The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  They moved Trofim, Apostol and the others to the outskirts. Slavnicu caved in as soon as they came to take him away – he signed a retraction and claimed to have been put up to it by Trofim and Apostol. They let him keep his Herastrau townhouse. Stanciu was diabetic, and Ralian had trouble walking, so they were put in apartment blocks, without lifts, electricity or gas. According to Ozeray, Trofim was in a one-roomed flat at the top of an unready tower block, where the only running water was what came through the roof and air conditioning took the form of unfilled window cavities.

  Trofim became big news: the US and Soviet ambassadors demanded to see him, while the Romanian ambassadors to both countries were summoned to the foreign ministries to receive official protests. The French foreign minister made a speech calling on Ceauşescu to release the remaining dissidents. Trofim’s publisher came in on the act, declaring that his non-attendance at his own launch, held to full media fanfare, with human rights activists, ministers, political exiles, and a fractious array of absurdist philosophers, poets and playwrights, had created coverage that exhausted the first print run. The Sunday Times ran an extract about the rise of Ceauşescu, in which Trofim revealed that he had been in charge of doctoring the Comrade’s war record to make him into an anti-fascist hero. He called Elena Ceauşescu a ‘barely literate laboratory technician and professional plagiarist’ and named the scientists whose work she had, over the years, put her name to. Another paper ran photographs of the Ceauşescus’ state visit: the Comrade and his wife with the Queen, hunting with a Conservative minister of Obelixian girth, and Elena receiving an honorary doctorate from the West London Polytechnic. Trofim revealed that eight universities had turned her down, and that she had at first refused to shake the Vice-Chancellor’s hand because he was Jewish.

  The other dissidents were quickly forgotten. Trofim was the story, emerging as the country’s leading statesman-dissident. Suddenly American secretaries of state and British ministers, French government officials and Russian spokesmen referred to his illustrious career. He was profiled in an article in the Washingon Post in which Kissinger called him ‘an alert, humane realist and old school European gentleman’. In Pravda he was described quite simply as ‘the Party’s choice’, which was far from the case but would quickly become so when ‘the Party’ read this morning’s Pravda. It was a risky tactic on Trofim’s part: if there was anyone the Romanians hated more than Ceauşescu, it was the Russians. But he calculated well – the Russians were now preferable: Gorbachev represented the only chance of democratic change; and to the Party apparatchiks he was the only chance of saving their skins if and when Ceauşescu fell.

  It was ten days before we found out where Trofim was being held, and when the information came out it was Ozeray who passed it on. No one asked how, but it was accurate, right down to the routine of Trofim’s guards. We had a half hour window between shifts, where the usual four-man watch was reduced to one. We also had the biggest bribe I had ever seen change hands: two bags of frozen steaks, six bottles of Johnnie Walker, a dozen cartons of Kent, three Walkmans and a hundred dollars. If the guard were discovered, he would probably be killed. In my mind thereafter that package of money, food and electrical goods came to represent the price of a life in Romania. I knew there were places in the world where life was cheaper, but this was the closest I would come to seeing it cashed in.

  The terrified guard met us in the dark lobby of the apartment block, a looming, leaning edifice of wet concrete and rusty twists of metal. It was nowhere near ready, but the mixers and lorries and cranes had moved on to the next job. ‘Fourteenth floor. Flat six. Here’s the key. Please be quick. This is very dangerous for me.’

  We climbed. Leo’s torch threw tunnels of light up ahead at dog turds, broken glass, the flattened, dried-out carcase of a mauled cat. On the eighth floor, a dog shivered in the corner of the elevator cubicle, a bitch suckling tiny puppies. She looked up, summoned all she had left in her of fight, and growled into the torchbeam. Leo slammed the elevator grille across her. The corridors were full of puddle water and uncollected rubbish. On the fourteenth floor, a scratching sound revealed a feral cockerel who jerked his head critically, training first one eye and then the other on us before striding into the unfilled cavity that was his home. He was probably the second or third generation of urbanised farm animals picking away at a living in the new suburbs.

