The Way Here [Part 2]

Second Prologue

Timisoara, Romania — December 1989

“How many?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas answered. “Twenty. More.”

We’d run from one side to the other or stood watching, awed. Thomas saying he didn’t like it and my saying over and again, this is it. We’d missed it in Berlin. We’d missed it elsewhere and we were finally seeing it here. It was too good and too powerful to stop.

Most journalists were in Bucharest and we were here where nobody expected. We’ve got this, I kept saying. I kept saying get the shots.

The ebb and flow was impossible. The number I saw were fighting the cold and the darkness as it fell. The number I saw were drunk with anger and joy, resentment, lust, hope, all. The number I saw were unlike anything I’d seen.

There were soldiers in the crowd, their greatcoats and fanned helmets shed. A group tossed one helmet across the peopled sea. The soldiers were with the crowd and we were with the crowd and it was falling, it would have to fall and it would fall soon.

“It’ll be like dominoes,” I said to Thomas. “It’s just like dominoes. Berlin and elsewhere and this is why we do what we do. This is why we’re here.”

“We’re here because of you,” he said with a smile.

“You just get your shots.”

“I’m spent, Jon. Let’s move on. Or back round that side there.”

Soon, I said. I told him soon, that we’d move round soon but I wanted to stay where we were.

He said he was moving on and I said okay. I’ll meet you later, I said.

I didn’t see when they started shooting. The crowd and the darkness both moving like they were, the snow falling and melting still. They were delirious by then with the chaos and the numbers, the damned numbers. That they were shooting took time to reach so many, so many crowded together and with nowhere to go.

The crowd moved like waves crashing on shores and those at the edges went down as those inside worked to get out. Men were caught up in the rush and as they ran they were knocked down or trampled. Some kept on, running at the edges of the breaking crowd with the new sounds coming on. The languid and rolling songs of protest were drowned with the sound of new energy, fright. Flurry. The volume that had been a breathing constant became an incongruous thunder as the violence burst near the front and those there forced the rush back.

Rifle shots were drowned with the sounds of those shouting, running, pushing at each other to move. Get out of the way. Hurry. Move. Those around me, so many men and so many women drunk with breaking freedom, sobered quickly and draped frightened new looks across their faces. Their eyes were anxious and their mouths wide. They reacted to the bodies in front of them, those moving round to run, and they in turn took steps from where they’d been pressing and pressed the other way. Retreat.

I watched one woman stumble but stayed where I was, crowded against a doorway with three or four others. Those coming near to us tripped over the steps and then those coming next tripped over those that had fallen. The woman that stumbled was gone, swallowed in a tidal sea of stunned energy and motion. The pile of bodies below me became a mass of struggling arms and legs. The flow of those still standing made its way around the stumbled numbers and I looked back at where the parliament’s steps were emptying still. There were bodies between there and here, bodies slumped or with arms awkwardly missing in the way they were prone. And the sea crowd kept its rush. And the men with rifles were walking the steps. And the bodies were left in the snow-wet plaza with the orange lighting and the darkness overhead. And the square was filled with fallen banners. And paper littered the space between and the concrete that shown was black and glistening.