This scheme, known as ‘typewriter day’, was an annual event, designed to keep records of any instrument that might be used for dissident or samizdat publications. If so it was a laborious way of keeping track – sending dozens of officers around town to test typewriters must involve massive administrative time and cost. But then this was not reactive repression but preventative. Leo had told me about the ‘National Handwriting Archive’, brainchild of Elena Ceauşescu. This was the machine version, logging the imprint, tug and slant of every key of every typewriter in the land. The old joke was that Professor Doctor Mrs Ceauşescu had invested in research into telepathy to set up an archive that recorded the accent and timbre of one’s thoughts.
I went to the staff room to make coffee, a reflex action that occasionally surfaced from a previous existence, since there was never any coffee and the hob had long ago broken. The perpetually out-of-order photocopier, a hulking East German contraption, had chosen today to begin working again. A small crowd, for whom the machine’s operational state was just a sort of urban myth, watched excitedly. It ground out a limp sheet of paper, sputtered, then stopped.
There was a note on my office door from Professor Ionescu asking me to pay him a visit. He was twitchy. A gleaming, typewriter-shaped square of desk in front of him was framed in a border of dust.
‘Please go to the university car park, where someone is waiting for you,’ he said.
‘Who?’ I asked. Ionescu’s sobriety was an ill omen. ‘You have a visitor. Deputy Minister Manea Constantin has asked to see you. I do not know what it is about, and it may be that I will not be here much longer to find out. I may be joining the janitorial staff. Now please go.’
Outside I found a black Mercedes with Party plates. Two smiling young men, well-groomed, smartly suited and smelling of French aftershave, climbed out. They were polite too – another worrying sign.
‘Domnul, we would like you to come with us. You are invited to meet somebody,’ said the first, firm but unthreatening in the manner of those who do not need to threaten. I wondered whether they knew the clichéd nature of what we were playing out. Given the black market in American action films and Mafia sagas, it seemed probable that they did: two minders in a black limo making me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
‘That would be terrific, but I’m afraid I’m working. I have a lecture to give.’
‘Everything is fine. It has been taken care of with your professor. Now please,’ said the other, gesturing into the tan-upholstered interior of the car, ‘we will bring you back after lunch.’ The Mercedes’ windows were of smoked glass and the conditioned air inside was icy. Morgue temperature, I thought as my teeth chattered.
There were no checks for us as we slid into the courtyard of the Interior Ministry, parked and walked into the building’s lobby.
I was taken upstairs and shown into a vast room with blank walls and high ceilings with hammer and sickle mouldings. There was one desk, a vast reinforced-glass slab on two marble trestles, and behind it French windows flanked, as usual, by portraits of the Ceauşescus. The figure behind the desk stood with his hand out in greeting: Manea Constantin, the deputy Interior Minister, in a charcoal suit and Savile Row shirt that was the rich dark blue of a winter afternoon sky. A few papers had been pushed to one extremity of the desk, and an espresso machine sat squarely in the centre, foreign magazines in a haphazard pile alongside it. An atomiser of Signor Ricci, retailing at thirty-odd quid a bottle in duty-free, served both as eau de cologne and all-round room freshener.
In an annexe, two secretaries typed. One was square and matronly, the other slim and beautiful and so much like Cilea that I had to look again to make sure it wasn’t. She turned and smiled; she exuded mistresshood, the unattainable sexual availability of the powerful man’s consort.
‘Call me Manea,’ he said charmingly. As if, I thought, my sweaty hand in his, two not-so-secretly holstered flunkeys on either side of me. ‘I thought we might spend a morning together… getting to know each other. I like to know who my daughter’s friends are.’
‘Were,’ I corrected, ‘I haven’t spoken to her for a month and she hasn’t returned my calls.’
‘But first a shave,’ he said, ignoring me. It was not how I expected the morning to go.
The car took us, through halted traffic and disregarded traffic lights, to the InterContinental Hotel. I was starting to feel that the place was cursed, and I cursed always to return to it. The manager dropped some tourists’ luggage with a crash and showed us to the hotel’s ‘Aesthetic Centre’, where two barbers were waiting on our arrival.
