The Last Hundred Days Read online

  It was as if all that was being destroyed around us was being stored in Leo’s flat, where everything belonged to some scattered or abolished set: from unpaired candelabra and antique chairs to erotic photographs, from unframed canvases to paintingless frames. It was all there, a gilded flotsam of salvage, and it occupied every surface, filled every drawer, teetered over every edge. The paleontologist Cuvier could reconstruct extinct species from a femur or a shin bone. Perhaps Leo might rebuild Bucharest from the glittering remnants he had crammed into his flat? The icons, the paintings, the paving stones and shop signs were all tagged and logged and shelved; there were clothes and jewels, old mirrors, street-signs… a small mother-of-pearl box with a forgotten saint’s fleshless finger sat on top of the only item in Leo’s front room that was not antique: a huge smoked-glass cabinet with a state-of-the-art television, video and hi-fi system.

  The walls were papered with photographs Leo had taken of the destruction, not just in Bucharest but beyond, where ancient villages were being razed and old towns all over Romania were being flattened by Ceauşescu’s architectural pogroms. Using his network of informers, Leo amassed evidence from across the country for news agencies in Europe and America. The clippings – from Le Monde, The Times, Die Zeit – he kept in a row of scrapbooks on his desk. Shelved nearby was a run of video boxes of action films and horror movies, sequels, prequels and spin-offs: Rocky, Rambo, Friday 13th, Indiana Jones. Inside the boxes the spines of the cassettes were marked with a date and a place. These were the films Leo or others had taken of the razing of villages and city streets, the churches and the monasteries.

  His flat had become the city’s hidden visage, like a backwards portrait of Dorian Gray: as the place itself disappeared around us, so Leo’s apartment grew in compressed splendour.

  ‘These places,’ Leo said to me one night, pointing at a tiny glass-covered arcade of shops in Lipscani, ‘these places are as much under threat as the rain forests or the Galapagos…’ A double row of tiny workshops, each with a different trade, twisted to the left, then opened onto a regimented precinct where all the shops had numbers. Six years ago, there had been a stone courtyard with a fountain and a street theatre where the city’s musicians, from students of the conservatoire to passing gypsies, met and improvised. Leo claimed he could still hear them. He put his hand on my arm: ‘Listen,’ he whispered, closing his eyes. At these moments Leo would go into a kind of trance, tuning into something that for him was still going on. His belief in the continued existence of lost places was not just a way of speaking.

  The lights were on in a nearby bakery, and the smell of rising dough and warm ovens drew people in, ready to sleep outside for their chance of fresh bread. It was past midnight, and we were using an old map, made in 1920, to navigate the unlit streets. ‘This is how you measure what you have against what there was,’ Leo said, ‘you walk it, what remains of it, you hear the clamour of all that’s gone. It’s your listening that brings it back.’

  We always used old maps or guidebooks, from the 1890s, the 1940s, the 1960s. For Leo, an occultist of place, each gone epoch could be recalled and for a moment brought back. We would cross the dark, cold, kitsch-marbled squares of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest using a map that told us we were in a bustling side street full of cafés and cabarets. We walked the length of a wide, new-built avenue following a map that claimed to take us through a web of twisting alleys between two blocks of the brewery quarter. Around us the uniform grid of main roads stretched emptily, but for Leo we were brushing the sweating walls of a ruelle, dodging broken glass and with the smell of smoke and hops in our nostrils. He marked out his lost walks on the new maps, overwriting their expanses of blankness and thuggish symmetry with the old streets and buildings, plotting his itineraries. The maps came to resemble geological diagrams, where time was expressed in layers, and where, for all their passing, for all their irrecoverability, all periods existed simultaneously.

  On my second nocturnal expedition with Leo to the depths of Dorobanti, we came upon men and women roasting a pig. They drank wine from barrels and sat and talked or danced in lamplight to accordions and fiddles. It was like a dream scene. Nobody spoke, just danced or sang or gestured, offering their food and drink, celebrating something which was never made clear. Passers-by like us happened on it by accident and were amazed. Like me, they thought at first they were dreaming, but Leo was convinced that we had stumbled in on the past, that we had crossed over, he said, that the city was full of such ghostly intersections of past and present, seams of layered time ready to be mined. We spent all night there, drifting back into the grey morning in time for work.

