Diary
Alison Mutler's Journal
This month's Vivid diarist is chief correspondent for the Associated Press and president of the Foreign Press Association of Romania. She records her impressions of Bucharest in the early 90's and how it has changed today
Posted: 03/10/2007
Alison Mutler: chief correspondent for the Associated Press and president of the Foreign Press Association of Romania. Picture: Vadim Ghirda
In the evenings of my first summer in Bucharest, I would join colleagues and friends, freelancers for British newspapers, and we would head to the Continental Hotel on Calea Victoriei to dine on salata de vinete, chateaubriand, roast peppers with summer tomatoes, sauvignon blanc, ice cream and tort diplomat. When winter came our preferred eatery was the old Capsa. Bottles of wine were arranged on a table, some of them dusty - denoting age, not neglect - by the cleaning staff. The restaurant was usually full in the evenings, cosy and humming with the intrigue of the day. Sometimes after a hearty supper, the waiters would tell us that we had just consumed a 1970s Tarnave vintage that would quadruple the bill and ignite a huge argument. I can never remember the outcome except that we would vow never to set foot in Capsa again with those schmecheri (eng: tricky) waiters only to slink back a few days later seduced by the cosy Capsa atmosphere and lack of other decent restaurants.
That could never happen now with the mushrooming of restaurants all over the city. The markets of today bear little resemblance to the ramshackle of stalls, with peasants offering paltry offerings of the same produce in the early 1990s. In winter, you could find a few stringy leeks, forlorn carrots, insipid needle-thin parsnips and mud-caked potatoes at the market, and that was Amzei, even then one of the best. For those of us who didn't have or didn't trust the unofficial meat suppliers, there were tins of meat at the Israeli food store on Calea Victoriei that you could spice up with powdered curry, paprika or garlic, and treat of treats, orange juice in cartons. Pulitzer-prize winning writer William McPherson, who also wrote columns for the Washington Post lived for a few years in Romania in the early 1990s, evokes the markets of yore. "I remember scallions (green onions) in May, when the markets really began to have fresh stuff. I would add raspberries and strawberries but especially raspberries, tomatoes, red peppers. I ate a quart jar of red peppers in late January or early February 1990 because I was so seized by the sight of something other than the ghastly state-produced vegetables that came out of the old central supply and were served at every hotel in Romania, along with rice and potatoes. I remember driving to Bucharest from Timisoara end of April or early May 1990 and stopping at a market in Lugoj. I was so starved for vegetables that I ate a whole bunch of those lovely baby carrots that come in the spring. And I don't even like carrots."
In the winter of 1991, as a foreign correspondent with a treasured blue card from the Foreign Ministry which seemed to confer some kind of diplomatic status, I was permitted to use the diplomatic stores 'shop diplomatic.' I remember one on Strada Dianei, where you could buy cascaval and butter and a sort of camembert or brie produced in Targu Mures. The packing wasn't highly attractive but the France-Presse bureau chief at the time said it was as good as any French cheese. Delicious. I wish it was still produced. When I was invited out to dinner, I'd buy a bottle of wine from one of the few bars in the city centre. There was one on a side road opposite the Minerva, the place everyone went for a good Chinese meal and a bottle of wine was 75 lei. Finding something different in a shop or the market, like a chicken or some courgettes would spark a raucous dinner party conversation that could last half the evening. The other half of the evening was usually consumed by me recounting the latest mother of rows I'd had with a cab driver where I strove to give as good as I got. My most memorable insult which I wore as a badge of honour came from a taxi driver who looked at me with scorn and called me o figuranta (eng: a bit-part actress) and that was almost ten years before I got to utter a few words in a walk-on role playing a German journalist in a scene with Jeremy Irons in Callas Forever. Back in early 1992, Sophie Eagar, then fiance of the Daily Telegraph correspondent Alec Russell (the only journalist as far as I know who asked Teoctist why he 'resigned') got so sick of the dearth of fresh vegetables in winter that she took some thinly sliced leek in a plastic bag to the Pescarul fish restaurant on Bulevard Nicolae Balcescu opposite the Intercontinental and asked the cook to steam them for five minutes and put it next to her battered salau and cartofi prajiti. He may have been bemused but the pale green circles of soft leek were soon sitting on all our plates.
There were a handful of us then in Bucharest, stringers, often at the beginning of our profession, telling a story of the aftermath of Europe's most dramatic and bloody revolution to a world still curious about it until the next big story erupted: the breakup and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Now there are far fewer foreign correspondents here. We have about 30 in our Foreign Press Association, some journalists for national news agencies like Russia's Itar-Tass or Hungary's MTI. Apart from the international news agencies - Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse - we have the financial wire Bloomberg. But there are very few newspaper stringers like we had in the early 1990s. Many went on to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and then moved to other places such as South Africa, Moscow or Washington, their hearts umbilically attached to Romania. I seem to have become the doyenne, she who keeps the fires warm for them all. Many return, marvelling at the changes, nostalgic for the old days, with their families, fiancés and friends in tow, recalling with delight obscure details from the early post-revolution years that have long slipped my mind.
