The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  Veronica was not to be consoled. At the time, so early on her first day in a new country, she had become very unhappy and wanted this uninvited man to leave. Nicolae too could not see any reason to continue the conversation, except that this Alexandru Ionescu did not act like any police he had ever known. He did not seem concerned to prove to Nicolae that he was in charge, or that he was as smart as anyone else.

  Underneath his genuine distress at having made a startling admission, he seemed, simply, very happy, like a child is happy. He watched young Dragos struggle to eat one of those bad cookies and laughed at the expressions on his little face. He looked around the room and out the window at Montreal, rubbed his moustache and said things like “fantastic; is it not fantastic?” while the wary family sat at the small table, looking at him, waiting for things to turn worse and wondering why they hadn’t turned worse already.

  It occurred to Nicolae that had he wanted to, this Alexandru Ionescu could have broken their spirits completely as soon as he entered the room, but he did not seem to want their spirits broken. In fact, it seemed this man had decided it was his job to make sure their spirits remained intact. As well, Nicolae could not ignore the fact that a Romanian Securitate in Canada simply cannot have the same powers as in Bucharest, and that in fact, if Nicolae had wanted to make trouble for this Ionescu, he may very easily have done so. Former Securitate, as this man claimed to be, were not generally in the habit of admitting to their past profession. It was the kind of history one generally wished to bury. For this man to make his admission to Nicolae was, as far as he could tell, a form of confession, not intimidation. Where Veronica’s well-trained nose smelled trouble, Nicolae sensed only pathos. Ionescu saw this understanding cross Nicolae’s face and continued his explanations.

  Ionescu had worked for the state police in Bucharest since his days as a student. He had been recruited secretly at the university—this was one way the state kept track of the goings-on of so-called radical student activities—and he had been a very willing and enthusiastic recruit. As a young man he proudly infiltrated and then destroyed numerous secret networks just like Nicolae’s own banned literature network, sending a small but significant number of his fellow students to jail for four years here and five years there. The number of his victims grew so significant that his presence at the university quickly became ineffective.

  Students would begin to instinctively avoid these fellows, smelling prison on their clothes. Eventually, these agents would disappear from the university, pulled in by their police masters and reassigned to a place they could once again be effective. And then, of course, students like Nicolae were in worse trouble, because without the obvious mole, they had to wonder who the new well-hidden agent was. They were more anxious without these operatives around than they had been with them in plain view.

  Ionescu told the Petrescu family all about himself freely, though often he stopped his story to repeat an apology. It seemed to be an apology he had been developing within himself for a very long time, and to Nicolae’s well-trained ear it contained a clear tone of sincerity. Ionescu said, “Please allow me to tell you about my former self, and so reveal my great shame again to the world,” and sometimes, in the middle of his story he would just stop, rub the tabletop lightly with his knuckles and say “my great shame, my great shame.” Listening to this repeated mea culpa, Nicolae understood his first morning in Montreal was becoming extraordinary, and he began to enjoy himself.

  Pulled from the university, Ionescu was sent for surveillance training in Timisoara, where he spent two years becoming the kind of secret police most feared in Romania. He became an invisible man. And when he said the words “invisible man” to Nicolae, the mystery of his face disappeared. In an instant, Nicolae understood the strange familiarity of his presence, how his body seemed to fit into the picture of the world as seen from Nicolae’s eyes. Here was the man who had haunted him the last five or so years of his life in Bucharest. No longer the apparition on the periphery, here he was right in front of Nicolae, across a table in Montreal now, eating cookies with his family. It was a thunderous realization, one that made Nicolae leave his chair and back away from the table.

  “You must understand,” Ionescu said, rubbing his moustache, “with you it was always just play. I did not detect in you any real threat to the state. In my job, you develop a very dependable sense for these things. But I was a man who followed the orders handed down to me. I could question the logic of these orders in my mind, but not openly to my superiors. For some reason, they were worried about you, especially after you applied for a visa, but for me, I could tell you were not interested in counter-revolution. When you spent hours in the library of the American Embassy, it was just to read books from another culture. That is all, am I right? You simply love to read books. I watched you read so many books, Nicolae.”

  Ionescu was assigned to Nicolae, not in the way the other two fellows were assigned to him. Those Securitate were to make themselves known to Nicolae, to appear to him as police, to look menacing, and to occasionally invite him for a discussion at the station. Nicolae was to know these men when he spotted them, and to feel the weight of their oppression on him at all times. But there were three agents on Nicolae, not two, and Ionescu was the invisible man. It was Ionescu who let the other two agents know where Nicolae would be and who he’d be with. Ionescu gave them the information that allowed them to ask Nicolae such pointed questions. He was the invisible man who watched Nicolae eating plum tarts.

  Ionescu was with him all day, every day. Nicolae was his job for over five years. He was to follow him through Bucharest, track his movements, anticipate any odd changes in routine, make note of his social circle, flag friends of his who were also worthy of individual surveillance. He was to follow Nicolae on his vacations and business trips especially, because it was on these disruptions of normal routine that most counter-revolutionaries did their real business. He was to do all of this without being detected.

