The orange Opel Rekord

It arrived as a car. An Opel Rekord: a perfectly ordinary German family saloon, which was the whole point, because nothing on our street was ordinary in that particular way. It came from the place where things worked. It started on cold mornings. The doors shut with a sound I had never heard a car make. We did not own a car; my mother never learned to drive, and neither did her parents, because a car of any kind was a luxury that belonged to other people’s lives. What rolled down a Romanian street in those years was a Dacia, mostly, with the odd Lada, drab and boxy and near-identical, the sort of thing you waited years for and were given rather than chose.

The Opel was not in that conversation. The Opel was orange. There is a horse at the very start of The Three Musketeers, d’Artagnan’s: an ancient pony of so improbable a buttery yellow that the whole town of Meung turns out to jeer at it as he rides in. I have always pictured that horse the precise colour of the Opel, because the Opel had the same quality of being the wrong, impossible colour for the grey it stood in. The difference is that nobody on our street would have dreamed of jeering. We worshipped the thing a little. Foreign cars did not come down our street at all; when one did, the street rearranged itself around it, children abandoning their games, adults stopping mid-sentence, the thing sitting there being foreign and impractical and indecently beautiful.

I saw it before I understood it. Mașină străină, bai, I said to my friend - a foreign car, look at it - the way you would announce a comet. We narrated it to each other from the bus stop, the two of us, as it came down the road. Then it slowed, and indicated, and pulled in and stopped in front of me, and the comet turned out to be my ride home.

The car belonged to Klaus. My mother had met him not long before - a German, the man who would become my sister’s father and, after my own father walked out when I was four, the nearest thing to a father I had had since - and he had driven the whole way from Germany, courting a woman with a son, and that afternoon, without anyone warning me it would happen, he had come to collect me from school. The most coveted object on the pavement, the splash of colour every kid there wanted, opened its passenger door, and the afternoon belonged to me.

I am about to say something that I have spent thirty years being careful about, so I will be careful about it now.

There was a particular dignity to that world. Not a freedom. Not a future. A dignity. We were poor, but we were poor in the same way as our neighbours. A banana was a Christmas present, but everybody got the same Christmas. There were queues, but there was nobody on the other side of the shop window watching you queue. Nobody in our building had a newer washing machine than anybody else, because there was one model of washing machine and nobody had it. The status game was thin to the point of nonexistence. You could not lose at it because nobody was being allowed to play.

This is the part that survivors of that world have to say carefully, because it sounds, if you do not listen properly, like nostalgia for the regime. It is not. The regime was monstrous. The surveillance, the queues, the food we did not have, the lies on the news, the friends my mother grew quiet around in case they were reporting. I have nothing soft to say about any of that.

But the texture of daily life - the texture, the thing your body remembers, the thing you do not notice until it goes - had a kind of equality that disappeared after 1989 and has not returned. Everyone you knew lived in a flat the same size as your flat. Everybody was rowing in the same direction, in the same boat, even though the boat was being rowed in a circle by people who had no idea where land was. There was a community in shared difficulty. You knew your neighbours. You needed them. You were needed by them. The Crăciuns next door knocked on the radiator pipes when they wanted us. The pipes were the building’s nervous system. You answered.

When the system fell, we got freedom and we got shops, and we lost the radiator pipes.

I want to be clear, because I have heard this misunderstood. We were right to want freedom. We were right to want shops. But by the time the system actually fell, we had already gone. We watched the revolution from Germany that winter, the whole convulsion of it on a borrowed television, freedom breaking over a Romania that had already stopped being ours. What broke over the people who stayed was freedom with no instruction manual: unchecked, unguided, pitiless toward the naive. The East Germans at least had a wealthy twin to catch them and show them how it was done. Romania had nobody. The country was sold off in pieces to investors whose whole model was to buy a factory for nothing and scrap it, and the people I had grown up among were steamrolled by all of it. I say we; I mean them. We were already in Germany, and my mother had got the two of us out the way you flee a house fire, glad to be on the lawn, with no wish to be nostalgic about the kitchen. The Romania she and I remember is the one that ended in 1989, and the country standing on the map today is one we would both walk through as strangers.

What I am describing is something narrower. It is the recognition, much later, that the way Romania changed after 1989 contained a loss that nobody was prepared to name, because naming it sounded like nostalgia. The loss was the loss of belonging by default. The loss was the loss of the shared shape of difficulty. The loss was the radiator pipes.

