The Princess and the plea

‘I’VE GONE OUT WITH Ceauşescu’s son, Valentin. I’ve had an affair with the Prime Minister. One of my helpers is my lesbian lover, another a Mossad agent. I’ve two illegitimate children, one of them conceived in a Paris hotel – but I’m refusing to let him speak Romanian and this has angered my father.’

The speaker, an attractive single woman with trout-green eyes, has been reading about herself in the anti-monarchist press. She sits in economy class on the flight to Bucharest and travels on a Danish passport under the name Margarita de Roumanie.

Few Romanians on the plane know who she is, or that her sad and dignified father is their King.

Whenever she reads such propaganda – and this has also included a photograph of King Michael and his dogs captioned “The King with his daughters” – Princess Margarita takes refuge in the fifteen-year-old memory of a psychiatric ward in Edinburgh. She was researching a United Nations survey on the social effects of alcohol when she found herself locked up with a vampire.

‘He said, “Oooh, I’m so glad you’ve come to see me,” and he told me very logically how vampires were going to take over the world. The way houses were built meant they could get in through the skylight and Scotland had the ideal climate. He said the doctors wouldn’t listen to him and perhaps I could help. I walked out of the ward and said to the doctor, “What’s he got?”

‘“Paranoid schizophrenia.”’

Margarita says the experience was invaluable training for what she later came across in Romania, land of Vlad the Impaler, Dracula and latterly Nicolae Ceauşescu.

She first visited her country in January 1990, a month after Ceauşescu’s fall. ‘I felt I was meeting myself. It was very painful. I didn’t speak the language fluently, not having been born there I knew my country only through films and photo albums.’

But nothing had quite prepared her for the sight of razed villages – ‘they dug a hole in front of each house and bulldozed the house into it’. Nor the old people’s homes – ‘there were three to a bed in a damp cellar, people who’d fought in World War One’. Nor, above all, the suffering of children, abandoned to Aids. The children lay in broken cots among their faeces, little scraps of flesh which had never been held. ‘You reached out to their hands and they just hung on.’ Later, a child died before her eyes. ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she says.

At the age of 40 she had found her country. She was not going to run away from it. So she applied her experience with the United Nations – including five years in Rome during which she helped organise World Food Day to form a Romanian charity. When the foreign charities pull out, as they must, the Princess Margarita Foundation will continue their work.

She is flying today to Bucharest to see the children, but there is another reason.

Margarita was moved by one further spectacle on that initial visit in 1990. Within hours of her arrival a long queue had formed outside her hotel room.

‘Each person was crying. There was a man without an eye who said, “I’ve been in prison nineteen years”. The next was a mother who’d been shot. A third person came in holding a baby with no arms. It just went on and on. When I’d spoken to 70 of them, I couldn’t take any more. It was like a hail of bullets. After a while they went through my bullet-proof vest.’

But the curious thing was, none of these people wanted anything for themselves. Instead, they wished to give Margarita little gifts, objects which for 40 years had lain hidden under their beds.

‘This is for the King, this is for the King. Please give it him,’ they said. Ashtrays with her father’s forbidden face, stamps, coins, books, anything.

‘They just wanted to ask me, “When’s your father coming back? When’s our hope coming back?”’ From then on the eldest of King Michael’s five daughters bent herself to the task.

She sought an audience with Prime Minister Roman, asking him to let her father return for Christmas. ‘Roman told me it wasn’t the best moment. He was very smarmy. He said he was reacting like a man before a beautiful woman. I told him I’d lived in Rome five years, I knew enough Italian waiters. He pretended to show a human face. His pretence was that there existed a lot of anti-monarchist sentiment. I told him it was his job to deal with it and anyway the visit would be secret. He said, “There’s a lot of pro-monarchist sentiment.” Finally I asked if he was forbidding a visit and he repeated: “It’s not the best time.”’

At one in the morning, Margarita telephoned her father’s home in Geneva where she also lives. When she related the conversation she’d had, King Michael replied simply, ‘I’m coming’.

