The Last Hundred Days (16 page)

Petre was a music student at the university and a classical guitarist. He told me about his next concert in the Atheneum – Bach, Villa-Lobos and Federico Mompou. Did I want to come? He handed me a pair of tickets from a book of stubs. But I soon learned that Petre was also lead guitarist in
Fakir
, a semi-underground rock band whose concerts were tolerated by the authorities but closely monitored. Leo had played me a bootleg tape of theirs. All their recordings were bootleg: since they were not members of the Musicians’ Union they had no access to studios or concert venues. I looked him over: his skin was smooth, his hands soft and delicate; his hair shone, his well-worn clothes were clean. A heavy celtic cross hung over his shirt.

‘Petre!’ called out the double-bassist, a stylish young man in a 1950s three-piece suit and Teddy Boy haircut, the retro’s retro.

‘You will stay here. I see you after. We can talk.’ Petre rose and joined the band.

I sat drinking beer and listening to a medley of silky jazz impromptus. After a forty-minute jamming session Petre returned to our table, his hair matted with sweat, his shirt sticking to his back.

By the time we left the tavern it was ten o’clock. Lipscani was the only part of Bucharest where there was an organic life after 9 pm. The hotels and bars in the town centre were either tourist traps or snazzy playpens for party apparatchiks. Here there was street life: drunks tightrope-walking kerbs, beer gardens spilling onto the pavements. People were buying and selling things that you couldn’t see and that maybe didn’t exist – it was the transactions that counted, not the goods. Transactions symbolised life, subversion, rebellion: flurries of haggling around absent commodities. Gypsy music came from the courtyards or open windows. The
BBC
World Service was loud but impossible to locate in the jumble of sidestreets: the pips dwindling into Lillibulero, and then the soothing voice of Bush House. I thought of the building, there on the Strand, of what London must be like now: the Tubes full and pubs heaving, the neon letters trademarking the air, the disposable income evaporating in the London night.

This was the time I liked best in Bucharest: people out for their last walks, the few cafés still open crossing into the indoor twilight of late drinking. Moths with frayed wings pounded against mosquito nets and as the night cooled, the day’s smells thickened and separated out – pollen, burned fuel, late baking, cigarettes, all distinct now in the prickly air. There was something about the way Petre breathed it all in, eyes closed, like a connoisseur savouring the fumes of a good bottle, that reminded me of Leo.

I asked where he lived, but there was no answer. We walked on, though I was now comprehensively lost. We came to a small square where Petre sat down and crafted himself another cigarette. I asked again, and he mentioned a new estate beyond the city circle. The buses and trams had stopped, and taxis were unlikely to go that far out now. Where would he sleep? He gave an empty-handed gesture of unconcern. ‘It is warm.’

I was meant to meet Cilea in my flat. I toyed with asking Petre back, but knew this was exactly the wrong thing to do. Besides, he had still not said what he wanted from me. Then I thought: they were both music students at the university… perhaps they knew each other?

‘You are asking yourself why I have made contact with you?’

‘I suppose I am, yes. I assume it’s something to do with my meeting Vintul the other day.’

‘Something to do, yes.’

‘You want to get out?’

He laughed. ‘This is my country. Why should I leave? I would not be me if I left and never returned, and that is why I stay in spite of everything… how hard it is to live, to make a good life. But I want to travel. I want to go to Spain, to Britain, to Canada, to the US…. It is difficult to go, but right now it would be impossible to come back. I want to come back. So I will not leave. Maybe that means I will never leave. But my friends, many of them, they want to go. Many have already left. I help them, and you can help us.’

‘What about you? Is it freedom you want too?’

