The Last Hundred Days (17 page)

‘Nothing thanks, I’ve had too much already. I was out with Leo.’ I realised I had let on that I knew Petre, and that I might have to explain myself to Cilea. ‘Don’t know the surname – long hair, plays the guitar, looks slightly spaced-out… you know…?’

Cilea stood in the doorway now, her black dress half-ridden up her thighs where she had slid forward on the sofa. She frowned – trying to remember or trying not to?

‘Ah, you mean
the
guitarist?
The Fakir
himself…’ Cilea laughed quickly, ‘that’s what they call him apparently. The girls go for him, but they say he’s not much interested in them… I’ve seen them in concert though, last year. Why?’

‘Oh… I just passed by the Atheneum and saw his name on some concert programme. I thought I might go. I bought some tickets actually… well, just one… I assumed you wouldn’t want to go.’

‘Probably not,’ Cilea was back on the sofa and Bond was back on the job, climbing a vertical cliff face in a dinner suit. I needn’t have worried. She had no interest in my life outside the time I spent with her, and this in itself was enough to make me uneasy: while I worried about what she was doing and who she was with, her interest in my activities never went beyond polite enquiry. For the jealous, jealousy becomes the marker of passion, of authenticity of feeling; unrequited jealousy was just as bad as unrequited love.

I ran my hand along her thigh to see if the intimacy on offer earlier was still available. She opened her legs slightly and pulled my mouth to hers, keeping her eyes on the screen over my shoulder as I carried her out of the room.

‘Sure about this?’ Leo asked, pulling up to the kerb and slinging my meagre luggage into the boot of his Skoda.

I was not. ‘’Course I am – why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Leaving your chums behind, the lovely Cilea, the holiday resort weather…who knows? There might be a revolution while you’re away… you might come back and find it all gone. Someone might knock your building down. Or your girlfriend off…’

Leo roared down Otopeni Boulevard, the speedometer of the Skoda touching 120 kmh. Motorcade speed. It was hot, and the tyres were sticky on the road. My suitcase thumped against the metal shell of the boot as we jammed to a halt at a checkpoint on the city limits. ‘No worries,’ Leo said. ‘Because you’re so anal we’re two hours early as it is.’

I was on my way back for my first home leave. I was due two weeks, and I intended to finish clearing out my parents’ house, sell up and settle my father’s debts. I had said goodbye to Cilea the night before. We had walked home from the Athénée Palace at 2 am, Titanu tailing us discreetly in the Dacia. She kissed me on the steps of my house and climbed into the car, claiming it was unlucky to sleep with someone the night before they went away. The darkness had been thick and humid, but today the storm it had preluded had failed to come.

At the terminal building Leo parked in a diplomatic slot and put a crested permit card on his dashboard. It read, in English, French and Romanian, ‘Ambassadorial Business’ and referred any queries to the Consular section of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy, Strada Jules Michelet. ‘I won’t stay long,’ Leo explained, ‘I’m not really a goodbyes man.’

My flight was not for another two hours. I checked in my case and joined Leo at his table in the ‘Progress Bar and Lounge’. The airport’s glass and concrete shell was almost empty of travellers, the usual battalion of officials with no precise duty sat or stood in postures of resentful vacancy. A flight from Belgrade was due, and a line of ministry limos waited on the tarmac, their drivers’ doors open. Trolleys of food and wine were wheeled into the
VIP
lounge full and rattled back out empty. Glasses clinked and corks popped – and the visiting dignitaries had not even arrived.

‘I thought you weren’t going to hang around,’ I said to Leo, though really I preferred him to stay, ‘you don’t do goodbyes, remember?’

‘Greetings are more my thing, as you know. Actually, I’m interested in who’s arriving. There’s some kind of welcoming committee here, and it pays to keep your ear to the ground… looks like a Yugo delegation.’

Leo ordered a whole bottle of wine and poured us both a glass: What did I plan to do with my leave? Beyond seeing through the arrangements for selling up and clearing out the house, I had no plans. I barely wanted to go at all, but these were arrangements I had held on to, something to steady myself amid the buffetings of my new life.

