The Last Hundred Days Page 6

  Five

  I met Cilea six weeks after my arrival. I was lecturing on essay writing when she came in late and sat at the back of the main hall, a great cavernous place with acoustics that turned speech into drizzle. This was the Romanian way – scale designed to outsize every human manifestation. She kept her sunglasses on, lounged across two seats in the back row and looked up at the dome of dirty glass.

  Her body signalled itself. Men and women with their backs to her suddenly turned like dogs at an inaudible whistle. It was not just that she was beautiful – there was enough beauty to go round, and Cilea had none of the consensus-beauty of the catwalk model or the men’s magazine. Her face was dark, her eyes at once stormy and aloof. Her skin was tanned, her mouth lipsticked bright red and her hair black and shiny as a Politburo limousine. Arresting was the word, though we tried to use it sparingly in a police state: her mix of carnality and untouchability, along with the way she wore the best and latest western clothes, not the way people wore them around here – with preening amateurism, labels pointing outwards – but casually, from an inexhaustible stock. She looked like someone from another epoch as well as another country: 1960s Italy or France seen through the prism of late 80s US buying power. Everyone noticed her; everyone seemed to know her too. I lost my wording when she came in, stumbled through the rest of the lecture, squinting across the rows of empty seats to where she sat.

  Afterwards she came to thank me for my reference. I felt clumsy. I wished she had come when I was giving a poetry lecture, when at least I might have looked less like a glorified grammar teacher, or during a class on the modern novel. Instead, behind me on the board were written those expository phrases found in that fatigued genre, the ‘topical essay’: in the final analysis, on the one hand/on the other, it might be objected that… No one wrote like that, except in international English, that committee-language sieved to a fine inexpressiveness through the strainer of compromise and neutrality.

  We went for coffee in the dismal canteen. This was her country, yet she made me feel that I had to justify the place to her, even though – and I must have known it even then – she was part of the system which made it what it was.

  The queue stretched from the entrance to the till. No matter that there was nothing worth queuing for. If there was a queue you queued. The only coffee on offer was known as ersatz, a thin flavourless substitute that tasted different each time because its ingredients always changed. Students with whom I was friendly avoided us and looked away.

  We waited. Our small talk got smaller. When we finally got our ersatzes, Cilea grimaced at her first sip and pushed hers away.

  ‘It’s Ionescu you should be thanking,’ I said, ‘he’s the one who told me to write the reference. All I did was sign it.’

  ‘I know, but he wouldn’t have done it without your permission.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have given my permission if he hadn’t made me. I don’t know you. You’re not even one of our students.’

  ‘True, but then again one of your students wouldn’t have got the visa and you’d have wasted your reference. Ionescu was being practical: fill in the forms, do it right and waste the place on someone who can’t use it, or bend the rules and use the place, and someone gets something out of it? I went, and I got something out of it.’ Cilea lit an English cigarette, something else she had got from her trip to London.

  Cilea looked at her watch: she had somewhere to be getting back to. She spoke an English that marked her out immediately: the English of the frequent visitor, contemporary, fresh, and not the embalmed patter we studied in the university’s Cold War grammar books. Most of my students would never leave Romania, but Cilea was different. She had words for material goods most contemporaries did not know existed; she had been to Italy, France, Spain, and even spent a term at Boston university on some scholarship designed to enhance the prospects of disadvantaged East European students. She could talk – about American films, French food, West End theatre – but never about where she got her money from, or what she had to do to live as she did, wealthy and untouched by her country’s miseries. But she never hid it either, and even when I found out, it was impossible to say to how far she was implicated in the system and how far she was merely living in its interstices, better and more happily than most, but nonetheless uninvolved in its brutality. Never once did I hear her say anything positive about the regime or the Party that protected her and kept her in luxury, but neither did she express any regret for those who made do with Romania’s poverty-line basics, or whom the regime persecuted or ostracised.

