Matasa (preview)

Dr.Radu Iftimovici

LASTING FOOTSTEPS A Memoir of Claude Mătasă

Adapted and translated from Romanian by Nicolae Melinescu, PhD

2011

Dr.Radu Iftimovici LASTING FOOTSTEPS. A Memoir of Claude Mătasă

The CIP is to be found at the Romanian National Library.

ISBN 978-606-8330-10-5

CA Publishing ADDRESS: B-dul Eroilor 34/3, Cluj-Napoca, Romania PHONE: +40 364-807.636 EMAIL: office@ca-publishing.ro WEB: www.ca-publishing.ro

My Dear Friend, With a broken heart, I offer you this book.

I hope it will challenge you to read it.

You must have met him or might have heard of him.

To me, he was a wonderful husband.

He was an example to be followed, in the community he left behind.

His steadfastness, his love of science and fine arts, his cherished passion for work to reach success helped him fulfill even the most daring dreams.

I shared a life with him that I had not even imagined May God rest his soul!

Netuţa Mătasă

Dr. Radu Iftimovici Member of the Academy of Medicine, Winner of the Kalinga UNESCO award

LASTING FOOTSTEPS A memoir of Claude G. Mătasă University Professor Doctor Romania’s Honorary General Consul to Florida

Motto: Everything valuable in the human society depends on the development opportunity granted to each individual. All that is lofty and inspirational has been created by persons who can work within their aspirations Albert Einstein

A preface by the victim of the present incrimination, disguised as a biography Unlike his brothers Constantin and Ion Mătasă, my father did not write books. He preferred to ad note them. Consequently, whatever he committed to paper was very much quoted and enjoyed. I have built my life on his experience as I have known my own life a lot better than others have. That is why I took the liberty to intervene wherever I felt that my remarks could eliminate possible misunderstandings of facts from this book. My final touches did not diminish the author’s narration; they outline it and try to bring it down to Earth.

Book writing must be part of the family tradition. A quarter of German extraction and another of French origins, part marquis and another a shepherd’s offspring, a refugee “fallen in disgrace,” machine-gunned by Russian soldiers, rejected in the “Mănăstirea Dealul” secondary school because of my French mother, I attended a confessional boarding school and I was accepted to the University by mistake. Attracted by the Romanian capital, I became a good sportsman, a globetrotter, a translator, a frustrated music lover. A former political prisoner, pronounced dead at a certain point, and thrown out of the University, I was rehabilitated but monitored by the communist secret police only to be congratulated by one of the regime’s ministers, soon before I was labeled “an enemy of the people”.

Life went on and I reached the position of head of research department in a communist factory for explosives. Gradually I became an inventor and I registered my inventions in many foreign countries.

I was still living in the communist Romania when my books were published in France and the US. Always in love, unsteady in my passion, I read in front of university undergraduates but I was forbidden to talk to them. I co-authored and I collaborated with a minister-professor only to be expelled from the university environment once more. Holder of two doctorate degrees, an Austrian and an American citizen, and more Romanian at heart than many others who were only claiming it, I returned as a university professor and I lectured both in my homeland and in the US. A publisher, an editor, a

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founding member of the Romanian American Academy and of the World Council of Romanians, I became honorary professor in medicine, chemistry and metallurgy. I fought a European corporation and I contributed to top publications in my domain as consultant and reviewer. I was awarded the “Ronald Reagan Golden Medal,” and I acted as Romania’s honorary consul in Florida.

I stop here and I let the chronicler tell his story.

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PART

I ET IN ARCADIA EGO I had to travel over a hundred miles eastward to see my old friend in Key Largo.

After more than eight years, I was eager to meet once more Claude Mătasă, a Doctor in engineering, the Honorary Consul of Romania and a renowned university professor. Someone who found out that we had known each other previously asked Claude apprehensively “Are you childhood buddies?” Masked in very shrewd and humorous words the reply was something like “From childhood you say? No, not yet, but we’ll work on it, that I can promise.”

I was familiar with his summer retreat, richly surrounded by lush tropical vegetation. I myself had worked to improve its look and I painted the outside walls. I had also, drawn a multicolor belt of shells and water snails to make it resemble more a seaside abode.

