A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

VII AN INTERVIEW WITH THE OLDEST DOG IN BUCHAREST

So, my dear friend, you’ve come all the way from Vienna to ask why there are so many dogs on the streets of Bucharest, even in the very center? You tell me that “there are an estimated three hundred thousand stray dogs in Bucharest, a city of more than two million people, and there are up to fifty incidents of biting per day”—figures you found in the news.

Striking statistics, and true, indeed.

Forgive me for saying so, but you must be a foreigner who is here for the first time to ask about dogs. I wouldn’t say that you’re naive, just that this is what foreign visitors like you notice first: the impossible traffic situation and the stray dogs. At this time of day I bet it took you two hours to get from the airport to my home, although it shouldn’t have taken more than thirty minutes? Am I right? Of course, but Romanians are used to it. They prefer to drive their cars, even if they have to drive at the pace of a snail. Our local humans don’t notice us dogs any longer—and if they do, unlike you they seem not to consider us a problem. You see, one gets used to everything with time, even thousands of dogs in the streets of, shall we say, one of the European Union’s capitals.

I agree when you say that we cani are cohabitants with humans as long as we don’t bite them. I also agree when you say that one doesn’t see thousands of dogs roaming the streets of, say, Berlin, Paris, or, God forbid, Vienna. By the way, I hear that Vienna is a kind of paradise for dogs. Not only are its citizens not bothered by dog—forgive my expression—droppings being spread all over the pavements of that beautiful city, but ladies take them along to fine coffeehouses, and waiters bring them water. Moreover, dogs are seen sitting in ladies’ laps and eating cakes from small plates of their own—if one can believe that kind of rumor. But you’re nodding! You’ve seen it yourself? Oh, it warms my heart that such a place exists in this cruel world! However, not even there do packs of dogs roam free.

I want to say that I understand your curiosity about this subject, my dear friend. It seems that canine freedom to move in this city somehow indicates primitivism in the local humans. Seriously, though, my opinion is that the dog question does not have a simple answer. Maybe I’m too old; maybe you should ask another dog. We dogs are just like you: Some of us don’t remember; some simply don’t care; and, most certainly, we have different opinions among ourselves. You happen to be interviewing a very old dog (that is me, Karl, called Charlie) who remembers that the beginning of the whole dog story in Bucharest started during the ancien régime, and who happens to think that the displacement of dogs was the consequence of a political decision. In former times, what you habitually call Communism (although there was communism and Communism), politics used to rule our lives in a more obvious way. I mean, both our and our human cohabitants’ lives, since our destinies are intertwined.

Without wanting to be pathetic, I could say that we dogs were also victims of the totalitarian regime. I’ll tell you how.

But I am running ahead of myself. I am prone to digressions, you know. It’s my age. On the other hand, I was recommended to you precisely because of my age or, rather, for my memory, eh? How old am I, you ask? I was born during historic times, in 1990, just before the “revolution,” which makes me extremely old in dog years. Or roughly 120 in human years. No wonder my mind wanders sometimes…

Where was I? Oh yes, that we dogs in Romania were victims of Communism. I am afraid that we are no less victims of the postrevolutionary period as well—as you can witness yourself today. My people—or should I say my kind, for the sake of what is nowadays called political correctness?—tell me that life on the streets is getting bloody tough. As if I don’t see that myself, just because I don’t go out for long walks anymore. Ah, my rheumatic legs! But I see, believe you me. Just yesterday I accompanied my friend (you understand, I can’t call him “master”)—Martin is his name—to the nearby grocery. Mind you, not one of these fancy chains sporting Dutch tomatoes that don’t smell or taste of anything, like Billa or Spar, that we have everywhere now. It’s a small state-owned Alimentari that hasn’t changed for some reason. Yet. It is selling locally grown cabbage heads and half-rotten onions. And there she was, lying in front of the store, an example of our misery for all to see: a beautiful Labrador bitch waiting for someone to take pity on her and give her a piece of bread. Waiting, I say, not begging, because you could tell that she was too fine to lower herself to that level. She had sad velvet eyes that reminded me of my motherʹs… Anyway, there was another dog on a leash, tied to a fence. Although just an ugly creature of a mix breed (and I’m not being racist here, merely expressing my indignation), he looked down upon the Labrador bitch as if proud of the status indicated by the presence of his leash. A dog on a leash is in possession of something very precious nowadays: a master. For any dog in Bucharest this is no small matter, since it means he’s fed regularly, which most can’t claim. So he looked at the bitch, at her hungry expression, at the infected wound on her ear, and at her dirty golden coat, and I saw his look. It was full not of empathy but of malice. I was disgusted at his behavior. “Wait here,” I told her, and she looked at me with gratitude. Of course my friend Martin gave her a few morsels; he’s that kind of person. But that’s not a solution for stray dogs; charity never is a solution for social problems.

