Excerpt
…yet something faintly trembling crept into my
legs all the same. On the wall, beside the state emblem, hung the
Conducător’s color portrait. They did not offer me a chair. I had to
remain standing the entire time. The balding officer seated in the
center looked up from the files before him and asked:
“Do you know why you are here?”
“No,” I answered timidly.
The officers glanced at one another. Then the same officer read
out the accusation: You shared military secrets with your friend.
You wrote anti-state and anti-regime statements in your letter. You
called the leader of the country, the party’s general secretary, a
bloodthirsty dictator, a parasite, Dracula himself. Do you understand
that this is an act against the state?
My throat tightened. My stomach clenched. The officer turned
another page. The rustling of paper sounded, in that moment, like
the hiss of a sand viper. Before speaking, I swallowed hard.
“I didn’t mean it seriously… I thought of it as literary exaggeration,”
I muttered, shifting from one foot to the other.
The other officers began questioning me as well. They asked
about my teachers, my studies, my friends, my family, my literary
activities. They took notes as I spoke, sometimes exchanging
glances among themselves. It was then that the realization struck
me: the poem itself may have been explainable, since no names
appeared in it, but the accompanying letter made unmistakably
clear who the tyrant of the people was, and which era of power
the poem condemned. They questioned and pressed me, and it
became obvious that what they truly wanted to know was under
whose influence I had become anti-regime, because they considered
me too young, too immature, to have become a radical dissident
at nineteen.
I feared for my father, and for the young parish priest whose influence
had inspired me toward the priesthood, so I never mentioned
either of them. My teachers never spoke openly about politics —
at least not publicly — though later I was astonished to learn that
my strict mathematics teacher had somehow been involved in the
investigation surrounding Counterpoints.
