Excerpt: “Red Hands”

“It had taken an earthquake for me to see Ceausescu greed as it really was, and I knew how bad these excesses would look to my countrymen.”

Writer’s introduction to the subject matter of Red Hands: As the world looks away, Romania becomes a nation overwhelmed by a myth of Romanian exceptionalism. The dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are furious when their son Valentin falls in love with Iordana Borila, a fellow member of the very privileged Nomenklatura class and the daughter of the head of the Central Committee’s opposition party. The Romanian Romeo and Juliet marry and have a child, while Romanians suffer increasing degrees of censorship, torture, and starvation.

The inevitable bloody revolution explodes in December of 1989. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are executed on December 25th after a mock trial by crowds calling for the death of all Ceausescus, including their only grandchild. Iordana chooses to turn her back on her life of luxurious excess, slips out of Bucharest in a harrowing escape, and hides out on the coast of Maine with her son–under assumed names.

Red Hands is a non-fiction novel based on 800 hours of discussion with Iordana. As much as she loathed sharing the tale of her own complicity, she could not bear her story’s erasure, allowing her homeland’s horrific fate to be repeated. She died in 2017.

I’d been in the main palace a few times, but never like this, unescorted. As we approached, I could see policemen and soldiers swarming the grounds.