  I thought I had been drawn into a group hallucination, but Leo assured me it was real. We spent all day arguing about it: we could go back, he said. We would go back, that very night. To take a particular walk, walking particular streets in a particular order, was like reciting a magical invocation. The lost walk had its syntax, its word order, like any spell. He was right. We found it again, a midnight fair in the urban clearing, and we visited it twice more before it disappeared. After that, Leo merely looked for the next thing, like the underground casino we found with a map of the catacombs, where a derelict nineteenth-century machine room beneath the Atheneum had been opened up by a Metro excavation. When we visited, it was full of men and women at gaming tables, with waiters in suits serving drinks and a pianist with an electric keyboard. It was real enough, but Leo was convinced it was part of some subterranean society, that old Bucharest was being rebuilt and repeopled underground. Leo could still find these places. He believed that they were holes in a sort of space-time fabric, time out of time, place out of place.

  To balance out the dream of the old city, Leo made me visit the new Bucharest, where whole peasant communities had been forcibly relocated to the cement outskirts. Families were broken up and moved into tiny flats, often without water or electricity or even windows. Many took their animals with them: goats and pigs rummaged around the rusty metal and broken concrete, shat in the corners, rutted in the courtyards. Cockerels, disorientated, crowed beneath builders’ floodlights in the dead of night and hens yaffled in the scaffolding. Old men with narrow eyes and calloused hands peeled potatoes and old women sat on deckchairs in peasant dress, watching the cranes stalk the strange horizon, listening to the mixers and diggers, new beasts lowing in the asphalt fields. It was a tragic transplantation. Many wandered off, back to the land, or to where the land had been. They were found, half-mad, walking the motorway hard shoulders; or, if they ever made it out of the city limits, weeping over their flattened shacks, their lost livestock. The few who stayed on the industrialised farms took jobs as machine hands or in abattoirs, or staffing the vast hangars where dioxin-filled pigs were shackled to the ground and fattened on darkness and fear.

  Everything was muffled, time-delayed. I listened to the BBC World Service, whose velvety voice of neutrality, patience and sang-froid assured us, in the face of the very facts it recounted, that all was as it should be in the world. There was also Radio Free Europe, the US-funded radio station dedicated to making mischief in the Soviet bloc. This was regularly jammed, and though it kept you informed about events in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia or East Germany, it hardly mentioned Romania. What you learned was that those places about which you heard the most tales of repression were also, relatively speaking, the least repressed. In Romania we had nothing of the sort. People talked about the Iron Curtain as if there was only one, but Communist East Europe was itself a system of partitions, curtains behind curtains. In the Comecon cosmos, Romania was the dark planet.

  From the few bare sentences in the ‘News in Brief’ sections of the newspapers – a village bulldozed here, a food riot quelled there – you could deduce the clamped-shut world of Romania, and, between the lines, make out the strangled voice of rumour and hearsay, distorted, crackling with white noise, breaking up like a bad phone line. That was the sound of our everyday life.

  The silent phon
e calls continued. Sometimes there were two or three in one day, sometimes nothing for a week. Always the line crackled and fizzed with the static from the listening devices I knew were tapping in, and always there was the caller’s indecisive, vacillating breath. Once he – I knew it was a he – was on the verge of speaking: there was something there, a name, a word, the edge of a voice.

  In the afternoons I walked through Herastrau Park or visited the museums. The Museum of the Communist Party of Romania dominated them all, an empty cavernous place whose lights were on all day despite the power cuts, while the Museums of Romanian History, Natural History and Science stood dwarfed and in darkness nearby. The Party museum advertised an exhibition on the ‘Heroism of the Family’, alongside its permanent show of ‘Omagiu’ to the Conducător and his wife.

  The Natural History Museum offered more stimulating fare: an exhibition entitled ‘Evolution and Extinction’, illustrated with a poster of a sceptical-looking giant lizard. I had visited the exhibition twice, and bought the poster that now hung on my office wall.

