Them

by Jon Ronson

  “Are you certain that porcupine is the local word for rat?”

  “Did you see any spikes?” chuckled David.

  “They said it was local,” I said. “I ate a local rat.”

  “Be glad of that,” said Dr Paisley.

  ♦

  In the end, something good came out of the events of the evening. Ian Paisley and David decided that rat-eating was a just punishment for my impudence, a chastisement of appropriate proportions. I was back in the entourage.

  ♦

  On our last day in Africa, Dr Paisley stopped off to inspect his mission house in the countryside near Yaounde. There used to be full-time Paisleyite missionaries in Cameroon, but their wives kept getting sick. The mission house was said by the locals to be a diseased house, and nobody went near the place nowadays.

  But behind the locked doors the house was preserved and ready, with a dining table, a sideboard and some wicker chairs. There was an Ulster flag nailed onto the wall, alongside a bunch of faded postcard-sized photographs of missionaries past.

  Dr Paisley wandered outside, and we sat on the porch. David Mcllveen bought us out some Marks & Spencers biscuits.

  There was time to kill before we needed to be at the airport. Dr Paisley said it was nice to have had some time away from his bodyguards. Being under police surveillance twenty-four hours a day could get trying, he said. He silently surveyed the scene, anthills and ferns. Perhaps now the trip was over he was thinking about the future, about the peace talks at Stormont, wondering what might happen.

  “There are various ways to martyr a man,” he said to me. “You can lie about him. And I have been lied about. You can ostracize him, and fundamentalists have been ostracized. You can defame him. You can seek to destroy him. You can, first of all, kill his character. And my character has been assassinated across the world by the media, simply because…” He smiled. “They’re not against me personally. I recognize that. They’re against my preaching, because I won’t give in. As one person said to me, ‘If it wasn’t for your religious views, you’d have taken Northern Ireland by storm.’ But I am not sacrificing my religious views for anybody. I am a captive to the Bible. I am a prisoner to the Bible…”

  I myself would occupy a small place in Dr Paisley’s future. For months to come, whenever a journalist would ask an inappropriate question at a press conference, Dr Paisley would reply, “Who do you think you are? The Jew?”

  ♦

  We caught our plane home. Although I was sitting only a few seats away from Dr Paisley, we didn’t talk to each other during the journey. Finally, we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Dr Paisley was going straight to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. David Mcllveen was going home to Belfast. I was staying in Paris. I had arranged to meet Alexander Walker, the London Evening Standard’s film critic. Like Dr Paisley, Alexander Walker is an Ulster Presbyterian with resolute views about moral probity. Alexander was in Paris on a visit to see Adrian Lyne’s potentially controversial remake of the movie Lolita, which was opening that day. He intended to write about the film before anyone else did, to discover whether it was worthy of his high-profile denunciation. I wanted to write about Alexander’s responses to the movie.

  On the transit bus from the plane to the terminal, David Mcllveen asked me why I was staying in Paris. I suspected that if I came right out and said I was about to see a film about underage sex, it might cause an unpleasant scene. So I chose my words carefully.

  “I’m meeting a film critic,” I said. “A very moral man, and an Ulster Presbyterian just like yourselves.”

  “Oh,” said David. “Why?”

  “Well,” I said, “we’re going to see a film which may cause a furore when it opens in Britain.”

  David’s attention perked up.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, carefully, “this film critic, who is forthright in his deeply held moral convictions, has travelled from London to see if the film deserves his condemnation.”

  “What’s the film?” said David.

  “Lolita,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with it?” said David.

  “Underage sex,” I murmured.

  Suddenly, Dr Paisley perked up.

  “What’s all this?” he roared.

  David turned to him.

  “Just another example of filthy immorality,” he muttered.

  Dr Paisley scrutinized me.

  “Oh,” he said, darkly.

  And, before I had a chance to explain the situation in any more detail, David Mcllveen and Dr Paisley were out of the transit bus, into the arrivals lounge, and I lost them in the crowd.

