Eternity for two: Elena and Costache Caragață

Costache Caragață spent a long time in hell, punished for his political beliefs. At 92, the old man from Tichiriș has no regrets and hates no one, convinced that his suffering was God’s will.

There are people to whom God has given a special destiny. And perhaps a different heart from most of us. A race of people who seem to belong to another time, a dying race of people for whom ideals are the most important thing, people for whom words like ‘country’, ‘truth’, ‘history’ or ‘God’ have a forgotten resonance today.

Such people never doubt, never hesitate, never back down, never give up because they can’t, because they don’t know how to fall back. They cross the slopes of history with the same ease as we cross the road, only to tell you years later about events that seem unimaginable today.

Costache Caragață is one of these special people, one of those whose biography could be the subject of a novel. He has truly lived a life as long as others live seven. Today he is 92 years old and his face shows no signs of the hell he lived through, the tortures he was subjected to have left no traces, his eyes are serene and calm, the wrinkles of his age do not know the shadow of resentment, hatred, enmity towards those who persecuted him in troubled times that today belong to history. Mr Costache, as his friends call him, lives with great serenity amidst heavy memories, the colour and consistency of rain clouds. This quality of his heart, which helped him survive in the communist camps and prisons, this absolute belief that God knows what he is doing and that nothing will go unrewarded, helps him overcome the barriers of hatred and revenge, helps him be serene and lucid, helps him see his memories as if he were watching a film. Sometimes, it’s true, he cries softly, his hands clutching his cane. No, he does not cry at the memory of his suffering, gazing at the mountain tops, but at the memory of the suffering of his family, my God, of his wife, who waited for him like a saint for years and years, of his daughters. He cries at the memory of the fear that no, not he lived, but… they, his daughters, his family. Costache Caragață lives high up on a cliff, at the edge of the sky. From his courtyard you can see the mountains of Vrance. Through his eyes you can see the past, you can smell history. Costache Caragață was a legionnaire, yes, and he says this with a curious eye, to see what I think, what… I think about… there are times now when maybe it’s not good to… I don’t believe in anything, all this is history, and for me old Mr. Costache is not a legionnaire, but a man who could not be defeated, a man whose faith overcame torture. In a century when truth, country and faith are words that make you smile, Mr. Costache utters them as if he were reading them from the Bible. These words contain the meaning, the motivation, the justification of his whole life. If he thought they were worthless, it would mean that all his suffering had been in vain, that his life and that of his family had been a waste. 

In the shadow of memories

Behind the great wooden gates lies the kingdom of Costache Caragață’s memory. I knock and wait. We are in the village of Tichiriș, Vidra commune, Vrancea county. The mountains are close by, already burnt by the scars of autumn. Behind the gate we hear footsteps, slow footsteps. It must be him. There he is. An old man, small in stature, like all the people of the mountains. He walks with a cane. The most striking thing about this man is the look in his eyes, the expression on his face, the absolute stillness, the absence of any frown. It is said that life leaves traces on people’s faces, that fear, disaster, despair and hostility are etched on our foreheads. In this man’s case, all shadows are missing. He’s happy to see me. Behind him is a beautiful house where Costache Caragață lives with his brothers-in-law. Elderly people who, I would learn, had always been at his side, step by step, who, I would learn, had shared the cup of suffering with him. They were united. I also know that behind the big house there is the green orchard and the beehives he loves, where he sometimes goes to walk and let unspoken memories ripen. We are sitting somewhere, on a shed. He tells it in a certain way, as if he were not telling it, but the memory itself was pouring into words, leaking out of him. I don’t want the memory to flow impersonally, I want to hear Costache Caragață. I attack. “You were a legionnaire,” I say, leaving him to fill in the hanging points. He descends from the clouds of memory and looks me in the eye. “Yes,” he says. I know it’s a sensitive subject these days, as it was in the days of the fallen communism, to talk about something like that.

We are treading on a minefield, I say to myself, we are living in times that still carry a certain complex of history, of facts, of characters, they are histories for which a few decades aren’t enough to understand or erase.

