The Last Hundred Days (22 page)

What brought the average age down was a two-abreast file of uniformed boys and girls. ‘Young Pioneers’, the Party’s children’s corps, were goose-stepping with knapsacks on their backs, compasses and water bottles around their necks. They walked in step and sang heroic songs, a phalanx of communist Tintins marching to the beat of an automated childhood. ‘Two Planks’ sped past on a red Vespa, wearing Ray-Bans and a Lacoste polo shirt.

‘This is the Central Committee compound,’ explained Constantin, ‘though some of us prefer to live in town. I’ll be hosting a Foreign Office delegation from your country here in December. I shall send you an invitation.’

Thanks, thanks very much
, I thought. Come Christmas, that would be all I needed: standing in a suit while Romanian Party bosses mingled with diplomats, sleazy defence contractors and some damp-lipped Tory undersecretary for closet arms sales. ‘I’ll pencil it in,’ I replied in Romanian, trying for sarcasm, a difficult nuance in a foreign tongue. The worst was that I knew I would probably go.

We were shown our table in the modern dining room. Unlike Capsia the room was boxy and ascetic; also unlike Capsia, it had an extensive menu with a prodigious wine list. Everything was available, from the oysters to the wild boar, the Cheval Blanc to the Chateau Talbot. The waiters looked seconded from some defence academy. They probably doubled as paratroopers, ready to protect the Party’s higher echelons in the event of an uprising. Or, it struck me later, to watch and incarcerate them in the event of a
coup
.

In the corner was a group of senior army officers. The conversation was loud, the drinks being poured and downed so fast the bottles barely had time to touch the tablecloths. Constantin ordered a gin and tonic, which came in a tall Party-crested tumbler. I had a Coca-Cola. The ambient music that came from the loudspeakers sounded like a crematorium organ played at one-and-a-half times normal speed.

‘The Comrade has his Palace here,’ said Constantin, pointing beyond the ponderous stone terrace. Below it, small pedalos and leisure boats bobbed along a clear blue lake. Over and beyond the grounds, I could just make out the turret of a tower around which the helicopter circled. ‘Looks like he’s home,’ I said brightly, pointing. Ceauşescu had forty-one villas and twenty-one palaces, each with a retinue of staff on alert. Each probably had a helicopter circling around it too. ‘I hear Nicu lives nearby too,’ I added.

At the mention of Nicu, Constantin put down his glass and wiped his mouth with a hammer and sickle-crested napkin. One of the waiters twitched but managed not to turn around.

‘The Comrade’s favourite son, yes. Our minister for sport and youth affairs is a troubled young man, but we have learned to deal with his personal problems. Something he has yet to do…’

People went out of their way to greet Manea as they passed. I recognised some faces from the
nomenklatura
shops and restaurants, the nightclub-and-foreign-embassy circuit. With some he conferred in a low voice, or wrote times and dates for meetings into his Party diary. He seemed popular, and it struck me that he probably didn’t just rely on power to get things done but on something approaching loyalty and fellow-feeling. Not least significant, I thought, was the number of junior people who spoke to him, and the staff he treated with courtesy, though never once hazarding his air of power both copious and withheld.

The army table was joined by Stoicu, who gave a dry contemptuous little nod towards Manea, looked me over and sat down. He showed no sign of recognising me from the night with the Serbs, but it was impossible to read those tiny frisky eyes pinned into the rolls of flesh that enfolded any expression before it took hold on his face. He proposed a toast: ‘To the Comrade!’ It meant everyone else had to get up, as to be seen not to do so would be cause for comment. Manea, in the middle of his
coq au vin
, had to join in. More toasts followed: to Elena, to the Young Pioneers, to the anti-fascist struggle, so that by the end most of the dining room was up and down every two minutes. People began to hurry their meals and leave.

We took our coffee onto the terrace, Manea lighting up a Sobranie and I sticking to my Carpati. ‘Going native, I see,’ he commented. Inside, Stoicu’s clan had started singing. Manea jerked his head back towards them: ‘You can abolish class differences, but somehow they always come out during meals, don’t you think?’

