The disaster happened a day after the flight of the dictator.

At the airport. 

At seven in the morning.

And to think that my unit arrived there at six. 

And to think that we got through the front entrance under the scalloped roof with the grubby Bucharest-Otopeni sign like a hot knife through butter.

The main lobby, the big terrace, the dim corridors with galvanised pipes – everywhere you looked, everywhere you went, the airport was seething with troops and echoing with orders that sounded as slam-bang and incongruent as ever, only now the officers underlined every other minute that they were acting in the name of the new ideals of freedom and democracy, while we, the soldiers, all conscripted rookies, all ill-fed and ill-trained, executed whatever they said in absolute, resentful silence. We cherished the new ideals heartily. However they didn’t seem to curb in any way our officers’ perennial stupidity or their latent sadism. Take my lieutenant: countless times he made my unit run up and down the staircase between the airport’s lobby and terrace just for the pleasure of slagging us off, as ever, for our wimpishness – he’s adamant that we’re wimps because we’re all Uni students – only now he called for more zing in our limp-wimp feet in honour of our newborn democracy. From the landing in the lobby, he derided our sweaty, absurd human yo-yo, in both his old way and in this novel way, for about half an hour. Then, asking us to stand to attention on the terrace, he dragged the burden of his portliness up the staircase, holding the banister rail with his hand at all times.   

All the planes were grounded. However, we’d spotted a handful of journalists and camera crews from abroad in the lobby. They expected to be on the move ASAP. Indeed, they’d been granted permission to take off around midday. They were due to land in Vienna, the closest Western destination, and tell the entire world about Romania’s ongoing revolution.  Meanwhile, the national TV station in central Bucharest was busy doing exactly that – they were broadcasting the revolution live. Oh, how I appreciate you agreed to switch the telly off while we talk over this glass of wine! Because you know and I know what they broadcast: very little footage, overblown tirades from big cheeses and tons of pirated MTV pop music video clips. Festival of freedom and democracy. The dictator has fled! Let’s dance the Lambada! Hey hey hey! Pour Some Sugar on Me! Cheers. Same to you. Anyway, that’s exactly what they were airing on the morning of the disaster, so it was clear that their kit and transmitters were up and running. So I wondered why did the foreign hacks have to take their tapes to Vienna? Why couldn’t they file their reports from Bucharest? But there you are, they had to go. And they were cleared. And nobody gave a bucket of dandruff for the quibbles and ruminations of a conscripted rookie like me.    

And so to our mission: 360-degree protection for the correspondents before and during take-off. Afterwards, we had to defend the site. From? From Him-Himself – no less! Apparently, the runaway dictator was backed by thousands of die-hard supporters – though nobody could confirm they’d seen or heard from any of them. Accompanied by these ghosts, the Beast, the Hideous Ogre, the former Supreme Commander from Hell was going to attempt to retake control of the airport so as to lay his blood-stained claws on an infernal machine aka a plane and soar into the stratosphere. Oh, I hate Him-Himself and the way he screwed our lives as much as you do, yet how bizarre to hear such phrases on our national TV, spoken by no one else but the same people who used to hail him as the nation’s Father, Son, Sun, Morning Star, Skilful Steersman, etc. Boy, I had to pinch myself at first. It felt like watching one of those mass hatchings of myriad crawling creatures on some remote beach when the TV toadies hatched out of their grey suits and sordid nests of encomiastic phraseology and put on mufti clothes and glossy revolutionary armlets and leapt into a sea of apocalyptic disparagement. Gathered in what they now called ‘the studio of freedom’, intoxicated by what they called ‘the strong air of democracy’, these bizarre creatures began to dub Him-Himself as the Fiend, the Antichrist, an Avatar of Dracula etc. They also went on and on about how vicious the odious dictator’s elite commandos were, how fully versed in terror attacks and equipped with the most surreally sophisticated weaponry and kit and with amphibian, robotic tanks complete with launchers of laser beams able to carbonise entire civilisations and what-have-you.  

