The video shows an old man standing on a balcony. He’s wearing one of those black karakul caps and a double-breasted coat with fur collars. He holds his hand up in the way dictators do, stiff and unflinching the way his statues do. The video warbles and skips, like an old VHS that’s been taped over endlessly. It’s got that warm, fuzzy look. A blurry ribbon runs along the bottom. Thousands are jammed into the square below him, ringed by palaces and neo-classical kitsch. They’re holding red banners and photographs of the old man from decades ago––the old man as a young man––the same black-and-white face. There’s a swell of Hurrahs! from the front lines, from supporters performing their choreographed chorus. Because of the video’s resolution it’s hard to make out anyone individually. There are only shapes and faces, massed like mosaic tiles on this cold European morning.
It’s like an old socialist realist painting, she thinks.
He barely gets to speak before it happens. There’s a sound of screaming. The old man’s face drops. The look is unforgettable. People are running around the balcony behind him. The camera shakes. “Come inside” someone tells him. “An earthquake?” He’s looking at something the viewer can’t see. “Somebody’s shooting.” The howls multiply and climb and he holds his hand up again to try to pacify the crowd.
All he can say is: “What?”
His mouth opens. He looks confused, like any old man would, sitting in his living room, staring into the middle-distance. The video trembles as tracking lines slide across the frame. “They’re entering the building,” someone tells him. The camera pans to the sky, a segment of blue above a line of roofs. Then the voice of the old man. Two syllables:
“Ahh-lo!”
Again.
“Ahh-lo!”
All you can see is the undescribed sky in the morning light and the counter in the top lefthand corner.
Then a woman’s voice: “Silence!”
“Shut-up,” he says. “Stop that.”
It doesn’t show the crowd, but the sound lets you imagine them, packed in animal panic.
“Ahh-lo!”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Shut up.”
The camera stays where it is. You can hear them talking amongst each other. You can hear him smacking the podium.
“Talk to them,” she says. “Talk to them.”
“I––” he begins. “I desire to emphasize…”
It’s grainy and unclear and the image itself seems to be thinking. The screaming continues.
After a few minutes the camera returns to the podium. The old man stammers and wags his hand. He resumes, calling for the preservation of the republic, something about “force and unity.” The gray apparatchiks along the balustrade follow with terrified applause. They’re trying to get the crowd back in order. The shots of the assembly are much tighter now. People are fleeing the square. The old man continues his speech, more or less as ordered, but something has changed. No one believes it. A veil has dropped. The screen flashes to red. The transmission ends.
The video is dated December 21st 1989.
If there were two people in Bucharest for whom it could be said that the fall of Ceausescu’s regime was not the greatest thing to have happened that day, it would have been Ion and Alexandra Valsescu, for that was also the day that Veronica Ioana Valsescu came into the world. She was born during the broadcast, according to her mother, who liked to think that her daughter’s birth had christened the decision of the Romanian people to turn against their leader. The speech was supposed to be about a raise in wages, an attempt by the regime to shore up some credibility amid the collapsing bloc of socialist states. She’d watched the video hundreds of times, finding something supernatural in it––the way the moment tips toward disaster, then tips toward liberation. There had never been anything like it before or since, an entire nation finding out that the emperor had no clothes live on television.
Veronica asked her father what he remembered, what it was like on that morning. He said he didn’t remember much of anything, in fact, and he didn’t know what had caused the assembly to collapse so quickly. Nobody did. This was part of the mystery that developed around the old man’s moment on the balcony––the search for the first person, the first expression of dissent that caught and cascaded through the crowd. Veronica knew all about the psychology of crowds and she looked for it, again and again: the moment when it finally broke. But she wasn’t able to locate it, not in the video, not even here, as she stood in the square where it happened, sometime towards sundown in Bucharest, with the white palace in half-light, the palatial library and the hotels and bronze monuments. A group of tourists were standing on the balcony, now the national museum, with water bottles and brochures, taking pictures of the Piața. Across the street, Veronica saw the memorial: a black cage (believed to be a crown) impaled on a large marble needle. The sunlight cut the column at its centre. There was red paint splashed up near the crown, adding to the impression of a king’s head decapitated. She lingered awhile and wandered the area around the square, looking for a trace of something, the place nearly empty at this hour; just pigeons, roofs and cupolas, the great abstract monstrosity of the memorial.
After revolution there is only banality.
She walked back to the hotel through lean residential streets. An old woman came out onto a terrace and snapped a carpet. A black dog slept at the railing, its snout resting between the bars. She bought a beer and sat outside a local pub, listening to people talk and letting the language fill her ears. She spoke to them and asked them where they were when it happened––the old man’s moment.
Most of them didn’t see it. For the people watching at home, all they saw was the red screen, the color of a dead transmission.
You know how people say they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when such-and-such happened, or so-and-so was shot? Well Veronica remembered every day of her life like that. For a long time, she thought there was nothing special about her memory. She just assumed everyone could remember what they’d done five years ago on the third Friday of July, or knew approximately how many headaches they’d had in their life, or that Easter had fallen on April 13th in 1998, and that it had been a balmy 63º that day. In her mind, every day was a historical date: every day was a Waterloo or a Norman Invasion.
