The Last Hundred Days (25 page)

There was a chapter in Trofim’s memoirs – the genuine ones and not the fake ones he was writing for the official publishing house – about how, after the war when he was out of favour, the old poet had made his living selling cherries from the orchard in his Bucharest garden on Strada Martisor. Trofim had bought some one day, finding Arghezi sitting on a wooden stepladder at the roadside. The old poet had no reason to know one of his tormentors was in front of him, since already evil could be done, as Trofim put it, ‘by remote control’.
I felt contemptible,
Trofim had written,
I do not know what he sensed in me – perhaps nothing, how could he? – but he drew all my guilt and self-hatred to the surface with his sly, knowing eyes. He drove a hard bargain too: I paid twice the going rate. He knew I was guilty. It did not matter of what. He just knew.

Trofim had planted one of the cherry stones in his Herastrau garden. The tree had blossomed; indeed it never failed, over forty years, to welcome the spring with a promising flourish of flowers. But it had never yielded a single cherry.

‘Remote control’, Trofim had called it: of course, he had not sullied his own hands with the day-to-day business of defaming Arghezi. He had picked an ambitious young academic for the job. The dirty work of smearing Arghezi in the press and coercing his friends and readers to desert him was done by the Party’s attack dogs, led by the young literature professor. When Trofim had supervised Arghezi’s rehabilitation ten years later he had chosen the same professor, no longer so young, to make the case for the old man’s status as ‘National Poet and Treasure of our Literary Life’. Trofim had not named the literary apparatchik in his book, and always refused to tell me when I asked. I had assumed he was dead or had fallen into irrelevance.

Now, as I went to the last page of Arghezi’s poems, there was an envelope stuffed with yellowed press cuttings. They were arranged in order of escalating vitriol. The first, dated March 1965, was headed ‘The Poetry of Bourgeois retreat’. The next, a few weeks later, was called ‘Emotional Pornography’. After a couple more, ‘Putrefaction and Decay: Arghezi’s insult to Life’ argued for the expulsion of Arghezi from the Union of Writers and his removal from the curriculum. All were signed Andrei Ionescu.

Ionescu! It had been Ionescu doing Trofim’s bidding! Further on in the pile of cuttings, a decade later, the process began again, but in reverse: an article claiming that socialist taste was now sufficiently embedded to admit of experimentation with what it termed ‘the vagaries of subjectivity as a counterpoint to the self-evident truths of scientific materialism’. By the end ‘a giant of World Literature was emerging from the neglect in which, by his own modesty and gentleness of temperament, he had too long suffered.’ It was eye-wateringly hypocritical stuff, comical now, though there was no mistaking the brutality and fear that underwrote it all. Leo noticed me scanning the articles. He had already read them.

‘Terrific isn’t it? Old Ionescu destroys the poor old sod’s reputation, then a few years later proclaims him the greatest poet of the century! You couldn’t make it up! Wait till I tell Ioana – it makes what goes on today look principled.’

I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. I felt sad and disappointed. In what exactly? In whom? After all, I knew all this – not the details, but I knew. About Trofim, Ionescu, Cilea, Leo and all the others… I was complicit in it too and I even knew that. But now I felt both crowded out and alone, implicated and out on a limb, in a world whose terms were perpetually shifting, yet whose rules would never change.

‘I don’t care what he’s done.’ Leo cut into some argument with himself, since I had said nothing, ‘he’s all right is Ionescu, poor bugger. There are no winners here. Even old Trofim hasn’t won. He’s got his nice flat, he’s had the power, the mistresses, the money, the foreign visits. But for what? For a system that’s on its knees in a city that’s coming down around his ears. That’s not evil out there, that dark cloud, the Securitate, the motorcade, the decoy dogs… it’s not evil. It’s failure, that’s all, failure. Colossal, ongoing failure: taste it! It tastes like a bottle of expensive Pomerol and a chateaubriand from Capsia, and it tastes like a crust of yesterday’s potato bread and some tinned pilchards from Korea. Whether it’s Cilea’s Chanel No. 5 you’re inhaling or the station baglady’s armpit juice, it’s still the same smell. Failure.’

