The Family Hightower Read online

  You climb out of the valley and up to the plain to get to Negostina, and even though Siret’s a little closer to the border, it’s out of the valley where you start to see Ukraine coming. It’s not just the signage in both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. It’s the land itself. The hills flatten out, the wind picks up. The sky gets bigger. It’s a little glimpse of the vast steppe that covers almost half of Ukraine, the land the Soviets wanted, that Hitler was willing to kill everyone there—not just the Jews, but everyone—to get. The place that could feed Europe, and where millions starved. Negostina’s huddled down against all that vastness. It’s been there for a long time, though it feels almost temporary, a concession to the borderlands, the waves of history. The town is just a few roads, some of them not so much roads as a set of dirt tracks that wind through the town, the paths where everyone’s agreed it’s all right to drive a car. The houses there are tidy, cozy, though even a tourist can almost tell the Romanian and Ukrainian houses apart. The Romanian houses are a little breezier, the Ukrainian ones more like compounds, as if the Romanians are living for the summer while the Ukrainians are getting ready for the winter. Things are easy between them, though. There’s a bust of Taras Shevchenko, orphan and serf, political dissident and conscripted soldier, exile and blasphemer, writer and artist—the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, the voice of Ukraine’s written language; part of the blood, now, of the Ukrainian nation, though if you’ve lost your Ukrainian, you’d never know it.

  So Madalina—a Romanian finding herself a minority among Ukrainians—learns both languages. Her Romanian is perfect; her Ukrainian’s only a little off, but you’d only notice after an hour of talking to her, a slight hesitation sometimes to look for a word she has in one language but not the other. She’s very bright, and from a very early age, everyone knows it. But she’s born under Nicolae Ceausescu, like the rest of Romania, and though we in the West have heard some of the stories—a little Stalin, a little Mao, a little Kim Il Sung—maybe we’re still not paying enough attention. Not enough for Ceausescu to spook the West the way other Communists did during the Cold War. The Conducator puts some space between himself and the Soviet Union, recognizes West Germany. Richard Nixon visits him in 1969; you can find the picture of them standing together in front of a bank of microphones, waving at what might be a crowd. Nixon’s got his arm around Ceausescu’s shoulder. In 1983, when the first George Bush is vice president, he calls Ceausescu one of Europe’s good Communists.

  But if you’re living under him in Romania, it’s probably hard for you to agree. There’s the development of a massive, paranoid cult of personality, pretty much at the same speed that the personality itself loses touch with reality. There’s the repression, the terror, prosecuted through a huge secret security apparatus. The willful ruination of his people, making them go hungry to pay the country’s debts. The building of gargantuan projects—herding farmers off their land into apartment complexes with forty-watt bulbs and terrible heating—for no useful reason, except maybe control. Ceausescu turns life in Romania into a knock-down, drag-out struggle to survive; infant mortality gets bad enough that they stop counting babies until they’re a month old. Meanwhile Ceausescu goes hunting for bears. He makes hundreds of men go up into the hills and drive the bears down into a valley by hollering and firing into the air with semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. He himself sits in a treehouse with a pair of Holland & Holland .375s someone else loads for him. By the time the bears are in the valley, they’re almost shoulder to shoulder. Ceausescu can’t miss, and doesn’t. He kills twenty-four bears at once and has them dragged back to a hunting lodge to be laid out so he can be photographed with them. The forest rangers still remember it years later. They call it a massacre.

