The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  Ottilia and I walked home. We had crossed unspokenly into couplehood. We went to bed together that night, made love silently, eyes closed, then turned and slept apart, saying nothing. With Cilea there was always something pornographic about our lovemaking: I watched myself fucking her, she watched me watching. I had to be conscious of it, of the unbearable pleasure, before I could feel it in my body. The carnality had to pass through the mind and through the eye first; it needed their validation. Ours were the disembodied bodies of watched sex, and even when we were together walking or eating or doing ordinary things it was always framed as if we were looking in at ourselves. It gave us a kick, it doubled the pleasure. Maybe that was because we lived under surveillance, but for me it was also a facet of my self-estrangement, my sense of being a lodger in my own consciousness.

  With Ottilia there was just us and the darkness, followed by a sound of raw sobbing that woke me and which I found came from myself. It woke her too, and as she turned to cover me with her body and stop my mouth with hers, I felt something breaking inside me. It was a far-off feeling, ice on a long-frozen lake starting to crack at some tiny bankside seam.

  Three

  Ottilia’s shift started at 7 am, but she allowed two hours to reach the hospital. As the mornings became darker only the pseudo-sunrise of the building site, its fake floodlit dawn across the rooftops, gave her a profile against the window: a thin, pale body dressing in the half-light. Across the flat, the kettle on the hob began its stifled whistle.

  I flicked the light switch but nothing came on. Another power cut, or still the same one? When I joined her in the kitchen Ottilia was holding the sports bag that contained her possessions. She dropped it on the table. ‘Maybe you can move my things into your bedroom? Won’t take you long.’ When she smiled and took my hand and kissed my mouth again, I sank into her arms. I was afraid that last night had been just an excess of emotion and closeness, a release of tension; that she would pull back from me, from my half-formedness. She felt me lose my balance and sat me down at the table.

  On my way to work I stopped to call on Trofim. The old man would have one hell of a headache, but he would also be bracing himself for the fallout of yesterday’s Paris publication of An Ideal Betrayed. I would take him to lunch, tell him about Ottilia; we would walk in the autumn sun and make plans for when his book made the headlines…

  The street was blocked, checkpoints at both ends. I walked on past. The militia men looked alert today. I crossed the road, better to see Trofim’s door and the balcony that looked out over the street. The windows were shut and the curtains drawn. As I approached the building, the door opened and two militia stepped out, accompanied by three Securitate officers, and blocked my way. I asked them what they wanted, but there was no reply. I handed my papers over with an unconvincing air of weariness. This was no routine inspection.

  ‘Officers, may I ask what this is about? I am visiting my friend, a senior comrade, the former minister Sergiu Trofim. I am helping him with his work…’

  No one spoke. They looked over my papers and pocketed them. One of the plain-clothes men pushed me into a black Dacia. I kept talking. I was a British subject, an ordinary visitor, without involvement in anything illegal… I looked back at Trofim’s window and saw the curtain stir. The men in the car were professional intimidators from the same assembly line that produced the likes of Stoicu. They called them plain clothes, but in fact theirs was a uniform, and they were never there to blend in. These existed to be seen and sensed, to inject every room, every street corner, every spontaneous gathering with the poison of overt surveillance. They had the same brown or beige suits with gun-bulging jackets and boot-cut trousers, the same heeled boots and regulation haircuts. Leo might have had a go at laughing at them, might have risked a beating with a witticism. Not me. For the first time since the visit to the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, I felt fear. Not fear in the face of spectacular danger or unimaginable evil, but the fear of the individual who has erred into the machine.

  We did not go to Securitate headquarters but to a poky basement flat near the central police HQ. The walls were damp and covered in peeling wallpaper. I was shown to a small table with two chairs. After twenty minutes a calm, professorial-looking gentleman joined me. He smiled and opened up a dossier. My file was already two inches thick. If I saw out my two years’ posting it would be eight inches and require two of those Monocom box files I used at work.

