The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘Mainly by taking its place…’

  ‘Maybe, maybe… there’ll be time to address that in due course, but the moment the borders open and the government collapses, they’ll be back…’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The gangsters, dealers, traffickers, the pimps and fascists, the Jew-haters and ethnic cleansers… you’ve seen it starting already in Yugoslavia, or whatever it’s called now, and it’ll happen here.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with me or Leo?’ I knew where Manea was going with this, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  ‘Florian Belanger is coming back. That’s what they’re saying, and I believe it. I always knew he would. That’s why I sent Cilea away. When he does he’ll be richer, more powerful and more ambitious than ever. He’ll have his scores to settle: with me, with Leo, but also with you. Cilea was besotted with him from the start – I hoped you’d take her away from him, and maybe you did for a while, I don’t know – but he’ll be coming back for her. He won’t be happy to know she’s been with you, and when he finds out you’re Leo’s friend he’ll have plans for both of you. Maybe he knows already.’

  ‘I can look after myself.’ Manea let it pass as the hollow bravado it was. I put my hand out to shake his but he hauled himself up out of the sofa and embraced me. On my way out the guard was gone.

  Nine

  Leo and Ottilia were waiting in the car, luggage and passports ready and engine running. I didn’t even have time for a last look at the flat, to shut the door marked ‘Belanger, Dr F’ behind me as I went.

  At Otopeni airport there were roadblocks and perimeter checks. Leo predicted that the chaos would make travel easier, but he was wrong. We got past the first militia checkpoint, and our papers were examined and approved by the army guard outside the departures gate. Crowds were being held back, but we managed to pass the next checkpoint without obstacle. Inside the terminal we thought we were through – Ottilia was already kissing Leo goodbye – when I saw the notice at the TAROM check-in desk: all flights had been grounded. The desks had been vacated; the staff had disappeared. Our tickets were worthless. The only operators running were Air China and JAT, the Yugoslav airlines. ‘Beijing or Belgrade… that’s the choice…’ I turned to Ottilia, but she was gone. Three Securitate men had pulled her from the queue and were examining her passport.

  ‘Shit,’ said Leo into my ear, ‘I’ve buggered it up. I thought being Russian would be OK, but it’s not. It’s the Russians they’re stopping – I should have bloody seen that coming! The Russians are the regime’s enemies! Fuck! What have I done?’

  I heard Ottilia pleading with them in Russian, then in convincingly broken Romanian. She looked over to me and waved me off. ‘Go!’ she mouthed as they took her passport into an office for checking.

  ‘Go on!’ said Ottilia as we approached her, ‘that passport’s not going to survive a proper check, and I need to be gone when they get back.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Leo, ‘I did my best – couldn’t very well get her a Chinese passport could I? We’ve got to get her out of here. Take this,’ he handed me a JAT ticket, one-way to Belgrade. How he had got past the chaotic queues at the JAT desk I didn’t know.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said, ‘I’m not leaving without you.’ I took Ottilia’s arm.

  ‘Yes you are.’ She kissed me then pulled free. ‘You’re leaving now, take that ticket and when it’s safe you can come back. Either that or Leo can make me a better passport and I’ll come to you. Go…’ She pushed me hard in the chest and was gone in the crowd, Leo lurching after her, keeping hold of her hand.

  I was alone at the airport again, just as I had been eight months ago. At the JAT desk they said I had missed check-in, so I left my suitcase on the marble floor and headed through customs to find the same pair of uniformed thieves who had fleeced me when I arrived. If they remembered me they gave no sign of it, just checked my expiring visa against a list on their wall, stole fifty dollars and waved me through. The system was falling apart, but here, in the microcosmos of their customs booth, it was business as usual.

