Exit into History by Eva Hoffman

Author:Eva Hoffman [Eva Hoffman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571322039
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Five

ROMANIA

There’s probably in every traveler’s fantasy a Bermuda Triangle of the mind, a place that concentrates all one’s anxieties about unnamable dangers and the darkness of the unknown. In my imagination, which proves itself rather platitudinous in its choice, it’s Romania that stands for such dangers; and within that country, the word that activates all my vague fears in the middle of hotel nights is Transylvania.

It’s not only the associations with blood-feeding aristocrats that lend themselves to these anxieties, though reading about the real model for the mythical Dracula is blood-curdling enough. He was the son of Vlad Dracul, himself named Vlad Ţepeş, or Vlad the Impaler, and though he isn’t recorded to have drunk blood from the necks of maidens, his actual exploits were quite as monstrous. Vlad Ţepeş was a mid-fifteenth-century voivod, or prince, of a Transylvanian principality, whose method of rule was unmitigated cruelty, and who specialized, as his sobriquet indicates, in impalings. At one point, hundreds of feudal overlords were expiring by this means in the courtyard of his castle. Given the less-developed technology of his day, he surely qualifies as one of the precursors – though only one of many – of the mass murderers of our day.

But my mental image of Transylvania is darkened by closer traces of violence as well. Romania is the only country of the ones I visit in which the changes were accompanied by armed fighting, and some of the worst bloodshed took place in the Transylvanian city of Timişoara, where the Romanian ‘revolution’ first erupted. Then there are stories I keep hearing as I move through Eastern Europe, of train piracy in the night and tourists disappearing in the dark Transylvanian woods. Hungarian friends warn me that I shouldn’t go into Transylvania in a car with Hungarian license plates – the tensions between the Romanian majority and the large Hungarian minority are high. They themselves routinely make a jog to Vienna to rent cars before making forays across the Romanian border.

Nevertheless, I make my first entry into Romania through Transylvania, in a car with the telltale Hungarian numbers. But as insurance against my own trepidations, if not the more external dangers, I have an American friend, Peter, accompanying me on this part of my expedition. Intimations of Romania begin even before we cross the border. Peter has knocked about some of the more remote parts of the world, and has gotten into the habit of picking up hitchhikers; halfway between Budapest and Debrecen, we stop for two passengers, who accompany us all the way into Transylvania.

They are young men, very black-haired and black-eyed, and they’re desperate to get food supplies before we leave Hungary. ‘There’s nothing to eat in Romania,’ they keep saying nervously. ‘It’s utter chaos. You can’t get anything.’ Both of them are from Bukovina, the region east of Transylvania, and both are electricians returning home after a futile attempt to get working passes in Austria. They were turned back at the border, an event they seem

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