The Last Hundred Days (11 page)

Later, after our chef, waiter and retainer had brought the flambéing pancakes, Leo tipped him in Kent cigarettes and shook his hand. The man left, taking with him his silverware and crockery in the two suitcases which clattered as he went down the stairs, home or to another assignment.

‘Well, what d’you think? Capsia dining in your own home,’ Leo enquired.

‘Very nice, Leo, thanks. You could have asked. That’s one sinister bloke, and I’m not sure I wanted him sniffing around my flat.’

‘I don’t think you get a choice here of who sniffs around your flat. The best thing you can hope for is to stay on good terms with whoever’s doing it.’

‘With you, you mean?’

‘Low blow, low blow, and I’ll put it down to your feeling tired and emotional after your trip down the old central police HQ.’

Leo poured the dregs of a bottle of Tokaj and lit a Cuban cigar from a box on my mantelpiece. Another of Belanger’s limitless stock. The phone rang again, the receiver going down and the click of the line-tap outlasting it by a few seconds. Again no one.

With Leo around, daily life was felt less as Stalinist terror than as shady ineptocracy – brutish and clumsy, sometimes comical, usually absurd. Our sense of the system’s viciousness was offset by our belief that it was not sufficiently organised to implement that viciousness. We were wrong, but when one knew a man capable of getting out of as many scrapes as Leo, one developed a risky sense of untouchability. It never occurred to me that irrelevance might feel much the same.

What was Leo escaping from? He too had been translated from another life – maybe that was what he saw in me when he picked me for the job – but it was hard to make out the original that lay behind. Most of us carry the mark of what we’ve run away from, a sort of bas-relief of damage, error or regret. Leo’s ran deeper than most: estranged children, a crashed marriage, a successful academic career scuppered on drink, affairs with students, and all-round unreliability. He had written a book on travel literature, still in print after fifteen years: a small classic in its field from which he received royalties that, though symbolic, were a useful hard-currency bonus in Romania. I found a copy in the university library. It showed Leo on the back flap, fifteen years younger, a full head of hair, clean-cut and sharply dressed. Not the Leo whose features now blended and blurred into each other, jowly and decadent-looking, half connoisseur and foodie, half gutterjuice-swigging reprobate: the Leo whose life was all subplot and no plot.

After one of his guided walks through the disappearing city, I asked him how he had finished up here. The verb
to finish up
seemed appropriate when it came to explaining one’s presence in the English department at Bucharest university in 1989, but never more so than when Leo used it: ‘One day I just woke up in my bed in East Molesey, and thought: “Apart from a wife, two kids, mortgage, home and job, there’s nothing holding me here…” and now look: here I am, Comrade, here I am!’

A few years ago, Leo had begun to run out of storage room for his salvage. He now used basements in the Museum of Natural History and the National Gallery. With these came semi-professional help, packing crates and even manpower. The museum directors too had an interest in Leo’s game. It enabled them to collect for themselves objects from pre-communist times, but with the museum as alibi. This or that object was catalogued and stored or put on show, while the reverse of its label designated its true owner by an elaborate code Leo had devised: a minister here, a general there, retired politburo members, artists and theatre directors and writers. Only Leo knew who owned what.

Highly placed officials used Leo to store their own
ancien régime
furniture, icons or modern art, and would come and admire them every few weeks. The obese minister for work, a man with the fleshiest and least toil-tested hands I had ever seen, would visit Leo’s flat with his latest mistress to admire the jewellery he stashed there. Rotund, jolly, ruthlessly corrupt, he came each month with a different adolescent girl. Leo was not fastidious in his business dealings, but there was a class of person – mostly ministers and pimps – after whom he always washed his hands.

Leo hosted auction parties in his flat, where people came to buy or watch others spend their way to ownership of fragments of the old world. He laid out the pieces, each priced and with a short paragraph of explanation, date and provenance, and waited for the bids, which were always made to him privately in the course of the party. Nobody knew who bought what: ‘untraceability all part of the service’. Bids were camouflaged as conversation, and gradually the small red ‘Sold’ stickers filled the price list. Those objects that could not be transported were photographed and the photographs laid out on the table to be fingered and passed around like pornographic snaps. The first time I attended one of Leo’s auctions, early in May, he was selling a fifteenth-century carved screen from a demolished church. It was bought by the minister for cults, who had ordered the demolition and wanted the screen for his bedroom.