We are getting up. Costache Caragață walks slowly. We go beyond, into the green orchard of his memories, we take a little walk in the shadows of his dizzy memory, through the beehives, through the native grasses that he does not see because of the deeds he remembers. I follow him discreetly, so as not to disturb the emotion that is overwhelming him, he has short white hair, round eyes and keeps the same moustache he had in his youth. His sister-in-law watches him from somewhere in the background, retreating into the past, among the apple trees.

War hero

Costache Caragață’s story unfolds like an adventure film in the shadow of apple trees and his endless memories. It is 1944, on the front. He, Costache Caragață, has risen from village teacher to second lieutenant. After four years of war, he already feels old. He fought on the Eastern Front and then, from 1941, on the Western Front. Much has changed, now that he is fighting the Germans. The Soviets have become allies, and he’s doing his duty. He led a platoon of 64 men and they walked from the Turda Plain into the heart of Hungary, sleeping through villages – villages they had conquered, destroyed, demolished, he was not thinking of heroism, but of home. He also defeated with the Romanian troops in the great battle of Megyozu on 8 December 1944, and then marched with his men into the depths of Czechoslovakia, through the world-ending frosts of the Tatra Mountains. He went through the toughest battles without hesitation, but not without fear. He knew that only God was above and that what had to happen would happen. He did his duty as a Romanian. In Banska Bistricza he became a war hero, in the middle of winter, in six feet of snow and…

Mr. Costache walks slowly through the branches of the apple trees, only the words flow fast. One full moon night, after they had occupied the villages of Hym and Pereny, General Marinescu, who commanded the Romanian troops, said to him in a whisper: “Lieutenant, I expect a lot from you tonight”. The lieutenant took it seriously. These brief words prompted Costache Caragață and his company to attack and conquer the impossible 1302 hill that same night, 20 February 1945. He did not know that this strategic point had to be conquered by the Soviets, and he conquered it, the teacher from Vidra, because General… That’s how he became a war hero. This man, I tell myself, always took himself seriously, maybe that’s why he believed so much in the ideals of a political movement, maybe it was his inflexibility in the face of reality that made him what he is, unbeatable, that helped him get through the successive hells that befell him. “So?” He ignores my questions. “We held Cota 1302 for a week, then Friski’s famous SS company retook it and we were captured by the Germans. For a year and a half we went from camp to camp, first in Czechoslovakia, then in Germany, we passed through Leipzig and Dresden, which had been flattened to the ground, 180,000 people had died in Dresden alone from the Anglo-American bombing, and I wondered how God could let all this happen, how the earth didn’t swallow up humanity.” He starved, he crossed across Europe to return home, was freed by the Russians only to be taken prisoner again, saved from deportation to Siberia by a Soviet officer who looked like the Archangel Michael. “A long and extraordinary adventure,” I say, looking at him with round, unseeing eyes, immersed in memories that would last others a lifetime. I know that this was only the beginning, that the Order of Michael the Brave would mean nothing back home, because things were changing in Romania while he felt it was his duty to be a hero. “How was it back home?” I ask. He looks worried. At home was Elena, his wife, whose destiny was always to await Costache’s return and, like a curse, Costache would always be prevented from coming home. And yet, when he returned from the war, from prison, from his travels in Europe, she was there on horseback, while he was coming back from the war. “What do you mean… he came on horseback?” I ask, trying to imagine. “Yes, Mr Horea,” he says, “it was in August 1945, when I was coming back, she knew and was waiting, and I saw her from the train, riding madly in the sunlight to meet the soldier who had come from the front.” His voice trembles for the first time since I’ve known the Iron Man, and suddenly I have the black and white image, like in a period film, of his wife coming down from the mountains, galloping to her horse’s death to meet this man who has the vocation of an eternal soldier. I see him coming out of the war train, or in the crowd, in his patched cloak, with his pride as a hero who took the 1302, his voice trembling as it does now, not knowing how to deal with her, with the beautiful woman of his life, whom he barely knows but dreams of every night. I see them embracing in the middle of the crowd at Focșani station, silent, he with the shadows of war upon him, she with the shadows of waiting. I look at Mr Costache, his eyes are wrinkled, we are always under his merii, in the year 2002 since Christ, but he has this hallucinatory power to give life to memories… I know that his wife, Elena, the love of his life, has recently died, and the way he talks about her, that imperceptible tremor in his voice, tells me that I am witnessing the epilogue of a never-ending love story. A shattering love story, precisely because time, history, his ideals, something kept them apart, always expecting and dreaming of each other, only to be together, haunted by the fear that they would be separated again. “You loved her a lot, Costache boy,” they say in a whisper. “I loved her a lot,” he says, closing his eyes to hide something. A man like him never cries, I tell myself, he’s walked the razor’s edge between duty and love all his life, like a hero in an ancient tragedy.