  In hindsight, his death seems almost a foregone conclusion; by the end, it’s obvious to everyone in Romania but him. A protest over the eviction of a pastor in December 1989 turns into a demonstration against Nicolae, who leaves the country to visit Iran while his security forces fire on the protesters. His power in Romania has been almost absolute since the late 1960s. This little uprising, he must think, it’s not such a big deal. On December 21, Ceausescu stages a rally, a speech. It all seems to be going so well. He speaks; people chant and clap. And then, from out of nowhere, a scream rises and won’t stop. It’s the sound of a predator coming for Nicolae, the sound of a regime dying, though even then, the dictator doesn’t understand what’s happening. His voice falters. His hand rises, feeble, shaking a little. On the balcony he’s speaking from, there’s confusion. Someone’s shooting, his wife Elena says. Earthquake? Stay calm! What’s wrong with you? It’s unclear who she’s talking to. Then Nicolae himself: Alo! Alo! Alo! Sit down and stay where you are! They don’t. On Christmas, Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu are executed in Targoviste, a hour from Bucharest, sentenced to death after a fifty-five-minute show trial and five minutes of what can’t be called deliberation. Against the wall, their hands tied behind their backs, Elena screams at her executioners while Nicolae sings from “The Internationale.” There’s no order to start shooting. Fifty rounds later, there’s an order to stop. The whole thing, except for the very beginning of the shooting, the moment of death itself, is videotaped and released to the Western news; in Romania, it’s played on national television over and over, even as pro-Ceausescu forces keep shooting more people before giving up. It looks at first like the natural end of a popular uprising. There’s that humming sense in the media that for Romania, the hell is over. But later it seems clear that it’s not that simple. Maybe under the robe of the revolt was just another coup, a chance for someone who wanted power for themselves to put a bullet in Ceausescu’s head and say it was what the people wanted. And maybe the people did want it, this tyrant’s death; though it’s hard to be sure that what comes afterward was what they had in mind to replace him. The crime. The instability. The long, hard road of recovery.

  Madalina’s twenty when they put the old regime in the ground. In December 1990, she leaves Negostina looking for work in journalism. Her father doesn’t understand why. The same people who controlled the papers under Ceausescu control them now, he says. Why would you want to work for them? She shakes her head. Things will change soon, she says to him. Don’t count on it, he answers, but sees there’s no talking her out of it. He gives her money, a long hug at the door. Good luck, my best girl. Be safe.

  She has a room in Cluj for a year, a small place near a stretch of apartment blocks. Every morning, a man with a shopping cart rattles by, filling it with cardboard. At the market that stretches along the train tracks that run into town, they’re selling scraps of wood, scraps of metal, shoe leather, salvaged pieces of fabric, the kind of stuff we’d throw away; but there, people will use them to patch their jackets, seal up a loose seam, prop up the walls in the buildings that were built in the 1980s and are already starting to crumble. Every night, Cluj’s stray dogs stage gang wars outside her window. It becomes a joke she has with the neighbors, that they’re living in a battle zone even though the revolution’s been over for years. One day, two men slaughter and butcher a pig on the sidewalk; they take what they can use and leave a huge smear of blood and offal on the ground. The dogs take sides around the carnage before nighttime, and the fighting draws the neighbors to their windows to watch. Some of them make bets, on bottles of beer, a plastic bucket. A ride to the next town, because someone knows someone who can borrow his cousin’s car, and favors are owed. They look at Madalina. What are you doing here? they say.

  Things are better in Iasi; she finds work in a used bookstore that runs a kiosk on Pietonalul Lapusneanu, a narrow tree-lined street that runs downhill from Bulevardu Independentei to Strada Arcu. It’s late April 1992, and the weather is pleasant; people are starting to get out again. Madalina’s outside all day. In the morning, two men dig a ditch down the middle of the street, lay in a drainage pipe, fill it with gravel, then cover it over with cement and leave it to dry. Seven minutes later, two Americ
an visitors on the other side of the street spy her kiosk open and cross. One of them steps right in the wet cement; son of a . . . the tourist says. Constantin Radalescu, sitting on a bench near Madalina’s kiosk, tries not to laugh, decides not to hold it in. He’s still smirking when the Americans are within earshot.

  “We’re looking for . . .” the American says in pretty bad Romanian. Then stutters, trying to find a phrase he practiced before but can’t remember now. He gives up, resorts to pantomime. Holds up a book, pretends to play an instrument while staring at it.

  “Sheet music?” Madalina says. Pronouncing the Romanian so he can learn the phrase.

  “Yes, sheet music.”

  “You should try up the street. Anticariat D. Grumăzescu.” She points to an antique store maybe ten doors up, on the other side of the street. The American peers up there and nods. Behind him, a university student running to class puts a deep footprint in the cement and hops away, cursing. A bicycle follows thirty seconds later, leaving long snaky trails.

  “Thank you,” the American says, or at least Constantin and Madalina think he does. Constantin waits until the Americans are halfway up the block.

  “Imagine that,” he says. “An American speaking Romanian.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Madalina says.

