We separated into three groups, me and Leo heading off first and Petre and Vintul each taking some of the others in different directions. We walked for about an hour across terrain that looked as anonymous as motorway hard shoulder, before reaching a range of bare, tinder-dry hills that took us to the edge of thick woods.
We walked carefully, stopping every twenty yards and waiting, listening out. The wood looked made of shadow. As we entered, the temperature dropped suddenly and our steps were padded with springy undergrowth.
‘Fox traps,’ whispered Leo, ‘they’re not for the foxes.’
At last, about two hundred yards into the wood, Leo brought out a torch. There was a path of flattened nettles and brambles, and great coils of bindweed thick as a child’s wrist. There were plants here that existed in permanent shade, like those fish that live miles below sea level, fleshy and filled with darkness. ‘Wolf shit.’ Leo aimed the torch’s beam at a pile of whitened, chalky turds. The torchlight made the ground sway beneath us. I tripped and as I fell forward I caught sight of a fox trap, gaping and rusty, the fanged zero of a shark’s mouth. People had been caught in there and bled to death or, if managing to free themselves, hobbled home, bones crushed and flesh gouged. A hand steadied me from behind and covered my mouth before I could call out. Vintul had come up suddenly from behind us, poked his stick into the trap and snapped it shut. He had been behind us all the time.
Eventually we reached the end of the forest, and before us in the gloom rolled the Danube, thick and dark and oily. Against the moonlight, standing a few hundred yards upstream, was a single watchtower with its lights out. Between it and the water stood a twelve-foot screen of barbed electric wire. We could hear it buzz, a thin insect hum.
Vintul now made an owl call. Silence. We waited. Then a reply came from across the water. I saw the flash of a torch on what I assumed was the opposite bank. It was hundreds of yards of water away. Vintul made one more call then there was nothing.
‘Have a breather. We’re waiting for the next power cut. Stay by the trees.’ Leo was puffing, bent over and with his hands on his knees. The others sat and waited on the edge of the wood. No one spoke, nothing moved. There was only the sound of the wire, the deadly voltage coursing through it.
Finally the current stopped and the wire shuddered. A little beyond it, thin razor wire, its edges catching the light, flashed then disappeared back into darkness. This was a well-chosen spot, as close as it came to being safely unobserved. There were holes in the wires, carefully made and easy to reset when the operation was finished. Vintul went first. With strong pliers, he began to untie the electric wire – ‘have to keep the wire connected between operations, or the circuit breaks and they’d know it’s been penetrated. Then we couldn’t use it again,’ Leo explained. ‘Every break in the circuit sets off an alarm.’ Slowly Vintul loosened the wires and opened a few feet of electric fence and parted it. He climbed through, and did the same with the razor wire. With the moon on the river and its light being reflected he was dangerously silhouetted, but he worked fast. A few minutes later he had made a series of holes in the wire large enough to pass through. He crawled to the riverbank, stopped, then turned around. The route was clear.
The current was strong. We could see the water twisting fast, catching the light in flashes, the river’s muscle flexing. I watched them go, two of the boys first, then the girls, and then the last boy. The water closed over their bodies. The two high-fiving boys, all bravado gone, looked terrified. We watched them all slide in, holding back cries as the cold water filled their clothes and shoes, weighed them down. One of them seemed to float rather than swim, silently letting herself go downriver. Then they were gone.
Vintul was back on the rocky bank and mending the electric wire. They had lost a few minutes somewhere along the line, and it was a race now to rejoin the broken ends of fencing. He was just in time: a few seconds after pulling back his hands, the current started again, its electric dirge drowning out the slop of water against the banks.
Petre smiled and embraced me. ‘Your first mission! We will toast it soon.’ Then they were gone, back into the forest. He and Vintul would follow the river as it pulled back inwards, then head deeper into Romania, towards Vânju Mare. ‘There is a small village where we know people. We will make our own way home,’ said Vintul, and turned to go.