You see, there we are, I’m calling for a systematic solution, and that, of course, is to slip into politics! Yes, politics about dogs. They, too, are intelligent creatures; they need rules.

You tell me that you recently visited New English College and that you met a dog there who was mildly curious and decidedly not aggressive. I know him; he was adopted there, lucky sod! But at least he was pleasant. There are many cases of self-adoption or semiadoption. That’s when people feed the dogs in their neighborhood and in that way domesticate them. As you can imagine, one must adapt or perish. Just think, dogs were the very first animals to be domesticated by humans thousands of years ago. Isn’t it a paradox that today humans are doing the same again? However, this isn’t the solution either, because, as you know, my lot tends to multiply rather quickly, which is an issue I’ll take up a bit later. Suddenly there are too many dogs on the streets, and nobody can feed them. And then, as a result, we become hungry—and angry. In other words, by behaving carelessly we make our own lives more difficult.

Do you see how this issue is getting more and more complicated?

You’ve most certainly met the kind of dog who passes you by, looking indifferent or very busy, although I can’t think with what. You know, the kind who deliberately avoids even eye contact with you humans. Those wretched creatures are making an effort to maintain their pride, even if—regrettably—they know they live off humans and always have done. Nowadays, I’m sorry to say, most dogs you meet in the streets of Bucharest bark at you, and even try to bite you. As I already told you, the statistics you quoted at the beginning are true. What was that? One of your friends here had such an experience? She told you that one afternoon she was walking home in her rather posh part of town when all of a sudden a dog jumped out from under a car and bit her on the leg? And that she considers herself lucky that it wasn’t a big dog, and that the wound wasn’t serious. Hmm… your friend was indeed fortunate that a solitary dog attacked her, I’d say. Stray dogs usually operate in packs. Your friend was surely aware of that, and therefore did nothing about it, didn’t report the incident to, say, the police. What would police have done? Probably just have laughed at her and told her that they are sometimes attacked themselves. Even today Romanians rarely report such incidents to the police—or any incidents, for that matter. Who trusts the police?

I’m aware that such attacks—such stray dogs—would raise alarm in any other city. A mayor would have to come up with some solution. Not here, not in Bucharest. Not even if children are attacked, which happens more than you might believe. Let me just tell you that besides organized crime and corruption, organized dog attacks are next! Alright, alright, dogs perhaps represent a different kind of danger, but again, it all depends on how you look at it.

You now ask me, How come the same people who got rid of a dictator like Nicolai Ceausescu seem not to be able to deal with dogs? A legitimate question, indeed, and one that I expected. What didn’t occur to you is that perhaps people here don’t want to deal with dogs. In a way, you see, this whole thing is Ceausescu’s legacy, one of many, I might add. How did it all happen? How did he, of all people, let dogs free? Because, as you say, to imagine that he would let anyone free, even dogs, is quite difficult.

