The Dutch connection or some adventures of Paul
Dan Cristea in the nineties.
Herbert ten Thij
The Letter
There was not so much sunshine in the office at the university, actually there never was, when I opened the letter from the Rector of the Politehnica University of Bucharest. Yes, we knew about the changes that had taken place in Eastern Europe. But it was Eastern Europe, you know, the part of the continent where James Bond encountered most of his troubles, so of course some changes were to expect there. But, good heavens, now these people wanted to come to visit me. It started to rain outside. Actually it’s raining most of the time over here, but now it had also the sound of a spell. There were a lot of formal stamps in the letter. I never saw such an official, serious official letter before in my life. So I answered that Rector immediately that it was all right that he or someone else in his place would come and see me some day.
The Visitor
Some
day soon a visitor, a vice rector from Romania, set foot on Dutch soil for the
first time of his life. Perhaps you would expect me to write that it was a dark
day, but alas it was only a grey day, as usually. But the dark haired visitor
smiled. As a first impression could Walter Matthau count with an 007 grin, but as I have seen other movies as
well I forgot about it as we talked. We talked a lot. We talked about
university life of course as it seems common all over the world. It appeared
than that I was mentioned by the Poli Torino from Italy during an official
visit as a person to contact. Some ideas keep to be inconceivable. We talked
about science, about biology, especially evolution theory, and about history
and about the events that recently had taken place in Romania, we went for
dinner in a Greek restaurant because I thought this would make my guest feel
somewhat at home, we talked about our family backgrounds, we talked about our
families, we talked about daily life in Romania in the Ceauçescu era, we talked about literature, we
talked about the future and finally we talked also about cooperation. Actually
Paul Cristea was talking most of the time, because I, with an always teaching
father teacher, was raised as a listener mostly and he was used to talking much
anyway.
As polite people do a letter showing gratitude
was sent to me, without stamps, but with also the announcement of the intention
to propose a project in the brand new TEMPUS programme at that time, the early
nineties, and with the request whether I as a representative of an organisation
in a EU Member State would like to become the coordinator of it as was required
in those early days of East-West cooperation in a project of the European
Commission. Trusting that as commonly twelve out of eleven proposals would be
rejected I agreed. However, early at the beginning of the next new academic
year I found myself buying a visa at the airport of Bucharest surrounded by
soldiers with machine guns. I thought I would never see my family back again,
but there was no return and Paul was waiting in the dark airport hall to take
me with his new old car over the broken roads of Bucharest to a hotel of former
grandeur with just one room only with an electric light, Philips of course,
probably to make me feel at home somewhat.
“Let’s buy some boulevards or main
streets in this city-without-children”, I said, but all present in the Rector’s
room, fine academics but suppressed for ages and cruelly prevented to do their
work properly, gazed at me and thought me the ultimate fool from the West. They
might have been right after all, but -still surprisingly- many years later some
of them who remembered these words told me than that we should have followed my
advice those days and that we would have become very, very rich. Yes, indeed,
but the horizon and goal of the moment was to come back to worldwide science
again and to participate at the normal, international level. As Paul Cristea
prominently did. During his first visit I, not being an electrical engineer of
study or profession (as some physicists are), introduced Paul to some people
working in advanced fields of this discipline. When we all met about one year
later again, these people told me in talks later on that it had been joyful to
learn that now the questions raised by Paul where all so very to the point. As
they always already were in mathematics of course. And as I have experienced
right from the start when we began our cooperation.
The lady in the bank was nervous but
willing. Such might be promising at an evening dance or so, but during broad
day light one needs to watch out carefully then. Here were the most magnificent
rector and main advisor of the Minister of Education or perhaps the Minister
himself as well soon and undoubtedly the Dutch boss of the European Commission
or so coming to her to open an ECU- account, something that never happened
before in Romania and undoubtedly sums of strange money and of amounts beyond
believe would appear on that account in time. Probably she was right about the
strange money, but about these amounts only in the reverse way, especially seen
the need of the day. So, after two times receiving her business card we found
ourselves completed with an account in Romanian ECU’s. Virtual money the ECU’s
were already in those times, but unfortunately double virtual doesn’t make
anything real by logical consequence. However, after a few more laughs behind
polite and friendly smiles Paul and I found ourselves back in the Calea
Victoriei having created the financial portal to start our first TEMPUS
project, one of the first of these projects in Romania as well.
