‘It’s just his little joke. He knows about it all right… he was there, and not, I may add, on the side of the righteous… Stanciu was a corporal in Antonescu’s army, fighting with the fascists. He’s from my village. We knew each other. During the war I was chief organiser of the Iaşi Party, but stuck in prison, a communist and a Jew. A double death sentence – just a question of which would be carried out first. But I was lucky. When I came out I got a junior prosecutor’s job at the Antonescu trial. I picked Stanciu for Antonescu’s firing squad and shredded his war record. After that he escaped the reprisals and joined the Party. Being one of Antonescu’s executioners got him a long way fast after the war, and he owed me.’
Trofim leaned on the railings of the old church on Strada Monetariei and caught his breath. The doors were open and the smell of incense hung in the still, sharp air. He sniffed and grimaced, then stood back and brushed the front of his coat clean of the taint of religion. ‘It was Stanciu who put the last three bullets into Antonescu when the soldiers missed his heart. He dined out on that story for decades. Each time he pulled the trigger, the corpse jumped – “like he’d been plugged into the mains!”, Stanciu used to say. When the next round of Jewish purges came in the late fifties it was good to have Stanciu on your side. He’s no anti-Semite, not really… but then again, most of those who tried to kill us weren’t either. That frightens me more than a few Jew-haters.’
Trofim and I walked in silence for some ten minutes before suddenly, out of nowhere and as if in conversation with himself, he said: ‘All right, I’ll take you…’ Trofim needed me there so he could talk to himself.
We about-turned and rejoined Mihalache, passing the clinic again and going back towards Piaţa 1 Mai. It was a considerable walk for Trofim, still frail from his punitive weeks in that husk of a flat. He leaned on my arm, and I saw the skin hang from his neck, the ring of shadow between it and his tieless, buttoned shirt collar. We came to the corner of Strada Neculce and Mihalache, to a high wall covered in cracked plaster and cement inset with broken bottles. We faced a pair of heavy spiked gates with a chain across them but no padlock. I looked at Trofim, and he read the question in my eyes. His answer was to lift a handful of ivy from a dirty brass plaque on the left of the gate: Cimitirul Israelit Filantropia. The Jewish cemetery. He raised his cane and ran it along the bars – a deep bronze ring that somehow fitted the red-gold of the leaves, the timbre of a dying day. We were on the tip of the afternoon, the sun massing what was left of its light and falling in strips across the pavement.
A tiny man came limping from a caretaker’s cottage, fastening the buttons of his jacket as he went.
‘Shalom,’ the old man greeted Trofim. Trofim gave him a brisk handshake through the bars: ‘Tovarăşul.’ This was their ritual: the religious salutation and the communist greeting, neither giving way to the other.
The gates crackled with rust as they opened. Beyond them, a tangled necropolis: graves at odd angles, stooping into clumps of grass and bramble, crumbling, broken or defaced. There was the pale lettering of graffiti that had been washed and repainted and washed again, until it had taken the quality of bas-relief: nazi slogans, swastikas, the Iron Guard’s fascist insignia. The anti-Semites still came here to hate and desecrate, while the state, which recognised only orthodox cemeteries, left it to volunteers to maintain. The paths were strangled by waist-high weeds, their directions deducible only from the flattened undergrowth that marked out, here and there, a solitary mourner’s struggle to reach a headstone. There were no ornaments, no flowers, and no euphemistic words: just names and dates, in Hebrew or in Romanian. If you squinted, the tops of the gravestones looked like the crests of waves on a turbid sea.
Outside the caretaker’s cottage, a wrinkled, photocopied map marked out the avenues, the graves of famous Romanian Jews numbered and indexed at the bottom of the page. There was no better symbol of what had happened to the Jews over the last hundred or so years: these graves, overrun, overgrown, leaning over or sinking back into the earth, held men and women whose descendants lived in Israel, France, America. The lucky ones. This was a place of death, not because of the dead but because the living no longer came. I looked at the names: Jewish names like Avram, Gerschom, Binyamin, names from all across the diaspora broken up and standardised into pseudo-classical Romanian. Trofinsky to Trofim, Saul into Sergiu…
The caretaker looked fearfully beyond the gates, listening out. I imagined his ancestors, or, judging by his age and frailty, himself as a young boy, straining to hear the thunder of the hooves which brought the next pogrom or the turning engines of the next deportation. That was all finished now, they said, but from the inside of his cemetery he knew otherwise.
