The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  The placards were mostly of Ceauşescu and his wife. A few posters bore the likenesses of other men, presumably ministers, but these were strictly rationed, and one or two had portraits of Marx and Lenin. Far up ahead the music continued, while the parade progressed joylessly: a sudden stop rippled its way to the back of the three-kilometre-long file of people, and what on TV looked like a tidy mechanical progression was really a sullen, fettered grind.

  Cilea tapped one man on the shoulder and asked for his placard. Suspicious at first, he was only too glad to hand it over and rest his arm. The picture was a magnified passport mugshot of Manea Constantin, treated in communist baroque style: sensible grey jacket, buttoned shirt, penetrating gaze, and framed with hammer and sickle motifs. There were only one or two of these in the waves of Nicolaes and Elenas; after all, no individual must look better, or appear more frequently, than the country’s leading couple.

  She handed it to me to carry. It is a sign of how inured I had already become to the grotesquery of things that when I recognised the man’s face, and knew it was her father, I merely noted it down as an odd piece of serendipity and continued walking.

  We processed onwards, hand in hand, for about ten minutes down Calea Victoriei. Cilea, tipsy and laughing and well dressed, drew scowls from the rest of them. For myself, I had never been a great dresser, but I was dismayed to see how well I blended in here.

  The mood was aggressive and despondent. People stepped on each other’s heels, elbowed each other in the kidneys, spat on the floor, strutted and squared up to each other only to retreat in a fade-out of grumbling. The smell of sweat and dirt was everywhere, punctured by Cilea’s perfume as she zigzagged ahead of me. At one point the line stopped suddenly and I was pushed into her from behind. She arched her back and pressed her head into my shoulder, her neck against my mouth. Her hair was warm and heavy.

  ‘When they get to the stadium, they’ll have to stop and stand around for three hours of speeches and ceremonies,’ shouted Cilea above the noise. She didn’t seem especially sorry. The sun beat down. For most of these people this ‘day of joy’ consumed the whole of their public holiday. Many of them would then trek home through building sites and urban dustbowls to their flats in the outskirts. They moved along, penned in by soldiers and militia. Every now and then an individual would try to make a break for it, try to disappear down a side street, only to be slapped and dragged back into line. It was human cattle herding. Only Cilea and I dodged through the crowd, snaked our way through the lines. Once or twice someone in a suit came to push us back in, but Cilea showed them her identity card and they saluted. Months later, these young men would be the people shooting at their compatriots during those unreal days in the strangulated city. I had no idea where she was taking me. Two kilometres down the road, the Romanesque gates of the Stadium of the People lay open.

  Without warning, Cilea pulled me into a side street and up into a gated avenue, where a guard clicked his heels and let her through. I had never seen such a place: overhung with cherry trees, their scattered petals on the pavement; a shop with frosted windows was guarded by a uniformed militiaman; the roads had been hosed down to cool them and the air smelled of wet pavements. Black Dacias and Mercedes were parked along clean kerbs. A gardener was bent over some perfect tulips, as if taking their pulse. Everything was fresh and opulent. Cilea led me into a shady courtyard where a fountain rippled quietly and balconies were crammed with fat-leaved plants. I followed her into a cool stairwell that curled upwards in a spiral. The clean smell of newly brewed tea hung in the corridor. Her flat was on the first floor.

  I had known, without being conscious of knowing it, that Cilea was the daughter of a top party member. So much was clear from the aura of untouchability she carried, which seemed, for all that we were in a classless communist state, the aura of lightness that rich and privileged people have everywhere you find them. It was as if the material world, the air itself, parted for them as they moved. You knew them from the way they passed through life untouched by life. Cilea was one of them: part of that international, borderless community of ease. What I had not known until this afternoon was that her father was more than just a member of the nomenklatura. The flat Cilea lived in alone would have housed two families. The living room looked furnished from a Nordic minimalist catalogue and full of US films and magazines, British books, Japanese electronics. The kitchen was stocked with olives, amaretti, French wine and English biscuits. There was Romanian art on the walls and shelves of photographs: Cilea and her father in front of Big Ben, the Pitti Palace, Harvard boathouse. In one photo a small girl, recognisably Cilea but perhaps five or six years old, played with other children on a green lawn. At a table nearby sat a group of adults enjoying a spread of food in the open air. At its head, and with Elena to his right, sits Nicolae Ceauşescu, elbows on the table. Behind him stand two minders. The servants, arranged just on the edges of the photograph, had the feudal air of self-erasing ubiquity you saw in the margins of photographs of nineteenth century royalty. They might have been attending on any Czar, Emperor or Sultan.

