The Last Hundred Days

by Patrick McGuinness

  In half an hour I counted twenty-eight buses, each carrying over fifty people. Unsurprisable though I had become in my short time here, I was still puzzled at how contemptuously the Securitate treated them. Surely this would be a time to show a semblance of camaraderie? Besides, how wise was it to fill the city centre with thousands of angry, ill-fed, working-age men at a time of national crisis, then prod them like cattle through the self-abasement of this ‘popular demonstration’? Workers dragged their banners along the ground, soaking up mud, grey snow and dirty water, spitting as they were handed their Ceauşescu portraits. A few argued with their superiors, union goons or shop-steward yes-men who were barely in control.

  Even if it started on time, there were more than two hours to go until the big speech. Whose idea had this been? It was stupid beyond belief. Only a leader absolutely sure of popular support and loyalty from the institutions could afford to take this sort of a gamble. But Ceauşescu could have no such certainties. He had looked old and confused on television. He or his wife had just ordered massacres in Timişoara and Brasov. There were strikes and demonstrations all over the country. A new opposition group was calling for his removal. Despite all this, he had decided – or had he been persuaded? – to bus a hundred thousand people to the city centre to exhibit their devotion to him. ‘The people love us…’ Elena later said at the trial, ‘the people love us and will not permit this outrage…’

  My mouth was dry, my chest tight, my skin prickled with excitement. I could not say I knew what was going to happen – knowing is what comes after – but I felt it then, that pregnancy of unhappening that precedes major events. It was a sense of imminence that others had – Leo, Ottilia, Trofim, Ozeray, Maltchev and the rest – but that had until now failed me. It was as if I had entered the weave of things, not that I could control or even predict them, but that I felt them massing, blurred and indistinct but ready to happen.

  I passed Trofim’s on the way home and found his house unguarded. In fact there seemed to be a sudden drop in police presence everywhere except the city centre. I knocked. No one answered. I heard people talking, and then the silence of hushed voices. The spyhole went dark for a moment, then Oleanu answered. He wore a suit and tie and was clean-shaven. Gone was the young Bolshevik look, the round glasses and dissident-chic stubble. What he looked like now was a politician.

  ‘Sorry, we have the radio on in here and it’s hard to hear the door.’ He looked at me with a liar’s overcompensatingly steady eyes. He wanted me gone.

  ‘Tell Sergiu I’m leaving tomorrow. Midday flight. It would be nice to see him before I go. Not sure when I’ll be back, or even whether it’ll be possible after…’ But I was speaking to a closed door. I felt light-headed, cut loose again. Even here, even at the centre of things, I was drifting away to the margins, dragged by some invisible current further and further out.

  It was nearly one o’clock when I reached the flat. I switched on the TV to find a medley of nationalist songs, footage from Party conferences and state visits, all of it cut with flashes of standing ovations and celebratory statistics about outputs and production levels. I couldn’t tell what was being outputted, but whatever it was, it was going up and up, year on year. Tractors, oil, Dacias, flour, steel, iron… all of it so plentiful and so efficiently produced that it stretched the vertical axis of every graph that plotted it. What it never stretched was the credulity of the people watching. They had never believed any of it in the first place.

  I turned the sound down and had just settled on the sofa when Leo hurtled into the room. ‘It’s madness out there. Crazy. They’ve got all these people in the main square, just waiting. There’s already been scuffles. At the front you’ve got Party goons leading the cheering. They’re about three rows deep. At the sides, Securitate. In the middle you’ve got these “loyal” workers and they’re getting more and more pissed off. And believe me – I’ve seen them – they’re on the verge of ripping the eyes out of the Comrade’s portrait. They’ve started arresting people already. Every now and then the Securitate jump into the crowd, drag someone out, and they’re gone. Where do they take them? Christ knows.’

  ‘I’ve seen the buses unloading the poor sods. They weren’t looking too happy when they got here.’

