‘Perhaps you have lived in freedom but not been free?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps if I knew what you meant…’ I was tired of the relentless obliqueness of these discussions: long sessions of quickfire goalpost-shifting between westerners who acknowledged only money and buying power as markers of civilisation and Romanians who insisted on their dignity by pretending that their régime, however appalling, promised a better future even if it no longer intended it. Petre reminded me of Trofim in this respect: he was still holding out for communism to deliver on its ideals.
I watched him take a long draw on his cigarette and lay his back against the bench, sliding his body forward so his backside hung over the edge of the wooden slats. I felt a speech coming on and looked at my watch. I needed to leave, to find my way home. But what Petre said stayed with me; not because it was penetrating or intelligent or even true, but because of its extraordinary purity, its ingenuity, and ultimately its complete and heroic wrongness.
‘I have known freedom in my life. I live in a place that is not free, but I have made freedoms that have gone deep. Short freedoms, only moments here and there, but freedom. I am not a stranger to it. The mistake you make in the West is to think we are just victims, bowed heads… to think that we do not keep safe a part of our lives in which to be normal and happy and become who we want to be. Many things are the same for us as they are for you: loving, dying, friendship, pleasure, the taste of good food and drink – when we can get them,’ he laughed, ‘and they have the same value, the same meaning…’
‘I try not to make that mistake about people…’
‘Maybe you, and maybe a few others. But I know how you look at us because we are not free the way you are. But what are you free for? To buy things? To choose twenty different models of camera? To give your children six different brands of cereals for breakfast. Is that autonomy? Is that why my friends are leaving the country, risking their lives to cross borders to live in places where they can make a big choice about eating Cheerios or Coco Pops in the mornings?’
‘Petre, save that stuff for the right person. I’m not arguing with you; I don’t pretend that the West is perfect. But you can’t say there’s any equivalence between what you suffer here and what we have in the West, even if we waste so much of our freedom on crappy things. These are small choices, but they stand for bigger choices, about who rules us, and what we are allowed to choose to say and do and believe. Perhaps a choice of cereals is a sign of a country where there’s a choice of governments.’
‘That’s not freedom,’ Petre said, ‘that’s being a customer. You are all customers. You live in a customer country. What is it Mrs Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society…’ He gave a dismissive laugh.
‘That may well be true when she’s finished with us, but it’s not true yet…’
‘I am free because I stay here, not because I leave. I choose to stay, that makes me free – even though I cannot say what I want, even though they are always watching me, destroying my city, even though they will stop me from playing my music and I always have to have my concert programmes approved in advance… I am free because I choose not to run away.’
I had no answer. Petre believed in the intensity of freedom as it was lived, not in its quantity thinly spread across a range of minor choices: what to wear, which brand of detergent to buy, the ‘freedom’ to choose who treats your piles or your bad teeth. But here, now, in the circumstances he found himself, Petre had no choice but to believe what he did. I had never heard anything so persuasive and yet so manifestly untenable, so ill-fitted for any of the kinds of life that were on offer to him. It was a philosophy of extremity that depended on extremity in order to exist. But it only seemed idealistic – really it was pragmatic: after all, when you cannot spread out freely, you dig down, and that was what he had done: he had created a logic where intensity replaced quantity. Petre had adapted, because he had adapted a theory of freedom to make sense of all the constraint.
Petre was twenty-three, two years older than me; he seemed to know nothing but to believe already in too much. There must have been plenty in his short life to knock all this belief out of him, to make him cynical and hard, but there was a calmness to him I had seen in no one else. He was more out of place here than I was, yet at the same time he was entirely adjusted to it. There was something about him: as if he was from a better but recognisable version of this place and time, in which higher versions of ourselves circulated uncontaminated by the gross realities we had created and which had in turn made us. That was my first impression and, as I came to know him, that impression deepened.
He had a half-sister, a doctor, with whom he shared a flat. His parents, now dead, were born into the Transylvanian peasantry and became engineers in Timişoara. His grandparents had been farmhands on an aristocrat’s estate and then worked in the first collective farms. Petre was proud of that: from illiterate peasants to engineers in one generation.
