Play Dead (14 page)

‘I made my first money in pigs.'

‘Begin at the beginning. Where were you born?'

He had not apparently expected this. There was a jerk of the head and a shrug, peasant-like, self-exculpatory. She watched him, keeping her face stiff, returning his original look, saying with her eyes that she too wasn't interested in continuing to meet him unless he gave her a glimpse, if not behind the mask, at least of the processes that had moulded it. The waitress came and took their order. He did not, as Derek would have, use the interruption to escape the challenge, but instead resumed the eye contact. The silence lasted at least as long as any of those between the snatches of music at the concert, but full of tensions which the composer had failed to achieve.

‘I am two or three years younger than you,' he said. ‘I am a Pole by birth, but I was born in Romania, almost certainly in 1942. The Nazis had shipped a group of workers down to Romania for their own obscure, bureaucratic reasons, and my mother, who was already pregnant, had disguised herself as a man in order to remain with her brother. I know nothing about my father. When my mother's sex was discovered she was allowed to have her baby but I was then taken away and put into a Romanian orphanage. Being Germans, they provided me with documentation. That is how, in the attempts at repatriation after the war, I was sent back to Poland, to another orphanage, on the theory that efforts would then be made to trace relatives who might take care of me. Of course nothing was done.

‘The orphanage was a terrible place, heartless and incompetent. It was ruled by the oldest children, brutally. So I learnt to fight. The orphanage in Romania, though the food was scant and the blankets thin, had been run by kindly monks. I yearned for it. When I was about twelve I was big and strong enough for the boys who ruled in the Polish orphanage to decide they had to break my will. I was not prepared to have my will broken, and their other option would have been to kill me, so I escaped and started to make my way back to what I regarded as my native Romania.'

‘At twelve? Did you have any money? Any help?'

‘No money. No papers. No help. I stole. I cheated and lied. I had reached Slovakia when a man attempted to rape me. I stabbed him with his own knife, and was arrested. I answered all questions in Romanian and gave the name of a boy I had known at the first orphanage—if I'd given my own obviously Polish name they'd have sent me back to Poland. The man I had stabbed had a record of attacks on children. It was obvious I had been acting in self-defence. I was simply a trivial problem to the Slovak authorities, which they solved in the obvious way by transferring me to Romania.'

‘Hurrah. Some things work out all right.'

‘Not yet. I didn't even know the address of my orphanage. I had imagined it could be traced through the church authorities, but all such enquiries now had to be made through the communist apparatus, and they were not interested. At twelve, I was old enough to work. I was given identity papers in my new name and sent to a collective. A pig farm. We have this in common—like you I knew in the depths of my being that my future was not in a pig farm. As soon as I could I left, illegally of course, and made my way to Bucharest. I had by now given up hope of returning to my orphanage. That was the past.

‘In Bucharest I learnt to live in the cracks of the system. All systems have these places, and the less flexible the system the more cracks. Eventually such systems are bound to collapse. This is what we are seeing happen now, in these very days, in Eastern Europe. They are like the crust of the earth, these countries, with the various bureaucratic elements in them floating like huge, inflexible plates on the mass of the people below. They grind against each other, causing tensions and crumplings, which must eventually build to a point where the whole system erupts and the people burst through. This is what is happening now. But until that point of eruption, inevitable but unpredictable, there are these interstices between the plates in which it is possible to survive. The system positively depends on them, because they provide the lubrication which allows any movement to take place at all.'

‘They're saying Romania's the one place where there isn't going to be a revolution. What's-his-name has got it all buttoned up.'

‘Ceausescu. They are wrong. It will erupt, with worse violence than we have seen elsewhere, very soon. There will most likely be a full-scale civil war. Take it from me. I have very good information.'

‘Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. Please go on. You were lubricating the system. With pigs, somehow? You said that's how you made your first money.'

‘Yes. At the collective I had of course heard all the grumblings about the system, and seen how everyone who had any authority used it as far as they could to feather their own nests. Because Romania had an extremely inflexible system it positively demanded corruption at every level to make it work at all. So the managers would falsify the numbers of pigs and have some slaughtered on the collective instead of being sent to the state abattoir. They would sell some of the meat on the black market, keep some for themselves, and use the rest to bribe the inspectors who came to see that they were not doing any such thing. The state abattoir was so inefficiently run that many animals died before slaughter, often of starvation waiting to go through the sheds, or else meat would wait for transport until it was unfit to eat because the refrigeration system had broken down or the generator fuel had been sold on the black market. It was extremely easy to write off imaginary carcasses. But all this cheating was unsystematic, small beer. Those who tried to operate on a larger scale were too stupid and greedy not to get caught, and shot. By the time I was sixteen I had set up an organisation, at first with a single collective and a single abattoir but later with a whole network, under which they co-operated­ to their mutual benefit. I ran the distribution, which was much the most difficult part. I found that I understood what was necessary without having to be shown or taught. I knew, as if by instinct, that I had to have a lot of small outlets and also had to maintain a balance of supply and demand so that my customers were satisfied, but at the same time I kept the price of pork as high as the market would stand.'

‘It sounds absolutely hair-raising. What would have happened if you'd been caught?'

‘If I'd been officially caught, and so unable to bribe my way free, I would have been shot. I was a criminal, an enemy of the state. I say this with no shame—in fact I say it with pride. You see, I and my friends and others like us were the only honest operators in the country. The official system and the people in it were totally dishonest, corrupt beyond belief. Truth was alien to their beings. But we kept our word. We had to. Everything depended on that. At the very simplest level my customers knew that they were getting clean, fresh meat from me, whereas if they bought from the state there was every chance that it would be diseased, rotten and underweight. You must also understand that in a system like that everybody accepts the necessity of lubrication. Everybody is on your side. The chief danger was in attracting the awareness of the secret police, the Securitate. They knew, of course, that a black market existed, and were happy provided they got their rake-off. What I had to keep from them for as long as possible was that a single organisation was now controlling the illicit pork trade. As soon as they learnt that they would move in and take the machinery over, for their own profit. I operated under fifteen different names. I kept myself as far as I could in the background. I became a Securitate informer and was then able to buy information about the Securitate itself …'

‘Did you inform against anyone?'

