The Last Hundred Days (30 page)

‘Well, that’s not really what I meant, to be honest…’ Wintersmith was struggling. ‘I meant … well… there’s plenty for the diplomat to do…’

Ozeray’s smile drained him of the will to go on. When the Belgian finally loosened his grip, Wintersmith backed off into the crowd, a beaten man.

‘Thank you. I wasn’t making much headway with him, and I was starting to lose my temper.’

‘My pleasure. That man is dreadful. I fear that in your country at least he is also the future.’

‘Did you mean that?’ I asked. ‘What you said about doing nothing?’

He was saved from answering by a loud knock on the table. At the end of the room a grey dignitary banged a gavel.

‘It is with great pleasure that our Union of Writers plays host today to the launch of Sergiu Trofim’s memoirs. They give unique insights into the great strides our nation has made on the world stage over the last forty years, and especially the last twenty – years, we may say, of fruition.’ There was a loud clack in the background: edging through the French windows at the end of the room, a smartly dressed Leo was beckoning to someone I could not see. He stumbled in, knocking his foot against the bottom of the door. After him came Ioana, tipsy and resplendent with embarrassment. The speaker turned to look behind him. Leo waved at him to carry on. ‘It gives me personally great pleasure to read out a message of warm good wishes from the President Academician, our
Conducător
, Nicolae Ceauşescu, known as much for his love of literature as for his expertise in other fields. A Renaissance man in the truest sense, a genuine Union of All The Talents…’ He paused, drew a big breath. There was a general grunt of agreement; a few ultras clapped.

Then came a further twenty minutes of preamble. People swayed in boredom. Leo tiptoed back outside with a bottle of wine, while Ozeray went into a kind of trance, his metabolism shutting down, like a tortoise overwintering. Ottilia prodded me in the small of the back and stifled a giggle. I felt her body move closer to mine. I put my hand behind me and held her waist. She came closer, leaned into my back.

Now came Trofim’s turn. He walked to the Party-crested lectern, lowered it a few inches, and began his address. For the next half-hour, without looking up, he delivered a speech encrusted with the most tedious communist euphemisms, buzzwords and aspicated jargon. No jokes, no witticisms, none of the expected urbane or learned comments. Petrescu and several of Trofim’s friends from the park scratched their heads in bemusement. Leo scratched his head too and looked confused. He raised his eyebrows at me:
what’s going on?
I raised mine back in bafflement. Ioana shook her head. Only Ottilia looked alert, pressing my hand, willing me to share a joke only she was in on. I sensed the broadening smile on her face without needing to see it. There was a long, full-body yawn from the back of the room, finished with a loud baritone grunt. Everyone looked at Leo.

Trofim was doing it deliberately, making a speech that was so boring it became subversive, not by standing outside the conventions and taking aim, but by dragging them down by the dead weight of their own leaden logic: subversion through over-compliance.

When the guests had gone he led me by torchlight down to a cellar where an old fridge hummed and trembled in a pool of rust-coloured leakage. Round about lay piles of books and papers, their pages eaten away, soaked through or greened with mould. ‘The archive,’ he chuckled tipsily and he opened the fridge door. Six bottles of French champagne glowed on its only shelf. I carried them upstairs in a flat box marked with the scratched-out name of some forgotten or disgraced writer.

‘A gift from Les Belles Lettres, by way of First Consul Ozeray, to help us celebrate our Paris launch.’

So Ozeray, altruist of inaction, had been our third man, the one who oversaw the French end of things, negotiating with the publishers on Trofim’s behalf? Before we reached the function room, Trofim gripped my arm: ‘There’s no going back now. It’s out of my hands… Let us drink now, for there will not be much celebrating afterwards.’

Ottilia and I walked home. We had crossed unspokenly into couplehood. We went to bed together that night, made love silently, eyes closed, then turned and slept apart, saying nothing. With Cilea there was always something pornographic about our lovemaking: I watched myself fucking her, she watched me watching. I had to be conscious of it, of the unbearable pleasure, before I could feel it in my body. The carnality had to pass through the mind and through the eye first; it needed their validation. Ours were the disembodied bodies of watched sex, and even when we were together walking or eating or doing ordinary things it was always framed as if we were looking in at ourselves. It gave us a kick, it doubled the pleasure. Maybe that was because we lived under surveillance, but for me it was also a facet of my self-estrangement, my sense of being a lodger in my own consciousness.

