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The Courtyard, the House, the Hall
Today, my childhood home no longer exists. In the 1980s, mass demolition work took place in Bucharest and my courtyard, my street and my whole neighbourhood were reduced to dust. In the name of Marxism-Leninism and the holy class struggle, the tyrant Nicolae Ceaușescu had decided to give the capital wider avenues with monumental prospects and immense constructions. Thus, the magnificence of marble and the fury of reinforced concrete were to intimidate a people starved and condemned to despair. On the dictator’s orders, thousands of inhabitants were expelled from their homes and dispersed to the city’s periphery. They had to pack their things and agree, at barely a day’s notice, to relocate to housing blocks still under construction, without water or electricity, often without even doors and windows. The bulldozer’s blades and caterpillar tracks razed their homes, turning them into a pile of bricks, stones and scrap metal. More than forty thousand houses, along with many priceless churches, monasteries, synagogues, hospitals, theatres and monuments, were demolished or moved. Among the many neighbourhoods annihilated was the old Jewish quarter stretching across the suburbs of Vacaresti, Dudesti and Vitan, where thousands of poor emigrants, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, had settled since the nineteenth century. This is how several streets of my childhood, with their houses, whose bright, joyful colours guided me in winter like morning stars on my way to school, were wiped out with the occasional exception of a few mutilated, pitiful segments.
At the very heart of Ceaușescu’s urban ambitions was his megalomaniacal plan to build in the city centre a gigantic House of the People, conceived, in his imagination, as the Eighth Wonder of the World. He wanted this project to mark the apotheosis of his reign, ensuring him an eternal place in history. The construction works for the House of the People were launched in 1984 and a fifth of the old city of Bucharest (a surface equivalent to three Parisian arrondissements) was converted into a vast cemetery of rubble.
Ceaușescu and Elena, his wife, did not have the chance to attend the completion of this project in all its grotesque majesty. On 21 December 1989, a series of riots in Bucharest and other cities in the country led the population and the army to rebel and provoked the fall of the communist regime. The brutal and degrading execution of the Ceaușescu couple, on 25 December 1989, was worthy of their ignominy and the suffering they had inflicted on their people.
I had left Romania well before Ceaușescu came to power. For me, on a personal level, he was just the thief of a few precious traces of my childhood. I cast him into oblivion now in order to devote myself to the period preceding the Second World War, when my neighbourhood of Vacaresti-Dudesti enjoyed a quiet life, just like Triumph Street and the big combined courtyards of numbers 47 and 49, at the centre of which nestled the little house where we lived, behind the branches of an old plum tree.
Most importantly, there was our courtyard. It was entered through one of the two gates that opened onto two parallel alleyways where the two properties joined one another. On the left was number 47 with the house inhabited by the landlord, Nae Theodorescu. Although he was short of stature, and a little overweight, his elegance, intimidating look and powerful voice commanded respect and submission: ‘A man of great class’, said those in the know. I have kept quite a clear image of Theodorescu: greying hair under a wide-brimmed felt hat; bulging eyes; bushy black eyebrows; a long nose poised above a perfectly trimmed pencil-thin moustache.
