The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  ‘Have you noticed what’s missing?’ Leo asked, pointing at an apartment block whose top two floors had collapsed into one.

  ‘Noise?’ I ventured. ‘People and noise?’ That was usually what was missing around here.

  ‘Them too. No, look. Look at those flats. Look at the broken concrete. There’s no steel framing – after a few floors they just build onto what’s there. They don’t bother with joists or girders. They just build floor upon floor, breeze block on breeze block. After a couple of floors there’s nothing holding them up.’

  The coming weeks saw a frenzy of demolition for which even hardened bulldozer-watchers were unprepared. The Buildings Directorate used the earthquake as an excuse to demolish swathes of old Bucharest. People were shifted from flats in places like Lipscani, Dudesti and Dorobanti and rehoused in buildings that were at once unfinished and dilapidated. After the earthquake many also came with a dose of the unromantic ruin, caught between the abolished past and a future that refused to arrive.

  Leo and I continued to film or photograph the demolitions, but they were happening too fast. I filled a dozen films with images and could have filled a dozen more. Leo had them developed and sent them out, filing reports for Reuters, Le Soir, Le Figaro. Bucharest’s diplomats, orchestrated by Ozeray, began protesting. What was happening here was only part of it: out in the provinces, in Sibiu, Timişoara, Moldova, areas where the minorities lived, all signs of different cultures were being eradicated. It was desolation: villages that had stood for centuries were bulldozed in a morning, to be replaced with high-rise blocks surrounded by scrubland or factory complexes that looked like abandoned galactic penal colonies. Romania was being turned into a huge, pastless no-place.

  ‘You see that?’ Leo asked, pointing at the world’s largest structure, the Palace of the People, an entire horizon’s worth of concrete, steel and marble cladding. ‘That’s the world’s biggest mausoleum. When they’ve finished building it, the whole of communism will climb in there, shut the doors, and die. They think they’re building the city of the future. What they’ve done is build their own tomb. The Megalo-Necropolis, the new city of the dead, waiting for its tenants.’

  On the first of November we witnessed the worst of the demolitions, the one that would stand as a monument to all the vandalism, crudity and farce of the city’s ‘remodelling’.

  The monastery of Saints Cyril and Methodias had stood for centuries on the south-west bank of the canal. Now it was in the way, its four-hundred-year-old tower an offence against the new skyline. It had withstood earthquakes, fires, woodworm, the Turks, rot and neglect, but now it would make way for the ‘People’s Leisure Park’: a year-round communist pleasure dome with underlit arcades and static rides, grey candy floss and the all-day seepage of uplifting music. The plans were on show in the Party HQ: neo-classical pillars and plinths holding up a huge glass bell, a crystal palace for totalitarianised leisure.

  This was an unusual demolition. The tower would be dynamited – a new measure to make sure the very stones were smashed and not merely sundered from each other. It would be unrebuildable. When the demolitions started a few years ago, notable buildings were only dismantled and put in storage. They lay in their stone archives like the undead in their graves, ready to rise again and haunt Ceauşescu. Now it was more vindictive: buildings blown up and steamrollered, then heaved as ballast into great holes beneath where they had stood. It was like those death camps where prisoners were made to dig their graves before being shot as they knelt over them. Megalo-Necropolis Leo called it, and despite his apocalyptic talk we had all begun to feel that these were terminal times in a Bucharest that was becoming both its own ghost and its own grave.

  We stood with a small crowd, braving the cold and the Securitate’s cameras. I recognised Andrei Liviu the poet, deathly pale but walking steadily. He had made it from Constanţa for this protest, and his presence was drawing attention. His cancer was in remission but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. In his new poems he likened it to a group of plotters regrouping in the shadows, readying themselves for their coup against his body. The book had been banned because the Ministry of Culture censor had thought the cancer was a metaphor for the state. They were wrong: the state had become a metaphor for the disease.

