The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘Bad news about Ionescu though – any thoughts on how that came about?’

  I shook my head, tried to pull myself up from the table but felt woozy and sat back down. No lunch, all that coffee at Trofim’s, the heat… all the same, it was only a pint of beer. Wintersmith watched me over the rim of his glass. ‘It would be very helpful if you could keep your eyes open, if we could trust you to keep us informed…’

  ‘Of what?’ I was being obtuse. I knew what he was getting at. He knew I had access to all sorts of information and rumours, but really I knew nothing. There was no inside track, or there were so many inside tracks it didn’t matter. Ionescu had been purged. So what? Did it mean anything more than if he hadn’t? I had seen a booze-up get out of hand with some Serbs. I had seen Nicu Ceauşescu get kicked out of a nightclub. What else? Gossip – unreadable, uninterpretable gossip. What bothered me was the whereabouts of Petre and Vintul. Would dealing with Wintersmith help with that?

  He couldn’t be trusted. I was used to that. But was he untrustworthy in ways I could rely on?

  ‘You might find all sorts of information that means nothing to you. But it may mean something to us if we connected it up. If you just passed things on, no matter what… your predecessor Belanger was very helpful. He kept the Romania desk busy with titbits for two years.’

  Belanger again, I thought. ‘Any of it much good?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes just knowing is enough,’ he replied. ‘To help with the narrative, flesh out the context.’

  ‘Anything in this for me, or is it a one-way deal?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Wintersmith sighed loftily as he said it: a pro dealing with an amateur.

  ‘Find something out for me?’

  I took the leap – more a leap of calculated mistrust than a leap of faith, but it would mean I owed him, and that was itself hard to swallow. I told him about Petre and Vintul. I told him the where and the when of the operation, leaving out my own and Leo’s involvement.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ he asked. ‘I mean, is it really you or is it someone else you’re putting out feelers for?’

  I wanted to leave Ottilia out of it. And Cilea. I invented some distant colleague who was related to one of the group and left it there. Wintersmith squinted at me, trying to decide if I was lying. My deceit had improved remarkably since my arrival in Bucharest, but I was not yet sure I could outwit the professionals.

  Fortunately Wintersmith’s need to give me a realpolitik lecture got the better of his scrutiny: ‘What’s happening is that all over Europe these regimes are falling. Not here. We’ve got a trade mission coming with the Foreign Secretary in a couple of months, and they’re hoping to sell a lot of planes and helicopters. It’ll be one of the biggest deals outside the Middle East. We’re going to be stuck with Ceauşescu for a long time, believe me, so we’re going to have to work with him. Look at it out there: the city’s coming down around our ears, the Securitate’s more powerful than ever. There are no dissidents. No one looks like they’ll make anything happen. The Romanians won’t – it’s not in their nature. No one helps those who can’t help themselves. The place is a basket case, but a basket case with money.’

  I wasn’t interested. Rising to leave I asked him: ‘Will you see what you can find out about those two boys?’

  ‘Will you keep me up to date? What’s going on in the university, student groups, any flashpoints of discontent you hear about? Knowledge – it’s a market, a commodity. Anything you can find out…’ Wintersmith had been eyeing my satchel throughout our conversation. I kept it on my lap, one arm crossed over it. ‘Writing a novel?’ he asked. ‘Only I saw you printing off a ream of paper back there. Must let me read it sometime.’

  I tried to look dismissive. ‘It’s nothing. Just some translations I’m working on, a bit of poetry…’ As I stood at the pub door, I felt nausea closing in, first in tiny ripples, then in stronger, rolling waves. ‘You OK? You’re looking… unsteady.’ Wintersmith held out a hand towards me. The white, bony fingers were inset with a few strands of thick black hair. The hands looked suddenly disembodied, the hairs quivering like tentacles. I headed for the toilets to throw up.

  When I returned Wintersmith was inspecting his right hand with a puzzled look. ‘You’d better stay here for a while, you’re in no shape to go home. As luck would have it, the embassy doctor’s down for a few days this month. He’s here now. I can get you seen first thing tomorrow.’

  I stumbled out of the embassy and headed in the rough direction of home. After five minutes at a half-run, I steadied myself on the corner of the street. Somewhere, Motorcade sirens started up. I sat in the doorway of a closed bakery and rested my head on my knees.