The descent into hell

Costache Caragață is bathed in the twilight of an autumn afternoon. We are on the terrace of the big house at the top of the hill. The sun will soon set behind the mountains that stretch to the horizon. It will somehow sink through the mist. In ’45, when he returned home, he hoped it was all over, he had become a teacher again, he was even the headmaster of the school, he sang in choirs with the children, he had been awarded the Star of Romania for services in arms. Then, one evening in 1952, his life turned to dust and shrapnel. It was the night of 19 July, and five armed soldiers and secret agents broke into his house. His little girl Cornelia, only ten years old, screamed in the dark, everyone was terrified, and the soldiers turned everything upside down, searching for documents, even taking away his application for the war decoration. It was the beginning of his descent into the infernos of the Securitate, his legionary past catching up with him, even though he… Such were the times, he couldn’t turn back now, he couldn’t deny, he couldn’t betray, he couldn’t. He was caught in the vice of moral duty, of his hero’s path, and the only way out was to resist or die.

Four months of investigation followed in Focșani. He had already become an “enemy of the working class”, along with all sorts of people, from priests to the landlords in the villages of Vrancea. Then he made a stopover in the basements of the Bucharest Securitate, in Ghencea, in some blocks that had belonged to the German army. From there he remembers nothing but endless beatings and the laughter of a lieutenant who beat him. Again, it’s all memories that speak for themselves. Memories that flow in the light of dusk.

“13th and 14th August 1952. It’s night, we’re on a freight train, it’s very hot, there are dogs and armed guards. We’re going to the canal, to the stone-breakers. They’re going to exterminate us, they have an order to kill us. We arrive in a village, the Gales Coast. There was hell, fear, horror, death. We are 3000 men in rags who are going to be killed. Here is Lieutenant Major Petrica. He’s shouting at us: “You’re enemies of the people, the scum of society, scum. 500 of you will die in the first phase, and after you there will be a report. Each stone wagon will be unloaded in a maximum of 36 minutes. We’re in hell. My hands are living flesh. We are all going to die, only God can save us”. Costache Caragață speaks as if in a trance, as if he were still there.

“And from home? Any news from home?” He blinks often: “From home, God, no, nothing, at home I had two little girls and she, my wife, who… I wasn’t allowed letters or visits, but at home I thought all the time, day and night, that’s what kept me alive, I told myself I had to hold on, to live, to… “

Did the great ideals, the country, justice, Christian morality, the future of the nation, all that the former legionnaire and war hero had come to fight for, still exist for him? Was he in danger of losing his faith there, in the depths of a hell he had hardly known? I was to find out no. He saw it all as purgatory, as God’s test of faith. Sentenced to 24 months’ administrative punishment, he was to be taken from the Galeș Coast to the Black Valley camp on the Peninsula. There he was to experience the moment of Stalin’s death and the terror of the two brigades of “re-educated” from Pitești, who, on moonless nights, mutilated the people and then boasted to the starving hungry about the food they had received in exchange for their wickedness. He was always alone, not mixed up with the others, always lost in thoughts and memories, until one extraordinary day, in a prison near Bacău, he was able to receive a visit from Elena, his wife, after he had taken the oath not to hinder the socialist state. After two more years. They barely spoke, they didn’t know what to say, she was beautiful and sad, hardened, he was stiff and felt like a stranger behind bars. He’s silent. I listen to this silence and the strange image of her on horseback, running, still a stranger, after years of war, watching her frozen through the window of a wagon.

