Finally, the minister asks him what it would take to clean the city streets of dogs. The rubbish removal man gives the question some quick, serious evaluation. He knows which direction the wind blows in, but that’s not difficult, because it always blows from the same direction. From the minister’s tone of voice he notices that “cleaning” the city of dogs is not formulated as an order (the minister could have simply said: “Kill them”), which gives him room to maneuver. “Well, it would certainly take a lot of work,” the rubbish removal man says. “Plus, it wouldn’t look nice.” He’s well aware that some decisions in his job are taken according to how nice or not nice the result would appear. Not inside the country, but to foreigners, to the enemies, and they are many. “There was a lot of negative publicity abroad because of the demolition of parts of the old town, so why risk more of it,” he adds cautiously. “Also, there are a lot of animal lovers out there who would go berserk.”
The minister looks at him without moving a muscle. “Mikhail,” he says, feeling secure enough to switch to the minister’s first name now, “all I’m saying is that it could be done, dogs could be exterminated. My men—with the help of the army, of course—could gather the carcasses and burn them within a week. But you should be aware that this operation is a sensitive one. All this would be very, very visible!” He sees the impact of his words on Mikhail’s face, which starts to crease into a grimace that looks faintly like a smile. “Perhaps it’s better to let nature take its course,” our man finally concludes, thinking of food shortages for people, never mind dogs. Upon hearing that euphemism for starvation, Mikhail’s face lights up. “Let nature take its course,” he repeats, excited, as if this banal phrase were some kind of wisdom bestowed upon him by god almighty. As he exits the office, the minister hugs the rubbish removal man once more, this time cordially. Because, you understand, the minister didn’t care at all for the destiny of our canine species. He wanted the easiest way out for himself.
The CEO was right; dogs died in silence and no bad publicity was created. Anyway, much bigger political issues soon arose. Madame Ceausescu had no time to think about dogs any longer, or of anything else, for that matter. A couple of years after this incident, her time was up. Truth be said, after being abducted, an improvised show trial was organized and they both were shot like a couple of old beggars. Ceausescu went down in history as a dictator, and most people here think that they both got what they deserved. I would have wanted to see them tried, real and proper. But that wasn’t to be. Romanians are foxy people; why complicate things with a trial? Why risk that the mad pair might say something unpleasant about others who had executed their orders and remained alive and kicking, as born-again “democrats”?
Soon the “let nature take its course” approach took another direction, one unpredicted by our garbage man, the minister, or anyone else. Living without any control, dogs started to multiply. In some two decades, from a mere few thousand, we grew to a few hundred thousand. The turbulence society was going through was called a revolution, though it would be more accurate to describe it, as I already pointed out, as a political coup. The best organized forces, such as the Securitate, the police, and the military, assumed power. Nobody cared about dogs.
It was only about a decade later, in 2001, if I remember rightly, that dogs became the center of attention. By that time we really had become visible, and a new, modern generation of Romanians who barely remembered anything about life under Communism became worried about animal rights. Imagine! Not people’s rights but animals’ rights! They pleaded for shelters, medicine, vaccination, and sterilization, all the right things, of course. In spite of homeless people, jobless people, hungry people on our streets, so many children begging that you could not walk freely, children who lived in a sewage system not even like dogs, but like underdogs. Frankly, as much as I was impressed by these dog lovers, I was puzzled as well. Then a certain animal benefactor, a French lady and former famous actress named Brigitte Bardot, who had allegedly been a great sex symbol in the ancient time of the sixties, responded to their pleas. And she still held power over the media. It was big news. She even visited Bucharest, met the mayor, and donated money. I still remember how newspapers reported it: “Ms. Bardot has agreed to donate more than $140,000 over two years for a mass sterilization and adoption program for the city’s strays, estimated to number 300,000… For his part, the mayor of Bucharest, Traian Basescu, has agreed to kill only dangerous, old, or terminally ill dogs… Mr. Basescu had earlier insisted that the dogs… must be exterminated.”
Well, what can I tell you? There was no intention to “exterminate” the dogs in the first place. Afterward, that lady’s money went to a few shelters, a few sterilizations—you can recognize these dogs by yellow tags they wear on one ear—and that was that. Most of it just disappeared, as usual.
Listen, I have a nice detail for your dog story. In the spring of 2008, city authorities cleared all the stray dogs out of the way so that foreign politicians coming to the NATO summit could pass undisturbed from the airports to the House of the People, where the summit was held. All the existing shelters were apparently filled with these dogs. You see, typically, our authorities only act when pressured from outside.
“It’s one of these bittersweet tales,” you remark. Bitter, yes, but not sweet. I remember times when Ceausescu’s police would clear all “suspicious elements” of your own species from the streets; now they are down to clearing away dogs. Strange, very strange.
No doubt, this represents progress. This is the twenty-first century; we are in the European Union. Except that all Romanians ever cared about was appearance, not a solution! I’d say that Romania hasn’t changed much in that respect. The “dog problem” hasn’t been solved, if stray dogs ever really were a problem for the people of Bucharest, which nowadays I doubt more and more. You rightly observe that not much was done about dogs except when foreigners got involved. This, however, brings us to the beginning of this conversation. You’ve listened patiently to such a long monologue from an old fool and received no real explanation. But if you look around, what else can you see besides stray dogs and clogged traffic? You see, again, old, beautiful (even if decrepit) villas being demolished to make room for new buildings of steel and glass—for foreign banks and corporations, like in Shanghai or Singapore. For new masters, who no longer rule by fear but by greed.
In the transition from Communism to capitalism, all people are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.
Stray dogs don’t fit into that new capitalist Bucharest, and mayor after mayor promises to do something about them. But he never acts. Probably there are many reasons for not acting and, moreover, for not knowing how to act. One could certainly blame it on cowboy capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, bad politics, or disappointment with the EU. But I happen to believe that in Romania dogs are considered as much the victims both of Communism and the democratization process (or the transition period, as they call it) as your own kind. I observe that when an individual in this society feels pretty lost and helpless, he doesn’t know how to take responsibility for his own life, much less for that of the poor dogs in his neighborhood. It doesn’t help that democracy, so far, means only that those who are up stay up, like in a kind of a merry-go-round of power. It also could be a laissez-faire attitude of this society in general, which hasn’t woken up properly from the Communist slumber. Generally speaking, people still believe that there will be always someone “up there” to make a decision in their names—whom they can blame later on. If yesterday it was Communism, today it is the bureaucracy in Brussels. Leaving everything to the higher-ups, not taking the initiative, not willingly acting in the common interest—this, in my modest dog’s opinion, is really what our problem is. What do you do when there’s not even an idea of a common interest, a common good? In a society like ours it needs to be created. The lack of it means that one day we’ll wake up to a decision of someone high up that dogs finally have to go. In the name of the EU we’ll be swept away for good. Then there will be a short outrage; the party in charge will perhaps lose a few votes. So what?, one may think. But, permit me to say these harsh words: The question is, Who will be next? Gypsies, perhaps? Jews? And why not people with glasses?