  Belgrade was cold and wet and as heavily policed as Bucharest. I chose my hotel because of its name, its price and its proximity to Belgrade station. There was nothing Romanian about the Hotel Bucarest unless you counted the lack of hot water, refreshments and heating. From my window I could smell the wafts of pavement buffets and hear noises of transit around Central Station. I hoped there would be a television, but in that too the hotel aspired to Romanianity. I had been without news for several hours, and now, in the early Belgrade evening, I went in search of somewhere to eat where I could watch the latest images. In the station buffet a large-screen television showed rolling satellite news from across the border. The western TV crews had arrived.

  Ceauşescu had escaped by helicopter that afternoon after his failed attempt to rally the troops. Army factions loyal to the president retained control of the TV station and telephone exchange, but Radio Bucharest was now in rebel hands, transmitting news and declarations by the minute. In Timişoara, Brasov, Cluj and elsewhere, the army and police had switched sides; the Securitate and some army units were resisting. Already the dead were being laid out on the pavements to be identified and mourned. Only in the streets of Bucharest was the fighting as vicious as ever. The university library was burning, its great dome smashed and the rafters poking out into the smoke. Tanks had turned their fire against the Central Committee HQ and blown holes in the facade. Ceauşescu portraits were being burned in the streets. Snipers fired from windows and bodies of civilians lay in the rubble. The Securitate were fighting in small deadly groups, but those who were caught were strung up from lampposts and left to seize up with cold or rigor mortis, whichever came first, as they swung in the breeze.

  It was on the night of the twenty-third too that the camera crews discovered the underground torture rooms, with their tangles of piano wire and implements that looked like straightened coathangers, their exposed electrics, hose pipes and clotted blood. Strewn across the floors were the papers and box files of victims and their torturers no one had had time to burn. All over Romania documents were being fed to flames and shredders, but the really foresighted people would not be destroying papers. They would be making copies.

  It was past midnight when I returned to the Hotel Bucarest. My bag had been stolen, along with all my hard currency. I appeared to have been the only victim of the burglars, but the hotel staff lost no time in blaming the influx of Romanians – Here just a few hours and already they’ve started stealing. The manager pointed to a notice which declined all responsibility for theft or damage. When I threatened to call the police he slapped me on the back and laughed so hard the hem of his moustache lifted like curtains in a draft. I had lost two hundred dollars – all my fare home – and my clothes. All I had left was twenty dollars, the passport in my pocket, and the copy of Arghezi’s poems Trofim had given me with the photo of myself and Cilea as bookmark.

  Christmas eve in Belgrade brought rain that froze as soon as it hit the ground. The borders were open, and the westward flow of refugees was unrelenting. The Yugoslavs didn’t mind. They were just a staging post. Thousands of Romanians were arriving in Berlin, Paris, Brussels. They were filmed begging in western streets and sleeping on blankets in gyms, cresting the waves of pity. They were right to make the most of it. Within a few weeks these ‘gypsies’ were being blamed for crimewaves, muggings and disease.

  I had to reach the UK consulate before midday. With luck I might be able to arrange a bank guarantee and borrow enough money to get home. The Vice-Consul was a sad-faced, gentle man who wore a summer suit and sweated tropically despite the cold. He smoked a medley of cigarettes, lighting one off the other as if trying to economise on matches. I filled in some forms and he advanced me enough to pay for a hotel and some meals. The rest usually took forty-eight hours, but given that it was Christmas it would have to be the twenty-ninth at the earliest. Did I have somewhere to stay? He re
commended a two-star hotel on the next corner, popular with visitors because it was cheap and clean and had remote control TV. The Lasta Hotel – ‘I wouldn’t read too much into the name,’ he smiled tiredly. He gave me his card: Francis Phillimore, Deputy Head of Mission. I had heard the name before but couldn’t place when or from whom.

  Outside the Lasta Hotel I was approached for money by a man claiming to be a refugee from Timişoara. I spoke a few words of Romanian to him but he was unable to reply. He spat at me and walked away: already the situation was providing new openings for fraudulent begging. At the Lasta Hotel the vaunted remote control turned out to be attached to the television with a six-inch chain, making it impossible to use without getting up and crossing the room. It was the object-equivalent of those absurd communist jokes I had laughed at and learned from over the last hundred days. I settled down on the bed with a bottle of Slivovitz and a meat pie, drinking from a tooth mug as I watched the first footage of the National Salvation Front in session. This too is stored in the perpetual present.

