The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  She came home irregularly, throwing herself into a frenzy of dirty, risky work. She did unnecessary, unpaid overtime, slept on the ward, volunteered a day a week at an orphanage or a cancer ward: penance for his guilt. The nights without her I spent fearful and apprehensive, but they were better than the nights she returned. I listened as she threw up in the bathroom or sobbed in the darkness, and when I tried to comfort her she shook off every touch, flinched at every tenderness. I lay sleepless in the Bucharest night, listening to the cold shower in the small hours as Ottilia washed herself clean of the day’s horrors.

  One morning as I woke before her in the blue metallic light of a winter’s 5 am, I saw her white coat covered in mud or grease. I took it to the kitchen to wash in the sink, turned the taps on and scrubbed it with my fingernails, the dirt coming off on my hands. She came into the kitchen and switched on the light. I saw my hands wrist-deep in red water, my fingernails crusted with blood, the sink ringed with rust-coloured scud.

  All around us were preparations for the Party Congress. There were flyovers and military rehearsals, soldiers parading to martial music. The sky was filled with the ripping of jets and streaked in squandered fuel, while down below buses remained in their depots for want of petrol and people froze in their homes. Even as shifts were disrupted and workers couldn’t reach their unlit factories or offices, targets went up: more steel, more cars, more wheat, more corn. Scînteia carried news of broken production records, of a stupendous collective effort bringing us to the edge – the very foothills – of a new, illuminated, era. Epoch of Light! was the headline.

  ‘Epoch of the forty-watt fucking lightbulb,’ snorted Leo, hurling the paper across the room – lightbulbs too were rationed now. ‘I’m off to see if I can meet my whisky targets. Anyone care to join me?’ He unscrewed the top of a fresh bottle of Scotch and settled in for a glum solo expedition to its depths.

  But the drink missed its mark, the dinners at Capsia failed to divert. Leo began to abandon his racketeering, losing customers here, forgetting deliveries there. All was spoiled for him by what had happened to Petre, and by Belanger. Only his work kept him going, his book of lost walks that grew fatter and fatter as there was less and less to describe.

  The obliteration of the city now happened at such speed that vacant spaces appeared where just a few days before there had been people and buildings. It was not unusual now to pass a place you knew and to find it gone, as if the ground had swallowed it up in one mouthful. I remembered that silent Chaplin film where a man returns to his demolished house and fails to notice it has disappeared. He walks to the absent door, inserts his key into the memory of the lock, opens and steps inside, even wiping his feet on the missing welcome mat. It is not until he tries to sit on his favourite armchair – a composite of air and memory – that he falls on his arse and realises there is nothing left.

  A British deputy foreign minister arrived for the promised official visit the week of the Congress. It had been due to be the Foreign Secretary himself, but the visit had been progressively downgraded as Romania became more and more isolated. Trofim and Leo refused to go to the reception, and Ottilia was not speaking to me, so I went alone. Wintersmith was in charge, and on unctuous form. He gave me a conspirator’s wink as I passed him, and pointed to Cilea who, despite the cold, was alone on the terrace, smoking. I came up behind her, but she greeted me without turning.

  ‘Will you take me into the Ship and Castle?’ she asked, looking out across the embassy compound, ‘I need to explain before it’s too late.’ She slid her arm through mine. We were strangers again, Cilea reverting to the careless, shallow intimacy of our first few meetings. As always I felt the power of her sexuality and the loneliness that had haunted me whenever I was with her. My fullest moments with her had been felt as lack.

  ‘Too late? Isn’t it too late already?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘there’s more to come. There’s always more to come…’

  We sat at a corner table, she in her black cocktail skirt, I in my clumsy suit. People looked at her: her long black hair, her red mouth, the improbably tanned but unblemished skin. Her eyes were black and burning, and her cheeks red from the cold.