‘I thought you were starting to deal with that by abolishing meals altogether,’ I replied, ‘for the populace at large, I mean…’

‘
Touché!
Yes indeed, a quick riposte. But I must say your appetite has remained unaffected by the hardship. The way that veal went down, that
crème brûlée
…’

‘True enough – I’ve learned to compartmentalise.’ I took a long draw of my Carpati.

‘Oh, I think you knew how to compartmentalise long before you came to Romania… Cilea tells me you helped her get that trip to London. I’m very grateful. If there is anything I can do for you, you will let me know. You will also, I hope, treat her well.’

‘She can look after herself, and as far as I can tell that’s all she ever does…’ I said.

Manea put down his glass and laughed. ‘Yes, a lot of people think that of her. I wish I thought it was true, though…’ He became serious: ‘She says you’re blaming her for something that happened to your friends. I don’t want to know the details. But I can tell you it’s nothing to do with her.’

‘You seem very sure of this… this thing that you don’t know about.’

He finished his cigarette and looked out over the terrace, an arm over my shoulder, and spoke up close. ‘Let me tell you how you perceive it, or how you are being encouraged to perceive it: Cilea finds out what is going on through you; she then tells me; I then give orders. Your friends are gone. But why should I care about what a bunch of hippies does? Suppose I already knew, have known for a long time, and never did anything? Why would I act now?’

‘
Did
you know?’

‘That is not the point – if so, I did nothing about it.’

‘Perhaps you passed on the information to someone who did…’ With napkins tied around their necks, hunched over their food, each one with crew-cut hair, small ears, and a flaccid pink face, Stoicu and his minions looked like the pigs in a cartoon of Orwell’s
Animal Farm
. I turned back to Manea who was, in more respects than not, one of them. ‘Anyway, people don’t just disappear!’

Manea raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘Oh no? Are you quite sure about that?’

He stirred his coffee for a few moments, then spoke confidentially: ‘I am telling you this – and it is dangerous for me, even I have to report on our conversation now – I am telling you this because of Cilea, and I too am sorry that she is no longer with you. I will explain why another time, but for now let me say this: you can think what you like of me, but she has nothing to do with any of it. None of us is safe at the moment. It’s department against department, minister against minister. Every organisation, every group of friends is infiltrated. Everything is known, it’s just a question of who acts on that knowledge and when, and why they decide to do so. You find out
why
your friends have been pulled in –
if
they have been – and you’ll know who did it.’

I nodded. I saw the sense in that; more exactly, I understood the contortions of state paranoia that caused it to make sense. Someone somewhere always knew what you were doing; several people at a time did. But what did they do with the knowledge? Use it? Trade or barter it? Perhaps several people knowing at a time, each with different or conflicting agendas, cancelled out the knowledge, gave you a cover second only to anonymity, which was in any case impossible? That was how Leo worked, relying on the informational bottleneck to pursue his shady career and to pursue, too, his acts of restitution and commemoration.

Behind us was a group of ministers brandishing building plans and two architects in black-framed spectacles and roll-neck sweaters. Manea took my elbow and whispered: ‘Everything’s tightening up. It happens from time to time, because some part of the system’s unstable, or just because the Comrade is afraid. It may loosen again in a few months. Perhaps things will be clearer then. For now, you keep your head down.’

Others joined us on the terrace. Manea stopped talking and we listened instead to the architects and their ministers. One of the ministers was explaining that the artificial canal currently being dug in the city centre was to be re-routed. The map, opened out across his knees, bore a crude red line straight through several districts. One of the architects quietly but steadfastly pointed out that this involved not only the refilling of the vast and now useless ditch they had spent the last three months digging, but the demolition of two old suburbs. The young and eager-looking woman minister replied with a well-known slogan: ‘These are uncharted waters, but we are well-captained.’ The architect argued his case, never raising his voice, running his finger along the fat red line that tore through the map of Bucharest. There was a silence, as always follows one who has gone too far. The minister changed tack, asked him outright if he was ready for the consequences of abandoning the project. He said he was. He made to get up and leave, thanking her for lunch. His colleague shuffled in his seat. One of the deputies, until now silently watching, put down his coffee, laid his hand on the architect’s shoulder, and spoke slowly, calmly, in a menacing stage whisper designed to be overheard.

