The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘I should hope so,’ Trofim muttered, ‘you wrote them.’

  ‘Have you thought about what you will do when it comes out?’ I asked when Hadrian had gone. ‘You’ll lose your privileges, you might be arrested, lose your flat, your Party pension.’

  ‘All this I know. I am not beyond their reach, that is for sure, but there is a limit to what they can do without making a martyr of me. Besides, there is more to come. I do not think I will be alone in speaking out. I have seen what is happening in Romania now. Things are tightening up because really, underneath, they are coming loose. I have given my life to the Party, and to socialism. I do not envisage, and I will not support, any alternative vision. But it is the Party that must act.’ It sounded like a prepared statement.

  ‘You’re a good communist and you want a palace coup, that’s what it is…’ I nodded towards the deserted chessboard tables, ‘it’s all about tactics, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nothing I see around me here, or out there beyond our borders – in Britain, America, Europe – has shaken my belief that the socialist state is the highest and most equitable form of human society. Nothing. I do not have American tycoons, the Pope or free-market politicians behind me, and I do not want to make my country safe for big business.’

  ‘You think removing Ceauşescu will make that socialist state work again?’

  ‘Again? It has not worked yet. But you are under the misprision that the liberal capitalist state works. For whom does it work? Not for your poor and your unemployed, your third-world workforce and their pillaged resources. For whom does cheap petrol work? Not for those who produce it. Cheap food? Cheap manufacturing? Nothing I have seen has changed my faith. Not Stalin, not Ceauşescu, not… not this…’ He indicated the freshly painted EPIDEMIA on the wall of the Natural History Museum. ‘Do you think that you who live in capitalist countries would believe in the right to a job, a decent wage, free health and education if socialism had not shown you the way? The welfare state? The National Health Service? Socialism showed you that what your employers and bosses sometimes gave you out of paternalism or pangs of social conscience was in fact life’s necessities, the minimum. You only think of them as rights because of socialism. Until socialism they were merely privileges or random acts of charity or luck. And that is before I talk of social mobility! Without socialism, without Lenin, and Trotsky and Victor Serge such things would be unimaginable. Capitalism owes its better self to us.’

  ‘And without Stalin?’ I asked, wanting to put the brakes on his sudden outburst of idealism.

  Trofim looked at me, at first with a look of hurt, and then with a wry, evasive, smile. ‘What is it your friend Leo has been saying these past few months? Hold on tight or get out quick?’

  ‘Something like that…’

  We watched a stray dog, its speckled, moulted skin yellowish pink, absorbed in a streak of another’s urine. It pushed its snout into the sodden gravel, inhaled, then slunk away into the bushes. ‘Well, he may be right, but not in the way he thinks. No one will mistake me for a capitalist outrider. I have dirtied my hands for the Party, as you know and many others will soon find out. I have purged and discredited. I have enforced and repressed. I have even killed people, with my pen at least… with my signature. It is not a revolution I want.’

  ‘I said it earlier, you want a palace coup…’

  ‘I want a bloodless transition. There will be no revolution here. It is not the Romanian way.’

  ‘If there is?’

  ‘The Party will intervene and I will support that. Gorbachev is right – our survival depends on liberalisation and opening up, but also on keeping control. Ceauşescus come and go. They are expendable. The Party stays.’

  He had become sullen again. An agile, subversive mind, a sense of humour, intellectual brilliance… Trofim had all this, yet there remained a sort of bedrock, a faith in the rightness of the cause which stayed unsubject to rational questioning. I had been wrong to think of him as a dissident. He was a fundamentalist – a pragmatic one perhaps, but a fundamentalist nonetheless, for whom all the failures of the ideal were due to the misapplication of the ideal, all the barbarity of the system was extraneous to that system and accidental to it.

  ‘Sophistry,’ said Leo later, ‘or, to use the technical term, Bollocks. Trofim knows that if there is a revolution, they’ll string him up. He won’t be the first in line, but they’ll get to him eventually.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. I think he knows that if he lets go and reneges on his lifetime’s beliefs he will have nothing left: he has no family, no life’s work beyond the Party, nothing but the here and now. It’s not his life he’s worried about, it’s what he’s given his life to. The Project.’

