A ROMANIAN JOURNAL : EXILE’S RETURN : The Author Fled His Homeland by Hoodwinking Ceausescu. Now He Returns to Find Small Dramas of Hope Amid a Profound Sense of Isolation

“YOU,” SHOUTS THE RUSSIAN--BARE-CHESTED and reeking of wine--to the Romanian truck driver in battered overalls. “You are undisciplined and stupid. Your truck blocks all the traffic.”

“You drunken sod,” the Romanian shouts back, his hands flailing about in search of a screwdriver. “I’ll cut your stuffing out, for how you robbed my country for 40 years.”

We’re on a congested highway by a lifted drawbridge across the Siret River. Other bare-chested Russians jump out of their tourist bus. A crowd of Romanians forms, grabbing sticks, pipes, crank handles. “You bled our country dry!” their shout swells. A pipe catches a Russian smack across the shoulder blades, drawing blood. In the midst of the buffeting crowd, my Californian wife and I are taking photographs. She is scared, while I feel an ancestral, frightening upsurge of self-righteous anger--against the Russians, any Russians, even these tipsy vacationers who should know better than to act arrogant in a former Soviet colony. I wonder how I can feel this after 18 years of absence, after becoming, for all practical purposes, an acculturated American.

The two sides are ready to kill each other. Luckily, someone in the crowd figures out that my wife and I are Americans, creating a diversion that cools off both sides. Romanians surround us, spewing stories about what Russians are doing to Romanians on the other side of the border, in Moldova. The Russians flash photogenic V signs and climb back into their bus. The rural police finally appear just as the bridge is lowered at last and opened to traffic.

In the car, as we drive off, my wife is still shaking. I passionately take the Romanians’ side and watch her eyes darken: Am I like these people--vindictive, self-righteous and ready to go off like an unpinned grenade? Well, I am and I’m not. I was raised in Romania. I absorbed a tradition of distrust and hate bred by countless Russian occupations. Now, with communism gone, nationalism is spreading like a brush fire. If economic conditions don’t improve, all of Eastern Europe, from Zagreb to Kiev, might become a giant Northern Ireland.

The thought grips my heart. I’m proud of everyone’s will to be themselves, yet appalled by their need to hate. Suddenly, I don’t know whether to defend these people or condemn them. I wish I could be one of them by enjoying their art and heritage, without having to share their pain and shame. But that is impossible.

Such has been the zigzag of my emotions during the first three days of my visit. I left Romania in 1974, a defector, an enemy of the people, a traitor. Today, I am received like a prodigal son, praised for my writing achievement in America, urged to be a spokesman for a forsaken homeland. Since the minute I returned, I’ve been torn between pain and joy, pride and embarrassment.

WE ARE ON OUR WAY to Nicoresti, to a hospital with an infantile neuropsychiatry section for “irrecoverable” orphans, the rejects of the Nicolae Ceausescu era. By banning abortions in 1968 to build up Romania’s population, the late dictator forced generations of women into coat-hanger abortions, causing some mothers to die and others to abandon children they could not support. Many infants survived, crippled or brain-damaged. The survivors, about 125,000 altogether, were shut away in orphanages for irrecoverables. Forgotten and starved, they slept four to a bed and were looked after by untrained peasant women who filled in as nurses. My wife and I are active in a U.S.-based charity that raises money for the orphans (the Free Romania Foundation, started in Massachusetts in 1989 by architect Ion Berindei), which is why we are en route to Nicoresti.

We travel past lushly green countryside. Men in undershirts drive horse carts with cows tied behind them; garbage burns in fields separating six-story apartment buildings topped with peasant-style shingled roofs. These are the model villages erected by Ceausescu for peasants uprooted from real villages, sometimes centuries old, that have been razed for his freeways and factories. On the shoulders of those freeways, peasants walk barefoot. The sense of isolation is overpowering. And yet, as we just witnessed, these boondocks have learned of the world. They’re not going to be ignored by the world--not this time.

