Rumania Hooray!

By KENNETH W. BANTA BUCHAREST

Like more than half the traffic lights in Bucharest, this one on the busy corner of Boulevard Nicolae Balcescu is dead. In the freezing fog, sputtering Rumanian-made Dacia sedans are lurching every which way, horns honking. On the sidewalk, pedestrians slog through ankle-deep mud and slush past an armored personnel carrier, guarded by shivering young soldiers fingering the triggers of their Kalishnikov rifles. At a kiosk nearby, 50 customers jostle for the meager pile of Romania Libera newspapers. Two doors away, a line of more than 100 shoppers shuffles toward a butcher's counter offering only hamburger. "One hour, maybe two, to wait," says a housewife bundled into a shabby parka. "That is, if any is left."

Westerners might wonder how things could get worse. But returning to the city I knew all too well under the iron hand of Ceausescu, I understand why Rumanians feel that they've never had it so good. They revel in their traffic jams; Ceausescu all but banned cars to save fuel for export. After 24 years of state-sponsored terror, martial law by young soldiers who defeated the Securitate thugs in the Christmas revolution is a relief. "I like waiting for a newspaper," Ion, a Bucharest undergraduate, said last week. "For the first time here, there's news worth reading." And food lines? At least the queues are for food, say Rumanians, savoring their first beefburgers in memory. Ceausescu drove his subjects to fisticuffs over rations of offal and chicken feet.

Food and freedom have in many ways restored the soul to Bucharest, whose soot-covered older buildings and hideous concrete towers bear witness to how hard Ceausescu tried to kill the city's spirit. The dimly lit cafes in which couples two months ago whispered fearfully over mugs of ersatz tea now ring with gossip over cups of real coffee. Rumanians who once shied in terror from contact with foreigners besiege me as soon as I open my notebook. In the vast plaza of Piata Unirii, crowds that would once have been swiftly dispersed by Securitate goons argue the merits of 30 new political parties, then race home to watch Rumania's hot new television show: taped excerpts from the trial of Ceausescu's top henchmen. In the final episode last week, the four defendants were found guilty of complicity in genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment.

But that trial, engineered by the ruling National Salvation Front as a means of officially burying the Ceausescu regime, instead symbolized how Ceausescu's legacy may yet poison Rumania's future. When a huge mob stormed the Front's headquarters last week shouting "Out with the Communists!," they were voicing the growing fear that the Front's leaders, who are almost all ex- lieutenants of Ceausescu's, may have renounced the dictator but not his methods. Now fledgling opposition parties to the Front are asking why it has mounted a Ceausescu-style show trial and why, if Ceausescu's old cronies are under indictment, ex-Communists in the Front should be exempted.

Already, walls in the city center that last month were scrawled with FRONT=DEMOCRACY bear such slogans as STALINISM, NAZISM, FRONT-ISM. Aside from tainting virtually all possible national leaders with participation in his totalitarian machine, Ceausescu ravaged Rumania's broader political culture. "Everyone hates communism as he hates the devil," says Sorin Botez, the executive secretary of the newly re-established Liberal Party. "But little by little Ceausescu's people dripped lies into the population, destroying democratic thinking."

In that climate, freedom has unleashed a hurricane of wild rumors and fear. Its eye is the brasserie of the Hotel Intercontinental, where prostitutes and black-market currency dealers whispering "Change, change" have been augmented by political rabble rousers. In one hour I learn: that the Securitate has bugged the offices of the National Front; that the Front has bugged the Peasant Party; that the television is controlled by the Soviets; that the Liberals give a bottle of French champagne and a $150 bill to anyone who signs on. "All these rumors! All these parties! Who can tell what to believe and who to vote for?" says Dana, 55, a housewife sipping a midmorning beer. "We still don't know if we can trust our own neighbors."

Ceausescu's legacy of grass-roots corruption and account fiddling augurs ill for a regulated economy. With the arrival of more than 1,000 journalists to cover the revolution and now hundreds of West European businessmen to cut deals, the main result so far appears to be an immense black-market boom. Waiters at the major hotels sell pilfered hotel caviar for $20 a tin. Prostitutes' rates have soared from $100 to $200, and Rumanians who used to bribe salesclerks with half a kilo of coveted coffee beans to get their hands on a TV now have to produce hard currency.

Ironically, that boom, coupled with Rumanians' freedom to travel to the West, may help lever Rumania's consumer economy out of its reliance on the barter of goods and services in return for Kent cigarettes, long the only real tender in the country. Explains Silviu, 21, a tour guide: "Now we can travel, and for that we need dollars, not Kents." If only Rumania's more vexing ills had such simple solutions.