  ‘You knew, didn’t you? About what had happened to Petre…’

  ‘Yes, but not all along, and only when Florian mentioned something about one of his men – one of Stoicu’s men – dealing with my father’s internal security agent on the border. It had been brewing for months, all part of the power struggle between my father and Stoicu. Belanger didn’t order it, if that’s what you’re asking… actually it’s been more trouble for him. When Manea’s man brought down Stoicu he took down half of Florian’s Bucharest network too… if it’s any comfort, you had nothing to do with any of it.’

  ‘Consider me comforted,’ I said sarcastically, ‘and that’s the man you’re going back to? The man you love?’

  Cilea looked at me in surprise: ‘Yes. I know what Florian is. I know what my father is and I love my father.’

  ‘Tell me about him… Belanger I mean, tell me about Florian…’

  Her fingers trembled, the cigarette ash shaking and crumbling onto the table. She blew it onto the floor, then took a long, sustaining drag. ‘Where do I start?’ she asked. ‘Besides, you don’t really want to hear…’

  That was true.

  They had met in 1984. He had just arrived, a young lecturer on his first posting from the UK, visiting the country of his ancestors. He knew Romanian from his grandparents, Frenchified Bucharestians – ‘bonjouristes’ – who had emigrated after the war. He knew nothing of the place, but right from the start he seemed to be drawing on some buried familial experience of it. It was as if he had been there before. He called it déjà vu, she said, this feeling that he had from the moment he arrived at Otopeni airport and found the place opening before him. At first his own facility with the city took him by surprise. Then he mastered it. The map was already in his head; walking the streets merely unfolded it. He began with Leo. They took walks in the night; they were inseparable. He said that each step was like a switch reactivating the place beneath his feet. Leo had been here three years already. He had had time to put down roots, scout out the terrain. He had already started his contraband empire. But it was Belanger who really knew the place. He knew instinctively how far he could go, what would sell, how much for, how long to stockpile and when to release. Leo was an amateur, and besides, there were things Leo wouldn’t touch which Belanger was happy to trade in. Within six months Florian Belanger was… Cilea searched for the phrase… in the driving seat…

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘My father. My father introduced us, though he regretted it pretty quickly. At a party at the French Embassy. Fourteenth of July. Belanger was there, he’d already started doing his own thing, cutting his own deals. Leo hated him because he had no respect for all those things Leo loved: art, buildings, books. Belanger didn’t mind what they were doing to the city. It cleared space, he said. Made things sellable… moveable. Leo always said that fifty per cent of business was making things portable… portable! Belanger took him at his word, that’s all…’ Cilea smiled at the reminiscence. ‘Everything was being dismantled, unscrewed, taken apart. Belanger packed it up and sold it. That first night he took me for a drive. He had a suite in the Inter Continental, a penthouse, like something from an American movie. He stood at the window and showed me Bucharest in the semi-darkness and told me that one day it would be lit up like New York or London. There’d be all-night shops and nightclubs, twenty-four hour restaurants, theatres and cinemas, flashing neon signs. I laughed. I didn’t believe such places existed. Not then.’

  What Belanger had offered her was the Bucharest of the future. ‘He took me to Paris, Madrid, Rome. My father disapproved, called him a criminal… tried to have him arrested and deported, but by then Belanger was working with Stoicu, and Stoicu overruled him. He was a protected man. Manea was humiliated. Then someone attacked Florian, sm
ashed his legs. Threatened to kill him if he stayed. He never walked properly again. Then one day he left.’

  I said nothing. Whatever kind of man Belanger was, Cilea had loved him then and still loved him now. She would never be talking about me like this.

  ‘He wasn’t a gangster or anything. He wasn’t seedy or violent. I never saw anything of what they said he was involved in…’

  I cut her off: ‘The Belanger most of us know about was a drug dealer and people trafficker, who made money from the sex trade. He sold off pieces of a disintegrating city and colluded with the Securitate. He bought human misery at rock-bottom prices and sold it on at a profit.’ I was surprised by my own vehemence. I hated Belanger, because of Leo, because of Cilea… I was living with his cast-offs, I had borrowed from his life to fund my own.