Leo knew a cross-section of Romanian life: Costanu, the chief of museums, a melancholy, cultivated man who took refuge in his poky office in the National Gallery and read poetry, cosseted in the 1930s’ heyday of his imagination; the tennis ace Nicolescu, for whom Leo procured Mercedes parts, Burberry clothes and champagne; the brutish pimp, Ilie, whose network of girls and Securitate-sanctioned honey-trap bars supplied sex and bad drugs to foreigners, and hired out the photographers who snapped them,
in flagrante
, for the secret police to blackmail. Leo called on favours from a gallery of Romanian ambassadors and envoys for whom he arranged the import of western goods using his network of gypsies or Poles in Polski Fiats. For these people, the country’s intensively patrolled borders were no obstacle. Stereos and magimixes made their way from Germany or Austria, fridge-freezers and washing machines slipped through the barbed wire. I imagined Leo’s ‘turbo-Poles’ driving iceberg-sized frigidaires strapped to their tiny cars: ants dragging carcases ten times their size into their underground feasting chambers. Leo once oversaw the migration of a thirty-foot Jacuzzi from a German luxury bathroom shop to a villa in Snagov, on the outskirts of Bucharest. As Leo told the story, he understood it was for Nicu Ceauşescu’s weekend bachelor pad, though he never discovered for sure. Just in case, he and his crew had relieved themselves into it as they filled it up and switched it on. ‘The Whirlpool of History,’ Leo baptised it as he unleashed a bladderful of beery piss.

Then there was the most poignant of all the people I encountered through Leo: ‘La Princesse’, an aristocrat who had lived in Paris for thirty years and reputedly been Paul Valéry’s last mistress. She had made the mistake of returning to Bucharest in the late 1960s and found she could never leave again. She had no money, and lived in two rooms of her family’s former
Hotel particulier
, the rest of which was given over to workers’ accommodation. Every Wednesday she went to the French Embassy for the coffee morning, to eat croissants and stretch the diplomats’ diplomacy with stories of 1930s Paris and Romanian émigré culture. Then she would visit the consulate and ask if her visa had arrived. The visa, stuck somewhere in the bowels of a frozen ministry, had been in process – the official term was ‘active’ – for nearly twenty years. Each time she walked home via the patisserie on Calea Victoriei, where the manager took pity on her and gave her an elaborately ribboned box of yesterday’s pastries.

She was always invited to the embassy functions, where she stood in her haggard finery – outrageous feather boas in the summer, 1940s Chanel two-pieces and moulting furs the rest of the year. Her once-luscious minks now hung off her like peelings from stray dogs. French ambassadors and cultural attachés still called on her, though less and less – she clung to them, her dry fingers clasping their hands too long, crowding them with desperate courtesies. With everybody else, she was an imperious, unreconstructed middle-European aristocrat. Then there was her crew: a feudal retinue of ultra-orthodox religious types and monarchist dreamers. All were unpaid and basked in her disdain. She held annual parties for the King’s birthday which the authorities monitored and treated as a piece of folklore: hand-kissing, curtseying and crossing. The telegram from the exiled King Michael, sent to her care of the
Ambassade de France
, was solemnly read out and followed by prayers. Her flat was a place of icons and stewing tea, incense and old books. Even Capsia French was too roughhewn a medium for her. Hers was elaborate, baroque, ceremonial, a Louis-Philippe chair among languages: fragile, substanceless, overstuffed.

In Paris she had been
La Princesse Antoinette Marthe Cantesco
. Here she was citizen Antoaneta Cantescu, the only person we knew who had a servant, or rather, who had someone officially designated as such, since there were plenty of examples of servitude. Hers, an old lady almost her own age whose own family had been employed by the Cantescos for generations, lived in a single room in the building’s basement. The maidservant never looked happier than when her mistress criticised her stoop, castigated her for her ugliness or found fault with her cooking. The look of beatitude on her face when
la Princesse
called her idle was the only expression of complete spiritual transport I have ever witnessed.

We went to see the Princess as one goes to visit ruins; and like all ruins there seemed something permanent about her, the indestructibility of the already felled. She lived, broken and poor and anachronistic, without once letting on that she knew it, or that her every waking minute was a triumph of wilful fantasy over reality. She shared her madness with her minions, who looked to her to sustain both them and it.