We sat side by side as the hot towels and razors came out. Manea Constantin spoke to me in the mirror. I kept turning to face him, but the barber had my head jammed. Just as well – the razor was so sharp it would probably not even hurt when it cut, not until I saw the blood. The blade was hot, the steel smooth in its thin, lethal slide on wet skin. My eyes watered as he hitched up a nostril and the blade scraped right up into the cavity. I fought back a sneeze.
‘Vlad the Impaler used to slit open the nostrils of his enemies so they flapped like rags in the wind,’ said Manea, by way of putting me at my ease.
The barber sprinkled some mentholated astringent over our heads and necks and began a Turkish cranial massage. It felt as if my skin was being peeled off, stretched out and tanned across my skull. I felt a high of physical health.
Constantin was practised at mirror talk, and enjoyed the symbolism of it: everything inverted, him talking to me via my reflection and I talking to him via his. He was an intelligent and graceful conversationalist, and I found myself forgetting that he was probably as corrupt as the rest of them, and as ruthless. He was certainly his daughter’s father: he had that same detachment from all he was implicated in, that same nonchalance in the midst of responsibility. The difference was that where Cilea could merely distance herself from it all, Manea implemented it. I asked him about what I had just seen in the university, about what might happen to Ionescu.
‘That charade this afternoon, the typewriters…?’ He laughed, ‘it is now a tradition, like folk dancing and basket weaving, but nothing to do with me. Orders from the highest place. As for the demotion of your professor, that is the responsibility of Comrade Stoicu. I do not interfere in his affairs. How do they say it in England? I do not cross onto his patch.’
‘The National Handwriting Archive?’ I began. He cut me off with a laugh. ‘Yes, I too have heard of that. Again, Comrade Stoicu’s department. A very expensive and very stupid initiative. Next you will be asking me about the research into telepathy…’
Manea settled back and relaxed. We said nothing more until the barbers were brushing the hairs from our collars.
‘Now you will be my guest at the Politburo restaurant in Snagov.’
Forty minutes later we were there. The journey out of town had taken us across some rubble-strewn roads. In Leo’s Skoda it would have been a boneshaking nervejangler of a journey. In Manea’s ministerial limo it was like a car journey on a fifties film set, the landscape rewinding in the tinted glass.
The Snagov ‘Socialist Village’ was a twenty-acre gated compound of villas and facilities for highly placed Party officials: health clubs, gyms, saunas, skin care and anti-ageing treatment centres. There were shops with blacked-out windows selling white goods, luxury food, designer clothes. Politburo wives shopped and dined while their children rode western motorbikes to cinemas showing US action films. Unlike Bucharest itself, the place was orderly and shiny; a cross between Switzerland and the retirement belt of Florida – an Iron Curtain Costa Geriatrica.
What brought the average age down was a two-abreast file of uniformed boys and girls. ‘Young Pioneers’, the Party’s children’s corps, were goose-stepping with knapsacks on their backs, compasses and water bottles around their necks. They walked in step and sang heroic songs, a phalanx of communist Tintins marching to the beat of an automated childhood. ‘Two Planks’ sped past on a red Vespa, wearin
g Ray-Bans and a Lacoste polo shirt.
‘This is the Central Committee compound,’ explained Constantin, ‘though some of us prefer to live in town. I’ll be hosting a Foreign Office delegation from your country here in December. I shall send you an invitation.’
Thanks, thanks very much, I thought. Come Christmas, that would be all I needed: standing in a suit while Romanian Party bosses mingled with diplomats, sleazy defence contractors and some damp-lipped Tory undersecretary for closet arms sales. ‘I’ll pencil it in,’ I replied in Romanian, trying for sarcasm, a difficult nuance in a foreign tongue. The worst was that I knew I would probably go.
We were shown our table in the modern dining room. Unlike Capsia the room was boxy and ascetic; also unlike Capsia, it had an extensive menu with a prodigious wine list. Everything was available, from the oysters to the wild boar, the Cheval Blanc to the Chateau Talbot. The waiters looked seconded from some defence academy. They probably doubled as paratroopers, ready to protect the Party’s higher echelons in the event of an uprising. Or, it struck me later, to watch and incarcerate them in the event of a coup.
