Usually the uniforms were almost dry at 6 in the morning, and they were perfect after breakfast, but that wasn’t to be the case that particular day. The alarm sounded at 3:00am when they had almost another three hours of welcomed sleep ahead of them. Swear words, curses, a corporal hitting crying ducklings. The air was damper than usual. Wet socks on skeletal feet, wet underwear on, wet shirt on, a dry sweater, the uniform, also still wet, dry boots, a dry winter coat, a dry winter hat, all went on. Gloves on hands and they were running. Everybody took an AKM on their way out and the frost fiercely attacked their knees, and it was like the marrow was being sucked out of their bones and their bones were like those in “racituri”, the pig gelatin they had with black pepper every January 1st.
The 83 kids dressed in army uniforms were lined up in the cold night and read the mission. Terrorists were going to attack the International Airport, the only International Airport that Romania had. Ceauşescu’s plane, that fabulous 707 that copied the American Air Force One, was there on the tarmac, and Ceauşescu planned to attack the airport, get on it and flee Romania with all the people’s money. So they had to fight back, they had to protect the airport.
I was still sleeping when they got in the three military trucks that their unit was able to somehow scrape. Fuel was scarce that day, and filling the fuel tanks with diesel had required emptying the fuel tanks of all cars and trucks parked there. Ceauşescu’s plane. Cold and freezing, everyone of them dreamed they would have a chance to get on it soon. But not one of them did.
I was asleep at 5 in the morning and dreaming my impossibleto-remember dream. Did I fly in Ceauşescu’s plane in my dream? I don’t know. I was afraid of flying. My father called planes “flying coffins”. But six years later, when I flew for the first time in my life, I flew in that plane.
B ack in 1996, I was working as a journalist to pay for my studies in journalism. My father had been dead more than a year when I was sent abroad to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to write about Meleşcanu’s visit there. Meleşcanu was the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a hotshot, married to a newscaster. A good communist.
And the Macedonians wanted to kill me.
The train I boarded in Sofia, Bulgaria, emptied in Nish. It stopped there for several hours before starting to move again towards Macedonia. It was my first time abroad, but it wasn’t exciting. Maybe because I looked too young. I was 20 but I didn’t even look 19. And I was traveling with an American soldier.
“US Army?”
“Yes.”
“In the business of slaughtering people?”
“No, in the one of saving them!”
“So you save the real slaughterers?”
“If I get lucky I get to save their victims too”.
He was a M.A.S.H. and had spent his leave in Istanbul and was heading back to his unit in Skopje. He was looking to buy some food but there wasn’t any. Yugoslavia was a country — or I should say still a country — devastated by ethnic war. I offered him a couple of sandwiches I was carrying with me.
“Try these. They’re made with Sibiu Salami, the best salami in the whole world” I said, and he liked them. We talked. M.A.S.H was being aired in Romania at the time and he saw the word on the TV program guide in the paper I was carrying and he thought it was funny. He was the first American I ever met and he was a good talker. But we stopped at the border and armed guards entered our compartment. They searched him, but not like they searched me. My bag flew open and I was embarrassed. My underwear was everywhere and I felt like I had lost my dignity, and they were asking me for money.
500 Deutschemarks, and I didn’t want to give it to them and they pulled me out of the train, pushing me with their guns until inside the train station’s office. Some uniforms were playing poker. A wooden table, lots of money. Money that I recognized and money that I didn’t. Bottles with spirits. Serbian slivovitz. Or Macedonian. Or whatever. They were drinking straight from those bottles. And there were guns too. On the same table. The one who looked like the boss wrote “500DM” on a piece of newspaper. They were quite organized, I thought, asking for the same price. With those guns on the table he could have easily asked for double that. But I didn’t pay so, with a black, oversized handgun in his hand he said something to me. But I heard nothing. It was the second time I had been so close to a gun. The first time was during the Revolution and that gun was on a table, too, beside a bottle of brandy. I was lightheaded, and I started to think whether what I was feeling was indeed fear.
They could kill me on the spot and nobody would know I had been on that train. That was what was going through my head when I started to lie. I told them in English I was a journalist, going to Skopje to interview their president, a guy called Gligorov. It seemed that they did not understand a word so I tried to repeat that Gligorov word, over and over again. I wasn’t there for Gligorov, I was there for Meleşcanu, but they didn’t know who the fuck Meleşcanu was, nor did they care.
The boss stood up and he didn’t look happy, he showed me the gun and suddenly a door opened and a young female officer entered and asked me in English for a Press ID, and I handed mine to her. Suddenly she was half screaming at them and the boss barked some order and a soldier took me by the arm and rushed me outside. I thought they were going to shoot me but then I saw the train and it was moving. First slowly and then faster, and the soldier was half carrying me towards it and I climbed in half disembodied. I had managed to catch a hold of the last handle of the last door. An unlikely scene, because it was night on the border between Yugoslavia, still a country back in 1996, and FYROM, something pretending to be a country but which at the time was not.
The shocked M.A.S.H was packing my bag. The incident brought us together in that train and that was the only incident on the way to our destination. We said our goodbyes. We were young, with hopes of a bright future. But so were the soldiers from Campina, when they boarded those three trucks six years earlier.
We did not know that September 11 would come, and in 1989 the soldiers from Campina knew even less. We didn’t know that the US would fight another three wars over the following years, that his countrymen would bomb the shit out of Serbia beyond the border we had just crossed.
The short story is that I had heard that Meleşcanu had come in a 707, Ceauşescu’s plane, to open the Romanian embassy there. Romania was still a poor country in 1996 and its kids still used decrepit textbooks in school, but we were spending the pennies we had on our diplomatic shit. And we were so proud of our shit.
“Excellency, you should see the residence of our ambassador. He lives better than any other European ambassador here”, said one of Meleşcanu’s trusted men, very proud of himself.
Anyway, I told the folks in the Embassy my story and they arranged for me to fly back to Bucharest in the same plane, but only after they accused me of trying to ruin the friendship between the two countries with absurd claims and that everything I had said was in order to get a free ride back on the 707. It was a “convenient claim”, as the moron in the embassy had put it.
So we went to the airport. A rather small one. Smaller than the central train station built by some Japanese companies after the earthquake that flattened Macedonia in the 70’s. Romania had built some flats there, too, after the same earthquake, and I could pick them out quite easily. They were the ugliest in Skopje. Not that they were any uglier than the flats back home.
We got on that plane and it looked nice, it had a saloon, and furniture, but it was no Air Force One, or at least not what we see in American movies. I sat in the back beside a Romanian pilot I had met in Skopje, in that hotel where I could not flush my toilet and nobody cared to clean my room. He, too, was offered a bottle to pour tap water in the toilet after he took a dump. And we were going up and down and up and down and left and then right. And so it went on and on.