‘Maybe not, but we’re friends. I hope we are friends.’ Something stopped me from phrasing that in the past tense. Ottilia sensed it anyway, that implied pastness, because she stopped eating and put her face in her hands.
‘I’m worried. I’ve heard nothing. No letter, no calls, nothing. There’s no one from the group left to talk to. Petre hasn’t been to classes or rehearsals since, and he’s never missed one. His friend Vintul’s gone too.’
‘What do you think’s happened?’
‘I think they’ve been captured. But if they had there would be something, some message, some word. And most importantly reprisals against friends and family. Me, for example. There’s been nothing. In any case, Petre is as unlikely to leave the country as I am.’
She sat for a minute and said nothing. ‘He always left messages at the hospital…’ The sentence petered out. There was nowhere for it to go except into the darkness that talking keeps at bay. Ottilia put down her fork, flipped open the pedal bin, and dumped the tin into the clanging cylinder. She looked defeated.
‘I was afraid this would happen. I told him: “Please – stop this, or at least get out yourself once and for all.” But he told me not to worry, that he’d never leave, that he was protected. He liked to say that there were two kinds of people – people who lost themselves in exile and people who found themselves. He knew he’d lose himself, and I know he’d never leave.’
‘What did he mean,
protected
?’
‘I asked but he never answered. Who would protect him?’
I put my arm around her, and felt her thin shoulders through the blouse, the tight strap of her bra biting into her. Her feet were swollen and her hands scrubbed and raw. I ran my finger along her bitten nails, the skin red and flaking where she had attacked the cuticles. Her face was thin and drawn. I tried to imagine what she would look like happy, well slept and properly fed. There was something Greek about her, with her dark brown eyes and high cheekbones, her thick crinkled hair pulled back with a Monocom clip but which kept tumbling over her eyes: a ruthlessly suppressed beauty.
I offered her images of hope – Petre hiding out underground, Petre out of the country waiting to make contact, Petre shopping for guitars in Carnaby Street… She did me the kindness of nodding once or twice, tightening her fingers around mine as I spoke.
I made some tea, the British reflex. As the water rolled to a boil, I watched her on the sofa. Her head hung down; her knees were clamped together, her hands clenched. Then, as I poured the tea, Ottilia was up and rearranging herself. She went to the bathroom and I heard the tap splutter. A few minutes later she returned, barefoot and wearing a homemade dress of colourful peasant cloth, her hair free to fall where it wished, her cheeks scrubbed and full of colour. She smiled – pure fortitude – and got out a bottle of Tsuica, slugged back a bracing nip then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘I must work now – I have things to prepare for tomorrow, case notes which no one will read, and then sleep. Thank you for coming. I will tell you as soon as I hear something.’
‘Well?’ asked Leo. Then, seeing me wince as I climbed into the car, ‘sorry – I’ve farted up a bit of a storm in here. The old soya salami I’m afraid. It’ll clear up once we start moving.’
As the breeze cut in through the open windows, Leo listened to my account of meeting Ottilia and said nothing. I kept saying the same things in different words, as if by doing so I might surprise some new meaning in them.
‘OK, OK,’ said Leo, ‘I get the message. Just let me think for a moment.’
But after ten minutes he had still said nothing. ‘Leo, what is it?’ I asked. ‘I know you’re thinking something. Just tell me!’
‘You’re not going to like this, but fuck it, I’m probably wrong anyway, and if I’m right it’s not really your fault, it’s the fault of the bastard system. But here goes: you introduced Petre to Cilea, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, just the once,’ I replied, unable to see the point of the question. I was tired and my tiredness was making me obtuse.
‘Once is enough around here. So: they meet, but obviously don’t want to speak to each other, in the InterContinental hotel, with Nicu Ceauşescu, Manea Constantin, Ion Stoicu and fuck knows how many other trolls, hacks, spies and stooges all around them. She’s the daughter of a top Party boss, he’s… what? Some student up to his neck in trouble. Then a few days later, Petre and Vintul go off on a mission they’ve done ten times before, and suddenly they disappear.’
It was more than a possibility now, it was likelihood, and it had been there, inside me, feeding my unease, my vague guilt for weeks. Now it was there fully formed, a sick wrenching feeling: something had happened and more likely than not it could be traced to me.
