The Last Hundred Days (39 page)

Leo opened his mouth for a riposte, but there was nothing there. He floundered grumpily for a few seconds, then raised both hands in surrender.

The special guest at this, the last Congress of the
Partidul
Comunist Roman
was Yasser Arafat. He sat in the first row beside Elena and Nicolae Ceauşescu, a tiny, weatherbeaten man with busy, nervous eyes. The earpiece he wore to ensure he missed nothing of the speeches was obviously not working, or working too well: he rotated and cocked his head in quick, baffled jerks like a sparrow, or fiddled with the contraption and yanked it from his ear and stared at it.

I recognised several of the people in the rows behind the Ceauşescus: Palin the trade minister and Leo’s best customer; the deputy foreign minister, the minister for cults, and a few others of middling to high rank. At the centre of the third row sat Manea Constantin, slick and well-dressed and with a suit that fitted him conspicuously.

They sat it out obediently, irradiated by boredom’s invisible waves, vegetating through the hour-long speeches and rising for the palm-blistering applause. Tractors, five-year plans, miraculous crops, except that there were no miracles, just socialist-scientific planning yielding its socialist-scientific results. The second day’s centrepiece was a speech entitled ‘The Era of Light Taken in the Round’ by the minister for culture, demonstrating how under Ceauşescu every individual aspect of policy had been brought to its highest and best form. The afternoon ended with a twenty-minute round of cultish applause which Ceauşescu brushed aside in unembarrassable mock-modesty.

‘Pinch me,’ said Leo, still in his pyjamas though it was past midday. This was to be his last day in my flat, now that he was able to walk and look after himself, but he showed no sign of being ready to leave. ‘Pinch me so I know it’s not a dream! I live in paradise! I live in bloody paradise!’

In the bedroom he had evicted us from, I heard him whistling, then straining to liberate a fart. He emerged businesslike and purposeful, flatulent and hungover but with a spring in his limp. ‘I’m off to put in a good word for Young Lenin. I’ll show the lovely Ottilia I don’t bear grudges…’ With that he was gone into the day.

Ceauşescu was re-elected unanimously on the fourth day of the conference. Unanimously? Not exactly. When I checked
Scînteia
for the list of Central Committee members, I saw a small paragraph with a dozen names of delegates who for various reasons had been unable to vote. One had died mid-Congress – he had felt a stabbing pain in his left arm during a marathon clapping session, and died in his Dacia on the way back to Snagov. Miron Banalescu thus became one of the first casualties of that Congress, a martyr not from the ranks of the brave but from the complicit and the cowed. Later, as the revolution mourned its heroes and persecuted its opponents, I wondered if there was a category for the Banalescus of this world, floating in the interstices of history like specks of dust: a great, grey purgatory of mediocrity that amounted to more than the sum of its parts because it was where most of us finished up.

The other names on the list of those who missed the vote meant nothing to me, but I knew the last one: Manea Constantin. 

They released Oleanu after a week. Just like the people he had informed on, he arrived at the university to find that his place had been withdrawn. He knew the routine, having so often set it in motion: he handed over his university card and cleared out his locker. But there was a calmness about him, a singleness of purpose. Whatever had been done to him in prison, it had made rather than broken him. Popea, charged with expelling Oleanu from the university, tried not to look at the bandage on Oleanu’s eye, the split lip, the way the boy held his ribs as every breath brought pain. But no one could ignore the new dignity he had; the way, even stooped over a bruised lung, he looked taller, stronger, surer of himself.

When Oleanu came out, Leo was waiting, his Skoda rattling in the morning snow. In the back seat sat an old man in a hat, with a French newspaper spread out in front of him, obscuring his face.

Leo was as good as his word. Better. He introduced Oleanu to Trofim, who made him his
de facto
assistant. Over the next two weeks we saw a complete transformation in Oleanu. Before, he had been a scheming, anal-retentive coward with a politician’s time-buying stutter, square spectacles and flat, greased hair. His trousers were too short and his bony wrists stuck out from the sleeves of a barrel-jacket. Now his hair was tousled, he wore jeans and an open-necked shirt. Round spectacles and the beginnings of a sharp little beard made him look more like the young Trotsky than the young Lenin. He had filled out, muscled up.

Soon he was drafting Trofim’s speeches, typing up his letters, accompanying him to events. He read dissident socialists –Trotsky, Victor Serge, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci – and reinvented himself as the intellectual guardian of a communism that might have been. Oleanu had not lost his faith, just transferred it.

