The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  He tapped the roof of the car and swung inside as it pulled away.

  I doubted I would see my newspaper vendor tomorrow. Where did people go after confronting the Securitate? Where could they hide? How long could they run? The policemen had crept back and were inspecting the damage to the shopfront: smashed glass, splintered doorpanels, animal blood spattered along the snow. They began to clear up. Passers-by approached them and cheered them for not helping the Securitate. A rumour was being born. By evening I would hear it again, inflated by imagination, drink and wishful thinking: the police had stood up to the Securitate, they had helped the protestors escape…

  Just before five o’clock I stopped at the TAROM offices. If I was going to buy a ticket home, this was the time. Perhaps it was already too late. Here too there were queues leading out of the doors. Most of the wealthy foreigners had arranged their exits: embassy people, defence contractors, the merchants of surveillance equipment and riot control gear they would soon have the chance to see being used. The only people left were student travellers, young families caught short in the middle of a cheap and spartan holiday, and East Europeans from soon to be ex-communist states trying to reach their bloodless revolutions before Christmas. No one knew very much about what was happening, but they knew enough to want to leave. I waited in the queue, feeling in my inside pocket for my passport, running my fingers along its edges and pointed corners.

  Eight staff were at their desks, of whom six sat and read newspapers, smoked or fiddled with their cuticles. The usual fusion of panic and lethargy dominated. On the walls, maps of Romania were drawing-pinned to cork noticeboards, and posters of churches, beaches and folk choirs curled at the corners. How many of the churches still stood, how many of the singers had been relocated to the cities, how many of the beaches were choking on oil slicks, poisoned fish and bloated dog carcasses?

  In front of me was a family of British tourists – two exhausted children and their mother – who had cut short their holiday in Timişoara. They had been put on a train to Bucharest this morning and were trying to swap their tickets. What had they seen, I asked. The woman looked around before she answered, already attuned to the dangers of speaking to strangers. ‘We didn’t actually see anything – the centre was cut off the day we got there, and for two days they wouldn’t let us leave the hotel. Bloody awful. Then this morning they stuck us on a bus and drove us to the station…’ She wiped her eyes. The children slept upright, leaning against her, while her husband waved ten-dollar bills at the staff. He was learning fast, but so was everyone else. It was more like a stock-market panic than a travel agency. ‘The bus they took us in – the windows had been painted over so we couldn’t see out. It stopped a few times, went back on itself, like it was changing route or something. Then when we got to Timişoara station the whole place was under armed guard. They put us straight onto the train and that was it. Didn’t see a thing except the inside of the hotel and the bloody bus.’

  Her husband returned with some tickets: ‘Who’s this?’ he asked aggressively.

  ‘Dunno, I mean… just some Brit in the queue, I just started talking to him…’

  ‘Yeah well, let’s just get out of here, shall we? I’ve managed to get flights for tonight and we’re going straight to the bloody airport. Sorry mate…’ He placed himself between me and his wife and said, in the tone of someone imparting hard-won advice: ‘It’s each man for himself round here.’ My smile puzzled him, then made him angry. He dragged a suitcase through the door and shouted back at his wife, ‘You coming or what?’ She smiled apologetically at me and hurried after him, a child in each arm and an Action Man with a tiny rifle sniping from her coat pocket.

  I followed them out. The snow was four or five inches deep and the traffic crackled along the salted roads. Night was setting in. The weak streetlamps and the whiteness of the pavements gave the place the grey translucence of hospital skin.

  At home I put my passport and papers back into the desk and flicked on the radio. The World Service said nothing about Timişoara or anywhere else, so I left the radio on and went for a shower. By the time I came out Leo was installed in my armchair watching Columbo.

  ‘Single or return?’ he asked without looking up from the television.

  ‘What?’

  ‘From the TAROM office… was it a single or a return?’