So here I am, it’s seven in the morning and the telly screens inside the Otopeni airport have just fed me with all that surreal jazz and, as I’m now standing outside, on the big terrace, I stare at the badly potholed road that’s right in front of me and links the highway to the airport and what do you think I see? 

Three decrepit military trucks. 

The only surreal touch in this sighting is a small but fully-formed crocodile of several taxis plus one milky-white bus following the trucks. Why? Why would they be coming here? Didn’t those armleted loudmouthed TV guys make it plain that the airport had been shut down? Taken over by us, the liberated people’s army? So as to prevent the Fiendish Fiend from laying his claws on a plane etc? 

Tailed by the taxis and by the bus, the wretched trucks kept puffing and blowing their way along the road, drawing nearer and nearer and nearer until

‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’

that was it 

that was the disaster

We 

opened fire against 

Them 

from three directions 

My unit was up on the big terrace, facing the trucks, and two other formations of soldiers were deployed on each side. Boys dressed in conscript uniforms jumped out of the ambushed trucks and waved their hands in a frenzy but from our vantage point on the terrace they seemed a bunch of bobbing marionettes, no different in any respect from the dummy targets put up for a drill, that’s how the desperate newcomers appeared to us while we kept following our order: 

‘Fire!’ 

They fell and froze on the ground or wriggled and crept under the leafless shrubs dotting the derelict park that surrounded the airport, as the circle of fire kept closing in on them, and all the while the foreign camera crews were filming us, large as life, profile view, three-quarter rear view, and them – small and scrambling for cover. 

Then, as disasters always allow enough room for death to bite deeper and scratch further, the bus approached and poked its milky-white square nose into the slaughterhouse. It was bringing airport staff to work – was its driver hypnotised by a telepathic-terroristic enemy entity? Was he intoxicated with something slightly stronger than the strong air of democracy? It took him a good few disaster-moments to pull back while his passengers, left to their own reflexes, kept taking or ducking the… our… bullets. 

Thank goodness for the cease-fire order. 

Afterwards how strange and intense the silence. Not even the tiniest twig or pebble stirring. Somewhere a bird shrieked a few times in such a monotonous way that it made me think of a mechanical bird – a toy mislaid in a graveyard. Then – silence again.

‘Oi, bastards, you fallen asleep?’ the officers shook us from our daze, ‘Go down there! Go search the park and check on the enemy’s means of transportation and the stiffs!’

 Down there we were taken aback by the holes made by our bullets in the metal of the truck cabins, hundreds of holes, mesmerising like the eye-sockets of heaped, agglutinated skulls. I guess our mental self-defence mechanisms kicked in at that moment, they lured us to see death staring us in the eye from the holed metal, and not from the broken flesh and bone in the wrenched bodies scattered on the ground, we couldn’t bring ourselves to understand and admit it hadn’t been a drill, we hadn’t shot at dummy targets but at other boys like us and so, as we checked our victims’ pulses, we kept reassuring  them with the most buoyant promises of recovery and even after we established there was no pulse, none whatsoever, we kept holding wrists and stroking necks, with a naïve and velvety solicitude, and we kept uttering encouraging clichés, with the most cockeyed optimism, while the still fairly warm corpses, with their stabbing gazes and their mouths locked open in death, appeared all too eager to dialogue with us, their killers. 

Yet there were also glimmers of hope down in the park: an arm rising here… a hand fluttering there. That’s how I found a conscript with the face of a fourteen-year-old and a deep wound to his hip who was lying in a pool of blood and whispering something. I knelt down and lowered my head, listening to the whispering, when my lieutenant materialised above me – please picture in your head an oversized ghoul-badger in drab khaki, with flabby, scarlet cheeks throbbing under the flaps of his shapka-hat, believe you me, that’s precisely how the plump sadistic bastard looks, oh yes and his hair is indeed grey with two black stripes above his unthinking forehead – and he started to kick me with the tips of his boots, yelling:

 ‘Soldier! Why are you bending over terrorists? Are you pitying them? Don’t you dare! Wanker! Disarm this nasty piece of shit and shoot him!’