  ‘No doubt about it. Things aren’t under control. I was passing Kiseleff and I saw hundreds of women being turned back at a roadblock. It wasn’t loyalty they were displaying. They were shouting and pushing, and the police had no bloody idea what to do. Some of the women had their kids with them. Babies in slings, kids running around everywhere, heroic mums and grannies waving their beefy arms. There’s sit-ins in every factory, miners in the streets… the police aren’t doing anything about it. Right across town: fights and lootings and attacks on Party offices, and the army’s too busy keeping hold of the parade to get on top of it. As for Timişoara, who knows how many people they’ve killed, but whatever’s going on there it’s beyond their control. I’ve heard of army commanders refusing to obey the shoot-to-kill directives…’

  ‘So why d’you think that with half the country in revolt, Ceauşescu’s decided to bring hundreds of thousands of people to the capital city to demonstrate their loyalty, just when they’re likely to be at their most rebellious, and at a time when he obviously can’t rely on his security services?’

  Leo looked at me and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, there’s two possibilties. One, he’s really got no idea what’s going on and he’s decided to act tough, give a big speech and get the flags and banners out. It’s always worked before… or someone’s advised him to do this, and they’ve advised him badly. That may be Elena, or any of the pet sycophants who ply him with stories of how much he’s loved. Or it could be someone who wants him to go too far, to engineer a no-return situation… There’ll be people out there, not so far away from where we’re standing –’ He jerked his head in the direction of Herastrau, ‘waiting and watching and hoping for a spark.’

  When Ottilia came home the big speech was already fifteen minutes late. Leo had brought beer and wine to the table but no one was drinking. We wanted our wits about us for this.

  What we were about to see for the first time I have now seen so often that it has become impossible to isolate it from the subsequent viewings, when it already had its place in the narrative of the Ceauşescu’s fall. It has been played over and over, on international television, on Romanian television, on radio, and on the new technology of the internet. It is the totemic moment, both the symbol and the thing it symbolises: the Revolution. Though it is a scene full of finality, it remains for me embalmed in a perpetual present tense: ‘Fresh as Lenin in his mausoleum,’ Leo would say.

  Ceauşescu stands on the Central Committee balcony, a pair of microphones at his mouth. He is alone, but behind the silver-grey lace curtain at the French windows, we can make out Elena’s face, defiant and watchful. Ceauşescu wears a dark coat and an Astrakhan hat and looks fragile – more fragile than yesterday. He starts to speak before his voice is ready – a croak, a thin rattle – then clears his throat. The noise that rises as he steps up to the podium is unnatural, a cold snarl topped with a thin layer of cheering. At the front, the loyal plodders wave their banners and chew through their scripted eulogies. Behind them, something elemental is happening, something that comes from the stomach, that gathers and swells up. On the balcony, they can only hear what is directly below. We can hear that second sound, and we can hear it live: low, menacing but above all authentic. It is the cry from the throat, the stripped-hoarse larynx: the sound of fury and hate.

  Ceauşescu starts to speak again. In his mind he is recreating his moment of greatness, twenty-one years ago, when he opposed the crushing of the Prague Spring, but his voice is drowned out. It is indistinct, but you can see a movement in the crowd, a fraying at the policed edges, people leaving and others pouring in from cracks in the cordon. Then the camera cuts back to the Conducător condemning provocateurs and enemies of socialism.

  Ottilia
and Leo are open-mouthed, their drinks untouched. Leo has been lighting cigarettes and forgetting about them, and there are five in the ashtray heaping their fug into the room like the smoke of the factory chimneys of Pitesti. Ottilia grips my hand; I think she is whispering something but it’s only her breath through clenched teeth.

  There is shouting. Very distinctly now we hear it: ‘Timişoara! Timişoara! Timişoara!’ Ceauşescu can hear it too. We can hear it on the television, and now outside our own balcony – we are experiencing both the event and its simultaneous mediatisation. We are there and not there. Ceauşescu puckers his face impatiently and sweeps the air with his hand. It is an authoritarian reflex only, because now there is no authority; he falters and falls to angry pleading. It is all beyond his grasp now. He promises more food, more money, an extra national holiday, but it’s no good. The loyalists are scattering and people are barging past them to the front. Ceauşescu looks helpless and terrified as the fantasy melts like a wall of wax before his eyes. It occurs to me that he has the same look on his face as the Princess the day she came back from Paris.