  I opened the door. ‘So, you’ve got Securitate on your payroll now too, have you? Spying on your friends…’

  ‘I found out quite by chance actually. I popped in myself a few minutes later to pick up some tickets for clients, and it just sort of cropped up that you’d been. Maybe this is what you were after?’ Leo slapped a plane ticket onto the coffee table and walked out. It was made out in my name, and my passport number had been typed in: a single flight to London for the 23rd. I pushed it away. After a minute or two I came past again, took it and placed it with my passport and papers in my jacket pocket.

  ‘Look. Think of it as insurance. I can’t say exactly what’s going to happen in the next couple of weeks, but just hang on to that ticket…’ Leo was waving another ticket now. ‘There’s one for Ottilia too, but you know she hasn’t got a passport… not a Romanian one anyway.’

  ‘What other passport would she have?’ I asked, but I should have known by now what Leo was capable of…

  ‘I’m having her one made, a perfectly serviceable Russian one. One previous owner… it’ll be ready in time.’

  ‘You know she won’t come. And as for me I went to TAROM wanting an excuse not to buy a ticket, not because I wanted to leave. And now you’ve bloody given me one…’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo guided me to the kitchen where he opened the window to reveal six bottles of Ukrainian champagne chilling in a snow-packed window box, ‘yes, I have. Because I want you to choose, to decide for yourself. I want you to weigh things up, to stop floating in the slipstream of your own life.’

  ‘You should write a self-help book.’ I unhooked myself from his arm.

  ‘I did, and I followed every step of my own regime. Can’t you see?’ Leo did a little fashion-model twirl in the kitchen. The jacket he had chosen for this evening was a metallic mauve colour I had only ever seen on toy cars.

  He popped the cork. ‘Timişoara’s erupting. While we’re at Capsia’s eating our pork Jewish style and crêpes Suzette the police will be shooting to kill – it’s either going to be a blood-soaked footnote in the history of communism or the start of the revolution. It’s the right time to be making decisions, not just for you but for everyone.’ He handed me a glass. ‘For me, for Ottilia, and if they want to stay on top, for people like Cilea and Manea… for all of them, right down to those poor frozen pawns down there.’ He pointed at the policemen stamping their feet in the snow as they sucked on Carpati, and raised a glass.

  Leo stopped outside the Athénée Palace and picked up what looked like a big pot of jam from the parking attendant. Then he took me inside and told me to wait. I watched him disappear through the overlit lobby, his jacket pulsing with a new reptilian sheen as he passed under the spotlights. I waited for ten minutes. When he returned he was carrying a bag that moved. I peered in: lobsters wrestling slowly, elastic bands around their claws. ‘Capsia,’ he explained, ‘it’s bring your own starters night. The roads are blocked and nothing’s coming through.’

  Capsia was busier than ever. Most of the tables were taken, and the waiters skimmed along the deep blue carpets as if their shoes had invisible wheels.

  Impassive at his post the Maître d’Hôte greeted us. He took Leo’s bag and the jar, which I now saw was Iranian caviar. Obviously one of the Comrade’s staff had done some shopping in Tehran. When Leo asked him what he recommended this evening he replied solemnly and with no hint of irony, ‘The lobster, sir, it is very fresh,’ and whisked his trawl to the kitchens.

  We were shown to Leo’s private function room, unofficially known as the ‘Labis Room’, after the young dissident poet Nicolae Labis, who, after a night of dri
nking and daring political talk in 1956, stumbled and was decapitated by a tram just outside Capsia. Leo had asked for it specifically.

  In the main dining room apparatchiks and nomenklatura eyed both each other and each other’s plates. A senior policeman in full uniform sat with three men in suits, an interpreter and some North Koreans in military dress, while a group of Arabs sipped Fanta from plastic bottles wedged into ice buckets. At a table near the string quartet the minister for work was softening up another scared adolescent for his under-table lunge. Nearby, behind calico screens, were tables of people so senior each had their own waiter. One of these, I learned later, was General Milea, the army chief of staff, in the process of making his greatest and last mistake.