‘I am the grandson of peasants, the son of engineers, and now I play guitar. In three generations of one family we have gone from pointless toil to efficient technocracy and now to useless art. That is progress. You show me that in your country!’ He laughed, crushing his cigarette butt with his heel and putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s time for me to go. We would like you to help us. You have spoken to Vintul, and very soon we will ask something of you. We have a project and we would like you to join us in it.’
Petre embraced me then disappeared, leaving a faint smell of leather, patchouli oil and tobacco. It was already eleven – I was late and I was lost. Cilea would have let herself in and found something in the fridge to graze on. I was the only person in the small square, and I could hear water rushing somewhere ahead, in roughly the direction of home. Choosing a likely looking sidestreet, I walked on. It was by now so dark I could orientate myself only by the occasional glimmer of a candle or paraffin lamp in the windows. I heard the scrape of a zippo flint. A flame swelled up and a face took shape, eyes looking directly at me, then fell back into darkness. I smelled drink and heard him breathing, saw the cupped glow of a cigarette end as he inhaled, and the shiny black rim of a policeman’s cap.
I heard voices, saw light lapping at the cobbles at the next turning. Some music funnelled its way down the alley.
I emerged into a gaudy little red-light zone. Beneath a sort of bridge of sighs that connected up two decrepit buildings, young girls wearing rubber shoes and short skirts sat in lamplight, reading crumpled German magazines. Drunk soldiers stood around and argued; builders drank from bottles or old pickle jars. Men in ragged suits and frayed ties counted money, exchanging wads of banknotes and cigarette packets. A brand new stereo system played western disco tracks. One of the girls struggled dopily upright, pulled herself up by a crumbling windowledge, and put out her small dry hand to take mine. There was no strength in it; her fingers grasped my wrist, her cracked, painted nails scratched my arm no more deeply than a bird’s claws, then fell away as I passed. Her eyes were ringed with shadow, sunken back into their sockets, circles of rouge painted onto her hollow cheeks. She looked like a broken doll. Behind her, the girls sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall had the air of marionettes propped up in the wings of a puppet theatre. Had I seen her in the InterContinental that day with Leo? Yes, I was sure now: there was a little less of her now; and the eyes… more than before afire with fever.
Some builders in dusty work clothes sat playing cards, an upturned crate serving as a table. Two prostitutes stood behind them, resting their heads on their shoulders like escort girls at a high-class casino. No one paid any attention to me – I was walking through someone else’s dream. People looked past me as I wandered through this underworld, an inner-city limbo of prostitution and racketeering; the smell of boredom, sickness, victimhood. Then the stench of human excrement and vomit and the grunting of paid sex. My shoes nudged through soft shit and broken glass. A figure stepped out in front of me. The policeman had followed me,
but had somehow finished up ahead. He took my papers, wrote something down in a little booklet then mock-saluted me past, leering, as if we had just shared some secret, binding experience.
I left my shit-caked shoes outside the door and went immediately to shower. Cilea was curled up on the sofa in front of the TV. She smiled up at me, a box of expensive chocolates on the armrest, and made room. She had painted her nails, and the smell of varnish hung in the air. The video was the latest James Bond, and I had arrived in time for the set-piece casino scene, in which 007 coolly fleeces the playboy-psychopath of money and amour propre before a gasping public.
Cilea teasingly nestled a foot into my groin. When I failed to respond, she paused the video and went to the kitchen to fetch some wine.
‘Do you know all the other music students?’ I called out.
‘I think so – but I don’t go to all the lectures…’
‘Petre Something – you come across him?’
‘There’s a few Petres… it’s a common name… Red or white? I went to the Diplomatic Shop this morning…’
‘Nothing thanks, I’ve had too much already. I was out with Leo.’ I realised I had let on that I knew Petre, and that I might have to explain myself to Cilea. ‘Don’t know the surname – long hair, plays the guitar, looks slightly spaced-out… you know…?’
Cilea stood in the doorway now, her black dress half-ridden up her thighs where she had slid forward on the sofa. She frowned – trying to remember or trying not to?
