The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  I must have been watching and listening too obviously, as Manea took me by the arm and guided me across the terrace and into the gardens.

  ‘Jesus, that was brave. What’ll happen to him now?’

  ‘He’ll get a cooling-off period, and if he doesn’t play, some of what that bastard threatened will happen. Most of it probably. Don’t worry – to get this far he must have done some pretty unsavoury things himself. We’ve got no heroes here. Or if we have this isn’t where you’ll find them.’

  I imagined a day of reckoning in which scores were settled and judgments meted out. Here in Romania, I envisaged a set of trials in which the judges would find the accused guilty, then swap places with them. In the end I was not far wrong – except about the verdicts.

  Manea received a message on his pager. Seconds later, the black Mercedes lounged down an avenue of linden trees. In their threadbare shade, the Young Pioneers were eating a picnic of soya salami and Rocola. There must have been forty or fifty children sitting in a circle and eating in silence, facing straight ahead, heads still and jaws munching, like clockwork infants.

  Manea spoke again: ‘Your friend Trofim must be enjoying writing his memoirs. I hear they are the memoirs of a good communist, but dull. He may wish to keep them that way. But if he doesn’t he may be needing friends. And in this case I do not mean friends abroad.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ I asked.

  ‘You persist in misreading me. It is not a threat. On the contrary. He will know what it is. Tell him.’ Manea was exasperated, the slick Party man hurt at not being trusted. As we drove back, I wondered if I had offended him with my smart-arse comments and my readiness to interpret all he said in the worst way possible.

  Stepping out of the car I turned back and apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be cynical, it’s just habit. I don’t need to tell you how hard it is know who to trust…’ Manea brushed away the slight, and as his arm moved I caught a whiff of his aftershave, still fresh and clean and lemony despite the heat. I was sweating, uncomfortable inside my skin, conscious of my own smell.

  ‘Of course you shouldn’t trust me, but maybe you should believe me…’ he smiled, ‘you still don’t know the difference?’

  I was no closer to finding out what had happened to Petre and Vintul, but I had seen the way things worked, and I believed Manea when he told me that Cilea had had nothing to do with it. Whatever it was. Would Leo?

  On my way back to my office I stopped on the landing of the second floor and looked out across the Bucharest skyline. Somewhere out there, the architect was waiting to learn his fate. Somewhere perhaps, Vintul and Petre and the others were being kept or, I hoped, were in hiding. The cranes jutted out everywhere; there was not a single piece of the horizon that wasn’t crane-crammed and prickling with scaffolding. That Snagov dining room was the symbol of the new Bucharest: behind communism’s inert symmetries, the great dead surfaces of marble or granite, there were the convoluted, winding schemes that took root and flourished and devoured both themselves and those who engineered them. Manea, Stoicu, Trofim, Ionescu, the purged and the purging… all were part of that tail-chasing paranoia, that frenzy of self-policing that boiled away inside the expressionless monolith of the Party.

  What I noticed first were the boxes outside Ionescu’s office. Framed diplomas were being wrapped in old copies of Scînteia by a snuffling Rodica and placed into boxes by Micu, who, in his elaborate uniform, looked like an old soldier burying his fallen comrades on a battlefield. Inside, Leo and Ionescu sat looking mournful with a bottle of Tsuica.

  ‘How am I going to break it to her indoors? I suppose I shall just have to lay it upon her straight.’ Ionescu’s gift for peculiarly off-key English was still with him, though he might not be putting it to use in his new job.

  ‘It’s not a purge, not really. Think of it as a shuffle. You’ll be back in no time,’ Leo was spinning for the positive: ‘Look on the bright side – at least you don’t have to oversee the computerisation of the faculty!’ Ionescu’s expression confirmed his refusal to cave in to optimism. ‘When’s the new man coming in?’ Leo continued, ‘And more to the point: who is it?’

  ‘I have not been told. Nobody will tell me,’ Ionescu emitted a tragic exhalation.

