The Last Hundred Days (2 page)

Nursing my father through the last months was a test of endurance for both of us. I wheeled him through the wards as he fulminated about bad spelling, poor grammar and grocers’ apostrophes on the laminated hospital noticeboards. The habits of work remained with him: twenty years in Fleet Street, he had manned the newspapers’ hot metal printing presses, setting the pages by hand, learning his trade and learning, as he went, a way with words that a less unhappy man would have put to better use. When they sacked him, along with six thousand other print workers three years before, he stood on picket lines for a few weeks and threw bricks at police cars before one morning going back to work in a reinforced strikebreaker bus, its windows painted over and layered with wire mesh, protected by one of the new private security firms. My father liked his politics intense but changeable.

As he died slowly we kept reconciliation at bay by talking only about trivia. In those last few days of delirium he asked for her, my mother – complained she wasn’t there to visit him. Even at the end he was still finding new ways to be angry. The doctor was baffled by the way he fought the illness inch by inch, holding his ground when by rights the cancer should have claimed him months before: ‘trench warfare’ the doctor called it. I knew what it was that kept my father going: anger.

Leo turned on the lights and made for the drinks cabinet with a manner yet more proprietorial than my own. Pouring a glass of gin, topping it off with a symbolic shake of the tonic bottle, he went to the freezer and tipped in a couple of ice cubes. This done, he sat on the sofa, crossed his legs, and looked up at me. My move.

Leo wore a sweaty flat cap that looked screwed on, leaving circles of red indented grooves on his forehead, and his skin was the texture of multiply resurfaced tarmac. His trousers were the colour of blotchy mushrooms, and though his legs were the same length, theirs were not. His shirt was that special shade of streaky grey that comes from having started out white and having spent years sharing washing machines with blue underpants.

Still dozy, I found it hard to compose myself. But composure was unnecessary: before I could say anything, Leo finished his drink and leapt up.

‘We’re going for dinner.’

He pushed me out of the flat and into the hallway. The phone rang behind me, but Leo had already shut the door.

‘Welcome to the Paris of the East,’ he said. Leo is the only person I have known who could be both sincere and sarcastic about the same things, and simultaneously.

The Paris of the East…
it was an epithet I’d heard before. Second-string cities are always described as the somewhere of somewhere else. But Bucharest was like nowhere else; that was its sorrow.

Leo was drink-driving, not that it mattered here, thanks to petrol shortages and the seven-year wait for a car from the state car plant. With Leo at the wheel it was like riding dodgems in a ghost town, especially with the CD –
Corps Diplomatique
– badge he’d bought on the black market and affixed to the back of his Skoda. The cranes and diggers that dominated the streets gave Bucharest the look of a deserted funfair. Some of them were still desolately working, half-manned and on half power, hauling the shades of labourers up towards a smoky moon.

The pavements looked empty, but the shadows were crowded with militia in grey uniforms. You only saw them when your eyes had become accustomed to the darkness: they took shape, limb by limb, from the penumbra they lived in. In old Bucharest, rundown Parisian
arrondissements
had been crossed with the suburbs of Istanbul; East and West were in perpetual architectural dance. Plants hung from balconies where people sat in the dark, backlit by the blue of their televisions. Candles flickered in the windows of orthodox churches. Shift workers stood at beer counters, drinking silently, eyes down, their elbows touching.

Leo’s car lurched into a vast trafficless square like a small fishing boat propelled into the open sea: Piaţa Republica, where the palace of Queen Marie faced the Party Headquarters  across a vast cobbled intersection. I heard, but much closer now, the same insistent clatter of building works, the hollow peal of scaffolding poles and the chug of cement mixers. I saw the pall of light to the north where they worked, 24/7, on the Palace of the People and the Boulevard of Socialist Victory. A tall building, a skyscraper on this stunted horizon, stood nearby, western cars and black Dacias parked in front of it. Doormen fussed around revolving doors.

Leo had been silent throughout the drive, but the prospect of a fresh glass loosened him up.

‘The InterContinental Hotel,’ he said, pointing, ‘home to the Madonna disco, and prowling ground for the Party’s golden youth.’ A heavy bass thudding reached us, intensifying and dying down as a basement door opened and closed.

A red Porsche sped across the square and braked hard outside the nightclub, its numberplate –
NIC
1 – catching the streetlamp’s glare. A man in a white suit and a metallic blue shirt climbed out and was ushered into the hotel lobby, followed by two thin girls in silver miniskirts and shoes with heels so high their every step was a trembling defiance of gravity.