In the corner was a group of senior army officers. The conversation was loud, the drinks being poured and downed so fast the bottles barely had time to touch the tablecloths. Constantin ordered a gin and tonic, which came in a tall Party-crested tumbler. I had a Coca-Cola. The ambient music that came from the loudspeakers sounded like a crematorium organ played at one-and-a-half times normal speed.
‘The Comrade has his Palace here,’ said Constantin, pointing beyond the ponderous stone terrace. Below it, small pedalos and leisure boats bobbed along a clear blue lake. Over and beyond the grounds, I could just make out the turret of a tower around which the helicopter circled. ‘Looks like he’s home,’ I said brightly, pointing. Ceauşescu had forty-one villas and twenty-one palaces, each with a retinue of staff on alert. Each probably had a helicopter circling around it too. ‘I hear Nicu lives nearby too,’ I added.
At the mention of Nicu, Constantin put down his glass and wiped his mouth with a hammer and sickle-crested napkin. One of the waiters twitched but managed not to turn around.
‘The Comrade’s favourite son, yes. Our minister for sport and youth affairs is a troubled young man, but we have learned to deal with his personal problems. Something he has yet to do…’
People went out of their way to greet Manea as they passed. I recognised some faces from the nomenklatura shops and restaurants, the nightclub-and-foreign-embassy circuit. With some he conferred in a low voice, or wrote times and dates for meetings into his Party diary. He seemed popular, and it struck me that he probably didn’t just rely on power to get things done but on something approaching loyalty and fellow-feeling. Not least significant, I thought, was the number of junior people who spoke to him, and the staff he treated with courtesy, though never once hazarding his air of power both copious and withheld.
The army table was joined by Stoicu, who gave a dry contemptuous little nod towards Manea, looked me over and sat down. He showed no sign of recognising me from the night with the Serbs, but it was impossible to read those tiny frisky eyes pinned into the rolls of flesh that enfolded any expression before it took hold on his face. He proposed a toast: ‘To the Comrade!’ It meant everyone else had to get up, as to be seen not to do so would be cause for comment. Manea, in the middle of his coq au vin, had to join in. More toasts followed: to Elena, to the Young Pioneers, to the anti-fascist struggle, so that by the end most of the dining room was up and down every two minutes. People began to hurry their meals and leave.
We took our coffee onto the terrace, Manea lighting up a Sobranie and I sticking to my Carpati. ‘Going native, I see,’ he commented. Inside, Stoicu’s clan had started singing. Manea jerked his head back towards them: ‘You can abolish class differences, but somehow they always come out during meals, don’t you think?’
‘I thought you were starting to deal with that by abolishing meals altogether,’ I replied, ‘for the populace at large, I mean…’
‘Touché! Yes indeed, a quick riposte. But I must say your appetite has remained unaffected by the hardship. The way that veal went down, that crème brûlée…’
‘True enough – I’ve learned to compartmentalise.’ I took a long draw of my Carpati.
‘Oh, I think you knew how to compartmentalise long before you came to Romania… Cilea tells me you helped her get that trip to London. I’m very grateful. If there is anything I can do for you, you will let me know. You will also, I hope, treat her well.’
‘She can look after herself, and as far as I can tell that’s all she ever does…’ I said.
Manea put down his glass and laughed. ‘Yes, a lot of people think that of her. I wish I thought it was true, though…’ He became serious: ‘She says you’re blaming her for something that happened to your friends. I don’t want to know the details. But I can tell you it’s nothing to do with her.’
‘You seem very sure of this… this thing that you don’t know about.’
He finished his cigarette and looked out over the terrace, an arm over my shoulder, and spoke up close. ‘Let me tell you how you perceive it, or how you are being encouraged to perceive it: Cilea finds out what is going on through you; she then tells me; I then give orders. Your friends are gone. But why should I care about what a bunch of hippies does? Suppose I already knew, have known for a long time, and never did anything? Why would I act now?’