  We loaded his things into Leo’s car. So far down the pecking order had the rumours percolated that even the drivers in the staff car pound knew of Ionescu’s demotion. Colleagues looked away or crossed the corridor to avoid him. Some might visit him when things calmed down, but for now it was the arm’s-length principle. He was starting to become invisible, disappearing at the edges. His nameplate would be off the door by 5 pm, his books off the library shelves by Monday. As we said goodbye, a man in blue overalls, his own purged predecessor, came to shake his hand.

  The next stage would be even harder for Ionescu: explaining to his wife why she had to move out of her Herastrau duplex and into some already-decrepit brand new two-roomer on the outskirts. That’s if they were lucky enough to be staying in town.

  Ionescu would be back next Monday to hear about his new job. It could be anything from provincial parking attendant to kitchen porter in the canteen’s ghost-ship of a catering wing.

  ‘Library assistant!’ Leo called jubilantly down the receiver, ‘he’s been made library assistant! Here!’

  It was the Saturday morning. I was alone with the radio on, listening to a World Service programme about the Polish Solidarity Movement. I had spent the night in a turmoil of nightmare, and had woken at 4 am screaming into my sweat-drenched sheets and vomiting into the sink from a shock so violent it had gripped my body as well as my mind. My recurring nightmare, that I thought I had left behind in London, was back: my parents, calm and happy together as they never were in life, beckoning me from across an enormous room. Now that I was in Romania, that room became the mouldy marbled cavern on the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, the hellish disco or the Snagov dining room I had been to with Manea. As I came closer to them, I realised that they were warning me to stay away, begging me stay away from them. They writhed and held themselves, doubled over in pain, then finally burned away at the edges like leaves, their faces turning to bone and ash as they screamed in silence.

  The dream had been with me for years, even when my father was alive. Here in Bucharest I thought I had escaped it. Now it was clear it had merely been internalising the new décor. It came back more ferocious than ever, and though I had been up for hours its aura still had not cleared. I could still smell burning.

  After months of seemingly effortless adjustment, everything I had left behind was crowding back into me, using sleep as its means of entry. Cilea had left me; I was guilty of something, I didn’t know what, to do with Petre and Vintul; I was caught up amid icebergs of corruption I barely saw the tips of, and at every moment of every day I was in danger from one or other of the activities I was involved in without ever being part of. Worst of all, I had nowhere and nothing to go back to. Well, wasn’t that what you wanted? I heard myself ask.

  ‘And that’s the good news?’ I asked, unable to rise to Leo’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Think about it – it could have been a hell of a lot worse: he could have been cleaning toilets in Turda…’ I recalled a place of that name, somewhere to the north-east, and possessed of a small seat of learning, ‘he gets to read, doesn’t have to leave town, we get to see him. Trust me, it’s better than it could have been.’

  ‘What’s the bad news?’

  ‘The new boss, Popea. Slimeball. Informer. Yes-man. Brontë specialist.’ These faults – was Leo listing them in ascending or descending order of perfidy? Ion Popea, a paranoid apparatchik so focussed on finding hidden meanings in everything you said that even your remarks about the weather were scrutinised for political content. Leo joked that Popea submitted everything he said to the Party’s ‘Workplace Conversation Unit’ a week in advance. ‘But it’s OK, I’ve got something on him,’ added Leo mysteriously.

  I told Trofim what ha
d happened when we met in the park that afternoon. I had still not shaken off my nightmare, and felt weak and exhausted.

  ‘The first law of a good purge is that it must be random; the second, that it must culminate in a promotion that sets the other pretenders to the job against each other and not the system; the third is that people must spend more energy trying to work out what it means than complaining about its unjustness. Sounds like a classic example of the genre. Very nice.’ Trofim was evaluating it aesthetically, a dealer approving of a fine objet d’art.