  Leo unlocked the door. A curtain blew in at us from an unglassed window. The flat was a shell, unplastered concrete walls and unsurfaced concrete floor. The main room was a mess of loose wires and unplumbed pipes. The stink of a full toilet came at us from a room to the side and the floor was wet. Trofim himself was lying on a mattress in the corner. We had woken him. Leo shone the torch in his eyes and he rubbed them, sat up, called out.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Trofim was still in the suit they had taken him away in. They had let him bring nothing. No books, no paper, no radio. His hands shook as he embraced us. His head was cut from some fall in the darkness. He composed himself and pulled up the only chair in the room and lit the camping stove. Leo took out some provisions: candles, biscuits, whisky, tins of baked beans and Heinz soups and sticks of German salami. The coup was three bananas which he produced with a flourish. Trofim looked thin and ragged. He had a painful, hollow cough. I remembered he had spent two years in prison during the war and six months in solitary confinement after it. He was probably better able to cope with this than most septuagenarians, but it had taken its toll. He spoke slowly, breathing hard.

  ‘The news?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard nothing. I spend the days alone. No beating, no torture, just isolation. I am managing.’

  Ottilia pushed past Leo and rolled up Trofim’s sleeve. She checked his blood pressure, looked at his eyes and listened to his chest. She took two inhalers out of her coat pocket, a jar of protein pills, and sachets of rehydration powder. For the first time I noticed she too had a bag. From it she took three bottles of mineral water. She poured some into a glass and added the powder, and handed it to Trofim.

  ‘Sleep, stay warm, boil the water here before drinking it. Try to exercise a little every day.’ Trofim nodded and placed his hand on hers. ‘Here are some antibiotics – you have a chest infection – three a day for a week.’

  ‘The others?’ Trofim asked.

  ‘Slavnicu and Ralian have given in. They say you tricked them into it. Stanciu’s holding out, but he’s ill. We’ve heard nothing from Apostol except that he’s in Baneasa somewhere,’ I told him.

  Trofim nodded. ‘Apostol will hold out if he thinks he will win. Stanciu’s different. A good man, pig-headed, awkward with everyone, friends or enemies. He’ll hold out from sheer stubbornness. He didn’t even want to sign the letter in the first place. Now he won’t retract it!’ His laughter segued into a coughing fit. ‘And how has it been reported?’

  ‘Ah, Comrade!’ Leo replied. ‘I wondered when you’d get to the point! I have prepared a folder of cuttings which you can peruse at your leisure, in your luxurious garçonnière, while your friendly cockerel patrols the perimeter.’

  Leo handed over a scrapbook of cuttings. Trofim scanned them – The Washington Post, The Times, Pravda, Libération… – and looked pleased. He peeled a banana and munched it slowly, eyes closed, focusing on the taste, then gathered two tin cups, a chipped mug and a rinsed-out pilchard tin, and poured the whisky.

  ‘To friends at home and abroad,’ he raised his cup, ‘I will be home soon. This is not a tenable situation for them. They cannot keep me here. Will you do one thing for me between now and then?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Find out where they are holding Stanciu and his wife and visit them? With some supplies?’

  There was a loud knock on the door, and the guard came in, breathless and terrified. ‘OK, time’s up. They’re on their way now. Time to go.’ He looked at Trofim’s stash of goods. ‘Hide that. Under the mattress, in the toilet, wherever, but don’t let them see it. Please, Domnul�
�’ Domnul… a sign that even here, even among his captors, Trofim was on top.

  As I left I gave Trofim what I had brought: a small short-wave radio and some headphones. I had thought ahead and put in batteries. He thanked me with an embrace. There were tears in his eyes. It was the first time he had displayed such vulnerability. Usually there was only a witty rejoinder, a handshake or a nonchalant goodbye. As I stood there with my arms around his thin shoulders, smelling the smell, despite his attempts at keeping himself clean and in order, of stale clothes, sweat, dirt and urine, I felt protective and respectful. It was what I imagined I would have felt for a father, had my father lived long enough to get old and had he been… well, like a father. Trofim’s frail body was so easy to kill off but his calculating mind remained ahead of the game: the puppet master running the show not just behind the scenes but here, in this damp and dirty cell.