  I must have looked like an ordinary passer-by, exhausted with drink or apathy, or a day-shift worker dozing between connections. But my head span, my stomach lurched. I was producing sweat so fast my clothes were saturated.

  A fierce kick to my thigh broke into my nausea: thick-heeled ankle boots, flared trousers. Securitate standard-issue. A young suited man stood over me, blocking the sun and jerking a thumb in the air, a signal doubtless picked up from US crime shows in which petty thieves in the Bronx are rousted by square-jawed cops. Perhaps he too watched Kojak. At least he had the right clothes. I tried to haul myself up, but my legs were shaky and the kick had deadened the muscle. He took my ID.

  ‘Open.’ He said it in English, pointing at my satchel.

  ‘University papers,’ I replied in Romanian. I was groggy, and the swirling sirens unbalanced me.

  ‘Open.’

  I opened the satchel, careful to let the sheets of Trofim’s manuscript fall sideways blank side up. He put his hand in and felt around and was lifting the papers out when a burst of shouting broke from his walkie-talkie. He dropped the papers and answered a one-syllable affirmative. I strapped the satchel closed and made to leave. His hand took my shoulder and pulled me back. He raised his right hand and put his middle and index finger to his eyes, then pointed them back at me – we’re watching you. He was thin and sharp-featured, not much older than me and six inches shorter. The Securitate’s footsoldiers: taken in late adolescence from state orphanages and trained in combat and surveillance, they owed all they had to the state. I had no trouble remembering he was a trained killer: it was his blankness, the vacancy in the eyes, barely masked by the darting, paranoid agitation that passed for life.

  I walked fast in the opposite direction, my spinning head now exacerbated by a thumping heart. Had it really been only ten minutes since the sirens? Time was distended; I was walking through syrup, every step slow and sticky and unreal. At the intersection, nothing but more Securitate and the road’s tyre-beaten cobbles giving back the sunlight. The stale afternoon light was breaking up, and through a sickly prism the colours began to separate out. I felt top-heavy, swaying along the kerb. I stumbled off into a shop entrance to vomit again. Several painful dry heaves, and I was empty, wrung out. I could feel my body dehydrating, my skin tightening over the bones.

  I pressed on through the backstreets, the long way round but clear of roadblocks at least. The sirens had faded but still no cars passed. They must have cordoned off the whole quarter, not just the roads the Comrade or his decoys were using. I heard a rush of engines behind me, their sticky tyres ripping down the one-way street. The Motorcade. Four black Dacias at seventy or eighty kilometres an hour down the small street, horns blaring. I jumped sideways and fell, my satchel strap catching at my throat as I went. The first car passed, and then the second. As I rose I drew level with the passenger window of the third. Behind the smoky glass I saw a pair of small startled eyes, the pinched face and pursed lips of the Comrade. He waved uncertainly, half shielding his face. The real Ceauşescu or his double?

  Fourteen

  It was Leo who found me on my living-room floor, ‘splayed out like a dried-up starfish’, and Leo who brought Ottilia, who now leaned over me with a thermometer and a bag of pale liquid, a saline drip that shone opal
in the declining sun. I brought my hand to my eyes but felt a tugging. I was plugged into a variety of tubes, and my bedroom was laid out like a field hospital.

  ‘Welcome back. Leo!’ she called out. Leo lumbered in, a pile of Sunday supplements under his arm.

  ‘Don’t worry – the good doctor stood aside while your old chum Leo took your trousers off and squeezed them dry. No job for a lady.’ He dropped the magazines onto the foot of the bed and patted my leg. ‘Don’t put that thermometer in your mouth, by the way.’ He winked at Ottilia, who smiled and left us to it.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ My voice was hoarse, my throat ached from all the empty vomiting. A basin of liquid shit was on the floor beside the bed, swampwater-thin and brackish, with flecks of grey foam on the surface.

  ‘Ready for the good news?’

