It was a sad time for Nicolae. As much as he desired to leave Romania, to travel the world and eventually see places like Greenwich Village, Brooklyn, the blues clubs of Chicago and Saint Louis, as much as all that was suddenly within his reach, he was leaving behind everyone who had liked him and tolerated his bad behaviour, who had entertained him in his beautiful country made horrible.
What happens in such a circumstance, when the subject has not responded to all the previous stimuli and therapy, and instead continues to insist on leaving the country, on betraying the People, what happens is the tempo and focus of the game changes. Once the plane ticket is in hand, and the bags are packed, it is like the moment in backgammon when the two players have managed to safely move all their pieces past the other's pieces. At this point, it is no longer a struggle, but simply a race. Also, the intensity and quality of the game changes, as in a good endgame of chess when each player has little more than their king, a few pawns and perhaps one meaningful piece. Suddenly, moves are at once more forceful, less subtle, full of ultimate importance. No more room for error. Little hope for a sudden and unexpected reversal of fortune after a blunder. Make a mistake at this stage, and it means the game.
Nicolae's two police friends were no longer interested in convincing him to stay. He was leaving; they had accepted that. Their mission had changed, and they were now only interested in limiting the damage he might do from out of the country. There were no more suggestions that Nicolae was robbing his son of a homeland, and that he was unaware of the realities of life in the West. No more lectures about the plight of the blacks in the American south, or the destruction of entire races of North Americans for the sake of expansionist commerce. They had each of them lost and won parts of these little battles over the three previous years of afternoon meetings. Nicolae mostly allowed them to win the debates on ideology, since there was little to gain scoring intellectual points against men with such heavy fists. Occasionally, for his amusement, he would gently question assumptions, make them struggle for answers, but he never took the last word.
“I understand, Comrade,” he might say, “the American Negro lives in a state of extended economic slavery. They are beaten into a subhuman existence by the cruelties of the profit motive. What I don't understand is why then are there so few Marxist American Negroes? Why is it we do not cultivate their oppression for our ends in extending the Revolution to the West?”
They would respond with an inevitable reference to Paul Robeson, as though one very well-paid entertainer sympathetic to Communist ideology could make a difference in a population in love with the idea of one day becoming as well-paid themselves.
Nicolae would nod and repeat, “Yes, Paul Robeson, I had forgotten,” and they would write something down in his file. But these discussions were now long past. The question was no longer
would he leave?
but was now
what would he do once he had left?
It had become important to convince Nicolae that Romania's control over his life would continue once he had crossed the border for the last time. This last job was one of their specialties and, quite possibly, the thing they did best.
They succeeded by showing Nicolae a simple photograph and then uttering two small words. Three days before he was to leave, after a short talk about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, one of the officers opened Nicolae's file, took out an eight-by-ten, black and white photographic print and placed it on the table in front of him. It was a photo of Nicolae, several years younger, on his birthday. He recognized the occasion immediately. In the photo, Nicolae was smiling the shy smile he put on whenever he received gifts. One of the gifts, plainly visible in the shot, was a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
This photo the police placed on the table in front of Nicolae. Then they both stood and left the room. On his way, the last of the two said “Miki, ciao.”
Photographs are often used as devices for code in wartime and between secret societies. It is simply a matter of predetermined meaning, or a meaning that can be gleaned from one's understood intent. Imagine a revolutionary group working within a country for the overthrow of the government. Imagine this group works in blind cells who do not know each other, but who are being controlled by a central intelligence and who must be mobilized quickly and with little forewarning. This mobilization message must also be silent so as not to inflame suspicion among the authorities or give them advance warning of a coming strike. This can be accomplished by coding the message within an innocuous photographic image. A picture of a family picnic perhaps, where the order to strike appears as an apple in the centre of the picnic table. No apple means the attack has been called off, but if there is an apple, this is an order of immediate action. The very elements of the image have specific meaning, and if you speak the language of the photograph, the meaning is clear.