  ∨ Them ∧

  11

  Ceausescu’s Shoes

  The mysterious Mr Ru Ru and his entourage sat in a gloomy hotel restaurant in the foothills of the Transylvanian mountains. There was Mr Ru Ru, his hulking personal bodyguard, his slight financial adviser and his two attractive private secretaries, eating lunch at a table next to mine.

  A tiny man, Mr Ru Ru was wrapped up in a silver fur coat. He slipped it off to reveal a bespoke Italian suit, with a gold tie and a silk scarf and a gold silk handkerchief. Everything about him was immaculate. I later learnt that he and Idi Amin share a hairdresser.

  Mr Ru Ru looked part Chinese, and he spoke in English with an Eastern European accent – from what I could overhear.

  My lunch companion, Eugene, a lawyer with the Romanian government, was entranced by Mr Ru Ru’s private secretaries.

  “They could be Playboy models,” he sighed. “Romanian Playboy models.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “Mr Ru Ru,” said Eugene, “is a very important man. A VIP. He is a millionaire businessman.”

  “What’s his business?”

  Eugene shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t ask questions. Perhaps Mr Ru Ru isn’t even his real name. Of course it is normal for businessmen not to give their real names.”

  By now, Eugene and I had stopped looking at each other. While we talked we stared at Mr Ru Ru and his people.

  “He is a very mysterious man,” said Eugene. “He is an enigma.”

  “From what I can overhear,” I said, “I think he’s talking about Nicolae Ceausescu’s feet.”

  ♦

  “Nicolae Ceausescu had tiny little feet,” said Mr Ru Ru to one of his private secretaries. “Little feet like mine. My feet fit his shoes.” He sipped his liquor. “I like his shoes. Very fine shoes. Historical shoes. Very good.”

  I knew how Mr Ru Ru knew about this. Just before lunch, I had watched Mr Ru Ru as he sidled over to a pair of Nicolae Ceausescu’s shoes and slipped them on.

  ♦

  This was November 1999. Ceausescu’s shoes, like everything else that he and his wife, Elena, had owned, were seized by the government during the days following their executions a decade earlier. Now the shoes were piled up next door, in a lounge next to the restaurant, along with many other Ceausescu possessions. These lots were to be auctioned by the government. The Romanian economy was in desperate crisis, and the auction was part of the emergency measures to raise cash. Around thirty entrepreneurs, from Europe and North America, had converged upon Sinaia, in the Transylvanian foothills, this weekend. They sat at different tables in the restaurant, nodding distantly to one another from time to time, here for a common purpose, but nobody approached anybody else to say hello.

  ♦

  I had come to Romania because I imagined that an auction of Ceausescu’s belongings was a fitting microcosm of what I believed went on inside Bilderberg meetings.

  There are hardly any references to Bilderberg in any published history of the twentieth century. Indeed David Icke had told me that he was forever standing in bookshops fruitlessly searching indexes for mentions of the word. I nodded in agreement because I had done much fruitless searching in bookshops too. But once in a while I discovered the tiniest sliver of a mention within some memoir of an early Bilderberger.
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  The picture I pieced together was that the group was created in 1954 by a band of influential post-war internationalists who believed that global capitalism would be the best way to thwart future Hitlers. The memoirs said that the Bilderberg agenda was to ‘build bridges’ and ‘strengthen links’ between the business and political communities of Western Europe and North America (the ‘global’ in global capitalism being, needless to say, these two places).

  The central tenet was, presumably, that international businessmen were not afflicted with crazy political belief systems. They were not ideologues. In fact the comforting thing about them was that they cared about nothing at all except for profits.

  So Bilderberg would be a place where up-and-coming politicians who were supportive of a global market could mix with powerful internationalists; Jack Heinz of the baked beans empire, for instance, or David Rockefeller, or the president of Philips, the electrical firm.

  Friendships would be forged, contacts made, words of wisdom passed from established internationalist to young politician. The politicians would rise, often to the office of President or Prime Minister (the talent spotting was quite brilliant: almost every British and North American premier since the 1950s attended a Bilderberg meeting early on in their career). And, once in power, the sensible, liberal-leaning globalist attitude they learnt at Bilderberg might filter through into policy.

