BOTOSANI, Romania -- Mitica Gavriliuc sinks into his leather armchair, checks the gold antique pocket watch he picked up on a recent vacation in London, and fires up a well-earned Marlboro. "I'll give you half an hour," he purrs, exhaling contentedly. "I'm feeling generous this evening."

And so he should be. Thanks to him, the town of Botosani -- a standard Romanian provincial sprawl of crumbling high-rises and decrepit heavy industry -- now has a private medical clinic, staffed by specialist doctors moonlighting from the municipal hospital. Everything is new: the computers, the carpets, the scanners, even the rubber plants and vending machines that line the air-conditioned reception area. It seems a typical post-communist success story: a new-era entrepreneur capitalizing on the deficiencies of the old.

"Poor diet, pollution, unemployment," he begins, ticking off the ailments that increasingly plague Botosani's 30,000 citizens, " mean bronchial problems and skin disease and stress-related problems. We should do well."

Absent from Gavriliuc's sales pitch is any mention of his day job -- he is the director of a local children's home -- or how he came by the clinic in the first place.

The three-story building was acquired seven years ago by a British foundation as accommodation for its volunteers working at the orphanage and the area's other institutions for the elderly, disabled and mentally ill.

"We bought it in Mitica's name because at the time, foreigners weren't allowed to own property," says Rupert Wolfe Murray, chairman of Scottish European Aid, the Edinburgh organization that put up the cash. "But we didn't buy it for him. There's a difference."

The credit slip from the bank, dated Sept. 25, 1991, clearly shows that Wolfe Murray paid the money. But the paper from the regional court, authorizing the conversion of the hostel to a health clinic, and dated February 1997, is registered in Gavriliuc's name.

Confronted with the suggestion of impropriety, Gavriliuc at first feigns bewilderment. When the documents are waved under his nose, he shrugs complacently.

"You're right: I suppose morally, it isn't mine," he says, gazing around at the surrounding luxury with an unmistakably proprietarial air. "But on paper it is."

On paper, too, Gavriliuc runs the "Ionoseni Asylum for Parentless Incurables," though he admits "other commitments" prevent him from making the 30-mile round trip from Botosani too often these days.

Housed at the end of a rutted cart track in a drafty 19th century hunting lodge, a nobleman's folly of Disneyesque turrets and battlements deep in the dense forests that line the border with Ukraine, it well suited the old order's "out of sight, out of mind" approach to those who didn't make the physical grade.

Even today, it seems, unannounced visitors are not welcome.

"Hey! You can't just barge in," protests the gateman, unshaven and red-eyed with drink at 9 in the morning. "People have to be prepared for what they see."

They certainly do. Like the malnourished 5-year-old boy still in diapers who huddles in a closet under the stairs, jamming a grubby thumb into the empty socket of his right eye in an apparent attempt to stimulate the nerve endings. Or the epileptic teen-ager -- strapped to a bed to control her convulsions.

Or the rows of children who sit obediently in room after darkened room under the bored gaze of peasant women hired as day-care workers from the nearby village. Forbidden to move, they spend the empty hours manically jerking back and forth from the waist as if riding a herd of invisible rocking horses -- a common self-comforting reflex, according to psychiatrists, in those suffering severe sensory deprivation.

For a while, things were different. After the summary execution of dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu on Christmas Day 1989, Western relief agencies were quick to come calling.

Irish monks installed a heavy-duty laundry. A London man who makes tennis courts for a living spent a month building an adventure playground. Health workers from Glasgow converted a ruined cottage on the grounds into a rehabilitation center. Physiotherapists, nurses, doctors piled in, all eager to pass on their skills to local staff. The Duchess of York and the British ambassador came to shake Gavriliuc by the hand.

Eventually and inevitably, the volunteers began to pull out, either to pick up their old lives or to move on to other high-profile hot spots like Bosnia and Chechnya.

Gavriliuc's staff quickly unlearned their lessons. The water pipes have burst, the squat lavatories once again overflow with human waste, the laundry has grumbled to a halt.

"It wasn't that Mitica didn't care about the kids' welfare. I think he did. But they just weren't his first priority," recalls physiotherapist Di Hiscock, who quit Ionoseni for a new job in Kenya in 1996, the last resident Westerner to leave Ionoseni. "He was too busy with his clinic."

The affair raises few eyebrows among those familiar with the murky world of Romania's "nonprofit" sector. As the international aid caravan has moved on, United Nations and European Union officials report that 65 percent of the country's institutions for the handicapped have sunk back into their communist-era squalor.

That's partly due to the paucity of state relief: Ionoseni receives less than a dollar a week for each patient. But veteran charity workers complain that their efforts have also been hampered by a society-wide culture of ruthless self-interest that is a legacy of the former regime.

"Four-and-a-half decades of Marxism-Leninism killed off their compassion," remarks Allison Butcher, a British nurse tutor who has been making working trips to Romania since 1991. "Under Ceaucescu, all forms of contraception were banned, so it's no wonder people offloaded their surplus kids."

Even today -- with family-planning measures largely limited to irregular supplies of high-dosage estrogen pills, faulty condoms or abortions performed under often primitive, unsterile conditions -- the birth rate is almost as high as it ever was; and the daily struggle to survive in Eastern Europe's poorest backwater leaves little time for useless encumbrances like babies.

"Most of the lads and lasses at Ionoseni aren't orphans," says Mike Warren, the headmaster of a British school for disabled children who made frequent advisory trips to the area. "Their parents just couldn't be bothered."

These days, he points out, many new additions to the 100-strong roll aren't even accorded the dignity of a name: On paper and to their faces they are called simply "Necunoscut" -- Unknown.

Back in his state-of-the-art health emporium, Gavriliuc rolls his eyes and casts up his arms helplessly.

"It's difficult to care about anyone when you don't have any money," he says. "I could give this place back, but what for?" he asks. "There aren't any foreigners living here anymore. At least now I'm doing some good."

Perhaps he has a point. Even so, it is difficult to imagine this archetypal Cold War time-server -- who still draws a government salary and holds the purse strings at Ionoseni -- losing much sleep over the suffering of his fellow creatures.

Locking the clinic up for the night, he nearly trips over a cat lying by the roadside. Its back has been broken by a passing vehicle. Still alive, it has been infested by insects. No one has bothered to put it out of its misery.

"Be careful," Gavriliuc warns, stepping gingerly around the tormented animal. "It'll have fleas." With that he hops into his car and disappears into the night with a cheerful honk of the horn.

Pub Date: 8/17/98