When I left Romania in the summer of 1989, Italy was not, in my plan, the final destination. Formally, I was leaving as a tourist, with a visa for a trip. In reality, I was leaving with a thought that went far beyond the limits of an ordinary journey: I wanted not to return, and I hoped to reach, one way or another, the United States.

That summer was, though no one could know it with certainty, the last summer of East European communism. In Poland, Solidarność had won the partially free elections; in Hungary, the frontier with Austria was beginning to open; in Romania, the wall still seemed unshakable, but the air had become harder and harder to breathe. I was a professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest, an author of books, a man with a respectable professional biography on paper. And yet, like many around me, I felt that I was living under a glass bell from which the air had been slowly and methodically pumped out for decades.

America was for me more than a country. It was the name of a horizon. I imagined that there I might be able to continue, in a free world, what I had tried to do in Romania: to teach, to do research, to write, to work in the field of computers and software engineering. I already had a professional identity, even if it had been formed inside a closed system. I hoped that, once in the United States, this identity could be recognized and resumed within a more normal framework.

In my mind, Italy was a bridge. It was to be the place of passage between a life that had become increasingly hard to bear and another life that I imagined more dignified, freer, and perhaps more suited to what I was. Like many East Europeans in those years, I knew of the old route of refugees who had passed through Italy toward America, Canada, or Australia. The name of the camp at Latina still had, for us, an almost mythical resonance.

Latina, the gate that no longer existed

Latina was not, in the East European imagination, merely an administrative center. It was an antechamber of the West. Throughout the Cold War, people who had fled communist countries had passed through it and waited to be taken into an emigration program. For them, exile, however painful, acquired there a recognizable form: files, interviews, lists, waiting, and then departure toward a country of resettlement.

When I arrived in Rome, however, I learned that this gate no longer truly existed for my generation. I had arrived too late. The mechanism that had worked for decades was disintegrating at the very moment when I was resting my life project upon it. The Cold War was ending, and for the world this was, of course, good news. For a man already on the road, however, the end of a historical mechanism could mean the disappearance of the only path he had known.

This was the first harsh lesson of emigration: history can produce freedom on a large scale and, at the same time, close doors for individuals. I had left Romania to save myself from a world that was ending; but precisely its ending made my status as a refugee more uncertain.

The center for emigrants

In September 1989 I submitted my emigration application at the center for emigrants administered by the United States Consulate in Rome. At the counter I was told, with professional kindness and without any hint of surprise, that the interview could be scheduled only after several months. I was not the only one. In the waiting rooms and around the building there were many Romanians: professors, engineers, doctors, workers, people with different biographies, but with the same expression, a mixture of hope and unease.

There, in waiting, a small provisional society was being born. We became friends the way people become friends when they share a long uncertainty: through rumors, comparisons of files, stories about those accepted and those rejected, information gathered from counters or from those who had arrived earlier. Everyone had a version of the Americans’ criteria, of chances, of dangers, of what should be said and what should be avoided.

I had, unlike the others, support from a distance: my aunt Anca, settled in New York together with her husband, Dr. Tiberiu. She had done everything in her power: she had sent me money, advised me, written me letters of encouragement. Among her pieces of advice was the suggestion that I should go to the Jewish organizations in Rome that helped emigrants arriving from the East. Although I was not Jewish, Anca knew that these organizations had experience, contacts, and goodwill toward people fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain. I went. They received me warmly, advised me, and helped me understand the procedures. But no one could go to the consular interview in my place.

The story of Anca and Tibi deserves to be told separately: it is a story about Târgu Mureș, about a love that crossed the boundaries drawn by family and history, about Auschwitz, Cleveland, and New York, about card and board-game tables that gathered the family together, and about the emptiness left behind by a departure. It can be read here.

Rome as a waiting room

Those months had a gray color, even though they unfolded in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Rome was not, for me, a holiday city. I did not experience it as a tourist, but as a man suspended between two decisions: the one I had made, not to return, and the one others were to make, deciding whether I would be able to go farther.

I went to Caritas, filled in forms, searched for information, tried to translate my biography into a language and a context that were not mine. Behind me I had a university career, books, research, students, but all of this now had to be explained as if it were a set of disconnected pieces in a file. Before an official, a person’s past ceases to be a life and becomes a sequence of boxes to be filled in.

At the same time, among the Romanians waiting for the American visa, stories that were hard to verify circulated constantly. Some had been accepted, others were waiting, others had disappeared toward other solutions. Such stories fed hope, but also suspicion. In emigration, rumor becomes a form of psychological nourishment: it does not satisfy, but it helps you endure one more day.

