Letter from Bucharest: Nichita isn't eating again. For the second time today he waves away the menu, pulling a face as he explains that he has a sensitive stomach. He'll just have a glass of water, writes Liam Stebbing
The tall, recently retired 60-year-old, who has thick shoulders and salt-and-pepper hair, doesn't look like a man with a delicate constitution. Perhaps it's the prices he can't stomach. At €5 for a starter and €10 for a main course - grilled sturgeon, perhaps, or stuffed pork - an evening meal costs more than the waiters serving us, on a terrace above the Black Sea, will take home today. Nichita may not be earning vastly more each day for showing us around Romania. Eventually, he relents: he'll have something simple. But no starter, thank you.
It's not that Nichita is parsimonious. Nor is he one of the Romanians who, pining for the days of Nicolae Ceausescu, leave flowers on the former dictator's grave: he loathes Ceausescu and all the other Red Commies, as he unfailingly refers to the people who confiscated his once well-to-do family's land and consigned him, you sense, to a life of professional frustration and personal turmoil. What seems to be bothering Nichita is something bigger: 15 years after Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were shot dead, and the country began its move away from communism, he is uneasy about modern Romania as it prepares to join the European Union, perhaps as soon as 2007.
Times are still hard, after all. Westerners may be prepared to pay hundreds of euro to stay in one of the country's many four- and five-hotels, but head onto the plains of Wallachia, away from the luxuries of the Black Sea resorts, and you quickly encounter the old Romania, where peasants spend their days in parched fields, bent over scythes as they cut hay for the winter, or sit by the roadsides, peeling cobs of brilliant-yellow maize in the harsh sunshine. Further inland, where the vineyards start, the people are more prosperous, perhaps owning cars instead of horses and carts, but even here they hardly live the life of Riley.
These, according to Nichita, are the people the EU is so keen to have on board: it can't wait to sell them Western lifestyles at Western prices. Another 22 million consumers? Like Romania's substantial oil reserves, he suggests with by now familiar scepticism, they're too big a chance to pass by.
But perhaps he is right to be disillusioned. The end of the Red Commies' half-century interregnum was meant to bring freedom; instead, he says, he sees only undeserving, unimaginably rich idiots who had the good fortune to inherit state companies.
One day, he is sure, they will be recognised for what they are, but it will be at least 20 years, and probably 50, before the mess sorts itself out.
The past continues to haunt Romania in other ways, too. For Nichita, whose 35 years as a civil servant must have benefited from his passion for facts and figures - from the length of Ovid's exile in the port city of Constanza to the amount of cement produced last year, there seems barely a statistic he doesn't know - even a short journey can bring reminders of a painful history.
One morning, as we cross the chiselled line of the Danube-Black Sea canal, he turns in his seat at the front of the minibus to tell us how long, wide and deep it is - 64 kilometres, 90 metres and seven metres - then pauses, almost sighing, before mentioning that it was also known as the Death Canal, for the political prisoners who lost their lives digging it.
Later, as we climb the road into Transylvania, he points out the forests that cover the spectacular Carpathian Mountains. They have always been home to deer, wolves and lynxes, he says. Now, a couple of decades after the hunting-mad Ceausescu wiped them out in the area, they are home again to bears. Despite his pessimism about Romania in the short term, Nichita seems keen for Romania to join the West more fully. As we pull up outside our hotel, next to the complex where NATO defence ministers met last month, he mentions that Romanians, who know a thing or two about dictators, backed the US invasion of Iraq. So keen are they, he says, on the American way of life that Romanians have taken to referring to their local town hall as the White House: a symbol of democracy and prosperity. Nichita will be glad if the EU transforms Romanians' lives as dramatically as they are hoping but, you suspect, unsurprised if it doesn't.
The next day, when we reach the airport, he goes over to wait by the glass entrance, where he pumps our arms as he says goodbye, full of professional cheer. Then we turn, go through the doors and leave him to struggle with his memories.