At the Nicoresti hospital, the orphans’ section has 90 beds for 130 patients, one doctor and four nurses per shift. Dr. Nicolae Preda has been here for 36 years. He is aided by six volunteers from Ireland, and there are American volunteers en route. “You don’t know what this place was a year ago,” Preda tells us. But the volunteers accuse him of being one of the old ones , not corrupt but incompetent, letting medicines from the West outlast their expiration dates in the storage room (we looked at the labels ourselves). We had been told that the orphans--starved for food, toys and love--might act hostile, might hit us or spit on us. In fact, they hugged us desperately, drooled all over us, fought each other for a caress or a piece of candy. New to crayons and drawing paper, they destroyed half of those we brought before being shown how to use them. Our visit was their fairy tale, to draw upon for months, until other visitors showed up.

We were accompanied by Dana Nistor, a coordinator for the Free Romania Foundation and a respected figure of the Romanian bar. She told us that the foundation encounters immense difficulties. “Ceausescu wanted these kids to die. We saved them, but now it is incredibly hard to align the attitudes of the Romanians here with the ones abroad, though both want to help. For instance, our official license to operate in Romania as a U.S. foundation should have been signed by the Romanian government months ago. Whether it’s bureaucracy or suspicion, it still hasn’t been signed.”

“And yet,” says Kevin, a 21-year-old Irishman hugging a little boy with a clubfoot, “it’s getting better. I’m here for three months, then I have to go back to Dublin. But I’ll return soon, for a whole year.”

What makes him want to return? The village offers no entertainment; the food is coarse and unvaried; the shower facilities are archaic. What draws him back is that his presence makes a big difference. Back in Los Angeles, we had met Christine Nelson, another coordinator for the foundation, who puts in hour after hour of volunteer work while holding down a regular job. Her motivation was the same: “ Any little gesture makes a difference. Which can be uniquely uplifting.”

Two days after visiting Nicoresti, we raised the question of the unsigned license with Romanian’s prime minister, Petre Roman (who resigned a month later, when miners and hooligans dressed as miners protested his free-market policies). Roman promised his cooperation and made a chilling point: “Have you seen the village kids, across the street from the hospital? The healthy ones? They look as deprived, malnourished, slowed down in their development as those clubfooted, cross-eyed little orphans.”

IN BUCHAREST, WE FOUND the scars of the revolution still being repaired. When I left, it was a relatively clean and orderly metropolis of 3 million in a darkly dignified dictatorship. But during his last 10 years, Ceausescu spent almost nothing on retooling and refurbishing the country while he wasted billions on Pharaonic projects such as his Casa Poporului (the People’s House), an administrative tower with more office space than the Pentagon. The People’s House is hideous, confused, vaguely neoclassic; unoccupied, it faces an unfinished boulevard broader and longer than the Champs Elysees.

North of the city, like a bluish wave frozen by a magician’s touch, loom the Carpathians. When the sun sets, a romantic glow transfigures the countryside, surrounding the city with memories of heroes, leaders who fought the Turks, patriot writers whose example I was supposed to follow. I left all that at the height of success, the most popular young novelist in Romania, roasted in the party press for a book called “Burial of the Vine.” In it, I had described the case of a young man, expelled from the party, who found haven and a part-time job in a Jewish cemetery, where a philosophical old body washer taught him about the transitory nature of politics. For that extravagant vision, official reviewers accused me in print of blaspheming the party and privately of “making the Jews better than us”--a major gaffe for a non-Jewish writer. “Burial of the Vine” came after three other novels, each of which attempted to break a taboo. I was translated into Czech and Polish, German and Swedish, interviewed at an early age by Look magazine, and read avidly, especially by the young. Yet every book of mine was published with 50-odd pages missing, the result of long fights with the censors.

So I defected, leaving my language, my audience, my self, to write, in almost physical pain, books in English.

