A year later, at my high school reunion, I lingered near the bar with a classmate.
“So, what are you doing these days?” he asked.
“Teaching English. You?”
“Accounting. We were in the same class,” he said. “Do you remember? I’m the guy who had the breakdown and screamed about being an informer. That’s how most people remember me.”
“You know what I remember?” I said. “That none of us did anything to comfort you. I’m sorry. I was in the same position. I should have helped you.”
“Same agent?” he asked.
“Big hands and BT cigarettes?”
“Yeah, that’s him. I thought he was so evil, but now I sometimes wonder—maybe he was a pawn of the regime, just like the rest of us. But you know what’s weird?” he whispered. “His daughter goes to the school right next to my apartment building.”
A cold clench gripped my abdomen. “Wait, you see Paddle Hands?”
“Yeah, he lives right near me, in building F2.”
Paddle Hands, the guards at Station 14, most of the torturers were never charged. They lived among us. Maybe the events of 1989 are a distant memory to them. But they’re not a distant memory to me. Like I said, too many unanswered questions.
“He lives near you?” I asked again. “Do you know his real name?”
He gave me the name.
I repeated it in my head.
Memorized it.
Vowed never to forget it.
And that’s how I eventually ended up at the cemetery, standing at our family gravesite with a manuscript. I’ve spent years panning for truth, interrogating my memories, correcting false narratives, and pondering the fact that when betraying others, we often betray ourselves.
My students sometimes ask about the revolution and I share stories. I change the names, just in case. They love hearing about Liliana, Bunu, and Starfish. When I speak of Cici, their sadness is palpable.
Sometimes we think we know. We’re sure we know. But we know nothing. Years pass and eventually, time becomes the unveiler of truth. And that painful shift in comprehension, I tell my students, is called “a rite of passage”—that’s the English term for it.
“Mr. Florescu, you should write a book about it,” they constantly tell me.
So I have.
The story ends well: Liliana. Me. Spectacular hope.
I’ve left it for Bunu to read. Maybe one day others will read it too.
But now I’ve arrived at Paddle Hands’s apartment, and I’m ready for answers. I’m ready to put the past behind me.
I’ve knocked.
I’ve heard his footsteps, and I can smell the cigarette smoke.
It’s happening.
This is it.
He’s going to open the door.
“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy;
for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;
we must die to one life before we can enter another.”
—Anatole France
Reuters/Radu Sigheti
December 1989. The Romanian Revolution in Bucharest.
Getty Images / Régis Bossu Elena and Nicolae Ceau?escu
“The communist regime under Ceau?escu had become totalitarian. It was one of the most repressive regimes in the Eastern Bloc at that time. It was so bad that even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described it as, ‘a horse being whipped and driven by a cruel rider.’？”
—Colonel Branko Marinovich,
Foreign Area Officer, U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, 1989
“I believe that Ceau?escu had gotten away with one of the greatest Cold War ploys, which was appearing one way to the West and yet maintaining in his own country probably the worst cult of personality dictatorship and abusive human rights that had existed since Stalin . . . It was just so out of control that it even out-Stalined Stalin.”
—Samuel Fry,
Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, 1981–1983
“Evil is unspectacular and always human and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
—W. H. Auden
National Archives / Jack E. Kightlinger Gerald R. Ford, Richard M. Nixon, and Nicolae Ceau?escu
Online Communism Photo Collection, Photo #BA421
The Ceau?escus visit with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, 1978
Fototeca online a comunismului romanesc
Official portraits of the Ceau?escus
Author collection
Magazines Cristian sees at the American Library, November 1989
Author collection
Vintage BT and Kent cigarettes in Romania
Deposit Photos
Ceau?escu’s Palace of Parliament
Author collection