The last months of suffering in the life of Dr. Vasile Voiculescu

Whenever I try to write down memories of the last year of my father’s life, after they brought him home from prison, my thoughts refuse to come together. But I’ll try.

The whole family was waiting for him at the front of the house, on the steps, with a sign saying “Welcome home”. My sister Gaby Defour was very shocked when my father came upstairs and said: ‘Godfather (his sister Florica Ștefănescu), I missed you and Nichilina’ (Daniela Defour). We put him in the room opposite where Ionică’s mother-in-law slept, who moved into the next bedroom with Lizi, and Ionică stayed to sleep with dad.

During the first days of his return home, we did not realise the seriousness of his illness, considering it to be a discopathy due to the conditions of detention, hoping that he would get better. But in spite of all his efforts, he could barely get up to take a few steps, and he was in great pain in his lower back. We tried to help him walk to the yard at the other entrance, where it was sunny, but gave up.

Ionică had a job, so in the morning I came from the Cantacuzino Institute with a good friend, Dr. Florian Horodinceanu, whom we called Nardy and who loved and cherished my father very much. I remember that once I picked him up and carried him to the bathroom to wash, and my father apologised – almost cried – for the helpless state he was in. He also tried homeopathy, which he believed in, but to no avail, the pain got worse every day. He also had acupuncture, but still no relief. Meanwhile, we moved him into the room with Nana Florica.

Realising that it must be something very serious, we took him to the Brâncovenesc Hospital, where an X-ray of the lumbosacral region was made, which revealed a tubercular lesion of the last two vertebrae (Pott’s disease). We took him to the Bone Tuberculosis Hospital in Foișor, where he was put in a plaster cast, my father called it a “stove”, it was really like a stove, or the lower shell of a turtle, and he began treatment with streptomycin and preparation for possible surgery. But the disease was progressing and the doctors couldn’t take the risk of an operation; my father was impatient and kept asking for an operation. While he was in hospital, he suffered from locked-in syndrome, and although the medical staff did their best, especially as the conditions here were not the best, he felt as if he was still in prison.

Recently I saw a childhood friend who used to come to our house (my father had treated him for typhoid fever when he was a child) and he told me that he went to the hospital almost every afternoon. Dad didn’t talk much, but from time to time he would ask him to leave the spare door open because he had no air. When asked if his son, who was dying to see him, could come, Dad replied with a pained expression: “Sorry, I can’t take him in! During this time I took him in and out of the hospital several times, as soon as he got home his fever would go down, and as soon as I put him in the hospital, as if it were a fact, it would go up, so the doctors refused to do any work on his spine while he was feverish.”

At that time the World Peace Congress was being held in Moscow, and the magazine “Glasul Patriei” intervened through Ionica, asking my father to write a poem dedicated to “Peace”. Dad refused, told Ionica to write it and he signed it. Indeed, Ionica put his head together and composed a pretty good poem: “Ode to Peace”. I was there when he read it to my father, who was delighted and said: “You see, Ioane, you have talent and you have written a better poem than me! The poem was published in the “Voice of the Fatherland” under the name of V. Voiculescu. Also, while he was in hospital, one afternoon Ion Vinea and Vlaicu Bârna came to him and asked him to give a written denial [of the claim] that he had died in prison, as announced by foreign radio stations (Europa Liberă). A monthly grant of 500 lei from the ‘Voice of the Fatherland’ depended on it. My father refused, saying he couldn’t write, and I wrote it.

After a series of admissions and discharges, I took him back to hospital in a bad state, he had a urinary infection with fever, his urea had increased, so they put him on a urethral catheter, infusions, a salt-free diet and injections of streptomycin and kanamycin. A few days later, one afternoon, he told me he heard a buzzing sound, like a fly in his ear. The next day he woke up completely deaf, the combined effect of the antibiotics being irreversible.

As his general condition was also quite poor, with urea increasing throughout the treatment, I asked Dr. Cahane to see him, especially as they knew each other well. When he entered my father’s room, he was still on the drip and complained that he couldn’t stand being crucified any longer, with the drip adding to the pain. Dr. Cahane came over to the bed, took a long look at Dad and said, “Boy, what a handsome man! Can I take a picture of him?” I was a bit shocked and started complaining to my father that he didn’t want to eat his diet, that he didn’t want to put up with the IV, etc. To which Mr. Cahane replied: “Man, would you eat what you are telling your father to eat? Leave him alone, get him out of here, take him home and let him eat what he wants, at least while he has to live!”

I took him home, where Nanny was waiting for him with cabbage rolls. Dad sat on the bed, he was happy and ate heartily from the pot of cabbage rolls, I also gave him some sardines and a bottle of beer. As he ate, he looked at us with a smile on his face and said, “I feel like an emperor”. Since then we haven’t taken him to hospital, after a while he got better, still in pain but bearable, his daughter from Paris, Olga Pontremoli, came to see him.

