A scatter of rats was busy in the corner. I tried to see what it was they were occupied with, but could not make it out: a coat draped across the floor? My eyes adjusted. It was an empty cement sack. I could hear the rats’ jaws clicking wetly. I pulled myself up on the ledge of an unfinished windowsill, stepped over Leo and crossed the room.
The bodies of two German Shepherds lay side by side. Someone had slung the cement bags over them, but blood had seeped through the dirt nearby. I prodded them with my boot – they were already stiff – and nudged the bag off. Their eyes were open, fixed on death’s middle distance. Their throats had been torn, and beneath the mess of tumbled viscera the blood had run and mixed with a small pile of cement dust. A small hard mound had formed. I kicked it, but it had already set: rust-coloured, veined with red.
‘Jesus,’ – I hadn’t heard Leo behind me. He swallowed back a retch and looked away. ‘Two militia hounds with their throats cut. Who the fuck does that?’
‘They’re not cut, Leo, look. They’ve been torn or bitten, straight through the windpipe.’
‘Let’s get out of here. These buildings are full of people living rough, gypsies, alcoholics, druggies, homeless… It’s like a shanty town, a fucking dangerous one.’
It was 4 am by the luminous hands of Leo’s watch. Outside, cranes started up and vans emptied workers along the pavements. The men were undernourished and thin, some were ill or lame, others looked like gangsters. Armed guards herded them into work details and led them off. We hung back behind a cement lorry until they had cleared.
‘Prisoners,’ Leo said. ‘Prison vans. Army numberplates, probably from the Jilava prison… Look: yellow trousers and shirts, numbers on the back and chest. Forced labour. These buildings are all forced labour now.’
‘I’m not sure I see,’ I said to Leo once we were back in the car, ‘the point of that unpleasant interlude.’
‘You will,’ Leo checked his mirrors and started up the car, ‘you will.’
Ten
There was nothing formal about my relationship with Cilea: I rarely knew where she was, who she saw, whether she even studied except in the nominal sense of being listed as a university music student.
As for my jealousy, which ranged over the blankness of the time she spent away from me and invented ever more painfully sluttish and disloyal ways for her to fill it, I kept it to myself. Admitting I had once followed her home and watched her flat, and that because I had found nothing suspicious I had followed her again the next time and the time after, would have been to give in both to her and to my jealousy. Besides, the jealous one always at some level wants to be proved right. Investing in suspicion is like investing in anything: after a while you want to see a return.
Cilea and I met by appointment only, and when I was not with her I heard nothing of her and never encountered her in any of our usual haunts. Sometimes I would arrive somewhere and the sense that she had only just left would overpower me – I would run out into the street in the hope of seeing her, or catching sight of her car, or (it would have been enough) just smelling her smell.
Then one day she told me her father wished to meet me. Wished: so much more elegant, and at the same time so much more authoritative, than a mere wanted. I was delighted. I thought it made our relationship official, made us a couple. We attended events together, I accompanied her to the theatre or to concerts, and when she sang in the Atheneum choir’s summer concert she booked me a seat in the front row reserved for family members. I still never saw her outside the times she arranged with me; there was never any question of dropping in on Cilea unannounced, and when I was not with her I might as well have been living in a different city since I never bumped into her or met mutual friends (we had none anyway). But I had become comfortable with how little I knew about any of them: Cilea, Trofim, Ionescu, even Leo. Partial knowledge was a condition of every friendship here.
‘You going to ask him for her hand over brandy and cigars?’ Leo mocked when I announced I would be meeting her father, ‘tell him what a fine prospect you are? Orphan, drop-out, what was it she called you? Gap-year deprivation tourist? Don’t delude yourself: he knows exactly who you are, he’s probably got your file, just wants you to know he’s got his eye on you.’
