G133: What Have We Done (13 page)

Earlier she had written:

Verdery has said that decollectivisation ‘became a war between competing social memories’ – between those who thought a pre- Communist system was restorable and those who treasured their own immediate pasts in places they had come to think of as home. It was a war fought, she says, ‘on shifting sands, for the surface was now wholly relativised.’

By mid-1994, 6,236,507 claims had been filed for the return of land. 4,897,573 were accepted, for a total of 9.2 million hectares, two thirds of Romania’s farmland. Just less than half of all holdings were under one hectare, 82 per cent under five hectares. But fog still hangs over the whole process. It remains unclear whether there are twenty-three million or forty-five million separately owned parcels of land in Romania. Poverty governed the territory; the price and number of horses both rose in 1990s Romania as few could afford any other form of farm equipment. What now looks like traditional peasant agriculture is in many cases not the persistence of ancient patterns
but a symptom of the collapse of what had been a relatively advanced form of collective agriculture. In some ways, Romanian farmers were demodernised in the 1990s.

In this last great twentieth-century dissolution of the known order, hand’s breadth murders peaked again and on into the new century, just as they had in the 1950s.

I
t is Saturday and Marisca Orha, the seventy-five-year-old widow of Ioan Orha, is in the kitchen of her house in Tămăşeşti, a village out in the rich, open country in the west of Maramureş. Her daughter Rodica, who lives in Baia Mare where she runs a tyre business with her husband, is visiting her mother as she usually does at weekends. Together they are brushing up the feathers on the earth floor from the chicken they have just plucked. Its naked body is lying on the table, with a stump where the head once was. A pot of something is stewing on the stove.

‘He wasn’t guilty,’ Marisca says when we ask about her husband. There is another hen and thirteen little chicks in a small enclosure by the stove, and while Marisca talks, the hen clucks quietly over them and they cheep in reply. ‘He died for nothing. The piece of land, it is just along there. You can go and look at it if you like. Go later. Have some wine. Nobody enters my house without receiving something.’ She brings a plastic bottle of her delicious fruity wine, the smell of grapes still in it, and Rodica fetches a big hank of paprika-stained lard which we eat in little rectangles with bread and peppers. Her kitchen is filled with an enveloping warmth.

Her husband’s great-grandfather had taken care of the land during the war. Originally it was 1.5 hectares, although now it is only a third of that, 4,600 square metres, just over an acre. At the time, under the fascist Hungarian regime then governing Transylvania, he had also taken care of the Jews who owned it. Until May 1944, there were about 40,000 Jews in Maramureş working in the villages as farmers, shepherds and foresters. Some five thousand of them survived Auschwitz, and after the war the Jewish family that owned
the land gave it to Orha to thank him for the trouble he had taken over them. ‘All officially done,’ Marisca says, with a rising urgency in her voice. ‘All with papers.’

During collectivisation the Communists took the land and made parcels of it, distributing it to different families to use. ‘And after the revolution each farmer moved back to his old field that was previously his own. But with this piece of land – it is called Ograda Jiga from the Jews who had it before – one family said that it was theirs. They had been working it for as long as anyone could remember. Even though Ioan had all the papers proving his right of ownership.’

The other family was called Sabou, and in 1997 the case went to trial in Baia Mare. ‘Father was very busy with his work here,’ Rodica says, ‘and so he did not go to the trial.’

‘We had no money to pay a lawyer,’ Marisca says. ‘We thought if we had the papers it was enough and we didn’t need a lawyer.’

‘But he lost because he was not there. We made an appeal but we lost that too and so we abandoned the field.’

Nobody used it for fifteen years. The land lay neglected, a weedfilled strip, ‘unarranged’, between pieces of land that the Orhas farmed carefully, planting them with maize. In March 2012 a young man from Baia Mare called Marinel Daniel Sabou, the thirty-year-old nephew of the Sabou who had won the case, needed it to graze some sheep he had just bought. ‘Sabou came here to see the boundary with his friend Petru Pocol. They came into the courtyard to ask Ioan to show him exactly where the field boundaries were, just to check they weren’t trespassing on another man’s field. So he went with them.

