The Last Hundred Days (26 page)

I watched Ottilia eating: a few experimental mouthfuls, a sip of French Embassy claret, and then she got into her stride. She caught me looking at her, smiled, and spiked a piece of Leo’s stuffed pork loin onto her fork.

‘I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have eaten meat like this.’ She pushed the morsel around her plate, mopping up sauce. ‘I exaggerate, but… well… it is not far short of the truth.’

Ioana looked at her. ‘You spend time with these two and you’ll be the biggest carnivore in Bucharest. As for Cilea Constantin, our friend’s paramour here, she’s a walking reminder of why the rest of us have to eat boiled cabbage and soya salami.’ That was Ioana’s idea of a lighter moment, and she gave me a quick flinty smile.

‘Ex,’ I said, in a tone I hoped conveyed manly insouciance. I had not eaten properly for days, and the food lay heavy on me. ‘Ex-paramour.’

‘Ex?’ Leo chipped in. I told them about our meeting of earlier, and explained what I now firmly believed: that Cilea had had nothing to do with what had happened –
if
anything had happened – to Petre and Vintul. Yet the thought crossed my mind: she knew
something
had happened to them, didn’t she?
Those boys
… she had said.

‘You know as well as we do that she’s behind it. It may not be her fault, she may not have intended it, but she came into our circle, a Party chief’s daughter…’ Ioana interrupted. I regretted bringing it up.

‘What you’re trying to say is that I’m the one who brought her in, isn’t that right?’ I said.

Ioana did not deny it. ‘You did what you thought was best. You behaved the way it is normal to behave for you. It is not, strictly speaking, your fault.’
Strictly speaking
… there was no clearer indication that Ioana thought it was my fault.

I was not letting go. ‘I don’t think it was. I think you’ve made a mistake, we all have. It doesn’t make sense. There’s something else. I don’t know what, but the answer is elsewhere. Why should Cilea care what Petre and Vintul do? It doesn’t affect her – she was never interested. Not once did she ask. Isn’t that strange?’ But I was uneasy. I still believed Cilea had nothing to do with it, but there was something about the way she had said it, as if she knew there was something specific… If I hadn’t been so consumed by my need to attack her, or to trample what was left of our relationship, I would have pressed her.

‘There’s something to that,’ said Leo, ‘what’s in it for her, getting involved in something like this? Ioana – I thought the reason you disliked Cilea was that she was unconcerned by anything other than living the good life? Why should she get involved now? In any case, she’s always been on the scene one way or another…’

‘Cilea’s no fool. She’s watching and reporting like the rest of them. She hangs out with dictators’ children, goes the US, shops in the hotels… and what about her and Belanger, have you forgotten that? No, Leo, you think she won’t dirty her hands to protect all that? There are no coincidences. Coincidences were abolished by the communists.’

I started to ask about Belanger but Ioana cut me off with a sweep of her hand. They all mentioned his name, but no one ever said
who
he was.

‘Please stop,’ said Ottilia, ‘No one knows anything for sure. It doesn’t help me to hear only speculations and recriminations. It won’t bring him back or help me find him again.’

The film Leo had taken of the aftermath of the demolition of St Paraschiva’s was aired on German news the next day. Then it did the rounds: Italy, Spain, France, the US, Britain. The Shit and Hassle had a new wide-screen digital TV for news and on a big screen the demolition seemed even more sinister. You could make out the actions better too: the predators tearing at the grounded dome, the Securitate watching and filming the demonstrators. Scattered about the wasted site, which Leo had caught in a wide-angle tracking shot, the bulldozers and wrecking balls were still, their work done.

All this had been going on for years, but for the media any story only begins the moment it is noticed. Perhaps because of the upheavals in Prague, East Germany, Poland, there was now real momentum behind the reporting of Romania. By August it was a big story. On the World Service a lisping young fogey from the Prince’s Trust for Architecture condemned the vandalism of Ceauşescu’s regime. There were a few aerial shots of the Palace of the People, cut with comments on the crudity and kitsch of the buildings. The human tragedy of Romania was irrelevant. Ceauşescu had been imprisoning, starving, brutalising and lying to his people for the best part of two decades, mostly with the connivance of the West. But his real crime apparently was bad taste.