The king is coming. All the beautiful freshly painted
eggs dry immediately by the heat of all the excitement that arises in the
streets of that sunny Easter day in Bucharest. People in the Bulevardul Nicolae
Bălcescu are rushing to the Piaţa
Universităţii. I am
staying in Bucharest together with my rector for giving lectures as a part of
the project. We are looking out of the window of the Lido Hotel to the growing crowd,
still with the choir music of the Easter mass in our ears. My rector is very
fond of orthodox choir music, but the choral music in the church where Paul
took us last night was all right as well. A new sound appears. Police cars are
clearing the road to free the way for the car of the king. “The king has
invited himself to visit Easter mass in his church”, Paul says when he enters
the door of the hotel room, “come and let’s watch an historical event perhaps.”
Minutes later we become part of the mass moving slowly but steady to the
Biserica Colţei. We had visited that very church a few days before where
we received the blessings of an old white bearded priest dressed in grey rags.
“I do apologize, I am not a believer that much”, I said. “It will help you
nevertheless” the rural city monk replied. Unfortunately I couldn’t ask him the
kind of help he meant as he vanished immediately in the dusk of the church. Now
the king visits the church, but I wonder whether it will help him to restore
the royalty of his dynasty. In the afternoon the king appears on the balcony of
the Grand Hotel Continental showing especially his grandson while the immense
crowd chants his name and bearing photographs of him from the time when he was
a young man. Amazing how all people grew into one whole, another new experience
to me. The king waves and vanishes from the balcony, his grandson and daughter
are following a few minutes later. The past tried to step into the future, but
the present reigns the time. The mass knew it someway and dissolved. If not
even a promise of a good or better life is made, no mass movement can be
expected. The king apparently had no skilled advisors. Possibly this has been
calculated well at the presidential palace at Şoseaua Cotroceni. A symbol
just staying a symbol is no threat to anybody or to anything, they must have
thought there and things were let to happen as they happened. So we all went
back to our quarters preparing for the evening dinner. Still some further
historical event had to happen. Rector Frederic, a very specialist in 1/f noise
(one over f - noise), often talking with an Amsterdam accent, in Dutch but in
English as well, and I decided to have a drink on a little terrace next to the
Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture that was nearby our hotel. While sipping
our beers a gigantic gypsy man took place next to us. He also ordered a beer
and started to play with a ten dollar bill. Suddenly he asked Rector Frederic
whether he had dollar bills as well in his pocket. I expected him to answer that
this was not this man’s business, but to my amazing he confirmed his wealth.
The man invited him to show that money. I knew it was useless to say anything
to prevent the actions to come. Proudly the rector showed his money in his
wallet. Immediately the gypsy giant pointed at a hundred dollar bill he saw
there too and asked whether he could hold it to see it closer. Rector Frederic
was very willing to do this very oriental looking man a pleasure and to give
him a new experience probably as well. He took the hundred dollar bill and gave
it to the man. The ten dollar bill had silently gone while the man hastily took
Rector Frederic’s hundred dollar bill. He looked at it so meticulously that
everybody thought he would copy it after having returned home. Than he begun to
fold the bill. When it was folded into a little packet the man handed it back
to the Rector and finished his beer. Rector Frederic unwrapped the bill while
the gypsy giant stood up to continue his way. Half unfolded it already appeared that the bill was of ten dollars
value. ”Polisie”(Police) shouted the rector very amsterdamned, “P’lisie”, but
nobody took any further notice. The man had disappeared and nothing further
happened. Everything was melted into ‘one over Frederic noise’. In emotions and
in mathematics one can think a lot, but not changing anything in the wide world
where also uninvented laws apply or even none at all. A historical truth not
only for magnificent rectors or kings. Perhaps some more illusions have been
lost on that Easter afternoon.
More
nicely painted eggs I could admire the next year when I was in Bucharest again,
but now alone, to do my tasks in that three years’ project. To my joy, I
dislike hotels, I was not framed in a
hotel, but lodged in an cosy apartment, but full of cockroaches as well, at the
Strada C.A. Rosetti, where the baker at the corner of the block baked such
delicious bread that people were queuing up for it every day. Being on myself
completely now I had much more opportunities for queuing up myself in shops,
for having contacts with Bucharest people around and especially with the
students. Often I invited them to join me for dinner. And as some had been
soldiers in those revolutionary days I learnt a lot more about what happened than. As for instance about the
surprise to them when they ignored the commands of their officers to shoot,
that everybody was thinking the same at that moment, but also about the fading
past situation in the country. It told much as well about the circumstances at
home in the previous era. And it explained a lot also how they developed their
double faces in public and privately. Something that was not seen that much
anymore in the next generations of students, for that matter.
