At some indeterminate stage in her dreams, Daniela became aware of natural light. Early-morning light the colour of dishwater was smeared across the window, streaked by thicker cloud as if applied unevenly with a cloth. Two of her fellow passengers were already awake: a stubble-faced old man stuffed into a shabby trilby, and a sallow boy no more than eighteen or nineteen. Their complexions reflected the mood of the morning and none of the revolutionary zeal she had expected.
Once she had woken up there was no going back to sleep. For one thing the dreams were too disturbing. She peered through the grimy glass hoping to see some feature of the presumed landscape loom out of the fog. But nothing emerged. The longer she stared the more she became dissociated from reality. Maybe Romania had vanished, replaced by this almost sea-like fog. She half expected to glimpse the flick of a fish’s tail or to meet the mournful gaze of some fantastic creature of the deep.
She must have drifted back to sleep because all of a sudden she was looking out of the window at the outskirts of Bucharest. The fog had lifted but still hung above the rooftops, below the sky; more a mist now than a fog, but one polluted by soot and grit.
The train passed over a level crossing and Daniela caught sight of figures loitering at various points down a dusty street. One of the Dacias parked in a long row beneath the skeletal trees was a charred wreck. She supposed there would be the odd one or two scattered about.
But the train rattled on deeper into the city. She’d only been away a year and in that time things had changed. In the last decade most of the city’s old buildings, churches first and foremost, had come under threat of demolition. It was no idle threat. The train passed a section of waste ground peppered with weeds that Daniela realised with a pang had been the site of one of the city’s oldest Catholic churches.
With a jolt from the locomotive as it braked round the last curve, the line of dirty green carriages visible ahead through the window see-sawed into the Gara de Nord.
The station was the same as she remembered it. As ugly as sin itself. Eager for impressions she walked out into the streets. They smelt the same as they had before, of spoilt and rotten fruit. Since fresh fruit had rarely been freely available in Bucharest, Daniela had always believed the drains to be responsible. It depressed her that the revolution had not left its own scent on the city. She looked for signs of the fighting she’d watched on the television news. There were potholes in the middle of the road, but there always had been. The people she passed looked much as they had done before: unhealthy, paranoid, defeated. There was none of the joy of liberation in their eyes, no spark of defiance. The burden appeared not to have been lifted from them.
She wandered bewildered away from the railway station and its satellite cheap hotels and prostitutes. One street crossed another and turned into a new one. But they all looked the same. She passed a lot of broken and boarded-up windows. Doors were tightly locked and where shutters protected windows still further, they were snapped shut.
When she stopped walking she fancied she could hear movement behind the sightless windows and obstructed doorways. But the susurrant nature of the noise she heard put her more in mind, once more, of the city’s drains.
On the corner was a dingy grocery store. She peered inside but could make nothing out of the huge shadows and shafts of dusty reflected light. Behind her the street whispered and she felt unaccountably anxious. She looked round. Three young children stood over a mound of fur on the opposite corner. Daniela looked closer and saw that the animal was a dog. Fixed in a rictus, its jaw was caked with blood and its legs stuck out stiffly. The children stared at Daniela with wide but uncurious eyes. One of them kicked the dog’s belly with a bare foot. The dead animal scraped against the gritty pavement. Daniela hurried into the grocery store.
She became instantly lost in a maze of shelves. They held nothing but dust so thick it looked like stacks of dead mice. She turned into a dead end and frightened a spider. As big as a bunch of keys it clattered on to the floor and scuttled under the bottom shelf.
Sweat began to run in the dust on her forehead and her breathing became tight. She whirled round looking for the exit. An aisle looked promising, but when she turned the corner she found herself by the counter. She would have fled but a man materialised from shadows which hung like curtains and twitched.
“What do you want?” he asked her in a friendly voice. She wondered if it might be a trap.
“The shelves are empty,” she whispered hoarsely.
He pointed to a selection of pickles and preserves in jars on a shelf behind the counter. He explained that stocks were low. His manner seemed not unfriendly and Daniela felt that if she couldn’t trust him she couldn’t trust anyone in this godforsaken city.
“I’ve been away,” she said. “I saw everything on television. And now it looks the same as before.”
The man shrugged his shoulders beneath his grubby shopcoat.
“Why are people still afraid?” she demanded crossly. “The Securitate are finished, aren’t they?”
At this the man’s brows knitted and he raised a yellowed finger to his lips. They parted to release a sound which reminded her of the boarded-up windows. She noticed that the man’s finger also seemed to be pointing at the wall above his head. When she squinted through the gloom she recognised beneath trails of dusty cobwebs a photograph frame.
Daniela turned and ran. She couldn’t deny that the frame had enclosed the shiny button eyes and hamster cheeks of the executed dictator. Why hadn’t the photograph been destroyed? She collided with a shelf and coughed and spluttered when the dust flew in her face like a cloud of flies.
She was relieved to reach the door but distressed to see the three children across the street knelt down around the dog, plunging their large bony hands into its split carcass.
