CHURCH

Many churches were demolished. I talked to a lot of people after 1990, and found out that they would not enter the church out of fear. I for one never heard of, or saw, anyone who was arrested for going into a church. Ceausescu did not prohibit the cult. I cannot believe that the Party might have prohibited church going. The preaching was then as it is now. Certain priests used to make incredibly overt allusions to the regime of terror we were living under in the last period. I eventually found out that they worked for the Securitate and were simply putting the people to a test. (A.-I. B., 101)

I used to go to church quite often in those times, and even the priest paid homage to Ceausescu at the end of his sermon: let us pray for the leader comrades of our country, for Comrade Ceausescu? Even the priest prayed for him! (22)

Professor Mihai Pop once wrote somewhere he had heard tell of a most intriguing practice in Romanian countryside: the relatives of the dead would put packets of American Kent cigarettes in the coffin so the dead could pay the ?customs duty? on the way to the nether world. What counted as universal currency ? alongside the Lux soap bars and Wiener Café anywhere in this world on all occasions, ought to be of some good after death as well; as if at those ?check points? there were any such customs officers, just as sleazy as the real ones, always hungry for some bribe to make things easier for you. I remember my former sister-in-law Rodica?s mother; on her death, they put a couple of packs of Marlboro. Rodica had just returned from Germany for the burial. So I asked her what were the bloody fags in the coffin and she went like: ?Poor mamma, she liked these so much!? (7)

At the end of the 80?s, in 1988 or 1989, some cinemas from the neighborhood were in a deplorable state. This was the case of Cinema Volga at Perla, for instance. In 1989, I went to see a film there, I do not remember the film, because we had to keep our feet up, so that we would not be attacked by rats, which squeaked so loud among the chairs, that we could not comprehend the film on the screen. (160)