We had just returned from fishing. Evening was covering the day of 17 January 2004 in its glorious purple mantle. Dinner was being prepared and all I could do was to cast furtive glances either towards the ocean waters turning into a constant deeper blue, or to

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the red and white flowers cascading down the walls of the surrounding houses.

Quite unexpectedly, Ipi, otherwise Professor Claudiu, or Claude Mătasă, started one of his famous games, a sort of “Guess the right answer.” Out of the blue, he would pop up a question and the members of the congregation had to give what they deemed to be the accurate reply. My partner was Nick Dima, a well-known radio host at “The Voice of America.” Among the usual chatter someone had hummed incidentally the tune of Lili Marleen, a hit song for the German soldiers in the 1940s.

It did not take long to Ipi to challenge us all: ten dollars for the one who could name the film or the radio station that had promoted the song.

I declared loud and clear that Zarah Lander was the entertainer who had picked out an old German ballad telling the story of a soldier who could see with his mind’s eyes his sweetheart waiting for him under a lamppost where they used to meet before he went to war.

Ipi had a different lead. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, had disliked the song all together. Therefore, it was discarded as old an ineffective for soldiers’ morale. Almost forgotten, the song was revived by Marlene Dietrich, the German American fascinating diva, when she starred in “The Blue Angel.” When several German listeners caught up the tune, the song became increasingly popular among the German soldiers fighting the Second World War. Lili Marleen embodied the romantic-Teutonic woman fighter.

We rushed to the Internet to check the answer. Ipi’s answer was the right one and I had to admit that I supported mine with too much confidence. I was aware that he would not forgive me for that.

He enjoyed to catch me off handed, to demolish stone by stone the pedestal of my own memorial that I was vainly trying to erect for myself, just like our legendary church builder, Manole.

He proved his claim with accuracy in a very elegant and considered manner. He employed the detached attitude of a Jesuit friar. Eyes to the sky and a gentle smile on his lips, was the posture he preferred to a blunt reprisal. He told us a sort of a fable, a brief, meaningful story that could prove by itself the value of scientific accuracy. “My dear friend,” he started, “I think it was in 1954 when I graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Chemistry of the

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Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest. I was assigned to work in the ‘Tanant Factory’ of Orăştie. Professor Alexandru Cişman, a distinguished physicist, trained by Ştefan Procopiu, who had tutored me during my studies in Timişoara, was distressed by my new job.

He liked my work and he told me: ‘my dear Mătasă, you cannot burry yourself in that damn factory. It would be a pity and a waste.

You have many abilities and I am sure you will make a good researcher.’ ‘I’m sorry, Professor’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid you are not aware of my...’ ‘Oh, come on, I know you had some troubles to go through, that you’ve been a political prisoner and all that. Still, you are a fine young man and, as I said, it would be a sad waste to get lost on the way. I shall recommend you to one of my good friends, professor Ion Ursu who is the Director of the Institute for Physics in Măgurele…’ I wonder if you could imagine what that meant to me,” continued Ipi, “what a brilliant chance I was being given by my former professor. However, the dream lasted only for a second. I, in Măgurele, a former political prisoner? As if reading my mind, professor Cişman told me that he would consult with the right persons and let me know the outcome in due time. Shortly afterwards he told me that I was to pose at my new job as a sophisticated scholar in a domain quite unknown to many: the ultra pure substances. Like everybody else, I knew next to nothing on the matter. I rushed to the chemical engineers’ Guru, professor Constantin Neniţescu, who told me: ‘I don’t know anything on the subject. But I can direct you where to search.’ It took me two weeks of intense study to fill in the gaps in inorganic chemistry and I had to address another of my former professors, Tudor Ionescu. Now, this man was one of the little darlings of the new Communist regime, he had been appointed Director of the Institute for Food Chemistry, and he chaired several committees and councils. He was also known as the ‘Impostor’ (he had forged the signature of a major Socialist leader by which his party accepted to merge with the Communists, the birth certificate of the Romanian Workers’ Party). When he met me, he gave me much nonsense with a flamboyant, knowledgeable posture that came into sharp contrast with the bibliography I had read on the subject. It was then that I realized the huge difference between Neniţescu, a genuine researcher, who was brave enough to say ‘I don’t know,’ and the improvised scholar pretending to be an expert on everything and anything. You may not believe it, my dear

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Radu, but it was then when a question hit me in the face: what did I really want to become? Someone like the great but modest Neniţescu or some boastful ignominious apparatchik like Tudor Ionescu? That was all I wanted to say,” my friend concluded.

