KEEPING HOUSE IN ROMANIA

Elisabeth Luard on the great

difficulty Ceausescu's subjects experience buying food

Bucharest WISE Romanian housewives have barri- caded their larders and laid in stocks of firewood to tide them over this winter's rapidly growing food and fuel shortages. In the capital, Bucharest, street lamps are already switched off on a random rota system, putting the long-suffering citizenry at hazard as they negotiate the huge holes being excavated for the new metro system. Places of entertainment are under a ten o'clock curfew and the non-tourist res- taurants have dispensed with menus: they offer either one dish or none. Cakes and ale will be in short supply this Christmas.

Virtuous Communists sup uneasily in public on cakes and ale, but it will hardly be virtue which deprives the Romanians of their Christmas commons. Under the near- septuagenarian bandit Nicolai Ceausescu, Romania is not only effectively bankrupt, it is also riddled with a kind of flamboyant South American corruption, nurtured by an absolute and Mafia-like official secrecy. All information is dangerous propaganda: the dictum covers even the most human of dramas. One bright day this spring the buses of Bucharest suddenly appeared without the long grey roof-mounted gas cylinders which normally power them. This gave an immediate boost to the black market in bottled butane on the ready assumption that it heralded a general failure of gas supplies. A shortage there certainly was, very possibly precipitated by the rumour itself, but the real reason for the cylinders' disappearance was more sinister. One of the buses, packed as usual at rush-hour, had been making its way through a distant suburban street when its cylinder exploded. The carnage was horri- fic and the official clamp-down absolute. In spite of many eye-witnesses it was weeks before the truth travelled the grapevine. By then the black market had made its own killing. The lethal grey cylinders are now back on the bus roofs, just in time to take the citizens of Bucharest to do their Christ- mas marketing.

Six weeks ago Bucharest's market was better, I was told, than it had been for months. The shortages of the summer had been caused by a decision to crack down on the black market suppliers, mainly the peasantry. The peasants shrugged, stayed at home with their produce, and the stalls were left bare. Now authority has turned its back again and supplies have reap- peared. The permanent official market consists of a single bank of fruit and vegetable counters and a covered super- market for goods produced by the collec- tives and factories. Everything is sold at rigidly fixed prices. The choice is sparse: the state export quota skims the milk as well as the cream, and anything worth hard currency goes abroad. The supermarket shelves contain an arbitrary assortment of goods peculiar to Iron Curtain grocery stores: tinned herring fillets in brine, ranks of bottled vegetables as anaemic as labora- tory specimens, flasks of rationed cooking oil, bundles of grey-brown spaghetti, a sticky pyramid of bottled beer, pot-still plum brandy, and several cases of what a corkscrew reveals to be a truly terrible red wine. The cold store is occupied by a large quantity of neon-orange sausages and a margarine mountain to rival the EEC's famous monument in butter. Business in the state corner shop today is not brisk.

Outside in contrast, the unofficial mar- ket is bustling. Stocked from the small private patches of garden the Romanian peasantry has managed to wrench from the collectivised bosom, it differs not so much in its prices as (for the buyer) in the range and quality of the produce, and (for the seller) in ownership of the sock into which the proceeds of a sale are stuffed. People buy small quantities: a single leek, a carrot, three potatoes. My attempt to acquire some unfamiliar mushrooms from an old gypsy woman with a basket causes havoc: a torrent of anxious Romany explanation is followed by the thrusting into my hand of her identity card and her official permit. A small partisan crowd gathers. Loudly, and probably courageously, they vouch for her legality. There is audible relief when in- stead of arresting her, I pay for a little clump of the fungus. As I accept the goods, I worry briefly about my resemblance to a Romanian undercover policewoman. I worry again when one of the dozen sharply-dressed currency spivs who haunt the hotel's steps offers me his services. He warns me against unscrupulous dealers. I warn him against undercover police- women.

The official rate of exchange is quoted at around six lei to the pound. It is nonethe- less surprisingly difficult to change curren- cy officially in Bucharest. At 10.45 a.m. on a working Tuesday the Bank of Romania is shut. Predictably no one knows why. The soldier at the Bank's international counter waves his sub-machine-gun at me and tells me to come back tomorrow. Round the next corner is another of the accommodat- ing gentlemen against whose blandish- ments I have already been warned. The black-market price for hard currency is 3% times the official rate. It brings the cost of shopping tumbling down.