“In 1954 I returned home and became a teacher again, teaching classes 1-4, and in the evenings I conducted choirs at the Cultural Home. In 1954 I taught 21 illiterates to write. Some of them were Securitate operatives. I already had many memories”. This man was already old in 1954, they tell me, and I think he was already looking for peace.

The torture

Only that peace was far away. Costache Caragață speaks without me asking any more questions. Every question is useless. He tells of waves of horror. For four years he stayed at home, always afraid of returning to hell. In 1958, the nightmare began again. In January he was arrested again, taken to Focșani, investigated again, beaten and tortured. Then he was sent to the Securitate Police in Galați and interned in the Culmea camp. Back to the canal to be crushed. In October, the system decided to find out at any cost what Costache Caragață knew about the Legionary movement, who his comrades were, who he had met, everything. “They took me to the investigation with dark glasses on my face, they kept beating me, I collapsed on the stairs, it was the terror of waiting for the blow from any direction. I thought the beatings were the worst, until the day they sent me to room X, I mean the torture chamber, without my glasses, so that I could see the beating hoops, the nail pullers, the blood on the walls and all the beating instruments they had. Aronescu, the chief investigator, didn’t ask me any more questions. They put me on the grill, tied me upside down with my legs up, and kicked me on the soles of my feet until I fainted. Then they’d pour water on me and start again, and this went on for days. During breaks they would throw me down into the cellar and pour buckets of ice-cold water over me. Then they beat me with thick wires, from the back of my head to the soles of my feet, I lost track of time and my memories, I didn’t know anything, I couldn’t remember anything. Days went by and all I wanted was to die, to kill myself, to escape the torture. One day they brought me the charge sheet and told me that if I didn’t sign it, the torture would continue. I signed what they wanted. On 19 July 1959, I found myself in front of the court, I was in a daze, and while the prosecutor was reading the indictment, God, God, I recognised my daughters, my children, and her, Elena, who was crying, and my brother-in-law, Costel Dumitrescu, and Nela, and just then someone hit me on the head with the butt of a gun, just when… my little girl, Cornelia, was crying with hiccups and screaming her heart out. One of us, a lawyer from Focșani, Voinea, whose father had also been a legionnaire, hanged in ’39, was shouting something about torture, about… Cornelia screamed at the top of her lungs: “Papa, Papa!”, desperately, with…”

Costache Caragață’s eyes are haunted by the weight of this memory, his hand trembles on his stick, the sunset no longer matches his troubled gaze. It is not the memory of the torture, nor that of his sentence to 25 years of hard labour that makes him tremble, but the memory of Cornelia calling out to him in despair, her cries, those of his daughters whom he never got to see grow up, who grew up in the terror of searches and investigations, who were always told that their father was an enemy of the people, who never even got to know him…

I help him. “And?” “And I ended up in Aiud, without hope, at the end, thinking I would never return home.”  

Butterflies at night

I sniff at this man’s memories with a tightness in my heart, because I know, I feel that beyond his words there is something I will never understand, something that is forever forbidden to me, like all those who have not experienced such circumstances, on the brink of death. There are things that cannot be put into words, feelings that remain forever with their possessor for the simple reason that he will never be able to say “everything”, feelings that elude words, deep spirits that cannot be disturbed. So, I tell myself, I will be content with the images his words can paint, the story of the horrors he has lived through, without trying to explain them.

Mr. Costache Caragață looks at me gratefully, the sun has already set behind the mountains and it has become cool. We always sit on the terrace. He tells me about the worst Christmas of his life, in Aiud in 1959. He was in a cell with a doctor, a philosophy teacher and a farmer, a Frunză, from around Tecuci. The Macedonians were singing carols and the whole prison was singing with them, he remembers, the thrill that came over him when the whole prison was singing carols at the barred windows, with the voices of the prisoners, the hair on your hands stood on end. “The Macedonians were strong men, no jokes, no betrayals, no chirping, they were Romanians from the Timoc Valley, but they were called Macedonians. They were more Romanians than Romanians. It was like that, a strange atmosphere that Christmas, the poems of Radu Gyr, who was also there, were transmitted between the walls in Morse code, we knocked on the walls, on the pipes… When I came home, after many years, I wrote down on paper more than 5500 prison’s verses that I knew by heart”.

