The Last Hundred Days (7 page)

He wore an old enamel Party lapel badge. The new ones were twice the size, raucous scarlet and made of plastic. Trofim’s was a discrete, weathered crimson;
classy
would have been the word in a different sort of society. It matched the rest of him: clean white shirt, dark grey suit with turn-ups, red braces and polished brogues. He was bald, with white hair on the sides –
dégarni
, as the French say,
ungarnished
– with a trilby sporting a pencil stub, like a feather, in the hatband.

As we walked I hung back to keep pace with him, though his slowness came more from wanting to spin out our conversation than from physical infirmity.

Trofim was a considerate conversationalist; he listened to my replies, asked my opinion on matters I knew nothing of, but about which I tried hard to sustain a view. ‘Tell me…’ That was how all his questions began. His technique was to put you in charge of knowing something, forcing you to live up to his opinion of you, and it was always your better, more knowledgeable, maturer self that Trofim placed within your reach. He spoke to me as if I was a diplomat back from a long foreign mission, his small talk projecting itself across the globe: he talked of statesmen as if they were acquaintances, of world events as if they had happened to him personally. Some of them were and some of them had, as I came to find out from my weekly visits to his flat near the Natural History Museum, which he called simply
Chez les dinosaures
. Afterwards I would accompany him to the park where his friends sat and talked and Trofim played chess with his friend Petrescu, the icon painter, a tall, thin man dressed in black who wore a heavy crucifix around his neck.
The extinct species
, Trofim would say, looking across at the statue of a mammoth on the Museum’s piebald lawn,
I think they will be making room
… For a long time, as he said this, I thought he was talking about himself.

That first day we stopped outside a house on Strada Herastrau, a few streets from my flat. In front of the gates was a cream Citroen DS. ‘My prized possession. I drove this from Paris to Bucharest in 1968, after the Russians put down the Prague Spring. I haven’t driven it for two years. It’s waiting for new parts… like me,’ Trofim laughed, raising his damaged hand. The car sat under a layer of dust, the bonnet sticky with sap from the tree above. On the dashboard lay a 1929 Baedeker guide to Bucharest. People around here seemed to have guide books for every epoch except the one they lived in.

Trofim saw me noticing it. He opened the passenger door of the DS, took out the Baedeker, and gave it to me.

‘A present for you. You won’t find the maps much use for getting around any more. Think of it as an urban memoir. It’s where your friend Leo lives.’

Later, we sat in Trofim’s living room; three walls were floor to ceiling with bookcases and the fourth covered in paintings and photographs: Trofim with Trotsky, Trofim with Victor Serge, Trofim with Diego Rivera, Trofim with a parade of heroes of the tragic left. He worked in their aura, at a small desk by the balcony, while at the dining table his secretary, a grey-faced buzzard with a socialist-realist scowl, typed into an expensive computer. A samovar of tea steamed in the corner.

After my second visit Trofim explained his strange predicament. ‘I am writing my memoirs. Every day she takes dictation, and then the papers are taken away for… let’s call it
editing
. They return for proofreading completely different from what I dictated. They are taking my story from me. You’ve heard of the Freudian talking cure, where the mere act of saying something to someone who is listening is sufficient? Well, we always have someone listening here, we are the Freudian state. This is the communist talking cure: they are curing me of my own life. Every day my altered past catches up with me. You know the old joke: with communism the future is certain, it’s just the past that keeps changing?’

‘I am unable to recover my text,’ Trofim lamented, ‘and by the time it returns it is no longer mine.’ I went across to the computer. There was nothing on the screen other than the menu of options. His secretary copied everything onto a diskette and then put the day’s work into the wastebasket to delete it. But she did not know that it needed to be purged each time, and that the files remained on the hard drive. She treated the computer as nothing more than a memorious typewriter. ‘Watch,’ I said, sliding cursor down to the screen’s wastebin and double clicking. There they were: chapter after original chapter. I dragged them out and opened them. I found a disk and transferred them all across. Trofim looked at me as if I had performed a miracle of Lazarine information raising. I felt proud, indispensable – in short, I felt the way Trofim wanted me to feel.