Perhaps the story of how I left Romania is a good illustration of what the country was like back then. Denied a passport that would permit me to attend the University of Iowa’s International Writing Workshop, I ultimately asked to see Mr. Ceausescu himself. I was received in private by the intense little man with a hoarse voice, who looked up from correcting his latest treatise on Marxism and asked why I would want to waste a year at a reactionary American university. He was so hostile that I panicked. With one phone call he could make me disappear. Seeing him scribble notes on his latest opus, I had a flash of inspiration:

“Comrade General Secretary, America is indeed a reactionary country, but you yourself are a writer. Universities are America’s only radical enclaves. If I go to Iowa, I shall spread your Marxist thought among young Americans.”

He bought it. Two days later, I got my passport and fled for good. After I asked for political asylum, the retaliation was drastic. My books were removed from stores and libraries, my valuables confiscated, my name erased from movies I had written. I was tried in absentia, the penal code defining defection as treason. I could not communicate with my parents. As a political refugee, I was not allowed to attend my father’s funeral eight years later.

The encounter with Ceausescu stands out in my mind like a scene from “A Thousand & One Nights.” I was alone with the Sultan, puzzling out the best way to gain his good will, and it was unabashed flattery meeting unthinkable naivete. Together, they opened my road to freedom. Yet Ceausescu’s naivete illustrated my country’s enduring isolation from the world. At the height of his power, he was as isolated as the villages of Romania, where low-wattage bulbs, and yes, oil lamps, still burn at night.

I HAVE A NEW ROMANIAN PUBLISHER, after 18 years: George Arion. He manages Flacara, a strong reportorial weekly and publishing house. Arion calls a press conference for me, and 30 journalists and writers show up, most disarmingly young. The magazines they write for are named Freedom, Free Youth, Free Romania and Truth. Two Free Youth reporters click on cassette recorders and ask about writing in English, and about Hollywood. I suddenly realize how much I’ve wanted to tell my story in Romanian, to Romanians.

The writers ask about commercial success. I respond, somewhat critical of America’s irreverence toward high-brow art and discover that irreverence is what they like about American writers. “They’re great, they go like this . . . . “ says one of the reporters, slicing the air with his hand, straight ahead, toward me. My God! Romanian art, a bastion of style and scholarship, is being assailed by novel trends. Although my fiction was by no means uncultivated, I was accused before I left of not giving form its due, of being too hard and direct. Now these youngsters say to hell with pretense--we want talent and truth. I’ve won--18 years later.

“I first read you this year,” says Oltea Mutulescu, a reporter in her mid-20s. “You hold up. Are you as good in English?”

“I like the Americans,” confides a young art director, “because in everything--literature, music--they know what they want and go for it.” His cultural image of America goes from big-band jazz to heavy metal and from Faulkner to Stephen King. He sees the United States as a vast liberation of the senses.

These kids love America as ignorantly as I did when I left. They are pure. And yet, when they talk of Romania, out of their purity come statements of astounding prejudice. I ask a 25-year-old doctor about Romanian crime, mostly committed by urban Gypsies. “Gypsies steal because they are genetically inferior,” he sighs. Otherwise, he is politically correct, and pitiless about provincialism and neocommunist thinking.

FULL OF conflicting feelings, I stroll through the city I knew. I grew up with the sound of slow streetcars, playing on streets lined with cute little palazzi and palazzetti , mansions and villas built with money from the ‘20s oil boom. It was a relaxed scene. My father’s generation chatted in cafes about sex and socialism.

Clearly, few people work hard now: At 2 in the afternoon the streets are filled with people.

Today, the “little Paris” (Bucharest’s nickname in the ‘20s and ‘30s) is all peeling, with sidewalks broken, filled with a rude humanity. People elbow each other and don’t wait for green lights at intersections, giving motorists lethal stares, implying that cars are a sign of former collaboration. The young are angry, skeptical about the depth of reforms, suspicious of the National Salvation Front, the ruling party. Bucharest University is graffiti’d with the sign, “Zone free of neocommunism.”

I see little neocommunism. I see the lack of democracy in institutions and manners that date back to 500 years of Turkish rule, finally overthrown in 1877. Of all the former communist nations, Romania has one of the strongest traditions of isolation and provincialism as result of foreign occupations. Ceausescu’s dictatorship deepened that isolation, suspending all ties with Romanians living abroad.