The crudity of my question disappointed him. ‘I know freedom. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we do not know what it is. I have had freedom, but I have not
lived in
freedom. But I can wait because I know I will never be free unless I am free in my own country. What freedom have you known?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I wasn’t. I had a sense of freedom in the abstract, but there were few concrete examples of my having really
used
my allotted portion. Was that perhaps itself evidence of freedom – that I had never had to measure and quantify it, that I had never had to answer for what I had done with it? I decided to stick to specifics: ‘This is about you not me. I am free, I can vote and say what I want and travel where I like…’

‘Perhaps you have lived in freedom but not been free?’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps if I knew what you meant…’ I was tired of the relentless obliqueness of these discussions: long sessions of quickfire goalpost-shifting between westerners who acknowledged only money and buying power as markers of civilisation and Romanians who insisted on their dignity by pretending that their régime, however appalling, promised a better future even if it no longer intended it. Petre reminded me of Trofim in this respect: he was still holding out for communism to deliver on its ideals.

I watched him take a long draw on his cigarette and lay his back against the bench, sliding his body forward so his backside hung over the edge of the wooden slats. I felt a speech coming on and looked at my watch. I needed to leave, to find my way home. But what Petre said stayed with me; not because it was penetrating or intelligent or even true, but because of its extraordinary purity, its ingenuity, and ultimately its complete and heroic wrongness.

‘I have known freedom in my life. I live in a place that is not free, but I have made freedoms that have gone deep. Short freedoms, only moments here and there, but freedom. I am not a stranger to it. The mistake you make in the West is to think we are just victims, bowed heads… to think that we do not keep safe a part of our lives in which to be normal and happy and become who we want to be. Many things are the same for us as they are for you: loving, dying, friendship, pleasure, the taste of good food and drink – when we can get them,’ he laughed, ‘and they have the same value, the same meaning…’

‘I try not to make that mistake about people…’

‘Maybe you, and maybe a few others. But I know how you look at us because we are not free the way you are. But what are you free for? To buy things? To choose twenty different models of camera? To give your children six different brands of cereals for breakfast. Is that autonomy? Is that why my friends are leaving the country, risking their lives to cross borders to live in places where they can make a big choice about eating Cheerios or Coco Pops in the mornings?’

‘Petre, save that stuff for the right person. I’m not arguing with you; I don’t pretend that the West is perfect. But you can’t say there’s any equivalence between what you suffer here and what we have in the West, even if we waste so much of our freedom on crappy things. These are small choices, but they stand for bigger choices, about who rules us, and what we are allowed to choose to say and do and believe. Perhaps a choice of cereals is a sign of a country where there’s a choice of governments.’

‘That’s not freedom,’ Petre said, ‘that’s being a customer. You are all customers. You live in a customer country. What is it Mrs Thatcher said?
There is no such thing as society
…’ He gave a dismissive laugh.

‘That may well be true when she’s finished with us, but it’s not true yet…’

‘I am free because I stay here, not because I leave. I choose to stay, that makes me free – even though I cannot say what I want, even though they are always watching me, destroying my city, even though they will stop me from playing my music and I always have to have my concert programmes approved in advance… I am free because I
choose
not to run away.’

I had no answer. Petre believed in the intensity of freedom as it was lived, not in its quantity thinly spread across a range of minor choices: what to wear, which brand of detergent to buy, the ‘freedom’ to choose who treats your piles or your bad teeth. But here, now, in the circumstances he found himself, Petre had no choice but to believe what he did. I had never heard anything so persuasive and yet so manifestly untenable, so ill-fitted for any of the kinds of life that were on offer to him. It was a philosophy of extremity that depended on extremity in order to exist. But it only
seemed
idealistic – really it was pragmatic: after all, when you cannot spread out freely, you dig down, and that was what he had done: he had created a logic where intensity replaced quantity. Petre had adapted, because he had adapted a theory of freedom to make sense of all the constraint.

Petre was twenty-three, two years older than me; he seemed to know nothing but to believe already in too much. There must have been plenty in his short life to knock all this belief out of him, to make him cynical and hard, but there was a calmness to him I had seen in no one else. He was more out of place here than I was, yet at the same time he was entirely adjusted to it. There was something about him: as if he was from a better but recognisable version of this place and time, in which higher versions of ourselves circulated uncontaminated by the gross realities we had created and which had in turn made us. That was my first impression and, as I came to know him, that impression deepened.

