The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘I don’t care what he’s done.’ Leo cut into some argument with himself, since I had said nothing, ‘he’s all right is Ionescu, poor bugger. There are no winners here. Even old Trofim hasn’t won. He’s got his nice flat, he’s had the power, the mistresses, the money, the foreign visits. But for what? For a system that’s on its knees in a city that’s coming down around his ears. That’s not evil out there, that dark cloud, the Securitate, the motorcade, the decoy dogs… it’s not evil. It’s failure, that’s all, failure. Colossal, ongoing failure: taste it! It tastes like a bottle of expensive Pomerol and a chateaubriand from Capsia, and it tastes like a crust of yesterday’s potato bread and some tinned pilchards from Korea. Whether it’s Cilea’s Chanel No. 5 you’re inhaling or the station baglady’s armpit juice, it’s still the same smell. Failure.’

  I didn’t answer him. Sometime later, half-asleep, I smelled Ottilia beside me. She was still in her working clothes but smelled of soap and scrubbed skin. As she leaned over me to tuck in the other side of the bed, her hair brushed my face. I caught a very faint floral scent, though not of any flower I knew. I half-opened my eyes, a movement she seemed to hear as if my eyelids had made a tiny noise. She leaned down and put her fingers gently on them, closing them to restore the darkness. Then I was conscious of some whispering next door and the quiet latch coming down on the front door as Leo took her back home.

  That night I dreamed a sequence from Trofim’s book as if I were seeing it with my own eyes. I remembered it word for word. I had typed it, and in doing so I must have archived it, perfect in every detail and in all its cold sad beauty. It had been Trofim’s epiphany of pragmatism, as he put it, when he decided to fall in with Stalinism. He reneged on his allegiances and friendships, de-judaified himself, joined the purges and was quickly promoted.

  On the flight to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1951, it all came clear: I looked out of the porthole of the plane: the dying sun behind its wall of ice, those fields of cloud and burning cold, the pressure of empty air, that press of void that held the plane up and kept it safe while at the same time threatening its destruction… ‘That’s all there is,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s all there ever was, a regulated vacuum.’ Over the next decades, whenever I was in a plane, whether it was a TAROM local flight or Kissinger’s private jet, that vision was always there, reminding me… ‘That’s all there is.’ I still believe that, but much of what I did in view of that belief I would undo or do differently if I had my time again.

  Leo arrived the next morning at nine. ‘Sorry I didn’t come back last night. I got held up. We’d got word that the old church of Saint Paraschiva in Lipscani was being demolished. Ottilia came too – wanted to see what it was like. The wrecking balls had done their job by the time we got there, but I snatched a few shots.’

  Leo slotted a video into the machine: in the slow, misty dusk, men were tearing the copper strips from a dome. It stood in the rubble like a giant tortoise as they attacked it with hammers and pliers. The picture was blurred and wobbly, taken from some nearby window whose wooden pane kept intruding on the image, framing it up and letting it go again. Lorries came and went in silence as the ghost of a sun rose behind the ruins. A few minutes in, a hand came from the left and covered the lens. That was it. Leo ejected the video and replaced it in its box: Chuck Norris, Missing in Action.

  Cilea visited for the first time a week later. I still spent most of the day in bed and Leo had used my illness to take up residence in my flat. Ottilia called in most days, usually in the mid-morning before her shifts at the hospital. Trofim visited twice. The interruption to his work was frustrating him; they had replaced his cement-haired secretary with a computer-literate Party loyalist, Hadrian (‘The Wall’) Vintile, who erased each new file and took away the only copy at the end of every day. For the first time there was an urgency to the project, a sense of time running out.

  Cilea brought chocolates, flowers, a fat pineapple with leaves like a cartoon explosion and an atomiser of her father’s cologne to fragrance my convalescence. I asked her why it had taken her the best part of ten days to come and see me.