Leo and I headed back to Hinova, the light gathering faster than we could walk. When we reached the hotel it was nearly 5 am. We passed the unmanned reception and went to our rooms.
‘Why did you want me here, Leo? What good did I do? I just stood around and watched…’
‘You did a great job,’ replied Leo, ‘…you stood around, yes, but you stood around getting implicated, and that’s much more useful to them, to us, than anything you could actually do… besides, you’ll be up to your neck in it soon enough, so you may as well take a back seat while you can.’
After breakfast we drove through the villages of Craiova county and the vineyards of Segarcea. After the grey privations of Bucharest, it was a shock to see such fertility. Everything grew. On all sides there were tomatoes, corn, cabbages; orchards heavy with fruit and bright fields of vegetables. The earth threw it all forth, and the sun ripened it generously. In the vineyards the fat white grapes hung on their boughs, the vines rising in perfectly aligned terraces. Melons the size of footballs lay on the earth, umbilicals ranging off across the dark soil; greenhouses and polytunnels stretched off into the distance. ‘All for export,’ Leo saw me scanning the fields, ‘most of the poor sods in the factories have never even seen a melon, except in Dynasty. This is naturally a land of plenty; it’s the bloody destitution that’s artificial.’
A week passed and Petre failed to make our appointment at the Carpathian Boar. Vintul made no contact with Leo either, though he had promised to ring the next day. I looked for Petre at the music lectures but there was no sign of him. He missed the first Fakir rehearsal, then the second. The concert scheduled for the beginning of July was cancelled.
Cilea still refused to see me. Something had happened that night, something other than Nicu Ceauşescu’s humiliation, but I could not make it out. Coincidence had placed them all together in that terrible disco – the Serbs, Nicu, Stoicu, Manea and Cilea – and the fluke of my last-minute decision not to leave Bucharest had brought me there too, and with me Leo and Petre. Had that chance grouping set something in motion whose consequences were being played out without our knowing what they were? Cilea was avoiding me, Petre had gone, Leo brooded and hid away in his flat.
Leo heard the first rumour three weeks later: a German trucker, Norbert the Talker’s colleague, boasting that he had been with the same prostitute in Hamburg, a Romanian girl, three nights in a row. This girl, Ana, was new to the game and he reckoned he had ‘broken her in’. Leo asked for a description and got what he feared: the girl had a nose stud and piercings, and was under the constant guard of her Yugoslav pimp.
‘Of course it’s not her!’ I said, ‘there’s probably hundreds of those poor girls in every port. In any case, Hans couldn’t tell the difference between a Romanian and a Russian.’ There was something in my voice, shrill and desperate-sounding…
Leo and I decided to find out where Petre lived. He had told me the name of the estate, but Leo found the address on the university database. It was just as well, since the twelve identikit blocks that made up ‘Housing Estate 14’ were impossible to tell apart. A seasoned observer, judging from the mould and crumbliness of the facades, might perhaps be able to tell which of the blocks had gone up first, the way an expert might assess the maturity of different blue cheeses, but to the layperson such distinctions were impossible.
Leo parked at the base of Block Seven and unpacked a soya salami. ‘You’ll see it in glow in the dark – the bean fields are right in the Chernobyl wind.’ He waved a speckled, flesh-coloured baton from the car window, and sent me up.
In the lobby, the lift squatted at the bottom of its cage. I pr
essed the button, but nothing happened. I had eight flights to climb. The concrete was rough and crumbly, and the stairwell was a vortex for disconnected, discontinuous sounds: human voices, the squealing of babies, the seepage of a single TV programme ramifying identically across each floor. The walls were damp and all around me I heard echoing droplets of water. One landed on my upper lip. It tasted of vinegar and chalk.
I came to the eighth floor, and stopped to get my breath back. The smell of thrice-boiled cabbage filled the corridor, but it was better than the smell of dogshit and decaying scraps on the way up. I found the door. On a sellotaped square of card was typed:
Romanu, P.
Moranu, O.