  ‘There has been nothing confidential about your stay so far,’ he began. ‘This dossier is so well-stocked with information from your friends and colleagues that we might have saved ourselves the trouble of monitoring you…’ He showed me photographs: me on the balcony, the first walk to work, the staff canteen, Leo and I coming out of Capsia that first night. Trofim and me on a bench. Cars leaving the museum after one of Leo’s soirées, me and Ottilia on the way back from Trofim’s. Ottilia outside my house. Leo picking his nose and changing currency with a pimp. Wintersmith talking to me at the embassy gates. There was no sign of Petre or of Vintul, the only genuinely dangerous associates I had, nor of Cilea or Manea. Surely that told me something?

  ‘You’ll have to remember to give me those for my autobiography. My Romanian period will be a small but important part of the story. And certainly the best-documented. Now tell me why I’m here.’

  ‘Ah, English wit,’ he replied evenly, still smiling, ‘we will see how well it serves you in this new situation… we have a large file on your activities, many of which can be considered against the interests of the state. Many of them also illegal in straightforward ways: changing money on the black market, attempted bribery of state officials, associating with criminals, using prostitutes…’

  ‘Prostitutes? I’ve never used, as you put it, a prostitute in my life. As for attempted bribery I think strictly speaking ‘attempted’ is not the word, as I’ve yet to see these attempts rebuffed…’

  ‘Do not waste our time. What this evidence points to is common criminality. If you are charged with that, there will be no heroics. Your embassy will not intervene in cases of mere hooliganism and criminal behaviour. You will be on your own.’

  ‘There is nothing I can do for you. Charge me or let me go.’

  ‘Charge me or let me go? I think you have been watching too many police shows. My favourite is The Sweeney,’ he laughed and took off his spectacles, while with his other hand he swung a punch that landed hard in the middle of my face. I felt my lip split across my front teeth and my nose buckle to a noise like bark being stripped off a tree. The metallic glut of blood filled my throat.

  My interrogator went on reading my file as if nothing had happened. He ticked a box on his cover sheet and inserted the time – 10.38 – followed by his signature. I strained to make out his name but it was deliberately illegible. Later, when they opened up the police archives here and in other ex-communist states, most of the reports were signed in these plausible pseudo-signatures, a generic squiggle of a name belonging to no one in particular while symbolising everyone’s complicity.

  ‘We will talk again. You will help us eventually. There will be no choice,’ he announced convivially, as if we had just laid the foundations for a happy friendship. He put out his punching hand for me to shake, then left the room. My head was swimming, my face a mess of blood and snot. My tooth hung on a hinge of torn gum. The two Securitate who had picked me up led me back up the stairs to the Dacia. Someone had put plastic sheeting across the seat to catch the effluvia of the recently interrogated.

  Back at my flat the front door was open, and the lock broken – needlessly, since they had the keys. Every room was turned over, cupboards emptied and drawers tipped out. Paintings and posters had been pulled off the walls and vandalised. The phone had been ripped out, my books thrown off the shelves and the shelves torn from the walls. The kitchen was covered in broken glass. In my bedroom, the clothes were strewn across the floor and slashed. Ottilia’s bag had been eviscerated with a single slice.

&
nbsp; I cleaned my face up in the bathroom. My top lip was swollen and the split was scabbing over. One tug and my tooth was in my palm. I dressed in what I could find and went out. At the Museum of Natural History I called Leo. There was no reply at home or work. I tried Ottilia, but the hospital line was dead. I replaced the receiver and wiped the blood off the mouthpiece. My head was ringing with the boxed-up sound of a television after closedown.

  No taxis stopped for me. I looked like a brawl-bruised drunk who had rolled out of a cell or the station toilets. My clothes were crumpled and mismatched: a red T-shirt bearing the logo ‘The Champ’, green jeans, Chinese basketball shoes and a tartan scarf to shield my mouth. By the time I reached Piaţa Victoriei I was waving dollar bills at passing cars, but no one dared to stop.

  A car horn sounded behind me, and Leo’s blue Skoda pulled up across the kerb. ‘Jesus. I thought they meant business by what they did to your flat.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened. Or why. I was just walking to see Sergiu on the way to work. When I got there…’

  Leo picked up the two newspapers from the back seat. ‘It’s all in there.’