The result was an unequivocal fiasco. King Michael passed through customs and was climbing into a white Land Rover when an official ran up and demanded his documents: apparently his passport was not in order. ‘I said to the driver, “Go!”’ remembers Margarita, and they accelerated away.

THEY HAD DRIVEN a hundred miles when they came to a road-block. A lamp-post was bent over the road, and there were lorries and police cars. A soldier opened the door and waved a machine-gun in the King’s face. ‘“Do something!” I told the colonel. “You know who that is?” He averted his eyes. “Please tell him I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything.”’ So, they waited. At one point Margarita pounded her head against the dashboard in frustration. ‘I’m an Aries. Very impulsive. I felt I’d done this to my father.’ In the early hours a Securitate general walked up to the Land Rover. He addressed the King contemptuously as ‘Mr Michael’. He charged him with violating the country’s airspace. He ordered him to leave immediately. After 44 years in exile, King Michael could not have scripted a more humiliating return.

Then, four months later, this Easter, something extraordinary happened. King Michael was granted permission to pay a two-day visit to the tombs of his ancestors.

Only the most monocled royalist could have anticipated the outcome. A crowd of half a million clogged the capital to welcome him. They removed the bollards so his car could pass under the Triumphal Arch, something not seen in 70 years. They kissed the windscreen, covering it in flowers. They lay down before the car, shrieking at those who ordered them out of the way, ‘You told us to get out of the way for Ceauşescu!’ For security reasons Margarita had remained behind, but the historian Andrei Pippidi, a grandson of the assassinated Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga, was among the crowd. ‘I never imagined such a thing could be expected. People of all ages and social conditions were in the streets. They were crying because the strongest emotion of their life was making them shudder. It had come from a desperate need for truth and dignity. I’m sure among the 500,000 were many Securitate informers. They were crying because they understood at once that such a thing as total honesty is possible. This idea was never represented in their lifetime by a Romanian leader.’

At the chapel in Curtea de Arges the King gave way to tears. ‘He was washing the poison away,’ says Margarita. ‘My mother saw he couldn’t speak and she touched his arm which he said almost made it worse.’

‘We love you,’ chanted the crowd. ‘We love you.’

He waved back. He stammered, ‘I love you with all my heart.’

When Margarita talks about her father, she is solicitous. Sadness has been scribbled in the lines of his face since a child. His parents separated when he was nine, his father Carol ‘the cad’ running off with Madame Lupescu, which caused his mother to throw her wedding ring in the Danube. Twice a year Michael was allowed to see Queen Helen in Florence but three spies escorted him there. Once he had severe appendicitis. ‘You’re just trying it on,’ said Carol, refusing permission to operate. When finally the Italian doctor went ahead, ignoring him, the appendix exploded in his hand.

Michael’s rule was brave but short. On 30 December, 1947, his palace surrounded by communist troops, the last remaining monarch in the Eastern bloc was compelled to abdicate. Margarita was born two years later in Lausanne, after which the family moved to Lord Brocket’s haunted house at Bramshill. There was the ghost of Sir John Cope, a misogynist who used to hang around the sitting room, glaring at women he didn’t like; also a young woman whose child had died. ‘She only came when there were children in the house. She would sit on my bed and talk to me: “I had a little girl, you see, and she went away.” She had a wonderful smell of lilies of the valley. It was quite a safe feeling. Then there was someone who was supposed never to appear which really scared us.’

They moved to Ayot St Lawrence and afterwards to Geneva where King Michael was offered a job testing instruments for Learjet. By the time Margarita went up to Edinburgh, to read sociology and politics, she had developed a taste for Tarzan stories and anything by Ursula le Guin. At university she became known affectionately as the ‘Red Princess’. She attended anti-Thatcher demos and had a five-year affair with Gordon Brown. ‘I helped him canvass when he stood for Edinburgh South. It was a very solid and romantic story. I never stopped loving him but one day it didn’t seem right any more. It was politics, politics, politics and I need nurturing.’