With Ottilia there was just us and the darkness, followed by a sound of raw sobbing that woke me and which I found came from myself. It woke her too, and as she turned to cover me with her body and stop my mouth with hers, I felt something breaking inside me. It was a far-off feeling, ice on a long-frozen lake starting to crack at some tiny bankside seam.

Ottilia’s shift started at 7 am, but she allowed two hours to reach the hospital. As the mornings became darker only the pseudo-sunrise of the building site, its fake floodlit dawn across the rooftops, gave her a profile against the window: a thin, pale body dressing in the half-light. Across the flat, the kettle on the hob began its stifled whistle.

I flicked the light switch but nothing came on. Another power cut, or still the same one? When I joined her in the kitchen Ottilia was holding the sports bag that contained her possessions. She dropped it on the table. ‘Maybe you can move my things into your bedroom? Won’t take you long.’ When she smiled and took my hand and kissed my mouth again, I sank into her arms. I was afraid that last night had been just an excess of emotion and closeness, a release of tension; that she would pull back from me, from my half-formedness. She felt me lose my balance and sat me down at the table.

On my way to work I stopped to call on Trofim. The old man would have one hell of a headache, but he would also be bracing himself for the fallout of yesterday’s Paris publication of
An Ideal Betrayed
. I would take him to lunch, tell him about Ottilia; we would walk in the autumn sun and make plans for when his book made the headlines…

The street was blocked, checkpoints at both ends. I walked on past. The militia men looked alert today. I crossed the road, better to see Trofim’s door and the balcony that looked out over the street. The windows were shut and the curtains drawn. As I approached the building, the door opened and two militia stepped out, accompanied by three Securitate officers, and blocked my way. I asked them what they wanted, but there was no reply. I handed my papers over with an unconvincing air of weariness. This was no routine inspection.

‘Officers, may I ask what this is about? I am visiting my friend, a senior comrade, the former minister Sergiu Trofim. I am helping him with his work…’

No one spoke. They looked over my papers and pocketed them. One of the plain-clothes men pushed me into a black Dacia. I kept talking. I was a British subject, an ordinary visitor, without involvement in anything illegal… I looked back at Trofim’s window and saw the curtain stir. The men in the car were professional intimidators from the same assembly line that produced the likes of Stoicu. They called them
plain clothes
, but in fact theirs was a uniform, and they were never there to blend in. These existed to be seen and sensed, to inject every room, every street corner, every spontaneous gathering with the poison of overt surveillance. They had the same brown or beige suits with gun-bulging jackets and boot-cut trousers, the same heeled boots and regulation haircuts. Leo might have had a go at laughing at them, might have risked a beating with a witticism. Not me. For the first time since the visit to the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, I felt fear. Not fear in the face of spectacular danger or unimaginable evil, but the fear of the individual who has erred into the machine.

We did not go to Securitate headquarters but to a poky basement flat near the central police HQ. The walls were damp and covered in peeling wallpaper. I was shown to a small table with two chairs. After twenty minutes a calm, professorial-looking gentleman joined me. He smiled and opened up a dossier. My file was already two inches thick. If I saw out my two years’ posting it would be eight inches and require two of those Monocom box files I used at work.

‘There has been nothing confidential about your stay so far,’ he began. ‘This dossier is so well-stocked with information from your friends and colleagues that we might have saved ourselves the trouble of monitoring you…’ He showed me photographs: me on the balcony, the first walk to work, the staff canteen, Leo and I coming out of Capsia that first night. Trofim and me on a bench. Cars leaving the museum after one of Leo’s
soirées
, me and Ottilia on the way back from Trofim’s. Ottilia outside my house. Leo picking his nose and changing currency with a pimp. Wintersmith talking to me at the embassy gates. There was no sign of Petre or of Vintul, the only genuinely dangerous associates I had, nor of Cilea or Manea. Surely that told me something?

