The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  I was spending more time with Petre than with Leo. Leo had started to notice, but if it hurt him he hid it well. Leo’s world of Capsia and cocktails, his fin-de-siècle Bucharest of battered luxury and threadbare high-life, had become too rarefied for me. Besides, between Trofim, Leo, Petre and Cilea I felt I was living in four different Bucharests, across four different epochs. None of them met except through me, and yet, because I kept them apart from each other, my own life didn’t even meet itself.

  I lived in crowded isolation, moving from one to the other, keeping them separate but running them in parallel: Trofim’s book, Cilea’s bed, Leo’s black market, Petre’s concerts… whatever was left over by the time I had subtracted them all from my life must, I supposed, have been myself.

  ‘There’s something… not quite real about Petre, isn’t there?’ said Leo one day, adding, ‘you know, something temporary…’ Maybe, I wondered now as I sat at Otopeni airport thinking of all I was leaving behind. Maybe. Though Petre was real enough, I knew what Leo meant. It was that unpindownable feeling that however much you knew him, however much he trusted you, there was something being kept back – not because he was hiding it but simply because there was more to him than you could take in.

  Then there was Cilea. My hold on her was slim enough as it was; how would two weeks away affect us?

  I was afraid to go home, afraid of those days stretching ahead in the empty house: that smell of fermented stasis, compacted carpet pile, the old cigarette smoke that was all that remained of my parents’ breath… And their things: the sunken cushions where their now cremated bodies had sat; the heartbreaking worn slippers beneath the table that held the phone and the mostly empty address book, each page a window onto the blankness of their lives. That Larkin poem – what was it? – ‘Home’: ‘It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go…’ The great, enveloping sadness of it all… I could smell it from here; or rather, it was in me already, the foretaste of its pastness.

  ‘Second thoughts, eh?’ Leo read me, and I realised I had not spoken for several minutes. ‘Still, home’s home,’ he said, hewing at my resolve.

  As the Belgrade plane came in, a group emerged from the VIP lounge, headed by a large, jowly man in a black suit, muscle run to fat, flanked by aides and followed by some lean-faced, watchful young bodyguards. They had the familiar Securitate suits with the gun-bulge in the left breast pocket. These people wore flares not from retro fashion sense but for easier access to the second gun that was strapped to their calf. The man in front, sweat filling the folds of his skin, exuded physical strength and ferocious malice, and looked as if he got plenty of practice exercising both. His eyes were close together; in anyone else it would have made them look dim, but in his case it gave him an air of mean, low cunning; the eyes of a man who sought in those around him the lowest motivations and always found it. A crew-cut emphasised the bulkiness of his scalp, which joined the collar of his shirt not via the intermediary of a neck but through five thick rolls of flesh that resembled a stack of pink bicycle tyres: a Slavic Mussolini.

  ‘Stoicu, Ion Stoicu… Interior Minister, Cilea’s dad’s boss for one thing. He’s a real piece of shit: a fat boorish peasant, but sadly no fool. He’s one of these people who’s so terrifying that he doesn’t need to kill people to get things done. He just kills them as a sort of free extra. He’s reduced his ministry to a small hate-filled village … it’s now self-purging, you know, like those self-basting chickens? He’s Ceauşescu’s most trusted lieutenant. Stoicu owes everything to Ceauşescu, and has absolute loyalty to him.’ Leo had his eyes half closed, and spoke slowly, as if reading from files stored in some inner archive. ‘Just a petty criminal in the forties, a fascist Jew-baiter who burned down a synagogue in Iaşi, then did time in the same prison as Ceauşescu, apparently for rape. The official story is that he was a close comrade of the young Nicolae and helped him activate the successful revolution. Actually he was in clink, wanking and thinking of ways to kill Jews when the communists took power. They say history makes the people who make history… cometh the time, cometh the man and all that bollocks. It’s not like that. History just crawls along on its belly picking up parasites… Stoicu, Ceauşescu… the lot of them… crabs on the pubis of history.’