I see the former communist bureaucracy, the nomenklatura, behind counters, in offices, leading work teams, walking around with battered briefcases. These are no Soviet mini-czars, rotund and freshly shaven, with Volga cars and dacha vacation homes. The Romanian nomenklatura is a rather faceless crowd of mayors and agronomists, managers and postmasters, rural police and small-town clerks. The bone they chewed was pretty bare. How can one fire them all in one sweep? Often, they’re the ones with experience, and that’s the catch: The experienced ones are not clean, and the clean ones are not experienced.

But let’s look at the concept of clean: Ceausescu, by insisting on total adulation, by forcing people to take an oath of allegiance every time they were granted anything, even an extra ration of soap, allowed no one to remain clean. One had to prostitute oneself, not for power or money but for daily bread. No one who drew a salary stayed clean; therefore, no one really has the power of moral judgment.

And yet, everyone damns everyone else. As the joke goes, “everyday, 23 million Romanians punch the clock--for complaining.” Young people eye opportunities abroad. “If this doesn’t improve, I’m off to Australia,” threatens an electrician’s teen-age apprentice. The elderly believe that their lives were wasted: “I worked a lifetime,” muses a retired stage director, “and my pension cannot buy dinner at a first-class restaurant.”

Some smellier ghosts are haunting the place. Eugen Barbu--a formula novelist, former crony of Ceausescu and dean of the Romanian right wing (I criticized him in print, so after I defected, he wrote my official excommunication in a party paper)--now runs the anti-Semitic weekly Romania Mare (Greater Romania). Historically justified nationalist dreams, such as uniting Moldova with Romania, become in his columns a troglodytical call to brawling. Romania Mare, a successful yellow rag, prints 150,000 copies and is second in circulation only to Expres, a paper of sharp investigative bite. Oh, well, it appears I haven’t won yet.

I return to my hotel and chat with five idle waiters about the hesitant progress of capitalism. Small businesses are being privatized, but the state hasn’t yet touched the bigger industries. One waiter tells me how he tried to open a fast-food counter on a busy street. He had the seed money but was refused the permit: The area was designated non-commercial. Two weeks later he found another stand operating on that very spot. “The owner was one of the ‘old ones’; he talked the city into selling him the permit. They prefer one of their own.”

The other waiters listen, appearing undecided about how far one should privatize and how soon. One comments that his small salary is enough for him, his wife and their baby. He wants no hard work under competitive conditions. After 40 years, he has no concept of excelling, of being at his best.

Yet the charm of this city would be so easy to restore. Romania has no foreign debt. Labor is among the world’s cheapest. Why is foreign capital so timid? Why is Romania perceived as a risky investment when it well might become Eastern Europe’s big economic success story?

The main reason for the reluctance of foreign capitalists are the rampages of the miners, who, many political leaders believe, have been repeatedly incited by former agents of the Securitate (Ceausescu’s secret police) to march on Bucharest and demand not only increased wages but a return to a subsidized economy as well. Their last march, on Sept. 26, brought down the government of reform-minded Petre Roman but made him into a sort of free-market hero. Now he is expected to run for the presidency. The situation is murky, with cloak-and-dagger scenarios being discussed in Parliament. Small wonder that foreign capital is keeping its distance.

AFTER LUNCH, I pass the front desk. Dorina, the receptionist, holds up a transparent plastic bag containing one of my old books. Only half of the front cover is left. The pages are mustard yellow, so tattered that they would disintegrate were it not for the bag.

“What happened to this book? Someone threw it under a tank?”

“No. We all read it. My family, my husband’s family, our relatives in the provinces. Then we kept lending it. Through the years, hundreds of people read it. We were asked to sell it, but we didn’t want to.”