It was Leo who had finally, in May this year, secured her visa. He bribed and cajoled and called in favours until it appeared, stamped and dated and ready for customs. And it was Leo who paid for her one-way flight,
Air France
, to Paris.

Leo and I took her to the airport. In the car I watched her face as it failed to comprehend the avenues of new apartments and office blocks, the fantasias of scaffolding and cement. Perhaps she never saw them; perhaps all she saw was the long-demolished Bucharest of her youth, the ghosts of its buildings. The airport baffled her,
habituée
of the Orient Express, whose family once booked whole Pullman carriages for their trans-European journeys. It was an evening flight, and from the departure lounge we could hear the cicadas, tiny engines thrumming in the trees. At the passport control she handed over her documents and kept her gloved hand out a few seconds for kissing. The young guard looked at her and laughed. On the other side of the plate-glass wall, she turned back and waved us away. Servants dismissed.

Or so we thought. She came back a month later, broken and beyond reach now, where before she had just been far away in time and place. ‘Properly crackers this time around,’ said Leo as he caught sight of her, swaying in the arrivals queue, dishevelled and staring out across some vast inner distance. No one knew, and she never said, what had happened in Paris.

We drove her back from the airport. She was dramatically thin and hollow-eyed, dressed in the same clothes she had left in and smelling of urine.

Leo and I helped her up the stairs back to her flat. Her maid curtsied and struggled to straighten back up: she too had aged a decade, symbiotically with her mistress. She had kept the flat exactly as it was left; had gone on polishing the silver, buffing the icons, dusting the books and furniture. The Princess looked around her as if seeing it all for the first time: the grimy stairwell whose walls had once displayed her family’s portraits; the banisters where she and her brothers – one dead in the First World War, the other disappeared when the Russians invaded – had played and slid down the handrails; the hallway where she had modelled ballgowns as a debutante now partitioned with chipboard, walls stuck with public notices and racked with jimmied-open letter-boxes. The old chandelier remained hanging, fragile and denuded, its crystal long gone. Three forty-watt bulbs strained to keep the vast space lit. Mosaic tiles that had once covered the floor were missing or chipped, clumsily refilled with cement, and behind the elaborate coving the faulty circuitry buzzed and crackled.

Paris, now that she had returned to it, was further away than ever. It no longer even existed in her imagination. When she lost that, she lost, too, the madness that had kept her sane. As Leo put it: ‘Madness is not living in a fantasy world – she has lived in her fantasy world quite happily for years, perhaps we all have. Madness is the space between the fantasy world and the real one, where you find yourself cut off from both. There’s no way back from that.’

May Day was a national holiday across the eastern bloc. In Romania it was an excuse for a minutely planned display of spontaneous celebration. The rehearsals had taken up three evenings of the previous week, the workers of Bucharest honing their spontaneity under the malignant watch of the police. When the day itself came, there was, exceptionally, no building work going on anywhere in the city. The morning was taken up with the hanging of placards and tricolour bunting; kiosks were stocked with Rocola, beer and sausages; news-stands sold celebration issues of
Scînteia
. ‘A true Bacchanalia,’ Leo gasped in ironic awe as he watched the preparations. Banners proclaimed joy in work, fulfilment at home and respect abroad. Everywhere you looked or listened you encountered the rhetorical rule of three:
People, Party, Ceauşescu! Peace, Prosperity, Plenty!
and, Leo’s favourite,
Epoch of Light, Dignity and Joy!

Leo, Ioana and I were drinking and smoking dope on the balcony. The TV was on with the sound muted while we listened to the parade outside: patriotic music, a bloated slurry of pomp that sounded the same whatever country you were in. Leo had found some liqueur chocolates which he had stacked in a cascade on a salver and displayed with an ambassadorial flourish. He was already drunk, singing communist party songs, a joint between his thumb and forefinger. Open on the table before him was the literary magazine,
Luceafarul
, named after the hero of Eminescu’s national epic, the fallen angel who became the evening star: Lucifer. The front page printed a new ‘Ode in Homage to the Couple of Light’ by some Union of Writers’ poet Leo knew and which Leo now translated.