  Not long after we started Leo had said: ‘Ah, Cilea – a girl of many layers’; then he elaborated: ‘layer upon layer of surface…’ I still cannot be sure I knew Cilea, not until it was too late for both of us, but I know now that Leo was wrong.

  I might not have come across her again if I hadn’t tried for that second meeting. It was a last-ditch attempt as she rose to leave. I stuttered out an invitation, the kind that comes swallowed up in its own embarrassed retraction. She turned it around, saying she would fetch me next day for lunch. I had a class but I didn’t tell her. I’d cancel.

  The rest of that day I spent in an itch of erotic expectation. I did two more hours of teaching and knocked off at four. The last thing I saw as I closed the door behind me was the top sheet of unmarked essays on my desk trembling from the electric fan as it chased the same air around the room. I called on Leo in his office. He was on the phone, speaking in quick, agitated bursts of Romanian. I understood a little, that the conversation was about Rodica and that she was in hospital. There had been some sort of complication with her pregnancy.

  Leo snatched a jacket from his chair and a fresh carton of Kent cigarettes from the filing cabinet, then pulled me out into the corridor.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it in the car.’

  But he didn’t. Leo drove nerve-wrackingly slowly, desperate not to be stopped: out of the university car park, past the library and down Academicians Avenue, out through the city centre and towards the north-east suburbs. Further beyond I caught sight of the Boulevard of Socialist Victory, a vast avenue that didn’t so much vanish into the distance as use it up, drawing everything around into itself. At one end, in a sort of urban phantasm, the steel frames of a vast palace reared up: the ‘Palace of the People’. It was going to be the biggest building in the world. What old buildings remained nearby had no choice but to submit to the gargantuan scale of its pettiness. With the sun behind it, it looked translucent, traced in the dust it threw up around it.

  All around were apartment blocks in different gradations of grey. Ten minutes from Bucharest’s picturesque and ragged centre, the streets straightened, stopped having names, and sank into numerical anonymity: ‘Strada 4’, ‘Calea 9’, ‘Piaţa 32’. We passed two schools, also numbered, and turned at a large roundabout in the middle of which people were selling machine parts. The pieces were strewn across white sheets on the ground, amid puddles of oil and piles of tools. It looked like the scene of a robot’s autopsy. A few shabby queues poked out of shops, but the pavements bore little by way of pedestrian life.

  There was even less traffic, just battered trams and buses gasping dirty fumes. The car followed the concrete rim of a waterless canal that bisected the city, then turned over a bridge and waited at a junction for the lights to change. No cars crossed. To my left the rubble of an old church was being boxed up and placed, stone by stone, into waiting lorries. The stones were tagged and numbered, the whole strange ritual supervised by men in suits. A few black-clothed people looked on, some with crucifixes, others crossing themselves and muttering.

  ‘The church is being dismantled,’ said Leo, ‘then it’ll either stay in storage or get put into some open-air museum.’

  ‘A working church?’

  ‘Still consecrated, yes, but it depends what you mean by “working”… they locked it up a week ago, and pulled it down yesterday. It’s one of the lucky ones. Most just get flattened and the
stones get used as ballast for the new apartment blocks. Dig up any of these building projects and you’ll find the pieces of some old church or monastery underneath.’

  ‘Those men…’

  ‘The men from the ministry – they deal with the Moonies, the Seventh-Day-Adventists and even the odd Christian, it’s all the same to the men from the Ministry of Cults… that’s right: The Ministry of Cults.’ He laughed grimly. ‘In the old days peasants on the border would build their churches on wheels, so they could shift them every time they were invaded by the Turks. They should have thought of that here.’

  When the car moved again Leo explained where we were going.

  ‘There should be a hospital somewhere round here, but it’s got no name, and since it’s brand new I can’t find it on the map. Rodica’s had a miscarriage… her husband’s on work detail in Cluj and can’t make it for a while. But that’s not all. Some fuckers from the Securitate took her into the police station for losing the baby. Losing babies is a tragedy in most places; here it’s a crime.’