There was excitement at the embassy. The country was in the news; we were on the map of dissent. No longer the forgotten kingdom, somewhere between Albania and Bulgaria on the ladder of irrelevance. The Romania desk at the
BBC
had been moved, as Leo had it, from the broom cupboard to the landing. ‘Any minute now they’ll be staffing it.’

Wintersmith was riding high. His bureau chief, the inappropriately named Jim Bossy, was being sent home on medical leave of absence. A gentle and nervous man, Bossy had spent all his life running from the authoritarian implications of his name. He deferred to everyone, even his chauffeur, and his body was prone to so many tics and jerks that he walked like a robot made of jelly. He had been having a long, discreet breakdown for years. Wintersmith was now Acting First Secretary.

Leo spent more time on his expeditions around the country, recording and photographing the destruction. With his contacts abroad, he set up a scheme in which villages and towns in the West ‘adopted’ counterparts in Romania that were earmarked for ‘modernisation’. ‘
SOS
Romanian Villages’ caught on. By the beginning of September forty villages had been ‘adopted’; western mayors, local politicians, schoolchildren and local history societies wrote to newspapers calling attention to what was happening to their town’s Romanian ‘twin’.

The black-marketeering had now been delegated to the Lieutenant and a junior Polish diplomat Leo christened ‘the apprentice’. It was hard to keep track of Leo. I had to replace the ‘Back in 15 minutes’ on his door twice because students had defaced it. Finally, I laminated it and just wiped off the graffiti every few days. He missed his lectures, stopped attending meetings, failed to hand in reports. Under Popea, the atmosphere at work became morgue-like. Even the draught had stopped blowing. When I went for my first meeting with Popea in Ionescu’s old room, the place was bare and the desk had been moved into a corner from which both door and window could be seen. The deskchair was backed up into the tightest angle where the walls met: the Feng Shui of paranoia.

Each time I called Cilea she was either out or not answering. I waited at the gates of her avenue, unable to get past the guard, while the black cars drove in and out and I peered through their tinted windows. As I loitered on Cilea’s street one night after another fruitless stakeout, Titanu blocked my way. He looked at me, looked up at her window, then shook his head. I realised I had never heard him speak, even when he kept guard for us as we fucked in theatre stalls, hotel rooms or the Dacia he drove her around in. It was a warning, and a friendly one by his standards. I nodded and turned back. As he let me past he patted my shoulder, a gesture so unexpected, of such repressed gentleness, that when he had gone I found somewhere dark and quiet and cried into my hands.

Ottilia now had her own room in my flat. Her own was no longer safe since she had been assigned two new flatmates. One was an informer, the other a devious lecher who made a pass at her as soon as he arrived. She had called us and when we picked her up she had a crumpled, sagging sports bag with some clothes and two framed photographs. ‘We’ll get the rest in the morning,’ I said. ‘There is no rest,’ she answered.

At weekends Ottilia and I walked through the parks before my visit to Trofim. Sometimes she came with me. At first she was suspicious of the ex-Party chief in his expensive flat, surrounded by capitalist luxuries accumulated over years of enforcing communist privations. To her he was one of the architects of the world we lived in. Yet they became friends. Both had a gift for the sort of friendship that grew unspokenly, that communicated itself in imperceptible exchanges of thought and feeling. She gave him her arm as they walked or visited museums without me; he saved her copies of medical magazines and took out a subscription to
The Lancet.

By mid-September, the book was ready for the printers. We stood on Trofim’s balcony watching the sun sink and feeling the start of autumn’s slow closedown. We toasted its completion with the Belgian Embassy’s vintage champagne, raising our glasses to the three hundred sheets of type. Trofim and Ottilia had already chosen the photographs: Trofim in childhood with his Rabbi father and his two sisters; his young wife; Trofim at party meetings, completely de-judaiefied in a suit and tie. The young Trofim in prison, and, a few yards behind him, Ceauşescu. Jailed under the fascists, then under the communists (‘same prison, same food, change of warders, that is all…’). Trofim with Stalin, with Khrushchev, with Kennedy…. The last photograph in the book was of him with his son Ion, now Iacub, the Tel Aviv rabbi, and his granddaughers Sara and Rachel.