  The front page of the International Herald Tribune carried a photograph of Trofim at the head of article entitled: The Letter of “The Five”: Ceauşescu’s Critics Break Cover. The article published an open letter from five senior communists calling for Ceauşescu’s resignation and sent to all the major papers in the West. Leo then showed me the French Libération, which carried an article on Trofim’s book and coverage of its high-profile Paris launch. Libération was serialising it the following week, as was the Washington Post.

  ‘Trofim’s under house arrest. It’s all over town. Ozeray called this morning.’

  Trofim’s letter accused Ceauşescu of mismanaging the economy and instituting a Stalinist personality cult, of emasculating the Party and imposing third-world living conditions on the country. It expressed support for strikes and protests and finished by calling on Ceauşescu to stand down. In a final rhetorical touch it concluded: The megalomania of a single individual has reached terrifying proportions: we are now witnessing not just the disgrace of communism but the destruction of a nation’s culture. Trofim was the chief signatory, and there was little doubt that he had authored the letter, calling for Romania to join Gorbachev’s train of reformed communism. Trofim’s Writers’ Union speech had been the joke, but this was the punchline. With the help of Ozeray and a few others, he had choreographed it all.

  ‘Canny old sod,’ said Leo, ‘he’s pressed all the right buttons: liberal, one-party socialism to keep the Russians on side, Pere-bloody-stroika and all that, and just the right amount of dissident derring-do for the Yanks and Europeans to stick him on a pedestal. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s people in Washington and Moscow thinking “Sergiu Trofim, now there’s a man we can do business with…” The old Stalinist fox turned reformist hero. Jesus.’

  ‘He’s finished isn’t he?’ I said, ‘political suicide. He’s already under house arrest. What else are they going to do to him?’

  ‘Not much. Look: five big communist chiefs write a letter to the world press. It’ll be on all the radio channels tonight: World Service, France Culture, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Moscow. It’s all round Bucharest already, probably the big cities too: Cluj, Braşov, Timişoara. The embassies, the consulates, the universities… They’ll shake him up a bit, maybe move him to some factory town with shitty restaurants and no library, make him sweat, but that’s about it. If they put him in prison they’ll make him a martyr. He’s seventy-three – that’s young for communist leaders – and he’s a well-known Party statesman. There’s a few years left in him.’

  ‘What about the others? Who are they?’

  ‘Four top-ranking but marginal ex-ministers. Stanciu, Ralian, Slavnicu, Apostol… I only know Apostol to talk to. Good bloke in his way.’ Leo tooted the horn and overtook a cement lorry. ‘Designated successor of Gheorghiu-Dej back in the sixties. Suddenly found himself out on a limb, all his allies rooting for our Kojak-loving comrade, and condemned to a life of ambassadorial postings in places like Venezuela and Bangladesh. And I know Ralian’s daughter, sort of. Apart from that, they’re just names.’

  The evening’s radio news was full of the story. On the BBC World Service, a segment of the main news bulletin was devoted to Trofim’s letter. Radio Free Europe gave it an hour-long ‘Focus on Romania’ programme, with potted biographies of the authors and rolling commentaries from seasoned communism-watchers. Voice of America joined in with an eight o’clock ‘Special Report’ on Ceauşescu’s Romania. Radio Moscow had the coup: a recorded interview with Trofim in Russian, apparently given three days before the letter appeared, in which he reiterated both his opposition to Ceauşescu and his own credentials as a loyal but liberal communist. It was the most explicit sign yet that he had Moscow’s backing.

  ‘Bloody hell. I’ll tell you what’s going on…’ Leo tuned the radio, chasing every sliver of the story across the airwaves, but he didn’t get the chance. It was Ottilia who spoke next: ‘That interview was conducted by the head of the Bucharest Pravda bureau, with the Russian ambassador in attendance, in Trofim’s flat last week.’ Leo and I looked at her, astonished.

  ‘How d’you know this? You’ve only know him a few weeks.’ I blushed with jealousy, and then at the obviousness of my jealousy: blush overlaying blush.

  She smiled and kissed my swollen mouth. ‘Trofim is now untouchable. They may keep him under house arrest and watch him carefully, but Ceauşescu knows that if he harms him, the Russians will act. In the end he’ll have to let him be.’

