The Last Hundred Days (35 page)

‘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.

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, smashed 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.