He had a half-sister, a doctor, with whom he shared a flat. His parents, now dead, were born into the Transylvanian peasantry and became engineers in Timişoara. His grandparents had been farmhands on an aristocrat’s estate and then worked in the first collective farms. Petre was proud of that: from illiterate peasants to engineers in one generation.

‘I am the grandson of peasants, the son of engineers, and now I play guitar. In three generations of one family we have gone from pointless toil to efficient technocracy and now to useless art. That is progress. You show me that in your country!’ He laughed, crushing his cigarette butt with his heel and putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s time for me to go. We would like you to help us. You have spoken to Vintul, and very soon we will ask something of you. We have a project and we would like you to join us in it.’

Petre embraced me then disappeared, leaving a faint smell of leather, patchouli oil and tobacco. It was already eleven – I was late and I was lost. Cilea would have let herself in and found something in the fridge to graze on. I was the only person in the small square, and I could hear water rushing somewhere ahead, in roughly the direction of home. Choosing a likely looking sidestreet, I walked on. It was by now so dark I could orientate myself only by the occasional glimmer of a candle or paraffin lamp in the windows. I heard the scrape of a zippo flint. A flame swelled up and a face took shape, eyes looking directly at me, then fell back into darkness. I smelled drink and heard him breathing, saw the cupped glow of a cigarette end as he inhaled, and the shiny black rim of a policeman’s cap.

I heard voices, saw light lapping at the cobbles at the next turning. Some music funnelled its way down the alley.

I emerged into a gaudy little red-light zone. Beneath a sort of bridge of sighs that connected up two decrepit buildings, young girls wearing rubber shoes and short skirts sat in lamplight, reading crumpled German magazines. Drunk soldiers stood around and argued; builders drank from bottles or old pickle jars. Men in ragged suits and frayed ties counted money, exchanging wads of banknotes and cigarette packets. A brand new stereo system played western disco tracks. One of the girls struggled dopily upright, pulled herself up by a crumbling windowledge, and put out her small dry hand to take mine. There was no strength in it; her fingers grasped my wrist, her cracked, painted nails scratched my arm no more deeply than a bird’s claws, then fell away as I passed. Her eyes were ringed with shadow, sunken back into their sockets, circles of rouge painted onto her hollow cheeks. She looked like a broken doll. Behind her, the girls sitting on the ground with their backs against the wall had the air of marionettes propped up in the wings of a puppet theatre. Had I seen her in the InterContinental that day with Leo? Yes, I was sure now: there was a little less of her now; and the eyes… more than before afire with fever.

Some builders in dusty work clothes sat playing cards, an upturned crate serving as a table. Two prostitutes stood behind them, resting their heads on their shoulders like escort girls at a high-class casino. No one paid any attention to me – I was walking through someone else’s dream. People looked past me as I wandered through this underworld, an inner-city limbo of prostitution and racketeering; the smell of boredom, sickness, victimhood. Then the stench of human excrement and vomit and the grunting of paid sex. My shoes nudged through soft shit and broken glass. A figure stepped out in front of me. The policeman had followed me, but had somehow finished up ahead. He took my papers, wrote something down in a little booklet then mock-saluted me past, leering, as if we had just shared some secret, binding experience.

I left my shit-caked shoes outside the door and went immediately to shower. Cilea was curled up on the sofa in front of the TV. She smiled up at me, a box of expensive chocolates on the armrest, and made room. She had painted her nails, and the smell of varnish hung in the air. The video was the latest James Bond, and I had arrived in time for the set-piece casino scene, in which 007 coolly fleeces the playboy-psychopath of money and
amour propre
before a gasping public.

Cilea teasingly nestled a foot into my groin. When I failed to respond, she paused the video and went to the kitchen to fetch some wine.

‘Do you know all the other music students?’ I called out.

‘I think so – but I don’t go to all the lectures…’

‘Petre Something – you come across him?’

‘There’s a few Petres… it’s a common name… Red or white? I went to the Diplomatic Shop this morning…’