The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  Leo had been silent throughout the drive, but the prospect of a fresh glass loosened him up.

  ‘The InterContinental Hotel,’ he said, pointing, ‘home to the Madonna disco, and prowling ground for the Party’s golden youth.’ A heavy bass thudding reached us, intensifying and dying down as a basement door opened and closed.

  A red Porsche sped across the square and braked hard outside the nightclub, its numberplate – NIC 1 – catching the streetlamp’s glare. A man in a white suit and a metallic blue shirt climbed out and was ushered into the hotel lobby, followed by two thin girls in silver miniskirts and shoes with heels so high their every step was a trembling defiance of gravity.

  Leo grimaced: ‘Nicu. The playboy prince. Ceauşescu’s son and heir apparent.’

  Capsia, a three-storeyed, French-style building on the corner of Calea Victoriei and Strada Edgar Quinet, was something out of fin-de-siècle Paris. The three sets of doors between the modest entrance and the resplendent dining room were like the decompression chambers of a submarine. They stopped the noise and smells and luxury from seeping out into the street, and kept the street’s hungers and deprivations from tainting the Capsia dining experience.

  Waiters in white shirts and dark green waistcoats with brass buttons fussed around tables heavy with silverware. Their uniforms were perfect, but their faces didn’t fit: sallow and ill-shaven, they were scrappy parodies of the French waiters who had, in the 1890s, brought Paris to a standstill by striking over the right to grow moustaches. Yet Bucharest too had been like this: An island of Latinity, so my guidebook said, of French manners, French style and French food. I took it out and looked up Capsia. There it was. The guidebook recommended ‘Absinthe, Cognac, Bitters or Amers, Curaçao, Grenadine, Orgeat and Sorbet’, tempering its advice to sit at the terrace and observe ‘Bucharest life in all its phases’ with the caveat: ‘Chairs placed in unpleasant proximity to the gutter should, of course, be avoided.’

  But then my guidebook, the only book about Romania I could find at home, was from 1899 and had cost ten pence from the Isle of Dogs Oxfam. Leo took it from me and stroked its tired cover, the red string of its binding hanging from the spine. ‘Dunno about the Curaçao, Grenadine, Orgeat and Sorbet,’ but the gutter’s still there. And as for Bucharest life in all its phases, well, I think I can promise you that…’

  1899 – ninety years ago. Back then Romanians who returned from France with heads full of the latest books, and bodies hung with the latest fashions were known as bonjouristes. Capsia was a relic of that era, and also its reliquary: embossed leather menus, monogrammed tablecloths and heavy silverware. Chez Capsia read the cover of the menu: Bienvenue à la gastronomie Roumaine. The décor – gold fittings, damask screens and lanky tropical plants with dusty leaves – was matched by a string quartet grinding out some Strauss. The walls were mirrors, smoky from age and minutely fractured. You felt pieces of your reflection catching in the cracks and staying there, like dirt in the grouting between tiles.

  Waiters rolled trolleys of food. At the far end of the room, a party of senior politicians was enjoying something flambéed in cognac. The blue flames spat and lit their faces from below.

  ‘There you go,’ said Leo, smiling at them sarcastically, ‘take a look: the Party has abolished want!’ They looked up and grinned, still chewing. ‘Bon appétit, comrades!’

  The Maître d’Hôte, splendidly liveried and with a wolfish face, showed us to a table at a frosted window overlooking Cercul Militar. We could see out, but no one could see in. This was the Romanian way, encapsulated in the city’s best restaurant: waiters sliced fillets of Chateaubriand with gentle strokes while in the shops beyond, unstacked shelves gleamed under twists of flypaper and the crimeless streets shouldered their burden of emptiness.

  Capsia was, Leo told me, the only place where most of what the menu promised was available. ‘That’s why it’s so short.’ He placed a packet of Kent cigarettes on the table. These were blocks of currency here, tobacco bullion; to lay them out was to signal your desire for special attention and your ability to pay for it. Leo ordered a bottle of Dealul Mare and it arrived immediately, conjured from behind the waiter’s back.

