An interview with Romanian 88-year old architect and writer Sanda Budis about the freedom found in being old and the courage to confront a mad history.

Not even movies or sensational novels would dare to tell a story where a woman gets married and in less than 36 hours after her wedding, her father is taken into custody and sent to prison by the secret police, and then her parents in law, which she didn’t yet meet, are sent to a labor camp, hundreds of km away. Such a story would seem excessive and hard to believe.

But this is what actually happened to Sanda Budis, a now 88-year old Romanian architect, and it’s just a tiny part of the unbelievable experiences she went through during her life.

And then at 85, Sanda sat down and started writing a book about her life called “The father’s girl and the daughter’s mother”- not exactly what you’d expect of an octogenarian. But Sanda has never been an ordinary person, even though she says the opposite about herself. “My story is that of an average person, who has lived through a convoluted History, lost everything many, many times and had to start everything from scratch three times, with a courage I wish you’d also have.”

Sanda Budis now lives in Switzerland, where she moved when she was 47, in 1973, “with 10 dollars in her pockets”, but she regularly comes to Bucharest to visit her daughter, the author and political and civic activist Sandra Pralong.

I meet her in a spacious, light-filled apartment, and I am simply taken by surprise about how funny and direct Sanda Budis is. She is a woman in her 80s, but there is no single detail that escapes her. She notices that the necklace I’m wearing is broken and she says, “let me fix it.” When I try to protest, we can leave it for later, she immediately reacts. “We need to take this load from our minds, dear, right now. Hello! This is what I taught Sanda, never load yourself with a bag of problems!”

The freedom

“Last year I turned 85 and I celebrated with some 50 friends: a few old ladies still alive, like me and a lot of young people, my daughter Sandra’s friends, but mine also. To everyone’s surprise, I arrived wearing some cabaret-like 10 cm high heels and I blew everyone’s mind: I was a vamp- a surprise not only for my daughter Sandra, but also for me. While looking for my flats I found the high heels and because all my life I’ve been doing crazy things, I thought- this is the time,” Sanda writes in her book.

Being old gives you an extraordinary freedom, she tells me. “You don’t care about anything anymore. You don’t have to be beautiful, smart, elegant, you don’t have to be anything anymore.” Then she adds laughing. “I’m a walking corpse. That’s what I told a group of 30 young girls I met some days ago. The all looked at me a bit dazed and scared. I like to laugh, to play, to confuse, especially those who give themselves such importance. And I like to shock Romanians. They are so scared and I’m the opposite.”

Old age creeps with helplessness, Sanda writes. You can’t open a jar anymore, you can’t run to catch the bus and you climb a hill only with difficulty. But she has developed two new weapons, surprise and scream, that are legitimate to use against absurd behaviours, she says.

Take the car episode, for example. Sanda is 82 and she is peacefully driving her little Matiz on Coposu boulevard when a big car illegally crosses her way. Sanda uses the car horn but the big car, now in front of her, teases her with sudden stops. When the two cars stop at the traffic light, “I got off my car, and surprise! I got next to him and I slapped his fat arm resting on the car door and back to my car, where I barricaded myself and chased away.”

God gave her a great deal of courage, she says. “I’ve been brave all my life, maybe a little bit unconscious, ever since I was a little kid. I was riding horses, cows, everything I could find. Scared of them? Not a single bit! Jumping fences, getting in everywhere. I was a cured boy.”

The father’s daughter
But Sanda has been responsible all her life. As a kid, only on holidays was she freely roaming around. In the rest of the time, at school, or in the family, she was quiet and obedient. “I never liked school. NEVER. I studied because I was told to, and because my parents, especially my father, took care of me.” Her father Alexandru Budis, a general in the Army, was a warm and committed person, with a great sense of humor. Her mother, a painter, came from an aristocratic family and was very beautiful and well educated. Besides painting very well, she was also great at playing the piano, playing tennis, riding horses. “A bloody Soviet military attache once told my mother, ‘you must be a great spy’. It’s not possible that such a special woman is married only to a colonel.”

On August 23, 1944, five days after Sanda turned 18,  and as the Red Army was penetrating the Moldavian front, the Romanian Army declared loyalty to the Allies and declared war on Germany, but the Soviet Union signed the armistice only on September 12, 1944. During the three weeks in between, they took about 130,000 prisoners, who were sent to the Soviet Union for work. Sanda’s father was among them.

When her father returned home after four years in captivity, fearing the worse for his daughter and wife, he discovered that Sanda’s mother took the helm and both of them were doing pretty well. After the communists installed, the mother was kicked out of the Artists’ Union in 1945, because of her “unhealthy origin”, was not allowed to have private exhibitions anymore, but  she did not give up, quite the contrary. She changed her profession and started painting churches which helped them survive.

The father’s sufferings did not come to an end after his return home in 1948. On April 28, 1952, some years after Sanda finished university and started working as an architect, and the day after she married in church with her great love, Nino, her father was taken by the Secret Police and sent to the Jilava prison.

The daughter’s mother
Half an hour into our talk, Sanda’s daughter, Sandra Pralong, arrives home. She is a thoroughbred, elegant woman, with a clear, distinct voice.  “Oh, look at that curler in your hair,” she tells her mom. “Oh, I forgot the curler,” Sanda bursts into laughs. Sandra, who recently published a book called “Why I returned to Romania”, joined her mother in Switzerland in 1974, one year after she moved there. Later on, she moved to New York, where she worked as a communication director for the Newsweek magazine, but after December 1989, she returned to Romania, as she felt she needed to help the country. Sanda Budis decided to continue living in Switzerland. “The difference between me and Sandra is that I’ve defended myself, I’ve defended my life. I’ve protected myself, and when I saw something ugly, I closed the window.”

I ask Sanda about her life in Switzerland as an architect. “I’ve been working all my life. Work, work, work. I am not special, nor different from others. But I have a huge sense of duty.”

After she retired in 1988, she had to find a new meaning for her life. “Tell Diana about that moment when you retired, and you were ashamed to walk out on the streets,” her daughter Sandra tells her. “Ohhh.. that moment,” Sanda recalls. “I was so hardworking, that after I retired and I was walking out on the streets in the morning, when active people were at work, I felt ashamed and I tried to become one with the walls, so the people wouldn’t see me that I wasn’t working.”

As Sanda goes on talking about her life in Switzerland and how the Romanian Secret Police was present even there, her daughter Sandra intervenes:  “Sorry to interrupt my mother’s secret police epopee…”, whereas Sanda gives her a strong look. “Why are you looking like this? I just want to ask Diana what kind of tea she wants.” Then Sanda starts laughing out loud. “Oh..I see. Then bring the old lady some tea, too,” she says.

Sandra and Sanda laugh and play and then they fight on something, just to make a joke about it, later on. I tell them that it’s amazing to see this mother-daughter relationship that is so joyful and free, to which Sanda adds: “You know, my daughter once told me that it’s a blessing that we don’t have a mother-daughter relationship, but a relationship between two friends who really love each other. Because only love and trust truly matter.”

By Diana Mesesan, features writer

(photo by Diana Mesesan)

Sanda Budis' book, in Romanian, can be bought at Polirom, or via the online bookshop here.