‘When he arrived back he was bleeding. He said, “I am dying.” He said that here at this door. “I was heavily beaten by them.”’

Why?

‘Because when they arrived at the land, they said, “Let’s measure it with our feet.” “No,” he said, “bring a tape. Doing it with your feet is not good enough. You can get it wrong so easily with your feet.”’

Now, with the memory, Marisca begins to shout in her kitchen. ‘They were so angry. They kicked him
here
’ – she put her hands to her
ribs and stomach – ‘until they broke his organs inside. He came back in such a bad state, so we called the ambulance and police.’

Why did they do it?

‘They were just angry and they turned to violence.’

‘It was a Saturday,’ Rodica said, ‘and the police told my mother: “We don’t come out for such a small case.”’

‘He was lying there on the bed then,’ Marisca went on. ‘They said: “You, Marisca, you must come to the police station on Monday to report it.”’

An hour later the ambulance came but while she was waiting Marisca took a hay fork and went herself to the field and found the two men there.

‘Your husband was lucky,’ they said to her. ‘He was not young enough. If he had been young enough to fight we were going to kill him, but we decided not, so we just left him lying there because he was so old.’

She pushed the hay fork at them. ‘“You bitch,” they said to me. “You thief.”’

His spleen, the doctors said, was not broken. It was ‘exploded’. He lost 2.5 litres of blood to internal bleeding. They operated on him as soon as he arrived in hospital, but they could not do much, and after five days in intensive care he died.

Two weeks after the funeral one of the Sabou cousins came up to Rodica in the street in Baia Mare and proposed to make peace. ‘It is a shame that such a young man should go to prison and your father was old and not far from dying anyway.’ She told him that she had nothing to say and justice must follow its course.

The next time the Orhas saw the young men who had killed their father and husband was at the trial. As Marisca caught sight of them she had a heart attack. Since then, she has had two strokes. ‘The worst part for me is that he died for nothing. He wasn’t guilty and for that I suffer, still today.’

The men were both given eight years in prison, of which they will probably serve four, contemptible sentences which are the surest
sign that the process was corrupt. Even today the land is empty. No one goes on it. Rodica took us there in the light spring rain, smoking with the anxieties of memory. ‘They never came back to graze it. It is all for nothing. My mother is suffering a lot but she is a fighter. She never stops.’

Goldcrests chirred in the hazel clumps beside us. Did Rodica have any photographs of her father? ‘No. I have taken them all to Baia Mare. It is not good for her to see him now.’

Back in the house, Marisca looks up at me, a golden tooth in her smile, her flowery, black-and-white apron like something a girl would wear, her black scarf on her head. ‘They came in March, that heavy day, just to measure the border. “Come with us,” they said. And so he went.’

C
an one see any of this from the other side? Is it really possible to regard murder, as the laughable sentences handed out to the killers imply, as a normal part of everyday life? Of how things are? Of what men do to each other – as unfortunate spontaneous eruptions of anger which do not need to disrupt the flow of life? Could I see how these land murders looked from the point of view not of the victim’s family but the killer’s?

There had been one particularly horrible murder on the edge of Săliștea de Sus, where the victim, Ianoș Pașca – a big, violent and angry ex-miner from a family of famous anti-Communist partisans – ended up lying dead in the shallows of the River Iza. The local press had been able to photograph him one long afternoon in May 2009, his shirt up over his hips and the back of his head bloody.

He had been sitting on the riverbank across from his house, just at the spot where a favourite cousin of his had been killed years before, accidentally electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river. Pașca had bought the land a few years previously – good valley land but only 1,800 square metres, or just less than half an acre, a
palmă de pământ
, something and nothing – because it was ancestral ground. His grandfather used it but his father had actually bought it and
then given it as a dowry for one of Pașca’s sisters. Pașca then ‘paid good money for it’ – 30 million old lei or about €750 – to his sister. His wife, Ileana, had urged him not to buy it because, as she said to me, ‘Everyone wanted it. It was fighting land. There were many other things he could have bought but he bought that land. His mind was fixed.’