  ‘A crime?’

  ‘As the Man himself, President Comrade Beacon of Progress Nicolae Ceauşescu, Danube of Thought, said – and he meant, oh yes he fucking did, he meant it literally too – the foetus is the property of the people… basically, no one wants to have kids in this godforsaken place, but old Nick has decreed that each family shall have at least three children. The population needs to rise! No matter that we can’t feed them or find them jobs, or that their lives are shit… oh no, fuck that, contraception is a crime, abortion is a crime, the pill, that’s a crime. Now losing your baby – that’s a fucking crime!’

  After a month here I could believe anything, even that women could be criminalised for losing babies. It was another ten minutes before we reached an anonymous avenue where Leo realised we were lost.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he shouted and thumped his hands on the steering wheel, ‘where the fuck are we?’

  I didn’t need to look at the rectilinear void around us to know this was a rhetorical question. If it was possible to build suburbs that were so bland, so empty of landmarks that they became unnavigable, it had been done here. The place was traceless. The eye sought out something to fix on, but kept rolling off the surfaces. Even the inhabitants must get lost; most, judging by the places they would be coming home to, would probably find that a mercy.

  Leo reached for a map but it was no use. ‘Half the fucking places on this map don’t exist any more – I only bought it last year! I thought this was where we were, I just couldn’t recognise anything around me. Christ, this used to be the red-light quarter, the place full of cafés and by-the-hour hotels.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘The only red lights you see these days are the bloody brakelights on demolition trucks!’

  There was no one to ask for directions, no car to flag down. Leo got out and found a phone box. These were plentiful in Bucharest, in an inversely proportionate relationship to what you were allowed to say once you got inside. I watched him kick it a few times, find another, and shout into the receiver.

  Things moved fast after that. Within ten minutes we were at the gates of a dirty-fronted hospital, half an hour and two world economic zones from the plush clinic where I had seen the EPIDEMIA graffiti. Rusty Dacia ambulances stood around, their drivers lolling beside them smoking or swigging Tsuica. Leo parked right up by the front door, and we walked unchallenged up the stairs and into the lobby. The reception desk was empty. There were no signs or notices or arrows pointing where to go; only the drag-marks of blood along floors and walls provided orientation. An open bin was full of crusted bandages on which flies feasted noisily. I swayed at the giddying smell.

  ‘I know you’ve had your share of Thatcher’s NHS, but you’d better be prepared for this,’ said Leo grimly. ‘Don’t even bother to press for the lift…’ He launched himself up a filthy staircase three steps at a time. My foot made contact with something which turned out to be a tooth lying on a bed of its own coiled rootage, like a jellyfish heaped on its tentacles. It was not the hospital’s dirt or mess that frightened me but its apparent emptiness: everywhere signs of illness, damage and trauma, but no one around.

  When we reached the ward, Rodica was the first person we saw, our eyes drawn to her bed by the mess of blood on the sheets. She was pale and clammy, in deep but precarious sleep. Leo took her hand. I think he was checking she was still alive. That would have been my first reaction too, had I not been so stunned by what I was seeing. The sheet rose and fell gently as she breathed. Her arm was punctured by a transparent plastic drip and some piping led from her nose to a square box with dials on the bedside table. The box was switched on but its pilot light was out.

  All around lay women in various states of pregnancy: some with their babies alive and well beside them, others, like Rodica, in bloody sheeting, the incubators empty, others still waiting to deliver. The mothers-to-be watched the mothers who had lost their babies, and vice versa; the successful births were ranged alongside the stillbirths and miscarriages. The room, above the penetrating odour of sweat, of human and clinical waste, smelled of fear and crushing sadness. A male nurse smoked and played solitaire at the end of the room, a bottle of Tsuica at his elbow. Leo walked up to him. Voices were raised: Leo waving his arms, the orderly turning away and lighting one cigarette off the other, making to resume his card game. Leo grabbed him by the lapels of his white coat and the man pushed him away. There was a pause, and then Leo reached for a packet of Kent cigarettes. Things changed after that.