Sixteen summers on, I was really hoping that I could begin this piece talking about the Rolling Stones concert. For me this was a symbolic triumph over Ceausescu, who considered rock music the embodiment of all that was bad and decadent about the West, the band playing in his 23 August Stadium, home to patriotic demonstrations and rallies honouring the conducator (eng: leader). Failing that I would have started out with tales of this reporter sailing down the River Danube, reporting on what is one of the world's top ten rivers under threat of pollution according to the World Wildlife Fund. But no. Summer tonsilitis and a nasty bout of bacterial conjunctivitis wiped those two happenings off my calendar, and sent me to bed for three days in the middle of a heatwave, with only Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles, apricot yoghurt, fistfuls of paracetomol and an unhealthy dose of self-pity to accompany my 38.6 C temperature.
One of the top requirements for being a journalist, as well as a politician, is to be of robust health. Other 'qualities' include an itchy curiosity, being a good gossip, having social skills and not minding being centre-stage or unpopular. That week was not my best. But the forced rest was bliss. The doing nothing was luxury. Just being there, even well below par. Like many people here, I often rush from place to place, appointment to appointment, person to person, country to country, that I am rarely just alone with myself. And if I am, I fret, fiddle, angst, start playing with the mobile phone, doodling on paper, and turn on the TV to watch nothing of consequence. In those three days I learned to revel in doing practically nothing. The first thing I did when my temperature subsided was put on a frivolous red frock, sunglasses (the temperature went back to normal but not the conjunctivitis) and went out. Those days had given me a zest for life I wouldn't have experienced had I not been felled by sickness.
Alison Mutler: 'Like many people here, I often rush from place to place, appointment to appointment, person to person, country to country, that I am rarely just alone with myself.' Picture: Vadim Ghirda
As I write the hot weather has fizzled to a drizzle. The 40 plus temperatures which felt like an oven you could bake meringues in, or the pleasantly hot 28 has shrunk to 15 and it feels like a dank autumn day on my tanned limbs.
I'd always wanted to be in Romania, and more precisely in the office, when Teoctist died. When the news was announced about 20 minutes after his death, I had just finished reading a Rompres report that he was doing well after surgery on his prostate gland and was expected to leave the hospital soon. I admit I shrieked. I've been doing this job for 16 years and there are few events that make me involuntarily exclaim out loud, but this was one of them. I remember being here in 1990 when passions against the former communists and their cronies raged and bubbled. It must have been on this wave that the patriarch stepped down in early 1990 only to quietly return a few weeks later. I recall him being called "the Antichrist" although that epithet had first and more credibly been used by Romanian national radio on 25th December, 1989 with the immortal headline "The Antichrist is dead on Christmas Day." Romanians have a saying, de morti numai de bine (eng: only say good things about the dead) and that was certainly evident in the moments, hours and days after his death. Detractors in his lifetime often became distraught with grief in his death. Our obituary, a juicy and compelling story of a complex character who lived during complicated times, was severely chopped about by the television stations who chose to use it with the line about him making history when he invited Pope John Paul II to Romania in 1999. It's funny. I find that the complexities, human frailties, the perniciousness of the totalitarian system make this story all the more fascinating. What you can say about Teoctist is that he was humble and made moves on the ecumenical front although less overtures to the Eastern Rite Catholics. I remember reporting brawls in churches and cathedrals between the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics, the chalice and communion plates hurled around as if they were pancakes or cricket balls by clergy and the faithful.
I do not believe in de morti numai de bine. Personally what impressed me the most about Teoctist was his admission after Pope John Paul's visit in 1999 that he had felt abandoned by God from the time he had briefly stepped down until the historic visit. How many other religious leaders would have made such a startling and stark admission? I never interviewed him, although I saw him at numerous events over the years, and I slightly regret that now. I hope I'll get to interview his successor.
It's still summer and I've been to the beach. I am not about to do a critique of the charms of the Romanian coast, but it is sandy, safe and the water by midsummer is warm. I took my daughters to Navodari because Mamaia was heaving with revelers and holidaymakers. It took me half and hour to find a parking space at 0100 in Mamaia where I'd arrived for a bikini show. Navodari, farther north, is in the throes of development. In fact half of it is a building site. But it's going to be more a resort of beach apartments, than Mamaia featuring even more hotels. Apart from the ugly Petromidia a few kilometres north, the beach is relatively empty and the water is clean. There are plenty of rubbish bins along the unpopulated coastline. What shocked me was the amount of litter, plastic bottles, bags, chocolate and biscuit wrappers and beer bottles that were thrown onto the beach and in the nearby dunes. If I'd had some black plastic bags I would have cleared it all up. If people keep throwing away rubbish just yards from litter bins then this beach is going to be totally polluted, unpleasant and unusable before half the pensione owners and beach apartments have had their parquet floors laid. It will be ruined before it's been created.
Alison Mutler is chief correspondent for the Associated Press and president of the Foreign Press Association of Romania. She has recently written her first book Plecata la Revolutie (eng: Gone to a Revolution) published by Compania.
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