  So if Bilderberg’s philosophy is, as they see it, to exchange irrational nationalism for rational internationalism, an auction of Ceausescu memorabilia seemed to me to be their dream in essence, in micro form. Who could have been more irrationally nationalistic than Nicolae Ceausescu? These were the actual belongings of a tyrannical isolationist, right down to his socks and shoes, being sold at auction (and what is more capitalistic than an auction?) to bidders from Europe and North America, for whatever money-making schemes they had planned for them.

  This was one belief system absolutely supplanting another: Ceausescu’s shoes, seized right from his feet, put in storage for a decade, taken out of storage, and slipped onto the feet of Mr Ru Ru.

  Mr Ru Ru, Eugene said, intended to buy everything he could, and money was no object, although there would be stiff competition from other international businesspeople. There was a man from Düsseldorf who said he was interested only in the ten beige peaked caps being auctioned – not Ceausescu’s fedoras nor his trilbys nor his woollen hats. Just his peaked caps. He declined to divulge what exactly he intended to do with them, what his cap-related scheme might be.

  Then there was the owner of a chain of theme pubs from Dublin. He travelled the world, he said, themeing bars – Irish bars, Dracula bars, whatever anyone wanted. He said that bars with a Communist Dictator theme were the way of the future, they were going to be big, internationally, and so he was buying up Ceausescu’s relics to decorate these bars when the market was ready.

  But, of all the international buyers, Mr Ru Ru was the most mysterious. Some said he was a surgeon. Others said he was in oil. He was from Russia, or China, or Japan, or America, or Romania or Saudi Arabia. Mr Ru Ru was the chief topic of conversation this weekend. We spoke about Mr Ru Ru even more than we spoke about Nicolae Ceausescu.

  “Look at that!” said the Dublin buyer earlier to me, as we stood in the viewing room and watched him from afar. “He’s actually trying on Ceausescu’s shoes.”

  “He’s doing a little dance,” I said.

  “That’s weird,” said the Dublin man.

  “That’s just not right,” said his wife. “It’s creepy.”

  ♦

  Mr Ru Ru finished his lunch and he stood up to return to the viewing room. His entourage stood up too. He slipped his silver fur coat back on. I stood up and strolled over with the intention of introducing myself to him. His bodyguard, noticing me, instinctively reached inside his pocket for a weapon of some sort. Mr Ru Ru stretched out his arms, shooting the bodyguard a barely noticeable glance – the meaning of which I presumed was something along the lines of: “Don’t kill him. He seems OK.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Give me a hug!” roared Mr Ru Ru, embracing me, enveloping my face in his fur. “You are a very handsome man. You have good eyes. Hasn’t he got beautiful eyes?”

  “Of course,” said Gabrielle, one of his two private secretaries.

  “Yes,” he said. “You are very handsome and wise. I can see that immediately.”

  There was a small and slightly awkward silence.

  “You are handsome and wise too,” I said.

  “Ah!” he said. “You flatter me.”

  “I’m Jon,” I said, extending my hand.

  “And I,” he said, “am Mr Ru Ru.”

  “May I join you,” I asked Mr Ru Ru, “while you inspect the lots?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

  We wandered next door.

  “You have a good eye,” he said. “Maybe you come and work for me? I will double your pay! Ha ha!”

  ♦

  There were Ceausescu’s shoes, his hats and coats, Elena’s furs, their chess sets and cutlery and hunting knives. Their photograph albums were there also, along with some vases and statuettes. There were ugly paintings of Nicolae Ceaucescu standing victoriously before the corpses of bears. There were backgammon sets and dusty, factory-built tea sets that had never been used – gifts from Yasser Arafat and Kim Il-sung and Mikhail Gorbachev.

  The truth was, Mr Ru Ru and I concluded, the stuff being auctioned was tatty and disappointing. It would be worth almost nothing if it wasn’t for the Ceausescu connections. It looked like a Ceausescu car boot sale rather than the spread of overwhelming riches I had envisaged as I drove up here from Bucharest.

  There were many stories of Elena Ceaucescu’s extravagance and hoarding of expensive items. On the Ceausescu state visit to Detroit, for instance, Elena got word that they intended to offer her the key to the city.