Thank goodness the lieutenant then ran away to discipline several other wankers busy helping, just like me, other injured men.

‘Don’t shoot me, please, please, help me, I’m a conscript, I swear, please, please’, wailed the man with the child-like face. 

‘Where you from?’ I asked. 

‘Alba. And y-’, he was struggling to articulate, ‘…y-you?’

‘Cluj.’ 

A taxi was hovering cautiously nearby. I ran towards it, gesticulating, and the driver parked next to the child-man from Alba, helped me lay the bleeding body on the back seat and promised to get to the nearest hospital as fast as his old car permitted. As we spoke, we saw how another taxi drove in and whisked away, a little faster, a young man who’d only been shot in the arm. 

‘Hello! You wanker! You thick turd! Think yourself Mother Teresa? How cute! That’ll get you court-martialled, cretin! That’ll get you bending over to please not terrorists, for once, but each and every dick in the military clink, animal!’ my lieutenant shouted from across the park, punching the air with his small, sinister ghoul-badger paws.  

‘But sir’, I said, ‘Permission to report that these people are…’ 

‘Zip your lip and put a bit of zing in those dragging feet! Gather all the terrorists’ weapons and get indoors!’

Indoors, in the area next to the loos, I counted 

twenty-two 

handcuffed 

prisoners

sat on the cement floor  

‘Stand up, scum!’ ordered the scarlet ghoul. ‘Turn around! Face to the wall! You’, he summoned the prisoners’ guard, a young man with an automatic weapon trembling in his hands, ‘Ready, aim…’ 

‘No!’ yelled another lieutenant. 

‘Fire!’ 

‘Nooo! Let’s find out who they are, exactly’, insisted the second lieutenant. 

From their documents, it was clear they were another military unit, just like ours, ordered to beef up the airport defence. But the officers kept calling them terrorists:

‘Boys, don’t be fooled by these beasts. Their IDs, their uniforms, their verbal statements, they’re all flat-out fakery!’ 

‘Sir, we beg to report, sir, their papers are all right.’ 

‘No way, check again! …What? Still no proof of fakery? Impossible. Check once more. Check properly. These are filthy fanatics who worship the runaway dictator, that new Dracula. They’re stains on our history. Blood-thirsty brutes!’ 

The airport staff on the white bus, shocked to have lost some of their own in the… our… ambush

called them stinking human garbage

covered them in spit

punched their faces

then, tired of spitting and punching

both men and women took off their shoes and began to thrash

the heads of the captives

with the heels 

Towards midday, a captain barged in: 

‘Soldiers, you’re in the clear. There’s been a misunderstanding. You’re free.’  

‘Thank you, sir. Are we also free to cry for our dead, sir?’

‘Cry? Ha! Why? Those guys died like fools, they should have defended themselves with more vim!’

‘How? Should they’ve taken some of your men with them, sir?’

‘Well, yes, maybe, aren’t we at war?’

‘But sir, if we fired a single bullet, you’d have killed even more of us. How can you blame us now, plus the dead, for not having fired back?’

‘There’s a war going on, boys. Dark or shine, tyranny or democracy, war is war. Well done, today you stayed alive. Tomorrow, who knows? No point splitting hairs. Carry out your orders.’

A handful of conscripts, including me, rushed to remove the prisoners’ handcuffs. We offered them cigarettes. They picked up the cigs and lit up – even the non-smokers. Then, with some of us puffing and panting and others coughing like mad, we ran outside to help the wounded comrades left bleeding on the ground, but… no, there’s wasn’t a crumb of life left out there in the field. We could only hope that the wounded we’d sneaked into taxis early in the morning had survived.

‘Oi, cute ladies, having a lovely stroll through the park? Watching winter turn to spring?’ the pack of officers, ghoul-badger included, caught up with us.