  There is a shot and the camera cuts to the crowd for a moment before pulling back to the president. People are bursting through the ranks of agents and stooges, and out to the sides the police cordon has given way. People are running past the militia, others joining them from the streets to the side of the square. More shots. Our first thought is that the Securitate have started to fire. Hence the thin rattle of single shots: snipers or close-range handguns.

  A fat bodyguard in a suit and hat who looks like a butcher in Sunday best hurries out and says something into Ceauşescu’s ear. He says it briskly, aggressively. Ceauşescu, who has never been spoken to like this, keeps going, but it is now just a pathetic ramble. The bodyguard comes out again, takes the Comrade’s arm and pulls him indoors. A few faces peer out from behind him to assess the heightening chaos, the curtain parts for Ceauşescu then ripples closed again behind him. It is like water recomposing itself over a drowning man, but to say that is already to read the end into the beginning.

  The screen goes blank, then dark. For a few seconds, nothing. No announcements, no explanations. Then patriotic music. Outside there is a roar. From where we are it is muffled like an underground explosion; then suddenly the streets are full.

  People are running in all directions, and still not a policeman, not a soldier, in sight. The streets I have known these last eight months, streets I imagined only half-populated, are full of people. They pour out of houses, doors swing open, men and women head out towards the city centre.

  The shooting is still far away, but denser. Machine-gun fire; black smoke rising from somewhere just off the main square, close to the university. It is the university says Leo, sure he can pinpoint the exact spot: the library.

  In Aleea Alexandru two of the militia men had changed into jeans and shirts. Whether they were joining the people, trying to save their skins or going undercover it was impossible to tell. Whatever the case, they were uninterested in stopping us as Ottilia and I left the flat to see what was happening on Aviatorilor.

  A cold breeze brought the tang of tear gas, still powerful enough to sting the eyes, and the smell of burning. People were singing and shouting, exchanging rumours and news, debriefing anyone who had come from the city centre. Despite the savagery of what was happening the mood was elated, carnivalesque. A hundred yards away the tanks rolled by. The army could move in any time, kill us all. But here, now, people were free; intensively, dangerously, and perhaps not for long, but they were free.

  This was what Petre meant, I told Ottilia. ‘It’s what he meant, yes. I wish he could have seen this.’ She added ambiguously: ‘Then we would have known for sure what side he was on.’ She smiled and went upstairs ahead of me. When I reached the hallway, she had placed her half-empty bag beside mine at the door, her new passport on top of mine.

  ‘What’s made you change your mind?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m going with you because it’s the only way to make sure you’ll come back.’

  By midnight the army had regained Piaţa Republica. Ceauşescu remained holed up in the Central Committee HQ, but made no announcements, no broadcasts; there were no declarations from either the government or the National Salvation Front. Radio Bucharest announced the suicide of General Milea at 1 am, just as Leo returned smelling of burned rubber, Tsuica and petrol. The sleeves of his reptilian jacket were charred and he had a nasty-looking burn on his arm. ‘That?’ he said proudly as he saw me eyeing his wound, ‘Molotov elbow I think it’s called… seems to be a lot of it about at the moment…’ He had news: a British Airways flight had landed three hours ago to take home the remaining nonessential UK staff and citizens. ‘Good of them to tell me,’ I remarked. ‘I went to the embassy too,’ said Leo, ‘I saw Wintersmith – he said they tried three times to call here, but the phone was dead. Anyway, he’s gone too now. Last on the plane, first up for the OBE.’

  I checked the line. It worked perfectly well. Not only that but it was incongruously clear. No clicking, no static, no bugs. No one was listening in any more. So much for Wintersmith trying to call me, I thought.

  ‘Another thing,’ said Leo, ‘Manea wants to see you. Meet him at Cilea’s in the morning. Ten o’clock. Don’t ask why – I didn’t. Be back here by eleven – I’m getting you to the airport by twelve and there’s no telling what things will be like by then. And we need to allow time for Ms Pullova here to get through customs.’ Ottilia took a bow and said something in Russian.