It wasn’t until years later, after reading a Borges story called “Funes the Memorious” that she suspected there was anything exceptional about her recall. She’d never submitted herself to testing, but learned that it was called “acute autobiographical memory,” or a Greek term she liked, “Hyperthymesia” (more appropriate, since being doomed to remember everything seemed like a symbolic punishment doled out by a deity in some ancient allegory). If she had to describe it––what it was like to see all those memories laid out in her mind’s eye––it would be something like a film archive, with shelves for the years and reels for the months and frames for the days, and at any time, she could go in, open one up, run through it, and tell you more or less everything that had happened to her that day. But at a certain point the camera in her head stopped rolling. The state cameras had turned off the moment her camera turned on, and she remembered only the red image.
That red reminded her of childhood. It was like the color of closed eyes on sunny mornings.
She watched the video again on her phone in the hotel bar. She had to sit through two ads first. One for a smart toothbrush, the other for cloud storage: a safe place for all your memories.
Veronica was born at the beginning––the very very beginning you could say––of a baby boom following the Romanian revolution. It was the same all over central and eastern Europe after the autumn of ’89: people went out into the streets to topple their governments, then they went into their bedrooms to celebrate.
She took a hike in the Carpathians, walking all afternoon through those fold-and-thrust hills, thick with primeval forest, paths evergreen and gray, legions of spruce, dense and packed like impalers on the slopeside, and those outcroppings of gothic rock shaped like castle battlements. The Valsescus came from these latitudes. Peasants, like so much of the country, until a heavy century of industrialization sent half the population into cities. Veronica’s mother told her that they’d been dairy farmers, but that someone on her father’s side must have been a dancer, since the name Valsescu, which is not a proper name of any kind, comes from vals (waltz).
The trial and execution took place on Christmas day. The husband and wife, Ion and Alexandra, were still in the hospital when the images were released of the other husband and wife, Nicolae and Elena, crouched in front of a firing wall, collapsing in a hail of mortar and debris, the old man’s hat flying off, trying to keep his feet as the machine gun slugs tear into him. Veronica went to the spot and saw where the bodies had been chalked, their outlines traced in the pavement, and a group of Portuguese girls asked her if she could take a picture of them, huddled beneath the bullet holes.
The next evening she was on a plane. She sat by the window, the Carpathians vanishing beneath her feet. She ordered herself a drink, orange juice and a vodka miniature, a little something to stare out the window with as the lamps of the receding city came alive, lighting up all at once like some reminder of night. She went through a cache of old videos in her mind, from documentaries she’d watched and memorized. One was a television clip of the fall harvest: Ceausescu browsing food stalls piled high with plastic meat and polystyrene cheese, wooden fruit painted and sprayed to look dewy. It was an attempt to reassure the nation of its abundance during the food shortages of the 1980s. The other was a black-and-white video of the leader on the balcony of the Royal Palace, August 21st 1968. The same place, the same square, twenty years earlier––the old man as a young man––denouncing the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia.
She came to see the red screen as her test frequency, the color of raw consciousness on which her memories were transmitted.
It never got old, the video. There was our animal nature, our hive mind, the fictions we agree to live under until we can tolerate them no longer. It said something essential about us, she thought, and it sent a throb through the shaft of nerves at the base of her brain every time she saw it.
It was a full system collapse, one that happened in a recorded moment. There had been a breakdown in communication between the command center and the people and the body politic suddenly went offline. The documentary voice in her head said: “What occurred on the morning of December 21st 1989 was an anomaly, a kind of spontaneous generation, a feedback loop that had reached critical mass and blew within a matter of minutes, without coordination or any apparent source.”
The state news cameras were careful not to let people see the crowd. They panned away and just held there, pointing up into the glaring skyscape, but you can hear them, and you can hear the old man. You can hear him failing to grasp what is happening.
The trial was televised too, in a small back room, dirty and poorly lit. It took less than two hours.
She came to think of the tape as a stand-in for her first memory. Because if she could have remembered anything from the day of her birth, she would have remembered this.
But it didn’t matter, did it? Because it was the same for everyone: the video was their memory. They remembered the old man wagging his hand, the screaming, the red screen, the speech finishing. Then it was over.
The red image said: “DIRECT TRANSMISSION”
In the museum she saw some footage she had never seen before, taken that morning by an auxiliary camera, one that was rolling but not for broadcast: it showed the line breaking, people streaming away from the square, the crowd rushing the doors of the palace. But it didn’t show when it happened, or how. One minute everything is proceeding as planned. Then the tape flashes and suddenly things have fallen apart. The frame froze at the end, becoming a still image. The Romanian voiceover said: “These recordings still give no indication of the nature of the disturbance.”
The more she watched the video, the less she understood.
Jared Marcel Pollen is the author of The Unified Field of Loneliness: Stories, and the novel Venus&Document. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Liberties, Gawker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, The Yale Review, Tablet and Astra. He lives in Prague. Twitter: @jaredmpollen
minor literature[s] 