‘Get ready to execute the park clean-up, morons!’

They made us carry and store the bodies on a sheet of tent canvas, outdoors, next to one of the back entrances. 

Thirty bodies or so.

No. I didn’t have the heart to count them, exactly, the way I previously counted the prisoners. I couldn’t look at the dead because

late in the afternoon

something like

a tidal wave of glassy serenity 

stole over their pained grimaces and frowns

soothing their features like a balm

sweetening and obscuring the sharp disbelief

and the charges of slaughter in their eyes

daubing them in a murky

sugary 

glaze

and that veneer

of feigned peace 

of lachrymose resignation

so evenly spread over them all

as if one and the same seemly mass-produced mask had been affixed to their faces

was unbearable to look at 

The dead boys were also unbearably weighty and so, to speed up the clean-up of the park, every single body was assigned three conscripts – two clasping a leg each and the third holding the armpits of the deceased. I took the armpits of the only man I helped carry, to avoid eye contact with his mask of false peace, but

my averted eyes couldn’t avoid spotting

my palms couldn’t avoid feeling

that 

He was encased in dried blood

as if in tree bark

from tip to toe

You know and I know that the day after the dictator’s getaway was unusually warm and sunny and so the blood had clotted and dried over the fallen boys’ skin and clothes and everywhere across the battlefield. 

After that, the former prisoners were deemed able to take positions alongside my unit, they received orders to stand on the terrace from where they’d been fired at only a few hours before. And while we stood guard together, the foreign hacks, who’d taken off at midday, as scheduled, landed in Vienna with their bags filled with bang-bang footage and duly filed their pieces. And so, later that same day, after our guard assignment ended and we handed over to our reliefs, we returned inside the airport lobby and

we saw ourselves on TV

cast

as

pro-democracy heroes 

and 

anti-democracy villains

Why? Wrongly glorified, wrongly vilified. Why? Because of some stupid, regrettable lie? Because of some clever lie, the type called, with hindsight, regrettable but historically necessary?

No point in any of my whys? 

No point in any of my… hah… venting?

Maybe you’re right: unwise is he who vents an angry breath. But then that’s me, you see, my head’s always teeming with quibbles and ruminations which now, courtesy of my disaster, now oh yes they’re ablaze with anger. 

Ablaze with complicated words? 

Come on. No words are complicated and no words are simple, they’re all sensible, they’re all necessary, I for one am smitten with them all: from the teensy preposition that rules with such discretion over everything we say to the dragonish neologism that turns out to be such good company when we reach – as one does – the crossroads of incomprehensibility that may never be solved. I do. Poetry. Yeah, that’s me, that’s what I write. Or rather what I wrote before I got conscripted in September. It’s now the end of December and since conscription, I couldn’t bring myself to put pen to paper. Anyway since the disaster – poof – proverbial pen’s gone AWOL for good. Broken. Oh yes. I’m now a useless sheet of paper besmeared and overstained with slaughter’s pencil – that’s the new me, my friend.  My Uni? Cluj. It is one of the best. Philosophy. I know. Disaster, no disaster, boy, can’t wait to end my military service next year in June and find myself back on campus, come autumn. You’re right I guess: some poets and philosophers are mental onanists. And egotistical. Nooo. Why should I be cross? I’m glad to see you, too, have a soft spot for so-called complicated words. This is a good talk. This wine is good. Oh but now let me tell you something really mental.