There was no answer when I knocked so I waited, crouching at the bottom of the door. In the darkness I heard some keys rattle and steps heading up to this level. Emerging from the stairwell, pale and exhausted, in a dirty, once-white clinical coat and flat-heeled shoes, was Ottilia Moranu, the doctor from the hospital. She had a torch, and as she saw me struggling to stand up, she shone it full in my face.
‘Who are you?’ She made for the door and kept the torch in my eyes.
‘We met. In the hospital.’ I spoke in English.
‘Get away from me,’ she edged back into the doorway.
‘My friend, my colleague, Rodica… you were the doctor on duty. That terrible night.’
Ottilia quickly recovered: ‘That terrible night? You mean that normal, regular, standard night in a Romanian hospital you happened to visit once?’
The flat was tiny, a single sitting room/kitchen/dining room, with a bathroom and a bedroom to the side. Ottilia put on a gas lamp. In its unsteady flames, the ceiling lowered itself onto us, the walls contracted. She flicked on the light switches just in case, but there was no current.
‘Tea,’ she offered. ‘Or water?’ She lit a hob connected to a portable butane bottle. A tin of North Korean pilchards stood beside a half-loaf of bread covered with a damp cloth. We sat down, she at the bar stool in front of her food, I on the sofa bed. I made space, moving the blankets and pillow that were folded across it. A guitar case and an amplifier leaned against the wall.
‘He’s not been back for those?’
Ottilia had her back to me, her elbow on the table and the fork hovering between tin and mouth. The fish was a rust-coloured marine sludge and its smell filled the room.
‘No. No word. No one has heard anything. We expected to hear straight afterwards, and he would not have escaped, certainly not without saying something.’
‘I was there. We saw no sign that he was thinking of leaving. In fact, he headed back into Romania.’
Ottilia looked at me, surprised. ‘What were you doing with them? You’re just a tourist here. Sorry…’ she refined ‘…a visitor.’
I explained. Then I asked her what she had to do with Petre.
‘He’s my half-brother. Different fathers. Petre was born when I was four. We grew up together.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘He said nothing about you.’
‘Maybe not, but we’re friends. I hope we are friends.’ Something stopped me from phrasing that in the past tense. Ottilia sensed it anyway, that implied pastness, because she stopped eating and put her face in her hands.
‘I’m worried. I’ve heard nothing. No letter, no calls, nothing. There’s no one from the group left to talk to. Petre hasn’t been to classes or rehearsals since, and he’s never missed one. His friend Vintul’s gone too.’
‘What do you think’s happened?’
‘I think they’ve been captured. But if they had there would be something, some message, some word. And most importantly reprisals against friends and family. Me, for example. There’s been nothing. In any case, Petre is as unlikely to leave the country as I am.’
She sat for a minute and said nothing. ‘He always left messages at the hospital…’ The sentence petered out. There was nowhere for it to go except into the darkness that talking keeps at bay. Ottilia put down her fork, flipped open the pedal bin, and dumped the tin into the clanging cylinder. She looked defeated.
‘I was afraid this would happen. I told him: “Please – stop this, or at least get out yourself once and for all.” But he told me not to worry, that he’d never leave, that he was protected. He liked to say that there were two kinds of people – people who lost themselves in exile and people who found themselves. He knew he’d lose himself, and I know he’d never leave.’
‘What did he mean, protected?’
‘I asked but he never answered. Who would protect him?’
I put my arm around her, and felt her thin shoulders through the blouse, the tight strap of her bra biting into her. Her feet were swollen and her hands scrubbed and raw. I ran my finger along her bitten nails, the skin red and flaking where she had attacked the cuticles. Her face was thin and drawn. I tried to imagine what she would look like happy, well slept and properly fed. There was something Greek about her, with her dark brown eyes and high cheekbones, her thick crinkled hair pulled back with a Monocom clip but which kept tumbling over her eyes: a ruthlessly suppressed beauty.
I offered her images of hope – Petre hiding out underground, Petre out of the country waiting to make contact, Petre shopping for guitars in Carnaby Street… She did me the kindness of nodding once or twice, tightening her fingers around mine as I spoke.
