Highly placed officials used Leo to store their own ancien régime furniture, icons or modern art, and would come and admire them every few weeks. The obese minister for work, a man with the fleshiest and least toil-tested hands I had ever seen, would visit Leo’s flat with his latest mistress to admire the jewellery he stashed there. Rotund, jolly, ruthlessly corrupt, he came each month with a different adolescent girl. Leo was not fastidious in his business dealings, but there was a class of person – mostly ministers and pimps – after whom he always washed his hands.
Leo hosted auction parties in his flat, where people came to buy or watch others spend their way to ownership of fragments of the old world. He laid out the pieces, each priced and with a short paragraph of explanation, date and provenance, and waited for the bids, which were always made to him privately in the course of the party. Nobody knew who bought what: ‘untraceability all part of the service’. Bids were camouflaged as conversation, and gradually the small red ‘Sold’ stickers filled the price list. Those objects that could not be transported were photographed and the photographs laid out on the table to be fingered and passed around like pornographic snaps. The first time I attended one of Leo’s auctions, early in May, he was selling a fifteenth-century carved screen from a demolished church. It was bought by the minister for cults, who had ordered the demolition and wanted the screen for his bedroom.
Leo knew a cross-section of Romanian life: Costanu, the chief of museums, a melancholy, cultivated man who took refuge in his poky office in the National Gallery and read poetry, cosseted in the 1930s’ heyday of his imagination; the tennis ace Nicolescu, for whom Leo procured Mercedes parts, Burberry clothes and champagne; the brutish pimp, Ilie, whose network of girls and Securitate-sanctioned honey-trap bars supplied sex and bad drugs to foreigners, and hired out the photographers who snapped them, in flagrante, for the secret police to blackmail. Leo called on favours from a gallery of Romanian ambassadors and envoys for whom he arranged the import of western goods using his network of gypsies or Poles in Polski Fiats. For these people, the country’s intensively patrolled borders were no obstacle. Stereos and magimixes made their way from Germany or Austria, fridge-freezers and washing machines slipped through the barbed wire. I imagined Leo’s ‘turbo-Poles’ driving iceberg-sized frigidaires strapped to their tiny cars: ants dragging carcases ten times their size into their underground feasting chambers. Leo once oversaw the migration of a thirty-foot Jacuzzi from a German luxury bathroom shop to a villa in Snagov, on the outskirts of Bucharest. As Leo told the story, he understood it was for Nicu Ceauşescu’s weekend bachelor pad, though he never discovered for sure. Just in case, he and his crew had relieved themselves into it as they filled it up and switched it on. ‘The Whirlpool of History,’ Leo baptised it as he unleashed a bladderful of beery piss.
Then there was the most poignant of all the people I encountered through Leo: ‘La Princesse’, an aristocrat who had lived in Paris for thirty years and reputedly been Paul Valéry’s last mistress. She had made the mistake of returning to Bucharest in the late 1960s and found she could never leave again. She had no money, and lived in two rooms of her family’s former Hotel particulier, the rest of which was given over to workers’ accommodation. Every Wednesday she went to the French Embassy for the coffee morning, to eat croissants and stretch the diplomats’ diplomacy with stories of 1930s Paris and Romanian émigré culture. Then she would visit the consulate and ask if her visa had arrived. The visa, stuck somewhere in the bowels of a frozen ministry, had been in process – the official term was ‘active’ – for nearly twenty years. Each time she walked home via the patisserie on Calea Victoriei, where the manager took pity on her and gave her an elaborately ribboned box of yesterday’s pastries.
