Excerpt
Disgust sat openly on the officer’s face, though he himself was
hardly a heroic figure. The lieutenant was a strange man: the collar
of his shirt greasy, his tie and uniform stained and wrinkled, yet
his gait and posture carried a kind of royal, exalted air. No wonder
he overestimated himself. As we later learned, he had come to the
army from some tiny Moldavian village, exchanging a mud-brick
house for a city apartment. And beyond all that, he could command
others, indulge his malice and exercise that little limited power he
would never have known had he not chosen a military career.
Meanwhile, the dictator’s grand plans had come to include the
construction of the Transfăgărășan road, already well underway
by that year. Five years of agony, rocks blasted apart with six thousand
tons of dynamite, dozens of soldiers’ corpses sacrificed to the
project — and all of it presented in the news as though a monument
to the triumphant will of the people were being built, when
in truth it was only a monument to power and to human suffering.
Every month sealed metal coffins arrived, and we knew that no
one would ever see what lay inside them, because they were forbidden
to be opened.
Beneath every stone and every slab of concrete of the Transfăgărășan
pulsed the bone-breaking, soul-crushing reality of slave
labor. They built it over five years. At the funerals of fallen soldiers
we fired three shots into the air, then returned to the barracks as
though we had become participants in some endlessly repeating,
cold ritual practiced by the world only so we would never forget
how easily a human life can be replaced. The soldiers escorting
the coffins were forbidden to speak. The families were forbidden
to ask questions. And each coffin was another sign of this truth:
in that country even your death did not belong to you, but to the
state. The construction of the Transfăgărășan had already become
a legend while they were still only moving earth — not because of
its beauty or engineering brilliance, but because of the number of
dead, a number everyone knew and no one spoke aloud.