  As a power-saving measure, museum visitors were organised into groups and the lights in each room were turned on as you entered and off as you left, the loud click of the switches reverberating in the high-ceilinged halls. It was like a tide of darkness following you, engulfing room after room behind you as you went. Walking past the skeletons of mammoths and brachiosaurs, their bones wired into place and clipped together with metal hinges, their skulls craned upwards and their jaws cranked open into silent screams, you felt the momentum of depletion, the world subtracting from itself faster than it could replenish.

  Bucharest’s modern parks were flat, planted with dwarfish shrubs and benches arranged to give the sitter maximum exposure and maximum discomfort. You never stayed long anywhere, harried on all sides by an invisible watchfulness. All the fountains were dry. As you walked you passed statues of one of the harmlessly dead: composers, poets, historians, scientists, evacuated from their own stories by these anonymising official monuments. The safe and useful dead, as Stalin called them, never shy of adding to their numbers.

  The older parks and gardens were more convivial. The nearest one to my flat, Parcul Kiseleff, was overhung with trees and criss-crossed with pebbled paths, canopied with overarching branches and set back from the street. These small groves of privacy were rare in Bucharest, and by now were only to be found in the well-to-do suburbs where foreigners, Party officials or members of the dilapidated bourgeoisie still lived. For most Romanians, leisure was rationed and policed, the regime reaching even into the slow, slack hours of inactivity.

  The old enjoyed the benefits of their irrelevance. I would stop and watch them: courteous, dapper little men who tipped their hats to passing ladies or competed with each other to give up their seats for someone older or frailer. The women brought tea in thermoses and pastries in boxes tied with ribbons, shook their heads and tutted at daring propositions, laughing at familiar jokes. Some spoke to each other in that meticulous, creaky, buttoned-up language known as Capsia French. Retired technocrats, ex-apparatchiks, bonjouristes from the pre-communist era… the police wasted little time watching them.

  It was as I passed late one afternoon that an old gentleman signalled with his stick for me to wait for him.

  ‘Où habitez-vous?’ he asked me. Where did I live? ‘Ah, ça tombe bien, je vous accompagne, ce n’est pas loin de chez moi.’ ‘That’s handy, I’ll walk with you, it’s not far from my place.’

  He introduced himself – Sergiu Trofim – and extended a hand for me to shake. It was small and dry, pocked with liverspots and missing its index and middle fingers. Drawing attention to the neighbouring stumps was a heavy gold ring on his wedding finger, set with a large turquoise stone. His sleeves finished with antique Dior cufflinks.

  ‘Mon plaisir,’ he said, bowing slightly when I told him my name. Trofim greeted everyone as if he had heard of them before, as if they came to him cresting the wave of a happy reputation.

  He wore an old enamel Party lapel badge. The new ones were twice the size, raucous scarlet and made of plastic. Trofim’s was a discrete, weathered crimson; classy would have been the word in a different sort of society. It matched the rest of him: clean white shirt, dark grey suit with turn-ups, red braces and polished brogues. He was bald, with white hair on the sides – dégarni, as the French say, ungarnished – with a trilby sporting a pencil stub, like a feather, in the hatband.

  As we walked I hung back to keep pace with him, though his slowness came more from wanting to spin out our conversation than from physical infirmity.

  Trofim was a considerate conversationalist; he listened to my replies, asked my opinion on matters I knew nothing of, but about which I tried hard to sustain a view. ‘Tell me…’ That was how all his questions began. His technique was to put you in charge of knowing something, forcing you to live up to his opinion of you, and it was always your better, more knowledgeable, maturer self that Trofim placed within your reach. He spoke to me as if I was a diplomat back from a long foreign mission, his small talk projecting itself across the globe: he talked of statesmen as if they were acquaintances, of world events as if they had happened to him personally. Some of them were and some of them had, as I came to find out from my weekly visits to his flat near the Natural History Museum, which he called simply Chez les dinosaures. Afterwards I would accompany him to the park where his friends sat and talked and Trofim played chess with his friend Petrescu, the icon painter, a tall, thin man dressed in black who wore a heavy crucifix around his neck. The extinct species, Trofim would say, looking across at the statue of a mammoth on the Museum’s piebald lawn, I think they will be making room… For a long time, as he said this, I thought he was talking about himself.