  In the Labis Room a long oval table was set in fin-de-siècle style. A fire burned, the red wine breathed and the cheeses sweated. Ozeray and Maltchev arrived first, followed a few minutes later by Professor and Mrs Ionescu and Rodica without her husband.

  Ottilia joined us soon after. She kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear, ‘It’s bad – bodies are coming in from Timişoara. Dozens of them… so far. Campanu says they’re dumping them at the morgue and cremating them, piling them into the incinerators…’

  Leo tapped his glass three times.

  ‘Friends! Let me thank you all for coming. As many of you are aware, these are my last few days. My last few days in this epoch of light, my last few days basking in the last few rays…. ah, I hear you ask, whose last few rays, that’s the question, Leo’s or this luminous epoch’s?’

  Nervous laughter. Ionescu scanned the room in panic, trying to calculate who might be tonight’s Securitate plant. Satisfied that the likeliest candidate was himself, he relaxed. A few Party people had come, but I knew Leo had invited them as insurance for himself and for his friends – he had the lowdown on their corruption, since he had been its principal conduit. Leo’s tactic was never to exclude people if they could be implicated instead.

  Ottilia nudged me and nodded towards Maltchev who stood at the edge of the crowd checking his pager and listening to something through a concealed earpiece. We knew there was something significant going on, but that was different from knowing what it signified. We sifted through portents, read the tea leaves, pored over the omens without ever knowing what they meant. Everything had a double meaning; you just never knew if what you had grasped was the meaning or its double.

  Leo called me over. ‘Where’s Trofim? Give him a ring. See what’s holding him up.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got the stomach for this “celebration” tonight.’ Ottilia joined me when Leo had gone. ‘It’s not right that we’re stuffing ourselves and drinking and pretending it’s all a joke when there’s people getting killed around us.’

  ‘I’m not sure anyone has the stomach,’ I replied. ‘Look…’ Maltchev was reaching for his barely portable phone. ‘I’ll get hold of Sergiu for Leo and then we’ll go home.’ The phone near the kitchens was broken so I turned down into the corridor and past the storerooms. At the very back I came upon the door to the wine cellar. I smelled earth and cobwebs. The door was open and the Maître d’ looked up at me silently, holding a paraffin lantern which swung its light across the bottles. Before I could ask about the phone he pointed to a door I had missed on my way down. He closed the cellar door behind him. I heard the sound of animated talking, smelled the familiar fug of Carpati in a cramped, unventilated room. I had passed this room without noticing it. The waiters’ rest room. There must be a phone in there.

  The talking stopped as soon as I entered. The smoke stung my eyes. My hand, which lingered on the handle, was seized and the door slammed shut. I had time to see people crowded around a table, some in military uniform, others in suits or jeans. A man I did not recognise sat at the head of the table, unshaven, with thin dark hair and a tanned face. He wore a check shirt and no jacket or tie and though the least well-dressed he was obviously the one in charge. Before I registered any more, someone had pulled my wrists together and was holding them fast with one hand, while pressing the base of my neck and grinding my face into the wall with the other. I did not need to see behind me to know the room was full, and not of waiters.

  ‘What the fuck were you doing, Andrei? Dozing again?’

  ‘Sorry boss,’ came the voice behind me, ‘I’d gone for cigarettes and when I came back he was just opening the door.’ Andrei had his face up against mine. His breath smelled of raw garlic and Carpati.

  ‘Great. What happens now?’ A different voice, then silence. Finally a chair scraped against the floor and footsteps came towards me. There was a touch on my shoulder. My captor loosened his grip. ‘Get him out of here, Sergiu.’ I recognised Manea Constantin, alert and edgy. ‘It’s all right, we’ll deal with this.’ I should have been reassured but I wasn’t. Then came Trofim’s voice at my back, guiding me through the door, telling me not to turn around.

  Back in the corridor I rubbed my neck. Trofim had my arm, ostensibly for support but it was myself I felt sagging as we walked. ‘Do not ask,’ said Trofim before I opened my mouth, ruthless beneath the kind smile, the bright, amused eyes. ‘Now let us help Leo with his official send-off.’