  ‘Mmmm…. the communists abolished God but they kept the theology. They knew it would come in handy when they cocked up. At least God has an excuse for screwing up – he doesn’t exist. These bastards most certainly do…’

  ‘I’m sure that’s part of it, but I’m sure he’s protecting himself too: the best way to defend yourself against charges of dissidence is by proclaiming your faith in the Party, not by attacking it.’

  Leo sat and thought it over. ‘Maybe he’s got something else lined up…’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a comeback?’

  It was the on the fifth of October that the German weekly, Die Zeit, carried the photographs Manea had sent us. They were the full-page feature in the international news section, beside a generalised account of Ceauşescu’s ‘two decades of misrule’. The Last Stalinist was the title. In powdery, news-ink monochrome, our photographs looked even more chilling, like the set of a Hammer House of Horror movie.

  Leo read the article out twice, each time with a different emphasis, re-angling some new piece of information in the context of other things we knew. Had Manea seen it? This was his doing after all, and he would be watching the consequences. I imagined him in his office, Die Zeit splayed across his desk, waiting for the rumble from Stoicu’s office after a bollocking from the Comrade and Elena. That was one scenario. This was another: Manea under arrest, his confession ready for signing. What had happened to his predecessor, General Anton, a few years ago? The defection of his son to the US had left the general in an impossible position. The general tried to distance himself from his son, and even made a show of disowning him. But it was not enough: after a visit from Stoicu, he took a pistol into the woods and shot himself. Murder was out; enforced suicide was in.

  The Union of Writers’ building, the Casa Monteoru-Catargi, stood on Calea Victoriei. Set back from the pavement, contemplating an impressively proportioned but now desiccated garden, the building’s porch opened up with a descent of marble steps beneath a glass and iron canopy.

  There were forty or fifty people in the Sala Arghezi, where tables were piled with copies of A Life in Service. I was impressed with the author photograph on the back: Trofim as a student in Moscow, Lenin-bearded and confident. It was what Leo liked to call the I’m-On-The-Side-Of-History – Whose-Side-Are-You-On? look, and these days we only ever encountered it in old photographs.

  Despite its name, the Sala Arghezi was dominated by two huge portraits of the Ceauşescus. Beneath them was a poem by their court poet, Adrian Palinescu, praising Nicolae as a ‘Danube of Thought’, a metaphor I found chilling given my recent acquaintance with that deadly river. The poems were terrible: there was no hope for the art of parody in a world where this was the real. Leo had once joked about writing an allegorical sketch in which Parody packed its bags, shut up shop and put a sign on the door that read: ‘Closed. Any enquiries please contact the Real.’ Palinescu’s poems would have been the last straw that pushed Parody into early retirement. Ottilia looked at them and laughed out loud, an incongruous, high-pitched giggle I had never heard before. People nearby squirmed and tutted, keeping their distance.

  The walls were decorated with gold and scarlet silk tapestries, now dusty and full of bald patches, and a row of glass cabinets displaye
d Arghezi’s manuscripts. Beneath the portraits of the Ceauşescus was a handwritten page of Arghezi’s great poem, ‘Blesteme’, Curses:

  Let moles and worms crawl

  Over the corpses of the famous dead.

  Let mice squeak in their hundreds

  Among purple robes

  And insects and strange moths

  Nest in precious things

  Larded with pearls and gold.

  Over violins and guitar strings

  Let spiders stretch their silent threads…

  Who had placed that particular poem there – subversive not by intention or even content but simply by accident of context – and got away with it?