When the phone rang one mid-June morning at 4 am, I answered as if it was a perfectly normal occurrence. Crossing the hallway I stepped over a suitcase that stood by the front door. I was due for my first trip back to the UK next month, my first ‘home visit’. I had packed my small luggage ten days early and left it here, hoping it might accommodate me to the dread I felt at having to return. The voice on the phone was hesitant, heavily Romanian-accented but with an American intonation. Everyone around here picked up their English from 1970s US cop shows, and my students could call each other ‘punk’ and ‘dork’ and feelingly throw out phrases like ‘This was a decent neighbourhood once,’ long before they had absorbed the niceties of everyday conversation.
‘Hi… Dr Belanger?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Then can I ask who is speaking?’
‘Can I?’
There was no answer. For a moment the line went quiet, as if the phone was being held to the chest or the speaker had his hand over the receiver and was consulting with someone at his side. It was an amateurish moment, my interlocutor not sure what to do next, though he had spent nearly three months working up the courage to speak. I knew it was the same caller – our silences being as unique as our singular pitch or our trademark turns of phrase. By now I was attuned to the way he hovered on the edge of speech, the sound of his breath drawing in, the lungs’ faint wheeze.
The line went dead. It was not what I was expecting now that we had finally made contact, but I shrugged and turned back to the bedroom: it was progress. I looked at Cilea asleep. She had her back to me, but I could see her in the full-length mirror propped against the wall. The room was silver with moonlight, and the rucked-up sheets she had kicked off had the grey shine of oystershell. I climbed in, kissed her on the small of her back, inhaling last night’s sex. I touched the inside of her thigh and she wriggled sleepily back onto me.
Suddenly I knew what was happening. I jumped out of bed, went to the balcony, and looked out across the street. A few yards down, I saw the phonebox. In some situations, paranoia is no more than an ability to read life’s hidden signals, no longer an unhappy fantasy but a sixth sense. I knew immediately that the call had come from there, and that I was meant to know it.
I pulled on some clothes and crossed the road. At the kiosk, the phonebook chained to the counter lay open at the name of a large supermarket in town. A few pages further on a bookmark made out of the side of a cigarette packet was inserted at a page where the first digit of an address, the 5, had been circled. If that was code, it was easy enough to break.
Thus it was that at 5 pm that afternoon, without telling Cilea or Leo, I stood in the lobby of the fittingly named Monocom supermarket, a shop where all there was came in one variety. Among the greyly lingering customers, a young man stood out: shoulder-length red hair, faded scarlet shirt and light-brown, fitted leather jacket. He was examining a Russian camera, pointing it at me and laughing. He turned the lens, focusing in and out, pretending to take pictures. The camera covered his eyes and nose, but the broad smile beneath it was unnerving: genuine, unfeigned, without ulterior meaning. That alone was suspicious. I stood and watched, waiting for him – if it was him I had come to see – to make his move.
Slender and bearded, he looked too thin to be among the system’s winners, yet there was no obvious sense in which he was one of its losers either. In a world of conformity, he seemed to know just how different he could be without paying the price. He had a kind of measured swagger; stood out, but not in a way that invited suspicion. He was well groomed, wore John Lennon glasses and was smoking a roll-up. Over his shirt, open at the neck, his 1960’s leather jacket was scuffed but elegant. His jeans were flared and his tall Cossack-styl
e boots looked at once military and bohemian. He put the camera back on the counter and darted out of the shop.
His thin, quick body provided all the colour in the street: following him was like tracking a fox in the snow, the russet streak zigzagging in and out of doorways, always pushing on to the next turn, the next set of traffic lights. It was rush hour, and though there were few cars, the pavements were thick with people and the trams and buses were nose to tail on Calea Victoriei. Somewhere, a few blocks away, the sirens sounded for The Motorcade but he pressed on, past the ministries and embassies, towards Lipscani.
Lipscani reminded me of old photographs of pre-Haussmann Paris: leaning houses of different builds and different heights, a teetering slum-jostle of styles and materials. A hundred years ago it had been a perfect setting for rumour, disease and crime; now it was a place of escapism, surprise, flânerie. The cobbles were uneven and some roads were without pavements. Private cars were scarce, and the trams wound their way through the backstreets, sparks flying from their wheels.