‘About one in five Romanians is an informer. I informed against other informers, against customers who tried to cheat me, and people like that. One has at that age and in such a milieu a very hazy concept of moral priorities. Yes, certainly I did things which I would now much rather not have done. Be that as may be, I judged my time and got out, carrying a suitcase full of dollars. I was about nineteen.'

He shook his head, rueful, nostalgic, almost like an Old Boy looking back on the irrecoverable months of sixth-form fame. Poppy thought he would now stop. He'd told her more than enough to repay her own mild self-revelations, but he was in a mood to remember.

‘I didn't go far—only as far as the student quarter,' he said. ‘I knew I intended to come West in the end, but I wasn't ready and nor were the times, so I decided to learn English. I had fresh, good papers, and bought myself a job as cleaner at the university, where I paid a professor for lessons. She was half-French and had married an Englishman before the war. She and her husband had been with the partisans. They were both communists, but the Russians immediately deported him and from then on denied his existence. Now the climate in Russia has changed and I am having fresh enquiries made.'

‘He can't still be alive.'

‘Highly unlikely, but I wish to know. As I told you, I had barely any contact with my mother and not even knowledge of my father, so at the age of nineteen I chose my own parents. Natalie I came to know well. She played me music, lent me books, talked about the world, and also things which may exist beyond the world. She had no faith in any religion, but you felt when you were with her that there were concerns of immense importance, eternal matters to which we give names such as truth and beauty and justice, without which we would indeed have been what the regime in that country was organised to make us, automata, ants in a nest, will-less and blind to any objective beyond the survival of the nest. She inhabited her own cavities in the system, different in kind from mine, crystal caves. But we recognised each other all the same as allies.'

‘She sounds absolutely marvellous.'

‘You remind me a little of her.'

‘Oh. I'm afraid I'm not like that.'

‘No? Then perhaps it is only that she lived in a basement with a giant cat.'

Poppy laughed and he watched her.

‘And her laughter, like yours, said yes to the world,' he said.

‘Does it? I suppose it does, in spite of everything. I'm afraid I don't pay as much attention to the world as I ought to—I seem to have shrunk into myself, somehow.'

‘You don't need a state apparatus to achieve repression. Perhaps you have made your husband into a Stalin, and you are now in your Brezhnev era.'

‘Oh, I hope not! Is Natalie still alive?'

‘She died eighteen months ago, still in her basement. She'd had a stroke four years earlier which left her speechless, though when I visited her I was able to persuade myself that she knew who I was. And I was able to see that she was cared for to the end.'

‘You didn't bring her back to England?'

‘The authorities wouldn't permit it. They had their reasons. Even in a country like Romania there are some things money can't buy. And besides, she would have refused to come while she still had the understanding to choose. She was a Marxist, of the sort they are now trying to tell us were the norm before Stalin. She wasn't an active dissident. Her nature was to be, rather than to do. Her faith was in the people. One day, she used to say, they will find their voice, and then nothing will stop them. She believed that the Revolution had not been perverted, but that it had never come. She would often when things were bad quote Gramsci—pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. And the West would have had no attraction for her at all. Here's our food, at last.'

Certainly he knew how to operate systems. The restaurant was part of a chain, with identical decor, identical menus, all prescribed by HQ. Tepid milk didn't figure in HQ's concept of the pizza paradise; there was no price for it, no way of recording it at the till, but he had asked for it and it came. He ate, as before, in silence.

While she was sipping her coffee she said, ‘What happened about your pig system, after you left?'

‘What you would expect. The Securitate moved in and took it over. They charged higher prices for worse meat and at the same time flooded the market in their greed. The market collapsed, so they arrested a few people at random and had them shot for corruption, and the system reverted to what it had been before I came, but worse. That has been the history of Romania over forty years. It is difficult to convey the feel of such a society, the effect of more than a generation of inefficiency, corruption and brutal but aimless totalitarianism.'

‘But you still have dealings with them? You got Natalie looked after.'

‘I am useful to them. Without channels to the West, official and unofficial, President Ceausescu's cousins would not be able to buy their Gucci shoes.'

‘Do they trust you?'

‘Of course not. Shall we go?'

They came out into a warmish drizzle. He took a collapsible umbrella from his briefcase, snapped it open and held it over her. She put her arm in his while she peered this way and that, trying to get her bearings so that she could walk to the Tube station. The neon of the shops and the lights of passing cars glistened off the wet tarmac, sheeny-slick with road oil after the long drought. She felt quite lost. London was her warren, her context, but she couldn't for the moment locate this road into it. It must run north from the City, but was she on the east side, or the west? She could have been anywhere, in any city in the world, isolated under the shelter of his brolly.

‘I've changed my mind,' he said. ‘I'd like to come home with you.'

‘I thought …'

‘My appointment's not until after midnight.'

He was looking at her, his eyes mere gleams in the dimness. Unlike his earlier challenge, this time his voice seemed to be telling her she could say no and still not alter their friendship. This wasn't anything she'd expected, or hoped for, or imagined she'd wanted, but her feelings about it, about him, about herself, seemed unfocused, the blur of the world without her spectacles. In those large general terms, where anything more than a couple of feet away becomes mere bulk and hue and only what is almost on your nose has shape, she knew what she wanted, now.