Nicolae's photo meant, for certain, the police were aware of the Cescu broadcasts and Nicolae's role in playing them for his small network of friends at parties. The photo, and their final words to him were meant to say
we know about the Cescu tapes
. All Nicolae's work to hide the tapes in the special hiding places, all his network's secrecy and all their pride at being so subversive, these things could be thrown away. None of these things were ever real, because plainly, the Securitate knew of the Cescu tapes.
But, there was more to be read in the image. It was a photo not just of Nicolae and the tape player, but of him, the tape player and his parents. Certainly there was no Cescu tape being played on the device when the photo was taken. This was taken the day he received the tape player, years before Cescu made his fateful trip to the seaside. Also, it was Nicolae's practice to keep the existence of the illicit tapes from his parents, as his father would have sniffed treason and his mother would have worried for his safety. Yet, there were his parents in the photo, smiling widely at him with the new tape recorder, the tape recorder they have just given their son, the son who will someday betray his country.
Here then the police were showing him the subtle consequences of his decisions. Here they were beginning to whisper to him.
You know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, and we also know your parents are not involved in this treasonous crime, but if we want to, we can make them involved. Yes, you are escaping our control, but if you doubt our continued power, please take a look at these two smiling people in the background, and know that you have given us control over them.
This whispering would visit Nicolae every night until that Christmas morning in 1989 when he woke in his bed in Montreal to the sound of his wife shrieking from the kitchen, “They've shot him, the bastard, they've killed him and that bitch of a wife as well.” They watched CNN all that day, watched Ceau
Åescu's body slump against the wall over and over.
There was a final message in the photograph, the most insidious suggestion, and the favourite message Securitate deliver. Nicolae sat alone in that room, listening to the clickings and scrapings behind the walls, staring at the photograph, trying to read its code, trying to decipher what it is they wanted to tell him. And then, like a sudden blow from behind, he remembered who took the photo. Because of course the photographer had been in the room at the birthday, he was right there in front of Nicolae, smiling as well and telling Nicolae to get that stupid look off his face. He was wearing the cream from the cake on his nose and getting a little too drunk on the
Å£uic
Ä
he brought for the occasion.
He was the one who always brought a camera, and the one who developed his own photographs in a small darkroom in the basement of his apartment block. He was the one who controlled so carefully the distribution of prints so they might never fall into the wrong hands. He was the trust Nicolae had in that small circle of friends he had known his entire life. And here he was, invisible but undeniably present in the police station in downtown Bucharest three days before Nicolae was to leave for Israel.
“On the plane to Tel Aviv, I tried not to think any more of the two fellows in the station back in Bucharest,” Nicolae says across the backgammon board, wiping sweat from the top of his head with a balled handkerchief. “I tried not to think of the people I was leaving behind and the painful doubts I had packed into our luggage. I tried not to think about photographs and my good friend Petre Dobrescu, the smiling photographer. I remember pointing out the window for Dragos to look at cloudsâthe boy had never seen clouds from above. I held my wife's hand and smiled at the pretty Israeli stewardesses, hoping for a free drink. I tried to imagine what waited for us on the ground, and could not. I tried to watch the film they were showing, and again could not.”
Tony listens to the older man intently, and just as intently he rakes the board with his eyes, trying to discover some strategic advantage, some way for him to win, but it seems impossible.
“Then, I noticed two men sitting in the centre section of seats. They were a row ahead of us, and they passed a matchbox back and forth between them. One man would take the matchbox and shake it in his fingers, as though to shake up the matches, except whatever was being shaken did not sound like matches. That man would then slide open the box and both men would peer in. The one who had shaken the box would then say something in Hebrew, and both men would nod. Then the matchbox changed hands and the second man shook, peered, said something, et cetera, over and over again. I watched this strange procedure for a long time, and finally, overcome with curiosity, I left my seat and walked past them in order to see what mystery they were sharing. In the matchbox was a small pair of dice.