  At the centre of all these pictures was a photograph of a beautiful young woman with the same dark brown eyes and thick black hair as Cilea, the same golden-tanned skin and red mouth. From her hair and clothes I judged it had been taken in the mid-seventies, against a background of blue sea, sun and shiny white passenger ferries. The only way you could tell it was taken in Constanţa and not Cannes was by looking at the grey-faced, ill-dressed communist apparatchiks around her, from whom she stood out as vibrantly then as her daughter did today. She wore the same necklace Cilea now had on, a crescent moon of beaten silver on a chain so fine it ran like water through your fingers. Cilea and I had that in common: she had lost her mother young and still mourned her in that imprecise, blurred way I understood because it infused everything I felt and did. ‘My mother died when I was eight. If I want to remember her, I look at that photograph. If my father wants to remember her, he looks at me.’ Cilea laid her head on my lap. I leaned back and stroked her hair, then lifted her face and kissed her eyes which were hot with tears that never fell.

  That afternoon we went to bed. I never knew and I never asked what had changed her mind about me, why she’d come to my flat, or how she even knew where to find me. If I had I might have been better prepared for what would happen, or at least known my place in it all. But already I had learned not to ask, not to wonder, not to dig too deep.

  Cilea’s lovemaking was frank, demanding, without prudishness. I had preconceptions about eastern bloc fucking from watching Czech films on the arts channel that started at midnight: the smell of hairspray slugging it out with body odour and plum brandy; grey sheets, armpit thatch and a backing scent of garlic. This was more like pampered women’s magazine sex, and I was having it in all places in Romania, a country where even the Bulgarians imported their own food.

  Cilea’s passport was on the bedside table, beside some French contraceptive pills: two of Romania’s most controlled subjects, travel and fertility, side-by-side. Having these was an imprisonable offence, but Cilea had nothing to fear. I thought of Rodica in the hospital surrounded by sorrow and death, and of Dr Moranu, the challenge of her anger. It looked like I was in a different world from them, here in Cilea’s flat, but in some strange way they felt connected. I pushed away the thought. I’m not part of all this… Cilea had said. It was enough for me at the time because I wanted it to be enough.

  The regime dealt in counterfeit: counterfeit goods, counterfeit money, counterfeit feelings. It gave you solitude instead of privacy, crowds instead of community, reproduction instead of sex. Sex was the one act in which all of daily life’s privations could be exorcised, the one sphere into which the state couldn’t reach. But Rodica knew differently. In other communist countries your body at least was your property, perhaps the only property that was not theft. Fucking was escape. ‘Poor man’s aspirin,’ they called it here. But really only the privileged fucked recklessly; fo
r the rest, it was another furtive, precaution-racked release.

  In other eastern bloc states abortion and birth control were statutory rights. Here they were a dangerous, illegal business. The black market in condoms was ferocious, and they were so hard to find that people used them again and again, washing and drying and rolling them back up. AIDS was still a secret, and didn’t officially exist, but you knew it was out there, taking hold, making its way in along the channels of denial and official secrecy. I had seen it: EPIDEMIA, the letters burning like a fever; I heard its tills ringing in the night, in the shuffle of banknotes in the hotels and clubs where the whores worked.

  On Cilea’s Swedish stereo Joni Mitchell sang, ‘Oh I could drink a case of you, darling/ And I would still be on my feet,’ to the steam of an espresso machine. She brought two scalding coffees and some Swiss chocolate which she broke into blocks and spread across its foil on the bed. She lived in a world without friction: nothing scraped or dragged as she went through life; there were no obstacles. When I was with her I shared that frictionless world, lived on a cushion of air where the only intensities came from the pleasures we shared: the nights when, as she slept, I would hold her from behind and press my face into her shoulders until she wriggled sleepily out of my arms and kicked off the sheets. That first afternoon the breeze dried the sweat off our bodies and Cilea’s arm lay weightlessly over my chest, while mine held her tightly to me.

