The Last Hundred Days (42 page)

Ottilia and I spent the morning at the radio. We had forgotten about Leo, but I became aware of him standing, unshaven and in pyjamas, in the doorway. I began an apology for having left early last night but he smiled and waved it away.

‘The Comrade’s back,’ he announced.

Bucharest had a strangely dislocated springtime feel to it on the twenty-first of December. It was sunny, the traffic flowed, shops were open, the cafés and restaurants that had been in hibernation were suddenly serving and full of people. We had morning coffee instead of
ersatz
at the Atheneum; butter and flour and meat had appeared in the shops overnight. Petrol was back at the pumps, and the smell of exhaust fumes returned as suddenly as it had disappeared.

The city was Rumour’s forcing-house. The police in Timişoara had turned on the army; the army had turned on the police; both had turned on the Securitate. General Milea had been summoned to the palace and arrested. In Alba Iulia the party HQ had been stormed by protestors, and the police had simply let them get on with it. In Timişoara the death toll was increasing. Despite the international press reporting very few bodies, the rumours were calling them in their thousands. Then there were the rumours of lynchings: Securitate men strung up from lampposts in Maramures, Craiova, Targoviste. In Sibiu, Nicu Ceauşescu’s fiefdom, a breakaway group of Party officials declared themselves supporters of the National Salvation Front. They were arrested, then let go. The Sibiu party HQ was burned down. The rumours about Nicu himself were that he was high on cocaine and personally shooting people, that he had surrendered to the demonstrators, and that he was in France whoring. None of these were unlikely, though it was ironic that only the most implausible of the rumours – that a brave judge in his home province had issued a warrant for Nicu’s arrest on charges of rape – was true.

The atmosphere in the university was even more febrile. Students stood in groups, plotting, the police only half-heartedly moving them on. Someone had stencilled images of Gorbachev dressed as Santa Claus along the corridor walls. Beside him was a large ribboned present the shape of the map of Romania. ‘TIMIŞOARA’ was painted in white letters on the front facade, and again across the cobbles of the courtyard. I passed the photocopying room, which was always locked. Today it was open and guarded by Rodica while inside our student Iulia was making hundreds of copies of the front page of today’s
Herald Tribune
. ‘Massacre in Timişoara’, ran the headline, and beneath it, ‘Fears grow of new Tiananmen Square: thousands dead’. ‘Is this true?’ I asked, pointing at the word
thousands
. Her answer: ‘True, false, it’s irrelevant, what matters is that people find out.’ Clearly her dialectical education had not been wasted.

I was the only one in work, and I busied myself with inconsequential tasks. It was a way of avoiding the terminality of my position, of persuading myself I would still be here on the fifth of January. I cast small hooks into the future – a date here, an appointment there, filled in my desk diary with January’s events. I looked out at university square for what might be the last time. These were Belanger’s views, his chair, his office. His handwriting too: as I picked off and flattened out the curled-up Post-it note with Cilea’s number, I wondered if Belanger was reading the
Herald Tribune
and listening to the
BBC
, if Belanger was watching events as they unfolded on TV, if Belanger was choosing, from fifty different rumours, the one that would best serve him. My phone rang.

‘There won’t be any
Kojaks
tonight,’ Leo shouted into the receiver. He was calling from a phone booth, and I could hear a plane overhead. ‘The Comrade’s giving a speech on telly, live, an address to the nation. Six pm.’

‘What’s he going to say?’

‘What’s he going to say? How the hell should I know? Am I his speechwriter now? Anyway, it’s not what he’s going to say that’s important, it’s that he’s saying it at all, that he needs to say it.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At the airport.’

‘What – you’re going?’

‘’Course not, I just thought, since I’ve got the ticket and the passport, I might as well pick up some duty free, get my visa stamped, then get back out in time for the Comrade’s state of the nation address. I’ve got Ottilia’s passport ready too: you’ll be travelling with a Miss Tatiana Pullova, engineering student. A Leningrad girl.’