  ‘You were being taken care of. I would just have been interrupting. I saw you were in good hands, then left it until you were well enough.’ She sat at the end of the bed, her smell mingling with the room’s nameless chemical odour. She had had her nails varnished, I noticed as she lit another Pall Mall, puffing the smoke out of the window, her concession to the medical context. She looked more tanned too, in her crisp white shirt and jeans, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, wearing the same clothes as when we had first met. The InterContinental’s ‘Aesthetic Centre’ had been busy. Either that or Belgrade had been blisteringly sunny.

  I struggled out of bed and manoeuvred us to the living room, away from all the signs of illness and dependency. Wrapping an embarrassing tartan dressing gown around myself, I sat on the sofa and let her make tea. When she returned, I touched her arm. She stiffened up.

  I knew then, from the coldness of her skin, the contraction of her body at my touch, that it was finished. She was all solicitude and dead libido. And it was decisive, the way only a body decides. The mind’s slant can be changed, the rational mechanisms can always review and go back on themselves, but the body’s knowledge is irreversible. I knew that was why she had avoided me these last weeks, why she had not spoken to me or contacted me since that night with Nicu and the Serbs. Something had changed.

  ‘I came to see how you were,’ she said redundantly.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what? You showed me that night what you really thought of me, I saw it all: the way you watched me, like you owned me, the way part of you was excited seeing those bastards touching me, and the other part of you wanted to kill them… I thought we might be together, but it’s obvious that will never happen. You don’t trust me, I’m not even sure you’re interested in me. I know you think you are, but when all the fucking and the high life is over you hold me in contempt. You followed me. Checked up on me. You thought that was love but of course you knew no better. I’m sorry for you. My God, you even suspected me of having something to do with what happened to those boys…’ She looked away.

  ‘And what did happen to those boys?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘I don’t know. Why should I? But you thought I was responsible.’

  ‘That’s not true. I was besotted with you. I still am. You know that.’

  ‘I thought I did. Now I know that you thought I just wanted to be a westerner, and that I was not as noble or pure as those who suffer, as your new companion Ottilia for example…’

  ‘There’s nothing going on with Ottilia…’

  ‘No, maybe not – because she can see through you. I didn’t, that was my mistake. Your friends hated me from the first day. Leo, hiding behind his buffoonery; your “pure” friends who were better than me, Ioana with her perfect credentials, Ottilia with her work in the hospital…’ Cilea swallowed, tried to continue, dragged on her cigarette and puffed the smoke out towards me. Her fingers shook. She closed her eyes. There was something else. ‘And anyway, I know now that I’m not free, I probably never was.’

  ‘“Free?” Don’t you start. I’ve had enough of all these bloody speeches about freedom…’

  ‘Shut up – I mean free to be with you. I shouldn’t have started this.’

  ‘So you have been with someone else? I bloody thought so!’

  ‘No. I was, before we met – never while we were together. You know who it was. Here, in this flat, you know that of course. So do they –’ She meant Leo and Ioana. ‘Belanger…’ She paused. ‘It’s complicated…’

  ‘I never finished college but I think can grasp the basics of a story where my girlfriend goes back to her ex while I’m supposed to be clearing out my dead parents’ house! How inconvenient of me to stay behind! How inconvenient of me to come to the InterContinental that night!’

  ‘It’s not like that. He called me, asked me to come back to him. I promised n
othing. Just to see him. My father hates him, made him leave the country, so I went to meet him in Belgrade. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have led you on.’

  ‘It took you six weeks to prepare that?’ I asked with as much derision as I could muster. I had already lost. ‘Or was it just between dances with Nicu, manicures and visits to Capsia that you put your mind to it? I’ve spent the last month begging you to forgive me, humiliating myself on your answerphone, and all that time you’ve been holed up in Belgrade screwing your ex?’

  Cilea turned to go, eyes burning. ‘I’d expected better from you. But really you thought so little of me that deep down you think nothing of yourself for having been with me. Well, you saw what you wanted to see, and got what you wanted to get. I am sorry. I’m leaving now.’

  I was suddenly exhausted. I tried to rise and stop her going, but sagged back into the chair. I heard the front door close behind her.