SHE NEVER MARRIED, although a couple of ‘chinless German wonders’ were presented for the occasion. Her current beau is a north Italian architect, ‘an Aquarian’, with whom she may tie the knot, but the question has become more complex since her father’s visit this Easter. Margarita is shy about the reason, but it is contained on her lap in a recently published book. In this book King Michael declares his fervent wish for the future. He wishes to ignore the Salic law of succession, as it has been ignored by several north European monarchies. He wishes the succession of his throne for his oldest daughter, Margarita.

We land in Bucharest, a city of redheads and hairdressers and men in leather jackets who look like Melvyn Bragg. The streets are crowded. There is a midday queue for a Bruce Willis film and at every corner stand small tables on which might be arranged four pairs of shoes, several bottles of orangeade or some second-hand books including an old Bucharest telephone directory. Margarita’s visit here was arranged before Easter and intended to focus on the work of her Foundation but now the possibility exists of a restoration there is a separate agenda. ‘There are a lot of loose nuts,’ she says mysteriously. A trade union chief comes to warn her of a military takeover. Lawyers convene in her hotel room to discuss a rival claimant, sponsored by the government to create maximum disarray. The head of the Monarchist Party paces outside in the lobby, prior to Margarita’s request that he dissolve his party because her father is King of all Romanians. Then there are meetings with ambassadors and with prominent academics who argue that the weakness of the opposition makes the monarchy ‘the only solution’. And in the evening she is driven in the faithful Land Rover to the Teatro Bulandra for the opening performance of Arsenic and Old Lace. The director is waiting on the steps facing Ceauşescu’s vast white palace, calculated to be ten times the size of Versailles. ‘That is the real theatre,’ he jokes and tells us he was among those responsible for making an inventory of the palace following Ceauşescu’s death.

After a week he had visited 6,000 rooms but still he had not completed his task. ‘It’s sick,’ agrees Margarita. ‘A cacophony put into stone.’

We enter the theatre. There is a television crew and a woman presents a bunch of flowers. In the interval the audience rises spontaneously to its feet. They turn towards Margarita. ‘King Michael,’ they shout. ‘Long live King Michael.’ The clapping and the shouting continue for several minutes. It is all very Balkan, but moving too. In Romania’s confusing aftermath, anything might happen and this must include the eventuality of Margarita’s accession to the throne. ‘I don’t know if I’d be a good queen,’ she says later. ‘I’d want to run my own things. But if it doesn’t work out there’s so much to do in Romania.’ Next day she shows me what she means. We drive to Colentina Hospital where there are 70 children dying of Aids. The children are looked after by Health Aid UK in conjunction with the Princess Margarita Foundation. Already I am impressed by the determined but deliberately modest work of the Foundation. So many charities operating in Romania have become bogged down by bureaucracy. Margarita is only prepared to concentrate on projects which she can see through to the end. ‘The world is getting Romania fatigue,’ she says. ‘People are sick of giving, yet now is precisely the time when we must sustain the work to make sure it’s not wasted. A lot of people rushed in and then abandoned the kids, which is worse than death.’ She tells me the main problem. The children here have all contracted Aids through shared needles. ‘There is a mania for injections. I’ve seen a child who had been given 500 injections for coughs, colds, anything.’ But when a child has Aids, the parents cannot cope. They have too many other children to worry about, because Ceauşescu ordered every mother should give birth to four children at least. Any woman found with traces of an abortion risked prison.

Consequently the runt was abandoned. Most of the children at Colentina have come from rural orphanages, but once they show signs of recovery there is absolutely nowhere for them to go, except back to the orphanages – ‘and certain death’. Margarita’s aim is two-fold: to sponsor and train a number of Romanian foster parents, and to build a half-way house.

The symbol of everyone’s abandonment is a pavilion in the hospital grounds intended as this half-way house. The government promised the necessary funds, but there is no money and work on the building has ceased. ‘We had a hole for a year, just a hole,’ says Anne McNicholas, of Health Aid UK. ‘Everything we want to do stops here. It’s a monument to stupidity.’