Trofim stayed on the periphery of the tombs. This was a place of religion, his religion, but he would be buried in one of the Party graveyards with their granite squares and their enamel hammer-and-sickle badges, overseen by some socialist-realist sculpture that replicated, without ever admitting it, the shape of the cross. I knew – I had seen the party cemetery in Snagov, its regimented lawns, perpendicular avenues, and in the centre a vast bronze sculpture of an aeroplane. Beneath it, an airman stood with his legs apart and his arms at right-angles to his torso, disrobing from his parachute as if taking off a shroud. Christ as pilot – all that repudiated Christianity seeping back into the images designed to replace it.
‘You go ahead, walk around.’ Trofim waved his walking stick at the cemetery whose furthest recesses now disappeared into darkness as the first few rows of graves burned all the stronger in the last of the sunlight. I set off. The graveyard resembled an evacuated town, full of broken slabs and gaping family vaults, their gates pulled apart, the tops of the graves jimmied open. Cats loped around; skeletons of pigeons or small animals were splayed across the marble chippings. There was a shuffle behind me, the crunch of gravel and dry twigs. The caretaker joined me, out of breath after a laborious scramble.
‘He comes every week but never goes beyond the perimeter… just sits on the bench. I’ve been opening those gates for him for thirty years. Always the same thing: he shakes my hand, sits down for an hour, then leaves.’
‘Where is his family buried?’ I asked, turning back. I knew straight away it was a stupid question, but it was too late to pull it back.
‘Buried?’ The old man shook his head. ‘No – everything else but not buried…’ For a few minutes we said nothing, then he spoke again: ‘His son came once. Maybe ten years ago, to say Kaddish for a schoolfriend. The rabbi. Lives in Israel. Domnul Trofinsky sat in his usual place on that bench. He said hearing it was enough, that he had a nice marble rectangle waiting for him in Snagov, all tidy and rational, no mumbo jumbo…’ The caretaker dropped his voice. ‘But I know he is proud of his son.’ Suddenly he said, in panic, ‘Look!’
Trofim was slouched over the bench. As we got closer to him, walking faster, a fear took hold that needed no verbalisation. The walking stick had fallen to the ground and his hand hung over the armrest.
‘Sergiu,’ I called out. No movement. ‘Sergiu.’ I ran down the gravel path, and with that sudden expansion of mental space that adrenaline liberates for irrelevant details, caught sight of the small, blue, ankle-high iron and enamel signpost dug into the path, ‘Bulevard Gala Galaction.’ A city of the dead with its own grid and its own white-on-blue street names. Another city of lost walks. ‘Saul!’
Trofim jumped and emitted a strange, muffled cry. He looked around, disorientated, blinked and rubbed his eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ Trofim said, ‘I was dozing…’
‘I thought you’d…’ I stopped. He looked so frail, so white, that in this place the word dead seemed more like invocation than speculation.
‘No, not that. Just practising…’ he laughed and coughed and leaned over to retrieve his breath.
I helped him up, and he leaned on me a little harder as we went home.
November brought the promise of a merciless winter. Leo would walk out in the
mornings, distend his nostrils, sniff the air: ‘Smell that… take a good long noseful… the smell of retreat.’
The trees seemed to lose their leaves in one overnight fall. As the building projects ate into the remaining parklands, people hurried from one wasteland to another, foraging for firewood, twigs, burnable scraps to keep them warm. One night I saw them, illuminated by the moon in a clinically clear, cold sky: twenty or thirty scavengers with axes hacking into the stumps and parcelling out the trunks of the felled trees. The silence was punctuated by the regular thwup of the blade parting the wood’s flesh. It was a medieval vision, however outscaled by skyscrapers and cranes, like a scene from a Brueghel painting. It caught for me the desultory, sad mystery of the place far better than the brutal images in Leo’s files.