I forbore to ask how Leo would make his way back out of the airport or how he might persuade Ottilia to take the passport and run. Anything was possible now, the country was tightening up and falling apart at the same time. Leo would be filling his suitcases with booze and fags and bribing his way back out of the terminal building, his name safely on the list of passengers. It would buy him a day or two at most, but maybe that was all he needed.

We met at the Carpathian Boar, where Leo had gone to ground by buying everyone drinks. At six o’clock, the bar so full we were standing on each other’s toes, we watched as Ceauşescu addressed the country, bent over and reading from a shaking sheet of paper. Behind him Elena loomed with a handbag, disconcertingly Thatcher-like in her demeanour, with three nameless barrel-suits at her side.

The Comrade looked tired and old. Against the rumoured thousands of deaths, he claimed no more than ten, every one of them a ‘foreign agent’. He rambled on in lumpy communist clichés, praising the police, the army, grinding out phrases like ‘imperialist saboteurs’, ‘enemies of Romanian sovereignty’, ‘capitalist provocateurs…’ It was the language of Stalinist show trials. People laughed, spat on the floor, called him an old fool, ‘Stalin’, ‘Dracula’. Ceauşescu finished his fifty-minute discourse by announcing pay rises, along with an increase in the student grant. ‘And what the fuck do we spend it on?’ called out one of the drinkers from the back, to general applause. If this was any gauge of the public mood, the Comrade could no longer count on his most effective weapon: fear.

Ceauşescu had miscalculated. He looked weak and shifty and slight. Usually alert, he seemed jetlagged and confused. His voice was high-pitched and breathless and his skin pasty, a diabetic mix of gaunt and puffy. His performance tonight would affect how all of his subsequent actions were interpreted. He had shown his weakness, and they would take revenge for his weakness now as much as for his strength before this. ‘Stalin did everything a man in his position should have done’; yes, but Stalin had fear on his side until the end. Ceauşescu was like his palace: a facade laid over a ramifying hollowness.

Ottilia returned at eleven without her papers. At the police station they had made her wait two hours then told her to leave. The militia who had taken her ID card had suddenly been transferred to another sector, and no one seemed interested any more. ‘They spend all their time watching you, then suddenly no one gives a shit.’ Leo was right: the system was breaking down into its constituent parts, paranoia and apathy, and as the centre started to give way the two were left to engage in their great, blurred, inconclusive Manichean struggle. Apathy and paranoia: two drunks fighting slowly around a park bench.

Leo handed her her new Russian passport. Ottilia looked it over and laughed. ‘Tatiana Pullova? Since this is the only ID I’ve got, I might as well hang on to it… see where it takes me.’ Leo looked at me and raised his eyebrows. We both knew better than to press her, but perhaps she might be using that
TAROM
ticket after all.

At five the next morning, 22 December, a kilometre-long convoy of armoured vehicles clattered down Boulevard Aviatorilor. More troops were being imported. Hundreds more had arrived at Basarab station to be met by lorries taking them down Calea Griviţei into the city centre, where they disappeared into dozens of closed-off security compounds camouflaged as ordinary houses.

If the radio was our source for large-scale news, then the street gave us the details: the city crematoria had been busy all night burning the Timişoaran dead, bussed in and unloaded namelessly into the ovens. In Timişoara the army had retreated and given in to the workers. The strike was solid and spreading. By now the whole of the west was in revolt, and in the border areas with Yugoslavia, Russia or Bulgaria, the structures of repression were faltering. Something else was emerging from the disorder: a radical, systemic inefficiency, where parts of the security apparatus just faded away, while others reacted with unimaginable ferocity. In Iaşi, the army and police stood back and let people storm buildings and ransack the shops. In Maramures they joined in. In Cluj they tortured them, killed them and burned their bodies in rubbish incinerators.

Radio Bucharest made its first allusions to the state of emergency. The announcer read out a roster of the usual suspects – imperialist-capitalist insurgents, reactionary forces and foreign terrorists – before reassuring us that the situation was well in hand. Another speech by the
Conducător
was announced for later today: a deliberate echo of his great triumph of twenty-one years earlier, after the Prague Spring, it would be televised live from the balcony of the Central Committee HQ in Piaţa Republica. The man who had condemned the Russians for intervening in Czechoslovakia was condemning them for not intervening now.

