr. Paxley in a conspiratorial whisper, “it's not as bad as they say.”
“The cold?” I said.
“No, no. The economy. Ceausescu may be the only national leader in this century who actually paid off his country's foreign debt. Of course, he had to divert food, electricity, and consumer goods to other countries to do it, but Romania has no foreign debt at all now. None.”
“Mmmm,” I said, trying to remember the fragments of the dream I'd had in my few moments of sleep. Something about blood and iron.
“A onepointsevenbilliondollar trade surplus,” muttered Paxley, leaning close enough that I could tell that he'd also had onion for dinner. “And they owe the West nothing and the Russians nothing. Incredible.”
“But the people are starving,” I said softly. Wexler and Father O'Rourke were asleep in the seat in front of us. The bearded priest mumbled slightly, as if battling a bad dream.
Paxley waved away my comment. “When German reunification comes, do you know how much the West Germans are going to have to invest just to retool the infrastructure in the East?” Not waiting for my reply, he went on. “A hundred billion Deutschmarks . . . and that's just to prime the pump. With Romania, the infrastructure is so pitiful that there's little to tear down. Just junk the industrial madness that Ceausescu was so proud of, use the cheap labor . . . my God, man, they're almost serfs . . . and build whatever industrial infrastructure you want. The South Korean model, Mexico . . . it's wide open for the Western corporation that's willing to take the chance.”
I pretended to doze off again, and eventually the Professor Emeritus moved down the aisle to find someone else to explain the economic facts of life to. The villages passed in the darkness as we moved deeper into the Transylvanian mountains.
We arrived in Sebes before dawn and there was some minor official there to take us to the orphanage.
No, orphanage is too kind a word. It was a warehouse, heated no better than the other meat lockers we had been in so far, undecorated except for grimy tile floors and flaking walls painted a vomitous green to eye height and a leprous gray above that. The main hall was at least a hundred meters across.
It was filled with cribs.
Again, the word is too generous. Not cribs, but low metal cages with no tops to them. In the cages were children. Children ranging in age from newborns to tenyearolds. None seemed capable of walking. All were naked or dressed in filthcaked rags. Many were screaming or weeping silently, and the fog of their breath rose in the cold air. Sternfaced women in complicated nurse's caps stood smoking cigarettes on the periphery of this giant human stockyard, occasionally moving among the cages to brusquely hand a bottle to a child . . . sometimes a seven or eightyearold child . . . or more frequently to slap one into silence.
The official and the chainsmoking administrator of the “orphanage” snapped a tirade at us which Fortuna did not deign to translate, and then they walked us through the room and slammed open tall doors.
Another room, a larger room, opened into the cold-shrouded distance. Thin morning light fell in shafts onto the cages and faces there. There must have been at least a thousand children in this room, none of them more than two years old. Some were crying, their infant wails echoing in the tiled space, but most seemed too weak and lethargic even to cry as they lay on the thin, excrementsmeared rags. Some lay in the foetal grip of near starvation. Some looked dead.
Radu Fortuna turned and folded his arms. He was smiling. “You see where the babies go, yes?”
Chapter Four
In Sibiu we found the hidden children. There were four orphanages in this central Transylvanian city of 170,000, and each orphanage was larger and sadder than the one in Sebes. Dr. Aimslea demanded, through Fortuna, that we be allowed to see the AIDS children.
The administrator of Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319, a windowless old structure in the shadow of the sixteenth-century city walls, absolutely refused to acknowledge that there were any AIDS babies. He refused to acknowledge our right to enter the orphanage. He refused, at one point, to acknowledge that he was the administrator of Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319, despite the stenciling on his office door and the plaque on his desk.
Fortuna showed him our travel papers and authorization forms, cosigned with a personal plea for cooperation from interim Prime Minister Roman, President Iliescu, and Vice President Mazilu.
The administrator sneered, took a drag on his short cigarette, shook his head, and said something dismissive. “My orders come from the Ministry of Health,” Radu Fortuna translated.
It took almost an hour to get through to the capital, but Fortuna finally completed a call to the Prime Minister's office, who called the Ministry of Health, who promised to call Strada Cetatii State Orphanage 319 immediately. A little over two hours later, the call came, the administrator snarled something at Fortuna, tossed his cigarette butt on dirty tiles littered with them, snapped something at an orderly, and handed a huge ring of keys to Fortuna.