Wanderer
The Lost Footsteps. By Silviu Craciunas. (Collins, 21s.) The Lost Footsteps. By Silviu Craciunas. (Collins, 21s.) HE fled through his own land like a defeated prince, succoured by peasants and nuns and strange women. He fell in love abroad, and then returned home to be hunted for seven years until he could escape again and find her waiting for him. The Security Police hung him upside down from a pipe and thrashed his bare soles with the bastinado. Now he lives quietly near Gloucester Road tube station, tends the boilers in a small block of flats, and has written this book.
Silviu Craciunas was a Rumanian, an organ- iser of resistance to the Russians and to his own government from 1946 to 1956: his speciality was the opening of escape routes across the frontier for others. It is all true, I assume; and Yet it reads like a fairy story about the wander- ings of the disinherited son—the book rushes so steeply down through scenes of horror and cruelty, through pellucid visions brought by extremes of pain and hunger, through the kitchens Of the noble friends who hide him and the starry nights of approach to border fences, that one is left with no feeling that this is a political book. The point about the tale is Silviu himself, who seems to have been one of those officer-class, Pious, heroic young men of Eastern Europe Whom the Second World War and the Peoples' Democracies have virtually managed to exter- minate. Their nationalism led some 'into miry channels during the 'war against Bolshevism' (Mr. Craciunas belonged for a time to the Fascistic Iron Guard), and then their simple, nineteenth-century courage against tyranny led them straight into the waiting hands of a Com- munist secret police. On the evidence of this book, the Rumanian resistance to Communism was widespread but amazingly shadowy and con- fused. The purpose of his own missions, and the reason which made him leave Paris in 1950 when he had reached safety at last and return for a second foray, are shadowy too. Through most of the narrative, he is either in desperate flight which leaves him no time to accomplish his aims or else fighting his gaolers with the weapons of his own will to survive. A colonel haunts the Car- pathians with a force of partisans, the hope of the oppressed but never actually, seen in action. Aged peasants live in caves, descending to vil- lages to preach visionary sermons against collec- tivisation. Directors of State enterprises plan their own hopeless campaigns of industrial sabotage. And suddenly over Bucharest, while the night shudders with gunfire, arrive great air- craft spewing out parachutists from heaven- knows-where, intended to commit heaven-knows- what.
Wanting to live as much as a beheaded dogfish wants to go on snapping, Mr. Craciunas broached one last reserve of mental stamina which his sophisticated captors had overlooked in their psychiatry and shambled off through a sickroom window, into a rainstorm, across Rumania, over two defended frontiers and the ruins of Hungary, through Vienna, across the English Channel and finally to SW7. I hope he will be careful of the traffic at the Cromwell Road intersection.
NEAL ASCHERSON
Previous page