The National Salvation Front made its second announcement within minutes. It called on Ceauşescu to resign, on the army and police not to obey him, and on the workers to observe the general strike. That the
NSF
was now issuing declarations to the western media within minutes of drafting them, suggested an extraordinary degree of access. I thought of Manea, Trofim, and the others in that room. Were they now in permanent session? Who was protecting them? How were they getting their statements out?

After so many weeks of stiff upper lip, it was a relief to see some genuine panic at the British embassy. It came in the form of that peculiar blank-facaded institutional turmoil I recalled from public-service information films from school: in the event of nuclear explosion, hide under the table with six months’ supply of baked beans. A similar spirit prevailed now. It was the hardwired British response, to hoard tinned foods and set up vats of tea. Those who hadn’t left last week were now bunkering down. Embassy wives were opening cartons of long-life milk and packets of Rich Tea biscuits. Fistfuls of teabags dropped into metal teapots so huge they had a handle on the front as well as the back. A good crisis allows both heady involvement and a kind of modest self-spectatorship, and this was a good crisis by any standards. The Shit and Hassle was showcasing the Best of British.

Wintersmith was riding high. No matter that he had assured us all along that things were OK, and that it was ‘business as usual, with the emphasis firmly on the
business
, if you get my drift…’ Ozeray was right: the nature of diplomacy is that mistakes are never remembered because they are never one’s own mistakes; events themselves are at fault for not making clear their intentions.

Right or wrong, there was an
OBE
at the end of this tunnel for Wintersmith. It was in the bag. He wore camouflage trousers and a panama hat, with a Swiss Army knife hanging from his belt. He had been taking lessons from Franklin Shrapnel and looked like a survivalist boy scout.

‘We have had communication from the National Salvation Front, and we are interested in talking to them. There’s no evidence that things will turn dangerous here in Bucharest. If the government remains in power nothing will change. If it doesn’t there is every reason to suppose an orderly and bloodless transition. On the model of the rest of communist Europe.’

‘When are we going to actually know anything for sure?’

‘Well, President Ceauşescu is making an announcement this afternoon, in which I expect things will become much clearer. There will doubtless be some policy announcements followed either by a smooth transition or by a general liberalisation of the current system. Change isn’t a Romanian
forte
.’

Diplomacy: the ability to stare the future in the face without meeting its eye.

The Comrade’s big speech was to be televised live that afternoon at two. It was 11 am now. Dirty snow was banked up and thawing on the roadsides and against walls. The police and the army were now under the supervision of the Securitate in a
mise-en-abîme
of surveillance. In the glass-fronted news boards the front pages of the day’s papers flashed morale-raising declarations and implausible figures from the cooked books of economic growth. The propaganda had been intensified. New roadside placards suddenly appeared, and the heroic murals were freshened up: ‘Unity, Strength, Leadership’, ‘Long Live the Romanian Communist Party’, ‘Ceauşescu, Heroism; Romania, Communism’. On
Scînteia
’s front page, I skim-read Palinescu’s new ode, which used the image of the national electricity grid to describe ordinary Romanians’ love for their leader, each citizen contributing his individual voltage to the great power station that was the country.

Calea Victoriei had been checkpointed to a standstill. Crowds of men climbed out of rattling, clapped-out buses with tired old banners. Infantile music rattled the loudspeakers while police with loudhailers and batons shouted instructions and streamed the crowds into lines. Above all this rose the mutual hostility of the three security forces watching each other rather than the workers – if they noticed the mutinous resentment building up among the marchers, they did not show it.

This was the vast popular demonstration we had been promised, the workers ‘electrified with loyalty’. I looked across the street to the corner of Aviatorilor and Modrogan and saw the familiar, slightly hunched figure of Trofim. He was alone, Astrakhan hat and scarf carefully placed to hide all but his eyes. A bus passed and when I looked again he was gone.

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.