The Last Hundred Days (32 page)

‘The news?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard nothing. I spend the days alone. No beating, no torture, just isolation. I am managing.’

Ottilia pushed past Leo and rolled up Trofim’s sleeve. She checked his blood pressure, looked at his eyes and listened to his chest. She took two inhalers out of her coat pocket, a jar of protein pills, and sachets of rehydration powder. For the first time I noticed she too had a bag. From it she took three bottles of mineral water. She poured some into a glass and added the powder, and handed it to Trofim.

‘Sleep, stay warm, boil the water here before drinking it. Try to exercise a little every day.’ Trofim nodded and placed his hand on hers. ‘Here are some antibiotics – you have a chest infection – three a day for a week.’

‘The others?’ Trofim asked.

‘Slavnicu and Ralian have given in. They say you tricked them into it. Stanciu’s holding out, but he’s ill. We’ve heard nothing from Apostol except that he’s in Baneasa somewhere,’ I told him.

Trofim nodded. ‘Apostol will hold out if he thinks he will win. Stanciu’s different. A good man, pig-headed, awkward with everyone, friends or enemies. He’ll hold out from sheer stubbornness. He didn’t even want to sign the letter in the first place. Now he won’t retract it!’ His laughter segued into a coughing fit. ‘And how has it been reported?’

‘Ah, Comrade!’ Leo replied. ‘I wondered when you’d get to the point! I have prepared a folder of cuttings which you can peruse at your leisure, in your luxurious
garçonnière
, while your friendly cockerel patrols the perimeter.’

Leo handed over a scrapbook of cuttings. Trofim scanned them –
The Washington Post, The Times, Pravda, Libération
… – and looked pleased. He peeled a banana and munched it slowly, eyes closed, focusing on the taste, then gathered two tin cups, a chipped mug and a rinsed-out pilchard tin, and poured the whisky.

‘To friends at home and abroad,’ he raised his cup, ‘I will be home soon. This is not a tenable situation for them. They cannot keep me here. Will you do one thing for me between now and then?’

‘What is it?’

‘Find out where they are holding Stanciu and his wife and visit them? With some supplies?’

There was a loud knock on the door, and the guard came in, breathless and terrified. ‘OK, time’s up. They’re on their way now. Time to go.’ He looked at Trofim’s stash of goods. ‘Hide that. Under the mattress, in the toilet, wherever, but don’t let them see it. Please,
Domnul
…’
Domnul
… a sign that even here, even among his captors, Trofim was on top.

As I left I gave Trofim what I had brought: a small short-wave radio and some headphones. I had thought ahead and put in batteries. He thanked me with an embrace. There were tears in his eyes. It was the first time he had displayed such vulnerability. Usually there was only a witty rejoinder, a handshake or a nonchalant goodbye. As I stood there with my arms around his thin shoulders, smelling the smell, despite his attempts at keeping himself clean and in order, of stale clothes, sweat, dirt and urine, I felt protective and respectful. It was what I imagined I would have felt for a father, had my father lived long enough to get old and had he been… well, like a father. Trofim’s frail body was so easy to kill off but his calculating mind remained ahead of the game: the puppet master running the show not just behind the scenes but here, in this damp and dirty cell.

For an extra half-bootful of goods, the guard told us where to find Stanciu.

‘We’re not going now, are we?’ I asked Leo.

‘Why not? We’re close by. It’s safe – he’s not being guarded at night because he can’t go anywhere.’

Ottilia checked her medical bag and found some syringes and ampoules of insulin. ‘He’ll be glad to see these.’

‘Stalingrad Boulevard, block nine, sixth floor: apartment thirteen,’ Leo repeated the address. The lift worked and the building was clean. Stanciu was being spared the worst, though it would still compare badly with the Herastrau flat they had taken him from. The lobby lights were on, the regulation forty-watt bulb holding its own against the darkness. We heard the lift grinding in its shaft, but did not risk it.

We knocked at the door and there was no reply. We knocked again. After a minute or two, Leo slipped a note under the door. There was the shuffling of slippered feet, a raised male voice followed by the placating voice of a woman. Then the timid opening of the door on its security chain. A jowly old lady with bedraggled hair peered out at us.

‘Yes?’ There was weary dread in her voice.

‘Mr and Mrs Stanciu?’ Leo pushed his face forward and she retreated and closed the door. Ottilia pulled Leo away and put her mouth up to the door.

‘Mrs Stanciu, I am a doctor and I have some medicine for your husband.’ There was a pause, then the unlocking of the chain. ‘Sergiu Trofim has sent us.’

‘Go away. That man has caused us enough trouble. My husband was not himself. He has nothing to do with this. He deeply regrets it all.’

A ferocious growl came from inside the flat. ‘For God’s sake, woman. Let the buggers in!’ The door flew open. Mr and Mrs Stanciu stood before us: she a smooth-skinned and lard-coloured communist matron; he a barrel-shaped, gouty, triple-chinned old trooper with short legs and a walking stick. His skin was yellow and his eyes watery. He sweated and his skin was clammy. I sensed Ottilia adding up his ailments, dividing them by his living conditions and trying to calculate the amount of time he had left to live.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘We’ve been through this shit. I don’t care any more. I’m not recanting. I’ve recanted enough. All my life it’s been
sign this, retract that, confess to this, deny that; purge him, rehabilitate her
. I’ve had enough. You can all fuck off.’ He sat down heavily on the sofa and jutted out the first of his chins defiantly.

Leo was soothing: ‘Comrade, I respect your fighting talk, but we have not come here to ask for anything. On the contrary. Your friend Trofim…’ Stanciu harrumphed contemptuously at the word
friend
but did not correct him. ‘Your
comrade
Trofim asked us to visit you and see if there was anything you needed to make things more comfortable.’