  Behind them stands a Romanian flag with a hole in the middle. They are in a room in the Party HQ, large but already befogged with smoke. Everyone is talking at once. Papers are being shuffled, most of them blank, and one man, sitting at the centre of the rectangular table, receives faxes and telegrams, scans them and dictates responses to Oleanu who stands at his back with a dictaphone and pen and paper. The man wears the same clothes as when I saw him in Capsia: Ilinescu, head of the NSF, former Party chief and lately high-profile dissident, now the NSF’s undisputed leader. Manea Constantin is there, near the middle of the table: interior minister and now also information minister. He is underdressed, and to one who knows his usual snappiness of attire, the dishevelment is deliberate. He has even taken care not to shave. He has the air of someone who has been on the barricades all night, though in his case the barricades were a Turkish sofa bed, a drinks cabinet and satellite television, and the weapons were phones, fax machines and a choking shredder. Manea is at the inaugural cabinet meeting of the first post-Ceauşescu government, the only minister with two portfolios. There is no sign of his leg plaster.

  The other men in the room look like the sort of people they have replaced. In most cases they are the same people. Then I see him. The camera picks out the end of his cane, sweeps across the room, then pulls back to where he sits on a chair a little to the left of the new Prime Minister. Trofim feels no need to underdress; he even wears his Party lapel badge. When he talks everyone listens. The expression on his face is one I have never before seen: concentrated, penetrating and completely impersonal. Trofim seems transfigured. A commanding presence, he is not in charge, but from the way they all consult him and ask his opinion, show him the new decrees as they pass them – eighteen in the first hour of government – he does not need to be anything so crude as in charge. Trofim has been transfigured into himself.

  The NSF spokesman declares that Ceauşescu has been captured after escaping by helicopter and will be brought to trial. The people’s representatives have taken control of the radio and television stations, and of the Scînteia building. They blame the Securitate loyal to Ceauşescu for continuing fighting and claim the army has been on the side of the people from the start. It may not be their first lie, but it is certainly the first I can recognise.

  I am surprised by a fresh belly laugh, a great, enveloping cackle of cynicism and bitter hilarity. It is coming from myself, and it soon veers into something that’s full of anger and ridicule and self-mockery. And then tears. I can feel them stinging, mixing with the cigarette smoke and the fumes of Slivovitz coming up from my guts. New brothel, same old whores, wasn’t that what Leo had said?

  I slept in my clothes and woke late, parched and sweating alcohol. At the hotel desk was a phone message from Phillimore inviting me for Christmas lunch. Drinks from 11 am, the note said, and gave an address. The hotel receptionist told me it was only two blocks away and outlined the route on my JAT tourist map.

  Phillimore opened the door holding two cups of mulled wine, a crepe cracker crown angled rakishly on his head. ‘Merry Christmas.’ His living room was decorated with portraits of distinguished ancestors, admirals and commodores with names like Fortescue and Phillimore-Mannering, who watched over the latest and, judging from the disconsolate bachelorhood of his flat, the last of their bloodline. Phillimore’s only festive concession appeared to be a single bauble hanging from a rubber plant.

  A smell of roasting wafted from his tiny kitchen. A small woman in a headscarf was basting goose and uncorking wine. In Phillimore’s living room, Euro News played the familiar images, except now the Ceauşescus were under arrest and stared, wrinkled, wild-haired and terrified, into the camera.

  ‘Sorry. You’ve probably had enough of that,’ said Phillimore, turning off the television and refilling my cup. ‘If I’d known you were a friend of Leo’s – no reason you should have said, of course not – but if I’d known I’d have sorted you out for cash immediately and put you on a flight yesterday. You’d at least have had Christmas at home.’ Phillimore was pointing a cracker at me.