I had only just met Petre, but much of the short time we had known each other we had spent together. I was drawn to him. Unlike Leo, whose life consisted of imagining a different world and making it happen in flashes by means of imagination, nostalgia and dirty money, Petre lived in the here and now. He managed to exist in it without either escaping or giving in to its crudity and greyness. He too had his plan for the city, his plan to link it all up into a single network. But not by lost walks. Petre was no more interested in Leo’s old guidebooks than he was in the brutalist blueprints of Ceauşescu’s architects. He had something else in mind.
The Project
he called it:
The Co-operative
.

With Petre I visited the new Bucharest with its factories and housing blocks, its identical new model suburbs. It was the counterpart to the old city of guidebooks and Baedekers, the city Leo was salvaging from a mass of broken stones and memory. But it had its beauty, its unlooked-for heroism and dignity: people trying to live normally, sending their children to school but supplementing the days of state indoctrination with unofficial classes on science or literature or history; men and women exhausted from banal and overmonitored jobs coming home on irregular buses to empty shelves and power cuts; old people eking out their pensions, younger ones struggling to fill their lunchboxes or put a square meal on the table. Everyone lived with the tug of hunger, the drag of boredom, a world and an epoch away from the Party bosses, the diplomats, the foreign businessmen. Leo’s louche, beautiful Bucharest was of no concern to these people, if they knew it existed at all.

They had their citizens’ groups which took care of the sick or the bereaved, distributing essential goods like medicines and baby milk, and Petre’s dream to was to co-ordinate these groups into a single, well-planned counter-economy – one that would make good the failings of the system without contributing to the corruption of the black market. He was building what he called a ‘skills bank’ where teachers, plumbers, engineers, medics and other essential workers would pool their time and talents. The teacher would teach for two hours and buy two hours of an electrician’s or a plumber’s time. He could use them or exchange them or keep them until needed. There would be no interest rates, no economics based on cash or investment – just on time and work, from which the central administration would take a percentage to build up a welfare system for the sick, the workless or the old. The Social Fund Petre called it. What Petre dreamed of was a society within a society, a huge, Bucharest-wide network that would eventually spread across the country. Versions of it existed already in apartment blocks or villages. What it needed was countrywide co-ordination. Petre showed me his plans, his maps, not of streets and buildings but of people. ‘Sounds an awful lot like communism to me,’ I said when he had finished explaining it last week in the beer garden of the Carpathian Boar. He nodded but didn’t answer, just dragged on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. ‘Like a world before money,’ I added. This time he turned and corrected me: ‘After money.
After
.’

Then there were the concerts Petre’s band gave in darkened warehouses to hundreds of students, close-packed and sweating, smoking bad dope and drinking flat beer; the
samizdat
songbooks and bootleg tapes they passed around, copying and recopying so often that the music became blur and the words became shadows on the page. This was the Bucharest that was left over when Leo had finished idealising it and the state had finished bulldozing it. ‘This is what we must start with, Leo:
this
,’ Petre had told him one night after a concert, pointing at the mêlée of thin, sweat-drenched students squeezed onto the temporary dance floor they had cleared in the abattoir that was
Fakir
’s venue for a night. The place smelled of detergent and blood. ‘You must work with what you have, with what’s there. Otherwise who will inherit the old Bucharest you love so much?’

That had been three weeks ago. Since then Leo’s habits had changed. In his black market deals he always took a cut for Petre and Petre’s friends, bought up school books and unglamorous, unprofitable essentials like flour and sugar and tinned food. His associates complained –
it was heavy stuff, cheap; there was no profit margin. Why didn’t he stick to whisky and watches, to the easy-to-carry, fast-selling luxuries the rich Party bosses paid so well for?
And whenever there were medicines involved, Leo always short-changed the buyer or over-ordered from the supplier to keep some back for Petre. Petre had changed the way Leo did business, had given him a focus for his sprawling, chaotic kindness that so often missed its mark or became lost in a tangle of double-dealing. It was through me that they communicated, and my role as go-between gave me my first real sense of being involved in Bucharest life. I arranged pick-ups and drop-offs, relayed messages, supervised payments and part-exchanges. Petre’s Social Fund was taking shape. For now he needed Leo’s racketeering, defectors’ escape fees, and all the tawdry trappings of a corrupt police state. But not for long. These were the start-up costs, he said, necessary to buy time and lay the foundations of the social fund, and it was Vintul who oversaw it all: Vintul the banker.