  ‘Genius!’ Leo clapped his hands in admiration. ‘The crafty old bugger. I told you, he’s trying to make a comeback!’ Leo went to the fridge and returned with Ukrainian champagne. ‘This calls for Sovietskoi fizz.’ Then, to me, ‘go and get some glasses and take that smacked-arse look off your face!’

  That night we joined Ozeray at the Athénée Palace Hotel, where he was finishing a long meal with one of his diplomatic dining circles. He smoked a cigar, surveying the debris-strewn table and its inebriated diners like a commander taking stock of his exhausted army.

  Ottilia and I stood at the bar while Leo and Ioana, going through a rare phase of harmony, danced to some ‘groper’s classics’ next door. Ozeray levered himself up, excused himself from table and joined us.

  ‘Trofim has been moved. We don’t know where. I’ve just spoken to Maltchev and he says they took him and drove away at ten this evening.’

  Maltchev, the Pravda bureau chief, sat at the other end of the bar. He gave us a brisk nod at the mention of his name, which he obviously lipread from years of espionage training.

  ‘They will take him somewhere where he will be uncomfortable and hard to find. But not a prison. Apostol and the others were picked up at lunchtime.’

  ‘All this is information – it’s coming from the Russians?’

  ‘New circumstances, new alliances,’ replied Ozeray, raising his glass to Maltchev, who raised his back.

  What had appeared to be selfless bravery on Trofim’s part now looked like a flawless campaign to get back in the political game, the scheming of a professional strategist. Ottilia had worked it out much sooner than I had. Trofim had tried to tell me, in his way: those stories about Arghezi, the plots and the purges, the multiple betrayals. He had not lied to me; on the contrary he had given me as many clues as he safely could. I had simply preferred to think of him as a disappointed idealist, an old statesman put out to pasture. I had felt protective of him, even jealous of his confidences. In reality he had run rings around his friends as well as his enemies. A voice behind me called out goodnight to the hotel’s concierge. It was Maltchev leaving with his minders.

  The entrance to the Athénée Palace was a revolving door whose segments were only large enough for one person at a time. It was the favoured haunt of those who thought they were being followed, or who wanted to show off how many bodyguards th
ey had: since people could only go through one by one, it was an ideal sieving system for a surveillance society. It worked like a prism: everything slowed down and separated out. Tailing Maltchev were two obvious Securitate stooges, clearly fresh from the provinces since they tried to squeeze into a single panel of the door, and behind them a single KGB minder in a coat and hat. Further back, a woman stepped discreetly in, followed by a man in a brown mackintosh and trilby. An entire eco-system of surveillance prospered on the back of one Russian journalist.

  The figure in the mackintosh, whose profile I now saw through the glass, emerged from the other side of the doors and into the street. He had a beard and neatly trimmed hair, glasses and a hat pulled low down on his forehead. But there was something about him that refused the anonymity. Or is that just how, later, I would justify to myself the sense that I had seen Vintul, that I had recognised his profile, and that when I knocked on the glass and shouted his name he didn’t flinch? Anybody else would have. Was it him? I banged on the window again, but though all around him people stopped and looked in at me, he continued to walk on.

  There was a bottleneck at the door. An old woman with a poodle the colour of dishwater had her suitcase stuck in the door, which jammed and left her trapped inside with her yelping dog. By the time I had passed through the revolving doors and out into the street, everyone had gone.

  I ran out to the corner of Strada Episcopiei but he had disappeared. I could run on ahead to the Boulevard Magheru, but by the time I reached it he would have melted away. I turned and walked back to hail a cab. I mentioned nothing to Ottilia. As I stared through the raindrop-beaded window of the taxi, I became less and less certain of what I had seen. An unremarkable man, hurrying through an underlit lobby, whose profile reminded me, for reasons I could not grasp, of someone I had been looking for. Already his image was clouding over: what colour was his coat? Had he worn a hat? A briefcase or a bag? What colour hair? Eyes? By the time we got home to my wrecked flat, there was nothing left of him but the aura of something missed.