See, the street dogs of today are the great-great-grandchildren of the dogs set free in the mideighties, when the old part of central Bucharest was erased from the face of the earth. This is how it all began. And you must be wondering, on the other hand, why a totalitarian regime capable of such destruction, of uprooting tens of thousands of humans, couldn’t have taken radical care of dogs? I suggest that you think about something else, about people who obediently abandoned these noble creatures, their best friends (because we’re talking here about house pets) to life on the street, to the cruel struggle of survival. Doesn’t that tell you something about those who didn’t have the courage to defend their own homes?

Ah, blessed times, when you could blame Ceausescu for everything, I say in retrospect. At least we dogs weren’t responsible for our situation.

You can tell that I’m still bitter about the whole thing. Why? Because of my mother. Mimi was a great lady. We are black poodles, with a fine pedigree. However, after that event it was unimportant who was who; class differences were forsaken because street life imposed another kind of hierarchy. The strongest, not the cleverest, ruled the rest. Homo homini lupus, you say to describe such a situation. But I would rather say: canus cani homo!

I hadn’t been born when the big eviction happened—it’s called resettlement nowadays. But my mother was, and she told me about it. I had the great fortune of living with her in the same household at a tender age (until Martin came along and picked me up) and so I learned my history, which today, regrettably, has been forgotten among my lot—as well yours, I’d say. These young idiots think that it’s always been this way, that dogs are born and die in the streets and not, say, in a sixth-floor apartment. They’d have a heart attack if they went in an elevator. Funny, when you think about it; I’ve lived almost all my life in such a place. And imagine them, if you can, in the back of the car going for an excursion at the seaside! Not that many Romanians have a car, but some do. No, these poor souls think that cars are there so that they can hide from people and rain. Simple technology such as radios or TVs are unknown to them. I’d like to know what they’d think of an airplane. I flew in one once; those were the days! I still can recall the taste of a biscuit my companion got with a cup of tea and gave to me, naturally. There’s something about flying ten thousand meters above the earth looking through a window at white clouds and chewing a biscuit.

Sorry, I got carried away again.

At that time, before everything went to the dogs, as they say, we dogs were still mostly living with humans, as is the case in every normal country. In their homes and gardens, even in apartment buildings in tiny apartments. Not all of us were in equal situations, because, to paraphrase George Orwell, a writer whom I admire, “we are all equal, but some are more equal.” But all of us had a minimum, a roof over our heads and a piece of bread, a bite of… well, at least mamaliga, a kind of polenta, you know. In my long life I’ve learned that security is what matters most, both to dogs and to humans. One can witness that now, in this period of total insecurity.

And let me tell you something else—and I’m aware that I run the risk of being judged as pro-Communist, which is foolish—we all worked! It might sound strange with all these unemployed youths on the streets to whom “work” has no meaning. What do they do? Do they hunt? Do they guard homes and defend them from burglars? Do they announce visitors? Are they employed by the police to chase criminals and sniff out smuggled drugs? Do they perhaps lead blind people through the streets of Bucharest? Or do they provide love and comfort to their cohabitants? Comparatively very few do that today. No, they live in gangs, catch rats, eat rubbish, bite children, and beg. Some end up in laboratories as well. The good news for us is that there aren’t many scientific experiments going on today in Romania!

Let me go back to Mimi. My mother didn’t only witness the eviction from the old quarters, but she herself, together with thousands upon thousands, was a victim of that madness. The orders to destroy the old quarters of downtown Bucharest, like the Uranus neighborhood where she had lived, came from the court, from Ceausescu himself, as did all orders. Although one could never be sure how much Elena had to do with that grandiose, maniacal plan to build a palace pyramid called (and I can’t help being ironic here) the House of the People. They were both incredibly vain persons and not very intelligent. Perhaps because of that they believed they were omnipotent. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from some eight thousand old buildings and villas into newly built apartments, gray blocks that you can still see standing today. And they were forbidden to take us along. Just when they needed us most to comfort them for their loss, as Mimi used to lament. You see, she was sad for people, not for her own destiny. That was the kind of person she was. Mimi saw with her own eyes a bulldozer destroying her beloved family home, with its yellow facade and a small garden behind. It was a horrifying scene, a huge metal hand reaching into the house and pulling out debris, like gutting a fish. Even today it’s hard for me to recall how she described her feeling of helplessness as she watched the destruction. It caused her physical pain to see that, she said. Imagine it: The whole neighborhood, humans and dogs, standing there and watching, desperate, frightened, and powerless… without a single voice of protest.