Back in Otopeni, late that night, while we kept watching ourselves as goodies and baddies warring on the screen, the corpses on the sheet of canvas at the foot of the building started to groan. We all pricked our ears: were there a few living people, maybe, among the dead we laid outside? no, there weren’t; though they made use of words, the groaning voices weren’t human; each death, each separate disaster, if you wish, had just started to sing

like a vagabond in despair

each individual death was now droning its own raspy monody 

one told about breaking off someone’s love

another about someone else’s bright never-to-be future as a musician

another about someone’s cheerfulness 

or timidity 

or ambitious 

or prosaic 

plans never to reach fruition

We couldn’t stop listening and making out what it was that the voices lamenting in the dark were saying. This was… yes, this must have been a collective auditory hallucination – does it really matter? Whatever their source, we kept listening to the laments, stared and stared at the sham war scenes on endless loop on TV and wept and sobbed out loud. Determined to contain that outburst of mass hysteria, the officers called us shitty wankers boohooing like superstitious hags at some countryside wake and ordered us to control ourselves. But most of us kept crying quietly until dawn. Then, still tearful, we resumed our guard duties on the terrace. 

In the end, worried that the troops’ morale was so low, a few commanders asked for more reinforcements – ouch! good luck to anyone summoned to beef up the Bucharest-Otopeni airport defense – and decided that the boys involved in what they now called the incident should take a breather. Back in our unit’s courtyard near the village of Otopeni, our lieutenant made us stand to attention:

‘Dearest boys, how about twenty-four hours of festive furlough? So all of you go back home for Christmas?’ 

Not just his choice of words… but his sudden generosity was also completely out of character – the ghoul-badger always granted us leave in exchange for sky-high bribes, which he requested in the form of ration tickets for petrol, cash in envelopes slipped into a fold of his military overcoat being only his second preference. And now to see his plump paws stuffing his dear subordinates’ pockets with gratis leave of absence letters. 

‘Thank you, sir!’ 

‘Don’t mention it, sling your hook and enjoy, lads, make your sweeties kiss your gums and bayonets!’ 

‘But, sir, permission to report, what about the boys drafted from hundreds of miles away, sir? They won’t have enough time to reach home and come back.’ 

The lieutenant scratched his head:

‘Aah, the boys from faraway counties, sure, let me think a bit, no, those boys won’t have enough time to aah, obviously, certainly! And so what? What do I care? They’ll find some shit to do in a metropolis like Bucharest, pick up some fine cunts in the North Railway Station, get pissed at the Trocadero, jump naked in the empty lido at the Lido, join the revolution for a day!’

‘But sir –’ 

‘Zip your lips, wankers, put a bit of zing in those paralytic feet and get out of my sight before I change my mind!’

So here I am, at the Transit Hotel. 

The one and only guest you have. Not surprising, when there’s so much shooting and confusion out there in the streets. 

Oh no, the other boys from faraway counties dreaded the idea of spending Christmas day in central Bucharest, deafened by bullets fired from only Santa Claus knows where. So they holed up in the Park Hotel at the edge of the city. You know the Park. Big, comfy, posh bar – and just a stone’s throw away from our barracks in Otopeni. But I craved for… just as the sneering lieutenant put it, if you wish 

I craved to 

join the revolution for a day

rest and cool my head

against the granite ankles

of this giantess

the innocent mother of my monster-disaster

hear 

her heart booming to the indifferent rhythm of the fusillades

roam

the contours of her mighty frame

smell

her smoke and copper odours

contemplate 

her vast raging fires

also, also, her smaller scars and scratches and marks 

her silent signs and traces and clues before they 

faded away

or they were 

muddied

or turned into 

text-book banalities 

or purely and simply deleted

Oh the deletion has already started. Yes, it has. Example? Half of the inscriptions graffitied around the University Square before the flight of the dictator have been deleted.  How? Painted over. Yes. Covered in horrid stripes of fuel oil and black dye. Don’t shake your head – that’s how it is, all those old walls look like huge dirty zebra hides, now. Boy, I wonder who managed to find the time and the hands for such a big painting job, under the constant gunfire. And who decided which graffiti to hide from view and which to let leap, for now, into the eyes of passers-by? 