  The plane had landed. A red carpet was being rolled out by crouching henchmen who stumbled backwards as they went. It was a civilian plane decked out in military colours, green and khaki patches through which you could still see the name of the Yugoslav national airline, JAT, not quite painted over.

  Stoicu stood flanked by his deputies, ready to greet the delegation.

  Leo drained his glass. ‘Ceauşescu picked him out and gave him a job running the Iaşi Party. Made him mayor. He purged the party, shut down the synagogues and started the process of selling Jews to Israel. Then Ceauşescu brought him here and put him in charge of the Interior Ministry. A real piece of shit – one of the people responsible for shafting your chum Trofim, who’s a shifty customer himself… Stoicu was in charge of the first “Romanianisation of the executive” programme in the early seventies. His job was to purge Jews, ethnic Hungarians and Germans, Moldovans and anyone else not one hundred per cent ethnic Romanian from government posts. In 1972 Stoicu walked into the Snagov villa of one of the anti-Ceauşescu Politburo bosses and shot him twice in the head. He was screwing the man’s wife anyway, but told the Big Chief he’d done it for him, that the poor sod was plotting against him. He got promoted, got the woman, and kicked his own wife out into the sticks. Business with pleasure… then he dumped her and married a niece of the previous president, Gheorgiu-Dej.’

  There was no way Stoicu’s fat fingers could fit through the trigger guard of a handgun, I thought, but around here they probably made revolvers for the larger customer.

  First off the plane were paramilitary bodyguards in combat gear and mirror shades; then a dozen officials in standard-issue, elephant-grey communist suits, tieless and with their top shirt buttons fastened, followed by young men in jeans and leather jackets sporting mullet haircuts, western watches and biker boots. One, his jacket over his shoulder, had an eagle tattoo on his upper arm. At the back of the group, indisputably in charge of them all, was a short man with steel-coloured spiky hair and a round, fleshy face. Everyone stopped and waited for him, watched him for cues as to when to walk, stand still or shake hands. Stoicu stepped out onto the red carpet and embraced him first.

  The Yugoslav flag hung out in welcome was different from the usual one: in place of the red star at the centre, it had a crest on it, two white eagles face to face, like the tattoo on the young man’s arm.

  ‘Serbs…’ Leo said, more to himself than to me, ‘the Serb flag. You see it everywhere since Tito died… I don’t think this is an official visit, look – there’s no Yugoslav Embassy staff to welcome this lot.’

  The group was waved through an unstaffed customs booth into the VIP lounge. On cue, two trolleys of elaborate canapés and cakes emerged from the airport restaurant and disappeared inside.

  ‘OK, I’m off to do some homework on this lot. Check a few things out. Have a good trip!’ Leo was suddenly businesslike, in a hurry to leave.

  I was flagging now, playing for time. I suggested another drink – my flight was over an hour away and the airport a desolate place to be alone in, full of other people’s business, the continuities of all their lives arching like flight routes across the globe.

  Leo pressed his advantage: ‘You don’t want to go, do you? Just like me on my first trip out – I got here, checked in, sat around for an hour and turned back.’

  ‘OK Leo, you win, take me home.’

  ‘Home! Home? Well, you said it!’ Leo clapped his hands in delight.

  I tried to get my case back from check-in, but the attendant refused to understand my request. No matter: my half-empty suitcase would tumble out in a jostle of bags and cases and finish up orbiting the luggage belt, unmatched, in the Heathrow light. After a few hours someone would
pick it up and convey it to lost property where it would sit out its time with others of its abandoned kind. I tried to follow it with my mind. Where did the story end for lost things? Would it be used again, dumped, thrown away? As a child I had been haunted by the way nothing disappears… until I saw that yes, there is one thing that disappears, it’s people. Their clothes, shoes, false teeth, suitcases and bags all rumble on in some form or other, landfilled, incinerated, compacted, shredded or scrapped. But people? They just go.

