Men and Puppets

Book Review

OAMENI ŞI MARIONETE/ MEN & PUPPETS 

by DANIEL DRAGOMIRESCU.

 Orizant Literar Contemporan, Bibliotheca Universalis, 2017

This is a dual-language publication, produced by the excellent and indefatiguable Contemporary and Literary Horizon, of Romania. For their background, see:

https://revistamulticulturala.wordpress.com/

http://contemporaryhorizon.blogspot.co.uk/

Every so often a book comes along that makes you feel good to be alive. This is one of those.

The best books broaden and deepen our sense and understanding of the world. I was going to go on and write ‘and add destinations to our bucket list.’ But no, these best books have already taken us there; we feel we know the places, the people, with our hearts. The place? North-eastern and central Romania.

I feel privileged to have a copy of Men and Puppets, by Daniel Dragomirescu. The book is a collection of reminiscences, autobiographical snippets, and is well worth the time and effort in getting hold of. Elegantly presented, and on the whole, well translated, this is part of a series of books by Orizant Contemporan Literar. All are dual-language, and by writers from many countries.

Daniel Dragomirescu grew up in the north-eastern Vaslui region of Romania, in the 1950s and 60s. He writes of life from the inside; the autobiographical angle gives a necessarily limited view of the times, limited to one’s interests, activities, and to the villages and small towns of the time.

Big Politics, the State, the Eastern Bloc, are not words or concepts of everyday life. He does come up against them (A Meeting with Cerebrus); they are also, on another level, a basic part of that life. Yet they are everywhere, especially for the generations from before the War, his parents’ and grandparent’s generations. It is they who have to watch what they say. We see the unquestioned fate of pre-War bourgeois families, in their disgrace (Sandals). All is accepted as a part of life. The State restrictions have their circumnavigations, but they can be suddenly enforced due to the arbitrariness and fickleness of officials (At the Nadovari Camp). But they are not ‘officials’, they are people one’s father might know from school, from ‘before’ - their fickleness is the fickleness of everybody, everywhere.

We read also a first-hand account of a devastating earthquake hitting Bucharest. People at their most vulnerable; we read also the hidden threats by people.

One of my favourite stories, Marilena, has its own ways of handling the hopes, passions and lost opportunities that are always with us. And this is one of the heartening aspects of the stories: how love, hope of love, arranged love that could grow into itself, are always a part of our lives, our world. These things are instantly recognisable, and they go to the core of who we are.

In the new Romania religion once again plays a major role. This may surprise us, and yet, as Fish Borscht makes clear (to my mind the only story that doesn’t gel), religion never really went away. Even this story is full of the riches of the lived life, the times, the mind-set of the period. The role of religion is a curious one; there are many expostulations to God, in the stories. These are post-Communist.

I wonder do they read as a little self-consciously apparent? Are the stories part of the new movement to re-establish a continuous Romanian identity, that had just been interrupted for a time?

What becomes clear through the reading is the seamless identity we all wear and are part of: here we all are, with all our hopes, woes and lapses of understanding. The details may differ, but the responses are so very recognisable. And because we can identify, our hearts are also in these stories, as we respond to the same things they did.

The last chapter, Typewriter, brings the whole book into focus. I had begun to wonder at the book's title, Men and Puppets. Well, here it was, spelled out. I wrote, above, how the fickleness of officials is the fickleness of man; there is the fickleness of officials themselves, though. I also wrote of the State being just the background to people's lives. So it was, but as they took on more responsibility, became adults, the State became a major interference in their lives. Take Ceausescu's decree that all typewriters should be officially registered.

It smacks of a Nazi-era dictat, and it is little surprise we find a militia chief admiring Nazi-era tactics.
After the Fall of Ceausescu, the militia excuse themselves as puppets of the regime. Officials, militia, puppets, anything rather than just ordinary people.

Daniel Dragomirescu has a masterful technique. The use of the motif of his meeting with a stray dog in a cemetery, in A Meeting with Cerebrus,becomes the key for opening up the whole part of his life at that period. It is this mastery that is the secret, it works behind the scenes to bring the chapters to life.

A most enjoyable book, full of the fears, hopes, loves and doubts of our lives.