She was always invited to the embassy functions, where she stood in her haggard finery – outrageous feather boas in the summer, 1940s Chanel two-pieces and moulting furs the rest of the year. Her once-luscious minks now hung off her like peelings from stray dogs. French ambassadors and cultural attachés still called on her, though less and less – she clung to them, her dry fingers clasping their hands too long, crowding them with desperate courtesies. With everybody else, she was an imperious, unreconstructed middle-European aristocrat. Then there was her crew: a feudal retinue of ultra-orthodox religious types and monarchist dreamers. All were unpaid and basked in her disdain. She held annual parties for the King’s birthday which the authorities monitored and treated as a piece of folklore: hand-kissing, curtseying and crossing. The telegram from the exiled King Michael, sent to her care of the Ambassade de France, was solemnly read out and followed by prayers. Her flat was a place of icons and stewing tea, incense and old books. Even Capsia French was too roughhewn a medium for her. Hers was elaborate, baroque, ceremonial, a Louis-Philippe chair among languages: fragile, substanceless, overstuffed.
In Paris she had been La Princesse Antoinette Marthe Cantesco. Here she was citizen Antoaneta Cantescu, the only person we knew who had a servant, or rather, who had someone officially designated as such, since there were plenty of examples of servitude. Hers, an old lady almost her own age whose own family had been employed by the Cantescos for generations, lived in a single room in the building’s basement. The maidservant never looked happier than when her mistress criticised her stoop, castigated her for her ugliness or found fault with her cooking. The look of beatitude on her face when la Princesse called her idle was the only expression of complete spiritual transport I have ever witnessed.
We went to see the Princess as one goes to visit ruins; and like all ruins there seemed something permanent about her, the indestructibility of the already felled. She lived, broken and poor and anachronistic, without once letting on that she knew it, or that her every waking minute was a triumph of wilful fantasy over reality. She shared her madness with her minions, who looked to her to sustain both them and it.
It was Leo who had finally, in May this year, secured her visa. He bribed and cajoled and called in favours until it appeared, stamped and dated and ready for customs. And it was Leo who paid for her one-way flight, Air France, to Paris.
Leo and I took her to the airport. In the car I watched her face as it failed to comprehend the avenues of new apartments and office blocks, the fantasias of scaffolding and cement. Perhaps she never saw them; perhaps all she saw was the long-demolished Bucharest of her youth, the ghosts of its buildings. The airport baffled her, habituée of the Orient Express, whose family once booked whole Pullman carriages for their trans-European journeys. It was an evening flight, and from the departure lounge we could hear the cicadas, tiny engines thrumming in the trees. At the passport control she handed over her documents and kept her gloved hand out a few seconds for kissing. The young guard looked at her and laughed. On the other side of the plate-glass wall, she turned back and waved us away. Servants dismissed.
Or so we thought. She came back a month later, broken and beyond reach now, where before she had just been far away in time and place. ‘Properly crackers this time around,’ said Leo as he caught sight of her, swaying in the arrivals queue, dishevelled and staring out across some vast inner distance. No one knew, and she never said, what had happened in Paris.
We drove her back from the airport. She was dramatically thin and hollow-eyed, dressed in the same clothes she had left in and smelling of urine.
Leo and I helped her up the stairs back to her flat. Her maid curtsied and struggled to straighten back up: she too had aged a decade, symbiotically with her mistress. She had kept the flat exactly as it was left; had gone on polishing the silver, buffing the icons, dusting the books and furniture. The Princess looked around her as if seeing it all for the first time: the grimy stairwell whose walls had once displayed her family’s portraits; the banisters where she and her brothers – one dead in the First World War, the other disappeared when the Russians invaded – had played and slid down the handrails; the hallway where she had modelled ballgowns as a debutante now partitioned with chipb
oard, walls stuck with public notices and racked with jimmied-open letter-boxes. The old chandelier remained hanging, fragile and denuded, its crystal long gone. Three forty-watt bulbs strained to keep the vast space lit. Mosaic tiles that had once covered the floor were missing or chipped, clumsily refilled with cement, and behind the elaborate coving the faulty circuitry buzzed and crackled.
Paris, now that she had returned to it, was further away than ever. It no longer even existed in her imagination. When she lost that, she lost, too, the madness that had kept her sane. As Leo put it: ‘Madness is not living in a fantasy world – she has lived in her fantasy world quite happily for years, perhaps we all have. Madness is the space between the fantasy world and the real one, where you find yourself cut off from both. There’s no way back from that.’