  Leo bent over me, spectacles on the end of his nose, pretending to read from a clipboard in the manner of the fat consultant from Doctor in the House. One or more late afternoon drinks haunted his breath. ‘You’ve been here two days. Touch of amoebic dysentery, we all get it to start with. Lucky I found you though. The lovely Ottilia’s been getting all the medication you need to spare you going into hospital. Know what they say about hospitals here in the socialist paradise: “There’s always a bed, the problem is, you never come out…” All fine now. That’s the good news.’ I propped myself up. Leo continued. ‘Bit of a bummer this, but you’re not allowed to move for another week – doctor’s orders.’

  ‘Has Cilea been?’

  ‘Yes, she popped by yesterday, but you had a thermometer up your jacksie and were raving about Wintersmith. She left some good wishes and a bunch of flowers. Didn’t get the sense that sickbeds were her thing really… She’s been away, Belgrade, just got back.’ His expression clouded as if he had just remembered something. I motioned for the phone, but Leo shook his head. ‘Not now. Wait a bit. Let yourself settle.’

  Thanks to Leo’s manoeuvrings Ottlia had all she needed to treat me, she said, and didn’t want to know where it came from. The drips had Greek writing on them, and the plastic nappy I wore came from a Red Crescent box with Arabic and Turkish packing. The boxes of pills and flagons of medicine were in enough different tongues to constitute a United Nations to themselves. I felt resigned, comfortable, helpless. Everything had a strange convalescent distortion: the lights glittered, the doors and windows were blurred at the edges, and the bowl of rare if not exotic fruit – oranges, apples, apricots – made a vibrant still-life on my bedside table.

  The red light of the answerphone flashed. I played the message: it was Trofim, his voice a snarl that made me recoil from the phone. I closed my eyes again and blacked over into sleep. I was aware, some time later, of Leo’s voice as he found me, unfastened from my drips and turning weakly in my burning sheets. Sometime in the middle of that night, I heard the World Service; later I was roused by terrible noise, like an oar scraping a rubbly riverbed. I reached out for the bedside lamp and fumbled the switch to find Leo snoring, fully-dressed, in the armchair. I called out, shouted, lobbed a biro at his head but failed to wake him.

  On the fourth day I was released from my drips, strong enough to get up and go to the bathroom unaided. I had lost half a stone. My cheeks were sunken and my eyes bottomed out into dark semicircles. My skin was yellow, and my arms puncture-bruised. I walked to the living room where Leo had set up camp. He was there now, reading Luceafarul and listening to an English-language broadcast on Radio Moscow. The answerphone still flashed its red light. I played the message again:

  My friend, I hope you are well. You never arrived on Sunday. Or Monday. I became worried about you, and of course about what had become of our work. Let me know. I shall be studying chess moves in the park, in my usual place, as usual. Otherwise, you know where to find me. With best wishes, your friend Sergiu Trofim…

  Trofim’s answerphone messages were like letters: he always began with a greeting, always spoke in perfect sentences, and always signed off with good wishes and his name. This was the message which, in my fever, I had imagined as some sort of vicious encryption.

  ‘I need to speak to Trofim,’ I told Leo. ‘Urgently… He hasn’t heard from me for nearly a week and I’ve got something of his.’ I noticed my satchel flapping open on the doorhandle. I looked inside, but the papers and diskette were gone.

  ‘Dealt with,’ said Leo lazily. ‘Where d’you think he’ll have the launch? Capsia? Banqueting rooms of his old ministry? A two-bunk, eight-man cell in Jilava Prison? After all, he’s a graduate of that establishment…’ I was taken aback. Trofim had not exactly hidden anything from Leo, but he had kept even close friends underinformed about what he was writing, its state of completeness and his plans for publication. Even I did not know the last of these, though I knew he was in touch with a French publisher through someone at the Belgian embassy. Trofim kept the different parts of the picture separate, jigsaw pieces secreted across town, across languages and across social spheres.

  I saw that Trofim had left me an old book of poems by Tudor Arghezi, Trofim’s favourite poet and also, I knew, Ionescu’s. It was signed by Arghezi, and there was a small United Nations compliment slip inside bearing Trofim’s name. As Leo fussed in the kitchen and made some lunch, I leafed through it. It was not the words that caught me – I was too tired and unfocussed to read those – it was the yellowness of the pages, the way they had begun to crumble and break rather than tear. They were the texture of rice paper and serrated at the edges like the wings of moths that had been battered by endless strivings against lamps and windows. As I turned them they emitted a pervasive, smoky dust that caught my throat and made my eyes itch.

