‘Where does that leave Petre?’
‘What I think makes no difference, but what I think is that it leaves him dead. I don’t know how, or when it happened, but he’s dead.’
‘What about his Social Fund, all those goods and money he put aside? What’s going to happen to all that?’
‘Whatever Petre built up, it’s all gone, that’s if it ever existed – remember Vintul was the banker, the man with the names and places. He probably siphoned the cash and the valuables back to Stoicu and Belanger, and let Petre think it was all getting distributed to those who needed it. It probably never existed. The only things that were real were the names on Petre’s lists, and they’re probably in Securitate hands now too. Oh, and the money, that was real enough. For a while.’
‘And you let me go on thinking I’d had something to do with it, that I’d made the mistake of bringing Cilea in and that she’d blown their cover?’
‘I’m sorry, but what else could we think? It made sense: Cilea was Belanger’s girl, still is, you were the only one who didn’t know, of course we thought she was involved.’ Leo looked down and shook his head. ‘Look, if anyone’s to blame, it’s me. I’m the one who brought Belanger in in the first place, set him up, started him off. You can see why I’d want to avoid facing up to that…’
I left the room and slammed the door, leaving Leo talking into the void.
It should have been us telling Ottilia that Petre was dead, but instead she found out in the most brutal way. I had left Leo in the living room, consoling himself with an epic measure of Johnnie Walker, when, at about 10 pm, the phone rang.
‘It’s me,’ shouted Ottilia, her voice faint against the sound of engines and helicopters.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at the morgue. Petre’s here. Come and get me please.’ She rang off or the line cut out – it was hard to tell. Leo was up and pocketing his car keys. We had not spoken since I had walked out on him, but by now we didn’t need to: Leo knew what was happening.
It took nearly an hour for what should have been a twenty-minute journey. Beyond Aviatorilor there was a sky of blood and rising smoke, and roadblocks every two hundred yards. The morgue was under police guard, its forecourt deserted. The phonebox from where I thought Ottilia had called was empty. If she had been unable to wait here, she would have headed home herself. We headed back a different way, hoping to pass her as we went.
Out to the east, the MetalRom factory was on fire, its chimneys stark against a blazing sky. At the mouth of the Boulevard of Socialist Victory stood eight armoured vehicles, their engines running and their doors open. Inside, like pods of alien eggs ready to hatch, were armoured paramilitaries in helmets, gas masks and night vision goggles, hunched forward over automatic rifles. They were absolutely still, waiting to be released, deadly and impersonal, into the streets. Nearby were two black vans with generators on their roofs: refrigerated morgue trucks.
Suddenly, from the burning factory, came the sound of bullets – not the full, round sound you hear in films but a thin, matt crack of steel splitting air.
Five
When we reached home Ottilia had not returned. By now Bucharest was crawling with Securitate. Something was happening in the industrial sector. Leo reached the radio just in time to hear Trofim’s voice on the BBC World Service. Now billed as ‘Romania’s most respected dissident’, Trofim was discussing the army’s heavy-handed response to a sit-in at the MetalRom factory. It marked the first sustained show of resistance against Ceauşescu in the capital, he explained: the sit-in had become a riot, and now the neighbouring car plant had joined in.
On a crackling phone line Trofim condemned the violence of the government’s response. There were dozens of dead, and the hospitals were full of Securitate tracking down the wounded: ‘What we are seeing in Romania is a travesty of socialism. While our socialist neighbours take the necessary steps to liberalise, we are seeing a war against the people themselves – against the very workers our government exists to serve.’ The line died. The newsreader apologised and moved on to the next item, the opening of the borders in Bulgaria.
Leo and I were so involved in the news that we failed to notice Ottilia until she was standing right in front of us. She had walked through town, through the checkpoints, past the guards, with the image of Petre imprinted on her mind. this time it had been him.