Eight
May Day was a national holiday across the eastern bloc. In Romania it was an excuse for a minutely planned display of spontaneous celebration. The rehearsals had taken up three evenings of the previous week, the workers of Bucharest honing their spontaneity under the malignant watch of the police. When the day itself came, there was, exceptionally, no building work going on anywhere in the city. The morning was taken up with the hanging of placards and tricolour bunting; kiosks were stocked with Rocola, beer and sausages; news-stands sold celebration issues of Scînteia. ‘A true Bacchanalia,’ Leo gasped in ironic awe as he watched the preparations. Banners proclaimed joy in work, fulfilment at home and respect abroad. Everywhere you looked or listened you encountered the rhetorical rule of three: People, Party, Ceauşescu! Peace, Prosperity, Plenty! and, Leo’s favourite, Epoch of Light, Dignity and Joy!
Leo, Ioana and I were drinking and smoking dope on the balcony. The TV was on with the sound muted while we listened to the parade outside: patriotic music, a bloated slurry of pomp that sounded the same whatever country you were in. Leo had found some liqueur chocolates which he had stacked in a cascade on a salver and displayed with an ambassadorial flourish. He was already drunk, singing communist party songs, a joint between his thumb and forefinger. Open on the table before him was the literary magazine, Luceafarul, named after the hero of Eminescu’s national epic, the fallen angel who became the evening star: Lucifer. The front page printed a new ‘Ode in Homage to the Couple of Light’ by some Union of Writers’ poet Leo knew and which Leo now translated.
‘I’ve known Palinescu for years – he’s got to be taking the piss! Listen: The Light that illuminates our epoch has a source! Two Suns that burn as one! Jesus, I hope they paid him well for that…’
‘Palinescu’s a wimp. He’d sell his grandmother for petrol tokens,’ Ioana cut in.
‘Twin lighthouses by which the ship of state, trusting – surely that should be rusting? – navigates the perilous waters…’ Leo went on, ‘Ioana darling, it’s your country, but I shouldn’t have to tell you that the world’s not divided into wimps and heroes. It’s not like that. There aren’t enough of either to really make a difference…’
‘It’s exactly like that. Palinescu’s a human oil slick – his kind spreads and spreads until nothing else can breathe.’
‘Ioana, it’s just some harmless crap poetry – and everyone knows it’s crap: he does, his bosses do, the magazine does, only Nic and Elena believe that stuff. They’ll check he’s mentioned the right number of tractors and stuck in some Romans and they’ll forget about it. We all will. Most people just want to get along and reach the day’s end unscathed, not weigh up the moral rightness of everything they do and say. Nothing wrong with that, and…’
‘It’s the lies,’ Ioana said, more despondent than angry, ‘all the lies. They eat away at you until you believe nothing; you feel nothing. That’s what I’m saying – if everyone believed it they’d be idiots, but they’d actually be believing. The part of themselves that believed would be there still, still getting used, not dying away like this, dying into irony and cynicism.’ She gestured at us, at Scînteia, at the television indoors, then at herself. ‘Instead we just listen to nothing, take nothing in, we think we’re resisting by laughing it off. The lies are wearing everything away… wearing us away.’
‘No, that’s not true.’ Leo was serious now, something he did not enjoy. ‘It’s because they’re lies and we know they are that they can’t reach us. If we’re going to be lied to on this scale, let’s know it.’
Ioana waved the conversation to an end and looked down at the floor. In Leo’s eyes the worst social crime you could commit was to lead one of his conversations into seriousness. He saw it as a kind of ambush. Leo could be angry, righteous and passionate, but he found seriousness hard. He preferred to exaggerate or play things down; seeing them in their proper scale disturbed him.