I didn’t answer him. Sometime later, half-asleep, I smelled Ottilia beside me. She was still in her working clothes but smelled of soap and scrubbed skin. As she leaned over me to tuck in the other side of the bed, her hair brushed my face. I caught a very faint floral scent, though not of any flower I knew. I half-opened my eyes, a movement she seemed to hear as if my eyelids had made a tiny noise. She leaned down and put her fingers gently on them, closing them to restore the darkness. Then I was conscious of some whispering next door and the quiet latch coming down on the front door as Leo took her back home.

That night I dreamed a sequence from Trofim’s book as if I were seeing it with my own eyes. I remembered it word for word. I had typed it, and in doing so I must have archived it, perfect in every detail and in all its cold sad beauty. It had been Trofim’s
epiphany of pragmatism,
as he put it, when he decided to fall in with Stalinism. He reneged on his allegiances and friendships, de-judaified himself, joined the purges and was quickly promoted.

On the flight to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1951, it all came clear:
I looked out of the porthole of the plane: the dying sun behind its wall of ice, those fields of cloud and burning cold, the 
pressure of empty air, that press of void that held the plane up and kept it safe while at the same time threatening its destruction… ‘That’s all there is,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s all there ever was, a regulated vacuum.’ Over the next decades, whenever I was in a plane, whether it was a
TAROM
local flight or Kissinger’s private jet, that vision was always there, reminding me… ‘That’s all there is.’ I still believe that, but much of what I did in view of that belief I would undo or do differently if I had my time again.

Leo arrived the next morning at nine. ‘Sorry I didn’t come back last night. I got held up. We’d got word that the old church of Saint Paraschiva in Lipscani was being demolished. Ottilia came too – wanted to see what it was like. The wrecking balls had done their job by the time we got there, but I snatched a few shots.’

Leo slotted a video into the machine: in the slow, misty dusk, men were tearing the copper strips from a dome. It stood in the rubble like a giant tortoise as they attacked it with hammers and pliers. The picture was blurred and wobbly, taken from some nearby window whose wooden pane kept intruding on the image, framing it up and letting it go again. Lorries came and went in silence as the ghost of a sun rose behind the ruins. A few minutes in, a hand came from the left and covered the lens. That was it. Leo ejected the video and replaced it in its box: Chuck Norris,
Missing in Action.

Cilea visited for the first time a week later. I still spent most of the day in bed and Leo had used my illness to take up residence in my flat. Ottilia called in most days, usually in the mid-morning before her shifts at the hospital. Trofim visited twice. The interruption to his work was frustrating him; they had replaced his cement-haired secretary with a computer-literate Party loyalist, Hadrian (‘The Wall’) Vintile, who erased each new file and took away the only copy at the end of every day. For the first time there was an urgency to the project, a sense of time running out.

Cilea brought chocolates, flowers, a fat pineapple with leaves like a cartoon explosion and an atomiser of her father’s cologne to fragrance my convalescence. I asked her why it had taken her the best part of ten days to come and see me.

‘You were being taken care of. I would just have been interrupting. I saw you were in good hands, then left it until you were well enough.’ She sat at the end of the bed, her smell mingling with the room’s nameless chemical odour. She had had her nails varnished, I noticed as she lit another Pall Mall, puffing the smoke out of the window, her concession to the medical context. She looked more tanned too, in her crisp white shirt and jeans, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, wearing the same clothes as when we had first met. The InterContinental’s ‘Aesthetic Centre’ had been busy. Either that or Belgrade had been blisteringly sunny.

I struggled out of bed and manoeuvred us to the living room, away from all the signs of illness and dependency. Wrapping an embarrassing tartan dressing gown around myself, I sat on the sofa and let her make tea. When she returned, I touched her arm. She stiffened up.

I knew then, from the coldness of her skin, the contraction of her body at my touch, that it was finished. She was all solicitude and dead libido. And it was decisive, the way only a body decides. The mind’s slant can be changed, the rational mechanisms can always review and go back on themselves, but the body’s knowledge is irreversible. I knew that was why she had avoided me these last weeks, why she had not spoken to me or contacted me since that night with Nicu and the Serbs. Something had changed.

‘I came to see how you were,’ she said redundantly.

‘And?’