Late in the evening, the doors to the wedding hall are opened, sucking in gentle summer air and the scent of pines, a slow cleansing of cigar haze and the smudge of beeswax candles, the sweat steam of musicians and dancers. The celebration slows and calms, catching its breath and resting before beginning again. A lone violinist scratches a slow, romantic waltz. It is a time for touching hands and cheeks, for fixing hair and dresses. Old people sit down. Stories continue around the backgammon board. Tony and Nicolae play the fourth game of a match of five. Other men take notice and crowd around. A foreigner is holding his own in the national game. It's an oddity.
Spectator chatter weaves through the games, interrupts the stories. There is a general willing of the dice for Nicolae. There is laughing and swearing. Plates of food are brought to the players from the never-empty side tables. Tony eats the blackened skin of a young pig, killed that very morning and roasted whole over a firepit dug into the earth outside the reception hall. The delicacy is salty and rich with burnt oils. He eats anchovy fillets mashed into soft butter on fresh crusty bread, pickled cucumbers and pickled hot peppers all from the local farms. Finally, he is handed a candied plum from the orchard of Irina's father, one of few plums not used to make Å£uicÄ. Å¢uica is in the air, the smell of it lifting from the forearm skin of all the men crowding the table.
Diana appears behind Nicolae, shy at first around so many men who knew her as a child, but with laughter and
Å£uic
Ä
, heartened into joining the profane cheering. Her face is flushed from dancing, a greenish-tan dress open at the collar, a neck slick with perspiration. She looks away from Tony's eyes, and smiles at everything. He remembers how he caught sight of her in the plum trees earlier in the day, picking the fruit that will become next year's
Å£
uic
Ä
. She had been seated in the upper branches, as though in the balcony of a theatre, carefully twisting the ripened plums from the branches, rubbing each one in both hands to test the firmness. At that time as well she had looked away from his eyes, and smiled. She had brought each plum to her nose, closed her eyelids and inhaled deeply.
The men notice Tony noticing her. There is a roll of laughter and Diana's face glows brighter in the candlelight. She yells back at the men, spitting fire, and they laugh even louder. Tony loses the game, stuck on the bar reading a newspaper while Nicolae quickly clears his perfectly blocked house. The match stands at two games apiece.
“My dear niece. She has been challenged to kiss you if you win. She has agreed, but I don't think you want to know what she said about you.”
Nicolae smiles at Tony from across the board and scratches at his goatee. He lights another cigar and picks up the dice.
“Do not think she wants to. She's just responding to a dare from the men. She cannot resist a dare. It is my job to make sure she does not have to kiss you. Please, nothing personal. For the honour of my niece, you understand.”
“I understand.” Tony says, but he has a physical memory of Diana's lips and, caught in a fog of drink and borrowed joy, he feels a need for more.
Another loud roll of laughter from the circle of men, and finally, Diana looks directly at Tony. She is defiant, proud. She sticks out her tongue and places both hands on her uncle's shoulders. Everyone slaps Tony's back at once. The bone dice clatter on the board.
“Six and six, the emperor's opening.” Nicolae winks and sets up two solid blocks at the bar. Diana cheers and claps her hands, spins on her toes. A full glass of
Å£uic
Ä
slides across the table to Tony.
“You will need it, for the disappointment.”
Unable to catch up in the race, Tony satisfies himself with blocking his house and holding two men back in the desperate belief they'll have a chance at a capture. A strategy of last hope, a prayer to the dice. When the roll comes, it feels as nothing other than a gift of fate. Nicolae is on the bar and trapped. Diana shrieks and tries to run away, but several men catch at her flailing arms and hold her in place, cursing. The match ends, three wins to two for Tony. Tony drinks his glass of
Å£uic
Ä
at once and sits back in his chair. In the crowd of men he recognizes Dragos smiling at him. Dragos raises a glass to him and drinks as well.
“Let her go if she wants to go,” Tony offers. “Winning is enough.”
Nicolae stands and holds his niece's hand.
“I'm sorry Diana. There are worse bets to lose, believe me.”