I have come to think that a great deal of what is going wrong in Western countries right now - the rise of strongman politics, the appetite for simple-minded answers, the way perfectly normal people have started saying that perhaps the strong-jawed person on television has a point - has very little to do with the issues being argued about and a great deal to do with the absence of those radiator pipes. People do not feel held by anything anymore. There is no shared shape of difficulty. There is just individual difficulty, each in its own flat, each on its own phone, comparing itself, in real time, to a thousand other individual difficulties, all of which look better-lit. The result is loneliness. The political symptoms of mass loneliness are well-documented in every century. Ours is not different.

What I learned, very young, is that human beings will trade a great deal of freedom for the feeling of belonging. They will trade a great deal of choice for the feeling of certainty. They will trade a great deal of comfort for the feeling that they are part of something other people can see. The communist regime understood this and exploited it cynically. The market democracy that replaced it understood it not at all, and accidentally dismantled the structures that delivered it. Both arrangements failed the same human need, in different directions.

I do not know what to do about this. I have no policy to propose. I am wary of any policy that thinks it can manufacture community by edict, because that is exactly what the regime tried. I am also wary of the position that the market will sort it out on its own, because the market has been sorting it out for thirty-five years and the result is the loneliness epidemic.

What I can say is what I do, in my own life, against my own version of the same problem. I know my neighbours. I have memorised their names, their kids’ names, what they do for work, what they are worried about. I drink with one of them in the pub on Friday evenings when I can. I lend tools and I borrow tools. I cook too much food on a Sunday so there is some to take next door, because next door is a widow whose kids live in Manchester. I am present at the school gate. I go to the village hall thing even when I do not want to go to the village hall thing. None of this is performance. It is the rebuilding, by hand, of something that used to come free.

The orange Opel Rekord was the dream of the West, from the inside of the East. The dream was real. The West existed. The shops were full. The cars worked. We were right to want all of it. What nobody told us, because nobody knew yet, was that the deal came with a hidden tax. The tax was paid in radiator pipes.

If you are reading this in the West, where the shops have always been full, the tax was paid before you noticed it. You did not lose your radiator pipes, because you never had them. You inherited a system that had already, quietly, decommissioned the apparatus of belonging-by-default, and replaced it with a thinner, more transactional apparatus of belonging-by-choice. The thinner system works fine when life is going well. It does not work in difficulty. In difficulty, people who have only ever known belonging-by-choice discover, with horror, that nobody is obliged to belong to them.

This is where the strongmen come in. The strongman’s offer is not, really, the offer of policy. It is the offer of involuntary belonging. It says: you are one of us, by virtue of having been born here, by virtue of speaking this language, by virtue of looking like this. You did not choose us. We did not choose you. We are stuck with each other, and that, after years of choosing and being chosen and not being chosen, is a kind of relief.

The relief is real. The bargain is bad.

I know what comes after the bargain, because my family bought it once, on behalf of a different ideology, and I spent my childhood in the after. The after is not what is promised on the front of the package. The after is what is in the small print of every regime that ever promised involuntary belonging: the surveillance, the silencing, the queues for things that should not have queues, the moment your mother goes quiet around an old friend.

I do not want my children to learn the radiator pipes the way I learned them. I want them to learn the radiator pipes the way you learn a musical instrument: by choice, with attention, because it is worth the effort. The choice does not get you the same depth as the necessity. It does, however, get you something the necessity never could, which is the choice itself.

That is the answer I have found, and it is not a satisfying one, because it is not a slogan. The radiator pipes have to be rebuilt voluntarily, by adults, one street at a time, against the considerable economic pressure of a system that prefers us atomised because we shop more that way.

Maybe somewhere, in some unrecorded backstreet in Ploiești, the orange Opel Rekord is still running. It would not be orange anymore. The paint would have gone. The engine would be on its third or fourth rebuild, kept alive by a mechanic who learned his trade in a country that no longer exists, who has nothing to lose by keeping an old car going because the new ones, frankly, are not as well made.

I think about that car when I think about belonging. It is the past, ridiculous and gorgeous and impractical, refusing to die because somebody is bothered enough to keep it on the road.

The radiator pipes can be rebuilt. Somebody has to be bothered.