  “Once, Nicolae, I served you and your friends beer for an entire evening,” Ionescu confessed, in Montreal, smiling with cookie crumbs in his moustache, “from behind the bar at that little tavern in Brasov. You were there for a conference, you remember. Some conference, Miki. How you can concentrate on work when you are throwing up half the morning I do not know, but it was all very entertaining for me. You see, it was a matter of playing for me, a matter of being able to look you straight in the eye as I handed you a stein of beer, to smile and know you had been fooled again. Fooled by me. And you, with your foolishness and gamesmanship that I admired so much. To be able to fool you was the greatest achievement.”

  Ionescu sat up straight at the table, smoothed his moustache and tried to calm the nervous tapping of his fingers on the tabletop.

  “Nicolae,” he said, a trembling of respect in his voice, “Mrs. Petrescu-Nicolae and the little sir, you have no reason to trust me, I know, but I wish to say to you that I am no longer a member of the security police of the Socialist Republic of Romania. You have nothing to fear from my presence here in your little room, just as you, Nicolae, never really had anything to fear from me in Romania.

  “If you were going to practise counter-revolution in Romania, you had me completely fooled. You know, sir, you and all your friends would read Kafka, you would pass these banned books between you. You would smuggle in writings by that rogue Havel in Czechoslovakia, you would listen to your tapes of Cescu broadcasting on VOA. But what you did not realize is that your oppressors were reading the same things. How do you suppose such writing becomes banned? In so many ways, Nicolae, during those five years, you were a teacher to me. I would slip your books out of their hiding spots when I knew I had a day or two before a pickup. I would read what you read. In Romania, I began my job by thinking of you as a mark, as my target, yet by the time you left for Israel, I had come to think of you as a brother in absurdity. So, if you please, all of you, I am here in this room as a friend, and as someone seeking forgiveness and a
new life of my own.”

  So formal, so dramatic. His speech was in the exact tone Nicolae had come to expect from a member of the ruling party proclaiming some important truth about the great socialist revolution, but the words were all wrong for who he was. He was being sincere about the wrong sentiments for a man like him. He was being, for him, dangerously honest. Nicolae and Veronica heard the new and strange tone behind what he was saying, and it made them more nervous still. What an entirely absurd land they had found if it could turn an Ionescu from what he was to what he now appeared to actually be.

  “It was the watching of you, in fact,” Ionescu continued, “that made it possible for me to be here today, I mean in my own head possible. I cannot say you convinced me of anything about our former country. I’m not really sure I ever needed convincing. Police work was a job to me. The job I was best at, and it had very little, I think, to do with politics or ideology. My great shame, my very great shame.

  “I was good at following, good at reporting what I saw, very good at disappearing into a crowd and pretending not to be who I am. I see you are thinking I am probably still very good at pretending, and that is why you don’t trust me. Fair enough. You should not trust me, but maybe you should trust where it is you are. This is no longer Bucharest. I have no authority here. If you wish, you can tell me to leave and according to the law of this country, I must leave. All I mean to say about my being here now, in Montreal, is that it seemed to me if you were so convinced there was a better life for yourself outside Romania, then the world outside Romania was not without interest to me.

  “I admired you, Nicolae. Admired your mind, and the way you enjoyed your life. It is not logical that someone like you would take his family into a mistake. I was happy enough in Romania, but after you left, suddenly I understood that there was also something not in Romania. After your departure at the airport—did you see me there, Nicolae, selling flowers in the terminal?—the world was no longer small enough to fit within the borders of one small country.

  “I don’t think I would have left Romania, myself,” Ionescu continued, “but for the next man I was assigned to. Such a dull, stupid man. He was a writer, this fellow, and he was a different sort altogether. I think perhaps he really was involved in counter-revolution. In half a year, I was able to report at least a dozen secret meetings with others under high suspicion. This man took me to Yugoslavia, and all the way to very near the border with Trieste. You and I understand what it means to be near the border with Trieste.”

  Ionescu mentioned the writer’s name and Nicolae laughed. This poor writer, Stihi, must have been the unluckiest man in Romania. He was universally despised by the young intelligentsia as a mouse of the Party, his writings ridiculed and parodied in the underground alternative press, and somehow also he managed to attract the attention of the security police. This poor Stihi couldn’t win.

  “Stihi was invited to a conference of socialist writers in Belgrade,” Ionescu explained. “You understand, the usual, ‘cooperation between sister republics, for the good of the worldwide revolution’ and etcetera. Whatever he must put down on his visa application—and of course officially, he was a member of the Party and above reproach, so such a trip would not be unusual for him. He was given the visa without problem, but he didn’t realize there was a ghost on his trail. I was sent to Belgrade with him, inside his pocket. My God these writers, Nicolae, how they can talk the shit in a bar. Excuse me, young sir. How they can stroke themselves and love themselves and lick themselves all over with their tongues, each one in turn while the others listen and try to think only of their own superiority.”