Leo grimaced: ‘Nicu. The playboy prince. Ceauşescu’s son and heir apparent.’

Capsia, a three-storeyed, French-style building on the corner of Calea Victoriei and Strada Edgar Quinet, was something out of fin-de-siècle Paris. The three sets of doors between the modest entrance and the resplendent dining room were like the decompression chambers of a submarine. They stopped the noise and smells and luxury from seeping out into the street, and kept the street’s hungers and deprivations from tainting the Capsia dining experience.

Waiters in white shirts and dark green waistcoats with brass buttons fussed around tables heavy with silverware. Their uniforms were perfect, but their faces didn’t fit: sallow and ill-shaven, they were scrappy parodies of the French waiters who had, in the 1890s, brought Paris to a standstill by striking over the right to grow moustaches. Yet Bucharest too had been like this:
An island of Latinity
, so my guidebook said,
of French manners, French style and French food.
I took it out and looked up Capsia. There it was. The guidebook recommended ‘Absinthe, Cognac, Bitters or Amers, Curaçao, Grenadine, Orgeat and Sorbet’, tempering its advice to sit at the terrace and observe ‘Bucharest life in all its phases’ with the caveat: ‘Chairs placed in unpleasant proximity to the gutter should, of course, be avoided.’

But then my guidebook, the only book about Romania I could find at home, was from 1899 and had cost ten pence from the Isle of Dogs Oxfam. Leo took it from me and stroked its tired cover, the red string of its binding hanging from the spine. ‘Dunno about the
Curaçao, Grenadine, Orgeat and Sorbet
,’ but the gutter’s still there. And as for
Bucharest life in all its phases
, well, I think I can promise you that…’

1899 – ninety years ago. Back then Romanians who returned from France with heads full of the latest books, and bodies hung with the latest fashions were known as
bonjouristes
. Capsia was a relic of that era, and also its reliquary: embossed leather menus, monogrammed tablecloths and heavy silverware.
Chez Capsia
read the cover of the menu:
Bienvenue à la gastronomie Roumaine
. The décor – gold fittings, damask screens and lanky tropical plants with dusty leaves – was matched by a string quartet grinding out some Strauss. The walls were mirrors, smoky from age and minutely fractured. You felt pieces of your reflection catching in the cracks and staying there, like dirt in the grouting between tiles.

Waiters rolled trolleys of food. At the far end of the room, a party of senior politicians was enjoying something flambéed in cognac. The blue flames spat and lit their faces from below.

‘There you go,’ said Leo, smiling at them sarcastically, ‘take a look: the Party has abolished want!’ They looked up and grinned, still chewing. ‘
Bon appétit
, comrades!’

The Maître d’Hôte, splendidly liveried and with a wolfish face, showed us to a table at a frosted window overlooking Cercul Militar. We could see out, but no one could see in. This was the Romanian way, encapsulated in the city’s best restaurant: waiters sliced fillets of Chateaubriand with gentle strokes while in the shops beyond, unstacked shelves gleamed under twists of flypaper and the crimeless streets shouldered their burden of emptiness.

Capsia was, Leo told me, the only place where most of what the menu promised was available. ‘That’s why it’s so short.’ He placed a packet of Kent cigarettes on the table. These were blocks of currency here, tobacco bullion; to lay them out was to signal your desire for special attention and your ability to pay for it. Leo ordered a bottle of Dealul Mare and it arrived immediately, conjured from behind the waiter’s back.

‘There’s a few things you’ll need to know…’ Leo begins, sloshing the wine around his mouth and swallowing it back hard. He abandons his sentence and looks me up and down for the first time: ‘You look like someone who thought they could travel light but who’s already missing his baggage.’

I tell him I’m tired, jetlagged by far more than the two hours time difference between Romania and Britain; that I’m sitting in an improbable restaurant in the half-lit capital of a police state with a jittery drunk; that I’m here because I got a job I never applied for, after an interview I never went to; that my baggage is all I’ve got to hold on to in these unreal times.

‘Enough about me. Tell me something about yourself…’ Leo has said nothing about himself. ‘You were most impressive at interview. Ticked all the boxes.’

‘Very funny – tell me, how much of a disadvantage did not turning up put me at?’