  That first day we stopped outside a house on Strada Herastrau, a few streets from my flat. In front of the gates was a cream Citroen DS. ‘My prized possession. I drove this from Paris to Bucharest in 1968, after the Russians put down the Prague Spring. I haven’t driven it for two years. It’s waiting for new parts… like me,’ Trofim laughed, raising his damaged hand. The car sat under a layer of dust, the bonnet sticky with sap from the tree above. On the dashboard lay a 1929 Baedeker guide to Bucharest. People around here seemed to have guide books for every epoch except the one they lived in.

  Trofim saw me noticing it. He opened the passenger door of the DS, took out the Baedeker, and gave it to me.

  ‘A present for you. You won’t find the maps much use for getting around any more. Think of it as an urban memoir. It’s where your friend Leo lives.’

  Later, we sat in Trofim’s living room; three walls were floor to ceiling with bookcases and the fourth covered in paintings and photographs: Trofim with Trotsky, Trofim with Victor Serge, Trofim with Diego Rivera, Trofim with a parade of heroes of the tragic left. He worked in their aura, at a small desk by the balcony, while at the dining table his secretary, a grey-faced buzzard with a socialist-realist scowl, typed into an expensive computer. A samovar of tea steamed in the corner.

  After my second visit Trofim explained his strange predicament. ‘I am writing my memoirs. Every day she takes dictation, and then the papers are taken away for… let’s call it editing. They return for proofreading completely different from what I dictated. They are taking my story from me. You’ve heard of the Freudian talking cure, where the mere act of saying something to someone who is listening is sufficient? Well, we always have someone listening here, we are the Freudian state. This is the communist talking cure: they are curing me of my own life. Every day my altered past catches up with me. You know the old joke: with communism the future is certain, it’s just the past that keeps changing?’

  ‘I am unable to recover my text,’ Trofim lamented, ‘and by the time it returns it is no longer mine.’ I went across to the computer. There was nothing on the screen other than the menu of options. His secretary copied everything onto a diskette and then put the day’s work into the wastebasket to delete it. But she did
not know that it needed to be purged each time, and that the files remained on the hard drive. She treated the computer as nothing more than a memorious typewriter. ‘Watch,’ I said, sliding cursor down to the screen’s wastebin and double clicking. There they were: chapter after original chapter. I dragged them out and opened them. I found a disk and transferred them all across. Trofim looked at me as if I had performed a miracle of Lazarine information raising. I felt proud, indispensable – in short, I felt the way Trofim wanted me to feel.

  If I had any inkling then that he had stage-managed my miraculous find in order to inveigle me into taking the dangerous job of his secretary, I ignored it. Even now I am not sure he planned it that way, but I know it would have made no difference: just because I was a suspicious person didn’t mean I ever acted on my suspicions. If I had I would probably have stayed away from all of them: Leo, Trofim, Cilea and the others. I would not have come here in the first place. But all I have ever learned from past mistakes was to how to commit new ones more knowingly. Self-knowledge for me was always just clarified inertia.

  By the end of April I was resurrecting Trofim’s deleted files, correcting them with him and taking dictation as he sat and smoked and rolled out his memories. His secretary would take away the text for editing, censoring and rewriting at the State publishing house, while Trofim and I retrieved the files and we worked on the genuine memoirs. Afterwards I took the files and printed them out at the British Embassy library, and later, back at his flat, we edited them together. This is how Trofim’s book was born.

  ‘So you’ve met Comrade Trofim?’ Leo said. ‘Well, you’ve shaken the hand that’s shaken the hand of Stalin. They say old Trofim’s writing his memoirs. That should be interesting. He’s swum in some pretty murky waters, has old Sergiu. You’ll notice he doesn’t have a picture of Stalin on his wall. Odd really, because he knew him as well as any of them, did a few jobs for him too… make sure you ask him about it next time…’