  Ion Marinaru was there with his wife. They made a handsome pair, the nearest Romania had to film stars. With them was the novelist Vasile Iorba, another good Party member now breaking cover. His last novel, a futuristic story about a penal colony on Mars, had only scraped past the censors because Elena Ceauşescu herself had read it and adopted the idea as a policy goal. The Romanian Cosmic Research Centre, with her as its patron-director, owed its existence to the small, sarcastic man who now stood smoking and stamping his feet on the ground, unlikely father of the national space programme. These people were standing up to the authorities for the first time.

  There was a whiff of experimentation in the air. Nobody knew how to stand or look defiant. They tried different postures and expressions and spoke loudly to keep up their confidence. The police were no better prepared. We knew some of the Securitate had been involved in the quelling of disturbances in factories and mines. We knew about all that, but this was different – these protestors were writers and artists, Party members, religious believers and technocrats, foreigners and diplomats. There was no blueprint for the authorities dealing with this.

  At the back of the crowd stood Ozeray and the Russian chargé d’affaires. Behind them, moving along the edges, was Maltchev speaking into his Pravda dictaphone as his photographer took reams of pictures. The presence of the Russians emboldened the crowd. Shouts of ‘Gorbachev! Gorbachev!’ and ‘Perestroika!’ could be heard towards the back. From elsewhere in the mêlée someone called out ‘Trofim!’ and a name I had never heard before: ‘National Salvation Front!’

  At sunset came the crack of dynamite. The tower flinched. A few tiles fell from the roof, then the little wooden belfry lost its rafters. There was another moment of hesitation, then the whole edifice convulsed, expired, fell down into its outline, sleeving its own descent. Up came a cloud of dust and rubble. The way was clear: the wrecking-balls tore into the building like a pack of dogs, crashed through the barriers, flattened the gate, trampled the graveyard and burst through the monastery’s walls. The wooden beams flew out like matchsticks.

  Leo hurled himself at the police cordon. They pushed him back again and again until a Securitate officer pistol-whipped him and pulled him into a waiting car. The car started up, drove off then suddenly stopped a hundred yards away and threw him out into the waterless canal. By the time I reached the bank, Leo lay in a heap at the bottom, blood from his head spreading slowly outwards.

  Two gypsies helped me drag Leo up to the roadside where I called Ioana from a functioning phone booth. Her first response was, ‘What’s he done now?’ She came over immediately in a neighbour’s Lada. We moved him onto the pavement; I was holding the back of his head, the sticky blood warm and slowly pumping from an open split in his scalp. Ioana sat with his head in her lap while I called Ottilia at her hospital, leaving a message in English, hoping it might ensure some response. Leo’s lips were blue, his breath so faint it barely registered. If those who ministered to the living were unfindable, I had to try those who ministered to the dead.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Campanu. I heard him suck on a cigarette, then the clink of something metallic on china. If I didn’t know he was in the middle of a post mortem, laying a scalpel down in a metal dish, I would have thought he was putting down his knife and fork and lighting up after a meal. ‘It’s the other end of the process I specialise in, you know that… I’ll do my best.’

  He arrived within minutes in a morgue van with a stretcher and a pile of zip-up black bags, like bed-sized bin liners. Campanu felt Leo’s hands. ‘They’re already cold,’ he said, taking a pulse and listening for breath. ‘We don’t have much time…’

  At the hospital I saw Ottilia immediately, s
tanding in the lobby with a trolley ready. Beside her, one of the nurses smoked fiercely and stamped her feet in the cold. It was nearly dark now.

  ‘I got your message,’ Ottilia said, ‘Diana was having a smoke in the office and heard you. Bring him here. Hold his head steady.’ We transferred Leo to the trolley. As usual the hospital looked deserted.

  Once inside, Ottilia took out her stethoscope and listened. I detected a tiny shake of the head, but refused to acknowledge it. No one else saw it – Ioana was stroking Leo’s blood-matted hair as we moved, Campanu concentrating on guiding the trolley through the endless recession of corridors. She lifted his eyelids, Leo’s pupils far up into the socket cavity, bloodshot white globes completely still.