Ioana was a disapproving girl, with a lot to disapprove of: from the local details of her life (Leo, principally) to the state of her country. It was hard to know which was the more easily remedied. Leo sat puffing into the sky and tapping his feet out of time to the music, the alcohol flush adding a scorched quality to his face. They were an unlikely couple, Ioana tall and slim and with features as sharp as her manners, Leo short and baby-faced, manic and idle. By starting a relationship with her, Leo was demonstrating his commitment to remaining in Romania; she, by starting one with him, thought she was staking her commitment to getting out.
The doorbell rang. I was expecting no one, but when I answered I found Cilea, a Burberry bag over her shoulder. She kissed me on the mouth and walked straight in.
I introduced her to Leo and Ioana but there was no need. These people knew each other, though for my benefit they went through the motions of meeting for the first time. Suddenly, Ioana’s roaming disapproval had fastened on an object. Cilea seemed unbothered by the change she had brought to our small party. Did she even notice? She took a seat and opened the bag from which she produced a bottle of chilled French wine and some Italian olives.
Ioana was the first to go, making up some engagement at the other end of town, not until now mentioned. Leo wavered and exchanged a few stilted pleasantries with Cilea before following. If any of this offended Cilea, it didn’t show. Without asking the way, she went to the kitchen for a bowl and glasses; Belanger’s flat clearly had a history of hospitality. The wine was so cold the glass beaded with condensation.
Cilea handed me the corkscrew and opened the olives with her teeth. I noticed a small line of newly applied lipstick along her front teeth and remembered its waxy red taste as I had tried to kiss her on our last meeting. I opened, she poured. My mouth was parched. Leo’s dope was rough, but rougher still was the Turkish tobacco it came with. Cilea’s wine tasted as perfect as it looked. A top-end Chablis, it was nearly impossible to lay hold of here, even in the diplomatic shops and western hotels, whether you paid in sterling, dollars or Deutschmarks.
She was in a different mood from our previous meetings. This time I knew she had made a decision about me, though I couldn’t yet tell which way that decision had gone. Her body language was more open. She was less careful, less guarded. For the first time too she was interested in me. I was half-stoned and half-drunk, but these two halves seemed to amount to a plausible whole. I found myself quicker off the mark, readier to engage her and better able to stand her scrutiny.
It was nearly five o’clock. The parade had been going for four hours now, four hours of music, marching and cloud-scraping military flyovers. Occasionally, the television would revel in a close-up of some dignitary. Colonel Gaddafi was one I recognised from the rogue’s gallery of western bogeymen; Mugabe fronting a row of elaborately uniformed Africans. Yasser Arafat, always a reliable guest at Ceauşescu’s celebrations, sat beside the Conducător. Months later, he would be guest of honour at Ceauşescu’s final Party congress. Behind them I recognised people from the diplomatic circuit. All looked blankly ahead. The British Ambassador wore his customary expression of very faint strain, a tightening of the eyes and mouth that could denote anything from a stifled fart to moral outrage. The close-ups of Ceauşescu’s f
ace were more interesting. He was man on perpetual watch. His small black eyes missed nothing of what was going on around him, alert and twitching with paranoia.
The next bottle, from Belanger’s stock, was warm and sweet and difficult to enjoy. It proved the law of diminishing returns that governs daytime drinking: the more and more becoming less and less. Cilea seemed happy enough, though I feared the afternoon would fizzle out into nausea and headaches before seven, and bed by ten. Alone. Cilea tasted the wine and scrunched up her face.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s join the parade – we’ll find you a placard. Actually, we’ll be the only spontaneous marchers there.’
As we left the flat, Cilea put her arm through mine. She walked jauntily, pulling me along. At the corner of Aleea Alexandru we found ourselves in the midst of the parade. I say ‘parade’, but it was more like a chain gang with invisible shackles. They marched as if their ankles and elbows were threaded together, heads bowed or facing straight ahead at the backs of other heads. Many held brightly coloured banners, yellow and red and black, and party crests modelled on Roman military insignia. They moved forwards in one drab, articulated shuffle.
The Last Hundred Days Page 9