  ‘There’s a few things you’ll need to know…’ Leo begins, sloshing the wine around his mouth and swallowing it back hard. He abandons his sentence and looks me up and down for the first time: ‘You look like someone who thought they could travel light but who’s already missing his baggage.’

  I tell him I’m tired, jetlagged by far more than the two hours time difference between Romania and Britain; that I’m sitting in an improbable restaurant in the half-lit capital of a police state with a jittery drunk; that I’m here because I got a job I never applied for, after an interview I never went to; that my baggage is all I’ve got to hold on to in these unreal times.

  ‘Enough about me. Tell me something about yourself…’ Leo has said nothing about himself. ‘You were most impressive at interview. Ticked all the boxes.’

  ‘Very funny – tell me, how much of a disadvantage did not turning up put me at?’

  ‘Well, I pride myself on being able to see beyond first impressions… Professor Ionescu’s looking forward to meeting you too. We think we’ve appointed the right person for the job. Someone who’ll, er… grow into it. You’ll notice too that we’ve taken the liberty of adding BA to your name: Bachelor of Arts. A welcome present from me,’ Leo pushes a degree certificate across the table, an ornate, multiply stamped and signed piece of parchment with a blot of sealing wax and some ribbon. First Class Honours, Summa cum Laude. ‘Mind you, if you want a PhD you’ll have to pay for it like everyone else.’

  Leo shrugs and laughs – he’s already onto the next thing, ready to give me the lowdown. ‘And believe me, it’s low.’ His joke falls flat (is it a joke?), but he is undeterred. He begins the pep talk he has given many times before. Dozens of people have passed through before me, but none of them stuck it out beyond a few weeks. Only Belanger had looked as if he’d stay the course, but Leo does not talk about Belanger.

  Leo explains, Leo contextualises and embroiders. There are things to exaggerate and things to underplay. After a few months here, it will amount to the same thing: life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routine.

  Our waiter, itching with solicitousness, comes to ask ‘if all is delicious?’ Since we have not yet ordered, this is certainly a good time to enquire. His eye is on the packet of Kent on the table.

  Leo replies Da, multumesc, yes, all is very delicious.

  ‘These new-fangled ways…’ he says, ‘asking you if your food’s good, telling you to enjoy your meal. I preferred it when they slammed the grub on the table and went off scratching their arses… it’s something they’ve picked up recently from foreign television. When I first arrived in Bucharest, I came here for lunch and one of the cleaning ladies was clipping her toenails on the carpet. That was old Romania. Ah! The old days… now it’s all Hi! My name is Nicolae and I’m your waiter for the evening…’ Leo’s American accent is terrible. ‘I blame Dynasty – they’ve started showing an episode twice a week. A way of using up a quarter of the three hours of nightly TV. It’s supposed to make Romanians disgusted by capitalist excess but all it does is give lifestyle tips to the Party chiefs. Suddenly the Party shops are full of Jacuzzis and ice buckets and cocktail shakers…’

  He motions the waiter to take our order: the house speciality, ‘Pork Jewish Style,’ a dish in which a whole continent’s unthinking anti-Semitism is summarised.

  Leo eats like a toddler, cutting pieces of food with his knife and skewering them to the end of the fork with his fingers, before changing hands and loading the food into his mouth. ‘This is a country where fifty per cent of the population is watching the other fifty per cent. And then they swap over.’

  I listen to his bad jokes and already I know
they aren’t jokes at all, just ways of approaching the truth at a less painful angle, like walking sideways in the teeth of a vicious wind. I eat the food and drink the wine as Leo describes a world of suspicion and intrigue in which he is happy, stimulated, fulfilled. The place suits him, not because it resembles him but because he is so far in excess of it.