  ‘If he’s got a cracked skull, a depressed fracture, the blood on the outside isn’t the problem, it’s what’s happening inside. If he’s having a haemorrhage I can’t treat it and I can’t do it here… there isn’t the equipment. If any of the bone from the fracture has gone into the brain tissue, it may be too late anyway, and even if it isn’t there’s a chance of brain damage. I won’t know until I’ve cleaned him up and given him a scan.’

  We wheeled Leo into an operating theatre. ‘I’ll scan him and stabilise him. If we’re lucky, it might just be a closed head injury, bruising of the brain tissue, some kind of contusion… there’s still a risk of course, but it’s something I can deal with. The other thing is that he’s lost a lot of blood… he may need a transfusion…’

  ‘No!’ Campanu was shaking his head. ‘No… you can’t do that. It’s too risky. The blood hasn’t been tested properly. The morgues are full of people with hepatitis from infected blood. There’s more people dying from that than from blood loss. You know about AIDS too. You can’t do it. It’s too much of gamble.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Ottilia said, looking at Ioana and then at me. ‘I’m giving you the options. We have blood. Campanu is right – it’s unchecked, we haven’t got the facilities to check it… we don’t know whether it’s infected or not. We don’t know anything…’

  ‘Do it if you have to,’ I found myself saying. Ioana looked at me, but said nothing. Ottilia nodded.

  The nurse assembled a drip and wheeled a ventilator towards where Leo lay. Ottilia taped in the mouthpiece, inserting a tube into his arm. She motioned us to leave. Campanu stayed behind. ‘I’ll come and tell you as soon as there’s anything to tell,’ she said, taking my hand and leading me out. It was her first act of tenderness since the day Manea had told her about Petre. The nurse came past with some bags of blood on a tray. They looked heavy, the blood dark and plethoric and dense.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to the flat?’ I asked Ioana. ‘Wait for him at home, rest, get the place ready for when he comes back. He’s going to need someone with him. I’ll call as soon as we know anything.’

  ‘I was about to leave him, you know. I was going to tell him today. I’ve been meaning to for weeks but I just never plucked up the courage.’ Ioana was crying, her hand covering her eyes. I had never seen her cry; I had always admired her ability to turn sorrow into anger, to turn the passivity of pain into an attacking energy. That ability failed her now. I said nothing. I was thinking about the logistics of a seriously ill Leo needing constant care. It was a difficult thing to envision, but it was better than the image over which I had superimposed it: Leo dead, his body wheeled through those double doors and out into Campanu’s van. I was cold and afraid, ready for another bereavement. And not just afraid for myself. With Leo gone, the loneliness would be collective.

  ‘He’s impossible to be with. He’s out all day or up all night writing. There’s no life for us here – it’s just his book and the city and the bloody black market. Cutting deals, taking pictures… we were never going to live normally. I wanted to get out. I’m going to – as soon as they open the borders. Maybe before. I told him. He didn’t even look up from his scrapbook – “Mmmm…” he said. Just that. Wasn’t even listening. Then I repeated it, hoping he hadn’t heard, but he had: his answer was “You go if you want to.” I tell you, he didn’t even look up. Now he’s in there, and he’s going to die, and I was going to leave him.’ She gripped my arm. ‘He thought he was keeping the place together, he thought he was its rememberer, the one who’d put it back together again. He doesn’t understand, he’s just a higher parasite, picking through the debris. It’s got so bad he’s started to imagine places that were never there. They’re more real to him than we are…’

  Ioana lay on the bench and slept. I smoked and paced the corridor. After three hours Campanu emerged. Despite the cold, he glistened with sweat, his fingers trembled as he smoked. His hair was wet and spiky, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows.

  ‘She’s relieved the pressure on his brain, operated and stopped the haemorrhaging. His skull is cracked but it’s going to heal. He’s responding well. He’s got a fractured ankle too, so he’ll be in a wheelchair when he comes out, and he won’t come out of that for a while.’