Weakened by her experience in the shop, Daniela felt unable to intrude on the depravity. She turned her back and at the next junction headed down the street that looked least threatening. There were still shuttered windows and patches of broken glass in the road but she began to feel reassured by certain signs. There were more shops and queues of people emerging from their doors. At an intersection she turned down a major boulevard towards the city centre.
Here the scars of civil war were plentiful. Burnt-out and overturned cars, entire tenement blocks destroyed by fire, craters in the road. Only the Intercontinental Hotel appeared untouched, where foreign journalists and newsmen would no doubt have stayed. Daniela drifted into a couple of stores. The photographs of Ceausescu had been taken down and left bleached rectangles on the wall. There was little to buy apart from the ubiquitous jars of pickled fruit and slabs of sweaty cheese.
She wandered further into the commercial district. Window-shoppers thronged the narrow lanes. Daniela couldn’t help comparing the shops and goods to those available in Belgrade. In truth, there was no comparison.
She turned her attention to the shoppers themselves. They were, for the most part, dowdy and introspective. Before the revolution, one in four citizens was reckoned to be an informer. Consequently no one spoke, making Bucharest an aural city of shuffled footsteps. Even now few words were exchanged, as if the facility had deserted the people.
Unless . . .
Unless there were still good reason to be fearful of speaking.
Daniela’s stomach flipped over. Her heart raced. The Securitate’s unofficial uniform had consisted of tracksuits and leather jackets.
All around her in the street were men dressed this way. She had got used to seeing expensive leisure wear in Belgrade and thinking nothing of those inside it. But in Bucharest these clothes meant something.
A dark, swarthy man in jeans and a leather jacket carrying a shopping bag filled with jars and potatoes approached Daniela. Her legs went elastic. He looked at her eyes as he passed and she felt her soul bristle.
Across the street a middle-aged man wearing a tracksuit stood looking in a shoe-shop window. A woman in a long black coat came out
of the shop and took his arm.
Two young men shared a joke as they sauntered down the middle of the street. At whose expense? she wondered as she eyed their leather jackets.
She couldn’t remember if there had been so many tracksuits and jackets before. But maybe they didn’t mean anything. They would be easier to get hold of after the revolution. And anyway, the Securitate had been eliminated. The National Salvation Front had seen to that.
Her head was in a whirl because she didn’t know what to believe. She recalled the thought she’d had upon waking up in the train, about the tunnels. There were tunnels under the street where she stood, and secret passages in the Central Committee Building and the People’s Palace. Was it possible that the Securitate had burrowed so deep beneath the city and into the nation’s psyche, that they had become ingrained, indelible, immortal?
The Deep Ones.
Thrown off balance by panic, she began to run up the street, skidding to a halt outside shop doorways to look in. People stopped and stared. Men in leather jackets, women wearing fur hats, young men in tracksuits. At one doorway she grabbed hold of the doorposts and hurled herself into the shop’s interior. It was a clothing store. To right and left hung cheap blouses and poor-quality jeans. Customers and staff stared open-mouthed as she dashed between the racks, brushing against the blouses and sending metal hangers spinning. She ground to a halt in a room at the back of the store furthest from the street. The carpet was reedy and worn and the floorboards sagged beneath her feet. The carpet smelt too, but the reek of leather was stronger. Around the room on rails suspended from the ceiling hung leather jackets. There were hundreds of them. In the middle of the room rails carrying tracksuits had been pushed together to squeeze in as many as possible. She caught a glimpse of a figure slipping out of the room by way of a narrow doorway between two thick curtains of leather and buckles and zip fasteners.
Her instinct was to run and grab the man from behind and force him to look at her. But she was immobilised by fear. The abundance of expensive gear should have relieved her anxiety – the inference being that this stuff was now widely available – but the effect was the reverse. She felt scrutinized. As if the jackets and cotton trousers had already been filled by the ever-watchful sharp-eared agents of the Securitate. She remembered mentioning Ceausescu’s name in a factory canteen and the entire row of tables falling silent. One out of four of her fellow workers was bending an ear for a whispered criticism, the other three too scared to air their views. A week later she was rapped across the knuckles and slapped by a supervisor for failing to meet her quota, where normally a verbal chastisement would have been expected. She never had proof that the two incidents were related. But in a country where terror and paranoia reigned, proof was irrelevant.
She didn’t need to worry any more, she told herself. Ceausescu and Elena were dead. She’d seen their bodies on television. They were the Old Ones now. They were history.
The garments surrounding her were just harmless threads inhabited by nothing more than twisted pieces of wire.
They were like shrouds enclosing ghosts.
Or swaddling clothes wrapped around newborn terrors.
The paranoia was a cancer. You thought you’d got rid of it. Then it sprang up again.
Daniela shivered and walked towards the doorway. She brushed against a jacket and the hanger jangled like the spider in the grocery store. The leather touched her cheek and she jumped away: it felt cold as a dead fish. Taking affright, she hared out of the shop.
The street was no haven. Her fellow citizens thronged the narrow streets and lanes and none could be trusted. She snaked through the queues of shoppers and escaped the commercial district for the wide boulevards where she could breathe easier. The people here were as few as the denuded trees under which they walked. Awkward adolescents in ill-fitting polyester suits stood guard in particular doorways as if the revolution had been a dream or a film made for television.