She wants to talk to Margarita about two new Portakabins which are about to be opened in her presence, to be used for training nurses. I leave the two women and walk upstairs to the children’s ward, situated in a large nineteenth-century building. There is the sound of singing from the end of the corridor where 70 children sit in a large room, waiting to be fed. One falls off a chair and cannot get up. The children are aged between one and five and most have been abandoned. This boy was found on a railway station. That girl was born in prison, where her mother remains. The newest patient is Iona. She is five with thin fingers that go on forever. Her long lashes are flecked with scurf and she sits motionless. All she has seen in her life is a cot, a green ceiling and a bottle. ‘She’s never spoken a word,’ says one of the nurses. ‘She doesn’t like being touched and that’s always sad, and it’s difficult to get eye contact. Her emotional damage makes you wonder what sort of little life she’s had. I don’t know if she knows what I’m saying, but she loves a balloon and she’ll smile at a balloon, won’t you?’ I see a three-year-old boy watching Iona. It is hard to convey the concern in his expression as she tries to support the white balloon.

‘So often you see a resigned look,’ says Karen, a nurse from Edinburgh. ‘It’s a funny emotion. It’s almost as if the children are older in experience than I am, as if so much pain has made them more mature in suffering.’ Karen leads me into a room painted in forget-me-not blue. It was opened last year, a piece of surgical tape for a ribbon, and there is a cartoon of Mickey Mouse on the wall and a card, ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ Karen says the aim of the Forget-Me-Not Room is to let the children die in comfort and peace.

In two years a hundred children have died at Colentina. ‘We know that’s what they face in the long run,’ she says, ‘but we want to give them a quality of life before they die.’ She leans over into a cot. ‘These kids – if they cry, they’ll get attention immediately, because they don’t try to vocalise pain. Mirabelle here is definitely in the last stages. Her muscles have wasted and she’s so thin. It’s an awful death.’ She looks up and in quiet, forceful voice says. ‘I am getting so sick of seeing children die.’

In the last month five have died from measles. The body is left in the cot for the hospital porter. Before he removes it, Karen lights a candle. ‘A few of us stand in a circle and I say a prayer in English and a local nurse says a prayer in Romanian and then I’ll put the blanket over the face. I think it’s very important we accept the child is dead. What you do wonder about is the child in the cot next door. They have feelings too, they have emotions.’

Karen is thinking of Gaby. She tells me what happened last year to Gaby after it was decided to return her friend Crina to an orphanage. ‘The only thing Gaby knew of a child leaving her was when they died. She mentally regressed. She didn’t want to go to the playroom. One afternoon I took her for a walk and she saw a large metal container. She said, “Is that where my friends are? Is that where Crina is?”’

AT THAT MOMENT the door bursts open and there is a short black-haired girl holding a white snowman. When Karen picks her up and tells me, ‘This is Crina’, I find it difficult to believe. It turns out Crina suffered a relapse in the orphanage where there was no proper nursing or medicine. She was duly sent back to Colentina. ‘But Colentina is a hospital, not a home,’ says Karen. This is why the pavilion needs to be finished and why Romanians must be trained to become foster parents. ‘Crina is very much the light at the end of the tunnel. We’re hoping she’ll be the first to be fostered.’

Outside, I find Margarita waiting by the soon-to-be-opened Portakabin. She holds a boy in her arms. He is called Nicu and has been here the longest. ‘When he arrived he couldn’t move. Nobody had held him before and he had never been touched. The other patients stayed out of his way, treating him like a leper. The doctor said he was brain-dead and would never do anything more than suck his thumb.’ Nicu smiles, knowing he is being talked about. Suddenly he sees Crina and squirming from Margarita’s arms he tears towards her, laughing, Margarita watches him. She says, ‘He’s now running around learning poems and shouting out car numbers, desperate to do more. That’s what you can do with a little bit of care.’

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