Belate! be in our hearts enshrined
… And his cigarette fell, one quarter smoked.”
When they heard about Belate and the Canal enemies, who, of course, “ended up drinking their own piss,” the young officers felt uneasy. They would never have dirtied their hands with crimes like those. In impeccable suits smelling of lavender, they toured the bookstores in search of fashionable reading. They paid each other visits, with their wives, having only a little coffee and a cognac (not sticking their guests at the table and drugging them with soups). Evenings, they gathered at the Select or Boehme … They had all spent their teen years dreaming of being what now, would you look at that, they really were. They all had passionately read At Midnight a Star Will Fall and The End of the Ghost Spy, identifying with the plainclothes officers, all without stain or blemish, Major Frunză and Captain Lucian, for example, who (the quintessence of both Hercule Poirot and the Hercules of myth) ended up solving enigmatic cases and catching the imperialist spies or war criminals returning to the country under false identities. “Who are you, mister Pietraru?” they dreamed of finally asking, at the end when the disarmed sunglasses-clad spy collapsed in his chair. “Isn’t it true that beneath this borrowed name hides Horst Müller, officer of the SS?” At which, before anyone could stop him, the man would bite down on the cyanide capsule hidden in his shirt collar …
No, the Securitate was no longer the old Siguranţa of the bourgeois-landowner regime, whose commissars were satirized in so many films, or even the Securitate that operated under Dej and Drăghici, with its camps and German Shepherds. It had become a modern institution, a corps of technicians from the ranks of the university, and it had a special social role, something almost messianic. The nation was industrializing, the Romanian miracle was on everyone’s lips in the West, and the annual growth of GNP was among the greatest in the world. The new Party leader was young, nonconformist, and admirably courageous toward the Russians. The joke was that he was like someone driving a car who signals left and goes right. Signs of prosperity — foreign-made cigarettes and liquor, full cafeterias, refrigerators and televisions for everyone, the chance that, if you ate bread and yoghurt for five years, you could flaunt a new car in front of your neighbors, a Dacia or even a Skoda or for the lucky a Wartburg (and why not a Fiat 600, at the end of the day?) — appeared in cities and villages everywhere. Political arrests halted, and some old communist leaders were rehabilitated. It seemed at the time that the only outlet for the elite corps of plainclothes Securitate officers would be industrial espionage. At any moment, in spite of the population’s growing social and patriotic consciousness, you could imagine that a bum on the beach talking to a foreigner would sell Romanian research secrets for a fistful of green money.
It became clear soon after the events of ’68 that things weren’t actually quite that way. It’s true that some colleagues of Lieutenant-Major Ion Stănilă, who meditated on all of this in a kind of somnolent reverie in his office in Dristor, on the second floor of a middle-class house with no sign, were still occupied with the surveillance of research laboratories: weapons at Tohan and Sibiu, chemicals at Turnu-Severin, something unclear but top secret in Apuseni, plus the routine industrial sites around Bucharest. Every day, they put on white coats and pretended to be scientists, working with minimal specialized knowledge from short courses of chemistry, physics, or metallurgy. Some of them, after years and years in research, came to understand their work pretty well and made something of a name for themselves in science. More envied were those who were sent to the West, our network of Securitate diplomats enwebbing the embassies and those who worked there. Lord, what a thought: to live in the West for years and years, sometimes decades, and save hard currency in the bank! Some, the best ones, infiltrated strategic points in the most disparate fields, under false identities and with proper paperwork. They lived there, got married, had kids, and no one ever knew their true identities. What would it be like, thought the lieutenant-major with fear and fascination, to be stuck in the ribs of a hostile world, to blend in until you almost had forgotten your own name and mission, to do your job and raise your kids in the culture of that place, to make friends and go to games and go out for drinks, when the whole time you are there with them, you are also extremely far away, a pseudopod, a peduncle of another world, voracious and merciless? How would you be reactivated, after years of dormancy, parasitism, and mimicry? What would it be like to suddenly receive the code word, to have it rise within you — suddenly, under the dull face that you wear of a mediocre engineer, inside your eyes that are bored with your obese wife — the demon of another empire? How would it feel to be possessed, not to belong to yourself, to be the glove into which, from time to time, an iron hand slides?
Distractedly regarding the reflection of his face in the Comrade’s portrait on his desk, Ion Stănilă admitted, in his heart, that he would not be capable of something like that. Secret agents were heroes whom he raised to superhuman heights. But as for himself … it was enough he had gotten this far. The rest of his family was still in the country. His brother had had such a hard time in ’58, when collectivization left him hobbled with a bad hip and a twisted hand, that he would have been begging at the church door if Ion hadn’t found him a job in the garage. So now Luca washes under the car with the hose, brings the mechanics cigarettes and bread buns, what can you do … Since his family had turned in the horses and been left with the cart in the barn (they had been to Măgureni last summer and been sad to see the way the beautiful landscapes of blue serenas and red flowers were flayed off of the rubber-tire cart), it looked like the whole family had gone senile. Ion always had to intervene at the mayor’s, the People’s Guidance, to ask that the authorities not take the vinery away … And here he was, an officer in the Securitate, with a big salary, success on every side, living in a house with calcio-vecchio and an interior stairway, and more importantly, with a woman who made everyone’s mouth water when they went out to a restaurant. “You know when my frickin yid walks in, with freckles down to her ass, in that red deux-pièces and red high heels, even the waiters have their mouths hanging open. What they wouldn’t do to her, there she walked, all tits and ass, her purse in her hand, down the carpet in the Athenée, the Hall of Mirrors …” Yes, he had been much luckier than other people. Many had been stuck on one level or another without knowing why, and it was more than certain that he would have gotten stuck, too, if the propaganda secretary at the university (“Aaah, I’m going to flee the country … oh, give it to me! harder!.. I’m giving a speech in Europe … uuuh! do me, lover … do my ass … aoleu! oh! down with Communismmmmmm …!”), his dear little wife, hadn’t watched over him, with her frightening dedication to principle. Take Dunăreanu: he went down on something stupid. He said something offhand at a party … something about Dubcek … or who the hell knows, just a joke, but his well-meaning colleagues ratted him out. Now he’s teaching Party history at who knows what communal school. With Maria’s man Costică it was something else: the comrades took them both at once, one from scrubbing statues, and the other from the metal shop in the ITB on Grozovici. “Comrade, would you like to go to officer training in the Securitate?” There wasn’t a stain on their files — they were children of poor peasants, not political. They had no family anywhere except Ficătari and Râmnicu Sărat. They were sharp kids who’d done junior high and an apprenticeship. That was in ’59. They took him and sent him right to Băneasa. Costică — blubba blubba blubba blubba (the officer had been flicking his lower lip and gotten lost for a moment). During the physical they found a cyst on one of his kidneys. No good for the Securitate, so they sent him to Ştefan Gheorghiu to become a newspaper man. But his kid, that snotty Mircea — who was like maybe … three at the time … (so they were still on Silistra) — when that smart Maria asked: “Dear, do you want your daddy to be a newspaper man?” he began to cry: for him, newspaper man meant the hunchbacked drunk who sold newspapers. Back then (you can see one even now) they wandered the streets, with a stack of newspapers in a pink cardboard box around their necks: “Informatia! Informatia!” Newspaper men and street cleaners were pretty much the same, in the minds of regular people. But two years ago, on Moşi, where Stănilă was dressed like a guy selling cardboard hats, trotting along on his mission to catch the spider-woman’s superiors, he had seen one of these lowlifes right next to the camper: he was staring, dead drunk, at the monkey-trainer’s tits on a billboard, while his newspapers fell from his box into the mud, one by one …