‘And what? You showed me that night what you really thought of me, I saw it all: the way you watched me, like you owned me, the way part of you was excited seeing those bastards touching me, and the other part of you wanted to kill them… I thought we might be together, but it’s obvious that will never happen. You don’t trust me, I’m not even sure you’re interested in me. I know you think you are, but when all the fucking and the high life is over you hold me in contempt. You followed me. Checked up on me. You thought that was love but of course you knew no better. I’m sorry for you. My God, you even suspected me of having something to do with what happened to those boys…’ She looked away.

‘And what
did
happen to those boys?’ I asked quickly.

‘I don’t know. Why should I? But you thought I was responsible.’

‘That’s not true. I was besotted with you. I still am. You know that.’

‘I thought I did. Now I know that you thought I just wanted to be a westerner, and that I was not as noble or pure as those who suffer, as your new companion Ottilia for example…’

‘There’s nothing going on with Ottilia…’

‘No, maybe not – because she can see through you. I didn’t, that was my mistake. Your friends hated me from the first day. Leo, hiding behind his buffoonery; your “pure” friends who were better than me, Ioana with her perfect credentials, Ottilia with her work in the hospital…’ Cilea swallowed, tried to continue, dragged on her cigarette and puffed the smoke out towards me. Her fingers shook. She closed her eyes. There was something else. ‘And anyway, I know now that I’m not free, I probably never was.’

‘“Free?” Don’t you start. I’ve had enough of all these bloody speeches about freedom…’

‘Shut up – I mean free to be with you. I shouldn’t have started this.’

‘So you
have
been with someone else? I bloody thought so!’

‘No. I
was
, before we met – never while we were together. You know who it was. Here, in this flat, you know that of course. So do they –’ She meant Leo and Ioana. ‘Belanger…’ She paused. ‘It’s complicated…’

‘I never finished college but I think can grasp the basics of a story where my girlfriend goes back to her ex while I’m supposed to be clearing out my dead parents’ house! How inconvenient of me to stay behind! How inconvenient of me to come to the InterContinental that night!’

‘It’s not like that. He called me, asked me to come back to him. I promised nothing. Just to see him. My father hates him, made him leave the country, so I went to meet him in Belgrade. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have led you on.’

‘It took you six weeks to prepare that?’ I asked with as much derision as I could muster. I had already lost. ‘Or was it just between dances with Nicu, manicures and visits to Capsia that you put your mind to it? I’ve spent the last month begging you to forgive me, humiliating myself on your answerphone, and all that time you’ve been holed up in Belgrade screwing your ex?’

Cilea turned to go, eyes burning. ‘I’d expected better from you. But really you thought so little of me that deep down you think nothing of yourself for having been with me. Well, you saw what you wanted to see, and got what you wanted to get. I am sorry. I’m leaving now.’

I was suddenly exhausted. I tried to rise and stop her going, but sagged back into the chair. I heard the front door close behind her.

Leo returned with Ottilia later that afternoon. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and woke in an icy sweat. The first days had been full of convulsions, as my body pounded the sickness out of me. Now it was slower, a glacial detoxification that felt too much like illness itself to persuade me I was getting better. They were both laden with shopping bags and bottles, and in a blistering good humour I could not match. Leo had persuaded Ottilia into one of the
nomeklatura
shops. He was breaking down her resistance.

That evening Ioana joined us for dinner while Leo, helped by Ottilia, cooked a messy and desynchronised meal in which everything that should have shared a plate arrived as a separate course. The food thus took us far into the night, with whoops of delight and laughter coming from the kitchen, clattering pots and pans and at least once a shriek of what sounded like terror, then modulated to relief, and then finished up as laughter. I asked Ottilia what she had made of the Party shop. The place had horrified her, though it enabled her to put an image to the rumours: there was nothing there she did not already know about, and seeing it had liberated her. It was not so long ago that I myself, a westerner used to groaning supermarkets shelves and all-night convenience stores, had been dumbfounded at the luxuries on offer to the privileged here. How much more shocking must it have been to someone like Ottilia.

Ioana was in a better mood than I had ever seen, though Ottilia’s and Leo’s closeness had at first made her suspicious, something for which she blamed me. During her one visit she mentioned something about Leo’s ‘sudden interest in medicine’, implying that I was a convenient alibi for their budding relationship. She was wrong, but Ioana was not one to acknowledge mistakes. She just moved on from them, mere obstacles on her march towards the truth. And it always was
the
truth with Ioana: singular and indivisible and clear, not the multiple, blurred or partial truths Leo dealt in.