‘You’ll have to remember to give me those for my autobiography. My Romanian period will be a small but important part of the story. And certainly the best-documented. Now tell me why I’m here.’

‘Ah, English wit,’ he replied evenly, still smiling, ‘we will see how well it serves you in this new situation… we have a large file on your activities, many of which can be considered against the interests of the state. Many of them also illegal in straightforward ways: changing money on the black market, attempted bribery of state officials, associating with criminals, using prostitutes…’

‘Prostitutes? I’ve never
used
, as you put it, a prostitute in my life. As for
attempted bribery
I think strictly speaking ‘attempted’ is not the word, as I’ve yet to see these attempts rebuffed…’

‘Do not waste our time. What this evidence points to is common criminality. If you are charged with that, there will be no heroics. Your embassy will not intervene in cases of mere hooliganism and criminal behaviour. You will be on your own.’

‘There is nothing I can do for you. Charge me or let me go.’

‘
Charge me or let me go?
I think you have been watching too many police shows. My favourite is
The Sweeney
,’ he laughed and took off his spectacles, while with his other hand he swung a punch that landed hard in the middle of my face. I felt my lip split across my front teeth and my nose buckle to a noise like bark being stripped off a tree. The metallic glut of blood filled my throat.

My interrogator went on reading my file as if nothing had happened. He ticked a box on his cover sheet and inserted the time – 10.38 – followed by his signature. I strained to make out his name but it was deliberately illegible. Later, when they opened up the police archives here and in other ex-communist states, most of the reports were signed in these plausible pseudo-signatures, a generic squiggle of a name belonging to no one in particular while symbolising everyone’s complicity.

‘We will talk again. You will help us eventually. There will be no choice,’ he announced convivially, as if we had just laid the foundations for a happy friendship. He put out his punching hand for me to shake, then left the room. My head was swimming, my face a mess of blood and snot. My tooth hung on a hinge of torn gum. The two Securitate who had picked me up led me back up the stairs to the Dacia. Someone had put plastic sheeting across the seat to catch the effluvia of the recently interrogated.

Back at my flat the front door was open, and the lock broken – needlessly, since they had the keys. Every room was turned over, cupboards emptied and drawers tipped out. Paintings and posters had been pulled off the walls and vandalised. The phone had been ripped out, my books thrown off the shelves and the shelves torn from the walls. The kitchen was covered in broken glass. In my bedroom, the clothes were strewn across the floor and slashed. Ottilia’s bag had been eviscerated with a single slice.

I cleaned my face up in the bathroom. My top lip was swollen and the split was scabbing over. One tug and my tooth was in my palm. I dressed in what I could find and went out. At the Museum of Natural History I called Leo. There was no reply at home or work. I tried Ottilia, but the hospital line was dead. I replaced the receiver and wiped the blood off the mouthpiece. My head was ringing with the boxed-up sound of a television after closedown.

No taxis stopped for me. I looked like a brawl-bruised drunk who had rolled out of a cell or the station toilets. My clothes were crumpled and mismatched: a red T-shirt bearing the logo ‘The Champ’, green jeans, Chinese basketball shoes and a tartan scarf to shield my mouth. By the time I reached Piaţa Victoriei I was waving dollar bills at passing cars, but no one dared to stop.

A car horn sounded behind me, and Leo’s blue Skoda pulled up across the kerb. ‘Jesus. I thought they meant business by what they did to your flat.’

‘I don’t know what happened. Or why. I was just walking to see Sergiu on the way to work. When I got there…’

Leo picked up the two newspapers from the back seat. ‘It’s all in there.’

The front page of the
International Herald Tribune
carried a photograph of Trofim at the head of article entitled:
The Letter of “The Five”: Ceauşescu’s Critics Break Cover
. The article published an open letter from five senior communists calling for Ceauşescu’s resignation and sent to all the major papers in the West. Leo then showed me the French
Libération
, which carried an article on Trofim’s book and coverage of its high-profile Paris launch.
Libération
was serialising it the following week, as was the
Washington Post
.