  ‘Can I see him?’ Ioana asked. Campanu nodded. ‘Don’t expect much – he’s not going to be conscious for days, and he won’t be up to much when he is. Go in.’ He turned to me. ‘He nearly died in there. I could have been wheeling him out to the morgue for his Y incision. Instead I’m here telling you you’ll need to take care of him, nurse him back to… well… normal,’ he gave an exhausted smile. ‘I don’t come across many reasons to believe in miracles in my line of work, but what Ottilia did in there, though completely explicable medically, was, in these conditions, a miracle…’

  Ottilia came to get me, her white coat bloodied and her hair stuck to her forehead. I had dozed off – fear alone had kept me awake, but when it went I fell into a chasm of soothing, imageless darkness. ‘He’ll be OK, but after a few days here he’ll be best off somewhere else. Take him to yours, I’ll come back and check on him when I can.’ She led me inside, where Leo lay unconscious, connected up to a tangle of pipes and drips. In the background a machine bleeped evenly. I stood over Leo and touched his face. He was warmer, fighting his way back. ‘Where’s Ioana?’ I asked, wanting to share this with her, to see the relief in her face. We looked around but she had gone.

  They moved Leo to a room that was less a ward than a holding tank for sickness, a place where diseases recovered from their cures and came out fighting: better and stronger and more resistant to treatment. In the deserted corridors, infections patrolled invisibly, bugs and viruses sought out new flesh to fix on and dig into, their hunting grounds constantly replenished.

  After three days Leo opened his eyes, his head creaked first to the left, raising a shaky salute to me, then to the right where Ottilia sat reading. Leaning on his elbows, he hauled himself up so he could see beyond the horizon of the bedsheet.

  ‘Jesus…’ he croaked, ‘if I’m alive – and looking around I’m far from certain I am – then you’ve got to get me out of here before I die.’

  Two days later we drove him to my flat, his ankle bandaged. Ozeray discovered an antique bamboo wheelchair, the sort used by white settlers in the Congo to tour their over-watered lawns. Attached to the rim was an adjustable parasol of grey silk, and the armrests held an ashtray and sockets for bottle and glass. It suited Leo, who spun around like a wheelchair Napoleon inspecting his troops. Our student Iulia turned up one day at my door and took him out for what she called a ‘test drive’. She came the following day, and every day thereafter.

  Leo knew Ioana had gone before we did, and knew she had gone for good. When I went to fetch his things from their flat, hers were missing. There was no note. Whatever farewell had passed between them had done so in the hospital: she had meant goodbye and he, by osmosis or mood-transfusion, had understood. He never mentioned her again.

  Leo adapted well to life on wheels and, after a few days of zipping round the flat smoking and drinking Yugoslav sparkling wine, he returned to work. At first it was only in short bursts, since his head ached and concentration hurt, but as he regained his strength,
he began asking for night-time excursions, me pushing and him taking notes in a Monocom exercise book. His first trip was to the site where the monastery had stood: a scraped-clean empty circle of dirt with a cordon of shredded ribbon flapping in the breeze.

  Ottilia visited every day and stayed long beyond what solicitude for Leo required. Something had changed in her. After ten days, we bit the bullet and bathed Leo, who was half-drunk and as truculent and difficult to manoeuvre as a fourteen-stone baby. After we had washed him and changed his pyjamas, he fell asleep. We turned off the lights and tiptoed away, muffling our laughter.

  As gradually as she had left, Ottilia came back. That night she asked to sleep on the sofa. I offered her my bed, which she refused. Later I went into the living room and heard her breathing and unsleeping. In the darkness, when someone has their eyes open, you can hear it. I touched her face, and she put my hand to her mouth.

  ‘Why did you leave me?’

  ‘I blamed you, I suppose, but not as much as I blamed myself. I looked up to Petre, I thought he was flawless, a perfect human being. I thought he was honest and principled. And because I couldn’t blame him for not being all that, I blamed us for believing that he was.’

  ‘Everyone believed it. But he was all that. He was just something else too.’

  A few weeks ago that comment would have drawn nothing but scorn. ‘I know that now. I tried to stay pure, clear of it all, and always thought that, up against him, I was failing. I tried to stay uncompromised, to measure up, not to myself of course but to him. It would have been cleverer to realise we were all compromised and to work with what there was, with the reality given to us. Bend a little here, gain a little there…’

  ‘You’re sounding like Leo.’