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 were 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 smelled 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 scrutinised. 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 smelled 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 h
er 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 innocent. 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 scrutinised 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.
Lurking on the threshold she became afraid, unable to enter or leave the apartment. There was no sound from the rest of the building, nothing stirring in the street. She couldn’t even hear the sluicing of the drains. The flat smelled bad. Still she couldn’t see anything, though her eyes had had time to adjust.
Having come so far, across borders real and imaginary, she couldn’t just walk away. Something—maybe the same determination that helped her escape from the country in the first place—carried her into the apartment. She felt her way along the wall beyond the light switch. The plaster was clammy beneath her right hand. She moved slowly forward, her left arm extended in front of her. Suddenly the wall disappeared. She had reached an open doorway and peered through. Illumination from outside squeezed through cracks between boards nailed across the window frame. Three or four faint rods of light divined the room’s secrets: a split mattress, stuffing and springs extruded, a smashed table, and an unresolvable jigsaw of broken glass.
A soft clunk came from somewhere behind her.
She froze and caught her breath. It was probably a bird trapped under the roof, or a rat. Or a man. A Securitate agent in hiding. A desperate man with nothing to lose.
She strained her ears for any kind of noise. The streets were as quiet as death. Then, as light as feathers falling on snow, she heard a pattering of tiny clawed feet.
Rats. She didn’t mind rats. She preferred them to men.
***
There was no point staying at the apartment. Her brother was obviously long gone and without light she could neither search for clues to his whereabouts, nor clear a space to sleep. Gingerly she picked her way out of the apartment and down to street level. There was no one about. She crossed the street and walked to its end. There she turned right and headed in what she hoped was the direction of the city centre.
She was strangely comforted by the slushing of the drains when she noticed the noise had returned. There were passersby too. Some turned ostentatiously to watch her as she passed; others tended more to the shadows away from the piss-yellow streetlamps. A hotel sign flickered and buzzed. She asked for a single room. The assistant manager gave her forms to fill out and, after a brief, mumbled phone conversation, a key. She trudged up the stairs to the second floor and peered at the numbers on the doors, looking for 25. The lighting was meagre: every other bulb had been removed and those remaining leached no more than twenty watts of soupy ochre. She twisted the key and closed the door behind her. Only when she was confident no one had followed to listen outside the door did she begin to undress. She dropped her sweater on a plain wooden chair by the window. The moon was almost full. She beheld her image in a cracked mirror as she pulled off her shirt and unfastened her underwear. The moonlight fell on her pale body like a caul, making the number branded on her shoulder stand out: 20363.
She climbed into bed and hugged the blankets about her. She was trying to deny the regret she felt at coming back. Though the window was closed she could hear shuffling footsteps in the street. Within half-an-hour they had completely died away. She was drowsy and her limbs ached.
A sound outside her door made her jump and tingle with fright. She had heard footsteps. She listened but heard nothing. Maybe she’d dreamed it. Then, quite distinctly, she heard footsteps coming along the corridor, slowing down as they approached her room. Another set of footsteps came from the opposite direction and followed the same pattern. Voices muttered unintelligibly and were raised slightly as if in disagreement.
Suddenly the door rattled in its frame. The handle twisted and turned. A weight was pressed against it from outside and Daniela heard wood splinter.
They were getting in and she couldn’t move: the blankets had pinioned her to the bed. She thrashed and grunted.
A long craaaack from the door.
She screamed.
And woke up, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear.
There was no sound in or outside her room. The hotel was as quiet as a morgue. She curled up into a ball underneath the bedclothes and tried to relax.
She was walking through the city again. Along nondescript streets battle-scarred from the revolution. With no aim in mind she just kept on walking. One street blended into another. She turned corners without being aware of changing direction. Her sense of smell, however, was active. The city stank of the drains which gurgled beneath the streets. And the smell was getting stronger. She walked on past darkened windows and barricaded doorways. The stench wafted up the street towards her in waves. At the end of the street she turned left into a wide boulevard as empty as it would have been in the early hours of the morning even though the sky was afternoon-bright. The boulevard broadened before her. A soft, persistent thrum could be felt beneath he
r feet. The old tenements had disappeared and been replaced by new buildings, huge and bland. She passed over a manhole cover and heard the rushing of something beneath. It smelled like sewage but sounded much thicker, almost corporeal. She wondered what vermin might be crawling around beneath the city.
She left the apartment blocks behind. In the middle of the boulevard now were fountains constructed out of plaster and false marble, and tall streetlamps twisted like grappling irons. These distractions melted away and she was suddenly engulfed by the stench of the drains. Like the sewage outfall pipes at Constanta, the smell reminded her also of the sea.
The boulevard had become a vast expanse stretching ahead of her to some kind of reef raised above it.
Then, in a flash, she saw the water. The entire boulevard between where she stood and the mysterious reef was covered with water. She stepped back in alarm for it was filthy water.
There was a haze above it which may have been steam or putrescence rising from the water. It was like a vast sea clogged with human issue. The stench became so bad she retched dryly. The reef shimmered in the haze and appeared about to reform its questionable geometry. Then it was solid again and peculiarly ugly and threatening, as before. If it was formed of rock, the surface was scored with holes and tunnels, like a maze. She wondered what foul creatures inhabited such a terrible place. The thought struck her that it might be a huge encrustation of waste fashioned by the tides into a rocky reef.
She noticed her legs were carrying her forward into the polluted shallows and screamed and screamed and screamed... until she woke up.
She sat up, her head throbbing from the horror of the dream and the din of her terror. Her screams echoed like ghosts on a tape recorder. Otherwise the hotel was quiet. No one came running to restrain the mad woman. Between two rags of curtains the morning fell into the room like a slab of unwashed concrete.
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