G133: What Have We Done (12 page)

It is easy enough to feel bewitched by the charm of this landscape, of people living in an animated, Bruegelian, pre-mechanised world, as if the experiences of Coleridge in Germany in 1799 or of Goethe in the Roman Campagna were still available to us now. The whole of Maramureş is like the Arba house in the Sighetu Museum: if you didn’t know better, you might think it perfect – that no damage had ever been done. But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into the fields: the steel crowbar, the
ranga
, for making holes in the earth, the axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the hedge slashers – all the instruments with which control and management can be imposed. Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday existence.

Vasile and Ioana Sas were walking along the road, an axe and hazel-handled rake in his hand, a checked work bag and hoe in hers. They were off to arrange some of their land. She walked on but Vasile stayed to talk.

He has twenty pieces of land and walks to all of them ‘because I like walking!’ He grows potatoes and beans and hay for his two cows. As we talked you could hear people having conversations half a mile away on the far side of the valley and the crackle of their fires as they burned the dead branches that the winter snows had brought down. Some of Vasile’s pieces of land are miles away. How far? I asked. ‘Oh,
over there.’ He pointed to a horizon where the snow was still lying in the forest. ‘The other side of that, twelve miles from the village, each way.’

L
and matters in Maramureş and ownership is a form of emotion here. A cluster of Romanian terms, all with the root
mos
, emerge in words meaning ‘giving birth’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘land’. Land is memory and family, a form of manhood and womanhood, a way of being in the world, a mooring and fixity, a tangible identity beyond the fluidities and threats of life. ‘Without land I always felt anxious,’ one Transylvanian farmer told the anthropologist Katherine Verdery. Earth is flesh here.

Both geography and climate reinforce the idea of defensiveness as the core relationship to land. Maramureş is almost entirely mountain, high, hard and forested. Wolves and bears still live here. The only valuable land, from which bread can actually be derived, is down in the narrow valleys, where people cluster, where villages are almost continuous ribbons of buildings along the valley roads, and the strips of land are as treasured as any family heirloom. ‘We are Maramureş,’ Teo said only half ironically. ‘We are very aggressive, very nervous. Everyone here will always reach for the knife in his pocket.’

The ethnic mix of the country also plays its part. A large majority is Romanian but scattered in among them are villages of Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Gypsies and even Armenians. Your own land has its boundaries, but your language community is limited too. Even within the Romanian valleys, every village tells contemptuous stories of every other: the people of Bogdan Vodă have no forest left because they burned all their wood in the distant past, trying to boil a boulder which they thought was the egg of a dinosaur; the inhabitants of Săliștea de Sus are ‘bumblebees’ because a half-deaf old lady once heard the noise of a bee trying to get out of a window, thought the Tatars were coming to kill and rape them all, rushed to ring the bells of the church and the whole village ran away into the mountains and the woods; those in the very poor village of Strâmtura are called ‘the
ones who put the bull on the church roof’ because in a drought they ran out of grass but decided they had to save the village bull. The men of the village hauled the bull up on the roof of the church, but by the time they got it up there it had died from the strain.

This is high and late country. The growing season was always thought to be one hundred days at best (that has lengthened with global warming), limited by frosts in May at one end and heavy rains in September at the other. Life had to be squeezed out of that growing year and most families were unable to survive without the wages earned by men labouring elsewhere in Romania and Austro-Hungary. ‘People here have always been fighting for their life,’ Dr József Béres of the Sighetu Museum says. ‘The land is mine, it is my family’s, it came from the past. The word peasant might mean “a man in love with the land”, but there is not enough land. Big land was always occupied by the nobility and so the peasants were always short of it. It is a form of devotion but also of unending anxiety and desperation, a predicament shared with every neighbour you have.’