Soon the old houses were gone, even the old scents. Now it smelled of newly dug soil, of cement and bitumen and dogs’ piss. It was dangerous to go to the building site, but they all went there at first. In disbelief, perhaps, as if expecting to wake up from a nightmare. Many dogs died of hunger right away. Without food, vaccinations, and care, they were decimated quickly. They also died from depression, especially the older dogs. Mimi was young and beautiful, and a woman from the outskirts of Bucharest took pity on her. So, I was not born in the street. She always reminded me how privileged we were.

Anyway, my mother was well connected and had a relative who lived close to the court. He told her that the Ceausescus had two pet dogs. This might surprise you, because you know that both Nicolai and Elena came from a village and that peasants have only working animals, not pets. Besides, Nicolai would never have petted a dog because of his mad fear of bacteria that made him change into a new suit every day. This was a kind of posing, though. Tito of Yugoslavia had two white poodles, not to mention the American president, the Queen of England, and other “decadent” characters. If it took pet dogs to be considered posh—so be it! Nicolai had a huge black one called Corbu (the Raven) who, they say, had the military rank of colonel and was driven around in an official car. And our queen, she had a lovely cocker spaniel, whose name escapes me now.

No, no, I’m not exaggerating! I know for sure because once, a very long time ago, our cousin Nicu was taking care of some children on vacation in a little house in the mountains close to the Ceausescus’ villa. One beautiful sunny winter’s day the children were out playing in the snow when all of a sudden he didn’t hear them anymore. There was a total silence. Nicu looked through the window and they were lying on their backs perfectly still, with a huge black dog standing over them. He rushed out and saw the two Ceausescus walking with the cocker spaniel at their heels. A Securitate officer, very elegant in his military uniform, was trailing behind them. Nicu happens to be a Doberman, so he started walking toward Corbu with a murderous look in his eyes. Just then the officer called the dog back. Apparently Corbu was trained to pull down to the ground and hover over anything that moved when the couple was around. Even while telling this story, our brave cousin would shake with rage. So yes, the Ceausescus were snobbish about the breed of their dogs and “walked them” now and then.

Nicu, who obviously belonged to a nomenclatura family close to the court, also swore he’d witnessed an interesting scene years later. He was there when it was reported to the royal couple that there were too many dogs roaming free on the streets. Elena laughed. “Thousands of dogs out on the streets? Well, this is really funny,” she allegedly said. “Why not kill them all?” she added, waiving her hand and dismissing the whole issue as a big joke. Her husband, meanwhile, didn’t even bother to listen. I wonder what Corbu or her own dog thought about those words? I bet they were as arrogant and mean as she was. That’s what you humans say about us, that we acquire the character, even the face, of a master. Although in my long life I’ve seen that the reverse can also happen.

Interestingly enough, and very unusually so, if I may add, Elena’s remark was not taken as a command but rather as just that, a remark. Someone in the court, either very clever or very cunning, decided that people in Bucharest were shaken enough after being evicted, and that it could have been dangerous to upset them even further by exterminating dogs. It must have been an experienced courtier to realize that an additional blow like that could shift the delicate balance between the oppressed and the oppressors. The totalitarian power structure resembles a house of cards. You should be very careful when you try to remove a single card, that we all know. But, oddly enough, it’s hardest to remove a card from the very top—then it’s called a coup d’état. This is exactly what happened some years later, right? In other words, there was no need to demonstrate power at that particular moment. Imagine, thousands of dogs lying dead in streets, killed with rat poison, and not enough rubbish trucks and manpower to collect them: the unbearable stink, not to mention the danger of an epidemic. Plus, there were all those foreign correspondents to consider; the whole world would have known about Ceausescu’s cruelty to animals. It was used to his cruelty to people. The Ceausescu regime was a murderous one, but it didn’t give its enemies the pleasure of seeing it demonstrated on dogs!