If I had any inkling then that he had stage-managed my miraculous find in order to inveigle me into taking the dangerous job of his secretary, I ignored it. Even now I am not sure he planned it that way, but I know it would have made no difference: just because I was a suspicious person didn’t mean I ever acted on my suspicions. If I had I would probably have stayed away from all of them: Leo, Trofim, Cilea and the others. I would not have come here in the first place. But all I have ever learned from past mistakes was to how to commit new ones more knowingly. Self-knowledge for me was always just clarified inertia.

By the end of April I was resurrecting Trofim’s deleted files, correcting them with him and taking dictation as he sat and smoked and rolled out his memories. His secretary would take away the text for editing, censoring and rewriting at the State publishing house, while Trofim and I retrieved the files and we worked on the genuine memoirs. Afterwards I took the files and printed them out at the British Embassy library, and later, back at his flat, we edited them together. This is how Trofim’s book was born.

‘So you’ve met Comrade Trofim?’ Leo said. ‘Well, you’ve shaken the hand that’s shaken the hand of Stalin. They say old Trofim’s writing his memoirs. That should be interesting. He’s swum in some pretty murky waters, has old Sergiu. You’ll notice he doesn’t have a picture of Stalin on his wall. Odd really, because he knew him as well as any of them, did a few jobs for him too… make sure you ask him about it next time…’

I met Cilea six weeks after my arrival. I was lecturing on essay writing when she came in late and sat at the back of the main hall, a great cavernous place with acoustics that turned speech into drizzle. This was the Romanian way – scale designed to outsize every human manifestation. She kept her sunglasses on, lounged across two seats in the back row and looked up at the dome of dirty glass.

Her body signalled itself. Men and women with their backs to her suddenly turned like dogs at an inaudible whistle. It was not just that she was beautiful – there was enough beauty to go round, and Cilea had none of the consensus-beauty of the catwalk model or the men’s magazine. Her face was dark, her eyes at once stormy and aloof. Her skin was tanned, her mouth lipsticked bright red and her hair black and shiny as a Politburo limousine.
Arresting
was the word, though we tried to use it sparingly in a police state: her mix of carnality and untouchability, along with the way she wore the best and latest western clothes, not the way people wore them around here – with preening amateurism, labels pointing outwards – but casually, from an inexhaustible stock. She looked like someone from another epoch as well as another country: 1960s Italy or France seen through the prism of late 80s US buying power. Everyone noticed her; everyone seemed to know her too. I lost my wording when she came in, stumbled through the rest of the lecture, squinting across the rows of empty seats to where she sat.

Afterwards she came to thank me for my reference. I felt clumsy. I wished she had come when I was giving a poetry lecture, when at least I might have looked less like a glorified grammar teacher, or during a class on the modern novel. Instead, behind me on the board were written those expository phrases found in that fatigued genre, the ‘topical essay’:
in the final analysis, on the one hand/on the other, it might be objected that
… No one wrote like that, except in international English, that committee-language sieved to a fine inexpressiveness through the strainer of compromise and neutrality.

We went for coffee in the dismal canteen. This was her country, yet she made me feel that I had to justify the place to her, even though – and I must have known it even then – she was part of the system which made it what it was.

The queue stretched from the entrance to the till. No matter that there was nothing worth queuing for. If there was a queue you queued. The only coffee on offer was known as
ersatz
, a thin flavourless substitute that tasted different each time because its ingredients always changed. Students with whom I was friendly avoided us and looked away.

We waited. Our small talk got smaller. When we finally got our
ersatzes
, Cilea grimaced at her first sip and pushed hers away.

‘It’s Ionescu you should be thanking,’ I said, ‘he’s the one who told me to write the reference. All I did was sign it.’

‘I know, but he wouldn’t have done it without your permission.’

‘I wouldn’t have given my permission if he hadn’t made me. I don’t know you. You’re not even one of our students.’