The revolution that changed the files

Then, in December 1989, the world turned upside down. The Romania I had left a few months earlier was no longer, at least in appearance, the same. The fall of Ceaușescu, the hurried execution on Christmas Day, the emergence of the new power led by Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman changed not only the country’s destiny, but also the way in which we, those already in the West, could be seen.

For millions of people in Romania, the end of the dictatorship was a liberation. For those already outside the country and involved in a political emigration procedure, it was also a complication. Until then, a Romanian who had left Ceaușescu’s country could be relatively easily placed within the logic of the Cold War: anyone fleeing communism confirmed, by the very act of flight, the failure of the communist system. After December 1989, this logic became blurred.

Romania had become, in Western eyes, a country in transition. But what kind of transition was it? A real break or a change of scenery? A democratic opening or a rearrangement of the old structures? We, those who had left, did not know. Nor did the West truly know. History had not clarified our situation; it had only made it more ambiguous.

James Baker’s visit

Eventually I received the appointment for February 13, 1990. Two days earlier, on February 11, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker visited Bucharest and met Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman. For me, this coincidence of dates would later acquire a heavy significance.

The American message was cautious but open: the United States regarded the new Romania as a country that could be supported, provided that its evolution toward political pluralism and respect for human rights was confirmed. For diplomacy, this was a natural position. For me, however, it meant that Romania was beginning to be removed from the old category of dictatorships with no way out and moved into a more ambiguous category: that of countries in transition.

This was the problem. I was asking for protection and emigration at a moment when my country was beginning to be seen as politically recoverable. I had left too late to remain the typical Cold War refugee, and too early for the West to understand the disappointments and violence that would follow in post-revolutionary Romania.

The interview

The interview in Rome took place in Romanian. My interlocutor was an elderly gentleman, probably Jewish, polite but distant. The atmosphere was not hostile, but neither was it warm. At first I was pleasantly surprised that he spoke Romanian. Then I understood that this was not a sign of closeness, but of competence: he knew exactly what to ask and how to interpret the answers.

He asked me what I had done in Romania, whether I had been a Party member, whether I had known Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman. I answered simply and accurately. I had been a professor at the Polytechnic Institute. Yes, I had been a Party member, because in that world, without the red card, one could not remain a university professor. Yes, I had known Iliescu as the publishing-house director with whom I had published books. I knew Petre Roman as a colleague from the Polytechnic, in the broad and ordinary sense of the word: we greeted each other in the corridor, but we had no close relationship.

I felt that his interest focused especially on Petre Roman. Perhaps his name, suddenly important after December 1989, changed the perception of anyone who could say he had known him. But I had nothing to invent. I had not known him closely. I had not been close to him. I could not turn a simple belonging to the same university environment into a political relationship.

The interview did not last long. There was no confrontation, I was not caught in a contradiction, and nothing clear was reproached to me. Everything took place within the limits of a cold, administrative politeness. It was precisely this coldness that would make the verdict harder to bear.

The refusal

A few days later I received the answer: refused. Without explanations. Without any stated reason. A white envelope with a “no” inside it. I was not told that I had lied, I was not told that I was dangerous, I was not told that I was ineligible for a specific reason. I was told, in fact, almost nothing.

Sometimes the absence of explanation weighs more heavily than the explanation itself. A reasoned refusal can be discussed, at least contested inwardly. An unreasoned refusal remains like a door closed without a handle. You do not know whether you have been rejected for what you said, for what you had been, for what you were assumed to have been, or for something that had almost nothing to do with you.

For me, that “no” was not merely an administrative failure. It was the collapse of a projection of the future. I had imagined that in America I might continue a university career, perhaps supported by the specialized book that was to appear at Prentice Hall. It was not a baseless fantasy, but one of the few continuities I could imagine for myself. The refusal cut short that hypothesis.

Those accepted and the unavoidable question

The refusal was all the more difficult to understand because, in the months before the interview, I had seen others. At the Caritas table, stories, confessions, and rumors circulated. I knew people who had been accepted. Some did not seem at all like clear examples of victims of the regime. There was talk of people who had worked in places one did not reach without connections and compromises, of ambiguous pasts, of forms of closeness that were hard to verify.

I do not say this out of envy. I say it in order to render my state at the time. When you see others pass and you are stopped without explanation, perplexity almost inevitably turns into suspicion. If they could be accepted, why not me? What, in my file, had weighed against me?

I still cannot know. I can only suppose. Perhaps I was a poorly classified case. Too connected to the old system to be perceived as an obvious victim: a university professor, a Party member, a man who had published books and had had professional contacts with people who had meanwhile become politically important. At the same time, I was neither a representative of the new power nor a man who could return without problems to a still troubled country. I was, quite simply, between categories.

The gray zone of history

Looking back, I believe I was not refused by a great solemn act, nor by a spectacular political decision taken specifically in my case. I believe rather that I fell into a gray zone of history. I had left too late to still be judged as a typical Cold War refugee and too early for the image of post-revolutionary Romania to deteriorate again in Western eyes.