  But most of all, he loves it: ‘It’s all here, passion, intimacy, human fellowship. You just need to adapt to the circumstances,’ says Leo, ‘it’s a bit of a grey area to be honest. Actually, I might as well tell you the truth: it’s all grey area round here.’ He gestures at the world outside Capsia as if it is a correlative of the moral universe we now live in. He motions for a third bottle of Pinot Noir. I wonder if they have aspirin in Romania. Christ, I think, what a start.

  But Leo is right. He is not like the other expatriates, who exist in perpetual mistrust of their Romanian colleagues, hush their voices when they come into the room, exclude them from conversations, or socialise with them only at arm’s length, nostrils aquiver. He is someone who, for all his excess and swagger, has calibrated his behaviour to those around him, to their extraordinary circumstances and to the violence these circumstances have done to their daily lives.

  It’s a close call for Leo’s special scorn, between the Party apparatchiks who rule their people with such corruption, ineptitude and contempt, and the expats: the diplomats, businessmen and contractors who live in a compound to the west of the city, with their English pub, The Ship and Castle (‘the Shit and Hassle’) and their embassy shop. One of his riffs is to compose designer scents for them: ‘Essence of Broadstairs’, ‘Bromley Man’, ‘Stevenage: For Her’. Their parties, an endless round of cocktails and booze-ups, are ‘sometimes fun, if only for a drink and a chance to read last week’s English papers’, but the circuit as a whole is, as he puts it ‘a doppelganbang: where largely identical people fuck each other interchangeably’.

  Sitting in Capsia that night I felt two things, two sensations that seemed at odds, but which took me to extremes of myself: a sense of the world closing in, tightening up, an almost physical sensation of claustration; and something else: exhilaration, a feeling for the possible, something expanding around me as I looked out at that empty square. It was as if the agoraphobia the new city was designed to induce, and the political system it existed to make concrete, was translating itself inwards, becoming an intensive inner space. In the way an atom could be split to open out a limitless vista of inverted energy, so now, in the midst of constraint and limitation, my life seemed full of possibility.

  The first thing I learned, and I learned it from Leo, was to separate people from what they did. People existed in a realm apart from their actions: this was the only way to maintain friendships in a police state. When Rodica, the faculty secretary, opened our offices for the police to search our things and copy our papers, or the landlady let them into my flat, I said nothing. I knew they knew I knew, and it changed nothing.

  For all the grotesqueness and brutality, it was normality that defined our relations: the human capacity to accommodate ourselves to our conditions, not the duplicity and corruption that underpinned them. This was also our greatest drawback – the routinisation of want, sorrow, repression, until they became invisible, until they numbed you even to atrocity.

  ‘Here’s the thing, right…’ Leo is telling me something – one of the few things – I already know about Bucharest: that it has the largest number of cinemas per head of the population in the world.

  Leo judges that I have had enough for the night. Capsia is closing – it’s nearly midnight. He wants another drink, but I need to sleep and he is merciful and drives me home, slowly this time, stopping to point places out to me. At the InterContinental, the music is still going. Further on, the porch of the Hotel Athénée Palace, a more stately establishment, flickers in the gold of limousine headlamps. Leo drives down an avenue where every other building is a cinema: Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd.

  ‘No Chaplin,’ says Leo: ‘Chaplin’s banned – The Great Dictator, see? And no Marx Brothers either. Can’t work that one out, mind. You’d have thought…’

  The Romanian censor has a fondness for those sad-faced Pierrot-types, Keaton and Lloyd, tragic/comic figures at odds with the world of things, Hamlets of the boom-and-bust West. Their comedy featured human beings crammed out of their own lives by objects in a world of surfeit, where material goods shut you out and marginalised you. Here, in Ceauşescu’s Romania, all is lack and absence, space unfilled, and the world of material surfeit as alien as the physics of Star Trek.

  I climbed the stairs, not knowing where the light switches were, following the stairwell with my fingers in the dark. Once in the flat, I found my bed. Not having bothered to lay out sheets and pillows, I lay down on the bristly peasant blanket. My mouth was dry, my head already ached. I looked about me for a pillow, found none, and lay down in the spinning room. I had leapfrogged drunkenness and landed in the middle of a hangover.

