The Last Hundred Days (36 page)

‘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.

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.

‘Have you noticed what’s missing?’ Leo asked, pointing at an apartment block whose top two floors had collapsed into one.

‘Noise?’ I ventured. ‘People and noise?’ That was usually what was missing around here.

‘Them too. No, look. Look at those flats. Look at the broken concrete. There’s no steel framing – after a few floors they just build onto what’s there. They don’t bother with joists or girders. They just build floor upon floor, breeze block on breeze block. After a couple of floors there’s nothing holding them up.’

The coming weeks saw a frenzy of demolition for which even hardened bulldozer-watchers were unprepared. The Buildings Directorate used the earthquake as an excuse to demolish swathes of old Bucharest. People were shifted from flats in places like Lipscani, Dudesti and Dorobanti and rehoused in buildings that were at once unfinished and dilapidated. After the earthquake many also came with a dose of the unromantic ruin, caught between the abolished past and a future that refused to arrive.

Leo and I continued to film or photograph the demolitions, but they were happening too fast. I filled a dozen films with images and could have filled a dozen more. Leo had them developed and sent them out, filing reports for Reuters,
Le
Soir, Le
Figaro
. Bucharest’s diplomats, orchestrated by Ozeray, began protesting. What was happening here was only part of it: out in the provinces, in Sibiu, Timişoara, Moldova, areas where the minorities lived, all signs of different cultures were being eradicated. It was desolation: villages that had stood for centuries were bulldozed in a morning, to be replaced with high-rise blocks surrounded by scrubland or factory complexes that looked like abandoned galactic penal colonies. Romania was being turned into a huge, pastless no-place.

‘You see that?’ Leo asked, pointing at the world’s largest structure, the Palace of the People, an entire horizon’s worth of concrete, steel and marble cladding. ‘That’s the world’s biggest mausoleum. When they’ve finished building it, the whole of communism will climb in there, shut the doors, and die. They think they’re building the city of the future. What they’ve done is build their own tomb. The Megalo-Necropolis, the new city of the dead, waiting for its tenants.’

On the first of November we witnessed the worst of the demolitions, the one that would stand as a monument to all the vandalism, crudity and farce of the city’s ‘remodelling’.

The monastery of Saints Cyril and Methodias had stood for centuries on the south-west bank of the canal. Now it was in the way, its four-hundred-year-old tower an offence against the new skyline. It had withstood earthquakes, fires, woodworm, the Turks, rot and neglect, but now it would make way for the ‘People’s Leisure Park’: a year-round communist pleasure dome with underlit arcades and static rides, grey candy floss and the all-day seepage of uplifting music. The plans were on show in the Party HQ: neo-classical pillars and plinths holding up a huge glass bell, a crystal palace for totalitarianised leisure.

This was an unusual demolition. The tower would be dynamited – a new measure to make sure the very stones were smashed and not merely sundered from each other. It would be unrebuildable. When the demolitions started a few years ago, notable buildings were only dismantled and put in storage. They lay in their stone archives like the undead in their graves, ready to rise again and haunt Ceauşescu. Now it was more vindictive: buildings blown up and steamrollered, then heaved as ballast into great holes beneath where they had stood. It was like those death camps where prisoners were made to dig their graves before being shot as they knelt over them.
Megalo-Necropolis
Leo called it, and despite his apocalyptic talk we had all begun to feel that these were terminal times in a Bucharest that was becoming both its own ghost and its own grave.

We stood with a small crowd, braving the cold and the Securitate’s cameras. I recognised Andrei Liviu the poet, deathly pale but walking steadily. He had made it from Constanţa for this protest, and his presence was drawing attention. His cancer was in remission but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. In his new poems he likened it to a group of plotters regrouping in the shadows, readying themselves for their coup against his body. The book had been banned because the Ministry of Culture censor had thought the cancer was a metaphor for the state. They were wrong: the state had become a metaphor for the disease.

Ion Marinaru was there with his wife. They made a handsome pair, the nearest Romania had to film stars. With them was the novelist Vasile Iorba, another good Party member now breaking cover. His last novel, a futuristic story about a penal colony on Mars, had only scraped past the censors because Elena Ceauşescu herself had read it and adopted the idea as a policy goal. The Romanian Cosmic Research Centre, with her as its patron-director, owed its existence to the small, sarcastic man who now stood smoking and stamping his feet on the ground, unlikely father of the national space programme. These people were standing up to the authorities for the first time.