Childhood and Family

Will you go to Personnel, please, Comrade le Marquis In the early 1950s, I had met a personnel apparatchik with the name of Petra. She was the queen without tiara of a research institute of the Romanian Academy. Her luxurious study was ornate with a large slogan reading: “Cadres decide everything! Stalin.” In 1951, and some time afterwards, major decisions were taken following such samples from the profound thinking of a peoples’ wise leader.

Suppose that the above-mentioned comrade found a folder marked Claudiu Mătasă on her desk one day. She would start reading it carefully, moving her lips, and following each and every line with her finger like a well trained intellectual. Alas, what did she see? A petty engineer requested no less than a job in her institute! A scoundrel descended from a family that had produced a number of priests, and very likely had migrated from Transylvania in the XVIIth century to flee the Hungarian forced assimilation! A family of churchmen did not secure a “sound background,” by the communist standards. In the case of his mother’s side, things were a lot worse.

His mother had been the offspring of an old German family from Riga. The roots of the family mingle with the Teutonic knights and their conquest of Latvia in 1237. Closer to our days, Paula Wolf (1875-1941) met and married André Aurand while both taught French at the university mission in Riga. Three children resulted from their union: a boy, Marcel Aurand, and two nice, quiet girls, Mireille and Marguerite. The outbreak of the First World War caught

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them in Sankt Petersburg. The mother and the children managed to repatriate thanks to their French passports. In the father’s case, things proved a lot more dramatic but at the end of two years of travels, partly under the shield of the Russian white army he succseeded to join the rest of the family in Toulon, his native city.

Even in France, life was tough for a teacher’s family. Paula told her husband that during their long trip from Sankt Petersburg to France, they had crossed a picturesque country, with decent people where French was quite common among intellectuals and where native French teachers were more than welcome.

Soon they took a train to Romania, where professor Aurand could employ his former experience of teaching French to nonnative speakers.

They landed in Petroşani, a mining town recently freed from the Austro-Hungarian occupation. At that time, there were no large differences in wages between Romania and the Western European countries.

The local elite incorporating intellectuals and rich local tradesmen congregated in a sort of an extended family. They all lived in nice mansions with large rooms, surrounded by beautiful gardens. Roses, shady trees and vines made life pleasant dotted with mutual visits, card games sessions and trips to the near mountains.

Soon, the two girls in the Aurand family found their match and got married. Margueritte met a young lawyer form Eastern Romania, Gheorghe Mătasă, who was the circuit judge. What made him the most eligible bachelor was his resemblance to Rudolf Valentino, the 1920s’ Hollywood sacred monster.

Gheorghe’s father, Claudiu’s grandfather, Dumitru Mătasă had been, alas!, a priest. And not a regular one, for that matter! He was an ardent researcher of the past, a collector of old icons, rare books and manuscripts. His brother, Constantin, also a priest (1878-1972) proved, in time, to be one of the most valuable archeologists in Romania, with more than 40 archeological sites to his credit. He became a close friend of the great historian Nicolae Iorga who jocularly used to say, “While all the priests of the country want to dig me in, priest Mătasă digs me out.”

Years later, in 1947 when I, some classmates, few girls from “Oltea Doamna” college of Oradea, and Ipi, a nephew by his father’s brother to this bishop archeologist visited the history museum of

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Deva, Ipi kept pelting Octavian Floca, a doctor in history with all sorts of questions about Father Mătasă and his discoveries. To my classmates and me, his curiosity looked very much like one of his customary show-offs. To our great amazement, doctor Floca, a decent rather stiff historian finally replied, “It is true that Father Mătasă is a great archeologist but he did not study the Roman civilization in Dacia. He focused his research on the Neolithic in the northern area and he made some important discoveries from the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture.” Ipi turned triumphantly towards us and exulted a bombastic “Eh!?” meaning “now you see, my dear stupid friends, what a great uncle I have!”