  ‘Why would they sack Ionescu? He’s done nothing wrong, he’s a respected academic, he’s obviously a good Party man…’

  ‘In his way, yes he is. It’s possibly nothing to do with the university, but an internal Securitate purge. Ah, the old days… after the purge, the interpretation of the purge,’ Trofim settled himself on the bench and lit his pipe. ‘I do miss it, the intrigue, the back room deals, the whole chess game of Party politics… my guess is Ionescu was unreliable, erratic, or using his Securitate position to further his academic career. That’s the wrong way round. He’s been getting better-known and better-liked, his work has been getting published abroad. He’s been letting things slide! People aren’t afraid of him, he’s respected, he runs a happy department, insofar as that’s possible here. These things get noticed you know…’

  ‘Everyone knows he’s as ruthless as the rest of them. I’ve seen him in action. He just hides it well. He’s just not a complete bastard.’

  ‘I remember Ionescu when he started out. A junior lecturer. Long before Ceauşescu – late fifties. Young and keen and razor-sharp, but always the gentle persuader, that was Ionescu. He had a boss and mentor, a kind, cultivated old gentleman, and a good Party man. Serafim he was called, a Jew who had survived all the purges of the forties and fifties. He helped Ionescu onto the ladder, put him on committees… launched him. He got Ionescu this coveted job in his department, promoted him, sponsored his rise up the ranks. One day, during one of the ‘Romanianisation’ purges, the old man arrived at work and found his things had been moved out and left in the corridor – this was before they did you the courtesy of providing boxes. The old prof’s first reaction was to visit Ionescu. He found Ionescu outside his office, with all his things in the corridor. “My poor friend,” said the old man to his protégé, “I am sorry to have implicated you in this. It is too late for me, but I will do my best to have you exonerated.” Ionescu, so the story goes, said nothing; he simply took Serafim’s office key out of his hand, walked straight into his newly vacant office and shut the door. What about that? The poor man thought Ionescu was getting purged too! When all the time it was Ionescu who had fingered him to get his job!’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ I said, ‘Ionescu would at least have explained…’

  ‘Explained what? I am just telling you the story as it happened. That’s how Ionescu got his first senior post. No one underestimated him after that… But do not get worked up. Life is full of such stories, ours at any rate. We all take our turn.’

  Trofim took my arm: ‘You mustn’t think that I have no regrets. I do, it’s just that there were – there still are – contexts for all we did wrong. I know that to you I am one of the many people who made this place what it is.’ He looked at me but I said nothing. It was himself he was talking to – I was just the context for him to speak it aloud. ‘There was a price to pay and at the time it was the right price, but it was never meant to remain like this. One generation of repression, perhaps two. And yes, some killing. But it was not an end in itself. We thought we had time, you see: we played the long game. But it was never a game.’ He shook his head: ‘And there was never long enough.’

  ‘Will you write that in your book, I mean in those words?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, if you can remember them when we get home,’ he laughed sadly and took my arm.

  Trofim’s secretary was just leaving as we arrived. Her hair, like some industrial-modernist sculpture, looked coiffed in fully set cement, and the room smelled of the spray she used to hold it in place.

  He disappeared into the bijou kitchen. Trofim had that habit, peculiar to those with little domestic know-how, of holding utensils and staring at them, waiting for clues to their use to be transmitted through his palm to his cognitive faculties. There was a new coffee machine on the windowsill, gleaming in designer black and silver, and definitely not from Monocom. Trofim peered round the back of the machine, looking for somewhere to put in the water, or the coffee, or both. Ten minutes later he came out onto the balcony with his usual long-handled Arabic coffee pot, a present from a UN PLO delegation, steaming with sweet cardamon-scented coffee.

  ‘What we have on the computer today is the morning’s dictation. Up to and including the last Olympics. I think there will be one more chapter, say, two weeks’ more work, and then we can think about the next step.’

  I suddenly remembered Manea Constantin’s message and passed it on to Trofim. ‘I’m not sure how to interpret it, but there it is anyway,’ I added in a throwaway tone that I hoped disguised my curiosity.