  Ottilia’s giggle had announced our arrival. Manea waved at me from across the room as Trofim, red-faced and tipsy, headed towards us. As in a vast dressing room, there were mirrors on every wall. Wherever you stood you saw the people behind and to the side of you – the Union of Writers building must have been one of the few places in the country where you didn’t need to look over your shoulder all the time. The room was strewn with oddments of furniture: elegant, thin-legged chairs and console tables which, up close, were chipped and scraped, their stuffing flat and their joints loose. Ashtrays fumed from mounds of smoking butts. Every now and then, like a tune picked out from noise, came the scent of a new western perfume, fresh from duty-free or Party shops. It crested the banal wafts of old clothes, mothballs and garlic, then faded away. I caught Cilea’s scent, Chanel, and followed the links in its chain of vapour across the room to a fat Party wife pushing vols-au-vent into her mouth.

  The diplomats mingled in a sort of levitating boredom. I knew by now that boredom could be a sort of out-of-body experience, something like a state of transcendence. But the diplomats were professionals, and the doyen of diplomatic Zen was the Belgian bon-viveur, First Consul Ozeray, who had dedicated his working life to doing as little as possible. A few years ago he had been caught in a homosexual honey-trap with a Securitate agent. They had burst in on him in flagrante and taken pictures. The story was that Ozeray insisted first on finishing his coitus; then, when they demanded he turn double agent, pulled on his socks and trousers and went straight to his ambassador to explain. His foreign ministry left him in post as an example that some people were beyond blackmail. He noticed me watching him, smiled and raised his glass to me.

  Wintersmith was mingling, or at least mingling was the verb he would have used for the shifty at-your-shoulder hovering he specialised in. This was the first time I had seen him since we had given him the pictures. The side of his face was still slightly bruised from the beating, and there were stitches on the brige of his nose.

  ‘It’s all right to talk, is it?’ Wintersmith sidled up to us and looked at Ottilia, ‘I mean with her here?’ Ottilia gave him a look of such withering transparency I was surprised he didn’t pinch himself to make sure he still existed. She went to join Trofim and Ozeray. Ozeray kissed her hand and she jumped back, blushed, then let his old-world courtesies enfold her.

  ‘You never did do anything with those pictures, did you?’ I said to Wintersmith.

  ‘Well, no, you see… I was all for it…’ he squirmed, ‘personally speaking. But we had a meeting and, well, it wasn’t seen as part of a viable strategy. There were no definable outcomes…’

  ‘You mean it might have buggered up the next trade fair?’

  ‘Well, let’s face it, the Germans and the French are in bad odour here because of those pictures. They’ve had their ambassadors summoned and I’ve heard the Krauts have lost at least one big helicopter contract…’ He smiled what he intended as a conspiratorial smile, ‘and it’s an ill wind that blows no good. We’re well on the way to getting it for ourselves.’

  ‘By we you mean UK Aerospace or British Defence Systems…’

  ‘I mean legal and respectable British companies who employ hundreds, and on whom whole communities depend.’

  ‘Since when was the British Embassy the diplomatic arm of private business? And if you want to see towns and communities dependent on industries that don’t get government sweeteners or the Foreign Office rooting for them, try the miners and steelworkers…’ It was a mistake to let Wintersmith rile me. I stood there flushed and angry as he watched me with satisfaction.

  ‘Or possibly the printworkers?’ He smiled: someone else who knew my story. ‘Learn to change what you can. Pick your battles. My job isn’t to approve or disapprove, and if I let my feelings get in the way I couldn’t do it.’ Then, to show his independence of mind, he added: ‘There’s a lot I don’t agree with actually. But the fact is that economics are the powerhouse of politics now. Political decisions are economic ones. That’s a fact. Nothing to be done about it.’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Midwinter? Gilbert, isn’t it?’ Ozeray loomed up between us and closed his fingers around Wintersmith’s hand.

  ‘Er… Wintersmith, Giles.’ The Belgian had him in a diplomatic half-nelson.

  ‘Ah yes, quite so. I could not help overhearing your wise analysis. I remember when I was just beginning my diplomatic career.’ Ozeray paused and closed his eyes, inviting us to join him in a prehistory where diplomats and dinosaurs roamed the same mirrored banqueting halls, ‘my mentor, Baron Henri Nivarlais, – a great diplomat – oversaw fifty years of the most radical change the world has known without batting an eyelid – the Baron, he said to me: “Young man, in diplomacy there are two kinds of problem: small ones and large ones. The small ones will go away by themselves, and the large ones you will not be able to do anything about. The biggest challenges in your career will come from the temptation to act. The test of your mettle will be how nobly you surmount it.” Very fine advice, Mr Midwinter, do you agree?’