I feel ashamed. Of writing in English, of having a comfortable life in the United States. Dorina lays the dying book on the desk. “Please, autograph it; you enchanted my youth.” How does one respond to such enormous praise? I write a florid autograph as the front page crumbles under my pen. Dorina talks on about the black market for banned books; I was at the top of an untabulated bestseller list. I notice how my wife seems nervous, irritated.

Later, I learn the cause of her state. She, too, is moved by what she sees. She is a journalist, a well-traveled person; she’s seen other freedoms in the raw, but this is so raw it hurts. “You’ve got to do something . . . something to help this country.”

What can I do? I’m not a politician, or a businessman. Just a writer, with new ideas, with a changed sense of world priorities acquired in America. All I can do is write again for these young people. And write about them, too, in English. For the first time in many years, the West wants to know about the strange, contradictory, tragic humanity staggering to its feet from the ashes of communism.

AT THIS TIME, almost all Romanians agree that free-market reforms are the only solution, but there are deep divisions about the right pace. Broadly, Romania is divided into “fast goers” (the urban young, the intelligentsia, most of the managers and emerging capitalists, for whom Roman has become a symbol), and “slow goers,” represented by the older segment of the National Salvation Front, many of the industrial workers and some peasants.

The slow goers respond to the folksy appeal of President Ion Iliescu, a former communist who opposed Ceausescu’s plan to put Romania through a Maoist-like cultural revolution in 1971.

Iliescu stood up to Ceausescu, at least twice, with a boldness Mikhail S. Gorbachev did not display in the Brezhnev or Andropov eras. For opposing the cultural revolution of 1971, Iliescu was publicly booted from the high political apparatus (I witnessed the excommunication) and humbled through a series of minor postings, until he was appointed director of the National Council for Water. In that position, Iliescu clashed with Ceausescu again in 1984 over the dictator’s disastrous plan to rechannel the Arges River.

“It was madness,” Iliescu reminisces in his office at Palatul Cotroceni. “The price tag was 30 billion lei ($600 million). Economically, socially, ecologically, I was being asked to rubber-stamp a crime. I wouldn’t do it. I told him bluntly that we had major water-supply problems in the biggest cities, for which there were no plans of correction, or budgets. He went on nonetheless, and until 1989 at least 18 billion lei were poured into the Arges River fiasco.”

Inexperienced in public relations, Iliescu isn’t publicizing his secret war with the late tyrant, at home or abroad. Three months after the 1984 confrontation, Iliescu was fired from the water council and appointed director of a technical publishing house. It was from that position that he emerged in December, 1989, putting together a committee that became the nucleus of the National Salvation Front during the first hours of the revolution.

My wife and I invite him to a Hollywood gala next February, a celebrity-studded affair, sponsored by the Free Romania Foundation, with which we hope to raise money for the orphans. He responds with interest. I also ask him why he doesn’t outlaw the right-wing press. He replies that it would be unconstitutional, but the republic’s procuratura (equivalent to the office of the attorney general) is suing the weekly, Romania Mare, for inciting nationalist unrest.

Unfortunately, the right wing’s vulgar verbiage suggests an utterly chauvinist Romania, which is simply not the reality. Romanians are nationalists and loudmouths, yes. The Iron Guard (Romania’s pro-Nazi organization) and the World War II killings of Jews in Transnistria are ugly blots on the national conscience. And yet, after the war--as noted by Nora Levin, the American author of “The Holocaust” --”the 350,000 Jews in Old Romania, in the main, survived. . . . In 1947, the Jewish population living within prewar Romania was 428,000--the largest . . . in Europe outside the Soviet Union.”

During my school days, when communism banned all religions, anti-Semitism seemed eradicated. So what do today’s outbursts express? Pure misdirected venting? A gross form of national redefinition? Maybe there is a conscious plan to blacken the country, to keep the West out. I give it some thought, and again, anxiety grips me. The direct beneficiaries of that could only be the nomenklatura , and the remains of the Securitate.

Funny thing. I drove to the City Hall of Saftica to register a claim for my vineyard, confiscated after I defected. By law, I can now have it back, but there is a man occupying it who pays rent to the state--an agronomist in his 50s with good connections. The day after my visit to City Hall, he shows up at my hotel, at 8 a.m.! Who told him I was staying at the Flora? Who told him I was here at all?