  “Those unending evenings listening to self-congratulation and petulant competitiveness. How I missed you and your gang on those evenings in Belgrade. How I longed for someone to accidentally light the tablecloth on fire, or pretend to the waitress that they were officials from a Russian delegation, just to try and get free beer. There is no amusement in watching a gang of writers loving themselves in a bar. There is no life there, only the slow drip-torture of perpetual ego.”

  Nicolae was not surprised to hear this description of Stihi away on a conference. It is how he had always imagined the “Party writers” behaving. So full of themselves and their position with the ruling class. So unconcerned that their talent was being used as nothing more noble than the grease they apply to lubricate the tracks of tanks. So boring. He was not surprised by the story, but he was surprised to hear it from this Ionescu. It was at this point of his long visit that Nicolae began to feel the first true easing of his spirit. As in Romania, the greatest clue someone was a friend and not a spy of some sort was the sympathy you felt for them when they spoke unguardedly. It was perhaps a foolish way to decide things, but for Nicolae it was often the only way to extend your trust.

  “As with all conferences of this sort,” Ionescu continued, “there must be the inevitable trip to the seaside, but instead of Dubrovnik, these morons are set to go north to Koper, in the Gulf of Trieste. I am sure the appearance of this trip to Koper on the official itinerary was part of the overall suspicion surrounding the man. Why go to plain, dull Koper over beautiful Dubrovnik with its girls in bikinis, unless there is some other reason you need to be so near the Italian border? As you must know, it is impossible I’m sure even today to go to Koper without there being at least one or two invisible men on your trail. The fleshly temptations of Dubrovnik are acceptable to the Party, but the temptations of Koper are worrisome.”

  Nicolae knew at least two others who had managed to slip across that very border spot. At that time, in 1985, it was considered one of the safest crossings. He had considered it as an option for himself once during an international handball tournament, but could not bring himself to make the crossing. The thought of leaving his family behind was too much for him.

  “We were there just two days. The writers visited the beach; they walked together along the strand and no doubt talked some more about how wonderful they all were. They visited the local museum, took in some architecture and stayed, here now is the interesting part, they stayed in a hotel very near the train station. The train station, you understand. This was it, I was sure. If not Stihi, then someone in the group surely was going to make a crossing. Someone was going to slip from the hotel in the night and walk to Italy. It was possible and had been done before. So, I was a good little policeman and I went to the station to investigate the lines. I showed my papers to my comrade Yugoslavian security police officers and asked for access to walk the fences. I was assigned a young man to accompany me. You understand, there is no trust even among fellow security police.

  “It was night and we were walking the perimeter fence. My comrade officer was explaining to me, in Russian, of course, that it was not true there had been many recent crossings there. This was a lie spread throughout the socialist world to embarrass Yugoslavia, long despised by its socialist sisters for its friendly independence from the USSR. These words all in Russian, you understand. He told me that the security at the railway border point was the highest it had ever been, and the whole time he was telling me this, I was watching the approach of a very obvious hole in the fence in the darkness between two light standards. There, almost a kilometre from the station, someone had dug a small dip in the earth beneath the perimeter fence right at the point where the light disappeared in a murky greyness.

  “I pointed out the hole to my comrade, and at first he did not know how to respond. He wanted to blame it on an animal. Perhaps a dog had dug his way to Italy. For me, it was all very comical, but I contained myself and did not laugh at the poor struggling idiot comrade. Finally, my young guard gained control of himself and remembered something about procedure. But not enough about procedure, lucky for me. He should have used his radio to call for an investigative unit to come in their Jeep and fill in the hole, or even just to monitor it from afar and see who tried to use it. He should have, but instead he ordered me to stand guard at the hole while he ran back to the station t
o rally his fellows.”

  Ionescu smiled across the table at young Dragos, no longer sleepy-eyed but listening intently to the story, worried suspense on his young face. Nicolae also looked at his son and thought, “For him, this will always be just a story. That is my gift to him.” Ionescu continued.

  “A kilometre he would have to run, my young security escort. I heard his footsteps disappear in the night. Maybe I should have suspected a trap, but I didn’t. And so there I stood, in the darkness, beside a hole from Yugoslavia to Italy, from east to west. The idea that I should leave then was upon me the instant my friend took his first running step, and I believe I hesitated not from fear or indecision, but simply to savour the moment when I became completely free.

  “And I don’t mean this slippery Western idea of freedom you will hear so much about in this new land, Nicolae. I mean, in that moment, when my comrade idiot security officer ran away from me in the night, I was completely free to make a decision in a way I had never before been free. I could choose to be who I had always been, to do my job and eventually to collect my pension, or to change completely into someone I suspected I might be. People will tell you this kind of decision is always possible here in the West, but don’t believe them. It is only ever really possible when what is on the line is your blood. Your blood seeping slowly into the dust of some Yugoslavian border crossing—or for you Nicolae, your blood on the back of a chair in the Securitate offices in Bucharest, am I correct? That is when real freedom occurs. This uninvited guest arrives, this choice, bringing with him danger and the possibility of something fantastic and unknown. Then, and only then is freedom real.