Campanu, the pathologist, had called her in the early evening after finding Petre’s papers on one of the dozens of bodies that had been brought in. It was different from the others, he noticed: first of all it was cold to the marrow, morgue-cold, and he knew immediately it had been dead for weeks, stored and then suddenly released; second, it was an execution-style bullet to the head – the rest of the casualties were messy distance shots; finally, unlike the others who had been carefully stripped of ID, this one still had his papers. Someone wanted him identified. Ottilia’s tone was appraising, a clinician’s description, detailed right down to the O of burned skin at Petre’s temple. It was the composure before collapse.
Ottilia’s clothes were wet where she had tripped and fallen among the blocks of broken ice used to cool the bodies during the power cuts. Campanu, fastidious and sad, had tried to help, busy as he was with the MetalRom casualties. He had given her something hot to drink and somewhere to sit and gather herself. Then she had simply walked home, the soldiers and militia letting her pass unchallenged like a ghost walking through the tumult.
Campanu was unable to tell her exactly when Petre had been shot. All he knew was that the body had been cold-stored and brought in with five of tonight’s victims by a squad of Interior Ministry troopers.
For the first time since she began speaking I noticed a polythene bag in Ottilia’s hand. She held it tightly. It was thick and transparent and wet inside – beads of water were clustered around the neck where she held it clenched in her fist. She dropped it onto the table to the sound of loose change, muffled by damp paper. She stood and looked at us.
‘Go on,’ she challenged, ‘open it.’
Leo looked at me and I shook my head. He sighed and sat down, carefully shaking out its contents onto the table. Petre’s watch, an East German Glashütte model, the best you could buy in communist Europe. I reached for it. It was cold and heavy in my hand, working perfectly despite a smear of condensation inside the dial. I laid it out straight on the tabletop. There were some coins and the notebook where Petre wrote his song lyrics with pencil stub attached by elastic band. A Havana Club keyring stripped of keys and an ID card which Leo fingered nervously, brushing the dirt off with his thumb. there was nothing else. He looked up at Ottilia.
‘Open the ID card,’ she told him.
Leo did as he was told. tucked inside the soggy cardboard of the standard Romanian citizen’s identity card was a laminated pass the size of a credit card. I didn’t know what it was, but Leo and Ottilia did. They had seen many like it. Leo dropped it as if it had burned his fingers. Ottilia looked away. It stayed where it fell, face up, the photograph of Petre in uniform aimed at the ceiling: an Interior Ministry pass belonging to Major Petre Romanu.
Ottilia began to weep. I held her tightly as she sobbed, great convulsive tremors riding her body. Her clothes smelled of smoke and cadaver-ice; they had brought the mortuary into our home, that odour of formaldehyde that overrode the smell of death so powerfully that it projected it back in devastating negative, filling the room. None of us could speak: Petre, a major in the secret police.
Leo began some explanation or excuse: the ID was a plant, Petre had been forced into it, it was all a set-up. I don’t think he believed it, but Leo’s way was to get through each crisis as it came, bluff it out and move on to the next one, changing the terms of the problem in the hope of wearing down the problem itself.
‘No more, Leo – no more speculation, rumours, wild guesses. No more double and triple bluffs!’ Ottilia cut him off.
She went to our roomand lay down, dosing herself on sleeping pills
. When I was sure she was unconscious, I left Leo to his brooding and joined her. I was woken by a ring on the doorbell, and the low, unflappable voice of Manea. It was eight o’clock. We had been asleep for three hours. I rose and splashed water on my face. It was icy, so cold it was like rubbing broken glass over my skin. I looked at myself in the mirror: a scoured red face, heavy eyes, sallow, unshaven cheeks.
