A Kaleidoscope of Chaos

By JAMES WILDE TIMISOARA

On Christmas Eve in Timisoara, the border city where the uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu first bubbled up, a young woman stood in a field, rocking back and forth, crying softly. "Bloody, oh, how bloody," she crooned over the corpse of an old man. His hands had been cut off, his body disfigured by boiling water and acid. He had been her father.

Nothing could have prepared the mind for Timisoara and the tableau of horrors left by the regime's last and worst spasm of barbarity. In the same muddy field, laid out on white sheets, were two dozen other naked bodies, more victims of a massacre Dec. 16 and 17 by the Securitate, Ceausescu's secret police. These bodies too had been subjected to efforts to render them unrecognizable, an obvious attempt not only to spite those the victims left behind but also to intimidate them. The bodies bore various marks of torture: ankles entwined in barbed wire, stomachs crudely sewn up where they had been slashed open. On the corpse of one woman lay the seven-month fetus that had been ripped from her womb. But horror was not the only emotion expressed in Rumania last week. In the village of Denta, near Timisoara, church bells were pealing. A procession of villagers, many of whom looked like Gulag veterans in their shabby overalls and torn jackets, streamed out of the small Orthodox church and gathered on the village green, singing in thanksgiving joy. A horse-drawn cart clattered by, and its euphoric driver shouted, "Long live the liberation!"

Scenes that were part of an otherworldly mixture of triumph and fear, suspicion and hope: peasants making the V-for-victory sign outside empty shops or beside wells said to have been poisoned by the Securitate. No one confident that those brutal defenders of the old regime were really gone; no one certain what kind of a government was in charge. People ricocheting between agony and elation. And fear everywhere.

More than a week after the rebellion erupted, Securitate snipers were still shooting at anything that moved, armed or unarmed, in the streets of Timisoara. Every intersection had a checkpoint manned by young and visibly frightened rebels. Whenever a car appeared, they flagged it down to search for weapons; even a stooped grandmother might join in the effort.

In a country thick with informers, where the constant fear of betrayal to | the Securitate had destroyed people's ability to trust one another and work together, the newfound sense of common cause showed itself in other ways. Women rushed out to the army tanks rumbling along Timisoara's streets and passed baskets of bread and pails of tea through the hatches. One recalled another legacy of Ceausescu's -- the beggaring of Rumania -- when she explained, "We have nothing else to give the soldiers except bread."

Rumor swirled. Everyone had heard about one place or another where Ceausescu followers had suddenly appeared: "Last night we heard that paratroopers loyal to that murderer ((Ceausescu)) had been dropped outside the town," said Asofei Jorim, 21, a student who had survived the Timisoara massacre and joined the militia guarding the city. "We have even heard that Palestinian students who were being trained as terrorists here are also supporting the old regime."

Everywhere, relief and triumph mingled with a persistent sense of danger. At Moravita, a sleepy Rumanian frontier post on the edge of the Yugoslav border, customs officials waved their arms high in victory but warned, "Be very careful. There is shooting all the time." In villages along the road to Bucharest, virtually every Rumanian flag had the communist logo scissored out of the center of the blue, yellow and red field; everywhere, signs lauding communism and Ceausescu had been defaced. In Craiova, an industrial city west of Bucharest, jubilation reigned even as fighting between the army and the Securitate was still going on. "We are all in ecstasy over our new freedom," said Eugen Radui, a 19-year-old student who was part of a group guarding a hotel. "I have had no liberty. It is impossible to describe what it was like living here." At the town hall, where a provisional governing committee of 40 people had been installed, the lights were kept dim so snipers could not spot potential targets through the windows.

Even so, nothing could dim the realization that Rumania had entered a new era. "It was the students who lighted the fire, the students in Bucharest and Timisoara," said Emilian Mercan, 36, a former travel agent and member of the Craiova committee. "I never thought this could happen, this revolution." Later, after hearing that Ceausescu and his wife Elena had been executed, Mercan summed up his feelings in what might be close to a nationwide sentiment: "We are like children waking from a nightmare in the middle of the night. All we want is reassurance that it won't happen again." ^