I
n 1848, the Transylvanian serfs were liberated and a large land-owning peasantry developed. From the 1860s onwards, each fragmented, multi-strip holding was carefully mapped and described in a meticulous Austro-Hungarian cadastral system. There were many local ways of policing this complex pattern of land ownership. Villages employed field wardens,
gornici
, to mediate in arguments between neighbours: where the boundaries lay, where cattle could or could not graze, whose hay grew in which meadow. The
gornici
were organised by a
birau
, a ‘mayor of the fields’, paid by the village, either through a local tax or by receiving the fines raised from malefactors.

But little was stable here. After the defeat of Austro-Hungary in the First World War, 3.9 million hectares were distributed to Romanian peasants; in 1945 a further 1.4 million hectares were expropriated from the German peasants and one million hectares redistributed. Communism and the collectivisation of most farmland in the decade after 1949 was only the most radical link in this necklace
of disruptions. Along with the local authority of the priest, the council of elders in each village was done away with. Most land and all tools were gathered up, even the yokes of the cows, the ploughs, the wheelbarrows. The agents of the party, the New Men, usually the landless, the poorest in the village, became the agents of confiscation. People talking of that time can become speechless with the pain of it. The richest and most influential villagers, who employed others or had wide networks of cousins and supporters, were given impossible quotas or tasks – to plough, for example, their entire ten-hectare holding in one day – and could be imprisoned if they failed.

The New Men began to impose collective solutions and in the 1950s violent neighbour-hatred ballooned. Administrative change can scarcely address the loyalties of the heart and, needless to say, ancient memories of possession and belonging persisted under the new collectivised regimes. Those ghost memories of ownership – with the pain of dispossession rising up into the surface of everyday life – lie behind the murder of a farmer called Todor Lumei in the autumn of 1972.

His daughter Viorica, now fifty-seven, lives next door to her sister Maria, five years younger, in the house they were both born in. It is on the western edge of Sighetu Marmației, tucked up in a little valley, the whole of which once belonged to their family, above the River Tisza. From their land they can look out over the gantries and towers of the salt mine at Solotvyno across the border in Ukraine and to the dark, cloudy forests beyond it. The sisters have divided the small wooden house in two and each has raised a family in their own inherited half. Cherry and apple trees blossom around their yards and gardens where the onions are already set. Dogs are kept in wooden runs, swallows sit on the telephone wires and chickens peck among the fallen blossom petals on the grass.

The worn air of loss fills Viorica’s hot yellow kitchen. She tells the story, twisting her hands, folding and unfolding her fingers, while Maria listens, playing with the buttons on her phone.

‘We were poor because our father died very early,’ Viorica says.
‘The whole hill here was once owned by our grandfather. But during Communism many others were settled here. The road is still our property but . . .’ A shrug and half a smile.

‘I was fifteen in 1972. It was in the autumn. And I was grazing the sheep with my younger brother. He was fourteen. We were looking after the lambs in the field up here’ – she points to the hill behind the house – ‘and the lambs went off into another piece of land, part of the collective farm then, and they ate some hay from the collective farm haystack.’

Next to that haystack was the little wooden house and yard of the man who had made the hay for the collective. It was not his hay, but he had done the work and built the stack. ‘His wife started to shout and scream at us from her yard. “What are you doing? Your lambs are eating our hay!”’

Just then, by chance, her father came up the hill. He heard the woman shouting at his children. ‘So he said to her, “Why are you making that noise? Why are you arguing with the children? If you have something to say, say it to me. I am here.” He went into their farmyard to deal with it. “If I did something against you, just tell me, we can sort it out.”’

Then the neighbour’s small dog tried to bite Viorica’s father. All his attention was given to keeping it away. And while he was concentrating on the little dog, the woman came up behind him and stabbed him with a little knife in the back. ‘He was not deadly wounded,’ Viorica says. ‘It was just a small wound. He didn’t pay attention to it, because he was still fighting the dog. Then the woman shouted, “Come and kill him! If you don’t come and kill him, I will kill you!” Her husband came out of the house with an enormous knife and stabbed my father with it in the back and he fell down dead in one second.’ With her hands she measures out the length of the blade on the plastic of the tablecloth, about two feet apart, each hand slightly cupped.