But the inexorable illness continued. Sometimes he couldn’t stand the probe and took it out, and I had to struggle to put it back in. I called a neurologist, a friend of the family, Dr. Cretan, who recommended some painkillers that he couldn’t stand and didn’t want to take any more. He prescribed her some painkillers instead. Also, because my father believed in homeopathy, I asked Dr. Alina Drâmba to give him a homeopathic painkiller. 

But his physical condition was deteriorating, his suffering and pain were increasing, and he had lost the last drop of hope of recovery. He began to withhold food. One evening I found him in a state of unconsciousness, a pre-coma, The godmother was there with a lighted candle, I looked at him, his lips were burned and he was barely breathing. There was also Nicu, his nephew, Filipache’s boy, whom he liked and allowed to stay with him. I put his probe back in, moistened his lips with cotton wool dipped in water, and gradually began to give him fluids, then a glass of milk, and after a while he recovered. I was happy to have brought him back to life. At that moment the godmother said to me in a low voice, “Radu, what a sin you have done, you have brought him back from the dead!”

Then he began to refuse food, and when food was brought to him, he said: “Why do you tempt me? One day, when I was with him, he was moaning, “Ah, this heart that won’t give in,” and then he said to me, “I beg you not to do anything more to me, not even an injection to strengthen my heart, or you know I will curse you. Please give me a shot of morphine so that I can fall asleep and never get up again.”

I was very disturbed by his increasing suffering. Sometimes he would say to me: “I’m in a bath of pain, I can’t stand it anymore, do something to make it stop”. So I took 10 ampoules of morphine from the Cantacuzino Institute where I worked, determined to put an end to his suffering, but I didn’t have the courage to carry out this (medical?) act of euthanasia. During this period of physical degradation and suffering, his mind remained lucid. Towards the end, the priest came to give him communion, but my father replied: “I’m not ready, Father!”. The priest stopped and asked him to take communion, to which he replied bluntly: “I have no sins, Father!” (Scene recounted by Gaby Defour, who was present).

When Gaby asked him why he refused communion, he said he couldn’t remember. Sometimes he would give the same answer to questions that didn’t suit him, pretending not to know – reminiscent of prison as a reflexive defence. Later, however, he received communion. I reproduce the (written) conversation between Gaby and my father: “Then you asked the priest, and he read to you, and at one point you got bored and shouted loudly: ‘Enough! Then you took communion. Did you understand?” Dad’s handwriting shook: “I’m surprised that I didn’t feel the sacrament in me… (three indecipherable words follow)[1] like Christ.” Gaby: “She brought you back to life”. “It was God’s will.

The end was near, and one morning I found him very distressed. He was whimpering: “Oh, oh, oh, it was the Security Service last night! Where’s Ionică?” He was in a state of agitation, between dream and reality, then he calmed down and his childhood came back to him. He told us as if in a dream: “He gave me to the Trentea family (a relative of his), who were miserly people”, and he complained about how hungry and cold he had been because of their miserliness, all told in a tragicomic tone, as if he were reading us from his novels.

A few days later, on the night of 25th to 26th April, the godmother came into Ionică’s room and said: “Get up and come, Ioane, Vasile is dying!” I reproduce this ending below, according to Ionica’s notes: “But only after he had risen from the death that had possessed him for three days, and after he had gathered the last remaining forces of his spirit in a lifeless body […] to tell me with a voice from another world: “Ionică, I am dying! I am dying! I am dead! I give them nothing!”. (He knew I was trying to publish his writings). And he simply concluded: “Be careful, they’re more perverse than you think! And he died”.

The funeral was simple, we dressed him in the clothes they took him in and he left the prison as he wished. He also asked to be buried only as a priest. Only a few of those close to him attended. No one from the Writers’ Union was official. His lifelong friend, Adrian Maniu, had the courage to speak at the grave. I remember only his final words: “The spine of this man, who bowed to no one, was bent only by illness and suffering”.

I conclude by quoting Ion once again: “After his modest and simple disappearance, like his life, the image of the man must be completed with those permanent features of his personality, deeply human and deeply rooted in the spirituality of the poetic universe. The granite pillars of this universe support at the same time the unrepentant beauty and humanity untouched by any dogma or division. This is how his work endures, and the image of man springs from his work. The only one who can speak and testify”.

(Radu Voiculescu, “Ultimele luni” in V. Voiculescu. Testimonies and Documents. On the half centenary of the death of the great writer – 2013, edited by Alexandru Oproescu, Alpha MDM Publishing House, Buzău, 2012, pp. 33-36; cf. Articles, Communications, Documents. V. Voiculescu, Vol. III, 1992, pp. 52-57)

[1] These words will remain a mystery until the Last Judgement, but we dare to speculate on them, while asking forgiveness for our boldness: “I am surprised that I did not feel the sacrament in me, since they tormented me like Christ”. I gave this interpretation because I thought it reflected the state of despair and agony in which the poet-doctor found himself at the time, caught in a vise of pain so unbearable that it tore at his will and spirit.