  In a new bed it is usually the unfamiliar sounds that keep you awake. Tonight it was the unfamiliar silence, a constant rustle just short of movement, tiny shifts in the stillness of Belanger’s flat. I woke up several times to piss or to drink rusty water from the bathroom tap. The phone rang, but I could not tell if I had dreamed it or if it was real. Each time I woke it had stopped. Pieces of the day gathered together in my mind: the plane, the glittering silverware of Capsia, the feral eyes of the Maître d’. I was tormented by the recollection of all the postings I might have had, all the cities I might be in: Barcelona, Budapest, Prague. Images of each, none of them visited, coalesced into one, and the place they formed in my mind was the Bucharest I had been in only a few hours: a heat-beaten brutalist maze whose walls and towers melted like sugar, and where the roots of trees erupted through the pavements.

  I slept late and woke in sunlight so hot the blood bubbled inside my eyelids. My first morning was given over to paperwork at the Ministry of the Interior. The building dominated a roundabout large enough to outscale even the cranes and diggers that stalked the city’s streets like Meccano monsters. A few old buildings stood across the way, precarious for all their seniority. Were their foundations already tingling with intimations of demolition? In a few months they would be gone. From the outside, the ministry was boxy and grey, its only ornament a stucco Party crest. As an interior space, it was barely comprehensible. I remembered those posters by Escher that decorated student walls: physically impossible architecture and abyssal interiors; staircases that tapered into a void, or twisted back into themselves; doors that opened onto doors; balconies that overlooked the inside of another room that gave onto a balcony that overlooked the inside of another room…There were vast desks with nothing on them except for telephones, ashtrays and blank paper; voices loud enough to startle but too faint to understand; unattributable footsteps that got closer but never materialised into presence, then sudden arrivals which made no sound. The rustle of unseen activity was everywhere, like the scratching of insects in darkness. Kafka’s The Castle came to mind, a book I had not read but that fell into that category of literature that culture reads on your behalf and deposits somewhere inside you. So I imagined Kafka’s castle.

  After an hour’s wait, a man appeared, blinking and smelling of basements. I filled in the forms, leaving only the ‘Next of kin’ box empty. I had looked forward to the ceremony of leaving it blank, the cleanness of it. ‘No kin,’ I said, ‘no next’; but he insisted I write something. There were no blank forms in this country. I wrote Leo’s name.

  My photo was affixed to a small card and stamped: my pass to Bucharest’s diplomatic shops, special petrol stations and foreigners’ clubs.

  Outside, clouds of dust billowed from roadworks across the avenue where men worked without helmets, shirtless in tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops. Soldiers sat and smoked on the kerbside, rifles across their knees, beside black vans with barred windows.

  Militia were stationed ever
y twenty yards. Last night they had looked sinister and immaterial, restless shades patrolling a missing population. Now they stood and swayed in the heat, badly dressed and bored and serving not as watchers but as reminders of a watchfulness beyond. As I walked, I sensed what was missing. No music came from any houses or shops; no radio, no one whistling or singing; there was nowhere to stop for a coffee or something to eat. No one stood about and talked and those who walked did so alone. The school playgrounds emitted no noise. A newspaper kiosk sold a brown drink called ‘Rocola’ – Romanian cola – cigarettes, and grey-green stubs of lottery tickets. It was hard to imagine what the prizes were.

  Doubling back past my flat, I noticed a commotion. Drawing level with the crowd, I saw a building that gave away so little about itself that I had not seen it despite passing it three times already. Like Capsia, its windows were of frosted glass. This place too served the Party, I realised eventually: it was their discreet, hi-tech clinic, where the bosses and their families went for everything from abortions and gout to heart surgery and chemotherapy. Fronted by forceful iron gates, its marble steps led to a porch with a glass roof, elegant but inconspicuous. Drawn up in front were Party ambulances, white Mercedes estates with red stripes and blue revolving beacons.