‘Ah, you mean the guitarist? The Fakir himself…’ Cilea laughed quickly, ‘that’s what they call him apparently. The girls go for him, but they say he’s not much interested in them… I’ve seen them in concert though, last year. Why?’
‘Oh… I just passed by the Atheneum and saw his name on some concert programme. I thought I might go. I bought some tickets actually… well, just one… I assumed you wouldn’t want to go.’
‘Probably not,’ Cilea was back on the sofa and Bond was back on the job, climbing a vertical cliff face in a dinner suit. I needn’t have worried. She had no interest in my life outside the time I spent with her, and this in itself was enough to make me uneasy: while I worried about what she was doing and who she was with, her interest in my activities never went beyond polite enquiry. For the jealous, jealousy becomes the marker of passion, of authenticity of feeling; unrequited jealousy was just as bad as unrequited love.
I ran my hand along her thigh to see if the intimacy on offer earlier was still available. She opened her legs slightly and pulled my mouth to hers, keeping her eyes on the screen over my shoulder as I carried her out of the room.
Eleven
‘Sure about this?’ Leo asked, pulling up to the kerb and slinging my meagre luggage into the boot of his Skoda.
I was not. ‘’Course I am – why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Leaving your chums behind, the lovely Cilea, the holiday resort weather…who knows? There might be a revolution while you’re away… you might come back and find it all gone. Someone might knock your building down. Or your girlfriend off…’
Leo roared down Otopeni Boulevard, the speedometer of the Skoda touching 120 kmh. Motorcade speed. It was hot, and the tyres were sticky on the road. My suitcase thumped against the metal shell of the boot as we jammed to a halt at a checkpoint on the city limits. ‘No worries,’ Leo said. ‘Because you’re so anal we’re two hours early as it is.’
I was on my way back for my first home leave. I was due two weeks, and I intended to finish clearing out my parents’ house, sell up and settle my father’s debts. I had said goodbye to Cilea the night before. We had walked home from the Athénée Palace at 2 am, Titanu tailing us discreetly in the Dacia. She kissed me on the steps of my house and climbed into the car, claiming it was unlucky to sleep with someone the night before they went away. The darkness had been thick and humid, but today the storm it had preluded had failed to come.
At the terminal building Leo parked in a diplomatic slot and put a crested permit card on his dashboard. It read, in English, French and Romanian, ‘Ambassadorial Business’ and referred any queries to the Consular section of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, Strada Jules Michelet. ‘I won’t stay long,’ Leo explained, ‘I’m not really a goodbyes man.’
My flight was not for another two hours. I checked in my case and joined Leo at his table in the ‘Progress Bar and Lounge’. The airport’s glass and concrete shell was almost empty of travellers, the usual battalion of officials with no precise duty sat or stood in postures of resentful vacancy. A flight from Belgrade was due, and a line of ministry limos waited on the tarmac, their drivers’ doors open. Trolleys of food and wine were wheeled into the VIP lounge full and rattled back out empty. Glasses clinked and corks popped – and the visiting dignitaries had not even arrived.
‘I thought you weren’t going to hang around,’ I said to Leo, though really I preferred him to stay, ‘you don’t do goodbyes, remember?’
‘Greetings are more my thing, as you know. Actually, I’m interested in who’s arriving. There’s some kind of welcoming committee here, and it pays to keep your ear to the ground… looks like a Yugo delegation.’
Leo ordered a whole bottle of wine and poured us both a glass: What did I plan to do with my leave? Beyond seeing through the arrangements for selling up and clearing out the house, I had no plans. I barely wanted to go at all, but these were arrangements I had held on to, something to steady myself amid the buffetings of my new life.
I had only just met Petre, but much of the short time we had known each other we had spent together. I was drawn to him. Unlike Leo, whose life consisted of imagining a different world and making it happen in flashes by means of imagination, nostalgia and dirty money, Petre lived in the here and now. He managed to exist in it without either escaping or giving in to its crudity and greyness. He too had his plan for the city, his plan to link it all up into a single network. But not by lost walks. Petre was no more interested in Leo’s old guidebooks than he was in the brutalist blueprints of Ceauşescu’s architects. He had something else in mind. The Project he called it: The Co-operative.
