Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan

The Little House on the ­Prairie part concerns Bugan’s early years, mostly living with her maternal grandparents (Bunicu and Bunica) and younger sister, Loredana. She conjures a rural idyll, watching her grandmother make “prune jam and marmalade over an open fire”, collecting warm brown eggs in willow baskets, nibbling walnuts and seeds from sunflowers “as big as my head”. She tells us of the ritual pig slaughter the week before Christmas; of holidays by the Black Sea; and grapes that are “purple-plum-red”.

Her main annoyance in these days is being forced by her dad, in very eastern European fashion, to watch the chess-masters programme on television every Sunday afternoon. Slowly, however, she starts to see that all is not well in the country. After her grandmother dies, circa 1980, the two girls, soon to be joined by a brother, move into a new house with their parents and help them to run their grocery shop, where they witness the austerity of ­government rationing. This is a society in which sunflower oil counts as a luxury; the normal cooking fat is lard, reused many times. There is a brilliant description of the unseemly fights in the bread queues. “At the end of the bread hour many people go home empty-handed and I see under the window fallen buttons from overcoats, lost scarves, dropped change, all stamped in the black dusty earth.”

Even this seems like fun, ­however, compared with what is to follow. In 1983, Bugan’s father puts on his smartest black suit and drives into Bucharest to broadcast his protest against Ceausescu, with a typed piece of paper pinned to his chest announcing: “I fight for Human Rights.” He is put in prison, leaving his family under constant surveillance from the Securitate, Romania’s secret police. There are microphones in every room of the house, making open ­conversations impossible. They struggle for food, and Bugan’s 37-year-old mother becomes so gaunt she “nearly fits into my clothes”. Even school is not a safe place for the girls. Teachers abuse them for being “bad ­pioneers” and children throw stones at Bugan in the playground. Later, death threats come on the telephone in the night and the beloved family dog, Bombolina, is poisoned.

All this might make Burying the Typewriter sound like a grim read. It isn’t, partly because Bugan has a remarkable ability to stay in the moment, like a child, so that everything that happens to the family, however grotesque, feels natural. She looks out of her bedroom window at peaches growing and thinks that “nothing can stifle the will to live. No amount of suffering will stop a peach from growing”. The Securitate officers lurking outside the house are like the bears and wolves in Little House on the Prairie.

Though often deeply moving, her account isn’t sentimental. When granted a rare visit to see her father in prison, now “a broken man”, the key detail she recalls is his failure to be impressed by her snazzy new blue tracksuit with white lines down the leg. “Carmen, you look terrible. Why are you wearing a running suit?” is his greeting. She makes the dynamics of the family entirely real: her mother’s shyness, her father’s humour and stubborn idealism. When they are all finally granted political asylum in 1989, thanks to a daring night-time dash to the American embassy by Carmen herself, you feel as relieved as if it had happened to you.

Bugan is wonderful on the daily travails of life in communist Romania: the weird, dusty tins of sour cabbage in the shops that nobody wants to buy; the way that, when a stranger offers you a drink, you assume it is poisoned. On the train, as the family escapes, they are offered a first taste of Coca-Cola by a Romanian expat. “When he offers it to us, dad asks him to drink it first, convinced he is a Securitate man attempting to poison us.” He is actually just a normal man visiting his mother in Romania, having emigrated to Australia “where there are all sorts of crazy things walking upon the earth”.

Even though the life she describes is horrific in many ways — if anyone in the family is more than 10 minutes late home, the others assume the worst — Bugan’s account is never black-and-white. She and her mother become close friends with their neighbour Sofica, even though they know she informs on them to the police. Not ­everything in this land of the Danube is bad, despite the regime. She likes the way school children are made to pick ­camomile flowers for medicinal tea in the summer: an imposition that doesn’t feel like one. Her memories give a richly ­specific sense of what Romania felt like in the 1970s and 1980s: of dark-red wine and polenta; lilacs and marigolds; old men smelling of walnut oil; sad songs on an accordion.

After Bugan had finished writing most of the book, in 2011, she returned to Romania to read the archives relating to her father’s case. She is now a happily married mother and poet, who has been living in safety in the West for more than 20 years. In the archives, she finds a penal dossier including surveillance orders and a photograph of her father’s forbidden typewriter being dug up all those years ago. She thinks it “fortunate” that she hadn’t seen any of these official documents sooner. “Had I had this know­ledge before I wrote this book, perhaps the voice of the child would have been strangled.” As it was, the voice of the child in this astonishing memoir comes out loud and clear, infused with an uncrushable spirit.

Staying silent

Just 12 when her father was arrested, Carmen Bugan was interrogated for over three weeks about the whereabouts of her father’s secret typewriter. Though she was given barely anything to eat in that time, she never told the police anything.

Picador £16.99/ebook £10.99 pp257, ST Bookshop price £15.29