Michael Murray, UK

At the Năvodari Camp

By Daniel Dragomirescu, Bucharest

For Irina, who went to the Năvodari camp

One of the dreams I had cherished for a long time when I was a child was to go the mountains or the seaside, since in the places I had visited with my family I had not seen and was not going to see anything more worthwhile than the hills in Gostinari, across the river Argeș, and the large Pustnicu lake near the Pasărea Monastery. Yet my father did not possess the means to make this dream become reality. Neither he nor my mother had been able to afford, not for as long as they had been married, to go to the mountains or the seaside. When she was in a good mood, my mother would dream romantically of a hiking trip in the mountains with ONT Carpați and sometimes she used to speak about it with dad, while he was listening and nodding continuously, without saying either yes or no. The only one who had somehow managed to go on a trip to the mountains (on a cart to Vidra, and from there by taking a few local trains) in order to go to Herculane for a treatment against lumbago had been Granddad, probably after he had managed to get a discounted ticket from the Pensioners’ Fund.

My father could not afford a vacation to the seaside, yet by using his influence as head of the financial office in Vidra, he miraculously managed to get a place for me in the Năvodari camp, where I was going to be sent in July together with a group of district students from the primary school. And also miraculously (for this never happened again afterwards) he managed to arrange that my little brother should be sent to the preventorium in Țigănești, even if this did not mean either the mountains or the seaside. My brother had caught a severe lung disease and had been hospitalized for months until he managed to recover, yet he had some sequelae, which still required medical care. It was a great success! Neither my stay at the seaside, nor my brother’s would have cost my dad a fortune, it was a bargain for his poor man’s budget, who dreamt of being able to buy a motor bicycle in the distant future.

I have no idea if my brother was enjoying the prospect of being sent to that preventorium, where he was going to be given shots and pills for almost three weeks, but for myself, with the image of the Năvodari camp in my mind day and night, I was ecstatic. My father shared my enthusiasm, as he was content that at least I would be going to see the sea, which he had never seen. With an almost childish enthusiasm, he described the anticipated journey on the train and used to say, delightedly, that I was going to cross Anghel Saligny’s bridge at Cernavodă and see from above, from the carriage window, the blue-waved Danube flowing under the mighty bridge. He did not tell me anything about the Sea, since he did not know what it looked like in reality. He had seen the Danube once, in his youth, when he had gone to Silistra for the conscription and it had left an indelible impression on him.

My mum was happy for me, too. As soon as she found out from Dad that I was going on a journey, she started, thoroughly and thriftily, to prepare everything she thought I would need for the Năvodari camp. I don’t think that she ever again showed so much energy, devotion and resourcefulness as she did during that summer, in order to prepare me for a trip or a camp, for the simple reason that there was never again any opportunity to send me on a trip or camp at the end of school. That was the astral hour of her maternal vocation. A few weeks before my departure she was ready with a whole travelling wardrobe, made up of a thousand little things that I could not miss for the world: pairs of socks, undershirts, panties, handkerchiefs, T-shirts, sandals, flip-flops, and what not. To protect my head against sunstroke: a jockey cap with a straight visor and a dark blue beret with a huge lightning rod. To wash my teeth (although I did not use to do it): a brand new “Cristal” tube of pink-coloured toothpaste, and a toothbrush made of pig bristles. To wash my hands and my face (although, again, I was not quite a fan of doing that): a blue bar of soap shaped like a goose egg, nice-smelling, the “Azur” brand, which my father had declared the best from the RPR. It cost a bit more than the Cheia soap, but it was worth it. I was also endowed with a round tin box of Nivea cream, which I could hardly find a use for, a telescopic glass made of plastic rings, which could fit into a pocket, and even a transparent ball-point pen which my father had brought from the Sample Fair in Bucharest and a notebook, for when I was going to get bored. During the few weeks of intense preparations, my trousseau was completed by my mum, who had taken to sewing since my grandma had made her a present of her own Gritzner sewing machine, with other useful clothes, among which a pair of flannelette pajamas and one of dark coloured shorts made of a new material that had just appeared on the market and was called ‘anti-dirt’, which was, of course, useful for somebody like myself, who enjoyed bathing in the street dust and used to like to pour it on my head, with an evil pleasure. She also sewed for me a couple of handkerchiefs with undulating margins, and on all these things, made by herself or bought before, she took care to embroider the initials of my name and surname. I can still see her in my mind’s eye, kneeling by the bed each night, sewing my initials again and again with a blue, brown or black thread on shirts, panties, socks, handkerchiefs, pajamas and what not, under the light of a gas lamp, while I was sitting behind her, watching her sewing. As for my dad, who did not use to sew at the sewing machine, he did not forget to mention my future trip to Năvodari on every occasion, whose double climax was represented, profoundly, by the crossing of the Danube and Anghel Saligny’s bridge.

The more I wished to go on that journey, the longer the waiting seemed. My father’s stories about seeing the Danube, Saligny’s bridge and everything else were not enough and I was burning with anticipation. I wanted to see myself on that train once and for all.