  “You ever think about going to America?”

  “No.”

  “How about Germany? When are you going there?”

  They’ve talked about this before. She holds up the book she’s had in her lap for the past few weeks, a German-language textbook.

  “As soon as I’ve mastered the language,” she says.

  Constantin laughs. He knows she’s half joking. “You don’t need to master the language to go to Germany,” he says. “You just need to be able to stumble around it like a drunk at a wedding reception.”

  “I think I should be a little better than that.”

  “Why? It’s not stopping the Americans.”

  “Nothing stops the Americans,” Madalina says.

  Constantin smiles. “Give it time.”

  By the time the Americans weave out of Anticariat D. Grumăzescu, drunk, full, and caffeinated, the cement in the middle of Pietonalul Lapusneanu is full of footprints, bicycle tracks, the deep trench left by a wheelbarrow tire. A record of every unlucky person who crossed the road that beautiful spring day.

  “You know,” Constantin says to Madalina, “you really should get out of here.”

  “But Iasi is such a nice town,” she says.

  “Sure. But people don’t teach themselves German just for the hell of it. Please tell me you have bigger plans for yourself.”

  She decides to be honest. “Journalism,” she says.

  Constantin nods. “Be seeing you,” he says. But after she leaves Iasi, a few months later, he never sees her again.

  You may be wondering why all this matters. Hang in there, reader. We’re getting there.

  Madalina’s in Berlin from 1992 to 1995. Her facility with languages applies to German, and she finds work as a translator, both writing and speaking. She gets involved with some serious journalism, too. Because she can speak both Romanian and Ukrainian—and because she’s a woman—she helps a few investigative reporters interview women who have escaped the sex trade. It’s hard to hear, hard to make them talk about it. They all thought they were coming for legitimate jobs. Someone told them they could work as maids in hotels, as housecleaners to wealthy clients in Berlin. Someone got them passports and working papers, covered the travel expenses. The women took the offers without asking a lot of questions; they couldn’t afford to. They came to Berlin by car, by plane, never realizing anything was wrong until they were led to an apartment somewhere that didn’t seem legitimate at all. Then the stories all turn horrible. The constant raping. The beatings. Some of them watched while women who tried to get out were caught and killed, by stabbing, by strangulation. Half of the survivors are sick now, so sick that they don’t want to get tested. They know what the results will be. For the first few days of this, Madalina goes home and cries. She has nightmares, a collage of the things she’s been told. It’s too easy to imagine, to picture herself or her friends from Negostina where those women are now. In the morning, she talks to the reporters. The ones who are men are ashamed of their sex. They know that if there weren’t men willing to pay for it, nothing they’re investigating—that brutal chain of illicit commerce stretching across Europe, the world—would exist. And it’s hard not to notice that it doesn’t work the other way around. There’s no male sex trade. It’s just men brutalizing women, raping and killing in the service of their pleasure, and that horror seems to reveal something: that the long conversation about how there’s no real difference between men and women is only half right. When we’re at our best, boys, maybe there’s no real difference. But at our worst?

  Then there’s the glimpses the reporters get of the organization that does the trafficking—the same shadows of movement that Kosookyy sees, that the FBI’s taking notes on. The chain of sex trafficking is one of many; there’s a web, a network, a cloud of connections. Money laundering, pirated goods, fraud, grift. Parting people from their money. Trafficking in drugs, in arms: All those guns the Soviet Union made have been sold off, and now they’re spilling across the world, to Africa, to Latin America, ending up in the hands of drug cartels, private militias, revolutionaries, child soldiers. Making the world a more dangerous place. And somewhere underneath all that, organ harvesting, the shadow of a shadow. The reporters know about the documented cases. The organ bazaars in India, local brokers paying people in shantytowns a few thousand dollars to give their kidneys to patients traveling from Oman, the United Arab Emirates, other places in the Middle East; by the early 1990s, it’s up to two thousand transplants a year. A law India passes in 1994 makes the organ bazaars illegal, but that just means that it’s taken over by organized crime syndicates. They say the trade is as thriving as ever. In 1995, it comes out that China’s government has been harvesting body parts from prisoners: kidneys, corneas, liver tissue, heart valves. Sometimes just after they execute the prisoner. Sometimes just before. The organs go to people in China with good political connections, or they’re sold somewhere in Asia, for as much as thirty grand. Chinese officials, of course, deny the whole thing, but that gets harder to do in 1998 when two Chinese citizens are caught on videotape offering to sell body parts to doctors in the United States. It’s all over the papers, but that doesn’t mean it stops.