  ‘Most of us? How dare you? You’re not part of any us! You’re not part of anything, not any of it. You watch, that’s all! You float along. You just go with what there is, with whoever there is – Leo, Ottilia, that old Stalinist Trofim, that slimeball over there,’ she jerked her head at Wintersmith, who was at the bar with the deputy foreign minister; he sensed he was a fleeting subject of conversation and waved at us. ‘Florian made things happen, he changed the way things worked. He wasn’t evil, he just wanted more than he had, like we all do. He didn’t choose the system, but he made something from it. He didn’t make the world. He’s not Ceauşescu or Stoicu. He’s not even Manea Constantin. He doesn’t have to sit and be judged by thieves and murderers and collaborators.’

  ‘That’s shitty logic. Sick logic.’ I had no image of Belanger, but in my mind I saw a photograph with a blanked-out face, and that blankness drew allmy hate. ‘Where is he now?’ I asked.

  A dampness behind me, like the musty draft that rides the backswing of a cellar door, told me Wintersmith was at my shoulder. Cilea pulled on her gloves. ‘Pleased you could make it,’ said Wintersmith, trying to kiss Cilea’s hand, a greeting he must have felt behoved his promotion.

  ‘I must go,’ she said, giving me a dry hug and moving through the noisy bar room.

  ‘I’ll get you a drink,’ said Wintersmith, raising his eyebrows, ‘you can tell me all about it…’

  While he was at the bar I left and walked home. There was a subzero undertow to the air. Winter was baring its teeth.

  Six

  That night I dreamed I was asleep on a train, that I woke and the train was still moving, the carriage swaying and the noise of screeching brakes and metal grinding against metal. The sound of sparks, the smell of sulphur. Clothes and suitcases tumbled from the luggage racks. Outside, a crescent moon swung from side to side like the rim of a hypnotist’s watch.

  Further down the carriage, my lost parents were unfazed. They moved calmly through the chaos, riding the air. As I struggled across the swaying compartment to reach them, they passed further and further back into the obscurity. Their expressions were neutral; then, as the shadow ate away at them, their faces contorted in horror and pain and melted to bone and darkness. They raised their hands to me as the blackness burned them like a reel of film catching flame, and when I reached for them they were gone. There was warm ash on my fingers.

  When I woke a second time, the dream stopped, but its décor still moved. I looked around me. A great shuddering convulsion had taken hold of the whole building. The house shook from the foundations up, a long rippling wave followed by the delicate crashing of glass. Then came silence, that species of stillness we only hear as aftermath: the hanging air, time torn and gathering itself.

  It was early morning. My bedroom curtain-rail had fallen and plaster dust covered the bedsheets. The window frame was loose. The bookshelves hung lopsided. I got out of bed and was surprised to feel the floor still solid beneath my feet. It was cold, spiky drafts pushing their way into the room. The balcony, when I went outside, gave a little underneath me: the building settling into its foundations.

  Outside the place had burst open: between road and pavement, pavement and housefronts, windows and window-frames. Every point where one part of the world was fastened to another had come asunder. The city’s innards were coming out: water, burst drains with their cargoes of shit and slurry, compacted earth and rubble. Fire hydrants fountained up, peaked, then splashed the pavements. Sewage, a monster from the deeps, pressed up slowly from every crevasse, a shiny brown curdling that swelled up as it made contact with the air.

  I pulled on my clothes and ran downstairs. The handrail was loose, the hall chandelier held up only by its wiring. The electricity had gone, which was just as well, given all the cables that now lay in water or drain sludge. There was a large crack shaped like lightning down the wall and you could feel the wind outside coming in, the darkness and the cold prising the bricks apart.

  There were no voices, no sirens; there was no sound of people stirring or panicking. Just the wind singing of fresh cavities. There was another tremor. 5.15 am. Outside, the scene was not so much devastation as a protracted teetering: blocks perched ready to fall, walls leaning into mere air, balconies hanging from threads of steel. The place looked normal, just a little shabbified, as if subjected to a sudden accelerated dose of wear and tear.

  I fetched my camera and set off to Leo’s. Lipscani was a ten-minute walk away, and I would doubtless come across something he could use.