No wonder we had not taken him seriously. He was of a confusing behavior. He would tell a joke with the seriousness of a monk preaching the Ten Commandments. He usually was taken for his word only to be discovered as a mischievous taleteller shortly afterwards.

His father, Gheorghe was the youngest of Dumitru Mătasă’s boys.

Gheorghe graduated the Faculty of Law in Iassy. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the future fascist leader, was his bench mate. As I have already mentioned, the presence of a Rudolf Valentino look-alike was a sensation in the small town of Petroşani. Numerous young ladies and several merry young widows looked apprehensively at the challenging young judge. Yet he preferred the French Marguerite Aurand. They got married in 1929. A year later on the 1st of April 1930 Claudiu Mătasă came into this world, the one later known as Ipi. Those were difficult times of the great economic crisis. The judge, like everybody else, had to face the hardships of the period, and keep up appearances.

The Aurand family could not understand, less accept a downgraded social status. The French professor of former Sankt Petersburg elite noticed the meager savings his daughter had to make to keep the wolf at the door. Her father might have very likely said, “Mais, ma chère, tu n’a épousée qu’un simple fonctionnaire” (my dear, you’ve only married a simple public officer”). Such remarks resounded painfully into his daughter’s soul. Therefore, it is not surprising that she may have told her husband, “darling, why don’t you try to do something about it?”

Yes, but what exactly? One easy way out could have been to submit to the daily temptations and to be biased in one trial or

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another favoring those rich enough to buy his professional honesty.

That was beyond the character and principles of the late Ceahlău bishop’s son.

Moreover, he was renowned for the fact that if someone ventured to buy him over, that person was sure to be regarded as a confessed criminal.

Let us return to Claude’s grandfather on his mother’s side, monsieur Aurand, who was expecting eagerly the birth of his grandson or granddaughter. A common belief at that time was that a French environment could only influence for the better the development of the unborn child. Henceforth, he helped the newlywed to travel to those places that elated the spirit and the mind, like Florence, for instance, a place richly populated with monuments and memorials. Their image would have built the sound body of the young human being. Florence had always been a favored art city in the Aurand family. Even before her marriage, Marguerite had spent long holidays and research tours in this jewel of Toscana.

It was here that she had learned English, which helped her later in life to teach Dickens’ language in Romania.

Quite wickedly, my friend stated that madam Aurand Mătasă’s admiration for Michelangelo’s perfect David was lost on himself who resembled, in his own words, more the fat toad of the Boboli gardens. (My God, that is a perverted self-denigration of an accomplished man who always expected others to contradict him in such baseless assumptions.)

I asked him which the dearest memories of his childhood were.

He told me that he could count just a few. Among them, that of his grandfather was the most vivid.

Professor André Aurand was a passionate researcher of natural history. A man who loved the very touch of a book taken out gently from the shelf in his own library, he had never ventured further than the Retezat and Parâng mountains surrounding the town of Petroşani. Monsieur Aurand was a true pater familias who cherished the observance of strict conventions. At lunch, at twelve o’clock sharp nobody touched the food before him. Yet his younger grandson posed a real problem. He had no appetite. If, by any chance he seemed to be hungry, that turned into a real family event.

On one such a rare occasion, the little darling stretched his tiny hand across the table and snatched a piece of stake.

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What a catastrophic mistake! Grandfather had not started yet.

Junior had broken the rule. For such a lack of table manners grandfather slapped the child’s wrist with the broad blade of a knife.

It was an outrageous reaction, which generated a wide protest from the rest of the family. His mother and grandmother tried to appease the poor victim. They both thought that a child who so seldom was tempted to eat should not be discouraged during the rare moments when he felt the urge to help himself. The hurt party went to his room while his grandfather was left to face the reproachful rest of the family, defending himself under the slogan that a future “monsieur” must learn to follow the rules from an early age.