Later would come University Square, the miners’ interventions, the disappointments, and the growing suspicions toward the new power. But in February 1990, for the American administration, Romania could still seem a promising country in transition. In such a logic, my case became inconvenient. I was neither dissident enough, nor visibly persecuted enough, nor sufficiently detached from the system I had left.

This is one of the subtle injustices of great historical changes. They create new categories before people’s lives can fit clearly into them. For diplomacy there are formulas: transition, reform, opening, normalization. For the individual there are only consequences: a visa granted or refused, a life that opens or closes.

Italy ceases to be a waiting room

After the refusal, Italy gradually ceased to be merely the place where I was waiting for America. It did not happen in a single day, but February 13, 1990 was the moment when the direction of my life began to change. When the American path closed, I was forced to look more carefully at the place where I was.

Rome could no longer be just a parenthesis. It had to become, at least provisionally, reality. I had to find work, rebuild my status, learn the language, turn accidental contacts into possibilities and possibilities into concrete activity. America remained a “what if,” but my life was moving, without asking for my full consent, into Italy.

In a certain sense, the American refusal forced me to stop. Not to give up, but to stop living exclusively in relation to a distant destination. I had to begin building where I was, with the materials I had, with the people I met, with the small and imperfect chances that appeared around me.

1992 — the same man, another situation

In 1992 I did go to America. Not as an immigrant, but as an author. The book had appeared at Prentice Hall, and I had to approve the cover. I obtained the visa without difficulty, invoking the visit to my aunt Anca in New York, which was perfectly true. The American Consulate raised no objection.

I entered the United States, saw New York, met Anca, who in 1989 had done everything possible to help me from a distance. I went to the publisher’s headquarters, discussed the book cover, and drank coffee with my American editors. It was the same man, the same destination country, but another administrative status: tourist and author, not asylum seeker.

The irony was complete. The system that had closed the door when I asked to enter in order to rebuild my life opened it without hesitation when I came for a short visit, with a book in hand. For the administration, it was not a contradiction. It was merely the normal functioning of its categories. For me, however, the difference between the two situations said a great deal.

America remaining as a hypothesis

For me, America has remained since then above all a hypothesis. Not an open wound, not an obsession, but a question that sometimes returns: what would have happened if? How would my life have settled if the interview had taken place a few months earlier? If Romania had not changed exactly then? If my name and contacts had not been read in an ambiguous light?

There are no answers to such questions. There are only lives built on the roads that remain open, not on those that have closed. America remained in my biography as a door that closed politely, without explanation. Italy, instead, became the place where I had to continue.

I have not come to change completely the opinion I formed then about American foreign policy. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that the principles publicly invoked as descending from the American Constitution often submit to the interests of the moment. Certain policies of the United States — those related to immigration, national security, or military interventions abroad, sometimes justified through international principles waved about too easily — often come into conflict with international human rights standards. I do not say this as a judgment born only of personal resentment. Life went on. But that episode made me see more clearly how geopolitical decisions, formulated in the language of great principles, can pass over individual destinies without truly taking them into account.

It is important not to understand from this that I am trying, retrospectively, to devalue America because I did not get there then. This is not the story of the fox declaring the grapes sour because it cannot reach them. In 1989 and 1990, America was for me a real and desired horizon. The refusal hurt me precisely because that horizon mattered. What changed later was not the value of that world in itself, but the way in which I came to understand the relation between personal projects and the cold logic of states. I continued to admire many things in American civilization, but I could no longer confuse that admiration with trust in the innocence of its foreign policy.

Every cloud has a silver lining

And yet, as Romanians say, every bad thing may turn out for the good. If I had emigrated to the United States in 1990, perhaps I could not have returned so easily to Romania after the Revolution to see my mother. Perhaps I would not have resumed, from 1994 onward, teaching at Romanian universities. Perhaps I would not have built the life I built between Italy and Romania, between two worlds I know and understand. Nor am I sure that I would have adapted easily to the living conditions and mentality of the United States. The European spirit is probably closer to me.

This life, settled between Rome and Bucharest, between Italian professional activity and periodic returns to the Romanian university, would have been much harder to imagine from an apartment in New York. That elderly official, who wrote something down on his paper when I mentioned Petre Roman’s name, sent me, without knowing it, onto another path. Not better or worse in absolute terms — but mine.

That is why the episode at the American Consulate is not, for me, merely an administrative memory. It is one of those moments when Great History enters a small room and changes a person’s life through a single sentence. For the powerful, history expresses itself through doctrines, reports, and diplomatic gestures. For the small, it can take the form of a sentence spoken without pathos, but with merciless effect: “Your application is refused.”