  That was what I had been going back to, and perhaps that was what Bucharest could help me with, not by overcoming it but by interposing its own dramas and sorrows between me and my own life. It had done so for Leo. Why not for me?

  There were tears filling my eyes but I blinked them back. Leo said nothing, just walked me gently to the car. We passed the roadblock, the road clogged up now with angry gesticulating foreigners who had yet to learn the first and only law of communist queuing: like quicksand, the more you fought it, the deeper it sucked you in.

  I wondered if in not taking that plane I had failed to confront something. Leo pulled up outside the university and turned to me: ‘No. That’s just psychobabble – all this “confronting the past” shit, all this bollocks about “closure” and all that. There’s no rule that says you have to keep going back, nothing to say you need to confront things. Your past doesn’t own you. That’s just a way of keeping you shackled to it, it’s the shrinks and the gurus and the TV chat-show shitemongers who say that. No. You can get up and leave whenever you want. Take it from me: if you can, keep on running, and if you ever have to stop, just start running on the spot.’ Leo O’Heix: lifestyle guru.

  Ionescu let me use his fax machine, the only one in the building with an outside line, to cancel my arrangements. I left a message with the solicitor and Deadman house clearance to sell what could be sold and throw out the rest.

  Back in my office I shuffled my papers and switched on the fan. Waves of stirred air cooled my face. I looked around. Stuck to the wall were the Post-it notes I had removed from the phone on my first day. For the first time I noticed that the number I saw written there, in Belanger’s tight hand, was Cilea’s. Of course I always knew without really knowing – it was how we knew most things here, the informational equivalent of peripheral vision – that they had been together. It had never bothered me before. Now I felt I was involved in a replay, a sequel, not in life itself, and maybe not even mine.

  I looked at Cilea’s number and decided not to call her. She would know soon enough I was still here. My non-return sat more easily on me now. Maybe Leo was right. The plane would have landed, my suitcase abandoned to its fate, trapped in lost-prop limbo. And that house, radiating sorrow like a damaged reactor… I was out of sight at least, if never quite out of range.

  ‘You’re best off out of it.’ Leo knocked, walked in, sat down and put his feet on my desk, as was his wont, in a single flowing movement.

  ‘Out of what?’ I asked, looking up and rubbing my eyes. Belanger’s Post-it note was stuck to my fingers.

  ‘Out of… wherever it was you were just then.’

  ‘Who was Belanger? I mean, really? What did he do? Apart from work in my office, live in my flat and fuck my girlfriend?’

  ‘I rather think, if we’re doing this logically, chronologically, that he’d be the one to ask you those questions, not the other way round…’ We walked to the canteen and ordered a couple of ersatzes.

  ‘I’ve done some detective work,’ said Leo proudly. ‘What we saw earlier wasn’t a Yugo official visit, it was a Serb delegation. It’s the new Serb president, Milosevic, and he’s got some meeting on later with Ceauşescu, fraternal greetings and all that. But I’ll bet you a Capsia steak there’s more to it. The shit’s about to hit the fan in Yugoslavia, it’s going to break up piece by bloody piece. I expect the new man’s doing the rounds of the friendly socialist countries, seeing whom he can rely on to keep their noses out. There’s an old Serb saying: “There’s only two people on the side of the Serbs – God and the Greeks.” Maybe you’d add Romania. Anyway, we won’t be seeing much of them.’

  We saw them sooner that we expected.

  Later that evening Leo and I went to the InterContinental. It was not a place we went to often. Leo saw it as enemy territory, expensive and sleazy, and the headquarters of a rival black-marketeering outfit, the darkest and most powerful of Bucharest’s undergrounds – Party-protected, maybe even Party-run. It was from here that Ilie the pimp ran his girls and pushed his drugs.