So we lived on.

Well, I also happen to know the story about how dogs were saved. Yes, there is some advantage to being old, if your brain doesn’t turn into pudding. It was told by a director or a manager of a rubbish removal company. Today he would be called a CEO, which is a funny title when connected with rubbish, you have to admit! One day Comrade So-and-so was called to the ministry of police (everything had to do with police in those days). Naturally, he believed that he had done something wrong. In Ceausescu’s Romania one had to consider such a possibility, because the rules were decided by one person alone—Ceausescu himself—and therefore arbitrary. And how arbitrary! For example, it was notorious that Nicolai had some digestion problems. Therefore his “morning decisions,” as they were called among courtiers, were—so to speak—softer than the afternoon or evening ones. It was also well-known (at least, it was an urban myth) that his cook was instructed to put a small amount of laxative into his meal if he needed to be “mollified” before an important decision had to be made. Servants actually had an important role in our history; if you only think how someone’s destiny depended on Ceausescu’s indigestion!

So this CEO of the rubbish removal company turns up at the ministry, his knees going weak as he enters the office of the minister. But the minister, an old pal, hugs him reassuringly. On the other hand, they would do that even before stabbing you in the back. Only after a couple of French cognacs (someone’s bribe, he was sure) does our garbage man come to his senses and realize that the minister really has summoned him for a so-called consultation. Since he knows only too well that this could be a method of handing over responsibility for a problem, he’s not completely relaxed, is he?

Finally, the minister asks him what it would take to clean the city streets of dogs. The rubbish removal man gives the question some quick, serious evaluation. He knows which direction the wind blows in, but that’s not difficult, because it always blows from the same direction. From the minister’s tone of voice he notices that “cleaning” the city of dogs is not formulated as an order (the minister could have simply said: “Kill them”), which gives him room to maneuver. “Well, it would certainly take a lot of work,” the rubbish removal man says. “Plus, it wouldn’t look nice.” He’s well aware that some decisions in his job are taken according to how nice or not nice the result would appear. Not inside the country, but to foreigners, to the enemies, and they are many. “There was a lot of negative publicity abroad because of the demolition of parts of the old town, so why risk more of it,” he adds cautiously. “Also, there are a lot of animal lovers out there who would go berserk.”

The minister looks at him without moving a muscle. “Mikhail,” he says, feeling secure enough to switch to the minister’s first name now, “all I’m saying is that it could be done, dogs could be exterminated. My men—with the help of the army, of course—could gather the carcasses and burn them within a week. But you should be aware that this operation is a sensitive one. All this would be very, very visible!” He sees the impact of his words on Mikhail’s face, which starts to crease into a grimace that looks faintly like a smile. “Perhaps it’s better to let nature take its course,” our man finally concludes, thinking of food shortages for people, never mind dogs. Upon hearing that euphemism for starvation, Mikhail’s face lights up. “Let nature take its course,” he repeats, excited, as if this banal phrase were some kind of wisdom bestowed upon him by god almighty. As he exits the office, the minister hugs the rubbish removal man once more, this time cordially. Because, you understand, the minister didn’t care at all for the destiny of our canine species. He wanted the easiest way out for himself.

The CEO was right; dogs died in silence and no bad publicity was created. Anyway, much bigger political issues soon arose. Madame Ceausescu had no time to think about dogs any longer, or of anything else, for that matter. A couple of years after this incident, her time was up. Truth be said, after being abducted, an improvised show trial was organized and they both were shot like a couple of old beggars. Ceausescu went down in history as a dictator, and most people here think that they both got what they deserved. I would have wanted to see them tried, real and proper. But that wasn’t to be. Romanians are foxy people; why complicate things with a trial? Why risk that the mad pair might say something unpleasant about others who had executed their orders and remained alive and kicking, as born-again “democrats”?