Once in his room, the young culprit faced an archenemy of isolation, hunger. He could not stoop to ask for food because he had to keep up his honor. Fortunately, fate played on his side under the name and appearance of Iulishka, the Hungarian maid of the family.

Impressed by the drama played under her eyes, she consented to take secretly some goodies to the hungry yet proud rebel. The very young Claude Mătasă learned the lesson that would turn very useful in adult life, “gardes les apparences,” keep up appearances.

Another incident shocked the surrounding escort of the young prince. One day a mourning crowd passed in the street, following a hearse. Ipi, not more than four years old, stood at the window. He had never experienced a personal drama and started to laugh at the sight of the dark windowed cart where a man had been placed in a wooden box surrounded by wreaths of flowers. His hearty, loud and innocent laughter took the mourners by surprise and soon they joined him with their own merriment.

Another event that happened in Petroşani, prefaced somehow what was going to happen in Romania after the war. The young and dedicated attorney Gheorghe Mătasă defended successfully a group of colliers arrested after joining a strike. He even managed the great performance to have them acquitted, that meant a great lot for himself, and for those he had saved. However, once the communists came to power after the war it was his turn, a “bourgeois” outcast, to go to the trade unions leaders whom he had kept away from prison.

To his amazement, he could not find any of them. After a while, he discovered that those who had fought for the cause of the pauper miners in the 1930s finally ended in the communist prisons…

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A few years later, the little dear tyrant of the family turned into the small terrorist of the house. He noticed that certain breakable porcelain were precious to his parents (usually Rosenthal plates, dishes, cups and trinkets) and he would employ them as blackmailing chips. He used to ask for a certain forbidden thing. If he was not indulged, he simply dropped that frail porcelain that smashed into pieces. Any attempt to prevent the accident by taking that object form his hands would summon his warnings “going down, going down,” with a similar result.

His performance in the primary school was anything but remarkable, except that one day a fellow lawyer from his father’s office saw Ipi through the open windows of the classroom teaching his own classmates who were listening mesmerized. Fact is that he had read a whole book on the subject and kept on interrupting the teacher. Obviously disturbed by such behavior the teacher asked his distracting student to prove his own knowledge and to go on with the presentation of the subject, hoping to ridicule him in front of the class. But, that did not happen.

He always liked history and he won the entire consideration and respect of his family when he made a brilliant, detailed story of the War of the Two Roses in front of the secondary school staff and students at Piatra Neamţ. All those present concluded that he should become a successful attorney.

Admittance to the “Moise Nicoară” secondary school of Arad School head master Spinanţiu had sized him up instantly and he used to tease him with remarks like “good stuff, wrong package,” “where have you escaped from?,” or “you look like someone dropping from the gallows.” The experienced teacher sensed the young man’s lack of interest in his own tenure. Unfortunately, Ipi never managed to drop this sort of disinterest in clothing and grooming himself. However, the head master declared the rebel dropped from the gallows “a honor student,” not for his performance but as a consequence of an arrangement with his father. Such a grade allowed him to apply for the “Mănăstirea

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Dealul” military school, the best in the country. He passed all the admittance tests brilliantly and yet he was rejected because he was not “all Romanian” (his quarter French origins mattered a lot in the beginning of the Second World War).

Like so many youngsters of his time, Ipi was swept away by the new literary productions of the adventure books. He immersed himself in the Dox submarine stories and imagined himself one of the heroic characters. That was quite natural for a teenager of 14 or 15, attending the secondary school “Moise Nicoară” from Arad. He even decided to build his strength and went to a famous boxer, Covaci who used to perform a sort of popular street fights with another famous character, wrestler Titi Boldescu throughout the country. The “trainer” welcomed him smiling, listened to his desire to learn how to fight and hit him unexpectedly in the face with his bare fist. Without a word he then stood up, turned his back to his victim fallen to the ground and went to attend to his business.

Ipi pulled himself together, washed his bloodied face and rushed to his father asking him to arrest the aggressor. The experienced judge wanted to know first what his business had been with such a violent man. And when he got the answer he just remarked that his son had got what he had gone after.