  Leo returned with Ottilia later that afternoon. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and woke in an icy sweat. The first days had been full of convulsions, as my body pounded the sickness out of me. Now it was slower, a glacial detoxification that felt too much like illness itself to persuade me I was getting better. They were both laden with shopping bags and bottles, and in a blistering good humour I could not match. Leo had persuaded Ottilia into one of the nomeklatura shops. He was breaking down her resistance.

  That evening Ioana joined us for dinner while Leo, helped by Ottilia, cooked a messy and desynchronised meal in which everything that should have shared a plate arrived as a separate course. The food thus took us far into the night, with whoops of delight and laughter coming from the kitchen, clattering pots and pans and at least once a shriek of what sounded like terror, then modulated to relief, and then finished up as laughter. I asked Ottilia what she had made of the Party shop. The place had horrified her, though it enabled her to put an image to the rumours: there was nothing there she did not already know about, and seeing it had liberated her. It was not so long ago that I myself, a westerner used to groaning supermarkets shelves and all-night convenience stores, had been dumbfounded at the luxuries on offer to the privileged here. How much more shocking must it have been to someone like Ottilia.

  Ioana was in a better mood than I had ever seen, though Ottilia’s and Leo’s closeness had at first made her suspicious, something for which she blamed me. During her one visit she mentioned something about Leo’s ‘sudden interest in medicine’, implying that I was a convenient alibi for their budding relationship. She was wrong, but Ioana was not one to acknowledge mistakes. She just moved on from them, mere obstacles on her march towards the truth. And it always was the truth with Ioana: singular and indivisible and clear, not the multiple, blurred or partial truths Leo dealt in.

  I watched Ottilia eating: a few experimental mouthfuls, a sip of French Embassy claret, and then she got into her stride. She caught me looking at her, smiled, and spiked a piece of Leo’s stuffed pork loin onto her fork.

  ‘I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have eaten meat like this.’ She pushed the morsel around her plate, mopping up sauce. ‘I exaggerate, but… well… it is not far short of the truth.’

  Ioana looked at her. ‘You spend time with these two and you’ll be the biggest carnivore in Bucharest. As for Cilea Constantin, our friend’s paramour here, she’s a walking reminder of why the rest of us have to eat boiled cabbage and soya salami.’ That was Ioana’s idea of a lighter moment, and she gave me a quick flinty smile.

  ‘Ex,’ I said, in a tone I hoped conveyed manly insouciance. I had not eaten properly for days, and the food lay heavy on me. ‘Ex-paramour.’

  ‘Ex?’ Leo chipped in. I told them about our meeting of earlier, and explained what I now firmly believed: that Cilea had had nothing to do with what had happened – if anything had happened – to Petre and Vintul. Yet the thought crossed my mind: she knew something had happened to them, didn’t she? Those boys… she had said.

  ‘You know as well as we do that she’s behind it. It may not be her fault, she may not have intended it, but she came into our circle, a Party chief’s daughter…’ Ioana interrupted. I regretted bringing it up.

  ‘What you’re trying to say is that I’m the one who brought her in, isn’t that right?’ I said.

  Ioana did not deny it. ‘You did what you thought was best. You behaved the way it is normal to behave for you. It is not, strictly speaking, your fault.’ Strictly speaking… there was no clearer indication that Ioana thought it was my fault.

  I was not letting go. ‘I don’t think it was. I think you’ve made a mistake, we all have. It doesn’t make sense. There’s something else. I don’t know what, but the answer is elsewhere. Why should Cilea care what Petre and Vintul do? It doesn’t affect her – she was never interested. Not once did she ask. Isn’t that strange?’ But I was uneasy. I still believed Cilea had nothing to do with it, but there was something about the way she had said it, as if she knew there was something specific… If I hadn’t been so consumed by my need to attack her, or to trample what was left of our relationship, I would have pressed her.

  ‘There’s something to that,’ said Leo, ‘what’s in it for her, getting involved in something like this? Ioana – I thought the reason you disliked Cilea was that she was unconcerned by anything other than living the good life? Why should she get involved now? In any case, she’s always been on the scene one way or another…’

  ‘Cilea’s no fool. She’s watching and reporting like the rest of them. She hangs out with dictators’ children, goes the US, shops in the hotels… and what about her and Belanger, have you forgotten that? No, Leo, you think she won’t dirty her hands to protect all that? There are no coincidences. Coincidences were abolished by the communists.’