Soon the “let nature take its course” approach took another direction, one unpredicted by our garbage man, the minister, or anyone else. Living without any control, dogs started to multiply. In some two decades, from a mere few thousand, we grew to a few hundred thousand. The turbulence society was going through was called a revolution, though it would be more accurate to describe it, as I already pointed out, as a political coup. The best organized forces, such as the Securitate, the police, and the military, assumed power. Nobody cared about dogs.

It was only about a decade later, in 2001, if I remember rightly, that dogs became the center of attention. By that time we really had become visible, and a new, modern generation of Romanians who barely remembered anything about life under Communism became worried about animal rights. Imagine! Not people’s rights but animals’ rights! They pleaded for shelters, medicine, vaccination, and sterilization, all the right things, of course. In spite of homeless people, jobless people, hungry people on our streets, so many children begging that you could not walk freely, children who lived in a sewage system not even like dogs, but like underdogs. Frankly, as much as I was impressed by these dog lovers, I was puzzled as well. Then a certain animal benefactor, a French lady and former famous actress named Brigitte Bardot, who had allegedly been a great sex symbol in the ancient time of the sixties, responded to their pleas. And she still held power over the media. It was big news. She even visited Bucharest, met the mayor, and donated money. I still remember how newspapers reported it: “Ms. Bardot has agreed to donate more than $140,000 over two years for a mass sterilization and adoption program for the city’s strays, estimated to number 300,000… For his part, the mayor of Bucharest, Traian Basescu, has agreed to kill only dangerous, old, or terminally ill dogs… Mr. Basescu had earlier insisted that the dogs… must be exterminated.”

Well, what can I tell you? There was no intention to “exterminate” the dogs in the first place. Afterward, that lady’s money went to a few shelters, a few sterilizations—you can recognize these dogs by yellow tags they wear on one ear—and that was that. Most of it just disappeared, as usual.

Listen, I have a nice detail for your dog story. In the spring of 2008, city authorities cleared all the stray dogs out of the way so that foreign politicians coming to the NATO summit could pass undisturbed from the airports to the House of the People, where the summit was held. All the existing shelters were apparently filled with these dogs. You see, typically, our authorities only act when pressured from outside.

“It’s one of these bittersweet tales,” you remark. Bitter, yes, but not sweet. I remember times when Ceausescu’s police would clear all “suspicious elements” of your own species from the streets; now they are down to clearing away dogs. Strange, very strange.

No doubt, this represents progress. This is the twenty-first century; we are in the European Union. Except that all Romanians ever cared about was appearance, not a solution! I’d say that Romania hasn’t changed much in that respect. The “dog problem” hasn’t been solved, if stray dogs ever really were a problem for the people of Bucharest, which nowadays I doubt more and more. You rightly observe that not much was done about dogs except when foreigners got involved. This, however, brings us to the beginning of this conversation. You’ve listened patiently to such a long monologue from an old fool and received no real explanation. But if you look around, what else can you see besides stray dogs and clogged traffic? You see, again, old, beautiful (even if decrepit) villas being demolished to make room for new buildings of steel and glass—for foreign banks and corporations, like in Shanghai or Singapore. For new masters, who no longer rule by fear but by greed.

In the transition from Communism to capitalism, all people are unequal, but some are more unequal than others.

