Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police > Status Update

"Before travelling to Michigan, we were to spend two weeks in Rome...taking an introduction course into American culture, in which we learnt that each American has a chequebook, & it doesn't matter how sad you feel when someone asks you ' how are you today?' You must always answer, 'Fine, thanks!'

"Today we received our visas from the American embassy. We must go to Bucharest for the blood tests and paperwork"

?did they need a blood test to leave Romania or to enter the USA?

Member of staff @ USE embassy: "your mother was forced to divorce, your siblings were kicked out of school, you are all under house arrest, you receive death threats on the phone in the middle of the night, & there are microphones recording everything you say? I think this is enough. Please tell your family that you will receive political asylum..."

"We are still asked (& comply with the order) to keep the curtains open at all times so the guards can see what happens in the house from the churchyard"

None of this suggests a tough, confident regime but rather a brittle, nervous one, prone to extreme over reaction - the family in this case have no contacts with the military/security/defence/politics/ or foreigners. They are part of no network.

"Last time we were all together, mum made the mayonnaise & Dad encouraged her from his chair"

-ah, men's work...

The author begins menstruating - which comes as a surprise when she has been recalling for pages how the police have stolen all the food from the house - & are squatting in the living room, while she and her grandmother are subsisting on scraps from an aunt.but I suppose that's part of the nature of a memoir, telescoped events and heightened colouration

The you get sister is at a gymnastics school and finds glass in the cafeteria food. I am unsure if this is because their father was arrested for protesting or just part of a general food aversion programme to keep the future gymnasts underweight.

"There is always news on television that having too much meat is bad for you & that a proper diet should be made mostly of pasta & beans. The most important thing the Romanian researchers found out, says the news announcer, is that you should get up from your meal slightly hungry so that you are not sluggish."
- I have also heard that the latter is a good idea if you want to achieve your maximum longevity.

It's the French teacher, a fashionable woman of 30 or so, still unmarried (which is scandalous), who breaks the Romanian flag when she hits my bottom with it because I haven't memorised the conjugations. Everybody in the class roars with laughter & for a while I am nicknamed 'stone-bum'.

At school we are punished a lot - corporal punishment. Everybody, including our parents, believes that a good bearing cultivates discipline.