  We dozed to the finale of the day’s celebrations: a choir of hundreds singing a song – with helpful subtitles: totalitarian karaoke – about Ceauşescu’s exploits in the anti-fascist resistance. Ceauşescu’s speciality was third-world leaders who could always be relied on to take up and reciprocate invitations to ‘state visits’ or, as Scînteia put it, ‘fraternal exchanges between helmsmen’. The speed at which these regimes collapsed or were overthrown ensured a steady supply of international helmsmen at Cotroceni Palace.

  By now Ceauşescu’s public engagements, which had once involved the likes of Nixon, Khrushchev and the Queen of England, had dwindled into a rotation of pigmy-plenipotentiaries and micro-dignitaries. He had been in power nearly twenty-five years; they eddied around him like a shallow stream around a rock. Marx talked about history as the great force propelled by logic and necessity, which could be prepared for and ridden but not hurried along; Mao had replied, asked if the French revolution had worked, that it was ‘too early to tell’. Just as religion had once promised rectification and reward in the next world, so Marxism offered us life as perpetual prelude. It was customary to take the long view – looking around us, what other view was there? – but History was not playing the long game with this lot. This was not History flattening out its dialectical kinks over generations, perfecting the conditions of its own unfolding. This was History as stopwatch: you could hear it at their backs, timing them out.

  Nine

  ‘I fancy a Kojak…’ Leo announced.

  Ceauşescu’s love of Kojak was legendary, and tempered the fear his name instilled with just enough ridicule to allow for a glimmer of humour. Most evenings on a good day the Conducător would watch a Kojak in his private movie theatre to prolong the warmth of his greatness. On a bad day, to take the edge off his quotidian tribulations, it was to the golden-domed Hellenic-American lawman that he also turned. Either way, Ceauşescu was reputed to fancy a Kojak much of the time.

  I fancy a Kojak: the phrase was Leo’s opening line whenever he was proposing an evening out. When, later, we met in a restaurant or hotel bar, he would open his arms wide and drawl, ‘Who loves ya baby?’ And before you could reply, Leo did it for you, arms extended and hands open in mock homage: ‘Ya People and ya Party!’

  Leo was inviting me to the highlight of the contraband calendar. Twice a year he hosted ‘museum parties’ where guests could visit the official exhibits at one or other of the museums before viewing, in secret, the unofficial collection that Leo kept in the underground storerooms. His favourites were the Sutu Palace on Bratianu and the Natural History Museum on Kiseleff, whose directors were both customers and shareholders in Leo’s business. This one was to be held at the Sutu Palace.

  Coded invitations were sent out on museum stationery for a certain day at a certain time. You added six days to the day, and six hours to the time, so an invitation to the Monday 3 pm reception was for the following Sunday at nine. The museum windows were blacked out, and the place would then be lit up inside with gas lamps and candles. Waiters from across the city materialised the way people did in Bucharest, appearing at your shoulder dry though it had been raining, warm-handed despite the frost, fresh and unhurried despite heatwaves, stalled trams and cancelled buses. Marshalling them from the shadows was the Maître d’ from Capsia: a man whose ubiquity was matched only by the sheer difficulty of getting from place to place in the city. I think of him not as someone who arrived or left, who came and went, but as a being who, like a light, switched himself on and off, into and out of place.

  Then the guests: they came in cars with dimmed headlamps and silently filled the museum lobby. Everyone whispered, not because there was any need to, but because it fitted the occasion: muffled, excited, faintly dangerous. Coats were lifted off shoulders and hung up as trays of wine glided through the crowd. The Maître d’ discreetly took the entrance fee, a steep ten dollars for the apparatchiks and racketeers, a few hundred lei for the artists and writers, or for Leo’s friends, flush with Romanian currency but with nothing to buy. A string quartet played quietly, canapés did their rounds, people mingled and admired the collections, the objects enveloped in gaslight.