The intimidation of Trofim increased. He received calls describing how his wife’s corpse had been disinterred and given to the dogs to fuck, how the Yids were still good for gassing, how they’d come for him and skin him alive. It was a different voice each time, but always the same sneer, reading its obscene script at all hours of the night. Trofim coped. He even joked that there was more imagination in these phone calls than there had been in the last twenty years of official literature. But they wore him down physically, they broke his sleep; when he disconnected the phone they banged on his door or pushed pornographic images through his letterbox.

All this intrigue seemed abstract and faraway on the streets of Bucharest. Rumours came and went of workers striking, food riots, flashes of isolated dissent, but so too did news of their quelling: the midnight raids on people’s homes, the bogus hospitalisations, the random relocations and imprisonments.

Communism was collapsing, but we didn’t know it then, or not here. After the Wall came the opened borders, the promise of free elections, new parties, western aid and western goods. But not for us. Looking back it’s easy to think that each brick knocked from the prison of communism brought another crack for the light to shine through. Perhaps that was how it felt in Prague or Warsaw or Berlin. In Bucharest it was a reminder of how much we remained bricked in, that sense that there would never be enough light to go round. Each relaxation outside brought a new squeeze. The Hungarians had opened their borders, but the Romanians tightened theirs. West Germany gave food and money to East Germany, but here new export targets were announced that left the people producing more and receiving less. Even the black market suffered, as the alternative avenues of supply closed down. There was nothing left to skim from the top of the quotas, the bottom of the inventories; nothing left to trim, no odds and ends to sell or barter. The luxuries were still there, rising like a glittering scum to the top of the day’s deprivations, but the basics ran out everywhere.

As I trudged through grey snow to work on the morning of 17 December, I saw the Comrade’s convoy, or one of its decoys, hurtling towards Otopeni airport to the crunch of snowchains on black ice. Here and there the thawing snow slid slowly down the roof tiles and fell in blocks, exploding on the ground.

Early mornings unnerved me: there was never anyone on the streets, but the criss-crossed footsteps testified to there having been some small-hours rush hour in the blue light, when hundreds of people had walked or run to work or stood and waited for their transport. You felt crowded out but alone – perfect police state weather. Leo told me after the first frosts: ‘
The Cold War
, ever wondered why they called it that? It’s not just all that bollocks about icy relations between East and West. The cold is a weapon here, they use it just like they’d use a gun or water cannon… you remember what Napoleon said about being defeated by
General Midwinter
? Well, around here Winter’s a colonel in the Securitate…’

At the university gates, Micu gave a stiff-jointed salute. He looked terrified, and I soon saw why. Two Securitate officers sat at his desk searching the students.

I knocked on Leo’s door and went in. ‘They’re jacking up security – shut down the politics department for the whole week. Something to do with Comrade Nic’s official visit to Iran. They’re tightening up.’

‘He’s going to Iran?’

‘He must be bloody nuts, but that’s not all. Guess who’s in charge of the asylum while he’s eating pistachios with the ayatollahs?’

I thought about it. The most obvious answer was also the most absurd. Still… surely not…

‘You got it in one,’ said Leo. I hadn’t said anything, but my expression was enough.

‘Comrade Academician Professor Elena Ceauşescu?’

‘You forgot “Scientist of Broad International Renown”, but I’ll give you the point. The shit’s hitting the fan in Timişoara, Brasov, Iaşi, and God knows where else, but what’s the Big Man going to do? He’s off to Iran. Iran for fuck’s sake! Who told him to do that?’

Popea hovered at the door.

‘Ah, good of you to come by…’ Leo motioned him to stand by the window. There was no pretence any longer that Popea was the boss, but there was something about him today, something satisfied and authoritative. ‘You’re looking pleased with yourself, Boss. Well, fire away.’

‘Very well,’ Popea closed the door, looking ominously confident, and produced some papers. ‘It’s a letter from the Dean terminating your employment. One from the ministry rescinding your visa and work permit will reach you tomorrow. You then have fourteen days to leave the country. Sadly, owing to the traditional clerical error, the fourteen days began twelve days ago. It can’t be helped. You have forty-eight hours.’