Forty years after the war bread is still rationed and must be bought with coupons. This autumn a large loaf cost 4.75 lei — say 80p, or 23p to the psst-over-here brigade. The rest of the items on the shopping list which are available work out as follows: Tomatoes: 3.35 lei per kilo — 60p official or 17p round the corner.

Potatoes: 3.75 lei per kilo — 63p official and 18p elsewhere.

Fresh sardines: 28 lei per kilo — £4.67 from the man with the machine-gun, or a more modest £1.33 elsewhere.

Green peppers (very dusty): 4.00 lei per kilo — 67p or 19p.

Cabbages — none. (What had they done with them all? Sauerkrauted them for export? Near the Bulgarian border massed regiments of cabbage were being grown on every roadside verge.) Walnuts: 80 lei (£13.33 or £3.80) for shelled ones — an astonishing concession to the consumer.

Gypsy mushrooms (subsequently identi- fied as Pholioto mutabilis): 15 lei (£2.55 or 73p) for an eye-judged 1/2 kilo in a paper cone.

Maize oil (rationed to 1 litre per custom- er, although the peasants' carts are burst- ing with the maize crop): 12 lei (£2 or 57p) for half a litre, plus 2 lei for the container.

Pork (the only meat I could find on sale, and the only one available in non-tourist restaurants): 20 lei (£3.33 or 95p) per kilo.

Two kilos of aubergines, the poor man's caviar with the longest queue in the mar- ket: one cellophane-sealed pack of Kent cigarettes — the most negotiable of Roma- nia s parallel currencies. In Hungary Marl- borough will do nicely, but in Romania it has to be Kent.

The provincial towns suffer even more than the capital from the incompetence and venality of the Ceausescu regime. Traditionally the old Transylvanian town of Sibiu has always had a spice or 'fore- igners' market. For as long as records have been kept — and Sibiu's German-speaking Saxon community have kept them meticu- lously for 800 years — merchants and gypsies have set up their stalls on Tuesdays and Saturdays under the colonnade in the great central square. They sold silks and dyes for embroidery thread, tea and coffee as well as cinnamon and cloves, to genera- tions of the town's housewives, meeting the requirements of the dark-eyed native Latins as well as the yellow-haired Saxons. The Saxon Lutherans have also long been excellent customers for Turkish carpets: the 'Black Church' in nearby Brasov glows with memorial prayer rugs bought over the centuries from the merchants of Ladik and Smyrna. Then, as the Romanian economy began to disintegrate, supplies of imported goods dwindled. Six years ago the market closed. Less than 40 years of peacetime communist rule has ended what eight centuries of invasion, warfare and general mayhem failed to interrupt.

High in the Carpathians above the spice- less town live some of Romania's last capitalists — the mountain villagers. In spring and autumn the richest men in the country herd their thousand-strong flocks to and from the winter pastures, a sea of sheep surging up and down the highways. The shepherds are lean spare men, Mongolian-cheekboned and wrapped, like their charges, in heavy grey-yellow fleeces. In the towns sour jokes about their wealth abound. There's the shepherd who could only raise half the million-dollar cash price of a sheep-herding helicopter: he had to borrow the rest from his brother. Moun- tain larders are piled high with meat, cheese, eggs and butter. Mountain cellars are awash with home-distilled plum brandy and liqueurs. Mountain shelves bend under the weight of pickled vegetables and pre- served fruit. The villagers' mattresses, say the people of Sibiu, are stuffed with dollars and Kent cigarettes. For centuries their ancestors have defied invaders from the safety of their wolf-patrolled uplands. Now, latter-day millionaires, they gaze down on the new grey men collectivising the farms on the plains. They themselves are unaffected — any village above 500 metres is prudently left alone. (Their own jokes are about the town quota-fixer who tries to count the local bears.) If the market price is right, the shepherds bring their produce down for sale. If it is not, they stay at home — and the good burghers of Sibiu, or Brasov or even Bucharest, are denied any of the luxuries the villagers take for granted as everyday fare. Perhaps this Christmas will see the first uprising in history of a starving socialist middle class against a bloated capitalist peasantry. It should make quite a fight.