Viorica shouted for her brother and when he got to her and saw what had happened, they both started to scream so loudly that they
could be heard in the town of Sighetu. Her brother ran down the hill to call for help. The murderer ran down after him, trying to stab him too, but he escaped. Then, quite suddenly, the murderer came to his senses and went into his house, with his wife, to wait for the police. Viorica stayed in the farmyard by the body of her father on the stones and the muck from the animals.

The neighbour was arrested. At court his family arranged things so that the wife was not accused and the murderer was sentenced to eight years, so little because he was already sixty-eight. During Communism, many general amnesties were issued and after one year and two months he was released. ‘For such a murder,’ Viorica says, half under her breath.

Compensation was set by the court. The neighbour was employed by the collective farm and sold his animals to pay the lawyers, so there was nothing left to give the children in compensation for their father’s life. The murderer had no goods, so they received only his small wooden house: ‘Seven by four metres, a room and a porch.’ It was valued at 17,000 lei, fifteen monthly wages at that time, but that figure draws sceptical laughs from the women. ‘It was worth much less but we took it,’ Maria says. ‘It was rotten, very rotten and so we didn’t have much timber from it. We built a barn with it.’ The man’s wife died when he was in prison and afterwards he moved away. ‘And can you believe,’ Viorica asks, ‘he lived until he was over ninety?’

What explains this? Why the rage of the murderer’s wife? There had been no trouble before. But the ghosts of history were in play. The murder site had never been part of Maria and Viorica’s grandfather’s property, but memories of class distinctions hung on. They had been rich peasants; the murderer was the poorest of the poor. The land on which the haystack stood and on which he had made the hay had been his before collectivisation. And so rage and resentment and the grief of loss found its outlet in this. Had their father somehow, even inadvertently, been acting the richer peasant? Had the murderer’s wife thought he was coming for a fight, and so attacked him first?

These questions drift around the kitchen, as they have these last
forty years. After the murder Viorica went to work in a restaurant and then a hospital to help her family. She has been sick ever since. ‘I was so deeply affected that I have had several strokes. Of course you can never get away from it. It is always in your mind. It is always in my memory.’ Their mother fell sick. The family borrowed money from relations for the funeral and to cover the fees of the priests, working for years to pay them off. Grief took up residence beside them.

We went up the hill to see where the killing had happened. The meadow has been planted since then with a new plum orchard, the trunks painted white, the trees coming into leaf, the blossom already falling like spring snow onto the grass. A neighbour saw us walking up there. ‘Look,’ Viorica shouted. ‘We have found some boyfriends so we are going out into the woods!’ But it was no weather for picnics.

T
he revolution of 1989 released a surging demand for restitution of the lands that had been collectivised during the years of Communism. Over 1.5 million Romanian farmers started court cases against their neighbours for land claims in the 1990s. Those who had been using the land during Communism thought they had as good a claim to it as the descendants of those who had owned it before. Many of the descendants had moved away and were now in the cities. How did they have more of a right to land than those who had been working it for decades? Corruption and complexity swamped the process. Village land commissions, run by the mayors and deputy mayors, became the means of rewarding friends and punishing rivals. Land which had been built on entered an ambivalent state: who did it belong to, the original owners or the owners of the houses? It was decided in the 1991 legislation that those who once owned the land on which others had built now lost the right to one thousand square metres of it – the area occupied by a house and a small garden – but could claim the rest of it, plus an equivalent of the one thousand square metres in another part of the village. But this meant that land had to be invented.

People had forgotten where their land was meant to be. The cadastral maps, which were ignored by the Communists and recorded nothing that had happened since 1948, were rejected in favour of hazy witness statements. As Verdery has described: