The Last Hundred Days (13 page)

Cilea’s passport was on the bedside table, beside some French contraceptive pills: two of Romania’s most controlled subjects, travel and fertility, side-by-side. Having these was an imprisonable offence, but Cilea had nothing to fear. I thought of Rodica in the hospital surrounded by sorrow and death, and of Dr Moranu, the challenge of her anger. It looked like I was in a different world from them, here in Cilea’s flat, but in some strange way they felt connected. I pushed away the thought.
I’m not part of all this
… Cilea had said. It was enough for me at the time because I wanted it to be enough.

The regime dealt in counterfeit: counterfeit goods, counterfeit money, counterfeit feelings. It gave you solitude instead of privacy, crowds instead of community, reproduction instead of sex. Sex was the one act in which all of daily life’s privations could be exorcised, the one sphere into which the state couldn’t reach. But Rodica knew differently. In other communist countries your body at least was your property, perhaps the only property that was not theft. Fucking was escape. ‘Poor man’s aspirin,’ they called it here. But really only the privileged fucked recklessly; for the rest, it was another furtive, precaution-racked release.

In other eastern bloc states abortion and birth control were statutory rights. Here they were a dangerous, illegal business. The black market in condoms was ferocious, and they were so hard to find that people used them again and again, washing and drying and rolling them back up.
AIDS
was still a secret, and didn’t officially exist, but you knew it was out there, taking hold, making its way in along the channels of denial and official secrecy. I had seen it:
EPIDEMIA
, the letters burning like a fever; I heard its tills ringing in the night, in the shuffle of banknotes in the hotels and clubs where the whores worked.

On Cilea’s Swedish stereo Joni Mitchell sang, ‘Oh I could drink a case of you, darling/ And I would still be on my feet,’ to the steam of an espresso machine. She brought two scalding coffees and some Swiss chocolate which she broke into blocks and spread across its foil on the bed. She lived in a world without friction: nothing scraped or dragged as she went through life; there were no obstacles. When I was with her I shared that frictionless world, lived on a cushion of air where the only intensities came from the pleasures we shared: the nights when, as she slept, I would hold her from behind and press my face into her shoulders until she wriggled sleepily out of my arms and kicked off the sheets. That first afternoon the breeze dried the sweat off our bodies and Cilea’s arm lay weightlessly over my chest, while mine held her tightly to me.

We dozed to the
finale
of the day’s celebrations: a choir of hundreds singing a song – with helpful subtitles: totalitarian
karaoke
– about Ceauşescu’s exploits in the anti-fascist resistance. Ceauşescu’s speciality was third-world leaders who could always be relied on to take up and reciprocate invitations to ‘state visits’ or, as
Scînteia
put it, ‘fraternal exchanges between helmsmen’. The speed at which these regimes collapsed or were overthrown ensured a steady supply of international helmsmen at Cotroceni Palace.

By now Ceauşescu’s public engagements, which had once involved the likes of Nixon, Khrushchev and the Queen of England, had dwindled into a rotation of pigmy-plenipotentiaries and micro-dignitaries. He had been in power nearly twenty-five years; they eddied around him like a shallow stream around a rock. Marx talked about history as the great force propelled by logic and necessity, which could be prepared for and ridden but not hurried along; Mao had replied, asked if the French revolution had worked, that it was ‘too early to tell’. Just as religion had once promised rectification and reward in the next world, so Marxism offered us life as perpetual prelude. It was customary to take the long view – looking around us, what other view was there? – but History was not playing the long game with this lot. This was not History flattening out its dialectical kinks over generations, perfecting the conditions of its own unfolding. This was History as stopwatch: you could hear it at their backs, timing them out.

‘I fancy a
Kojak
…’ Leo announced.

Ceauşescu’s love of
Kojak
was legendary, and tempered the fear his name instilled with just enough ridicule to allow for a glimmer of humour. Most evenings on a good day the
Conducător
would watch a
Kojak
in his private movie theatre to prolong the warmth of his greatness. On a bad day, to take the edge off his quotidian tribulations, it was to the golden-domed Hellenic-American lawman that he also turned. Either way, Ceauşescu was reputed to fancy a
Kojak
much of the time.

I fancy a Kojak
: the phrase was Leo’s opening line whenever he was proposing an evening out. When, later, we met in a restaurant or hotel bar, he would open his arms wide and drawl, ‘Who loves ya baby?’ And before you could reply, Leo did it for you, arms extended and hands open in mock homage: ‘Ya People and ya Party!’

Leo was inviting me to the highlight of the contraband calendar. Twice a year he hosted ‘museum parties’ where guests could visit the official exhibits at one or other of the museums before viewing, in secret, the unofficial collection that Leo kept in the underground storerooms. His favourites were the Sutu Palace on Bratianu and the Natural History Museum on Kiseleff, whose directors were both customers and shareholders in Leo’s business. This one was to be held at the Sutu Palace.

Coded invitations were sent out on museum stationery for a certain day at a certain time. You added six days to the day, and six hours to the time, so an invitation to the Monday 3 pm reception was for the following Sunday at nine. The museum windows were blacked out, and the place would then be lit up inside with gas lamps and candles. Waiters from across the city materialised the way people did in Bucharest, appearing at your shoulder dry though it had been raining, warm-handed despite the frost, fresh and unhurried despite heatwaves, stalled trams and cancelled buses. Marshalling them from the shadows was the Maître d’ from Capsia: a man whose ubiquity was matched only by the sheer difficulty of getting from place to place in the city. I think of him not as someone who arrived or left, who came and went, but as a being who, like a light, switched himself on and off, into and out of place.

Then the guests: they came in cars with dimmed headlamps and silently filled the museum lobby. Everyone whispered, not because there was any need to, but because it fitted the occasion: muffled, excited, faintly dangerous. Coats were lifted off shoulders and hung up as trays of wine glided through the crowd. The Maître d’ discreetly took the entrance fee, a steep ten dollars for the apparatchiks and racketeers, a few hundred
lei
for the artists and writers, or for Leo’s friends, flush with Romanian currency but with nothing to buy. A string quartet played quietly, canapés did their rounds, people mingled and admired the collections, the objects enveloped in gaslight.

These gatherings divided into two groups. First there was the old bourgeoisie; discreet, educated and delicately mannered, they had lost everything in the transition to communism, seeing their homes requisitioned, their savings nationalised and their social networks shattered. Most were denied Party membership and endured a purgatory of
déclassement
, eking out livings as concierges, museum attendants or theatre ushers, jobs designed to confront them daily with what they had lost: their homes, their pasts, their culture. A few managed to climb the Party rungs in spite of their family’s past, occasionally, like Manea Constantin, becoming powerful members of the
nomenklatura
, ministers and diplomats in much the same positions as they would have been under the
ancien régime
. Then there was the new breed, people who owed everything to the Party, and more specifically to Ceauşescu, who preferred people like himself: semi-educated, crude but full of low cunning; unquestioningly loyal and wholly corruptible.

At the back of the room, in front of an expressionist painting of a yellow-skinned nude, Trofim had been cornered by the British Embassy’s ecomonic
attaché
, Giles Wintersmith. Wintersmith talked and munched peanuts at the same time, so that the contents of his mouth resembled the churn of the weekly rubbish as the jaws of the bin lorry closed on it. After years of cocktail parties, his fingers had set into a kind of tapered simian scoop with which he shovelled up bowls of snacks. Beside him was Franklin Shrapnel, his opposite number at the US embassy, an overweight civilian with an army fetish and a penchant for military attire with zips and multiple belts and holsters. Shrapnel strove to give himself the air of a presidential bodyguard on a dangerous state visit: he tweaked his ear in pretence of listening to a hi-tech earpiece and his eyes darted around the room unmasking extremists. Their friendship was a parody of Anglo-American cold war relations: Shrapnel admired Wintersmith’s phlegmatic limey wit and Wintersmith looked up to Shrapnel as a man of action.

Wintersmith’s big obsession was identifying ‘contacts’ to press for information or to interpret rumours. He was asking Trofim if he knew of any dissident movement likely to capitalise on the unrest elsewhere in communist Europe. I had not been here long, but I knew enough to see this was the wrong approach. In a world where there were no direct answers, only fools asked direct questions.

‘What a gross approach,’ I heard Trofim say, in perfectly enunciated English, ‘and unworthy of a diplomat, even one of Thatcher’s, sir.’
Sir
… the way Trofim hissed it out, drenched in contempt, was withering. Wintersmith shrank back. Shrapnel puffed out his chest and muttered some item of superpower machismo.

‘Does the man think he is James Bond?’ Trofim asked when they had disappeared.

‘The name’s Wintersmith,’ I laughed, ‘Giles Wintersmith.’

A tap on the shoulder. ‘Your consort,’ Leo pointed across the room, ‘she’s not on the list, or not on mine anyway…’

Cilea stood at the door, handing her coat to the Maître d’ and slipping him a banknote.

‘I didn’t invite her…’

Leo raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course not. Still, better make her welcome.’ He took her a glass of
Sovietskoi
sparkling wine and she smiled innocently.

‘How did you know about this?’ I asked her.

‘Dr O’Heix’s
soirées
? Highlights of the Party calendar. You don’t think the cloak and dagger stuff is for real do you? You couldn’t get away with this kind of thing without the say-so of someone up there…’ She pointed up at the ceiling. ‘I’ll bet you a new Dacia that for every five guests here one of them is an informer. But one in five of those informers is watching the other four. They’re the ones to worry about. That’s the beauty of the system.’

The beauty of the system
… what was beautiful about this
mise-en-abîme
of paranoia, this endless recession of spies being spied upon?  

‘Anyway, I’m here to check up on some of the family collection.’

‘You’ve got some stuff here?’ I asked, paying new attention to the exhibits.

‘My father’s family were diplomats in the old days. The
ancien régime
they call it now. His grandfather and father were ambassadors.
Haute-bourgeoisie
,’ she stage-whispered, her breath candied with lipstick, haunted by wine and duty-free cigarettes, ‘most of their belongings are stuck in museums. Every now and then he buys a bit back, or splashes out on a new piece…’

‘How d’you
buy a bit back
from a national museum?’

‘How d’you buy anything?’ she answered, unfazed, reaching for a bowl of green olives skewered on toothpicks. If indifference was like armour, then nonchalance was a finely spun, weightless chain mail. Cilea was
nonchalant
– my life had never given me much use for that word until now.

‘Show me.’ I took her arm and she led me through the crowd. We toured her father’s belongings: a Renaissance peasant chest, a pair of ornamental swords, Afghan rugs, paintings by Romanian artists in the manner of famous western masters now considered ‘decadent’. Cilea showed me a Romanian cubist picture of a lady climbing from an Orient Express carriage, her movement plotted as in Duchamp’s more famous picture: in the electric wake of her passing, a flurry of hats and furs, noses and eyes, legs and arms, bracelets and jewels, laid their mark on the air and delineated her descent.

‘
Tainted with the sickness of individualism and bourgeois materialism
,’ Cilea recited with mock-sincerity, ‘that’s what we were taught at school – all this stuff:
decadent and aesthetic and foreign to the concerns of socialism
…’ She laughed. ‘But she’s so beautiful – look at that dress, that necklace…’

‘She could be the Princess in the old days,’ I said, looking at the Chanel two-piece and the fur boa, the pale oval face and the dark eyes topped with a straight black fringe. Cilea laughed. ‘Christ – it
is
the Princess!’ I cried out, astonished. There it was, written in gold on a small lacquered plaque at the bottom of the frame: ‘Portretului Contessa Antoaneta Cantesco’.

At that moment there was a disturbance across the room. The Princess herself. As always, she had spotted something that had once belonged to her family and was demanding it back. Leo always mollified her, even, sometimes, buying whatever it was back and presenting it to her.

‘There’s always an outburst by some ex-aristocrat over reassigned property,’ Cilea said wearily, taking me by the hand and leading me upstairs to the lobby. After the hot crowded basement, it was a relief to reach the cold marble of the atrium, to feel the sweeping draught of the staircase as we climbed, the sweat on my back drying in the cold. I followed Cilea into a side room in the gallery, the curator’s office. We kissed at the door as she expertly unlocked it behind her, then she pulled me backwards, a hand on my belt buckle, until she bumped against a table. She swept it clear without turning around and lifted herself onto it, wrapping her ankles around the back of my calves. She was already wet, and I lifted her skirt and fucked her quickly. She kept her face away from me, watching the door, and with my mouth against her neck I tasted the bitterness of her perfume that had smelled so good and musky moments before. When I put my tongue in her mouth it was burning. Cilea bit my lip as she came and held me inside her. My lip bled but she kept her mouth there, running her tongue along the cut so that it stung.