  “No!” she snapped to her aide. “That is not what I want. I want something in gold. Earrings. Bracelets. That sort of thing. Make sure they do it. Find out how much it weighs.”

  But if these stories were true, the hoarded valuables were nowhere to be seen this weekend.

  Mr Ru Ru and I stopped at Lot 32, a silver-plated factory-made statuette, a gift from the firemen of Romania to Nicolae Ceausescu on the occasion of his sixty-third birthday. Gabrielle, Mr Ru Ru’s Romanian secretary, translated for us the engraved inscription.

  It’s your birthday, a very delightful holiday for our entire people. The firemen wish you – the Builder of the Outstanding Stage in the Millennia-old Existence of the Romanian People, Oak Tree of the Carpathians, Creator of the Epoch of Unprecedented Renewal, Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma, Source of Our Light – the warmest and most respectful healthy wishes from the bottom of our hearts. Long and wealthy life to lead the destiny of Romania to the golden future of humanity. Communism!

  “Goodness,” I murmured, “this used to be a strange country.”

  “Dictatorship,” he said, “very bad. Capitalism good! Very good. See that!” Mr Ru Ru pointed at a small wooden statue of a shepherd. “That was a gift from Yasser Arafat to Nicolae Ceausescu. Maybe I will buy it and then it will be a gift from me to you. And isn’t it a strange and wonderful world where this sort of thing can happen?”

  “This is the democratization of tyranny,” I said. “That’s what this auction is all about. Turning dictatorship into capitalism.”

  While I spoke with Mr Ru Ru, his bodyguard stood a little way off, along with one of the beautiful private secretaries. The bodyguard pulled out his knife, as if in a quick-draw in a Western, twirled it effortlessly around his fingers, and slipped it back in his pocket, to the delight of the secretary.

  “The normalization of dictatorship,” nodded Mr Ru Ru. “This is why I buy. You come to my house for dinner, we eat with Ceausescu’s knives and forks! Yes? The food tastes better!”

  “The normalization of dictatorship,” I repeated.

 
; But I wasn’t certain of this. I couldn’t imagine how dinner with Mr Ru Ru, eating with Ceausescu’s cutlery, could possibly be a normal experience.

  ♦

  “Idi Amin,” said Mr Ru Ru, “is my friend!”

  “Really?”

  “Really! It is true!”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He is my neighbour. I have a house in Jeddah. Also in Florida and Bucharest. He lives near me in Jeddah. He’s crazy!” He laughed. “He’s crazy but he’s history! Last time I saw Idi Amin he was in a barber shop. I entered. He was in the chair. When he saw me he jumped out of the chair! Ran over to me. He still had his towels around him. And he gave me a big hug! He’s my friend, really! He’s become so fat that I cannot hug him any more. I cannot get my arms around him. He’s fat now, but very poor. He has nothing.”

  “I read that Idi Amin eats twenty oranges a day because he thinks it will cure his impotence,” I said, “and that his nickname has become Colonel Jaffa.”

  “I do not know if that is true,” said Mr Ru Ru. “Perhaps the next time I see him I will ask to see his penis! Ha ha! His little floppy willy!”

  “What sort of conversations do you have with him?” I asked.

  “One time,” he said, “he walked towards me and he was surrounded by many big men. I am small so I do not like big men.”

  “Ceausescu didn’t like big men either,” I said.

  “That is true,” said Mr Ru Ru.

  “Anyway,” I said, “carry on.”

  “So, standing next to Idi Amin was a very beautiful woman,” said Mr Ru Ru. “Idi said, ‘You like this lady?’ What do I say? I have to please him. If I say yes, is he offended? If I say no, is he offended? So I don’t say anything. What he did then was he opened her dress. She was naked underneath. Completely naked. He said, ‘You don’t like this body?’ This happened. This happened.”

  “And did you ever meet Nicolae Ceausescu?” I asked.

  “Shhh!” said Mr Ru Ru urgently. He looked around him.

  “Many times,” he whispered. “But be quiet. Please. The people here they don’t like Ceausescu. If they know that I knew him, they will not like me!”