The Last Hundred Days (14 page)

Someone called her name. She held me to her hard, sighed and kissed my face, then rearranged herself. She rubbed a trace of blood off her upper lip. ‘Give me a few minutes to leave first,’ she said as she left, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ In the lobby stood Titanu, her father’s bodyguard, a hulking, bullet-headed Moldovan ex-wrestler. He had suddenly appeared on the scene when Cilea and I began seeing each other – ‘my father likes to keep an eye on things,’ she said, whether as warning or reassurance I still couldn’t tell and was unlikely to ask. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she looked up and blew me a kiss. That was what Cilea was like: I had no idea she would come tonight, and now I had no idea where she was going. Yet again I had that sense of her – the sense by which I remember her – as someone who could give you everything and then leave you alone with it.

‘There you are!’ called Leo from the shadows when I went outside for air, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’ He stood beside his Skoda. ‘Get in.’

Minutes later we were on the outer perimeter of the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, parked on a street with a few kiosks and a one-storey glass-fronted supermarket. The shelves were stacked with pyramids of tinned carp. There was nothing else. The darkness was diluted here and there by streetlamps so weak they succeeded in illuminating only the miasma of moths and midges that pulsed around them.

‘This way,’ said Leo, guiding me down the street. ‘You need to come to it from the front to get the full effect.’

We turned down a wide, new avenue, full of unfitted shops and offices. Bent saplings were planted at intervals along the pavement and held upright by splints of wood. Wires and piping stuck out of the ground. Incongruously new and polished shop signs had already been put up – butchers, bakeries, clothes shops and supermarkets – but the places they designated had yet to materialise. There was even – black humour – a travel agent, already decorated with posters of Hungarian lakes and Black Sea resorts.

The avenue was more than uniform, it was relentless: eight storeys of flats and offices with identical doors and windows, and facades clad in identical blocks of white funereal marble. Leo stopped at a huge roundabout and waited. As I walked to join him, I saw narrower unfinished streets that stopped abruptly a few hundred yards further down in a mass of rubble and slabs. One of these came up against an old monastery that blocked its path and stood there, contemplating its next move. A painted wooden gate with carved posts and a small roof stood between it and a ramshackle cemetery where gravestones were scattered haphazardly like grazing sheep. Beyond them, lights burned in the monastery windows. Diggers and dumpers stood outside, their articulated claws hanging slack, open jaws silhouetted against the clear sky. I thought of the dinosaur skeletons in the museum: it was as if they lived once more and had the run of the streets. I reached Leo, in the middle of the roundabout, where a white plinth stood with nothing on it. Four vast avenues, all also incomplete, met here, intersecting on this vacuum of a monument.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Round the decay_
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Leo declaimed, puffing out his chest, ‘Shelley’s “Ozymandescu”… required reading around here…’

‘Very funny, Leo. What are we doing in this Stalinist Legoland?’

His answer was to take me by the shoulders and ceremonially turn me 180 degrees.

‘I give you…The Boulevard of Socialist Victory. The Palace of the People.’

Seen from a distance, the place hulked over the city, the butt of so many jokes that we no longer thought of what it cost in money and human suffering. It merely absorbed them and gave them back as idiot magnitude, laughable bad taste on a mammoth scale. Face to face there was nothing harmless about it: standing there on the main avenue it felt like an attack, a gaudy, brutal, humanity-denying mass of stone. Instinctively I raised my hands to shield my head – the sight of it came down in blows.

The Boulevard of Socialist Victory, wider than the Danube and twelve storeys high, was assembled with that mix of careless sloth and paranoid haste that characterised eastern bloc public projects. In different parts of the vast building site, men and machines worked in deafening noise and blasted white light. But here, almost a kilometre away, it was darkness. Open holes around us disgorged bilious water that smelled of rust, metallic effluvia and industrial decay. As we approached, an open gutter higher up the slope seethed with waves of slurry that rustled and sucked as it descended an uncompleted marble staircase. Up close, with Leo’s pocket lamp, we saw what it was: a moving carpet of rats, and their sound the high-pitch static of rodent panic as they tumbled in a collective rush. It had not rained for weeks, but here the air was lacquered with a kind of fetid, effluent damp.