  ‘Very simple. The minister knows, or thinks he knows, I am up to something. This is his way of saying that other people do too, people who may not be as – what? – tolerant as him. He is offering me something, in exchange for which I must offer him something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He does not know yet; nor do I. But yes, thank you for the message – it is good news, I suppose.’

  We spent the afternoon on his files. Our routine: first I fished the day’s file from the computer’s virtual trash can. Then I scrolled down paragraph by paragraph, while Trofim, sitting to my right, dictated his additions. It usually took us two or three hours. I then copied everything onto a diskette and replaced it in the trash, before taking the files to be printed in the British Council library, a tatty prefab building inside the embassy grounds.

  Today, as I left the building with the printed sheets, Giles Wintersmith loomed up behind me. ‘The draught,’ Leo called him, a reference not just to his ability to chill a room, but to the ripple of shivers by which one sensed his imminence. I had that now, and turned to face him: grey watery eyes, pale oily skin polished to translucence, a sharp thin beard and hair that grew a sheen of grease even as you watched. Since the ambassador, like some public school headmaster, had declared summertime ‘shirtsleeve order’, Wintersmith wore a white short-sleeved shirt with brown semicircles of sweat under the arms. The inside of his open collar looked like the ring of dirt in a bath. His arms were white and pimpled, crossed over his chest and bent upwards like deep-frozen chicken wings.

  We were now on page 180 of Trofim’s memoirs. I held the day’s papers to me, fifteen pages, the only copies of the latest instalment. Beside them, the diskette with the first two thirds of the book. Wintersmith noticed me clutching the satchel.

  ‘Drink?’ He tried for a smile: a thin, vampiric leer of yellow teeth.

  I sat in the Shit and Hassle while Wintersmith ordered at the bar. The place smelled of sweat and smoke and old lager. Beer towels hung sweating but never drying over bar pumps: Worthington’s, Skol, Guinness. The tabletops were streaked with bullet-shaped burn marks where forgotten cigarettes had consumed themselves on the veneer. The windows were open but the air had no intention of clearing. There was a darts board with one drooping arrow stuck in the bullseye, and an Aunt Sally range that doubled as a children’s play area. A calendar of Page 3 Lovelies was pinned behind the bar. We might have been in any pub in middle England, but this was like a film set; you half-expected the scenery to clatter to the ground. To counterbalance the diplomats, there was a different crowd of Brits: Embassy security guards, ex-police or ex-army; construction workers or decorators sent from home to do up this or that wing of the compound; a few businessmen on foreign sales trips thirsty for a familiar brand. A few tables away a Geordie handyman, beyond tipsy, was loudly going through a roster of people in line for one of his Glasgow kisses. At the back
of the room an embassy wife, pale and graceful and etherealised with boredom, watched her children squabbling over last month’s Beano. A Friday afternoon in the Home Counties.

  Wintersmith sat down. ‘You’ve rather thrown yourself into things out there, haven’t you?’ he asked, waving his long fingers at the world beyond the embassy gates. ‘We don’t see you much at embassy dos either. We do our best, you know, trying to put together a sort of scene…’ It was phrased as an apology but the tone implied I was arrogant and thought myself better than my own people, whoever they were.

  ‘Cheers,’ I took a deep drink from my pint. The room was cool but the sweat stung my eyes. I wiped my brow. Wintersmith hesitated over his half-pint and watched me. A piece of advice from my father came to me, the only advice he’d ever given me: never trust a man who drinks halves.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Wintersmith asked, interested but not concerned.

  I nodded and asked him bluntly what he wanted. I wouldn’t get a straight answer, or even a short one, but it would do no harm to get him started. Most diplomats conversed like telegrams: short objectless phrases delivered in staccato rhythms. Not Wintersmith. His sentences came out in coils. ‘I suppose that with all that time you spend with Leo O’Heix you’ve been getting to see quite a lot of what goes on? And word has it you’re close to – if that’s the right term these days…’ he smirked, ‘the daughter of a highly placed official…’

  ‘Not especially – I do my job, see Leo, have a few friends.’ I drank fast. Only two good gulps then I could leave.