as though Iâd just had a cup of coffee. Drunkenness was simply the easiest and most common excuse for arrest and detainment.â
Until his departure from Romania, Nicolae still attended his job every day, though he felt very little reason to continue doing work. Many of his very good friends worked with him, and as they were all upset that he would soon be leaving, they made it a point to get him drunk each day before three in the afternoon. So it was that every day of his last months in Bucharest, Nicolae walked home from work completely without legs, and so it was on many of these days he found himself spending some time with the dreaded secret police.
On the first of his series of detainments, Nicolae was placed alone in a large dark room on an upper floor of the downtown station. He had been made to climb at least five flights of stairs, though he couldnât be sure because of his condition. On his way up the stairs he had concentrated on sounds. There were stories of the unmistakable noise of torture coming through the walls of this station, but all Nicolae heard was the mechanical hum of the ventilation system and the occasional cough or laugh from behind a closed door. The two Securitate pushed him into a hard wooden chair beside a large table, and then left the room. While they were gone, Nicolae twisted in the chair and observed his darkened surroundings.
The room was mostly bare, no wall decor, no windows, just the large wooden table like something designed for feasts or large meetings, and seven identical wooden chairs with no padding on the seats. When he looked down at his own chair he saw markings in the back rails near the seat, dents and rubbing marks, like those made by handcuffs or chains. Nicolae wiped the palms of his hands on his pant legs to remove the sweat that was accumulating there. In one murky corner of the room there was a dark shape, something hulking or piled. Nicolae stood from his chair and took a few tentative steps into the gloom. He expected at any moment for a voice to stop him and leave him sweating and silent on his feet, but the only sound he heard was from his own shoe soles dragging across the wooden floor. As he approached the corner, he found himself laughing low and uncontrolled. There was a small table, a folding table like he himself used for playing bridge with friends, and on the tabletop was a backgammon game, set for fresh play.
Nicolae taps his forehead with a finger. âYou could never tell in a police station in Bucharest if what you were seeing at any moment was really what was there, or just something constructed for you to see and wonder about. The police station was a house of games. Games of the mind. Not such nice games like we play.â
The backgammon set was in the same place each time Nicolae was brought into the room. He never saw anyone playing it nor any evidence of play. He imagined the police must have played it on their lunchtime, or in the morning before it was time to interrogate. It looked foreign, not the table sets you would normally see in Romania. It was made of something heavy, like marble or even a slab of steel, and the pieces were actual stones. In Romania, one almost always played table sets from the mountains of Transylvania. Peasants in the mountains would construct wooden box sets out of a light wood, bass or pineâquite thin and with little heft. They would include quick, rural carvings on the outside of the boxes, and the pieces were nothing more than round wooden chips painted red or black.
But the game in the station was something else entirely, an alien-looking thing, something confiscated perhaps. At that time in Romania, in the late 1970s, it was possible to travel from Romania if you knew the right people and had the right jobâif you were in, or connected to, the Party. And everyone who travelled brought back some little thing, sometimes many little things. There was always something tucked away in the
Until his departure from Romania, Nicolae still attended his job every day, though he felt very little reason to continue doing work. Many of his very good friends worked with him, and as they were all upset that he would soon be leaving, they made it a point to get him drunk each day before three in the afternoon. So it was that every day of his last months in Bucharest, Nicolae walked home from work completely without legs, and so it was on many of these days he found himself spending some time with the dreaded secret police.
On the first of his series of detainments, Nicolae was placed alone in a large dark room on an upper floor of the downtown station. He had been made to climb at least five flights of stairs, though he couldnât be sure because of his condition. On his way up the stairs he had concentrated on sounds. There were stories of the unmistakable noise of torture coming through the walls of this station, but all Nicolae heard was the mechanical hum of the ventilation system and the occasional cough or laugh from behind a closed door. The two Securitate pushed him into a hard wooden chair beside a large table, and then left the room. While they were gone, Nicolae twisted in the chair and observed his darkened surroundings.
The room was mostly bare, no wall decor, no windows, just the large wooden table like something designed for feasts or large meetings, and seven identical wooden chairs with no padding on the seats. When he looked down at his own chair he saw markings in the back rails near the seat, dents and rubbing marks, like those made by handcuffs or chains. Nicolae wiped the palms of his hands on his pant legs to remove the sweat that was accumulating there. In one murky corner of the room there was a dark shape, something hulking or piled. Nicolae stood from his chair and took a few tentative steps into the gloom. He expected at any moment for a voice to stop him and leave him sweating and silent on his feet, but the only sound he heard was from his own shoe soles dragging across the wooden floor. As he approached the corner, he found himself laughing low and uncontrolled. There was a small table, a folding table like he himself used for playing bridge with friends, and on the tabletop was a backgammon game, set for fresh play.
Nicolae taps his forehead with a finger. âYou could never tell in a police station in Bucharest if what you were seeing at any moment was really what was there, or just something constructed for you to see and wonder about. The police station was a house of games. Games of the mind. Not such nice games like we play.â
The backgammon set was in the same place each time Nicolae was brought into the room. He never saw anyone playing it nor any evidence of play. He imagined the police must have played it on their lunchtime, or in the morning before it was time to interrogate. It looked foreign, not the table sets you would normally see in Romania. It was made of something heavy, like marble or even a slab of steel, and the pieces were actual stones. In Romania, one almost always played table sets from the mountains of Transylvania. Peasants in the mountains would construct wooden box sets out of a light wood, bass or pineâquite thin and with little heft. They would include quick, rural carvings on the outside of the boxes, and the pieces were nothing more than round wooden chips painted red or black.
But the game in the station was something else entirely, an alien-looking thing, something confiscated perhaps. At that time in Romania, in the late 1970s, it was possible to travel from Romania if you knew the right people and had the right jobâif you were in, or connected to, the Party. And everyone who travelled brought back some little thing, sometimes many little things. There was always something tucked away in the
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