That was no consolation and Ipi tried to find some allies. One of those who heard his story said, “Well, didn’t you know that this is the famous ‘Covaci test’? The moody boxer wants to produce real fighters to make him proud. Whoever returns after such a ‘test’ is worth his time.”

The head of the “Black Hand” gang banned from all secondary schools in the country The district attorney’s son gave up fighting and tried to imitate the life and adventures of the famous Zorro by leading a gang, which he called “The Black Hand.”

Actually, that was not the right time for such deeds, soon after the end of the war (1945, 1946). The teenage members of the gang discovered a real treasure inside the Arad citadel, a fortress erected

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during Maria Theresa’s reign. The German army had left behind a heap of ammunition and weapons in its hasty retreat.

After a while, when the Soviets had pushed the front line into Hungary, the military found the arms cache frm the citadel and placed guards to all the entrances, ordered to open fire without warning on anyone attempting to come close to the precinct. But that was a small challenge for the “Black Hand” gang members who knew countless secret ways-in and tunnels between different storage chambers. When the Soviets noticed that weapons disappeared mysteriously, they became very suspicious and ordered the guards to fire in the air every now and then to scare away possible thieves. The daring young men would wait quietly for the fires to die and then would sneak into the place of their destination. So, more and more, submachine guns, revolvers and the like went on disappearing and the Soviet guards substituted their random fires with sustained salvos of heavy machine guns. Ipi soon found himself in the middle of automatic crossfire. Instantly he hit the ground and saved his life only because the soldier aimed his gun at the height of an adult individual.

Yet, that was a very dangerous game from another perspective.

To prove their sense of balance children used to play hop Scotch and they came to separate the squares on the ground with infantry mines.

Some of the weapons there were unique and unknown. To his delight, one of the gang members discovered a new type of hand sprinkler, quite fit for watering the flowers in the school garden.

When put to use the thing proved to be a dangerous flamethrower.

Luckily, those attending the test got away with a good scare and some lightly burned clothes.

For the members of the notorious “Black Hand” gang there was another looming danger: a very severe legislation that sentenced to prison and even death those hiding weapons. The Russians feared a popular revolt behind the front line. Nevertheless, the idea of a gang leader armed to the teeth flattered Ipi enormously.

One day his mother set to a thorough clean of the apartment, which covered the entire ground floor of the building on Moise Nicoară Street, no. 17. While sweeping Ipi’s room, the respectable district attorney’s wife discovered that part of the hard wood floor could move and when she took it out she almost had a heart attack.

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She called instantly her husband to watch the arsenal under their very feet. The poor man turned paler than death itself. He finally managed to pull himself together, told his wife not to utter a word about it to anyone. Ipi was immediately sent out on a holiday in the country and judge Gheorghe Mătasă risked everything, placed all the weaponry into two large suitcases and threw them in the Mureş river in the middle of the night.

Imagine what might have happened if a Soviet patrol had stopped him and summoned to open the suitcases? I doubt that his position of district attorney would have saved him from very dangerous consequences.

“The Black Hand” gang itself was soon to be discovered right in the classroom, of all possible places. One of the members, Voicu Mager was so proud of his Mauser pistol from his pocket that he pulled the trigger in the middle of a history class when the revisited Romanian history, Soviet style, was boring him to death. The booming sound brought a number of people into the classroom, including the school headmaster. Fortunately, no one was hurt and the bullet hit the floor. However, all the gang members made full confessions during the official inquiry and they identified the district attorney’s son as their mighty leader. A huge scandal could not be avoided and he culprit had to bear the consequences while his father listened to the sentence with a bowed head: his son was banned from all secondary schools in the country. Luckily, at that time, the communist secret police had not come to work in full force and no criminal prosecution followed the school sanctions.

What was the undesirable Claude Mătasă to do under the circumstances? His parents could not accept that their son would be left without formal education. Had he applied for the position of a trash man that might have helped him later on to become a communist leader with a “sound” background? At the end of countless arrangements, the unfortunate father of a rebellious son received some mercy. His offspring could continue his studies in one of the most severe Greek-catholic secondary schools in the country at Beiuş or Blaj. The former was selected, as his father was again district attorney in Oradea following northern Transylvania’s return to the motherland at the end of the war.

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