In search of Baron Kurtz in Bucharest

One year after the execution of a dictator, I stepped off the train at Gara Nord. I was looking to witness the new dawn after revolution. The platform was long and narrow. The station was airy. There were newspaper kiosks streaming with Cyrillic screeds and trolley stands where porters smoked Turkish cigarettes. It was so hot I could feel myself on the crossroads of another weather system, no longer in temperate northern Europe, but, with its palm trees and sticky heat, I had reached the East.

Disparate yet related

On the platform was a “ratty little man”, to quote Graham Greene. As he begged a spare coin from me, a jumble of impressions led me back to Holly Martin’s arrival in Vienna and his meeting with a character called Baron Kurtz. The title of Baron took me back to the brittle elegance of Mitteleuropa and the intrigue of lost status, lost wealth and the gambits of survival. The name, Kurtz, sent me floating into the heart of darkness. But it turns out that Baron Kurtz is no more than a violin player in a cheap café. He does, however, have an agenda.

He tells Holly that Mr Popescu has disappeared. However, Mr Popescu turns up at the Casanova Club. In a city like this, everyone has to be careful.

Major Calloway explains, “You’re blundering around with the worst racketeers in Vienna.” But Holly won’t listen. He has come to Vienna to look for his friend, Harry Lime.

Who would I find in Bucharest? Would I find Major Calloway – a brisk, kindly guide in an army-regulation duffle coat? Or would it be Harry Lime, who, when he was 14 years old, taught Holly three card tricks? That’s growing up fast, says Holly with a rueful smile. I know what it’s like to grow up fast and my heart belongs to guys like Harry.

I made my trip to Vienna and Bucharest shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It was the world of perestroika and Reaganism. But I could not let go of my vision of a black and white free-for-all, in which spaces open up for a guy like Harry to break the rules. Why has Romania, the home of Baron Kurtz, captured my imagination more than its Balkan neighbours? It’s different from those neighbours. In 104 AD, the Roman Emperor, Trajan, imposed an imperium after winning a series of wars over Dacia, of which Romania was the heartland. The imperium lasted 165 years. This was long enough for the Daco-Romans to develop an offshoot of Latin. The Romanian language makes Romania’s voice hard to hear in the chorus of Slavic languages that threatens to drown it out.

To increase my attachment to their story, the Romanians were largely ignored, or at best misunderstood, by the rest of Europe, because the life of other nations was more florid. Check. I was an only child overwhelmed by a dysfunctional family. Centuries of evading domination and destruction by Ottoman Turks, Hungarians and Hapsburgs made Romanians revert to a passive, avoidant and dreamy state. They call it the “mioritic” syndrome. The Dacians invented it. According to an ancestry.com test, among the strands of DNA my sample contained was a 14.9 per cent streak of Dacian. Early chroniclers said that the Dacians were refugees from Troy. The word “Dacia” means “wolf” with whom the Dacians identified. We circled settlements and villages waiting to take them over. We used knives and daggers to attack from behind. We were cunning, and there is an implicit cunning in the “mioritic” syndrome, by which the immortality of the soul lifts us above the squabbles and squalor of chaos. In the end, as I see it now, it was Holly Martins who was walking with me through a cityscape that was Bucharest, on to which I projected a melody that belongs to a film about Vienna.

Harsh reality

Memories of the zither’s sweet refrain are so potent they take over the present of today. I can go further back and hear carriages rattling over cobblestones and hawkers shouting their wares. In the 19th century, Bucharest was called the “Paris of the East” because of its Latinate influences. Under the socialist dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu, the boulevards gave way to concrete conurbations. I was walking in a city that had been turned into numbered blocks of flats. The concourse I trod was empty of landmarks, and I struggled to navigate the blocks. They were ziggurats, pyramids with windows, as silent and impassive as ancient. I do not remember how I got there from the station. I must have walked. I do not remember how I found the address written on a card given to me by the tourist officer at the station. My eyes were skimming off surfaces. Somehow, the address revealed itself as a second floor flat coming off an internal staircase. I knocked on the door. If I hadn’t been so dreamy, I would have been afraid.

The door opened into a widow’s flat. Her name was Ioana. She was in her 40s and was renting out a room. In many ways, her home reminded me of my childhood home. A two-bedroomed flat with low ceilings and mould on the walls. (“Low ceilings and cramped rooms crush the mind and the spirit”, Raskolnikov tells Sonya in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.) But in our flat, there was a saving grace: the sunshine of suburban London. It filled our rooms with the promise of space and abundance. Not so in Ioana’s home. I could only intuit the bulky shapes of her furniture. She herself was a small, plump woman with dyed blonde hair and blue eye shadow.