‘Well, I pride myself on being able to see beyond first impressions… Professor Ionescu’s looking forward to meeting you too. We think we’ve appointed the right person for the job. Someone who’ll, er… grow into it. You’ll notice too that we’ve taken the liberty of adding BA to your name: Bachelor of Arts. A welcome present from me,’ Leo pushes a degree certificate across the table, an ornate, multiply stamped and signed piece of parchment with a blot of sealing wax and some ribbon. First Class Honours,
Summa cum Laude
. ‘Mind you, if you want a PhD you’ll have to pay for it like everyone else.’

Leo shrugs and laughs – he’s already onto the next thing, ready to give me
the lowdown
. ‘And believe me, it’s low.’ His joke falls flat (is it a joke?), but he is undeterred. He begins the pep talk he has given many times before. Dozens of people have passed through before me, but none of them stuck it out beyond a few weeks. Only Belanger had looked as if he’d stay the course, but Leo does not talk about Belanger.

Leo explains, Leo contextualises and embroiders. There are things to exaggerate and things to underplay. After a few months here, it will amount to the same thing: life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routine.

Our waiter, itching with solicitousness, comes to ask ‘if all is delicious?’ Since we have not yet ordered, this is certainly a good time to enquire. His eye is on the packet of Kent on the table.

Leo replies
Da, multumesc
, yes, all is very delicious.

‘These new-fangled ways…’ he says, ‘asking you if your food’s good, telling you to enjoy your meal. I preferred it when they slammed the grub on the table and went off scratching their arses… it’s something they’ve picked up recently from foreign television. When I first arrived in Bucharest, I came here for lunch and one of the cleaning ladies was clipping her toenails on the carpet. That was old Romania. Ah! The old days… now it’s all
Hi! My name is Nicolae and I’m your waiter for the evening…
’ Leo’s American accent is terrible. ‘I blame
Dynasty
– they’ve started showing an episode twice a week. A way of using up a quarter of the three hours of nightly TV. It’s supposed to make Romanians disgusted by capitalist excess but all it does is give lifestyle tips to the Party chiefs. Suddenly the Party shops are full of Jacuzzis and ice buckets and cocktail shakers…’

He motions the waiter to take our order: the house speciality, ‘Pork Jewish Style,’ a dish in which a whole continent’s unthinking anti-Semitism is summarised.

Leo eats like a toddler, cutting pieces of food with his knife and skewering them to the end of the fork with his fingers, before changing hands and loading the food into his mouth. ‘This is a country where fifty per cent of the population is watching the other fifty per cent. And then they swap over.’

I listen to his bad jokes and already I know they aren’t jokes at all, just ways of approaching the truth at a less painful angle, like walking sideways in the teeth of a vicious wind. I eat the food and drink the wine as Leo describes a world of suspicion and intrigue in which he is happy, stimulated, fulfilled. The place suits him, not because it resembles him but because he is so far in excess of it.

But most of all, he loves it: ‘It’s all here, passion, intimacy, human fellowship. You just need to adapt to the circumstances,’ says Leo, ‘it’s a bit of a grey area to be honest. Actually, I might as well tell you the truth: it’s all grey area round here.’ He gestures at the world outside Capsia as if it is a correlative of the moral universe we now live in. He motions for a third bottle of Pinot Noir. I wonder if they have aspirin in Romania. Christ, I think, what a start.

But Leo is right. He is not like the other expatriates, who exist in perpetual mistrust of their Romanian colleagues, hush their voices when they come into the room, exclude them from conversations, or socialise with them only at arm’s length, nostrils aquiver. He is someone who, for all his excess and swagger, has calibrated his behaviour to those around him, to their extraordinary circumstances and to the violence these circumstances have done to their daily lives.

It’s a close call for Leo’s special scorn, between the Party apparatchiks who rule their people with such corruption, ineptitude and contempt, and the expats: the diplomats, businessmen and contractors who live in a compound to the west of the city, with their English pub,
The Ship and Castle
(‘the Shit and Hassle’) and their embassy shop. One of his riffs is to compose designer scents for them: ‘Essence of Broadstairs’, ‘Bromley Man’, ‘Stevenage: For Her’. Their parties, an endless round of cocktails and booze-ups, are ‘sometimes fun, if only for a drink and a chance to read last week’s English papers’, but the circuit as a whole is, as he puts it ‘a
doppelganbang
: where largely identical people fuck each other interchangeably’.