The day I had waited for so long eventually came. The train for Năvodari did not, of course, leave from the Vidra station, which was close to us. It was, I think, at that time, a special train for students, which left from the North Station early in the morning. In order to get to the North Station in time, I don’t remember whether we left home at daybreak, with the bus that took the commuters and the vegetable-sellers to the city or if we left on the evening of the previous night and spent the night at the place of one of our relatives in the city, yet this is not very important. What is important is that on the morning of the Z day, my mum, my dad and I, loaded with luggage and emotion, were scurrying through the wide hall of the station, beautifully paved with small square coffee-coloured slabs and with a stained glass roof that made up a celestial mosaic, very impressive in the eyes of the provincials that came and left the capital of the country. We were not late, on the contrary. We even had time for other things: I ate a Eugenia biscuit from a stall, my dad smoked a cigarette and my mum cooled herself with a glass of lemonade. So that I should not be thirsty on the train, my mum took care to buy and stuff into my pockets a few packets of mints, while my dad announced me that the moment of my meeting with Anghel Saligny’s bridge was getting closer. I started running on the platform, thinking that the only train there would be the Cernavodă one, waiting for us, yet when I was faced with the tens of engines belonging to the tens of trains stationed on different platforms and I saw the bustling passengers who were coming and leaving, I stopped, disoriented. My mum could not fare better, either, yet my dad had received exact directions and was able to see us without any hesitation towards platform one, to the left, where our special train was indeed stationed. Some groups of students had already got in and were looking for their seats in the compartments, other groups of children in pioneer uniforms were getting in or waiting to get into the carriages, under the care of some supervisors with an authoritarian air, all dressed up in dark blue tailored suits and wearing pins in their lapels. Neither I, not my mother had any idea what our supervisor, the one that promised to take me with her group to the seaside, looked like. My father knew her, of course, and after seeing her at the door of a carriage, not far from where we were, left us at the end of the platform and went to let her know that we had arrived.

A deep emotion overwhelmed me then and I could see myself in the train carriage crossing the Danube on Anghel Saligny’s bridge as in a heroic apotheosis. A great dream, which had become even greater, was about to come true. My father, smiling courteously, greeted the supervisor and started telling her something. Things had been arranged a long time before my departure for the camp, and I was waiting for my father to hand me over to the supervisor, wishing me a pleasant journey and a nice stay in Năvodari. What else was there to wait for?

However, fate willed it otherwise. The supervisor, who had promised to take me in her group to the Năvodari camp, refused to keep her promise, on the grounds that I was not of school age yet, although she had known it well before. All my mum’s thorough preparations and my hopes of seeing the sea were ruined that very morning, but not because of nature’s blind forces. Only we can be more dangerous than these, those who possess reason and empathy.

                                                                  Translation by Roxana Doncu

The author at the Black Sea, 2017                                        

                                           Foto: D. Dragomirescu

“Contemporary Literary Horizon”, No 60

What a title for a literary magazine which is now edited for the 60^th time and, further more, is raising the claim: “ALL THE WORLD IN A JOURNAL”!

The claim is program because, started as a bilingual journal, long since a multilingualism resulted by the steadily growing number of authors which, from many countries of all continents, contribute to the success of this unique bimonthly periodical.

Poets, editors, essayists, philosophers, journalists, social critics, nature lovers and philanthropists are creating , in liberal independence, an exemplary project of cultural, international-global collaboration as it hardly turns out in world politics, unfortunately.

Initiator and spiritus rector is in Bucharest the Romanian writer, translator, editor and journalist, Daniel Dragomirescu. His untiring commitment, his publishing qualification and his overwhelming sociability, combined with his sharp analyses of political and historical circumstances, are motivation for many authors to look above the own horizon, not at least for their own confirmation.

This beacon “Orizont Literar Contemporan (Contemporary Literary Horizon , CLH) is coming from a Romania that Daniel Dragomirescu describes as follows:

“Dominated by political forces for whom real democracy did not matter at all, Romania remained at the periphery of the civilized world, with corrupt politicians, an economic development under its potential, a multitude of plagiarists that turned into ministers overnight … with palaces of hundreds of thousands euro and tens of thousands of socially assisted, with millions of people that are leaving or have already left the country in search of a better life.”

A shameful balance for a country that belongs to the European Union, but is let down by it.

This, for me personally, is also a reason to participate again and again as an author.

On the occasion of the anniversary edition No 60 I congratulate us all, writers as readers and especially Daniel Dragomirescu to whom I feel attached by friendly relationship and philosophically similar views.

He and “his” magazine give honor to liberal ethos, give the pleasure of independent art and they convey also sense to literary work for the benefit of nonviolence and peace in a world of painful turmoil.