You are about to read an emotional, clumsy and confusing confession about my first trip home after 17 years.
by Dan Hayon
(click on thumbnails for full-size images)
First try. I don’t have any illusions. I never succeeded from the first time.
As I expected, the phone goes crrrr, glong, grrrr; clang – for about two minutes - and then silence, nothing, niente, nada. Stone dead.
I dial again and again and while I listen to those strange metallic sounds, I imagine the phone signals crawling through thousands of miles of cables, following an irrational path on their way from Paris to Bucharest. God knows, they might go first to Antarctica then straight back to Albania, (why not?), upward to some satellite, then down again to Finland or something, and so on, before getting stuck by some operator’s switch.
Finally, I hear my mother’s voice: “Pain. Big pain in my hips. I haven’t been out for the last two weeks. I’m afraid we won’t be coming to Paris this year.” I say to her: “Don’t worry, I’ll come in May for a few days if…” She shouts back: “What? I can’t hear you (she’s selectively hard of hearing), I’ll pass your father, tell him.”
So, this is it: I’ll go back to Bucharest, first time after 17 years. Strange. The thought of going there, after so many years, doesn’t provoke any particular feeling. “I go to Bucharest” equals “I go downstairs to buy some cigarettes.”
1988 was the last time I flew there, from Stockholm, where I’d been living since ‘85.
I took a chartered old Russian Ilyushin plane, a wreck with two propellers, better suited to carry soldiers than tourists. The noise was terrible, the service hopeless, the food grotesque, the rough toilet paper unforgettable. But we survived and made it in one piece to Bucharest’s international airport, small in size but big on Ceausescu portraits. And, of course, policemen, everywhere, looking suspiciously at us, like bipeds from another planet.
In 1972, leaving Romania for good, I was seen off by my parents and a few friends from the Art Academy. I was carrying in a little folder a
number of photos, all of them portraits, and each one glued by their corners on yellowish cardboards. They were the only works I’d been allowed to take with me; supposed to be worthless souvenirs by the customs officers. Nevertheless, they checked under the photos to see if I didn’t hide any forbidden green dollar bills. .
A year before leaving, and still being a student, I got a summer job for a fiction movie using mostly unprofessional actors, as a stage photographer charged with shooting the portraits of the candidates for different small roles. Strange old people living strange lives. Scared of what tomorrow will bring them. Strange young people living weird lives. Asking themselves if their hopes will be answered one day.
I got the job because I was the friend of the film director’s fiancée, an art student like me.
With the little savings I had, I bought a compact Russian camera, the kind of you-push-the-button-we-do-the-rest plastic box.
The nights, at the hotel, in the darkness of the bathroom I was developing the films and making prints smaller than letter-size pages, because the enlarger – also Russian-made – was the size of a James Bond attaché case and didn’t accept anything bigger.
Such is the story of the black and white portraits you see here. That’s when I got hooked forever on photography. And even if life made sure afterwards that I wouldn’t make my living as an artist, I never stopped taking pictures since.
Bucharest. My father waits for me at the flashy new Otopeni airport, along with his neighbor, owner of an antique Romanian-made Dacia car still in service as a taxi. A special car for a special occasion for a special price. The conversation that followed confirmed that this didn’t change since my last visit. “This” meaning the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” system of getting things done.
We pass by interminable gray buildings built on the personal indications of the biggest
architect Romania ever had: Ceausescu. Like a surgeon, he, the Haussmann of the socialist era, cut in the living flesh of the old city his never-ending victorious perspectives, tearing down all the houses and churches that stood in his way, making sure nobody will ever forget him.
But now, a new era is galloping towards capitalist heaven: huge outdoor billboards cover the buildings, selling Coca Cola, Pepsi, mobile operators, Japanese cars, French cars, German cars, Koreans cars, McDonald’s, bank services. I’m amazed by the size of those posters, the height of five, six floors, as wide as three apartments. The taxi driver tells me why there are so many everywhere. The tenants want them, even if their presence is stealing almost all the light that could come through their windows. The money they get from renting the space to advertisers helps them pay for the electricity and hot water, which are very expensive.
Finally, I arrive home: block B2, entrance B (it goes as long as H), fourth floor (it goes as high as 9), apartment 42 (it goes as far as, …well, I never knew). The trees with the bottom part of their trunks painted in white, the staircase walls covered with olive-green oil paint, the mailboxes covered with the same olive-green oil paint. Almost nothing has changed, only the apartment doors, each in a different style, according to the artistic tastes and the financial resources of the owners.
Bucharest. I’ll be staying here only five days and I know already that they will pass as quickly as five seconds, yet feeling like five years. I start taking pictures, obsessively. Like those five 
days will be my last days on Earth. My parents surely think I’m crazy when they see me turning like a caged animal, photographing the kitchen – where nothing changed since the days I lived there – the bathroom, the balcony and the red plastic chairs, about which my father is so proud that he keeps asking me every five minutes, “Isn’t it nice here?”
And for the next five days I’m out photo-hunting, chasing my memories: the house where I was born 58 years ago, the city quarter where I made my first charcoal drawings on pavements heralding the future big artist I never became, the Art academy where I spent six years, the 
main streets, the central park with its military band (still playing there), the people doing people-watching, the Gypsies selling flowers and tickets to the park amusement spots.
I try to find old friends that are still in Bucharest but, with only one exception, I don’t have much luck. They are all over the globe, emigrants like me, living in the USA, Australia, Germany, Israel, France, the UK, you name it.
And then I’m taking pictures of what I have never seen: the absurd People’s House, the second biggest building in the world after the Pentagon (a Ceausescu masterpiece, of course),
an incredible number of abandoned cars (spread everywhere over the city) slowly melting into the ground. The icons of the new consumer-hungry society where, for the first time in half a century, you can buy anything you want (though more and more people have less and less money to do so). The graffiti on the walls with Bin Laden next to Jesus next to mother Theresa next to Ceausescu, who’s announcing “I’ll be back in five minutes.” And the signs of the reborn religious fever (lots of memorials dedicated to the saints that decided to show themselves to the population after the December 1989 “revolution”).
I took about six hundred photos. Back home in Paris, I’ve thrown away half of them.
But I’ll probably be going there again soon: my folks are too old now to travel. Well, that’s life.