  For an extra half-bootful of goods, the guard told us where to find Stanciu.

  ‘We’re not going now, are we?’ I asked Leo.

  ‘Why not? We’re close by. It’s safe – he’s not being guarded at night because he can’t go anywhere.’

  Ottilia checked her medical bag and found some syringes and ampoules of insulin. ‘He’ll be glad to see these.’

  ‘Stalingrad Boulevard, block nine, sixth floor: apartment thirteen,’ Leo repeated the address. The lift worked and the building was clean. Stanciu was being spared the worst, though it would still compare badly with the Herastrau flat they had taken him from. The lobby lights were on, the regulation forty-watt bulb holding its own against the darkness. We heard the lift grinding in its shaft, but did not risk it.

  We knocked at the door and there was no reply. We knocked again. After a minute or two, Leo slipped a note under the door. There was the shuffling of slippered feet, a raised male voice followed by the placating voice of a woman. Then the timid opening of the door on its security chain. A jowly old lady with bedraggled hair peered out at us.

  ‘Yes?’ There was weary dread in her voice.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Stanciu?’ Leo pushed his face forward and she retreated and closed the door. Ottilia pulled Leo away and put her mouth up to the door.

  ‘Mrs Stanciu, I am a doctor and I have some medicine for your husband.’ There was a pause, then the unlocking of the chain. ‘Sergiu Trofim has sent us.’

  ‘Go away. That man has caused us enough trouble. My husband was not himself. He has nothing to do with this. He deeply regrets it all.’

  A ferocious growl came from inside the flat. ‘For God’s sake, woman. Let the buggers in!’ The door flew open. Mr and Mrs Stanciu stood before us: she a smooth-skinned and lard-coloured communist matron; he a barrel-shaped, gouty, triple-chinned old trooper with short legs and a walking stick. His skin was yellow and his eyes watery. He sweated and his skin was clammy. I sensed Ottilia adding up his ailments, dividing them by his living conditions and trying to calculate the amount of time he had left to live.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘We’ve been through this shit. I don’t care any more. I’m not recanting. I’ve recanted enough. All my life it’s been sign this, retract that, confess to this, deny that; purge him, rehabilitate her. I’ve had enough. You can all fuck off.’ He sat down heavily on the sofa and jutted out the first of his chins defiantly.

  Leo was soothing: ‘Comrade, I respect your fighting talk, but we have not come here to ask for anything. On the contrary. Your friend Trofim…’ Stanciu harrumphed contemptuously at the word friend but did not correct him. ‘Your comrade Trofim asked us to visit you and see if there was anything you needed to make things more comfortable.’

  The flat they were being held in was efficient but without luxuries. A packet of flour and some fruit lay on the kitchen table, and there was a television in the room. Mrs Stanciu may no longer be shopping in the duty-free shops, but she was getting the basics in somehow.

  ‘My friend, the doctor here, has some insulin which I believe you need.’ Stanciu looked at Ottilia and nodded, his face lightening. She handed him the medical purse with the bottles and some syringes. He seemed about to say thank you, but pulled back. ‘I have some things which I shall leave here for you and your wife to do as you like with.’ Leo took out some cigarettes, tinned ham and salami, a half bottle of whisky and a few bars of chocolate. Stanciu did not move, but Mrs Stanciu leapt up and hid them away in a cupboard. We rose to leave.

  Stanciu stopped us. ‘What’s happened to Trofim?’ We told him. He harrumphed again; then, rolling a glob of phlegm around his mouth for a few seconds, spat a gelatinous khaki mass onto a handkerchief. ‘He always was a crafty old Jew. The only man who could go into a revolving door after you but still come out in front of you. That’s Trofim.’

  Leo laughed. Stanciu glared at him. ‘And if you think I’m going to thank you for your capitalist pity and your little luxuries…’ he called out as we left.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know…’ Leo raised his hands placatingly as we backed out towards the exit.

  ‘…you can fuck off!’ The door slammed behind us.