  ‘Well, that’s not really what I meant, to be honest…’ Wintersmith was struggling. ‘I meant … well… there’s plenty for the diplomat to do…’

  Ozeray’s smile drained him of the will to go on. When the Belgian finally loosened his grip, Wintersmith backed off into the crowd, a beaten man.

  ‘Thank you. I wasn’t making much headway with him, and I was starting to lose my temper.’

  ‘My pleasure. That man is dreadful. I fear that in your country at least he is also the future.’

  ‘Did you mean that?’ I asked. ‘What you said about doing nothing?’

  He was saved from answering by a loud knock on the table. At the end of the room a grey dignitary banged a gavel.

  ‘It is with great pleasure that our Union of Writers plays host today to the launch of Sergiu Trofim’s memoirs. They give unique insights into the great strides our nation has made on the world stage over the last forty years, and especially the last twenty – years, we may say, of fruition.’ There was a loud clack in the background: edging through the French windows at the end of the room, a smartly dressed Leo was beckoning to someone I could not see. He stumbled in, knocking his foot against the bottom of the door. After him came Ioana, tipsy and resplendent with embarrassment. The speaker turned to look behind him. Leo waved at him to carry on. ‘It gives me personally great pleasure to read out a message of warm good wishes from the President Academician, our Conducător, Nicolae Ceauşescu, known as much for his love of literature as for his expertise in other fields. A Renaissance man in the truest sense, a genuine Union of All The Talents…’ He paused, drew a big breath. There was a general grunt of agreement; a few ultras clapped.

  Then came a further twenty minutes of preamble. People swayed in boredom. Leo tiptoed back outside with a bottle of wine, while Ozeray went into a kind of trance, his metabolism shutting down, like a tortoise overwintering. Ottilia prodded me in the small of the back and stifled a giggle. I felt her body move closer to mine. I put my hand behind me and held her waist. She came closer, leaned into my back.

  Now came Trofim’s turn. He walked to the Party-crested lectern, lowered it a few inches, and began his address. For the next half-hour, without looking up, he delivered a speech encrusted with the most tedious communist
euphemisms, buzzwords and aspicated jargon. No jokes, no witticisms, none of the expected urbane or learned comments. Petrescu and several of Trofim’s friends from the park scratched their heads in bemusement. Leo scratched his head too and looked confused. He raised his eyebrows at me: what’s going on? I raised mine back in bafflement. Ioana shook her head. Only Ottilia looked alert, pressing my hand, willing me to share a joke only she was in on. I sensed the broadening smile on her face without needing to see it. There was a long, full-body yawn from the back of the room, finished with a loud baritone grunt. Everyone looked at Leo.

  Trofim was doing it deliberately, making a speech that was so boring it became subversive, not by standing outside the conventions and taking aim, but by dragging them down by the dead weight of their own leaden logic: subversion through over-compliance.

  When the guests had gone he led me by torchlight down to a cellar where an old fridge hummed and trembled in a pool of rust-coloured leakage. Round about lay piles of books and papers, their pages eaten away, soaked through or greened with mould. ‘The archive,’ he chuckled tipsily and he opened the fridge door. Six bottles of French champagne glowed on its only shelf. I carried them upstairs in a flat box marked with the scratched-out name of some forgotten or disgraced writer.

  ‘A gift from Les Belles Lettres, by way of First Consul Ozeray, to help us celebrate our Paris launch.’

  So Ozeray, altruist of inaction, had been our third man, the one who oversaw the French end of things, negotiating with the publishers on Trofim’s behalf? Before we reached the function room, Trofim gripped my arm: ‘There’s no going back now. It’s out of my hands… Let us drink now, for there will not be much celebrating afterwards.’