“Can I have a bath?” I asked her, keen to wash off the grime of train travel.

“No,” was the short answer. Ioana was very gracious but her message was stark. Electricity was rationed and so was hot water – to two hours a day. There would only be hot water again from 8pm to 10pm. I did not know what to say. But I knew I could not stay in that flat and take hot water that would deprive my host of her share. Ioana showed me her son’s room which was to be mine for the night. I saw a boy’s photograph on a shelf. Like other young people I had seen so far, he had green stubs for teeth and dull, frowning eyes. Ioana herself, she told me, had stomach cancer.

Had I come here to be part of something I would never have to live with? I had not set off with the idea of poverty tourism. At the same time, my naiveté appalled me. How could I expect anything else? The contrast between my romantic fantasies of “Paris of the East” and the harshness of reality was too much for me. I did not have the right to take my ease. Unnerved, I drifted back to the city centre, a stranger to my own motivation. Palaces with palm trees would usually charm me with their hints of oriental splendour. But all I could see was the drabness of Bucharest’s citizens. No one stood out to me. Passers-by fitted into an overall theme that washed away colour. I retreated into not seeing. An angry police officer came chasing after me. I stood in the road trying to make sense of his gesticulations. I finally made out he was saying, “No jaywalking!”

I must have looked terrified because he let me off with a contemptuous gesture, probably sensing I was out of my depth. He was right. Finally I found a hotel that offered me a distraction from my shortcomings. There were bullet holes in the walls of the Athenée Palace Hotel but the air grew denser in its environs. Congestion offered the comfort of anonymity. The Athenée Palace, with its marbled façade and pillared lobby, was a glorious relic of the Art Nouveau “Paris of the East”. Dacias – the Romanian car, pulled up, parked, and let out passengers in its forecourt. Commerce – the movement of money – helped me regain my confidence.

Theatrical performances

The Athenée Palace had gained a reputation during the interwar years as the most elegant – and notorious – rendezvous in the Balkans. At the start of the Second World War, Romania was in league with Nazi Germany. By 1944, the government had switched sides. So Bucharest, and specifically the Athenée Palace, served as a haven for wavering Nazis, western diplomats, spies and the dispossessed royalty of Eastern Europe. They all hung out at the hotel’s English Bar.

The gilded mirrors and gold leaf filigree were still here, the illegal money changers were still here. But the English Bar was closed. Gone were the bellboys in white gloves and crested caps. Gone were the waiters in emerald jackets serving canapés and popping champagne corks. The staff were evasive and indifferent. My disappointment was intense. What was I to do? A nonchalant waiter offered me a chair at a table. I took my seat and looked across an ocean of white tablecloths dotted with empty wine glasses and discarded napkins. In the distance, were the descendants of Baron Kurtz.

A portly, middle-aged prostitute and a skinny man in a leather jacket were hustling a half-drunk American. I guessed the woman was a prostitute because she had a look in her eye that said she was up for business. A kind of smiling alertness that was far more telling than the short skirt a couple of sizes too small for her. She wriggled in her seat, eyeing up the room while her companion convinced their mark he was onto a good thing.

“My friend, my friend, you must believe me,” I heard him say, as he leant ever closer towards the westerner. He was too sozzled to do anything but go along with whatever scheme his new best friend was proposing. Meanwhile, a throng of incantatory voices was approaching. Out of a cloud of black cassocks a convocation of Orthodox priests streamed through the restaurant like a frieze. Each one had a silver pectoral chain falling to his waist. Their numbers and the complexities of the turrets that sat atop their birettas amazed me. What did these turrets signify? Why were there so many variations? Equally unreadable were their waxy faces ending in beards that were uniformly thick and far-reaching.

These spectral figures were reclaiming their territory after Ceauşescu’s reign of madness. Between the con artists and the priests I had to wonder if I had been drawn into some theatrical event staged for my benefit. I felt the same sense of hyper-reality Holly Martin feels when he sits at a banquette in the Casanova Club. All these characters were spinning a line. The film was seeping into my reality. My head was spinning with dialogue from The Third Man.

For example, when Holly visits Harry’s girl in her flat in a crumbling mansion, he sees she has a cat:

Harry’s girl tells Holly the cat only likes Harry.

Holly thinks Harry, his best friend from childhood, is dead.

Harry laughs at fools like Holly all the time.

He shops his girl to the Russians.

It’s the cat who finds Harry Lime.

But that was Vienna, and this was Bucharest. How do I get back to the moment? I have to work at it, push away the curtains of forgetting and denial.