But look, it’s getting late. I only have a few minutes left to finish this last glass – give wine to those that be of heavy heart – then time to get going, duty, yes, in the shape and form of a scarlet ghoul-badger, calls… You were so incredibly kind to keep the Transit bar open just for me. But now I’d like the bill, please. Reception lobby? No bar at the Transit? No bill? …and then these wine bottles… oh really? your own? blimey… from the black market… kept for Christmas… oh man, but then thank you a thousand times. Gosh, what a treat! And look, above all, I ought to thank you again big time for saying yes when I asked you to switch the telly off… sure, sure, please, put it back on now…   

…the last notes of the Lambada, one of the greatest hits of 1989, there… Now for the latest news… Esteemed viewers, the situation is worsening here at the TV headquarters. We are under massive attack, of which we have no live footage, as yet, so we’ll give you the pictures filmed previously at the Otopeni airport, they illustrate we’re at war with dangerous extremists, savage terrorists…

sweet Jesus

they’re still airing those sham war scenes

made-up 

pro-democracy heroes

busy killing 

made-up 

anti-democracy villains

And you, friend, you don’t… you didn’t believe me.  

…and it’s because we bring you the truth that the terrorists keep attacking us, and by truth we mean the truth of the information we provide, any piece of information, of any kind, and also, dear viewers, be assured that we all realise we’re dealing here with history in the making and therefore with the historical truth. But the terrorists abominate the truth, because these filthy fanatics worship the dictator, this new Dracula, this blot on our national history, this bubble of lies which has now fortunately burst. Beware, dear citizens, these criminals are thoroughly trained and able to disguise themselves extremely well. They infiltrate all walks of life and use the most unexpected tactics, they’re taught to shoot whatever moves, but also to misinform, they foment evil by denigrating and sowing doubts about our new democracy and our heroic army. They pose as normal Joes, as ambulance staff, as old folks attending church mass, as soldiers in conscript uniforms…

Something slightly wrong about my conscript uniform? Gosh, you’re right, there’s one thing that’s wrong: this outfit is, to my despair, all too genuine. If only we were part of something like a masked ball, I’d do away with it at once, but… heigh-ho, as a conscript I’ll be stuck inside this silly second-world-war-style carapace for another six months of national service – despite us calling ourselves a new democracy, now. What do you mean do I celebrate the new democracy? Sure thing I do. What do you mean – in what way? Look, I don’t know much about the ways of democracy. But I do know there’s a beautiful chance out there for us all to regain our dignity. Let’s hope enough of us grab it with both hands. Then there’s, or there should be, this beautiful plurality of voices, replacing that single ominous voice of Him-Himself. Delicate, but crucial, beautiful balances instead of tyranny. And there’s this most beautiful right to say no and but why without being sent to the big house. Yes but what? Oh you mean which side I’m on! Of course I detest Him-Himself. Of course, I’m thrilled about our journey to democracy. Problem is… look, we’ve started off on the wrong foot. No. No way we’re on track. We won’t be on track until the powerful  

say it like it is

stop dancing the Lambada on the cinders of my disaster

let rain and snow, not the censors’ brushes, dim the new graffiti on the old walls

air more news and less hot air 

…be vigilant, dear viewers, the terrorists are among us… 

You must be kidding. I didn’t denigrate the army. I wasn’t trying to sow any stupid doubts. Come off it, I’m no  

…meanwhile, let’s return to the pictures shot at the Otopeni airport, to the reality of the fierce battle that broke out between our brave military and these venomous snakes who keep raising their monstrous heads in one place or another, they keep firing, they keep conspiring against our newborn democracy, slaying innocent people, misinforming, destabilizing…

Yes.

That’s me all right, in my metal military helmet and holding… firing that big gun.

That reassures you? 

Happy to raise your glass, now, to a… hah!… hero? 

No, no more for me. If that damned close-up shot took a load off your heart, then, boy, you broke mine, you coffined and buried it, oh yes you did, with flags of bullshit pinned all over.

Delia Radu

Delia Radu is a journalist, writer and translator. Born and educated in Bucharest, she’s lived and worked in London since 1999. Her journalistic work was published on the BBC News website and BBC Sounds. Her literary work has appeared in the Cardinal Points Literary Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Circumference, Mantis and Acumen.

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