I was spending more time with Petre than with Leo. Leo had started to notice, but if it hurt him he hid it well. Leo’s world of Capsia and cocktails, his fin-de-siècle Bucharest of battered luxury and threadbare high-life, had become too rarefied for me. Besides, between Trofim, Leo, Petre and Cilea I felt I was living in four different Bucharests, across four different epochs. None of them met except through me, and yet, because I kept them apart from each other, my own life didn’t even meet itself.

I lived in crowded isolation, moving from one to the other, keeping them separate but running them in parallel: Trofim’s book, Cilea’s bed, Leo’s black market, Petre’s concerts… whatever was left over by the time I had subtracted them all from my life must, I supposed, have been myself.

‘There’s something… not quite real about Petre, isn’t there?’ said Leo one day, adding, ‘you know, something temporary…’ Maybe, I wondered now as I sat at Otopeni airport thinking of all I was leaving behind. Maybe. Though Petre was real enough, I knew what Leo meant. It was that unpindownable feeling that however much you knew him, however much he trusted you, there was something being kept back – not because he was hiding it but simply because there was more to him than you could take in.

Then there was Cilea. My hold on her was slim enough as it was; how would two weeks away affect us?

I was afraid to go home, afraid of those days stretching ahead in the empty house: that smell of fermented stasis, compacted carpet pile, the old cigarette smoke that was all that remained of my parents’ breath… And their things: the sunken cushions where their now cremated bodies had sat; the heartbreaking worn slippers beneath the table that held the phone and the mostly empty address book, each page a window onto the blankness of their lives. That Larkin poem – what was it? – ‘Home’: ‘It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go…’ The great, enveloping sadness of it all… I could smell it from here; or rather, it was in me already, the foretaste of its pastness.

‘Second thoughts, eh?’ Leo read me, and I realised I had not spoken for several minutes. ‘Still, home’s home,’ he said, hewing at my resolve.

As the Belgrade plane came in, a group emerged from the
VIP
lounge, headed by a large, jowly man in a black suit, muscle run to fat, flanked by aides and followed by some lean-faced, watchful young bodyguards. They had the familiar Securitate suits with the gun-bulge in the left breast pocket. These people wore flares not from retro fashion sense but for easier access to the second gun that was strapped to their calf. The man in front, sweat filling the folds of his skin, exuded physical strength and ferocious malice, and looked as if he got plenty of practice exercising both. His eyes were close together; in anyone else it would have made them look dim, but in his case it gave him an air of mean, low cunning; the eyes of a man who sought in those around him the lowest motivations and always found it. A crew-cut emphasised the bulkiness of his scalp, which joined the collar of his shirt not via the intermediary of a neck but through five thick rolls of flesh that resembled a stack of pink bicycle tyres: a Slavic Mussolini.

‘Stoicu, Ion Stoicu… Interior Minister, Cilea’s dad’s boss for one thing. He’s a real piece of shit: a fat boorish peasant, but sadly no fool. He’s one of these people who’s so terrifying that he doesn’t need to kill people to get things done. He just kills them as a sort of free extra. He’s reduced his ministry to a small hate-filled village … it’s now self-purging, you know, like those self-basting chickens? He’s Ceauşescu’s most trusted lieutenant. Stoicu owes everything to Ceauşescu, and has absolute loyalty to him.’ Leo had his eyes half closed, and spoke slowly, as if reading from files stored in some inner archive. ‘Just a petty criminal in the forties, a fascist Jew-baiter who burned down a synagogue in Iaşi, then did time in the same prison as Ceauşescu, apparently for rape. The official story is that he was a close comrade of the young Nicolae and helped him activate the successful revolution. Actually he was in clink, wanking and thinking of ways to kill Jews when the communists took power. They say history makes the people who make history…
cometh the time, cometh the man
and all that bollocks. It’s not like that. History just crawls along on its belly picking up parasites… Stoicu, Ceauşescu… the lot of them… crabs on the pubis of history.’