The person who wanted it more than anyone was Pașca’s cousin Mărtin Grad, a small man, known as Mărtinuc or Little Martin, who lived in the same village. His father and Pașca’s were brothers, and Mărtinuc and all the Grads thought that in some way, despite the documents to the contrary, the slip of land, just at the point where the side valley called Tătarului comes down to the Iza, should belong to them. Pașca and Mărtinuc had been at each other’s throats for years. Pașca had complained more than twenty times to the police that Mărtinuc was threatening him. And he had said to Ileana, ‘I am going to kill him.’ She had said, ‘Don’t touch him. You only have to hit him and he will die.’

The
palmă de pământ
is a sweet spot: the green sward in May is covered in dandelions and daisies. Pear trees run along the public road, loaded and thickened with blossom. Willows have been pollarded on the riverbank itself, and there is a woodyard to one side, tangy with newly cut oak.

On 21 May 2009, the feast day of saints Constantine and Helen, Mărtinuc had been drinking with a friend. It was a holiday and just before four o’clock in the afternoon he stood up and told his friends, ‘Now I am going to kill someone.’ Pașca was sitting on the river-bank with Mimi, his treasured three-year-old granddaughter, in his arms. Mărtinuc crept up behind him and hit him in the back of the head – it is generally thought with an axe, or perhaps with a split-oak fence post. He tried to kill Mimi too, to get rid of a witness, but he was drunk and she ran away. She remembers her bag dropping into the river.

Mărtinuc went home, said, ‘I killed him,’ and waited for the police. He was given twelve years, will serve six and is due out this year.
Pașca’s widow Ileana was awarded 100 million old lei compensation for murder, about €2,300, but she has yet to receive it. Worse than that, when she came home from court and walked past the gate to the killing land, Mărtinuc’s family, quite illegally, were there with their hoes and forks. As she walked past, one of them said: ‘We will kill you just as our father killed your husband.’

Ileana Pașca lives in a state of dread. She is sixty-seven and has spoiled her eyes ‘with cheap Russian glasses’. Her face is saggy with emotion and exhaustion. Mimi, her granddaughter, spends much of her time with her, solemn and almost entirely silent, perhaps permanently traumatised by the scene she witnessed six years ago. Meanwhile, gossip ripples around the village: that Mărtinuc had been looking after the chief of police’s sheep; his children had been making the chief of police’s hay. Mărtinuc himself had been in the front row of church every week and the priest loved him. Ileana told me that the priest had even visited him in prison and urged her to forgive him. To which she shot back, ‘If your wife had been killed, would you be ready to forgive the murderer?’

I
started asking in the village for Mărtinuc’s family. It wasn’t easy. Mărtinuc? Mărtin Grad? Aren’t there two people of that name? The one who killed that man by the river and walked off? Oh no, I don’t know that one. I know the other one. Then going on their way down the village street, the relief palpable in their bodies, the cigarette in one hand, the small black hat resettled on the top of the head. Or, with people who were connected to him, that look of difficulty and defence, of thoughts in mind that are not to be expressed, an inwardness, a retraction below the surface of the face, even while stirring the coffee or working the till. No, not a nice person. It isn’t enough to go to church. He wasn’t a good Christian. Perhaps even a false Christian you could say. Not an honest man. And that result was final proof, wasn’t it? People had entertained their suspicions before.

A man drinking coffee in the Irimi cafe bar, Dan Iuga (he had lost his right index finger to an axe: ‘No problem! One less fingernail to
clean!’), thought there might be a relation – Mărtinuc’s daughter’s mother-in-law – living just along the street, but it turned out she was away in hospital in Cluj. Ioana Iuga, running the bar and related both to the Grads and to the Pașcas, thought maybe Mărtinuc had some relations living up the little narrow valley called Tătarului, up in the hills, the very valley at the foot of which he had clubbed Pașca in the head.