  On my way here I had stopped by the music faculty, remembering that Petre would have been rehearsing, and invited him to join us. The only way his band got time to practise was when they booked the concert hall as a classical chamber group. Every member of Fakir doubled as a classical musician, and after an hour of formal rehearsal, once Micu the porter had safely locked up and taken out his hearing aid, out came the guitars and synthesisers, the drum kit and the saxophone.

  Now, in the half-deserted basement nightclub, I saw that inviting Petre had been a mistake.

  Cilea was there, with some of her friends: Elena Ralian, the daughter of the Bucharest party chief, an imitation of Cilea – same clothes, same hair style, down to the perfume, a lost girl whose identity had been pieced together from duplicated facets of other people’s; Ion Stoicu’s son, damaged, ferret-eyed and with an air of someone preparing a chilled dish of revenge without having decided who to serve it up to; the dim-witted Nestor Postelnicu, son of the foreign minister, who went by an idiomatic nickname the nearest English equivalent of which was ‘Two Planks’. There were a few others wearing western clothes and perfumes but unable to shake off the aura of a closed society. Only Cilea got away with it. Even Leo, with his Monocom trousers, yellow nylon shirt and Bulgarian moccasins, looked more like westerner than they did. His clothes were the visual equivalent of a perpetually tuning-up orchestra, but he carried it off.

  The nomenklatura youth were out in force tonight to entertain the savage children of the Serb chiefs. They were all drinking hard and chatting up the girls. At the bar, the callgirls were waiting for the drink to wear down their customers’ inhibitions. Ilie the pimp had put on his best shop window. His girls looked disposable, carnal, professional. They waited to be asked. They didn’t hustle.

  When Cilea saw me she looked at me first in astonishment, then in anger. She shook her head, warning me not to get involved.

  Leo had already seen her. ‘Bad move,’ he said, trying to bring me back out of the room, ‘let’s try the Athénée Palace… a bit more class.’ But I pushed on and headed for the bar, indicating the table we would be sitting at.

  Stoicu, Constantin and the Serbs were dining upstairs while the golden youth entertained themselves down here. A row of ice-buckets stood on the table. When a bottle was finished, they upended it and shouted for another. Cilea sat among them but apart from it all, smoking, laughing politely, looking at her watch. Beside her, one of the Serbs was too close, peering down her front for a glimpse – more than a glimpse, a luxurious tracking shot – of her cleavage. When he lit her cigarette he looked her in the eye, touching her hand as she tried to steady the lighter.

  One of the Serb boys crossed the dance floor and went to the little stage on which the resident singer, ‘Doina the Diva’, was performing. She had put on a brave show so far, against the drawn-out insult of their boorishness. Leo knew her slightly – a matronly woman who each night squeezed herself into leather trousers and tight, breast-enhancing shirt. She sang anthemic pop songs like ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ and ‘I need a Hero’ with a backing band that looked like starving undertakers. In her thick make-up and overblown wig she looked like a transvestite, but she was in fact an attractive woman beneath it all. Did that make her, Leo wondered, a ‘trans-transvestite’? ‘Voice like a bag of broken glass,’ he joked, but Doina was a Bucharest institution. Sometimes, after closing time, the curtains would be drawn and a new clientele of musicians, students and othe
r nostalgists arrived to hear her sing the old peasant songs she had learned as a child in Banloc.

  The Serb climbed onto the stage and barged her off. She retreated with dignity, her high heels teetering, the flesh so tight-packed and the leather so ungiving that she walked like a robot, moving only at the joints. I scanned the clientele: foreign businessmen, German truckers, lost tourists and the odd local slipped through the net, looking in at how the other half lived.

  It was the time of night when men start to edge towards the prostitutes; one of the truckers, a regular on the Frankfurt-Bucharest route, had already made a start. Norbert he was called, ‘Norbert the Talker’, because he liked to pretend that he was charming and chatting up the girls, that the money he gave them was a gift they could take or leave, and not a payment. He bought them dinner and a night in a luxury hotel.