Costache Caragață draws from the depths of his memory photograms of Aiud, just moments, outside any chronology, are the photograms that not the memory, but his heart has preserved. He talks about pride and betrayal, about God and the Black, about the most terrible form of imprisonment that was Aiud, where the cell was glued to the wall of the chimney, about “the great ones” and about… What do you mean by “the great ones”, I ask. “Well, I mean Crainic, Țuțea, Stăniloaie, they were the big ones. We were the small ones. Re-education didn’t work like in Pitești, the communists had become more cunning. They took the big ones out of their cells, put them in an Ims and drove them around Aiud, so that they could see the blocks and the great achievements and write about them. They wrote them and published them in the Army Voice and read them to us at Christmas so we could see that the “big ones” were on their way. That was in ’63, “re-education”. Once I was contacted by someone I had known for 30 years. He had been with me in the Brotherhood of the Cross, Teofanescu called him. He took me to the kitchen and helped me to stay there because it was easier. I didn’t know I had to pay for it. He thought I was a chatterbox. It was better there, we were freer, we walked around the courtyard and ate as we pleased, but I couldn’t eat at all because in the same courtyard was Zarca, the worst place in Aiud. Even the soup was put in there so that the prisoner would die of hunger and exhaustion. We could talk in the cell, we listened to Țuțea’s lectures on philosophy, it was something different, but in Zarca even Morse code didn’t work. And while we were in the kitchen, there were some re-education sessions. I didn’t speak. And at one of the re-education sessions the chairman of the committee stood me up, and to my astonishment it was the former legionary prefect of Vrancea, Țocu. On his right was Teofănescu, also a legionnaire, the man who had helped me to sit in the kitchen. And he said: “Codreanu is a criminal. What do you have to say? And I said that in my opinion Codreanu was a hero who never betrayed anyone. It was November 1963. In one week I was in Zarca, waiting for the end of my days. I spent seven months in Zarca, which doesn’t count anymore, because I was so weak, I was delirious, I actually travelled through other worlds, I saw my people at home, I dreamed, and I probably would have died if the liberation decree hadn’t come in ’64. I came straight from the Zarca, from the extermination, from -15￮C, where they kept us in shirtsleeves. When I came out and saw rivers of people… We left the prison like moths, black swarms, floating silently, nobody said a word… “

40 years of silence

“And then?” “And then nothing,” he says. We silently leafed through hundreds of pages of poems, thousands and thousands of verses he transcribed after his return home, poems by Nichifor Crainic and Radu Gyr and other anonymous ones. I stare in awe at his room, the cell of his memories, with two framed photographs on the walls. One is of him and his wife Elena, a strange photograph. They are young, he is proud and strong, she is beautiful and a little sad, a thin smile stretches across her face. What does this photograph hide, what were these people thinking, feeling, frozen forever in the photograph, frozen like insects in the amber of their fate? Were they already suffering, or was it just a foretaste of what was to come? I could ask the old man, my good Costache, but it is enough to look at his face to understand that such a question cannot be asked. The other photo is of the captain, of Codreanu, a famous photo that he will never take down from his wall. It’s too late, and then such a gesture would be useless, it would be ridiculous, it would be…

I walked arm in arm with this man through the depths of his memory, in the muffled whisper of old songs I did not know that spoke of the motherland and God, he was silent for long periods or told small, unimportant stories, as if telling this long story had exhausted him. How does this man see the world, how does he understand the present? “You know,” he tells me, “after ’64 they wouldn’t let me teach, I was a dangerous person, so I became a forest ranger. In the evenings I gave violin lessons in the village schools and in the cultural centre. I stayed away from politics and kept quiet”. “And after the revolution, or what was it?” “And after…” Forty years of silence. His old comrades had died or betrayed him, he was somehow left alone. He drifted away, he became lonely among his memories, his war medals, his notebooks full of heartbreaking, heart-rending poems. No, not alone, he stayed with his family, with the daughters of his heart, Cornelia and Olguța, and with Elena, his wife, who always waited for him, “like a saint”, and who still waits for him… in heaven.

(Horia Turcanu, “Eternity for two” in Formula As, no. 535, 30 September – 7 October 2002, pp. 12-13)