  The stories will continue for years, multiply all over the world. In Brazil, a São Paulo police investigation reveals that the local morgue has taken several thousand pituitary glands from the bodies of poor people and sold them to American medical companies. An anatomy professor in Recife has sold inner ear parts to NASA. A couple German and Austrian medical centers get heart valves taken from the corpses of paupers in South Africa. A clot-dissolving drug has been developed from kidneys taken from dead newborns in a hospital in Colombia; it’s unclear whether the parents know, let alone consent. A South African doctor tells a researcher that there’s a broker in Southern California who delivers fresh organs, as he calls them, to anywhere in the world in thirty days; clients place their orders by email. In 2002, it’s discovered that local kidney hunters recruited three hundred men from poor rural villages in Moldova to sell their kidneys. They’re trafficked to Turkey and the United States to do the operation. The men are destitute, don’t have what you’d call proper shoes, don’t have enough to eat. Nothing left of value but themselves. And then there are the rumors, of people—children—kidnapped and murdered for their eyes, their hearts, across the southern hemisphere and into Eastern Europe. The stories are wild and terrible, hard to prove, but so persistent. There’s a market out there for bodies, parts of bodies. Parts of us. It’s capitalism taken to its logical end, our complete rendering into a commodity. A dollar amount on just how much we’re worth. The m
arket is an animal, and when you let it run free, it eats us. And Madalina, in time, reports on it herself. First she shares bylines with other reporters, but when they, and their editors, realize she can get the story herself, they hire her to do it.

  She’s written twelve pieces already, under her own name and no one else’s, for newspapers, magazines, and advocacy organizations, by the time she goes to Ukraine. She’s there because she’s been translating for a German telecommunications company that’s interested in moving into the Eastern European market. A junior executive there sees that Madalina’s more than a word machine. She’s smart, and knows things about Romania and Ukraine that he doesn’t. So when he gets the account to start business in Kiev, he says he won’t go without her. That’s how she meets Petey Hightower.

  She’s in Kureni, a restaurant overlooking the Dneiper. On the table are plates of duck leg and rabbit liver, pike and salmon. She and the junior executive are entertaining a client, a large Ukrainian man with an interest in being a conduit for German investment into Ukraine. He already has a cell phone himself—one of the sleek, new-generation ones that, for 1995, is pretty sophisticated—and he makes a show of having it, leaves it next to his plate while they’re talking, has a habit of picking it up and tapping it on the table every time he says the German word for it—Handy—which he insists on using. He’s still smarting from not being in on the Mobile TeleSystems deal that went down in 1993. He should have been there, he says. He should be raking in the cash now; and Madalina looks again at the cut of his Western European suit, his custom Italian shoes. A man who doesn’t want for much. But he wants, she thinks. He wants everything. Then she sees Petey, over the businessman’s shoulder, a young man sitting among older men in expensive suits in the VIP section. Everyone at that table’s having what even for Ukraine is a little too much vodka, and they’re all yelling at each other as drunk men do, in a mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, and English. She’s repulsed by them, but not by Petey, his lightning-blue eyes, dark hair combed back like the two photographs from the 1920s of Madalina’s relatives that her parents have on the walls of their house in Negostina. Then he sees her and stares back, stops paying attention to everything else around him. She breaks eye contact, returns to her meeting, but when it’s done and they’re leaving the place, she notices the young man excusing himself from his table, following her out the door from a distance. She pretends that she forgot something in the restaurant she has to go back for. She shakes hands with the Ukrainian businessman, who tells her it was wonderful to meet her and then says something awful to her—when we close the deal, tell the Germans to send a man. She doesn’t flinch. Why? Have I misrepresented you? Because one more remark like that and I can start. The junior executive smiles through the whole thing; he doesn’t understand a word. She nods, turns, walks back into the restaurant, and stands in the vestibule. In three seconds Petey is there, a little hazy around the edges, but still looking at her with the same intensity, as strong as it is opaque.