We moved into a shell of a building. The walls sweated, and already greyish-green stalactites hung from the ceilings. This room had mosaic tiles for a floor, three large chandeliers and marble walls. It had never been used, but already it looked like the mouldy inside of an old fridge. Leo guided me towards a ball of light, a campfire in the far distance.

‘Ah! Leo –
Salut
!’

Leo: ‘
Salut! Vintul, ce mai faceti?
’

In the shadows, lit by a petrol-soaked rag torch, was a group of young men and women smoking some rank-smelling dope. They sat cross-legged, leaning forward into an acrid open fire so their faces were lit from below. They were the counterparts, the distorted reflections, of the group of party hacks I had seen in Capsia on my first night, their faces illuminated by brandy-flamed crêpes. More and more I had the sense here that everything had its counterpart, its other self, that everything, even the opposites, corresponded and connected up – perhaps especially the opposites.

I hung back while my eyes learned the darkness. Four men and three women sat around the fire. Two fat joints circulated and a ghetto blaster played the Grateful Dead. Everyone looked young and all were dressed in clothes you rarely saw here. One girl had a bandana and piercings that made my eyes water, they emerged through her eyebrows and cheeks and in the taut skin of her throat above her voicebox. All of these would have been self-administered: sterile needle through skin numbed with ice or deodorant spray. All had long hair and wore flowery shirts and flares. Aggressive-looking peaceniks, they eyed me suspiciously. Leo had broken protocol by bringing me here. The pierced girl said something to me in Romanian and they all relaxed a little when they saw I was foreign. She held the joint out to me.

‘Mel –Melina…’ she smiled, watching me wince at the first hit of dope. She had big eyes and freckles around her nose, which was pierced by a faceted glass stud that caught the firelight. I passed the joint on, feeling its smoke spreading along my lungs, hitting the downstream of my blood. It tasted wrong, dipped or cut with some chemical. In a country where they put sawdust into flour to make the bread go further, there was no telling what they used to spin out the drugs. My heart felt as if it were being suddenly drained of blood then pumped full again. A conversation began that I couldn’t understand. ‘Friend of the Devil’ was playing. I thought I detected the first signs of a flattening battery, the distending lyrics, the spiralling guitar chords… or maybe it was just the nauseous high taking hold.
The Grateful Dead… such a ferocious name
, I thought as I slid down the damp wall and hung my head between my knees,
such graceful, spacious music
.

The young man who had first addressed Leo was the most alert of the group.

He prodded me: ‘Leo’s friend, eh?’ Sardonic, detached, effortlessly in charge.

‘Is that a question?’

Leo explained: ‘You said you’d like to make yourself useful. I took you at your word. How much more useful than meeting Vintul –
Le Vent… The Wind
– and hearing what he’s got to say?’

The young man was bearded, long-haired and wiry. Even crouched on the ground he looked powerful, ready to spring. Everyone around him was druggy and slack, but he exuded tension and resolve. He looked at me and held me with his eyes. I tried to square up to him, sit up and shake off the dope-torpor. My saliva was sticky and tasted of burning.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘anyone fancy telling me what’s going on?’

‘We help people leave. Leo has been helping us for four years now, and Belanger did,’ said Vintul. Leo looked uncomfortable at the mention of Belanger, and dragged hard on his joint. ‘We’re a group that helps people cross the borders into Hungary or Yugoslavia. But we need people like you and Leo to get them papers or letters of invitation from foreigners… to find someone to take care of them when they get out.’

‘And stump up the funds when there’s people to pay off,’ chipped in Leo.

Vintul looked at him with distaste. ‘As Leo says, there is a financial dimension, but we do not make money from this.’
There is a financial dimension
… Vintul’s English was exceptional: formal, precise, elegant, and wholly out of keeping with his appearance.

