Notes from the Other Side of Night: From Communism to a Fragile Freedom (Curations) - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, where she has directed AHI’s Washington Program on National Security since 2016. Her books include: An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left; The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom; The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World; Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve; the anthology Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace; Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice; the anthology Every Vote Counts: The Role of Elections in Building Democracy, which she co-edited with Richard Soudriette; and The Bloody Flag: Post-Communist Nationalism in Eastern Europe—Spotlight on Romania. The author of over two hundred fifty articles and reviews on international affairs, human rights, literature, and philosophy, she has made frequent appearances on radio and television. Her writings have recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), Academic Questions, the American Mind, and the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, among other places. 

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Floating above the clouds . . . we could land anywhere. The galaxies don’t require passports: round, inscrutable celestial mythology. Each revolution a question: Where does the heart beat? What makes the comet smoke? The puffs of cloud tease the traveler; familiar as breath, they are the testimony of eternity. I try to take them seriously but can’t just now; eternity is so irrelevant from this perspective.

Going home, the archetypal attempt. The clouds are a pretext—my mind is infested with fragments of memory, swept together in bits and pieces, not even trying to make sense. A patchwork of impressions. Will they fit any of what’s left?

I sip my coffee to pretend this is an ordinary trip, from one corner of smug civilization to another. We pass through a dense night, much like the usual but for the proximity of clouds and the curtain of noise. Slowly, light would come, as if to reclaim us. It must be the same sun, the same night. We won’t drop into timelessness; I know the signs of voyage. The stewardess smiles, tired. She longs for her hotel bed and a cigarette in peace. Around me, the trappings of reality.

But still a dream: to have returned, after adulthood, to that familiar language—the grammar of fear, the semantics of ideology. No, it’s not the same sun, not the same night. How do we spell the new words? They mean what we want them to mean.

Suspended, movement is no longer: instruments are all we have. I search for signs of distance but I find just stars, and they are still. The thick surrounding darkness, the texture of illusion, tempts me to be bold and wonder if our voyage might be taking us to the bowels of the earth, to Dante’s ghosts. The stewardess would lead us out like friendly cattle and would name the highlights: “On your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the First Circle. The sinners with some hope.” That would be fine, for I would know we had arrived where I had left: among sinners barely aware that desire does not stop with dawn. My compatriots, my old comrades, had not yet mastered their new catechism sufficiently well to forget the distinctions between night and night, blood and wine. Unequipped for the requirements of new salvation, they lay awake with grief, dreaming. A terrible curse, enough to condemn anyone to hope eternal. A kind of drunken folly made them risk their lives on a mere note of sarcasm, a refusal, a demand to leave.

No, this is obviously no ordinary sky: thicker, more ominous, a permanent reminder that seat belts are to be kept on to protect our livers against a tremor within. I close my eyes to listen to the engine covering up the real sounds of night: a hiss of premonitions, the grinding bark of remorse, that murmur of a lust we know as need. The engine seems to laugh at us, monotonous and efficient to soothe as it denies fancy. And it is just as well: my mind should stay clean of mirage if it is to peel off the years gently, accurately.

“Coffee?” the stewardess demands, half-polite, half-resentful. She must think herself too pretty to be stuck in a place like this small old plane with too many seats. I take it she didn’t think I was sleeping, or didn’t care—her job is to make sure the coffee pot gets emptied. I hand her my cup and thank her but she doesn’t seem to hear—perhaps not expecting it, not really believing I need her potion, or just unable to pretend that I am welcome. No hard feelings; I’m tempted to tell her everybody is too pretty to be stuck anywhere, but I don’t think she would find that very heartening. I lean back collecting whatever is left of my thoughts.

My coffee tastes bitter. A bit like espresso, a bit like that hellish liquor we prepared on our trip to the West, our unlikely journey into exile.

The train was probing through the mountains, the wine-colored autumn trees, muttering its old song: clickety-clack, you’ll come back, clickety clack-clack don’t come back, come back, come back. . . . Our few pieces of luggage nestled on the racks were hopping to the rhythmic noise, as if amused. Most of our belongings had been packed away in a trunk, not to be opened till after we had crossed the mighty ocean. A government list had been issued to remind us of what we could expect to need, though in effect impressing upon us what we must do without.

The Romanian mountains were lavish with foliage, festive for autumn. They made it seem as if we were leaving before a holiday and all the fun was to start after we’d gone. But we knew better.

We watched the scenery, paying no attention to the road-signs—there would be no need to remember. Soon we’d have to learn to spell other, more exotic geographical landmarks. Each foreign word is a lot like the name of a new town: mysterious at first, symbolic of a whole galaxy of relations, it intimidates then becomes as familiar as the inhabitants themselves, friendly and so evident that no other group of sounds seems quite as appropriate.

While passing through the Transylvanian countryside, my mother cried silently, thinking about home, unable still to accept the nomadic turn. No one said anything; we didn’t comfort her. Or blame her. Maybe we didn’t have the courage to take her pain seriously—each of us had his own terror to confront. Silence seemed better than confusion, even if its price was loneliness—a gamble we were willing to make. Huddled together, we felt less sorry for one another than for ourselves. This was it: the road. And each one of us was convinced he was the least equipped to comprehend it, the most vulnerable.

My sister’s small hands were holding mine tightly, as if to make sure I’d stay. She had just lost her small friend: a tiny gold elephant she had been wearing around her neck for years as a charm. My mother had noticed, soon after the train had left the Bucharest station, that my sister was nervously playing with her elephant, teasing it with her tongue. We had forgotton all about it: a small detail with possibly disastrous consequences. Though she could not help turning pale, my mother controlled herself enough to consider the feelings of her eight-year-old and asked very gently to please give her the charm. My sister had obeyed, but a look of alarm indicated that she knew something was not right. “They don’t allow these things,” my mother explained, almost too quietly to be heard, as much to justify the action to herself as to appease my sister who seemed ready to demand an explanation. But no question was asked, not even when my mother opened the window to toss out the small elephant. The operation done and the window closed, she didn’t dare look at my sister. No one quite knew whether the little girl had been upset by her loss—quite likely she too had become numbed by the last three weeks when everything had been...