My driver points out that today’s edition of Free Youth mentioned my staying at the Flora. But Mr. Agronomist surely doesn’t get Free Youth delivered at my vineyard. And even if he scanned the paper with unfailing instinct to find out about me, he surely couldn’t fly 25 miles from Saftica to Bucharest in 10 seconds to show up at my hotel?

I dodged him by running off to a meeting. But what is to be understood from this? Have we been spied upon? It seems likely. The zigzag of pain and hope, trust and distrust, starts again.

That is how Ceausescu ruled, quashing all dissent by using constant surveillance and hordes of informers, but with little bloodshed. He’d inherited the memories of bloodshed of former party boss Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the only other master of Romania during 40 years of communism. Under Gheorghiu-Dej came the big purges, jailings and shootings. After Gheorghiu-Dej, the country’s spirit was broken. With Ceausescu’s empty stand against Russia, he managed to deceive not only his own people but also former Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, who acclaimed him as a “patriot.”

The incident of the agronomist makes me wonder what paranoias are endured by Romania’s opposition. “Truly, I’m too busy to be paranoid,” says Nicolae Manolescu, president of a new opposition group, the Civic Alliance Party.

At the time when I was shaking the taboos, Manolescu, a literary critic and historian, opted for aestheticism (by his own definition, he was a “resistant,” not a dissident). He charges that to an electorate brainwashed by communism, the National Salvation Front initially presented capitalism as a threat to savings, jobs and pensions. As an intellectual, and in some eyes an elitist, Manolescu would be at a disadvantage in next spring’s election. His competitors, Iliescu and Roman, have already-formed constituencies.

We discuss the other unknown in Romanian politics, Moldova. “One cannot fault Moldovans for being nationalistic,” Manolescu says. “Forcibly incorporated into Russia in 1940, for them nationalism came to mean freedom, independence, dignity. But if Moldova unites with Romania, and Moldovans enter Romanian politics, all political candidates then will outdo themselves at nationalism.”

What will come out of that? Social activism and brotherhood, or recrimination and intolerance? The youths I encountered and liked so much--the boys and girls so wild about computers, jazz, American movies and neocapitalism--will they forget all that, don camouflage suits and become parochial soldiers, like the Yugoslavs?

I shiver. Here, in the area of ethnic tension, is where Americans could influence the situation considerably, but they don’t realize it. They don’t understand that Eastern Europe craves contact with America, craves recognition of its new-formed importance more than money. Ahead of loans and credits, Eastern Europe needs a boost in its confidence. Eastern Europe admires America so much that American involvement in its development would certainly help the region find its balance. There would be more resorting to talk and less to violence. But from Romania, America’s plans for the Balkans appear inscrutable.

WE SPENT a tearful afternoon, my wife and I, visiting with my family. I started choking up when I saw my godmother, aged and infirm. Then my Uncle Nicu, a heroic character in one of my books. Uncle Petre, Aunt Ella, my young cousins Tudor and Riri, new doctors from a good Romanian medical school that even communism couldn’t destroy. I cried into my lunch.

“Don’t forget us again,” Ella said. I’d heard that line so many times in the past week: Don’t forget us again.

I never forgot you. If I could, from the plane, I would reach down for the familiar map of the country, grab it up, and wrap my heart in it.

We have to come back, I answer over and over. We take along some small gifts: a meat pie left over from lunch; a few sacred family pictures, black and white, on the back of which are the names of photo studios long out of existence. The fact that the photos are entrusted to me means: Be one of us, out there. Make us known. Perpetuate us. I’ll be one of them. Everyone in America belongs to two countries, the America of their daily lives and the land of their roots. On the plane, we see the first American newspaper in many days. America’s problems appear tame, manageable. America is powerful and young, and has money.

We fly on, rising higher, glimpsing Europe below us through scattered white clouds. The place that gave us to the world. Can we help?