Leo had been beaten up, imprisoned, robbed and almost killed. But this was the first time I had seen him genuinely distressed. He leapt from the chair and took Popea by the lapels, but Popea pressed his advantage: ‘Unless you are here, in this place and in this job, you are nothing… a nobody, an unemployable hack lecturer past his sell-by date. I’ve spent too long taking orders from you, I’ve watched you rub our noses in the shit, threatening and blackmailing people, corrupting the system… well, now that you’re going I can tell you I have always held you in contempt. I had nothing to do with your expulsion, but go ahead if you want: expose me, humiliate me, lose me my job. Then it will be over. I’m calling your bluff.’

Leo sank back into his chair. ‘What can you do to help?’ he was the supplicant now, ‘what’ll it take this time?’

‘Fuck you, Leo, I’m happy to say there’s nothing I can do. Oh, I’m sure if there was I’d do it like I always have, just to save my skin. Actually, I already tried – no luck I’m afraid… I’m happy to say this one’s out of my hands. There’s something liberating about that, Leo, it’s a relief. You should try it, just giving up and letting things take their course…’

Then, remembering a small detail, Popea turned to me. ‘You too,’ he said. ‘You’re out as well. Your Christmas break starts on the twentieth, but your visa won’t be renewed. Best find another job, maybe one where they interview you…!’ Popea smiled: I was just an additional bonus to his primary victory. ‘Anyway, with Professor O’Heix gone you won’t last long around here…’

‘If those bastards think they’re getting rid of me they’ve got another think coming. I’ve got contacts, I’m going to need to call in some favours. They’ll have to tie me up and drug me and put me on the plane themselves while everyone watches and wishes they were in my place!’

Leo’s letter was delivered by two ministry officials, revoking his working permit, his visa and his contract. I was not worth a visit: my termination papers were in my department pigeonhole and I was to leave by the twenty-third, two days after Leo.

Leo thought he could call in favours, reel in those dozens of powerful people who were in one way or another beholden to him. He was wrong. No one returned his calls and the few who agreed to meet him failed to show up. Only Manea replied, with a short note offering Leo a meeting for 28 December, his ‘first window in the diary’. As Manea surely knew, Leo was due to be sent back on the twenty-first.

On 19 December, protesters in Timişoara stormed their Party HQ and set fire to its contents: Ceauşescu portraits, Party records, books and pictures, even the furniture went onto the pyre. The police stood by. In that protracted moment of hesitation perhaps, the end of the regime came and installed itself.

The first symbol of the revolution was hoisted from the balcony of the Timişoara Party HQ: the Romanian flag with a hole of blue sky where the communist insignia and
PCR
logo had been. People crowded to touch it, they carried it with them. The new national flag.

The Securitate presence from Calea Victoriei to the Central Committee building was stepped up. Young suited men with ostentatiously hidden guns stood every ten yards, smoking and watching, checking papers, pulling up cars, questioning anyone who stood and talked in the streets for more than a few seconds. ‘Two’s a crowd’ became the motto. But sometimes it only took one: a construction worker with a megaphone at the top of the scaffolding on Piaţa Unirii bellowing out, ‘Timişoara! Timişoara! Timişoara!’ for half an hour before they managed to bring him down. On the Atheneum lawn ‘Down with Ceauşescu’ appeared in weed-killered grass. ‘Death to the Vampire and his Bitch,’ was daubed in red on the wall of the Party museum.

When the clampdown came it was easy to put an end to social life: all they had to do was stop the supply of food and drink to restaurants and cafés. Even the
ersatz
dried up. Only the dollar bars and international hotels stayed open, and even there the plain-clothes agents outnumbered you. And Capsia: Capsia had the diplomats and the Party
nomenklatura
to feed. It also had Leo’s last week of decadence to host, a sort of Viking feast punctuated with flashes of mortal danger and the political surreal.

In the early hours of 20 December, Ottilia and I were awoken by a low rumbling noise close enough to the flat for us to feel the vibrations in the glass shelves in the bathroom. I looked at the clock: 4 am. Downstairs the police guard dozed upright. Two others stood and smoked a few yards away. If they saw me leave they gave no sign. The noise was louder now, an even, mechanised buzz that shook the ground. At first I thought it was the earthquake revisiting. I walked to the corner of Aleea Alexandru and Aviatorilor and then I saw them: dozens of armoured cars heading into town, their headlamps off. There were lorries carrying troops and tanks cruising at frightening speed. I’d always imagined tanks were slow and heavy. But it was their speed and their surprising, indestructible nimbleness that terrified me.