  That was Stanciu. Rude, boorish, fat and ill, he was the unsung hero. He had thrown it all away with nothing to gain; now he refused – whether from bravery or pig-headedness – to back down. It was as Trofim had said: friends or enemies, he wanted nothing more to do with any of them. When the journalists and historians wrote up their accounts of the end of communism, I wondered where Stanciu and his like would fit in. While some, like Trofim, set in motion their high political strategies, and others took to the streets and pushed from below, there were those, like Stanciu, who bogged the system down in its own absurdity with individual acts of courage or perversity. What history, obsessed with individual stories of great men or the myth of collective action, would find space for them?

  They released Trofim a week later. He was back in his flat after two days in the Party clinic, and though still under watch he was able to receive visitors. Stanciu and Apostol too were allowed back into their homes, but it was Trofim people came to: a train of ambassadors, Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, all with messages from their foreign ministers. In theory the old man was under house arrest, but the guards charged with preventing people from reaching him quickly became his social secretaries. One day, when Ottilia and I were lunching with him, the police captain in charge of Trofim’s surveillance detail came in.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, Domnul, but the Canadian chargé is here. I have told him he’s early. Shall I ask him to wait in the lobby?’

  Four

  Trofim adjusted to his semi-clandestine celebrity like a man returning to work after a long vacation. From somewhere, visibly not the Bucharest tailors, he was kitted out with sharp new suits and jackets. The regime continued its intimidation – intentionally clumsy surveillance, break-ins, phone-tapping – while, out of deference to the Russians, allowing him plenty of leeway. He was free to travel, spending a week in Moscow at the beginning of November, and a week after his return he was invited to give a lecture in Paris. The Romanian authorities granted him a visa immediately. They sped him on his way but he disappointed them by coming back.

  Two weeks after his return, Trofim heard that Stanciu had suffered a stroke, and took me to visit him in the Politburo health centre on Strada Mihalache. Stanciu sat in a wheelchair with an old peasant blanket over his knees. His face was the colour of ash, and his left hand shook. A party-crested ashtray overflowed with Havana cigar stubs. The shelves of the clinic’s visiting room were stacked with improving literature: Marx, Engels, Ceauşescu his’n’hers volumes of speeches and scientific treatises. Two portable metal lecterns, symmetrically placed at each end of the bookcases, held one of Elena’s ghostwritten tomes on polymers and a book by Ceauşescu entitled Socialism and the New Society. A half-read novel in Russian by Gorki lay upturned on Stanciu’s lap. A nurse stood by, watching and listening.

  ‘Bloody hell. Not you again! Haven’t you caused me enough trouble?’ Stanciu gave an effortful chuck
le, coughed, tried to spit, and managed only a thick dribble down his chin which he wiped with his dressing-gown sleeve.

  ‘Are they treating you well?’ Trofim asked in the traditionally upbeat but tactful way one addresses the dying.

  ‘No complaints. Fuck all to do except listen to your body packing up and the teacups rattling. Sometimes I feel my leg’s wet and I check to see if I’ve pissed myself again or just spilled my drink.’ He took a sip of water. ‘And all that fucking Gorki: when they open the KGB archives I bet they’ll find out the reason Stalin disappeared him was that he was so boring.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Comrade?’ asked Trofim, ‘it was I who got you into this…’

  ‘Saul,’ Stanciu leaned forward confidingly and dropped his voice, ‘I’m always sorry we never finished the job Marshal Antonescu started,’ he laughed. ‘But yes, please, come back next week. And bring me some more of these…’ He waved an empty box of Havana cigars at us and called the nurse to wheel him away.

  ‘Great sense of humour,’ I said outside, ‘that joke about Antonescu. Very funny. I don’t suppose he cares much about the Iaşi pogrom does he?’ I was referring to July 1941, when ten thousand Jews, among them Trofim’s parents and sister, were murdered by Antonescu’s fascist troops. Stanciu had used Trofim’s real name: Saul, his Jewish name, the name he had changed to the more Latinate Sergiu. Trofim’s own Romanianisation was complete, but to some he would remain Saul Trofinsky. The rabbi’s son from Iaşi belonged to another world, another epoch.