  These gatherings divided into two groups. First there was the old bourgeoisie; discreet, educated and delicately mannered, they had lost everything in the transition to communism, seeing their homes requisitioned, their savings nationalised and their social networks shattered. Most were denied Party membership and endured a purgatory of déclassement, eking out livings as concierges, museum attendants or theatre ushers, jobs designed to confront them daily with what they had lost: their homes, their pasts, their culture. A few managed to climb the Party rungs in spite of their family’s past, occasionally, like Manea Constantin, becoming powerful members of the nomenklatura, ministers and diplomats in much the same positions as they would have been under the ancien régime. Then there was the new breed, people who owed everything to the Party, and more specifically to Ceauşescu, who preferred people like himself: semi-educated, crude but full of low cunning; unquestioningly loyal and wholly corruptible.

  At the back of the room, in front of an expressionist painting of a yellow-skinned nude, Trofim had been cornered by the British Embassy’s ecomonic attaché, Giles Wintersmith. Wintersmith talked and munched peanuts at the same time, so that the contents of his mouth resembled the churn of the weekly rubbish as the jaws of the bin lorry closed on it. After years of cocktail parties, his fingers had set into a kind of tapered simian scoop with which he shovelled up bowls of snacks. Beside him was Franklin Shrapnel, his opposite number at the US embassy, an overweight civilian with an army fetish and a penchant for military attire with zips and multiple belts and holsters. Shrapnel strove to give himself the air of a presidential bodyguard on a dangerous state visit: he tweaked his ear in pretence of listening to a hi-tech earpiece and his eyes darted around the room unmasking extremists. Their friendship was a parody of Anglo-American cold war relations: Shrapnel admired Wintersmith’s phlegmatic limey wit and Wintersmith looked up to Shrapnel as a man of action.

  Wintersmith’s big obsession was identifying ‘contacts’ to press for information or to interpret rumours. He was asking Trofim if he knew of any dissident movement likely to capitalise on the unrest elsewhere in communist Europe. I had not been here long, but I knew enough to see this was the wrong approach. In a world where there were no direct answers, only fools asked direct questions.

  ‘What a gross approach,’ I heard Trofim say, in perfectly enunciated English, ‘and unworthy of a diplomat, even one of Thatcher’s,
sir.’ Sir… the way Trofim hissed it out, drenched in contempt, was withering. Wintersmith shrank back. Shrapnel puffed out his chest and muttered some item of superpower machismo.

  ‘Does the man think he is James Bond?’ Trofim asked when they had disappeared.

  ‘The name’s Wintersmith,’ I laughed, ‘Giles Wintersmith.’

  A tap on the shoulder. ‘Your consort,’ Leo pointed across the room, ‘she’s not on the list, or not on mine anyway…’

  Cilea stood at the door, handing her coat to the Maître d’ and slipping him a banknote.

  ‘I didn’t invite her…’

  Leo raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course not. Still, better make her welcome.’ He took her a glass of Sovietskoi sparkling wine and she smiled innocently.

  ‘How did you know about this?’ I asked her.

  ‘Dr O’Heix’s soirées? Highlights of the Party calendar. You don’t think the cloak and dagger stuff is for real do you? You couldn’t get away with this kind of thing without the say-so of someone up there…’ She pointed up at the ceiling. ‘I’ll bet you a new Dacia that for every five guests here one of them is an informer. But one in five of those informers is watching the other four. They’re the ones to worry about. That’s the beauty of the system.’

  The beauty of the system… what was beautiful about this mise-en-abîme of paranoia, this endless recession of spies being spied upon?

  ‘Anyway, I’m here to check up on some of the family collection.’

  ‘You’ve got some stuff here?’ I asked, paying new attention to the exhibits.

  ‘My father’s family were diplomats in the old days. The ancien régime they call it now. His grandfather and father were ambassadors. Haute-bourgeoisie,’ she stage-whispered, her breath candied with lipstick, haunted by wine and duty-free cigarettes, ‘most of their belongings are stuck in museums. Every now and then he buys a bit back, or splashes out on a new piece…’