REPORT FROM ROMANIA : Ceausescu's legacies.

Eleven years after the end of Communist rule, Romanians still try to fill the gaps and resolve the contradictions created during four decades of repression and isolation from the West. And sometimes, as in last December's election to the presidency of former Communist Ion Iliescu, who served from 1990 to 1996 as the country's first president after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, they make progress by going backward. In a run-off with Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Iliescu received over 66 percent of the vote, much of it from moderates whose candidates failed to make the second round of voting. Tudor, head of the Greater Romania Party and fierce opponent of Jews, Hungarians, and gypsies, then asked Romania's highest court to set aside the vote on grounds of fraud, bribery, collusion, and a number of other allegations. The court quickly rejected Tudor's appeal only three days after votes were cast.

Aside from electing a former Communist to lead a country into capitalist democracy, the most obvious contradictions in Romania, as in every post-Communist country, are evident on the drive into Bucharest from the airport. Glitzy signs for Western consumer products only partly mask Communist gray.

Much of the gray is literal. What seems on landing to be a golden ground haze turns out to be smog that rises higher and grows thicker toward the center of the city. By day, the grime visibly coats the buildings and dusts the cars (mostly Dacias, locally assembled) that crowd streets and clutter sidewalks. By night, the haze, not quite as thick as that in Blade Runner, softens signs and street lights, making the vendors' stalls and the cobbled side streets of the Old Court district look like the Left Bank in Paris.

Bucharest was, by older accounts, a lot more like Paris before various disasters: earthquakes in 1940 and 1977, the bombing of World War II, and the megalomania of Ceausescu, who, like Nero, wanted to demolish large sections of his capital in order to build a monument to himself.

What is left are nineteenth-century neoclassical government and commercial buildings, domed at the corners and chastely ornamented; Romanian Orthodox churches, the older ones aged into individuality and distinction; mansions of the nobility and higher bourgeoisie turned by the Communists into museums, writers' clubs, and other cultural sites. From these, one can see what early twentieth-century Bucharest must have been like.

Today there are literal gaps in the city, especially in the south center, where the market was cleared and remains empty and boarded up. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other buildings fell to Ceausescu's wrecking ball, their sites open wounds. Bucharesters especially mourn the lost churches, and the more superstitious feel that their destruction released forces even more malign than Stalinism and what they called Ceausism.

Given Romanian attitudes toward what Ceausescu managed to build before his fall, they should be more tolerant of the ruins. They shrug at the Exposition Center to the north and sneer at the National Theater at the center, but they seem compelled by a perverse form of pride to first take visitors to see the enormous House of the People, second largest building in the world after the Pentagon.

By American standards, the buildings aren't bad--or at any rate are no worse than most of our municipal architecture. People in former Communist countries tend to blame party ideology for what is merely official bad taste. For the Exposition Center, the builders dug a large circular hole and put a dome over it, but the symmetry is much more pleasing than the Stalinist block nearby. The National Theater, a cube slightly rounded at the edges, would grace, or anyway not disgrace, a good-sized American city. It may not harmonize with the classical buildings to the north of University Square, but compared to the dark glass rectangle of the Intercontinental Hotel just to the southwest, it looks restrained, even elegant.

The House of the People could be worse. Like the Pentagon, it doesn't look that big because it's a lot broader than it is tall and because, from the front, its full dimensions are not observable. True--and again like the Pentagon--it has no features that would tempt one to take a closer look. But the Romanians will insist that every visitor see it, so prepare to be appalled.

Gaps and attempts to fill them are not confined to Bucharest. In Transylvania, churches built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Saxon settlers are largely deserted or turned into monuments because Ceausescu allowed the parishioners, still largely German-speaking after more than eight centuries in the region, to emigrate when the German government paid large exit fees. Those that remain are regarded with less suspicion by ethnic Romanians than the much larger Hungarian minority. In Cluj (Klausenberg under the Austrians, Koloszvar under the Hungarians, to give an indication of the complexities involved), the mayor removed the part of the plaque identifying King Matthias Corvinus as a Hungarian king and has excavated large holes in front of the statue, apparently to demonstrate what no one disputes: Cluj was a Roman settlement.

And this leaves out of the account the Jews, who suffered under the Iron Guard in the 1930s and even worse under the Nazis during the war. Or mention of the Rom, or gypsies, who are, sooner or later, mentioned by everyone. Ethnocentric racism, as Tudor's popularity attests, is a real problem.

Romanians have tried to bridge cultural and social as well as ethnic gaps. Communist attempts to industrialize a predominantly agricultural people brought to the cities a number of those who found difficult the transition to urban life. Even the casual visitor to Bucharest will see far more evidence of peasant ways than in Central European capitals: wagons drawn by horses, women in rural dress (not colorful peasant costume) sweeping sidewalks with brooms made from twigs, trash carts rumbling down sidewalks on two iron wheels past store windows displaying luxury goods from the West. Off the main streets, one can see women teetering on spike heels across cobblestones, a symptom of Romania's struggle to accommodate new and old.

The new seems to have the edge. During the 1980s, Romanians were quarantined to prevent toxic Western influence. They were and are hungry for cultural fare more substantial than Big Macs--though they clearly want those too. Theaters and cabarets mount avant-garde works that combine lyrical reading with intricate choreography, for example, the use of shopping carts, that would have delighted Busby Berkeley.

Romanians I spoke with have not had enough time to become disenchanted with the West. At a symposium on postmodernism, held in a seventeenth-century building in a district established by Vlad Tepes (the model for Dracula), a Central European participant observed that discussion always seemed to come back to America as a reference point. The only (mildly) anti-American sentiments were expressed by a performance artist from San Diego.

Romanians are even more enthusiastic about the American political system, though they express wonder and dismay at the confusion about our recent election. As I was leaving Bucharest in November, the passport control officer sympathized with our confusion. To him, "America means democracy." I replied that, in fact, most Americans weren't worried, and in any case, it was better to wait three weeks or even more to get the results than to know them in advance. He did a quick take and agreed. Little did I know that Romanians would soon face their own disputed election. Happily, they had only three days to wait for the result to be finalized.

Robert Murray Davis has written extensively on Central and Eastern European literature.