Leo was leaning over Mel’s chest, getting a furtive eyeful of her cleavage as she bent forward to roll another joint. Her skin was clear and milky, and her piercings crude and out of place, all that metal diving into her flesh. ‘They’re all at it,’ said Leo, taking the joint from Mel and drawing in deeply, ‘Petrescu – he doesn’t just paint icons, he doctors passports, makes rubber stamps and visas; Ionescu does a line in headed notepaper from US universities… nicks the stuff from conferences and brings it back here. Costanu at the natural history museum – he’s been known to lend us a couple of packing crates… a few holes for air, some straw, and Bob’s your uncle: a tidy little first class compartment for a courting couple in search of a better life.’

Vintul was not enjoying Leo’s levity, nor his readiness with people’s names. I looked at Leo and the handful of bleary-eyed youngsters around the fire. What an amateur operation: some hippies and a motley band of painters and professors up against one of the world’s most ruthless security apparatus.

‘You had much success?’ I tried sound offhand, to recover my footing in the conversation.

‘More than you think,’ answered Vintul.

‘What happens to the failures?’ I asked.

‘That’s not your concern. We are living in terminal times…’ a brisk nod towards Leo, ‘did you know it was Leo who brought us capitalism? What do you call it? Supply and demand, everything with its price and its price always changing – depending on how much Leo thinks you want it. That’s the new world we all want to get to now…’

‘You’re the one who’s been ringing me?’

‘We have been trying to get in touch but your phone – Belanger’s phone – is bugged. All phones are bugged. Now we will make an arrangement for our meeting, if you wish to help us.’

‘How?’

‘You can write references, check things, carry stuff around for us. We can use your passes and currency. You can help in all sorts of small ways, not all of them dangerous. What do you want in return?’

‘I don’t want anything in return. I came here to see what I could do…’

‘We all want something in return. Money, influence, a good conscience… what is the difference?’

‘If I’m doing this at all it’s because I think there
is
a difference – don’t you?’

‘If you say so.’ What he meant was:
I’ve had this conversation with better people than you
.

Leo put an arm around my shoulder. It was a protective gesture and it jarred – Leo rescuing me from a better opponent. Vintul told me I would be called some time in the next few weeks and all would be clear when the call came.

When he had finished Vintul took a swig of red wine and rolled up a fat joint which he kept to himself. Someone had changed the tape: we now heard something aggressively ethnic in which violent bursts of folk music were crossed with electric dance rhythms. Vintul jerked his head in time to it and drank from the bottle. I noticed his muscular arms and neck, his lean, strong face. Everyone around here was flabby or emaciated, unfocussed and vague, but not Vintul. Two of the girls had fallen asleep and the three boys were doing a drunken peasant dance around a stepladder they had set fire to. On top of it they had arranged empty bottles, re-corked, which now exploded loudly one by one.

Suddenly we saw the criss-crossing of powerful torch-beams outside, followed by shouting and the barking of dogs.

‘Out! Now!’ called Leo, pushing me hard towards the corridor.

‘No,’ said Vintul. ‘They’ll be expecting you to go out. You’ve got to go further in. Come.’

Vintul jumped up, surprisingly agile for a man who had been smoking dope and drinking all night. The drugs had little effect on him, but the others looked dazed. He shook them awake, split us into three groups and pointed us in different directions. I felt sick, Leo even greener-gilled than usual. The music pounded from the tiny ghetto blaster on the floor.

We heard a snarl in the darkness: a pair of yellow-flecked eyes catching the torchbeam. Then another. Two German Shepherds.

‘Go right, always right, no matter what you see,’ said Vintul. Then to me: ‘We’ll be in touch!’

Leo turned out the flashlight and we moved off into the depths of the building.

For what seemed like hours, we bore right, though corridors and halls, always with the sound of dogs and voices at our backs. Time was distended: drugs, fear, adrenalin. It cannot have been more than twenty or thirty minutes, Leo and me retching in the darkness and two of the girls with us, but it felt like a stumbling odyssey. Somewhere along the way we lost the girls. We walked into paintpots and concrete buckets, tripped over cables and leads. Every now and then Leo would stop and lean against a wall and puff. Once there was no wall, just a screen of plywood, which came clattering down as Leo sank his weight onto it. Leo had lost the torch, so we saw nothing but flashes of moonlight or streetlamp outside. Finally we came to the shell of a ballroom and found a damp corner where Leo sat and fell asleep. I listened out for noise, but there was only the hollowness of the building echoing to itself.