I made some tea, the British reflex. As the water rolled to a boil, I watched her on the sofa. Her head hung down; her knees were clamped together, her hands clenched. Then, as I poured the tea, Ottilia was up and rearranging herself. She went to the bathroom and I heard the tap splutter. A few minutes later she returned, barefoot and wearing a homemade dress of colourful peasant cloth, her hair free to fall where it wished, her cheeks scrubbed and full of colour. She smiled – pure fortitude – and got out a bottle of Tsuica, slugged back a bracing nip then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘I must work now – I have things to prepare for tomorrow, case notes which no one will read, and then sleep. Thank you for coming. I will tell you as soon as I hear something.’
‘Well?’ asked Leo. Then, seeing me wince as I climbed into the car, ‘sorry – I’ve farted up a bit of a storm in here. The old soya salami I’m afraid. It’ll clear up once we start moving.’
As the breeze cut in through the open windows, Leo listened to my account of meeting Ottilia and said nothing. I kept saying the same things in different words, as if by doing so I might surprise some new meaning in them.
‘OK, OK,’ said Leo, ‘I get the message. Just let me think for a moment.’
But after ten minutes he had still said nothing. ‘Leo, what is it?’ I asked. ‘I know you’re thinking something. Just tell me!’
‘You’re not going to like this, but fuck it, I’m probably wrong anyway, and if I’m right it’s not really your fault, it’s the fault of the bastard system. But here goes: you introduced Petre to Cilea, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, just the once,’ I replied, unable to see the point of the question. I was tired and my tiredness was making me obtuse.
‘Once is enough around here. So: they meet, but obviously don’t want to speak to each other, in the InterContinental hotel, with Nicu Ceauşescu, Manea Constantin, Ion Stoicu and fuck knows how many other trolls, hacks, spies and stooges all around them. She’s the daughter of a top Party boss, he’s… what? Some student up to his neck in trouble. Then a few days later, Petre and Vintul go off on a mission they’ve done ten times before, and suddenly they disappear.’
It was more than a possibility now, it was likelihood, and it had been there, inside me, feeding my unease, my vague guilt for weeks. Now it was there fully formed, a sick wrenching feeling: something had happened and more likely than not it could be traced to me.
‘You don’t know. No one knows anything for sure.’ Leo was backtracking now, a sure sign that he thought he had hit on something, ‘there’s all sorts of reasons they might have got caught, all kinds of ways someone might have found out
.’
He was driving so slowly that a policeman flagged us to the side of the street and demanded our IDs. There was no backchat or bonhomie from Leo, just sullen co-operation. The policeman checked our papers and waved us on, puzzled. He knew Leo’s reputation and expected something more lively, an extravagant bribe or a risqué joke.
‘I’m dropping you at your flat. I want you to forget about this for now. Just leave it. And whatever you do, don’t go and have it out with Cilea. Let me see what I can find out.’
Thirteen
It was the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, when the expat community looked forward to the French Embassy’s big soirée. The only person who refused the invitation was the Princess, who each year sent back the same letter. It began ‘I thank his Excellency the Ambassador for his kind invitation, but he must know that I do not consider the fourteenth of July to be a day of celebration…’ and went on to elaborate a long history of Republican atrocity and failure. Someone walking along Bucharest’s Piaţa Republica on July Fourteenth 1989 would have agreed with her. Even with the daily queues and shortages, the ubiquitous police and Securitate, the place felt even more purged and prostrate than usual.
I had nearly reached the university by the time I realised why. The streets were full of people carrying typewriters. This was no easy feat: most of the machines were the old iron models, with Bakelite keys on long articulated fingers, beautifully kept antiques in perfect order. From the TAROM offices two men were carrying out an electric typewriter the size of a baby elephant. Office girls with manicured nails and immaculate hair stood outside looking sad as the beast was hauled into a waiting van.
The Last Hundred Days Page 16