‘Did you know?’
‘That is not the point – if so, I did nothing about it.’
‘Perhaps you passed on the information to someone who did…’ With napkins tied around their necks, hunched over their food, each one with crew-cut hair, small ears, and a flaccid pink face, Stoicu and his minions looked like the pigs in a cartoon of Orwell’s Animal Farm. I turned back to Manea who was, in more respects than not, one of them. ‘Anyway, people don’t just disappear!’
Manea raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘Oh no? Are you quite sure about that?’
He stirred his coffee for a few moments, then spoke confidentially: ‘I am telling you this – and it is dangerous for me, even I have to report on our conversation now – I am telling you this because of Cilea, and I too am sorry that she is no longer with you. I will explain why another time, but for now let me say this: you can think what you like of me, but she has nothing to do with any of it. None of us is safe at the moment. It’s department against department, minister against minister. Every organisation, every group of friends is infiltrated. Everything is known, it’s just a question of who acts on that knowledge and when, and why they decide to do so. You find out why your friends have been pulled in – if they have been – and you’ll know who did it.’
I nodded. I saw the sense in that; more exactly, I understood the contortions of state paranoia that caused it to make sense. Someone somewhere always knew what you were doing; several people at a time did. But what did they do with the knowledge? Use it? Trade or barter it? Perhaps several people knowing at a time, each with different or conflicting agendas, cancelled out the knowledge, gave you a cover second only to anonymity, which was in any case impossible? That was how Leo worked, relying on the informational bottleneck to pursue his shady career and to pursue, too, his acts of restitution and commemoration.
Behind us was a group of ministers brandishing building plans and two architects in black-framed spectacles and roll-neck sweaters. Manea took my elbow and whispered: ‘Everything’s tightening up. It happens from time to time, because some part of the system’s unstable, or just because the Comrade is afraid. It may loosen again in a few months. Perhaps things will be clearer then. For now, you keep your head down.’
Others joined us on the terrace. Manea stopped talking and we listened instead to the architects and their ministers. One of the ministers was explaining that the artificial canal currently being dug in the city centre was to be re-routed. The map, opened out across his knees, bore a crude red line straight through several dis
tricts. One of the architects quietly but steadfastly pointed out that this involved not only the refilling of the vast and now useless ditch they had spent the last three months digging, but the demolition of two old suburbs. The young and eager-looking woman minister replied with a well-known slogan: ‘These are uncharted waters, but we are well-captained.’ The architect argued his case, never raising his voice, running his finger along the fat red line that tore through the map of Bucharest. There was a silence, as always follows one who has gone too far. The minister changed tack, asked him outright if he was ready for the consequences of abandoning the project. He said he was. He made to get up and leave, thanking her for lunch. His colleague shuffled in his seat. One of the deputies, until now silently watching, put down his coffee, laid his hand on the architect’s shoulder, and spoke slowly, calmly, in a menacing stage whisper designed to be overheard.
‘Listen, you bourgeois pig. This is how it goes: you leave here and we do the work anyway, except it’ll be you and your whole clan of Yids digging the new canal seven days a week. It’s goodbye nine to five and the flat in Herastrau, and hello nightshift and worker’s hostel. Your kids…what are they? Four and six? Might get rehomed in one of our State orphanages – you know about them? – maybe down in Iaşi. If you like your black pullovers and your Johnnie Walker, and your wife likes her western tampons, you just nod your head and we’ll all forget about your lapse in socialist taste.’
The architect was alone. His colleague turned away. The minister looked down at her shoes. The others at the table pretended not to hear, but like us they would remember every word. Manea put down his coffee and shook his head, though he must have said and doubtless done worse things himself.
Then a remarkable thing happened. The architect dislodged the man’s hand from his shoulder and walked off, throwing his napkin onto the table. His colleague buried his head in his hands. The minister was speechless; there was no slogan to hand for this eventuality. The enforcer smiled a thin, vicious smile of humiliated sadism.
The Last Hundred Days Page 17