The decoy book was ready too, text and images back from ‘retouching’. This one was celebrated with a glass of warm
Sovietskoi
fizz, the only sparkling wine available in Monocom. The cover was apartment-block grey with a rust-coloured lettering, and felt as if it was already biodegrading in your hands. Hadrian was with us, sharing the glory. ‘Comrade, I have taken the liberty of writing the dedicatory foreword to President and Doctor Ceauşescu. I have followed the template, but you may add a few personal touches of your own.’ Trofim thanked him and asked him with gentle sarcasm to put in some personal touches on his behalf.

Trofim was enjoying himself. He had arranged for both books to be launched on the same day: the seventh of October.

‘What will you do now?’ I asked him later, clearing the glasses after Hadrian and the Party cronies had left.

‘I had better practise my chess.’

On the twentieth of September Wintersmith called. ‘Found out about a shooting near the border. One casualty.’ Was that what I had wanted?
Wanted
was not the word, I told him, but certainly the dates fitted, if the number didn’t. ‘Just one?’

‘That we know of,’ he said, ‘but it’s pretty reliable. Border guards on the Yugoslav side heard one shot across the water. Later, during a cross-border security meeting, the Romanians produced the official story: one attempted crossing, one armed man acting alone, who shot first before he was taken out. “Organised criminal elements”, says the report. The Yugos don’t buy it, but they’ve got other things to think about. It’s taken a while to get back to us from the Belgrade office, but it’s
bona fide
info. Our man there, Phillimore, he’s gone native but he’s got the contacts.’

‘But just one shot?’ I asked, ‘that doesn’t add up. How could he have shot first if there was only one shot?’

Wintersmith sounded satisfied with himself. ‘I never said the story added up. I said the source was
bona fide
. As is the next bit of info…’

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Wintersmith had watched too many films: he was spacing out his revelations for maximum dramatic effect. ‘They found two bodies next day.’

‘In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life’

– Karl Marx

When Ottilia returned from work at midnight exhausted, I said nothing and let her sleep. When she woke, I brought her breakfast and gave her Wintersmith’s news as she lay in bed. That way there was nowhere for her to fall.

Leo had called in so many favours, indebted himself to so many people to get information about the bodies, that even his network of contacts dried up. He spent hours on the phone, paid out hundreds of dollars for leads, but it came to nothing except a few expensive dead ends.

It was Leo who suggested I contact Manea Constantin. After what had passed between me and Cilea, it was unlikely he would want to see me again.

‘You sure you want to get involved with him again?’ asked Leo, starting to backpedal.

‘It’s probably the only chance,’ I said, ‘and besides, if he has anything to do with it, and it’s my fault in the first place, then it’s the least I can do.’

‘Are you sure you can face finding out?’

‘I’m not sure I can.’ We both turned. Ottilia stood at the door, her face sallow and tear-stained, fingers bleeding where the cuticles were bitten down. ‘I am not sure I want to know, not this way.’

Not knowing had its advantages, and for me it always had: not knowing about Cilea, not knowing about Belanger, not knowing even half of what Leo got up to on the black market. But it had been two months now with no word from Petre and Vintul.

‘Someone will call for you and the girl tomorrow morning.’ Manea’s voice was brisk and ministerial on the line. He had been quick – I had left a message on Cilea’s answerphone and she must have relayed it to him. It gave me some comfort – at least she was still listening to them. ‘Be ready by eight,’ he said.

No one slept that night. Leo lay on the sofa, claiming to be too drunk to drive home, the first time he had shown such compunction. Videos played in silence and the TV cast its blue monster-shadows against the wall. Ottilia went to bed early but her light stayed on. I dozed, read, paced about, stood on the balcony and listened for the sound of building and unbuilding that accompanied our nights. Light the colour of blood and egg yolk broke across the sky: the raising up and coming down of buildings was ever-present, like the breath or heartbeats or pulse that kept a body alive and drew it ever closer to death. Even on the slowest days, the most languid weekend afternoons, it was always there. I even heard it in my sleep, and on the rare occasions when it stopped I heard it inside my head, a sound that had become a part of me.