The place was rough, chaotic, apparently unpoliced though always watched; thick with informers gone native, natives turned informer, or those – most of the people I knew – who oscillated between the two. It was also the gypsy area of town. Its spectacular old buildings had been left to decay and filled with Romany who helped the government along by running their homes down in preparation for Lipscani’s eventual demolition, scheduled for 1990: campfires in living rooms, horses stabled in the hallways, walls knocked down and the roof-lead sold off.
Gypsies stood or sat soaking up the afternoon sun, eyes closed, their arms extended and palms open as if receiving a transfusion of empty hours from Time itself. The outdoor life was hardwired into them. As they went in through the tall arched doorways of their buildings they ducked instinctively even though they had several clear feet of space between the doorframe and their heads – all indoors, however spacious, was a confinement, a shrinking, an unnatural inward turn. They left their homes at 5 am and returned after midnight. The day was their living room, their place of work, their habitat; and the homes they had been given merely places to store the body in the dark hours.
The boy was slowing down; people stopped him and exchanged greetings, or waved at him from across the street. This was his territory. At a small art gallery there was a launch or opening of some kind. Judging from the nervous look of the guests, it was unsanctioned by the Union of Artists – such gatherings could be broken up at any time. If you were lucky, the local informer would wait until he or she had eaten and drunk enough before calling the Securitate and the party would at least have time to catch light. There was Leo with a plastic cup of red wine, talking with Ioana and Petrescu the icon-painter. Petrescu caught my eye over Leo’s shoulder, but if he saw me he showed no sign of it. I recognised Campanu the pathologist, smoking and wearing a cream jacket over his blue morgue shirt. In the window hung a large painting of workers sharing bread and milk against a background of gleaming cogs and pulleys.
I had lost sight of the boy in the scarlet shirt. A few yards away, a cast-iron tavern sign of a Carpathian Boar hung from the lintel of a doorway. I had to stoop to go in, and the door was stiff and ungiving. I found myself in a noisy crowded bar so low that if I stood on tiptoe I could scrape my head on the liver-coloured ceiling. Just below it, covering the faces of the drinkers like mountain mist, hung a layer of smoke. This was no mist, but the fug of Carpati, the cigarette that shredded your lungs with every gasp: you didn’t inhale Carpati smoke, you chewed it. Everyone, young or old, looked bohemian here: students sat with pensioners, workers with hippies. There were even – a rare sight – gypsies at tables with non-gypsies.
‘You have failed Securitate surveillance training – please report to your commanding officer!’
I turned. The boy was there, holding two frothing beers, enjoying his cloak-and-dagger moment. We shook hands and looked each other up and down. I liked him straight away, that mix of mischief and serenity. He offered me a roll-up from a dented pewter case: Turkish tobacco and a leavening of good, sweet dope. It was what Leo called an ‘office hours’ measure, just enough to give the bottom of the day a gentle lift without spinning it all into orbit. His smile was open, full of warmth and amusement. We looked at each other grinning stupidly, stranger to stranger.
His fingernails were long and clean. He noticed me noticing, and ran his fingers over the strings of an air guitar. In his top pocket was a Walkman, rare in Romania and new even in the West. He pulled a cassette tape from an inside pocket: ‘John Cale – Paris 1919,’ he said. ‘You like?’
I liked. ‘I am sorry,’ he said after we had both taken long slugs from our beers. ‘I am Petre and I am happy to meet you.’
The lights dimmed and a small jazz band started up in one corner of the room. ‘You like jazz?’ His English, like my own beginners’ Romanian, began with basic likes and dislikes. I knew the form: speakers laid claim to extreme opinions about subjects they cared little about just to keep the conversation turning over. I followed protocol and expressed a deep, lifelong love of jazz. Petre nodded, satisfied, and waved to a punky girl at the bar wearing a Mrs Thatcher T-shirt. It was a startling thing to see, but unlike at home it could not immediately be construed as ironic.