Bucharest was braced for the Fourteenth Party Congress. The gas and electricity were intermittent in most parts of the city, and where a system existed it was this: power rotated, sector by sector, in two-hour segments, starting with the city centre and gradually rippling outwards, by late evening, to the outskirts. This led to surreal scenes in which brightly lit blocks of flats exuded the smells of cooking and the rush of showers and bathwater in the dead of night. These pockets of nocturnal society were scattered around the rims of the city. Later, when the uprising came, it meant that large sections of the population – mostly those on the receiving end of the regime’s incompetence and brutality – were up and ready to mobilise. Many had even washed.
The stories leaked out: of men and women sleeping in their kitchens with their hobs on for warmth, then dying of carbon monoxide poisoning when the gas cut out and then resumed as they slept. All over town braziers blazed with burning rubber and plastic, ribbons of acrid smoke catching the eyes and throat.
The week before the Party Congress, I decided to tell Leo that I had seen Vintul at the Athénée Palace the night of Trofim’s launch. I had meant to surprise Leo, but I should have known he would be a step ahead of me.
We had both seen him, and each of us had kept it from the other. But Leo had investigated. ‘I went to see Manea. He told me he’d seen a dossier meant for Stoicu that strongly suggested Vintul is an Interior Ministry plant, a Securitate agent, always has been. That he’s been in charge of monitoring student activities, especially the underground scene. That he’s been running the defection and escape programme on behalf of Stoicu.’
‘Stoicu? You mean we’ve been puppets for Stoicu? How long have you known?’
‘A few weeks. After your visit to Manea with Ottilia. I called Manea myself. He didn’t know exactly who was Stoicu’s man on the inside, but he’d narrowed it down to a few people, all of whom had now disappeared. Two of them we know are dead – you saw the photographs – and around here being dead usually means you’re innocent. One of the other possible Securitate plants was Petre, but since you’ve seen Vintul and so have I, we know it’s him and not Petre. There’s still a chance Petre’s got free, but I’ve got to say I don’t believe it.’
‘What’s been going on?’ I asked. Leo told me to take a seat.
‘It’s all been a con. I know it now for sure. The escapes, the defections, the middle-of-the-night adventures. Most of them fail, or get caught, or end up like those poor sods sliced up in the water. That’s because it’s all part of a semi-official plan. The only escapes that work are the ones where money’s been paid. Mostly the girls get smuggled out to the west and put to work as prostitutes. They’ve got no passports, they don’t know their rights once they get to wherever they’re going. The men, if they aren’t lucky enough to escape from the people supposed to be helping them, are dragged back and made to work in the mines or the prison details. The ones who do get out join the gangs, black-marketeering, people smuggling… Look at what’s happening – people flooding into the West from everywhere. Next thing you hear is that the girl you thought had made it to a new life was giving hand jobs on the hard shoulder of some German U-Bahn.’
That lorry driver, I remembered, the one who boasted about the Romanian girls he’d had in his cabin, two at a time. What had kept Ottilia going was the thought that these people had made it, that at least they had escaped and started a new life. Now it all made sense, the lack of letters or phone calls, the smooth operations where the border guards were always absent and the electric fencing always cut out on time. They weren’t escapes from the system; they were part of the system, ways for the system to export itself and replicate in new places. It was an appalling thought, like being trapped in a board game where the board never ended and the players never left the table. That was frightening enough, but what Leo said next had the effect of at once explaining things and making them worse than I had ever imagined.
‘It took me a while to work it out. Vintul had me fooled. But there it is. I’ve known him for four years, and he never once dropped his guard. That night in the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, when the police came by with the dogs… that was when he nearly blew his cover, would have if they’d caught us. He got us out, but only for long enough to sort things himself, kill the dogs, divert the police. They’d have caught us if they’d wanted to. Even plodders like the militia nightshift can catch two lost drunks and a stoned girl. Mel…’ Leo shook his head as he remembered her. ‘The bastard probably pulled rank on them, told them to fuck off, that they were disturbing an operation… killed their dogs just to show he could.’
