In the communist world, the house is connoted differently. That is where one takes refuge from an exterior existence that is watched by ill-meaning eyes. It is a dangerous world that forces one into a chameleon?s existence. The home becomes thus the world where one can be king and make his own decisions, where one can forget about the world without.

In the ?80s, the power retrenchment brought to the Romanians? houses the cold, the dark and the dirt. One?s home became an entirely freezing and slimy abode. (90)

A house was generally given to the man, to the head of the family. You had to be a good worker, and a party member, to participate in all meetings, to have exemplary work results, never to take leaves. Not anyone got a house. If a couple did not have children they only received a studio flat, that?s if they were lucky and really did not have a place to stay or if they had a privileged position in that unit, and were engineers or directors. Couples with children came first, especially those with more children. If they had two daughters, they got two rooms, if a boy and a girl, they got three rooms. The hardest to find were the two-room flats, since the case applied to the majority. You could wait for five years before you became eligible. The application form was analyzed by the party administrative board of the unit. If it was accepted, only then did they put you on the waiting list. The list was discussed every year, since there could be special cases that were granted more advanced positions on the list. In order to obtain a house faster, you had either to have some connections or to have 5ooo lei to bribe the commission. If you had a heart condition or some noteworthy health problem, you had a right to one extra room. (M. V., 121)

The size of the flat you got depended on the number of family members. We received ours, that is, the flat where my parents live now, by illegal means ? my father placed the necessary ?stuff? with the commission and they finally gave him the three-room flat, even if we did not have a right to three rooms. When they learned about it, we received a paper saying that we have to let one room ? it was considered surplus space. We didn?t want a stranger in the house, so we had to bring grandmother from the countryside to live with us. In those times, the bribe was not excessive, you could solve things even with a rooster. But you had to ?keep clean? and have someone supporting you. Or you could give the bribe in installments, a bit of it every month. (O. S., 120)

Everyone had a place to work, a place to stay, a home, be it a studio flat or anything. The circuit was this: the lodger of a studio flat moved to a two-room flat, the lodger of a two-room to a three-room and the lodger of a three-room to a four-room. So lodging in Bucharest was a regulated issue. So was that of the work places. (22)

I once went to a party, at a colleague of ours who was a bit better off and lived in a privileged area. She had a breath-taking villa, something we?d never seen before. Her father was tops in the army, something related to political education. They had just moved to Bucharest. The party started and at some point I broke an ashtray, I can?t think how it happened. She saw that and she gave me the fiercest look, as if I had caused some catastrophe or something. I stayed put, did not say a word, and a few days later asked her why she?d given me that look, and promised her I?d buy a new one for her. I learned then that everything in that house, from towels and ashtrays to the chandeliers and the rest was on inventory. They gave you everything, but my colleague lived under terror, she could not feel at home, this property system took away all sense of freedom from her. (C. M., 84)