  Tudor Arghezi… collaborator in the war of 1914–18, anti-fascist in the war of ’39–45, dissident in the Stalin years and National Poet in the Gheorghiu-Dej era. After the second war, the poet had been denounced by the Stalinists. In an article in Scînteia entitled ‘The Poetry of Decay and the Decay of Poetry’, they vilified him as the bard of the bourgeoisie, the poet of sickness and decadence; ‘pathological’, ‘perverted’, ‘a putrefied consciousness…’ I knew all this from Trofim’s memoirs. Trofim had known Arghezi a little, first as his persecutor and then his rehabilitator, but always as his admirer and most avid reader. Trofim knew Arghezi’s work by heart, despite being the Politburo member with special responsibility for Arghezi’s ‘critical reappraisal’, a reappraisal which resulted in the poet’s expulsion from the Union of Writers and the banning of his poems.

  There was a chapter in Trofim’s memoirs – the genuine ones and not the fake ones he was writing for the official publishing house – about how, after the war when he was out of favour, the old poet had made his living selling cherries from the orchard in his Bucharest garden on Strada Martisor. Trofim had bought some one day, finding Arghezi sitting on a wooden stepladder at the roadside. The old poet had no reason to know one of his tormentors was in front of him, since already evil could be done, as Trofim put it, ‘by remote control’. I felt contemptible, Trofim had written, I do not know what he sensed in me – perhaps nothing, how could he? – but he drew all my guilt and self-hatred to the surface with his sly, knowing eyes. He drove a hard bargain too: I paid twice the going rate. He knew I was guilty. It did not matter of what. He just knew.

  Trofim had planted one of the cherry stones in his Herastrau garden. The tree had blossomed; indeed it never failed, over forty years, to welcome the spring with a promising flourish of flowers. But it had never yielded a single cherry.

  ‘Remote control’, Trofim had called it: of course, he had not sullied his own hands with the day-to-day business of defaming Arghezi. He had picked an ambitious young academic for the job. The dirty work of smearing Arghezi in the press and coercing his friends and readers to desert him was done by the Party’s attack dogs, led by the young literature professor. When Trofim had supervised Arghezi’s rehabilitation ten years later he had chosen the same professor, no longer so young, to make the case for the old ma
n’s status as ‘National Poet and Treasure of our Literary Life’. Trofim had not named the literary apparatchik in his book, and always refused to tell me when I asked. I had assumed he was dead or had fallen into irrelevance.

  Now, as I went to the last page of Arghezi’s poems, there was an envelope stuffed with yellowed press cuttings. They were arranged in order of escalating vitriol. The first, dated March 1965, was headed ‘The Poetry of Bourgeois retreat’. The next, a few weeks later, was called ‘Emotional Pornography’. After a couple more, ‘Putrefaction and Decay: Arghezi’s insult to Life’ argued for the expulsion of Arghezi from the Union of Writers and his removal from the curriculum. All were signed Andrei Ionescu.

  Ionescu! It had been Ionescu doing Trofim’s bidding! Further on in the pile of cuttings, a decade later, the process began again, but in reverse: an article claiming that socialist taste was now sufficiently embedded to admit of experimentation with what it termed ‘the vagaries of subjectivity as a counterpoint to the self-evident truths of scientific materialism’. By the end ‘a giant of World Literature was emerging from the neglect in which, by his own modesty and gentleness of temperament, he had too long suffered.’ It was eye-wateringly hypocritical stuff, comical now, though there was no mistaking the brutality and fear that underwrote it all. Leo noticed me scanning the articles. He had already read them.

  ‘Terrific isn’t it? Old Ionescu destroys the poor old sod’s reputation, then a few years later proclaims him the greatest poet of the century! You couldn’t make it up! Wait till I tell Ioana – it makes what goes on today look principled.’

  I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. I felt sad and disappointed. In what exactly? In whom? After all, I knew all this – not the details, but I knew. About Trofim, Ionescu, Cilea, Leo and all the others… I was complicit in it too and I even knew that. But now I felt both crowded out and alone, implicated and out on a limb, in a world whose terms were perpetually shifting, yet whose rules would never change.