Petre was a music student at the university and a classical guitarist. He told me about his next concert in the Atheneum – Bach, Villa-Lobos and Federico Mompou. Did I want to come? He handed me a pair of tickets from a book of stubs. But I soon learned that Petre was also lead guitarist in Fakir, a semi-underground rock band whose concerts were tolerated by the authorities but closely monitored. Leo had played me a bootleg tape of theirs. All their recordings were bootleg: since they were not members of the Musicians’ Union they had no access to studios or concert venues. I looked him over: his skin was smooth, his hands soft and delicate; his hair shone, his well-worn clothes were clean. A heavy celtic cross hung over his shirt.
‘Petre!’ called out the double-bassist, a stylish young man in a 1950s three-piece suit and Teddy Boy haircut, the retro’s retro.
‘You will stay here. I see you after. We can talk.’ Petre rose and joined the band.
I sat drinking beer and listening to a medley of silky jazz impromptus. After a forty-minute jamming session Petre returned to our table, his hair matted with sweat, his shirt sticking to his back.
By the time we left the tavern it was ten o’clock. Lipscani was the only part of Bucharest where there was an organic life after 9 pm. The hotels and bars in the town centre were either tourist traps or snazzy playpens for party apparatchiks. Here there was street life: drunks tightrope-walking kerbs, beer gardens spilling onto the pavements. People were buying and selling things that you couldn’t see and that maybe didn’t exist – it was the transactions that counted, not the goods. Transactions symbolised life, subversion, rebellion: flurries of haggling around absent commodities. Gypsy music came from the courtyards or open windows. The BBC World Service was loud but impossible to locate in the jumble of sidestreets: the pips dwindling into Lillibulero, and then the soothing voice of Bush House. I thought of the building, there on the Strand, of what London must be like now: the Tubes full and pubs heaving, the neon letters trademarking the air, the disposable income evaporating in the London night.
This was the time I liked best in Bucharest: people out for their last walks, the few cafés still open crossing into the indoor twilight of late drinking. Moths with frayed wings pounded against mosquito nets and as the night cooled, the day’s smells thickened and separated out – pollen, burned fuel, late baking, cigarettes, all distinct now in the prickly air. There was something about the way Petre breathed it all in, eyes closed, like a connoisseur savouring the fumes of a good bottle, that reminded me of Leo.
I asked where he lived, but there was no answer. We walked on, though I was now comprehensively lost. We came to a small square where Petre sat down and crafted himself another cigarette. I asked again, and he mentioned a n
ew estate beyond the city circle. The buses and trams had stopped, and taxis were unlikely to go that far out now. Where would he sleep? He gave an empty-handed gesture of unconcern. ‘It is warm.’
I was meant to meet Cilea in my flat. I toyed with asking Petre back, but knew this was exactly the wrong thing to do. Besides, he had still not said what he wanted from me. Then I thought: they were both music students at the university… perhaps they knew each other?
‘You are asking yourself why I have made contact with you?’
‘I suppose I am, yes. I assume it’s something to do with my meeting Vintul the other day.’
‘Something to do, yes.’
‘You want to get out?’
He laughed. ‘This is my country. Why should I leave? I would not be me if I left and never returned, and that is why I stay in spite of everything… how hard it is to live, to make a good life. But I want to travel. I want to go to Spain, to Britain, to Canada, to the US…. It is difficult to go, but right now it would be impossible to come back. I want to come back. So I will not leave. Maybe that means I will never leave. But my friends, many of them, they want to go. Many have already left. I help them, and you can help us.’
‘What about you? Is it freedom you want too?’
The crudity of my question disappointed him. ‘I know freedom. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we do not know what it is. I have had freedom, but I have not lived in freedom. But I can wait because I know I will never be free unless I am free in my own country. What freedom have you known?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I wasn’t. I had a sense of freedom in the abstract, but there were few concrete examples of my having really used my allotted portion. Was that perhaps itself evidence of freedom – that I had never had to measure and quantify it, that I had never had to answer for what I had done with it? I decided to stick to specifics: ‘This is about you not me. I am free, I can vote and say what I want and travel where I like…’
The Last Hundred Days Page 12