  By 8 am it was clear that the army and police had won only a temporary victory. Piaţa Republica was filling up again. There were thousands more people today and peaceful demonstrations right across town. The general strike had brought the whole country to a stop. There had been no word from the president now for over twelve hours. There was no shooting, no tear gas, no fighting, just a swell of peaceful sit-ins, demonstrations and rallies. Yesterday it had mainly been men. Now it was women and children and old people, quiet and disciplined and dignified.

  In Herastrau guards stood at their posts waiting for orders that never came. The deeper in I went, the more I felt the muffled panic of the nomenklatura, torn between staying on and protecting their possessions and getting safely out of town. The Party food shop near Cilea’s had been looted by its own customers: the padlock had been jimmied off and a pair of women who looked like opera singers were making off with stuffed suitcases. They were chewing fast – anything they couldn’t carry, they tried to eat.

  Outside Cilea’s flat the guard waved me through. He was no longer in uniform either – he too had taken the precaution of going civilian. I had first seen him that May Day afternoon when Cilea and I had repaired here for sex and chocolate. It felt like a decade ago. It was certainly a regime ago. In front of me was a courtyard of shivering, denuded trees, shovelled snow, empty window boxes and verges of dormant grass. I must have been standing there, taking it all in one last time, because he knocked on the glass of his sentry box and shooed me in.

  Cilea’s living room had been turned into a centre of operations. Manea Constantin was reclining across a deep sofa, his head resting on Turkish cushions, his leg in plaster from heel to thigh. Two televisions were on simultaneously: one showing German satellite TV footage of the events just a few hundred yards away, the other showing the TVRom testcard and playing patriotic songs. One of Manea’s men was feeding papers into a row of shredders, while another stuffed the chewed paper into black bags. There was no sign of Cilea.

  Constantin had telephones at his side, lights flashing like the rotating beacons of police cars. Next door I heard the low calm voice of Cinzia taking messages. Manea nimbly swerved his plastered leg off the sofa and made room for me to sit down.

  ‘Your leg?’

  ‘Yes, that has been something of a… a bugger, you might say. Tripped down the ministry steps on my way to an emergency meeting with the Comrade, I’ve had to cancel all engagements for the foreseeable future.’
He gave a wince of pain so false it might as well have been in inverted commas. ‘Can I get you a drink? A whisky perhaps?’

  One of the phones flashed its green light. Cinzia answered. Manea levered himself up and opened an elaborate peasant cupboard which had been gutted and customised into a drinks cabinet with mirrors and cocktail shakers. The sunlight, angled through the half-tilted blinds, caught the glint of his library of malts.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out there giving the Comrade a hand?’ I asked sarcastically. He feigned not to hear and poured a pair of daytime measures. ‘Where’s Cilea? You moved her out so you could set up your headquarters? Well, at least you can tell me what’s going on out there.’

  ‘It’s difficult to say what’s going on, I will be honest with you, very difficult… this is all unforeseen and I know little more than you…’ He looked at me to make sure I knew he was lying, which was his way of telling me a sort of truth. ‘…but I think the Comrade is facing some trouble. I’m afraid,’ motioning to his leg again, ‘I will have to – what do you say – sit this one out. Literally…’ His dry laugh was not without some real pleasure. He knocked back his drink, refilled the glass. He became serious again. ‘Cilea has gone. She left for Paris last week. She wanted to see you.’

  ‘Not enough to come to find me… last week? Sounds to me like she’d had plenty of advanced warning of this, er… unforeseen uprising…’

  ‘Yes, well… she read the signs and chose to leave. It’s what you should have done. I will always regret that you and she did not stay together. You might have been happy back in Britain, away from all this.’ The red light on the phone flashed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘this call I have to take.’ He picked up the receiver and listened. ‘Da,’ he said simply. Yes. Then in reply to someone querying him, he repeated it brusquely and rang off. ‘Look, I had a reason for wanting to see you and it has nothing to do with saying farewell. It is a warning. When the Comrade falls there is no guarantee that what comes after will be substantially better, not to begin with at least. What concerns me, and it should concern you too, is that when that happens all sorts of people will return to Bucharest. The regime had its problems, but it kept some control over the criminal class…’