It
was also in these days that Paul and I were invited to the headquarters of the
newly founded Black Sea University – BSU with strangely two jumping dolphins in
its logo. We went to that former presidential palace in the spring quarter to
admire the beautiful magnolia tree that was flowering in the little square
before the building and the peacocks in the well-kept garden that surrounded
the villa. We wondered whether the Latin word for peafowl: ‘pavo’ was as well
an onomatopoeia as the Dutch word ‘pauw’ seemed to me when we heard these birds
screaming. We joked about so many symbols of immortality all together in this
place, but shortly after
that we found ourselves invited to give a course at
the summer school later that year in merry Costineşti in the region of the
city where once that famous author of the sad letters lived.
Paul
waited again at the airport where we stepped from the sharp and lazy shadows
into the sun that meant to shine for infinity, most certainly that summer
baking the Bucharest mosquitoes to true Dracula sizes. Family fathers or other
adventurers would think of holidays for this kind of weather, but we poor
servants of science and education we prepared for giving courses to students
with heads and hearts full of summer, sea and sand and sun. So, after a sticky
vaporous Bucharest night with much insect fight in Cotroceni at the border of the
Dâmboviţa River we got up early to bridge some two hundred and
seventy kilometres or a few more by car
to reach the voice of the sea. Later we came to learn that this was not so much
the gentle sound of Neptune’s organ, but the sky filling music of five
discotheques surrounding our hotel in Costineşti and beginning at night at
the very moment we went to bed. This all was still unknown to us when we got
into the car to start our journey to the Black Sea.
Already the sun was burning in the streets putting the market merchants in slow motions and making the jumping car windows mirror lightning flashes on the buildings, but we reached the outskirts of Bucharest shaken but not stirred. Of course Paul was telling about all the remarkable places we passed by. About the secret physics laboratories everybody knew about and that it was a shame that I didn’t play bridge, about the winery we undoubtedly would visit in Murfatlar, but mostly about a lot of things that were just fresh history or from a further past. People we passed on the road, people busy to get things done before the afternoon heat. An old man with a slow cow on a rope we passed, a farmer’s family with a long whip on a chariot with a skinny horse as well, women in the villages sitting in front of the house either just counting the cars passing by or trying to sell some fruit or perhaps just happy to enjoy the morning sun. Over a small bridge over a small summer river we crawled and within the river bend nearby a few horses were grazing with their fowls and at a distance petrified trees stood reflecting silently themselves in a stream that almost had forgotten already how to move. But we talked, we drunk some lemonade on a terrace of an old inn along the road and we talked. Paul stopped to buy a big melon and told everything a decent man needs to know about melons and how tasty they are when one eats them on a summer evening. And so we talked even more and even more about history when we stopped nearby Adamclisi to see the Tropaeum Traiani, the rebuilt monument commemorating also that the Romanian language of today is a Latin language of origin. Paul then always said that Romanians and Italians could easily understand each other’s language. “Si?”, I then always asked, “Da”, he usually answered hastily. But to make a vivid touch with the Antiques we lifted a tortoise (‘Testudo hermanii’, whispered the herpetologist of younger years in me) that had the firm and stiff intention to push us aside. When we put the ever crawling animal back on the ground we looked at the new old stones again as if something moved there. Probably it was the dancing of the light in the heat of the day that was forging our brotherhood. When we looked back around the ‘old’ creature had gone already and was not to be found anymore. It is the habit of the ancient gods, on earth they come and go.
So
back on the road there was again a lot to talk about. We wondered about the
tortoise why it did not hide in its shell when we lifted it. This should be its
natural defence behaviour. Not seldom however bleached skeletons of tortoises
were found clinched between the rocks witnessing the determination of the
animals to follow a once chosen way even when returning would have saved their
life. That must be an example of linear thinking come what may. As was this
specimen an example of such prehistorical robotic behaviour perhaps. Still more
there was also to tell about the monument and about the times it was erected
and re-erected. Once beginning to talk a lot more subjects arose, as always.
Time flew by. We passed trees perhaps and some villages may be, in the corner
of the eye they did look all the same. And when we were aware again of linear
thinking and of our surrounding world it appeared that we had not arrived at
the Black Sea, but in Bulgaria.
We
had missed a junction perhaps. So we had to take a ferry to bring us back over
a border river to Romania. We arrived late in Costineşti, but still in
time to meet our students. In the evenings after lectures we developed from
some initial formal sentences of a Belgian mathematician a nice piece of
software showing evolution lines of flowers. Also we indeed visited Murfatlar
and the Arabic horses in Mangalia and we had a swim near Două Mai at night
in the fluorescent sea under the millions of galaxies and stars and many more
happened during our stay, but by now our friendship was already sealed forever.
June 2014