Stray dogs don’t fit into that new capitalist Bucharest, and mayor after mayor promises to do something about them. But he never acts. Probably there are many reasons for not acting and, moreover, for not knowing how to act. One could certainly blame it on cowboy capitalism, corrupt bureaucracies, bad politics, or disappointment with the EU. But I happen to believe that in Romania dogs are considered as much the victims both of Communism and the democratization process (or the transition period, as they call it) as your own kind. I observe that when an individual in this society feels pretty lost and helpless, he doesn’t know how to take responsibility for his own life, much less for that of the poor dogs in his neighborhood. It doesn’t help that democracy, so far, means only that those who are up stay up, like in a kind of a merry-go-round of power. It also could be a laissez-faire attitude of this society in general, which hasn’t woken up properly from the Communist slumber. Generally speaking, people still believe that there will be always someone “up there” to make a decision in their names—whom they can blame later on. If yesterday it was Communism, today it is the bureaucracy in Brussels. Leaving everything to the higher-ups, not taking the initiative, not willingly acting in the common interest—this, in my modest dog’s opinion, is really what our problem is. What do you do when there’s not even an idea of a common interest, a common good? In a society like ours it needs to be created. The lack of it means that one day we’ll wake up to a decision of someone high up that dogs finally have to go. In the name of the EU we’ll be swept away for good. Then there will be a short outrage; the party in charge will perhaps lose a few votes. So what?, one may think. But, permit me to say these harsh words: The question is, Who will be next? Gypsies, perhaps? Jews? And why not people with glasses?

Sorry, sorry. As I said, I tend to get carried away. Look at me, an old dog giving speeches! As you can see, in Romania even dogs are political animals.

You could almost take this whole canine story as a metaphor for humans in Romania: victimized, abandoned, poor, hungry for everything, totally disillusioned. But this would be a bad metaphor, because, unlike humans, dogs won’t get together and vote for someone like Napoleon (I’m referring to Animal Farm, George Orwell’s ingenious parable) or go and start a war. And here I would like to leave you, my friend, to ponder over the frustrations that lead to populism—and to wait and see what these newly declassed masses will come up with, who will manipulate them and how.

But before we part, let me tell you just one more story. Have you heard of the “Baghdad Pups”? No? Of course not, this is a typical American venture. It’s about stray dogs in Afghanistan and in Iraq and about American soldiers who befriended them. Boys wanted to take their friends back with them to the United States, but it proved to be against the law. However, a certain navy lieutenant was so in love with his dog, Cinnamon (what an idiotic name for a dog, I must say!), that he managed to do the impossible. He gave Cinnamon to a contractor, who took him to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. But the man could not put the dog on a civilian flight to the United States, so he abandoned Cinnamon at the airport. An airline employee gave the pup to a local family. Then the lieutenant’s energetic sister stepped in and, with the help of some organization or other, located the lost dog. Now Cinnamon lives happily ever after in Maryland. Americans being Americans, they immediately realized that there are more soldiers who would like to do the same, so they organized “Operation Baghdad Pups.” Their newspapers report that so far more than thirty pet formerly stray dogs have been brought over—don’t ask how! The point is that Americans do things by themselves. They don’t wait and despair.

Now, what shocked me are the costs of such rescue trips, between four thousand and six thousand dollars per dog. This gave me an idea. True, unfortunately Romania is not occupied by American soldiers. But why shouldn’t we take action ourselves and, under the slogan “Exportation, not extermination” (I imagine this could catch media attention), offer our dogs for adoption abroad? I’m sure that there are people willing to take them; costs would be one third of the American costs, if not less. Remember how Westerners were crazy about adopting our children from orphanages? Not that dogs are as popular as white orphans, but one could at least try. For example, what if adoption included a free long weekend in Bucharest with your future pet? Of course, someone is bound to label this “dog tourism,” but I think it is better and more decent than, for example, sex tourism. The more I think about the idea, the more I like it. But being an old and experienced dog, I suspect that Romanians would rather do real business by selling dogs to the Koreans as meat! In fact, I’m surprised that no one has already had that idea. The state would probably subsidize it, and some smart-ass with good connections would get rich over our dead bodies. And then he’d launch himself head-on into politics, including in his program the defense of animal rights! None of that would surprise me—especially because I heard rumors that something similar happened in the Chinatown of Budapest. But what’s that you say? I see your face; you’re smiling and shrugging your shoulders. You must think I’m mad.

Hey, relax. After all, I’m only a dog!