Manea had parked round the corner. Even he was wary of being seen as he entered the flat. ‘I am sorry this happened,’ he was saying to Leo, ‘I knew nothing about it until tonight. You must believe me. these are not my tactics, and this is not my department.’ Then, seeing me, he said: ‘Sit down. I think we understand each other when I tell you that both Stoicu and I have people infiltrating the opposition groups. Both of us play dirty when we need to. that’s normal. It’s our job. Each of us wants to know what the other is doing. He spies on me, I spy on him. I had someone on Stoicu’s personal staff. What I know is that one of his operatives was involved in the university’s music and samizdat scene, in the people smuggling and defections. His cover was blown and he is now useless as an agent. But he did leave a body that night after a struggle, the night those two boys were killed, and this body was shot in the head at close range near the border. That accords with our own reports of a single shot fired. this was the boy you came to see me about, the boy I then did not know about. Petre. the body was carried back to Bucharest with the intention that it would stand in for Stoicu’s operative, take the blame, and Stoicu’s man could resume his activities. The rest you know, or at any rate suspect: that operative, whom you know as Vintul, was seen and recognised at the Athénée Palace. By you and by Leo, though neither of you thought to mention it to the other…’
‘Petre was killed for that?’ Ottilia was standing at the door, ‘to cover up some bastard’s Securitate activities? To stand in for the Securitate officer who killed him so you could all get back to your Party power games?’ She gripped her left arm with her right hand, her nails digging into the skin.
‘No – Petre was killed because he had too much on Stoicu and Belanger and the others. Because he was working for them without knowing it, making them money, trafficking people when he thought he was helping them make new lives but the time was coming when he would find out… Unfortunately the only one of them he didn’t suspect was Vintul, which is why he trusted him right up to the end.’
Manea moved towards Ottilia. She put out a hand, motioning him to come no closer. He raised his palms in surrender and stepped away from her. ‘Petre worked for me. He was my man on the inside. His job was to track down the racketeers and block their money, their foreign links, smoke out the corrupt Securitate officers. His job was to find out who was running it all, and he did find out…’ He looked at Leo. ‘But of course, you know that, Leo, you know who’s running it all, because you started it…’ Leo began to say something in his defence, then looked away. Once again we had come to the edge of that name – Belanger – and pulled back from speaking it.
Manea turned to Ottilia: ‘When you came to see me I had no idea. I didn’t know the details of his involvement with Vintul, and maybe if you’d been a bit more forthcoming when I helped you we’d all have found out sooner. I waited for Petre to make contact. I thought he’d re-emerge, take back his double life. Nothing happened. Petre was a good man, a better man than most of us. He never informed on others, never took part in the repression of citizens. He helped many people, and he always used his position to make things better. You all know that. But he was also a socialist. He represented what the Party could have been if it had kept faith with its roots and its principles. We’re not all like Stoicu and his cronies. Petre hated the corruption and the brutality, hated what Stoicu and Belanger and the others were doing. If there’s any comfort in all this it’s that we are now in a position to act against Stoicu. the evidence that Petre gathered is what will nail him.’
He opened the door, paused, then turned back to us. He took something from his coat pocket. It was Petre’s red, bound folder of names – all the people he had recruited for his network of mutual help, all their addresses, jobs and details of their contributions in time and money.
‘This…’ he tapped the cover, ‘this needs to be destroyed. The Securitate will be looking for it, Vintul knows it exists, and I’m duty-bound to copy it and take action against everyone whose name is written here. But I’m giving it to you. As far as I’m concerned it’s lost somewhere at the bottom of the Danube. Burn it.’
Nobody moved. We were too stunned to speak, to follow him down the stairs, to ask any more questions. After a few minutes, I smelled smoke where Leo had kindled a fire in my metal dustbin and stood on the balcony ripping pages from the book and feeding it in. the pages caught, turned brown, then scattered in black flakes into the air. In the morning’s fierce sunlight, the flames were invisible. Finally Leo threw in the hard binding of the book, Ottilia and I standing over the makeshift brazier.