With Petre I visited the new Bucharest with its factories and housing blocks, its identical new model suburbs. It was the counterpart to the old city of guidebooks and Baedekers, the city Leo was salvaging from a mass of broken stones and memory. But it had its beauty, its unlooked-for heroism and dignity: people trying to live normally, sending their children to school but supplementing the days of state indoctrination with unofficial classes on science or literature or history; men and women exhausted from banal and overmonitored jobs coming home on irregular buses to empty shelves and power cuts; old people eking out their pensions, younger ones struggling to fill their lunchboxes or put a square meal on the table. Everyone lived with the tug of hunger, the drag of boredom, a world and an epoch away from the Party bosses, the diplomats, the foreign businessmen. Leo’s louche, beautiful Bucharest was of no concern to these people, if they knew it existed at all.
They had their citizens’ groups which took care of the sick or the bereaved, distributing essential goods like medicines and baby milk, and Petre’s dream to was to co-ordinate these groups into a single, well-planned counter-economy – one that would make good the failings of the system without contributing to the corruption of the black market. He was building what he called a ‘skills bank’ where teachers, plumbers, engineers, medics and other essential workers would pool their time and talents. The teacher would teach for two hours and buy two hours of an electrician’s or a plumber’s time. He could use them or exchange them or keep them until needed. There would be no interest rates, no economics based on cash or investment – just on time and work, from which the central administration would take a percentage to build up a welfare system for the sick, the workless or the old. The Social Fund Petre called it. What Petre dreamed of was a society within a society, a huge, Bucharest-wide network that would eventually spread across the country. Versions of
it existed already in apartment blocks or villages. What it needed was countrywide co-ordination. Petre showed me his plans, his maps, not of streets and buildings but of people. ‘Sounds an awful lot like communism to me,’ I said when he had finished explaining it last week in the beer garden of the Carpathian Boar. He nodded but didn’t answer, just dragged on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. ‘Like a world before money,’ I added. This time he turned and corrected me: ‘After money. After.’
Then there were the concerts Petre’s band gave in darkened warehouses to hundreds of students, close-packed and sweating, smoking bad dope and drinking flat beer; the samizdat songbooks and bootleg tapes they passed around, copying and recopying so often that the music became blur and the words became shadows on the page. This was the Bucharest that was left over when Leo had finished idealising it and the state had finished bulldozing it. ‘This is what we must start with, Leo: this,’ Petre had told him one night after a concert, pointing at the mêlée of thin, sweat-drenched students squeezed onto the temporary dance floor they had cleared in the abattoir that was Fakir’s venue for a night. The place smelled of detergent and blood. ‘You must work with what you have, with what’s there. Otherwise who will inherit the old Bucharest you love so much?’
That had been three weeks ago. Since then Leo’s habits had changed. In his black market deals he always took a cut for Petre and Petre’s friends, bought up school books and unglamorous, unprofitable essentials like flour and sugar and tinned food. His associates complained – it was heavy stuff, cheap; there was no profit margin. Why didn’t he stick to whisky and watches, to the easy-to-carry, fast-selling luxuries the rich Party bosses paid so well for? And whenever there were medicines involved, Leo always short-changed the buyer or over-ordered from the supplier to keep some back for Petre. Petre had changed the way Leo did business, had given him a focus for his sprawling, chaotic kindness that so often missed its mark or became lost in a tangle of double-dealing. It was through me that they communicated, and my role as go-between gave me my first real sense of being involved in Bucharest life. I arranged pick-ups and drop-offs, relayed messages, supervised payments and part-exchanges. Petre’s Social Fund was taking shape. For now he needed Leo’s racketeering, defectors’ escape fees, and all the tawdry trappings of a corrupt police state. But not for long. These were the start-up costs, he said, necessary to buy time and lay the foundations of the social fund, and it was Vintul who oversaw it all: Vintul the banker.
The Last Hundred Days Page 13
