What I learned from Graham Greene

A memoir of communist and post-communist Romania, a father who read Graham Greene, and a death he refused to certify.

Dan Gorzo was a forensic pathologist in provincial Romania a surgeon’s son who read Greene, le Carré and French spy paperbacks by the shelf. In June 1984 a disgraced Party boss, demoted by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu to run a state farm, died in the local hospital. The certificate said heart attack. Gorzo would not put his name to it. The cause, he insisted, was “intoxication with a substance of unknown origin”. Within a year, prosecutors had five bribery cases against him. He went to prison. By 1995 the family was living in a Bucharest slum under an eviction order, and Dan was bait for an experimental police unit, under a Belgian identity: Marian Mermond. There was a forged passport. There was a gun on the bedside table. His teenage son answered the phone in French. Decades later that son, one of Romania’s leading film critics, set out to write the father he had never been able to read, and found he could only do it through Greene. He interviewed his father through his last months, then his mother every week for two years, and set the life beside Greene’s, chapter by chapter. “Greene was my secret sharer,” he writes, “the man I wanted my father to be.