The encounter

In the restaurant of the Athenée Palace, the waiter arrived at my table. I wanted to ask him about Baron Kurtz’s descendants. Instead I asked for mititei (meatballs). He said they were out. I asked him for soup. He said it was out. What do you have, I asked. Powdered eggs.

I made a mental survey of the restaurant, the lobby and the street outside. I acknowledged to myself that I had stumbled into a post-apocalyptic drought, with a complex set of rules I could not comprehend.

I left the Athenée Palace Hotel, and made my way back to the train station. The queue was long. When I finally got to the counter, I was told the first train to Vienna was the following morning. I just had to survive the night. Behind me, two loud voices were speaking English. I turned to see two Americans in shorts, baseball caps and vests. They looked so vigorous and western, I almost leapt into their arms.

Frank and Howard were on a walking tour of Europe, they told me, raising awareness for AIDS. Both men were HIV positive, and had been to visit a Romanian orphanage. They were now doing a tour of the capital and had hired a young man, Florin, to show them around. Florin was eager to please, and once Frank and Howard had done their business at the counter, he suggested we go to Manuc’s Inn. It was one of the few wooden buildings left in Bucharest. The first-floor gallery extended on all four sides of the inner courtyard. Behind me, a waiter lurked in a darkened doorway. He was not so much waiting for customers to place an order, more resenting any possibility of us lifting the gloom.

“Let me order for you,” Florin said. He waved at the waiter who sloped over. Twenty minutes later, we received a round of Slivovitz beer and tinned pilchards.

I sized up my companions. The most noticeable features in Florin’s grey plasticine face were his wary eyes. The two Americans were shining examples of health insurance. They both had moustaches like the Leather Biker from Village People. I felt reassured by their MTV modality. But Howard had a story to tell me. Romanian children were being abandoned by their impoverished parents. Orphanages were full of children who were dosed with tranquilizers, administered intravenously. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS was ravaging through the orphans. Howard showed me a photo. A tiny infant bundled into a commode at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies. I thought of Harry Lime diluting penicillin. I thought of Major Calloway forcing Holly to visit the children who had been affected by Harry’s penicillin.

“A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads,” the Major says. “It doesn’t bear thinking about very closely, does it?”

On the Ferris Wheel in Vienna, Harry tries to talk his way out of the horror he has helped to create. Sitting next to me, in an old Romanian inn, Howard was talking of the horror he had seen. Like the Major, I could not bear to think about it. Absolution was what I wanted, not a reminder. I pledged to support Howard’s marathon walk across Europe and to raise money for the Romanian orphanage. The sun spread a benevolent silence through the latticed beams of the inn. Howard smiled and pressed my hand with his. With the other, he picked up his napkin and smoothed over his moustache, brushing out the smile and, just for a moment, leaving his face vacant.

***

Several days after my return to London, I was standing on a carpeted floor in a comfortable living room. I had been woken by the telephone ringing. It was two o’clock in the morning. I picked up the receiver and heard the distant clicks that signalled an international call. A man was weeping. It was Florin.

“What’s the matter?” I cried.

“They’re going to kill me,” he said in a stifled whisper. I pictured a man in a balaclava pressing the barrel of a gun to Florin’s head.

“Ple-ee-ase send me some money …” He broke off, his voice muffled. I was on an assistant’s salary. I started crying, too. I felt there must be something I could do. But did I want to do it? I hung up the phone, and stood for a while, ignoring its desperate ringing, gripped with the hopelessness of myself ever being the person who could or would help him, the person I wanted to be.

Back at my job in a literary agency, I set about raising funds from my colleagues in the publishing industry. The outside world had also discovered Ceauşescu’s network of “child gulags”. I wrote letters about Howard’s mission and that here was an opportunity for us to help. I received many donations and was able to send a cheque for £2,000.

I did not receive a receipt or an acknowledgement. I did not hear back from Howard or Frank or anyone else about the orphans.

As the song of the zither fades, it is the orphans who ring in my ears. Those worried babies and my helplessness. All that effort, that misplaced belief that I could help them; the pity I evoked in others, only to be exploited. Worse, the children were exploited. I did not hear from Howard or Frank and I could only feel the numbness of my own denial – this didn’t happen to me. Now I am writing about it, I hear again the words of Major Calloway. This time, he is talking to me: I had been blundering around with the worst racketeers in Bucharest.

Lilian Pizzichini is the author of four books including Dead Men’s Wages, which won the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 2002, and The Novotny Papers, which featured in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror in 2021.

Bucharest, memoir, Romania, Vienna