Her Excellency

Last week the well-to-do residents of Bucharest's smart Parcu Filipescu section had something to talk about. A woman as Foreign Minister of Rumania, the first to serve in such a post anywhere! And such a woman! Although Ana Pauker, mother of three and self-made widow, lived among them in the Parcu district, kept a lakeside villa at Snagov, and rode in the swankest limousines (bullet-proofed), she had but lately "arrived," in a way most ominous for her neighbors.

"Tovarish Anny," as her Rumanian comrades call her, has a ladylike reticence about telling exactly how many years ago she was born as Ana Rabinsohn. Estimates vary anywhere from 51 to 58 years (the Rumanian Legation in the U.S. cautiously states that she is "in her early 50s"). More certain is the number of years she has spent in exile or "underground" (15) or in jail (6). For Ana, after a fling at teaching school and studying medicine, turned to the precarious business of Balkan politics.

Husband Added & Subtracted. In 1921 she joined the Communist Party. By 1924, when the Government ban on Communism forced her to go underground, she was a member of the Central Committee of the Rumanian Communists. On one of her underground visits to Switzerland she met and married Marcel Pauker, a Rumanian Communist engineer and journalist. Together they spent the late 1920s in the U.S., working for the Soviet trading agency Amtorg.

In 1935 Ana was back in Rumania, illegally. She was arrested for "subversive activities endangering the security of the state." On that occasion a policeman shot and wounded her ; the bullet is still in her leg. She had served five years of a ten-year sentence when, in a 1941 exchange of prisoners between Russia and Rumania, Moscow asked for and got Ana; she became a Soviet citizen. About that time her husband disappeared. (His probable fate: execution as a Trotskyite after Ana turned him in to Soviet police.) Their son, Vlad, is in the Rumanian Army. Daughters Tanya and Marie are in school.

When the Russians marched into Rumania in August 1944, Ana was among them, in a Red Army officer's uniform. She became boss of the Rumanian Communists, co-founder of the revived Comintern and one of Stalin's most trusted lieutenants in the Balkans, ranking with Tito and Bulgaria's Georgi Dimitroff.

Last week formal glories crowned her behind-scenes power. Opportunist George Tatarescu, who could turn his coat faster than Houdini, had outlived his usefulness to the Communists as Foreign Minister. The Communists kicked him out. On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, on the eve of St. Michael's Day (his own "name" day), King Michael named Ana Pauker, who was not even one of his subjects, to be his Foreign Minister.

Dot . . . Dot. Jut-jawed Ana is a booming, passionate orator. When shouting to a big audience, her greying, boy-bobbed hair flops about her face. She usually wears quiet, expensively tailored dresses in solid colors. Occasionally, at a party, she comes out in something gayer, but she never wears jewelry.

"We are realists," she told a U.S. correspondent two years ago. Then she penciled two dots on a sheet of paper. "This dot is where we are," she said, "and that one is Communism. When we come to an obstacle on the straight line between them, we go around it, but we come back to our original line. We had to deviate to win the war. Now we must deviate to conquer present problems. But Communism always is our ultimate goal." By last week, when Ana took over the Foreign Ministry, the distance between the dots had shortened.

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