The Last Hundred Days (12 page)

‘I’ve known Palinescu for years – he’s got to be taking the piss! Listen:
The Light that illuminates our epoch has a source! Two Suns that burn as one!
Jesus, I hope they paid him well for that…’

‘Palinescu’s a wimp. He’d sell his grandmother for petrol tokens,’ Ioana cut in.

‘
Twin lighthouses by which the ship of state, trusting
– surely that should be
rusting
? –
navigates the perilous waters
…’ Leo went on, ‘Ioana darling, it’s your country, but I shouldn’t have to tell you that the world’s not divided into wimps and heroes. It’s not like that. There aren’t enough of either to really make a difference…’

‘It’s exactly like that. Palinescu’s a human oil slick – his kind spreads and spreads until nothing else can breathe.’

‘Ioana, it’s just some harmless crap poetry – and everyone knows it’s crap: he does, his bosses do, the magazine does, only Nic and Elena believe that stuff. They’ll check he’s mentioned the right number of tractors and stuck in some Romans and they’ll forget about it. We all will. Most people just want to get along and reach the day’s end unscathed, not weigh up the moral rightness of everything they do and say. Nothing wrong with that, and…’

‘It’s the lies,’ Ioana said, more despondent than angry, ‘all the lies. They eat away at you until you believe nothing; you feel nothing. That’s what I’m saying – if everyone believed it they’d be idiots, but they’d actually be believing. The part of themselves that believed would be there still, still getting used, not dying away like this, dying into irony and cynicism.’ She gestured at us, at
Scînteia
, at the television indoors, then at herself. ‘Instead we just listen to nothing, take nothing in, we think we’re resisting by laughing it off. The lies are wearing everything away… wearing us away.’

‘No, that’s not true.’ Leo was serious now, something he did not enjoy. ‘It’s
because
they’re lies and we know they are that they can’t reach us. If we’re going to be lied to on this scale, let’s know it.’

Ioana waved the conversation to an end and looked down at the floor. In Leo’s eyes the worst social crime you could commit was to lead one of his conversations into seriousness. He saw it as a kind of ambush. Leo could be angry, righteous and passionate, but he found seriousness hard. He preferred to exaggerate or play things down; seeing them in their proper scale disturbed him.

Ioana was a disapproving girl, with a lot to disapprove of: from the local details of her life (Leo, principally) to the state of her country. It was hard to know which was the more easily remedied. Leo sat puffing into the sky and tapping his feet out of time to the music, the alcohol flush adding a scorched quality to his face. They were an unlikely couple, Ioana tall and slim and with features as sharp as her manners, Leo short and baby-faced, manic and idle. By starting a relationship with her, Leo was demonstrating his commitment to remaining in Romania; she, by starting one with him, thought she was staking her commitment to getting out.

The doorbell rang. I was expecting no one, but when I answered I found Cilea, a Burberry bag over her shoulder. She kissed me on the mouth and walked straight in.

I introduced her to Leo and Ioana but there was no need. These people knew each other, though for my benefit they went through the motions of meeting for the first time. Suddenly, Ioana’s roaming disapproval had fastened on an object. Cilea seemed unbothered by the change she had brought to our small party. Did she even notice? She took a seat and opened the bag from which she produced a bottle of chilled French wine and some Italian olives.

Ioana was the first to go, making up some engagement at the other end of town, not until now mentioned. Leo wavered and exchanged a few stilted pleasantries with Cilea before following. If any of this offended Cilea, it didn’t show. Without asking the way, she went to the kitchen for a bowl and glasses; Belanger’s flat clearly had a history of hospitality. The wine was so cold the glass beaded with condensation.

Cilea handed me the corkscrew and opened the olives with her teeth. I noticed a small line of newly applied lipstick along her front teeth and remembered its waxy red taste as I had tried to kiss her on our last meeting. I opened, she poured. My mouth was parched. Leo’s dope was rough, but rougher still was the Turkish tobacco it came with. Cilea’s wine tasted as perfect as it looked. A top-end Chablis, it was nearly impossible to lay hold of here, even in the diplomatic shops and western hotels, whether you paid in sterling, dollars or Deutschmarks.

