Like more than half the traffic lights in Bucharest, this one on the busy corner of Boulevard Nicolae Balcescu is dead. In the freezing fog, sputtering Rumanian-made Dacia sedans are lurching every which way, horns honking. On the sidewalk, pedestrians slog through ankle-deep mud and slush past an armored personnel carrier, guarded by shivering young soldiers fingering the triggers of their Kalishnikov rifles. At a kiosk nearby, 50 customers jostle for the meager pile of Romania Libera newspapers. Two doors away, a line of more than 100 shoppers shuffles toward a butcher's counter offering only hamburger. "One hour, maybe two, to wait," says a housewife bundled into a shabby parka. "That is, if any is left."
Westerners might wonder how things could get worse. But returning to the city I knew all too well under the iron hand of Ceausescu, I understand why Rumanians feel that they've never had it so good. They revel in their traffic jams; Ceausescu all but banned cars to save fuel for export. After 24 years of state-sponsored terror, martial law by young soldiers who defeated the Securitate thugs in the Christmas revolution is a relief. "I like waiting for a newspaper," Ion, a Bucharest undergraduate, said last week. "For the first time here, there's news worth reading." And food lines? At least the queues are for food, say Rumanians, savoring their first beefburgers in memory. Ceausescu drove his subjects to fisticuffs over rations of offal and chicken feet.
Food and freedom have in many ways restored the soul to Bucharest, whose soot-covered older buildings and hideous concrete towers bear witness to how hard Ceausescu tried to kill the city's spirit. The dimly lit cafes in which couples two months ago whispered fearfully over mugs of ersatz tea now ring with gossip over cups of real coffee. Rumanians who once shied in terror from contact with foreigners besiege me as soon as I open my notebook. In the vast plaza of Piata Unirii, crowds that would once have been swiftly dispersed by Securitate goons argue the merits of 30 new political parties, then race home to watch Rumania's hot new television show: taped excerpts from the trial of Ceausescu's top henchmen. In the final episode last week, the four defendants were found guilty of complicity in genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.
But that trial, engineered by the ruling National Salvation Front as a means of officially burying the Ceausescu regime, instead symbolized how Ceausescu's legacy may yet poison Rumania's future. When a huge mob stormed the Front's headquarters last week shouting "Out with the Communists!," they were voicing the growing fear that the Front's leaders, who are almost all ex- lieutenants of Ceausescu's, may have renounced the dictator but not his methods. Now fledgling opposition parties to the Front are asking why it has mounted a Ceausescu-style show trial and why, if Ceausescu's old cronies are under indictment, ex-Communists in the Front should be exempted.