Stoicu’s fall was swift and bloodless and secret. If I had been Trofim I would have admired it aesthetically, especially now that Manea, with his new reputation as the scourge of Party corruption, was promoted to minister. From one day to the next Stoicu’s power base was dismantled and his staff reassigned. the level of corruption he oversaw amazed even the nomenklatura who had most gained by it. But what had really done for him was the proof, meticulously gathered through Petre’s work, that Stoicu had been running a network of people-smuggling gangs, prostitution rackets and money changing scams on behalf of ‘foreign interests’.
‘For foreign interests read Belanger,’ Leo explained, ‘Stoicu’s gone, and Manea gets his job… tidy, eh?’
Was that what Cilea had discovered when she went to Belgrade to meet Belanger? Had he said something to her? Was that why she had seemed to know, but could not tell me without looking implicated?
As far as public disgrace was possible in a society based on secrecy, Stoicu encountered it: re-housed to the outskirts and given a job as a caretaker, his wife divorced him within days. Manea’s was a better class of corruption. there were no gold bath taps in Manea’s flat, no gilt-threaded kimonos; there were no pyramids of caviar jars stacked in his larder like Korean pilchards in Monocom. Manea never wiped his mouth with the back of his hand or belched after drinking Krug with a Tsuica chaser in the ‘Madonna Disco’. He did not parade teenage trophy-fucks at party gatherings or wear three different French aftershaves at the same time. His fingernails were clean.
And now he owned not just the ministry but the dark and ramifying underworld of enforcers and informers that fed it. ‘Cleaning up the ministry, eh?’ snorted Leo, bitter that this was one plot he had not been involved in, ‘a Bulgarian bath’s what they call it here: a couple of sprays of deodorant and then business as usual…’
Ottilia scattered Petre’s ashes over Herastrau lake, speaking inaudibly to him or to herself or to their dead parents, while Ioana and Leo and I hung back. trofim sat with Campanu on a bench behind us. Even the plain-clothes man, one half of the surveillance double act who now watched Trofim all day, had his hat off. It was a blue expansive day, the sky wide open, the trees’ black and leafless branches rooted in clear air.
Manea’s mercy extended to ensuring Petre’s work for him remained secret. Word got out that he had died helping others cross the border. It was true in its way, I supposed. I liked Manea, I was grateful to him, but I had no illusions: knowledge was good to hold on to. You stored it as you stored petrol or food or currency.
Petre had been the only person I had believed was untainted by the viciousness and deceit we all lived in. But Ottilia felt betrayed and held me complicit in the betrayal – complicit by ignorance, and more precisely wilful ignorance, the mind’s averted gaze. We had believed in Petre and that belief had stopped us succumbing to the very cynicism and suspicion that would have protected us from his duplicity. To rise above the lies, you had to stop believing there was any truth.
And besides, I had
known Petre was dead since the night I found Ottilia in their flat. the abandoned guitar in its case, the amplifier still plugged into the currentless socket: I knew the language of abandoned objects – I had learned it at home – and I knew it then. I just hadn’t given room to the knowledge or shared it with her. She held that against me too.
For me, what Petre had or hadn’t done was irrelevant. He really had believed in his project, just as Leo believed in his. The difference was that Petre’s was not escapism or evasion of reality, but an attempt to change that reality, to use it as a basis for something better. According to Manea, Petre’s relationship with socialism was more complicated than we thought. Like Trofim, he could never quite let it go. The Project, however unreal it was, however little of it was left, was evidence of that. Most people were closet dissidents. Petre had been a closet communist. the good he had done was real enough, though he himself might not have been. I tried to explain this to Ottilia. I told her that Petre’s double life didn’t cancel out what we knew and believed of him. She looked at me with pity and something like contempt. ‘Go join a church,’ she said. And then: ‘Or the Party’.
Ottilia thought she was left behind to shoulder the shame. She punished Petre by punishing herself. Whenever people eulogised him or praised his music or his actions, she cut them off or left the room. Grief, they imagined. Now she barely spoke to me, and our life together was made of silence.
The Last Hundred Days Page 27
