Digging Survivors

No one believes that the worst can happen to them when they are leading a happy life. Neither did my father, whose life course narrowed twice in his life, and twice he worked to dig out a new one.

A few years after I was born, my father received a letter informing him to report for duty at one of the Danube-Black Sea Canal labor camps where he was stationed for six months. The project of the Danube-Black Sea Canal had been started in the 1940s but took amplitude in the 1950s when the Communists called every citizen to “volunteer” to work there, and turned this task into a civil duty. Although my father had never been imprisoned, he along with millions of other arrived at what he later found out to be a labor camp. Here, he worked twenty four hours a day to dig out from the muddy banks of a former river, a wide canal meant to connect the Danube to the Sea. But what he actually found out here was that doing your duty and working for the Communists might have actually led to your loosing your life rather than gaining good credits with the party.

He learned that the special team of workers deployed to dig out parts of the canal where the secret warehouses and depots were to be, died mysteriously once they completed their work. So did millions of workers in Bucharest laboring to build the most impressive cement monster, the People’s House. Once you got the notification that you were to go and labor at one of these sited, you could expect anything. You would kiss your family good bye because it wasn’t certain you would return home on your two legs and not in a coffin. Hanging down a steep ravine by thick strings and facing the wall of soft earth, my father would pretend not to see his neighbor being shot dead by one of the strategically placed militia men on the other bank of the canal. He would shut up and dig. He didn’t see anything but clay and dirt, nails, shovels, trowels, buckets and more dirt. And he came home alive.

Today, thirty years later, his canals need to be dug clean again. This time, we’re talking about his arteries. In Romanian hospitals, he’s treated like a prisoner. The nurses shout if patients unable to move call for a bedpan. The doctors, like the militia men, survey but never tell you what to expect. The hospitals reek of urine, and the medication is administered to you if you buy it yourself. You just do your civic duty and stay still. Patients with atherosclerosis are sent 130 kilometers away for investigations because the local hospitals lack the necessary apparatus. There again, they keep you waiting. They don’t explain to you what your course looks like. Rather, you dig it out. And if you’re lucky, you come out clean and you return home on two legs.

I wonder what obstructions can hold back his blood from circulating. I wonder why now and not so many years back when his blood could have actually frozen in his veins. I sit powerless, knowing that there are many others are like him. I know there are many others like me, sitting in waiting rooms, counting the piles of magazines on stands, inspecting every medical employee passing by, and hoping they can tell us there’s still a chance, that the operation is very basic, that there are no risks. We all hope and we all believe. We believe in digging survivors.