‘True, but then again one of your students wouldn’t have got the visa and you’d have wasted your reference. Ionescu was being practical: fill in the forms, do it right and waste the place on someone who can’t use it, or bend the rules and use the place, and someone gets something out of it? I went, and I got something out of it.’ Cilea lit an English cigarette, something else she had got from her trip to London.

Cilea looked at her watch:
she had somewhere to be getting back to
. She spoke an English that marked her out immediately: the English of the frequent visitor, contemporary, fresh, and not the embalmed patter we studied in the university’s Cold War grammar books. Most of my students would never leave Romania, but Cilea was different. She had words for material goods most contemporaries did not know existed; she had been to Italy, France, Spain, and even spent a term at Boston university on some scholarship designed to enhance the prospects of disadvantaged East European students. She could talk – about American films, French food, West End theatre – but never about where she got her money from, or what she had to do to live as she did, wealthy and untouched by her country’s miseries. But she never hid it either, and even when I found out, it was impossible to say to how far she was implicated in the system and how far she was merely living in its interstices, better and more happily than most, but nonetheless uninvolved in its brutality. Never once did I hear her say anything positive about the regime or the Party that protected her and kept her in luxury, but neither did she express any regret for those who made do with Romania’s poverty-line basics, or whom the regime persecuted or ostracised.

Not long after we started Leo had said: ‘Ah, Cilea – a girl of many layers’; then he elaborated: ‘layer upon layer of surface…’ I still cannot be sure I knew Cilea, not until it was too late for both of us, but I know now that Leo was wrong.

I might not have come across her again if I hadn’t tried for that second meeting. It was a last-ditch attempt as she rose to leave. I stuttered out an invitation, the kind that comes swallowed up in its own embarrassed retraction. She turned it around, saying she would fetch me next day for lunch. I had a class but I didn’t tell her. I’d cancel.

The rest of that day I spent in an itch of erotic expectation. I did two more hours of teaching and knocked off at four. The last thing I saw as I closed the door behind me was the top sheet of unmarked essays on my desk trembling from the electric fan as it chased the same air around the room. I called on Leo in his office. He was on the phone, speaking in quick, agitated bursts of Romanian. I understood a little, that the conversation was about Rodica and that she was in hospital. There had been some sort of complication with her pregnancy.

Leo snatched a jacket from his chair and a fresh carton of Kent cigarettes from the filing cabinet, then pulled me out into the corridor.

‘I’ll tell you all about it in the car.’

But he didn’t. Leo drove nerve-wrackingly slowly, desperate not to be stopped: out of the university car park, past the library and down Academicians Avenue, out through the city centre and towards the north-east suburbs. Further beyond I caught sight of the
Boulevard of Socialist Victory
, a vast avenue that didn’t so much vanish into the distance as use it up, drawing everything around into itself. At one end, in a sort of urban phantasm, the steel frames of a vast palace reared up: the ‘Palace of the People’. It was going to be the biggest building in the world. What old buildings remained nearby had no choice but to submit to the gargantuan scale of its pettiness. With the sun behind it, it looked translucent, traced in the dust it threw up around it.

All around were apartment blocks in different gradations of grey. Ten minutes from Bucharest’s picturesque and ragged centre, the streets straightened, stopped having names, and sank into numerical anonymity: ‘Strada 4’, ‘Calea 9’, ‘Piaţa 32’. We passed two schools, also numbered, and turned at a large roundabout in the middle of which people were selling machine parts. The pieces were strewn across white sheets on the ground, amid puddles of oil and piles of tools. It looked like the scene of a robot’s autopsy. A few shabby queues poked out of shops, but the pavements bore little by way of pedestrian life.

There was even less traffic, just battered trams and buses gasping dirty fumes. The car followed the concrete rim of a waterless canal that bisected the city, then turned over a bridge and waited at a junction for the lights to change. No cars crossed. To my left the rubble of an old church was being boxed up and placed, stone by stone, into waiting lorries. The stones were tagged and numbered, the whole strange ritual supervised by men in suits. A few black-clothed people looked on, some with crucifixes, others crossing themselves and muttering.