‘Listen, you bourgeois pig. This is how it goes: you leave here and we do the work anyway, except it’ll be you and your whole clan of Yids digging the new canal seven days a week. It’s goodbye nine to five and the flat in Herastrau, and hello nightshift and worker’s hostel. Your kids…what are they? Four and six? Might get rehomed in one of our State orphanages – you know about them? – maybe down in Iaşi. If you like your black pullovers and your Johnnie Walker, and your wife likes her western tampons, you just nod your head and we’ll all forget about your lapse in socialist taste.’

The architect was alone. His colleague turned away. The minister looked down at her shoes. The others at the table pretended not to hear, but like us they would remember every word. Manea put down his coffee and shook his head, though he must have said and doubtless done worse things himself.

Then a remarkable thing happened. The architect dislodged the man’s hand from his shoulder and walked off, throwing his napkin onto the table. His colleague buried his head in his hands. The minister was speechless; there was no slogan to hand for this eventuality. The enforcer smiled a thin, vicious smile of humiliated sadism.

I must have been watching and listening too obviously, as Manea took me by the arm and guided me across the terrace and into the gardens.

‘Jesus, that was brave. What’ll happen to him now?’

‘He’ll get a cooling-off period, and if he doesn’t play, some of what that bastard threatened will happen. Most of it probably. Don’t worry – to get this far he must have done some pretty unsavoury things himself. We’ve got no heroes here. Or if we have this isn’t where you’ll find them.’

I imagined a day of reckoning in which scores were settled and judgments meted out. Here in Romania, I envisaged a set of trials in which the judges would find the accused guilty, then swap places with them. In the end I was not far wrong – except about the verdicts.

Manea received a message on his pager. Seconds later, the black Mercedes lounged down an avenue of linden trees. In their threadbare shade, the Young Pioneers were eating a picnic of soya salami and Rocola. There must have been forty or fifty children sitting in a circle and eating in silence, facing straight ahead, heads still and jaws munching, like clockwork infants.

Manea spoke again: ‘Your friend Trofim must be enjoying writing his memoirs. I hear they are the memoirs of a good communist, but dull. He may wish to keep them that way. But if he doesn’t he may be needing friends. And in this case I do not mean friends abroad.’

‘Is that a threat?’ I asked.

‘You persist in misreading me. It is not a threat. On the contrary.
He
will know what it is. Tell him.’ Manea was exasperated, the slick Party man hurt at not being trusted. As we drove back, I wondered if I had offended him with my smart-arse comments and my readiness to interpret all he said in the worst way possible.

Stepping out of the car I turned back and apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be cynical, it’s just habit. I don’t need to tell you how hard it is know who to trust…’ Manea brushed away the slight, and as his arm moved I caught a whiff of his aftershave, still fresh and clean and lemony despite the heat. I was sweating, uncomfortable inside my skin, conscious of my own smell.

‘Of course you shouldn’t trust me, but maybe you should believe me…’ he smiled, ‘you still don’t know the difference?’

I was no closer to finding out what had happened to Petre and Vintul, but I had seen the way things worked, and I believed Manea when he told me that Cilea had had nothing to do with it. Whatever
it
was. Would Leo?

On my way back to my office I stopped on the landing of the second floor and looked out across the Bucharest skyline. Somewhere out there, the architect was waiting to learn his fate. Somewhere perhaps, Vintul and Petre and the others were being kept or, I hoped, were in hiding. The cranes jutted out everywhere; there was not a single piece of the horizon that wasn’t crane-crammed and prickling with scaffolding. That Snagov dining room was the symbol of the new Bucharest: behind communism’s inert symmetries, the great dead surfaces of marble or granite, there were the convoluted, winding schemes that took root and flourished and devoured both themselves and those who engineered them. Manea, Stoicu, Trofim, Ionescu, the purged and the purging… all were part of that tail-chasing paranoia, that frenzy of self-policing that boiled away inside the expressionless monolith of the Party.

What I noticed first were the boxes outside Ionescu’s office. Framed diplomas were being wrapped in old copies of
Scînteia
by a snuffling Rodica and placed into boxes by Micu, who, in his elaborate uniform, looked like an old soldier burying his fallen comrades on a battlefield. Inside, Leo and Ionescu sat looking mournful with a bottle of Tsuica.