  ‘You know Leo?’ The cracker came apart and its tiny explosion made me jump.

  ‘Known him for years, though it’s been a while now since we met. I used to keep an eye on things over here for him – you know, paperwork, visas, export permits… low-level stuff but still basically corrupt.’ He gave a glum smile and raised his cup. ‘I’m afraid you’re my only Christmas guest, but there’s plenty to eat and drink. I’ve got no plans for today, except the Queen’s Christmas message at four and embassy staff drinks tonight if you’re interested…’

  Phillimore was easy to be with. He had the undemanding sadness of the lonely-by-choice. Just being with him was an unburdening, a clearing-out. ‘So Leo called you?’ I asked.

  ‘Last night, late. On some sort of portable telephone. Terrible reception. Said to look out for you, and I told him you’d actually already been. He said to tell you everything was fine, that they were safe. Then he told me to help you out with cash. Actually he made me promise to tell you to come back to Bucharest, but I’d be going against Foreign Office advice if I did that. Look, here’s three hundred dollars, more than enough to get back – back where is up to you. Take them and I’ll settle up with Leo later.’

  We listened to the Queen’s speech over roast goose stuffed with buckwheat and some Croatian wine.

  Christmas day for the Ceauşescus ended early, because that morning they were executed against a wall and their not-yet-dead bodies were finished off by handgun.

  By five o’clock, Phillimore and I were watching film of the trial on television.

  It is only the Ceauşescus we see, sitting at a small table in a Targoviste bunker. They were defiant to the end, and strangely tender in their small proprieties. It is always the small proprieties that stick in the mind. Perhaps it’s because they seem to take death’s measure and, for a brief moment, to square up to it: the way she buttons up her coat and juts out her chin decisively; the way he strokes her hand, smoothes his hair, puffs out his chest. Is it my memory playing tricks or does she, minutes before the end, wrap a scarf around his neck? She is disorientated and in terror, but musters a mad defiance. Asked how old she is, she replies, ‘You shouldn’t ask a lady her age,’ this, no more than half an hour before they are shot.

  Every dictator’s trial has one of these moments of unexpected dignity or fastidiousness when the bloodlust that has been stirred up in us begins to waver. What is he saying? There are subtitles, but it’s just a desolate life-and-death patter: ‘I am the president’, ‘I do not recognise this bandit court…’, ‘I will answer to the people, and to the people only’…She: ‘We made you. We looked after you. Is this how you repay us?’, ‘This is nonsense: the Romanian people love us and will not stand for this coup.’ Bravery? Or just fantasy outlasting its relationship with reality, like the last note of a symphony hanging in the silence that will swallow it up?

  The
y are found guilty of a range of crimes, from starving their people to owning too many pairs of shoes. At one point, their defence lawyer has to be reined in by the prosecutor because he is shouting abuse at them. Their accusers are kept out of sight, and their names, when either Nicolae or Elena mentions them, are blanked out of the subtitles. One of the voices is Manea’s, I recognise it, but though the names of those at the trial were eventually released, Manea’s does not figure among them.

  It’s all finished now. The camera pans across the corpses. Their faces are intact, the entry wounds tidy; on the other side the exiting bullets have ripped through their skulls, and the backs of their heads flap open like hoods blown off in a gale. She lies across the pavement while he has died on his knees with his torso and head thrown back. Someone opens their eyes and checks their pulse.

  There’s a sudden jolt and we see an irrelevant snatch of blue sky as the cameraman loses his balance: a perfect azure expanse, empty, weightless. Then he steadies himself, stepping across first the one body then the other: the close-up of their hands, parted where the bullets’ force tore them from each other’s clasp. The clothes of the dead are what stay in the mind, not their faces: she has a shoe missing, his Astrakhan hat is by his side; her bag, which she kept until the end, still lodged in the crook of her elbow.