  Some bottled water and a wet flannel were brought to Rodica’s bed for me to administer. The water was cold, straight from the fridge. I pressed the bottle’s flank across her burning forehead, then soaked the flannel and ran it over her face. The nurse got up and shouted down the corridor, and within minutes a young woman doctor came in. She nodded to Leo and came over to Rodica, checked the temperature, and asked me something in Romanian. I expressed my inability to understand, and she asked me in English: ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘No, I’m a friend. A colleague. At work.’

  She headed towards Leo, then turned back to me: ‘If she wakes up come and tell me. Keep doing what you’re doing. It isn’t useless.’

  That double negative expressed the horizon of the doctor’s expectation, where the best that could be hoped for was that the worst might omit to happen. She couldn’t have been much older than me.

  What had happened to Rodica, we slowly found out, was terrible. Last night, alone in her flat, she had begun to lose blood. She lived on the eighth floor; the lift was broken and there was no phone, but she managed somehow to get down the stairs and wake a neighbour who helped her to a friend’s car. She had arrived here at 3 am, unconscious and losing blood. Rodica had lost the baby, but by 6 am her own condition had stabilised. She had come round long enough to drink a little and eat some chocolate she had brought with her. A message was put through to her husband, an engineer in Cluj, but he was refused leave to come home. In any case, he had no idea of what had happened afterwards.

  Rodica and her husband were part of Romania’s ‘technocracy’, the educated, Party-affiliated middle class who helped run what was left of the country after the regime had finished with it. If this was how someone like her was treated, it was difficult to imagine what those lower down the scale went through.

  At 10 am this morning, two Securitate men paid her a visit. All miscarriages in Romania were investigated. The statistics on illegal or self-administered abortions here were frighteningly high and frighteningly grisly, Leo explained later, and many of them produced the dramatically disabled children discovered, not long after the regime’s collapse, filling the country’s orphanages. Party members went to clinics for safe and secret terminations. Ceauşescu planned to increase the population from twenty-three million to thirty million by 2000. A ‘celibacy tax’ was imposed on women who could have children but did not, while officials were sent to interrogate women about their sexual habits. ‘Anyone who
avoids having children is a deserter,’ proclaimed Ceauşescu, announcing the ‘Mama Eroica’ scheme to reward mothers with five or more children. But there was no milk, no food; it was impossible to find sterilised feeding equipment; electricity was now as random and inscrutable as Acts of God had been for ancient civilisations.

  Rodica, traumatised and in pain, was taken from the hospital for questioning. Two hours later, she was left in the street outside the police station and somehow found her way back to the hospital. By the time she returned she was bleeding heavily. Her body had gone into toxic shock. Her interrogators had refused to confirm whether or not she would be ‘charged’. Leo looked up the offence in the penal code: ‘Crime against the integrity of the Romanian family’.

  The young doctor was not ashamed. She was not resigned or fatalistic or sorry. She didn’t avoid our eyes. She was angry, defiant, daring us to implicate her in all this. It was the second time today, though for different reasons, that I had felt challenged to account for something I had nothing to do with: once by Cilea, who circumvented all the miseries of her country, and again here, by Dr Ottilia Moranu, who lived and worked in their midst.

  ‘She’ll be OK; there’s not much you can do here unless you think seeing a friendly face will help. It might.’

  Leo pressed a carton of Kent on Dr Moranu, but she refused it. How long would she keep that up? All the best people here put up token resistance to being bribed. I trusted them more than those who gave in straight away, but the few who never gave in were genuinely suspicious. ‘The dirty bastard’s clean!’ Leo exclaimed on the rare occasions he encountered someone he could not bribe or blackmail. Now he said nothing, just scratched his head and looked pleadingly at Dr Moranu. She was young. Perhaps she hadn’t yet worked out that taking bribes didn’t make you worse, or that refusing them didn’t make you better.