  The quake had happened nearly twenty minutes ago. As I passed the lower end of Calea Victoriei I heard activity: sirens in the distance and militia cars without headlamps speeding towards the city centre. I passed Trofim’s street, which was mostly undamaged and where fear had passed into a kind of self-interested curiosity. A man speculated that the quake would flatten the new monstrosity in the town centre and good riddance. Some cautious laughter ensued, followed by a Shhhh… as I passed by, a stranger with a camera.

  Lipscani was full of noise and bustle. An informal action group had already taken control. Two gypsy men gave out bandages while a local Party man went around calling out names from what was, even in Romania, called the ‘voting register’. Outside Leo’s block three matriarchs fanned the flames beneath a vat of Tsuica-fortified tea. People huddled around its alcoholic fumes and queued with whatever they had – empty cans, plastic cups, broken china – for a ladleful. The power had gone, but ferocious braziers sent out waves of scorching heat. I asked one of the women if she had seen Leo. She handed me two paper cups of alcoholic tea and sent me to the next corner where Leo was eating aspirin from a jar as if they were peanuts at a cocktail party.

  ‘They’ve been predicting another quake for years. We’re lucky it’s only this. The last one was in seventy-seven; killed two thousand people. Doesn’t look to me like this one’s done much damage, but the real test’s going to be in the outskirts. The sort of gerrybuilt shit they’ve been putting up out there, you’ve got to wonder…’ He sipped his tea, adding Tsuica from a bottle in his pocket.

  ‘Lipscani’s not done too badly. A couple of roofs fell in, chimneys came down… a big crack in Strada Lipscani itself, but nothing they can’t sort out with a bit of resurfacing.’ He noticed the camera strap over my shoulder. ‘You seen anything interesting?’

  I had snapped the convoy of militia cars as they headed into town, but wasn’t sure the light was good enough. I hadn’t wanted to draw attention by using a flash. From an open window a radio played folk songs, and down below Leo had his long-wave set tuned to the BBC World Service. There was no mention of this morning’s earthquake. Unusually, there were no police here either – Lipscani had been left to its own devices.

  ‘Probably all headed into town to check the damage to the Palace. Christ knows what it’s like in the outskirts. You wouldn’t want to be on the top floor of one of those apartment blocks this morning would you? Poor sods.’

  Across Bucharest the old buildings were undamaged. The only one on Leo’s street to suffer had been bisected by a falling crane rather than the quake. Only the back wall of the house remained, with its oddly undisturbed paintings
and still-smouldering fireplace. Even the bibelots on the mantelpiece stood unharmed, draped in a layer of plaster dust but looking invincibly delicate.

  ‘You see, it’s always the small things – the luxuries, the decorations, that survive. The frivolous stuff. When they excavate ancient sites, it’s a few jewels of beaten gold or bits of broken pot. An earring, a perfume bottle, we recreate the lost civilisation from. All that’s built to last disappears… crashes down or ebbs away. No place ever tells the story of itself as it planned to do… look, a forty-tonne crane comes crashing down, but the little china dog on the shelf survives…’

  There were flaws to Leo’s argument, but he was not ready to hear them. Already he saw this earthquake as a punishment for the outrages that had been visited upon Bucharest by Ceauşescu. Everywhere we looked, old churches or houses stood intact, while their hulking new-built neighbours had cracked from foundation stone to roof tile. It was difficult, even without Leo’s cranky urban animism, not to see it as an Old Testament-style retribution. I half-expected to see clouds of locusts bearing down on the city.

  From the university’s library dome where Ionescu had his attic office, we looked out at the damage while our former boss made Tsuica coffee. In the gathering light, Bucharest’s skyline was piecing itself back together. In the city centre, things looked normal: the Scînteia building’s needle-like spire still stood, as did the towers of the three cathedrals. Below them, like a range of minor hills clustered around resplendent peaks, the uneven roofs and domes of the old city. It was on the outskirts, in the places where Bucharest stopped and the Saturnal rings of urban blankness rippled off into the distance, that the real destruction appeared.