She was in a different mood from our previous meetings. This time I knew she had made a decision about me, though I couldn’t yet tell which way that decision had gone. Her body language was more open. She was less careful, less guarded. For the first time too she was interested in me. I was half-stoned and half-drunk, but these two halves seemed to amount to a plausible whole. I found myself quicker off the mark, readier to engage her and better able to stand her scrutiny.

It was nearly five o’clock. The parade had been going for four hours now, four hours of music, marching and cloud-scraping military flyovers. Occasionally, the television would revel in a close-up of some dignitary. Colonel Gaddafi was one I recognised from the rogue’s gallery of western bogeymen; Mugabe fronting a row of elaborately uniformed Africans. Yasser Arafat, always a reliable guest at Ceauşescu’s celebrations, sat beside the
Conducător
. Months later, he would be guest of honour at Ceauşescu’s final Party congress. Behind them I recognised people from the diplomatic circuit. All looked blankly ahead. The British Ambassador wore his customary expression of very faint strain, a tightening of the eyes and mouth that could denote anything from a stifled fart to moral outrage. The close-ups of Ceauşescu’s face were more interesting. He was man on perpetual watch. His small black eyes missed nothing of what was going on around him, alert and twitching with paranoia.

The next bottle, from Belanger’s stock, was warm and sweet and difficult to enjoy. It proved the law of diminishing returns that governs daytime drinking: the more and more becoming less and less. Cilea seemed happy enough, though I feared the afternoon would fizzle out into nausea and headaches before seven, and bed by ten. Alone. Cilea tasted the wine and scrunched up her face.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s join the parade – we’ll find you a placard. Actually, we’ll be the only spontaneous marchers there.’

As we left the flat, Cilea put her arm through mine. She walked jauntily, pulling me along. At the corner of Aleea Alexandru we found ourselves in the midst of the parade. I say ‘parade’, but it was more like a chain gang with invisible shackles. They marched as if their ankles and elbows were threaded together, heads bowed or facing straight ahead at the backs of other heads. Many held brightly coloured banners, yellow and red and black, and party crests modelled on Roman military insignia. They moved forwards in one drab, articulated shuffle.

The placards were mostly of Ceauşescu and his wife. A few posters bore the likenesses of other men, presumably ministers, but these were strictly rationed, and one or two had portraits of Marx and Lenin. Far up ahead the music continued, while the parade progressed joylessly: a sudden stop rippled its way to the back of the three-kilometre-long file of people, and what on TV looked like a tidy mechanical progression was really a sullen, fettered grind.

Cilea tapped one man on the shoulder and asked for his placard. Suspicious at first, he was only too glad to hand it over and rest his arm. The picture was a magnified passport mugshot of Manea Constantin, treated in communist baroque style: sensible grey jacket, buttoned shirt, penetrating gaze, and framed with hammer and sickle motifs. There were only one or two of these in the waves of Nicolaes and Elenas; after all, no individual must look better, or appear more frequently, than the country’s leading couple.

She handed it to me to carry. It is a sign of how inured I had already become to the grotesquery of things that when I recognised the man’s face, and knew it was her father, I merely noted it down as an odd piece of serendipity and continued walking.

We processed onwards, hand in hand, for about ten minutes down Calea Victoriei. Cilea, tipsy and laughing and well dressed, drew scowls from the rest of them. For myself, I had never been a great dresser, but I was dismayed to see how well I blended in here.

The mood was aggressive and despondent. People stepped on each other’s heels, elbowed each other in the kidneys, spat on the floor, strutted and squared up to each other only to retreat in a fade-out of grumbling. The smell of sweat and dirt was everywhere, punctured by Cilea’s perfume as she zigzagged ahead of me. At one point the line stopped suddenly and I was pushed into her from behind. She arched her back and pressed her head into my shoulder, her neck against my mouth. Her hair was warm and heavy.