  I started to ask about Belanger but Ioana cut me off with a sweep of her hand. They all mentioned his name, but no one ever said who he was.

  ‘Please stop,’ said Ottilia, ‘No one knows anything for sure. It doesn’t help me to hear only speculations and recriminations. It won’t bring him back or help me find him again.’

  The film Leo had taken of the aftermath of the demolition of St Paraschiva’s was aired on German news the next day. Then it did the rounds: Italy, Spain, France, the US, Britain. The Shit and Hassle had a new wide-screen digital TV for news and on a big screen the demolition seemed even more sinister. You could make out the actions better too: the predators tearing at the grounded dome, the Securitate watching and filming the demonstrators. Scattered about the wasted site, which Leo had caught in a wide-angle tracking shot, the bulldozers and wrecking balls were still, their work done.

  All this had been going on for years, but for the media any story only begins the moment it is noticed. Perhaps because of the upheavals in Prague, East Germany, Poland, there was now real momentum behind the reporting of Romania. By August it was a big story. On the World Service a lisping young fogey from the Prince’s Trust for Architecture condemned the vandalism of Ceauşescu’s regime. There were a few aerial shots of the Palace of the People, cut with comments on the crudity and kitsch of the buildings. The human tragedy of Romania was irrelevant. Ceauşescu had been imprisoning, starving, brutalising and lying to his people for the best part of two decades, mostly with the connivance of the West. But his real crime apparently was bad taste.

  There was excitement at the embassy. The country was in the news; we were on the map of dissent. No longer the forgotten kingdom, somewhere between Albania and Bulgaria on the ladder of irrelevance. The Romania desk at the BBC had been moved, as Leo had it, from the broom cupboard to the landing. ‘Any minute now they’ll be staffing it.’

  Wintersmith was riding high. His bureau chief, the inappropriately named Jim Bossy, was being sent home on medical leave of absence. A gentle and nervous man, Bossy had spent all his life running from the authoritarian implications of his name. He deferred to everyone, even his chauffeur, and his body was prone to so many tics and jerks that he wa
lked like a robot made of jelly. He had been having a long, discreet breakdown for years. Wintersmith was now Acting First Secretary.

  Leo spent more time on his expeditions around the country, recording and photographing the destruction. With his contacts abroad, he set up a scheme in which villages and towns in the West ‘adopted’ counterparts in Romania that were earmarked for ‘modernisation’. ‘SOS Romanian Villages’ caught on. By the beginning of September forty villages had been ‘adopted’; western mayors, local politicians, schoolchildren and local history societies wrote to newspapers calling attention to what was happening to their town’s Romanian ‘twin’.

  The black-marketeering had now been delegated to the Lieutenant and a junior Polish diplomat Leo christened ‘the apprentice’. It was hard to keep track of Leo. I had to replace the ‘Back in 15 minutes’ on his door twice because students had defaced it. Finally, I laminated it and just wiped off the graffiti every few days. He missed his lectures, stopped attending meetings, failed to hand in reports. Under Popea, the atmosphere at work became morgue-like. Even the draught had stopped blowing. When I went for my first meeting with Popea in Ionescu’s old room, the place was bare and the desk had been moved into a corner from which both door and window could be seen. The deskchair was backed up into the tightest angle where the walls met: the Feng Shui of paranoia.

  Each time I called Cilea she was either out or not answering. I waited at the gates of her avenue, unable to get past the guard, while the black cars drove in and out and I peered through their tinted windows. As I loitered on Cilea’s street one night after another fruitless stakeout, Titanu blocked my way. He looked at me, looked up at her window, then shook his head. I realised I had never heard him speak, even when he kept guard for us as we fucked in theatre stalls, hotel rooms or the Dacia he drove her around in. It was a warning, and a friendly one by his standards. I nodded and turned back. As he let me past he patted my shoulder, a gesture so unexpected, of such repressed gentleness, that when he had gone I found somewhere dark and quiet and cried into my hands.