At the next intersection two police motorbikes roared into the boulevard, resounding against the canyon walls formed by massive apartment blocks. Following the police bikes came two smart black Dacias. Another escort was two seconds behind. The cavalcade gained speed, moving down the wide thoroughfare away from Daniela.
She felt an icy hand grip her insides and squeeze. Why did the country’s new leaders ride around with a police escort? The National Salvation Front was the revolution. They didn’t need protecting from the people. They were the people. She resumed her stride. Maybe they feared the Securitate like she did. With the Ceausescus dead the former secret police had nothing to lose, so might be even more dangerous than before.
The tunnels, the tunnels . . .
She imagined she could hear them susurrating in the dark labyrinth, feeling their way beneath the city, behind the façade, like grubs in a rotten apple. It smelt as bad.
She had noticed that passersby had slunk into the shadows of the buildings when the black Dacias came into view. Now they came out again like slow-witted, sightless creatures from beneath stones.
She stepped into the road and crossed to the other side. Cutting through an area of light industry she aimed for the district where she had lived, before deciding she’d had enough and hiking through the mountains south of Resita, where the frontier was traversable in the early hours of the morning. She patted her pocket and felt reassured by the bulge the keys made.
The devastation got worse as she veered south-east. Entire blocks were destroyed or the lower floors were knocked out and the upper storeys abandoned. Where people clung to their past existences, shreds of curtains were tousled by the breeze through jagged holes in the glass. A face peered down into the street. Its complexion hinted at a lifetime spent hundreds of fathoms beneath daylight. Daniela watched to see if the eyes would follow her as she passed by the building. They did not. She felt queerly light-headed and wondered if the detached aspect of the face was more than just an impression. It looked bloodless enough to have been severed, possibly weeks before.
Disappointment awaited her when she reached the building that had been hers. The upper floors had been demolished and the debris had trickled down to fill the apartments nearer the ground. Daniela had lived within four cracked, peeling walls on the third floor. She could still make out her room. It resembled a ruined tooth in which caries had festered for years.
Tears stung her eyes. She tried to knuckle them back. Instead of wanton destruction, it was a sacrifice in the name of the people. The Old Ones were dead, the Deep Ones bereft of leadership. All she had lost was a place to sleep. She took the keys from her pocket and flung them into the rubble at the base of the building. Wiping at her tears with a sleeve, she walked away, wondering glumly where to seek shelter.
At the back of her mind since returning to the city had been her brother and his apartment in the south-west quarter. It was fifteen years at least since they had seen each other and she had never visited him at home, but she had the address.
She headed back towards the city centre, wrinkling her nose at the ripe stench that blew up side roads from abandoned buildings and stagnant sewers. Among pedestrians once more she watched them slyly, but too many gibbous eyes met hers. They were observing her. She diverted her gaze to the pavement, where it existed, and the pitted road where it did not. She wondered if her clothes, acquired in Belgrade, aroused suspicion. But they were dull compared to items she could have bought.
She saw a bus and thought about crossing town in one to save time: soon it would be getting dark. It stopped at a red light and she frowned at its broken windows and dented panels. A skin of grime had been pulled tight over the whole bus. Disembodied heads bobbed behind the thick aquarium glass as it lunged away from the intersection.
Daniela shuddered at the thought of stepping into such a bus and the concertina doors flapping shut behind her like sentient accomplices of the dubious folk already on board. She would feel like a defendant confronted by her jurors and judges. Guilty until proven innocen
t. Sentenced and executed right there in court. Which, after all, was what the people had done to the Ceausescus. So now the Securitate would take their revenge. Suddenly everyone in the city was in the service of the Securitate and she was their quarry.
Another bus had pulled up at the side of the road and its doors folded back. Daniela turned and fled into the next side street. She didn’t look back, but crossed the street and turned out of it as soon as she could. At the next corner she looked behind. There was nothing to see. Just the same random patterns of broken glass and boarded-up windows, machine-gun scratches and shell craters. She kept walking in what she hoped was the right direction, but had lost heart. She glanced up cross-streets, having developed the irrational fear that the bus might be following her on a parallel track.
Before long she was completely lost and her teeth had begun to chatter with the cold. Dusk obscured the nature of everything within her field of vision. Street lighting, part of the Old Ones’ legacy, was the merest glimmer. Like a torch swung in a shuttered house, it only served to make it seem darker than it was. Daniela strained to read the name of the hundredth identical street she’d turned into. She was about to give up when the shadows smudging the letters cleared for a moment and she read: Gheorghe Street.
That was the street. It had to be.
Excitedly she dug a folded piece of paper out of her coat pocket and scrutinized it. The street name was the same.
With a lighter step she moved down the street trying to read the numbers. When she reached the right building she stepped back and gazed up at it. Nothing distinguished the building from its neighbours. The sky above the roofs was rapidly losing its colour. She ran up three flights of stairs, dodging lumps of masonry and piles of household rubbish. The door to her brother’s flat was ajar. She knocked, expecting no reply, and gently pushed the door open. It was too dark to make anything out. She flicked a light switch and nothing happened.
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