‘You don’t know. No one knows anything for sure.’ Leo was backtracking now, a sure sign that he thought he had hit on something, ‘there’s all sorts of reasons they might have got caught, all kinds of ways someone might have found out.’
He was driving so slowly that a policeman flagged us to the side of the street and demanded our IDs. There was no backchat or bonhomie from Leo, just sullen co-operation. The policeman checked our papers and waved us on, puzzled. He knew Leo’s reputation and expected something more lively, an extravagant bribe or a
risqué
joke.
‘I’m dropping you at your flat. I want you to forget about this for now. Just leave it. And whatever you do, don’t go and have it out with Cilea. Let me see what I can find out.’
It was the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, when the expat community looked forward to the French Embassy’s big
soirée
. The only person who refused the invitation was the Princess, who each year sent back the same letter. It began ‘I thank his Excellency the Ambassador for his kind invitation, but he must know that I do not consider the fourteenth of July to be a day of celebration…’ and went on to elaborate a long history of Republican atrocity and failure. Someone walking along Bucharest’s Piaţa Republica on July Fourteenth 1989 would have agreed with her. Even with the daily queues and shortages, the ubiquitous police and Securitate, the place felt even more purged and prostrate than usual.
I had nearly reached the university by the time I realised why. The streets were full of people carrying typewriters. This was no easy feat: most of the machines were the old iron models, with Bakelite keys on long articulated fingers, beautifully kept antiques in perfect order. From the
TAROM
offices two men were carrying out an electric typewriter the size of a baby elephant. Office girls with manicured nails and immaculate hair stood outside looking sad as the beast was hauled into a waiting van.
This scheme, known as ‘typewriter day’, was an annual event, designed to keep records of any instrument that might be used for dissident or
samizdat
publications. If so it was a laborious way of keeping track – sending dozens of officers around town to test typewriters must involve massive administrative time and cost. But then this was not reactive repression but preventative. Leo had told me about the ‘National Handwriting Archive’, brainchild of Elena Ceauşescu. This was the machine version, logging the imprint, tug and slant of every key of every typewriter in the land. The old joke was that Professor Doctor Mrs Ceauşescu had invested in research into telepathy to set up an archive that recorded the accent and timbre of one’s thoughts.
I went to the staff room to make coffee, a reflex action that occasionally surfaced from a previous existence, since there was never any coffee and the hob had long ago broken. The perpetually out-of-order photocopier, a hulking East German contraption, had chosen today to begin working again. A small crowd, for whom the machine’s operational state was just a sort of urban myth, watched excitedly. It ground out a limp sheet of paper, sputtered, then stopped.
There was a note on my office door from Professor Ionescu asking me to pay him a visit. He was twitchy. A gleaming, typewriter-shaped square of desk in front of him was framed in a border of dust.
‘Please go to the university car park, where someone is waiting for you,’ he said.
‘Who?’ I asked. Ionescu’s sobriety was an ill omen. ‘You have a visitor. Deputy Minister Manea Constantin has asked to see you. I do not know what it is about, and it may be that I will not be here much longer to find out. I may be joining the janitorial staff. Now please go.’
Outside I found a black Mercedes with Party plates. Two smiling young men, well-groomed, smartly suited and smelling of French aftershave, climbed out. They were polite too – another worrying sign.
‘
Domnul
, we would like you to come with us. You are invited to meet somebody,’ said the first, firm but unthreatening in the manner of those who do not need to threaten. I wondered whether they knew the clichéd nature of what we were playing out. Given the black market in American action films and Mafia sagas, it seemed probable that they did: two minders in a black limo making me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
‘That would be terrific, but I’m afraid I’m working. I have a lecture to give.’
‘Everything is fine. It has been taken care of with your professor. Now please,’ said the other, gesturing into the tan-upholstered interior of the car, ‘we will bring you back after lunch.’ The Mercedes’ windows were of smoked glass and the conditioned air inside was icy. Morgue temperature, I thought as my teeth chattered.
There were no checks for us as we slid into the courtyard of the Interior Ministry, parked and walked into the building’s lobby.