The flat they were being held in was efficient but without luxuries. A packet of flour and some fruit lay on the kitchen table, and there was a television in the room. Mrs Stanciu may no longer be shopping in the duty-free shops, but she was getting the basics in somehow.

‘My friend, the doctor here, has some insulin which I believe you need.’ Stanciu looked at Ottilia and nodded, his face lightening. She handed him the medical purse with the bottles and some syringes. He seemed about to say thank you, but pulled back. ‘I have some things which I shall leave here for you and your wife to do as you like with.’ Leo took out some cigarettes, tinned ham and salami, a half bottle of whisky and a few bars of chocolate. Stanciu did not move, but Mrs Stanciu leapt up and hid them away in a cupboard. We rose to leave.

Stanciu stopped us. ‘What’s happened to Trofim?’ We told him. He harrumphed again; then, rolling a glob of phlegm around his mouth for a few seconds, spat a gelatinous khaki mass onto a handkerchief. ‘He always was a crafty old Jew. The only man who could go into a revolving door after you but still come out in front of you. That’s Trofim.’

Leo laughed. Stanciu glared at him. ‘And if you think I’m going to thank you for your capitalist pity and your little luxuries…’ he called out as we left.

‘Yes, I know, I know…’ Leo raised his hands placatingly as we backed out towards the exit.

‘…you can fuck off!’ The door slammed behind us.

That was Stanciu. Rude, boorish, fat and ill, he was the unsung hero. He had thrown it all away with nothing to gain; now he refused – whether from bravery or pig-headedness – to back down. It was as Trofim had said: friends or enemies, he wanted nothing more to do with any of them. When the journalists and historians wrote up their accounts of the end of communism, I wondered where Stanciu and his like would fit in. While some, like Trofim, set in motion their high political strategies, and others took to the streets and pushed from below, there were those, like Stanciu, who bogged the system down in its own absurdity with individual acts of courage or perversity. What history, obsessed with individual stories of great men or the myth of collective action, would find space for them?

They released Trofim a week later. He was back in his flat after two days in the Party clinic, and though still under watch he was able to receive visitors. Stanciu and Apostol too were allowed back into their homes, but it was Trofim people came to: a train of ambassadors, Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, all with messages from their foreign ministers. In theory the old man was under house arrest, but the guards charged with preventing people from reaching him quickly became his social secretaries. One day, when Ottilia and I were lunching with him, the police captain in charge of Trofim’s surveillance detail came in.

‘Sorry to interrupt,
Domnul
, but the Canadian
chargé
is here. I have told him he’s early. Shall I ask him to wait in the lobby?’

Trofim adjusted to his semi-clandestine celebrity like a man returning to work after a long vacation. From somewhere, visibly not the Bucharest tailors, he was kitted out with sharp new suits and jackets. The regime continued its intimidation – intentionally clumsy surveillance, break-ins, phone-tapping – while, out of deference to the Russians, allowing him plenty of leeway. He was free to travel, spending a week in Moscow at the beginning of November, and a week after his return he was invited to give a lecture in Paris. The Romanian authorities granted him a visa immediately. They sped him on his way but he disappointed them by coming back.

Two weeks after his return, Trofim heard that Stanciu had suffered a stroke, and took me to visit him in the Politburo health centre on Strada Mihalache. Stanciu sat in a wheelchair with an old peasant blanket over his knees. His face was the colour of ash, and his left hand shook. A party-crested ashtray overflowed with Havana cigar stubs. The shelves of the clinic’s visiting room were stacked with improving literature: Marx, Engels, Ceauşescu
his’n’hers
volumes of speeches and scientific treatises. Two portable metal lecterns, symmetrically placed at each end of the bookcases, held one of Elena’s ghostwritten tomes on polymers and a book by Ceauşescu entitled
Socialism and the New Society
. A half-read novel in Russian by Gorki lay upturned on Stanciu’s lap. A nurse stood by, watching and listening.

‘Bloody hell. Not you again! Haven’t you caused me enough trouble?’ Stanciu gave an effortful chuckle, coughed, tried to spit, and managed only a thick dribble down his chin which he wiped with his dressing-gown sleeve.

‘Are they treating you well?’ Trofim asked in the traditionally upbeat but tactful way one addresses the dying.

‘No complaints. Fuck all to do except listen to your body packing up and the teacups rattling. Sometimes I feel my leg’s wet and I check to see if I’ve pissed myself again or just spilled my drink.’ He took a sip of water. ‘And all that fucking Gorki: when they open the
KGB
archives I bet they’ll find out the reason Stalin disappeared him was that he was so boring.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you, Comrade?’ asked Trofim, ‘it was I who got you into this…’

‘Saul,’ Stanciu leaned forward confidingly and dropped his voice, ‘I’m always sorry we never finished the job Marshal Antonescu started,’ he laughed. ‘But yes, please, come back next week. And bring me some more of these…’ He waved an empty box of Havana cigars at us and called the nurse to wheel him away.

‘Great sense of humour,’ I said outside, ‘that joke about Antonescu. Very funny. I don’t suppose he cares much about the Iaşi pogrom does he?’ I was referring to July 1941, when ten thousand Jews, among them Trofim’s parents and sister, were murdered by Antonescu’s fascist troops. Stanciu had used Trofim’s real name:
Saul
, his Jewish name, the name he had changed to the more Latinate Sergiu. Trofim’s own
Romanianisation
was complete, but to some he would remain
Saul Trofinsky
. The rabbi’s son from Iaşi belonged to another world, another epoch.

‘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.