  Leo’s party had run aground. Maltchev had returned, and stood with his back to the fireplace watching the door. He stopped talking when we came in and looked at Trofim, who nodded very gently. Maltchev had his cue. ‘I have received reports tonight, minutes ago, that there is a full-scale uprising in Timişoara and that it is spreading. There are rumours, unconfirmed, of a great many deaths. The security forces are shooting to kill. Witnesses are talking about live ammunition, tanks and tear gas. It is a very bloody night.’

  Leo stood to Maltchev’s right, a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. The food and drink lay untouched on the table. I felt the fear and apprehension in the room, but also rage and something like desperation – a sense that we were stepping into the beyond.

  Ottilia rose from the table. ‘I spoke to Campanu at the morgue earlier… he said he’d received bodies, dozens, with more to come… most had been shot, but he said there were signs of torture too… they’re being cremated in the night…’

  Maltchev again: ‘It’s gathering momentum: Arad, Sânnicolau Mare, Oradea… anti-Ceauşescu demonstrations. In Brasov a group calling itself the New Workers’ Council has called a general strike. The ringleaders have been arrested but the strike is holding. Right across the country the unrest is spreading.’

  Trofim spoke now, calmly pouring himself a drink and walking to Maltchev’s side. ‘The president is still in Iran, but will cut short his stay and return to Bucharest tomorrow. He does not believe these demonstrations are against him. He has been told that they are protests about wages and rations and he thinks he will be able to resolve them. We will see. At present, it is Elena who has taken over, and she has given specific orders for the security apparatus to respond to unrest. We have seen that response.’

  ‘That’ll be why General Milea is eating quails in the next room,’ Leo chipped in. ‘Has he been sacked or what? Does the fat sod even know what’s going on?’

  ‘I am not sure the General is master of his destiny right now,’ said Trofim ambiguously. ‘It is becoming clear that what Ceauşescu is doing to the country is not being done in the name of the Party, and I cannot imagine that the Party as a whole is behind the latest torrent of repression.’ He turned to Maltchev for confirmation. Maltchev nodded.

  I knew what Trofim meant. I had just walked in on a crisis meeting between dissident communists like Trofim and members of the Party high command like Manea Constantin: The National Salvation Front. The rest of those in the Labis Room, better attuned to doublespeak than me, grasped it immediately. Ozeray raised a glass to his mouth, the diplomat’s way of hiding a reaction. Ionescu smiled, seeing the restoration of his old job ahead, which, coupled with the prestige of the injustice he had suffered, would make him an unstoppable force once back in place. Turda Technical College would be getting
a brace of new janitors soon enough.

  Though everyone knew what Trofim meant, Leo was the only one ready to question him. ‘The Party… what you mean, Comrade, is that the rats are deserting the sinking ship, isn’t that right? But all they’re going to do is regroup somewhere else, hose down the decks a little – Christ, I can’t seem to shake off these bloody nautical metaphors – then back to business as usual…’

  ‘I have no knowledge of any such plan, Leo.’ Trofim glanced at me and I looked away, ‘I am speaking in a personal capacity which, as you know, is an isolated and…’

  ‘Sergiu, I don’t for a moment believe that, but if it makes it easier for you, I’ll say no more. What I do know is that all of you Party hacks have something invested in the system. What’s the old Romanian saying? New brothel, same old whores…’

  ‘What you are suggesting, Leo, is without foundation. I have no idea of any plans. I am as they say “out of the loop”, but I was permitting myself to speculate…’

  Leo cut him off. ‘Some speculation. You think we don’t know? For one thing, you’re meant to be under house arrest, and yet you’re here, getting more attention than you were as UN ambassador…! What does that tell us? Right across the country they’re rising up and getting shot, the army’s on alert, troops are coming in under cover of darkness… but Sergiu Trofim’s suddenly got himself carte blanche to visit his chums in Capsia, and all day the black Dacias line up outside his flat… “out of the loop”, eh?’