‘When they get to the stadium, they’ll have to stop and stand around for three hours of speeches and ceremonies,’ shouted Cilea above the noise. She didn’t seem especially sorry. The sun beat down. For most of these people this ‘day of joy’ consumed the whole of their public holiday. Many of them would then trek home through building sites and urban dustbowls to their flats in the outskirts. They moved along, penned in by soldiers and militia. Every now and then an individual would try to make a break for it, try to disappear down a side street, only to be slapped and dragged back into line. It was human cattle herding. Only Cilea and I dodged through the crowd, snaked our way through the lines. Once or twice someone in a suit came to push us back in, but Cilea showed them her identity card and they saluted. Months later, these young men would be the people shooting at their compatriots during those unreal days in the strangulated city. I had no idea where she was taking me. Two kilometres down the road, the Romanesque gates of the Stadium of the People lay open.

Without warning, Cilea pulled me into a side street and up into a gated avenue, where a guard clicked his heels and let her through. I had never seen such a place: overhung with cherry trees, their scattered petals on the pavement; a shop with frosted windows was guarded by a uniformed militiaman; the roads had been hosed down to cool them and the air smelled of wet pavements. Black Dacias and Mercedes were parked along clean kerbs. A gardener was bent over some perfect tulips, as if taking their pulse. Everything was fresh and opulent. Cilea led me into a shady courtyard where a fountain rippled quietly and balconies were crammed with fat-leaved plants. I followed her into a cool stairwell that curled upwards in a spiral. The clean smell of newly brewed tea hung in the corridor. Her flat was on the first floor.

I had known, without being conscious of knowing it, that Cilea was the daughter of a top party member. So much was clear from the aura of untouchability she carried, which seemed, for all that we were in a
classless communist state
, the aura of lightness that rich and privileged people have everywhere you find them. It was as if the material world, the air itself, parted for them as they moved. You knew them from the way they passed through life untouched by life. Cilea was one of them: part of that international, borderless community of ease. What I had not known until this afternoon was that her father was more than just a member of the
nomenklatura
. The flat Cilea lived in alone would have housed two families. The living room looked furnished from a Nordic minimalist catalogue and full of US films and magazines, British books, Japanese electronics. The kitchen was stocked with olives, amaretti, French wine and English biscuits. There was Romanian art on the walls and shelves of photographs: Cilea and her father in front of Big Ben, the Pitti Palace, Harvard boathouse. In one photo a small girl, recognisably Cilea but perhaps five or six years old, played with other children on a green lawn. At a table nearby sat a group of adults enjoying a spread of food in the open air. At its head, and with Elena to his right, sits Nicolae Ceauşescu, elbows on the table. Behind him stand two minders. The servants, arranged just on the edges of the photograph, had the feudal air of self-erasing ubiquity you saw in the margins of photographs of nineteenth century royalty. They might have been attending on any Czar, Emperor or Sultan.

At the centre of all these pictures was a photograph of a beautiful young woman with the same dark brown eyes and thick black hair as Cilea, the same golden-tanned skin and red mouth. From her hair and clothes I judged it had been taken in the mid-seventies, against a background of blue sea, sun and shiny white passenger ferries. The only way you could tell it was taken in Constanţa and not Cannes was by looking at the grey-faced, ill-dressed communist apparatchiks around her, from whom she stood out as vibrantly then as her daughter did today. She wore the same necklace Cilea now had on, a crescent moon of beaten silver on a chain so fine it ran like water through your fingers. Cilea and I had that in common: she had lost her mother young and still mourned her in that imprecise, blurred way I understood because it infused everything I felt and did. ‘My mother died when I was eight. If I want to remember her, I look at that photograph. If my father wants to remember her, he looks at me.’ Cilea laid her head on my lap. I leaned back and stroked her hair, then lifted her face and kissed her eyes which were hot with tears that never fell.

That afternoon we went to bed. I never knew and I never asked what had changed her mind about me, why she’d come to my flat, or how she even knew where to find me. If I had I might have been better prepared for what would happen, or at least known my place in it all. But already I had learned not to ask, not to wonder, not to dig too deep.

Cilea’s lovemaking was frank, demanding, without prudishness. I had preconceptions about eastern bloc fucking from watching Czech films on the arts channel that started at midnight: the smell of hairspray slugging it out with body odour and plum brandy; grey sheets, armpit thatch and a backing scent of garlic. This was more like pampered women’s magazine sex, and I was having it in all places in Romania, a country where even the Bulgarians imported their own food.