Those Alsatians with their throats torn out, the ground sticky with their blood. No knife. Just hands and teeth. Leo paused. ‘It doesn’t end here, on this side of the border. It goes on outside. For years they’ve been selling people. They started with the Jews, selling them to Israel – ethnic cleansing and a chance to make some money. Stoicu’s speciality, the Ceauşescus loved him for it – especially Elena. Then they did it with the German minority. Since then some of the top brass have seen the chance to make a bit for themselves. Things are changing. They know it won’t go on like this forever. They need to have something stashed away for when it all goes to shit. Vintul had a business on the side: get paid, get people out, have them caught again when they’ve gone over. But even he was working for someone else.’
‘Who’s on the other side,’ I asked, ‘I mean, things like this don’t work without some kind of organisation. Money, networks…’ But even as I spoke I knew. Belanger. Belanger was everywhere, had preceded me everywhere. Even gone he was more here than I was.
‘Belanger started here, with me, a few years ago. We had a good thing going. He took to the business immediately. A bit of black here, a bit of grey area there. Buying, selling, bartering. He was a natural. Had vision… well, I mean… he saw where the chances were – he was the first to start making pirate copies of CDs and videos, action films, porn, you name it…. Soon he was dealing in stuff I wouldn’t touch. Drugs – cut with anything he could find, stuff much worse for you than the drugs themselves. One batch killed more than a dozen people that I know of, blinded God knows how many. Girls. Started to hang out with Ilie and the pimps… he had some kind of a hold over them. Bought a BMW. Made contacts on the outside – people who’d only ever dealt black-market petrol or fags now suddenly dealt in drugs and whores. Overnight it turned dirty…’
‘Yes, sure, because of course all your stuff was strictly above board, wasn’t it?’ I said sarcastically. I was angry. I tried to persuade myself it was the righteous anger of outrage, but there was jealousy there too.
‘Not sure when Stoicu decided to muscle in, but he and his cronies wanted a piece of his action. Maybe it was Belanger who went to him. Either way, Belanger became his man. The ministry and the Securitate have always been involved in the shadow economy. I’ve dealt with them for years, low-level stuff, you know, buying passes, changing dollars… Belanger knew that and played on it, but he took it a step further. Didn’t just bribe them, he started to employ them. “Shareholder,” that’s what he called Stoicu. Quid pro quo, he began to do Stoicu’s work too: information-gathering, entrapment, really dirty st
uff. Eventually I confronted him with it. In there,’ Leo nodded towards the living room, ‘I told him I knew what he was up to and I wanted it stopped.’ Leo looked at his beer and frowned, then took a long gulp. ‘I gave him a bit of a slapping, nothing violent, just to get it across. He let me do it, didn’t resist or fight back, just smiled as I blacked his eye. He could have beaten the shit out of me, but instead he just laughed me out of the house.’ Leo shuddered at the memory, and nodded towards the inside of the flat. ‘I hear it every time I come up those stairs, the laugh of someone who can’t be hurt. But I tried…’ Leo continued, ‘I mean I tried to hurt him. I called in a favour.’
‘Manea?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I asked to have him taught a lesson. You know, the old “we’re watching you” stuff. Christ, it works in Northern Ireland, punishment-beatings for petty thieves and criminals, compliments of your local paramilitary.’ He managed a weak laugh, then his face turned: ‘Manea was only too happy to oblige – the bastard was seeing his daughter, this was a way of doing both of us a favour. A few days later someone took Belanger aside and smashed his legs; one of them’s permanently damaged. Didn’t work. He just upped sticks and left, but now he runs it all from abroad, and that’s worse. He’s got people in his pocket from here to Vienna. Thing is, I’ve seen it grow, his business, and it’s different now: harder, deadlier, the drugs and the girls aren’t a sideline any more, they’re the business itself. What I do is chicken feed compared…’
Belanger had been the original apprentice, the high-flying graduate from Leo’s school of contraband and racketeering. Now he had taken his master’s work to another level.
‘You’re sure he’s behind it?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I am. Belanger’s been laying down networks, patiently building it all up as the structures of old East Europe come down. He’s the one who started smuggling people out of the country, and to begin with I’m sure it was bona fide. At least, I think the money was not the main reason. But not for long. Vintul was his man on the inside, and the trail leads up to Stoicu and then across all the prostitution rings, the drugs routes, the pirated CDs and videos… most of the people who work for me are doing jobs for him on the side… Christ, it turns out I’ve been doing his work without knowing it… we all have…’
The Last Hundred Days Page 26