I was taken upstairs and shown into a vast room with blank walls and high ceilings with hammer and sickle mouldings. There was one desk, a vast reinforced-glass slab on two marble trestles, and behind it French windows flanked, as usual, by portraits of the Ceauşescus. The figure behind the desk stood with his hand out in greeting: Manea Constantin, the deputy Interior Minister, in a charcoal suit and Savile Row shirt that was the rich dark blue of a winter afternoon sky. A few papers had been pushed to one extremity of the desk, and an espresso machine sat squarely in the centre, foreign magazines in a haphazard pile alongside it. An atomiser of
Signor Ricci
, retailing at thirty-odd quid a bottle in duty-free, served both as eau de cologne and all-round room freshener.
In an annexe, two secretaries typed. One was square and matronly, the other slim and beautiful and so much like Cilea that I had to look again to make sure it wasn’t. She turned and smiled; she exuded mistresshood, the unattainable sexual availability of the powerful man’s consort.
‘Call me Manea,’ he said charmingly. As
if
, I thought, my sweaty hand in his, two not-so-secretly holstered flunkeys on either side of me. ‘I thought we might spend a morning together… getting to know each other. I like to know who my daughter’s friends are.’
‘
Were
,’ I corrected, ‘I haven’t spoken to her for a month and she hasn’t returned my calls.’
‘But first a shave,’ he said, ignoring me. It was not how I expected the morning to go.
The car took us, through halted traffic and disregarded traffic lights, to the InterContinental Hotel. I was starting to feel that the place was cursed, and I cursed always to return to it. The manager dropped some tourists’ luggage with a crash and showed us to the hotel’s ‘Aesthetic Centre’, where two barbers were waiting on our arrival.
We sat side by side as the hot towels and razors came out. Manea Constantin spoke to me in the mirror. I kept turning to face him, but the barber had my head jammed. Just as well – the razor was so sharp it would probably not even hurt when it cut, not until I saw the blood. The blade was hot, the steel smooth in its thin, lethal slide on wet skin. My eyes watered as he hitched up a nostril and the blade scraped right up into the cavity. I fought back a sneeze.
‘Vlad the Impaler used to slit open the nostrils of his enemies so they flapped like rags in the wind,’ said Manea, by way of putting me at my ease.
The barber sprinkled some mentholated astringent over our heads and necks and began a Turkish cranial massage. It felt as if my skin was being peeled off, stretched out and tanned across my skull. I felt a high of physical health.
Constantin was practised at mirror talk, and enjoyed the symbolism of it: everything inverted, him talking to me via my reflection and I talking to him via his. He was an intelligent and graceful conversationalist, and I found myself forgetting that he was probably as corrupt as the rest of them, and as ruthless. He was certainly his daughter’s father: he had that same detachment from all he was implicated in, that same nonchalance in the midst of responsibility. The difference was that where Cilea could merely distance herself from it all, Manea implemented it. I asked him about what I had just seen in the university, about what might happen to Ionescu.
‘That charade this afternoon, the typewriters…?’ He laughed, ‘it is now a tradition, like folk dancing and basket weaving, but nothing to do with me. Orders from the highest place. As for the demotion of your professor, that is the responsibility of Comrade Stoicu. I do not interfere in his affairs. How do they say it in England? I do not cross onto his patch.’
‘The National Handwriting Archive?’ I began. He cut me off with a laugh. ‘Yes, I too have heard of that. Again, Comrade Stoicu’s department. A very expensive and very stupid initiative. Next you will be asking me about the research into telepathy…’
Manea settled back and relaxed. We said nothing more until the barbers were brushing the hairs from our collars.
‘Now you will be my guest at the Politburo restaurant in Snagov.’
Forty minutes later we were there. The journey out of town had taken us across some rubble-strewn roads. In Leo’s Skoda it would have been a boneshaking nervejangler of a journey. In Manea’s ministerial limo it was like a car journey on a fifties film set, the landscape rewinding in the tinted glass.
The Snagov ‘Socialist Village’ was a twenty-acre gated compound of villas and facilities for highly placed Party officials: health clubs, gyms, saunas, skin care and anti-ageing treatment centres. There were shops with blacked-out windows selling white goods, luxury food, designer clothes. Politburo wives shopped and dined while their children rode western motorbikes to cinemas showing US action films. Unlike Bucharest itself, the place was orderly and shiny; a cross between Switzerland and the retirement belt of Florida – an Iron Curtain
Costa Geriatrica
.