I was up at five. Leo was sleeping deeply in front of the TV Rom testcard. Ottilia was flat out, fully dressed and spread across the bed in deep, forgetful sleep. She snored lightly, one eyelid trembled, the eye half-open, a short circuit somewhere in her body fizzing on after the rest had shut down. I leaned across and closed it, staying a moment to touch her hair. Her sports bag lay on the floor, unzipped, her few poor possessions laid out: a photograph of her parents and an old house I knew immediately had been demolished. Pastness clung to it. A photo of Petre in his leather jacket and jeans, smoking and smiling his life-devouring smile. A skirt hung on a coat hook, and some jeans were folded on the floor beside a pair of working shoes. An alarm clock on the windowsill marked time with a scratching sound, grinding the minutes into dust.
Downstairs the news stall was opening to the empty clatter of regulation lunchboxes against belts.
Scînteia
’s new slogan, ‘One Nation, One Paper’, beamed from the awning. The sardonic newspaper vendor pointed up at it as I bought my copy.
‘They forgot to add “One Reader”,’ he said, thoughtfully sipping the coffee I had brought him, concentrating on the taste. He was a man of few words and only one joke, which fell into the category of jokes that became funnier with repetition: waving a string of lottery tickets at me as I left each morning, he would call out, ‘Feeling lucky,
Tovarăşul
?’
I heard the shower splattering the walls, the floor, probably the light switches in the bathroom, then Leo’s long expectorating growl as he cleared his throat into my toilet.
‘What happens when Constantin’s boys come to get you? Any idea at all where he’ll take you?’ he asked.
‘You heard what I said. He asked me to be ready with her and I said yes. I’m about as clued up on this as you are.’
‘Well, you’re the man with friends in high places…’
‘One friend. And he’s hardly a friend. Besides, that’s rich coming from you.’
‘Ah no, you see what I have is many, many friends, and they’re mostly in low places. I find it works better that way.’
Leo turned the dial of the long-wave radio, his ear pressed to the box like a safe-cracker. It was difficult to avoid the touch-tag of velvet revolutions across eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary… Gorbachev’s
Perestroika
and
Glasnost
might now be part of the English language, but they still felt a world away from Romania.
Ottilia was disorientated from sleeping deeply but not enough. We tried to tempt her with breakfast, but she barely acknowledged us. The radio droned on: small African wars, Britain’s European opt-out, Thatcher and Reagan’s nuclear courtship… Ottilia disappeared into the bathroom.
‘You’re going to have to look out for her,’ Leo said. We watched for Manea’s car. ‘I don’t know what this will do to her. Part of me wants it to be him so we can close things up. The other part of me dreads it will be.’
‘What d’you think it’s doing to me?’ I asked. ‘If it turns out to be him lying there, where does that leave us?’
‘This isn’t about whose fault it is. It’s not about you. It’s about her, and what’s going to happen to her, knowing or not knowing…’
Ottilia emerged from her room washed and dressed and in a different frame of mind. She had put on some make-up Cilea had left in the bathroom. Her mouth was lipsticked, her eyes shadowed and outlined by mascara. She wore her one pair of jeans and sandals, one of my shirts tied up at the bottom over her belt. She looked changed, as if by entering a new personality she might spare her real self the brunt of what was coming.
‘I’m ready,’ she announced, braced and standing tall in the face of whatever lay ahead. She went to Leo and kissed him, took my hand and led me downstairs, closing it tight in her own. At his kiosk, Mr
Scînteia
gave us a big double thumbs up.
‘Good morning, Sir.’ To Ottilia, ‘
Buna ziua Tovarăşa.
Please.’ It was the same young man as the first time, just as polite and well groomed and at his ease. He must have known something of Ottilia’s situation, since he was gentle and considerate, which put her on edge more than the predictable thuggishness would have done. When he touched her to help her into the car, she flinched. His apology was genuine. Manea might be in charge of a large section of the repressive apparatus, but he employed people who looked intelligent and humane and capable of fellow feeling. In the car, there was no conversation. Ottilia had still not let go of my hand. I put my free arm across her shoulder, and she moved her body further into mine.
As we walked through the ministry’s atrium Ottilia looked about her, comparing the reality with all the versions she had heard over the years. In a few weeks she had visited the fabled shops and sampled the pleasures of the society within a society that constituted the Party’s inner circle. Now she was going to meet a minister to find out if her brother was dead.
With Manea there was none of the customary waiting that people in the upper echelons put you through as part of the protocol of intimidation and obstruction. He shook my hand and introduced himself to Ottilia warmly and without condescension. I knew then he had something definite. He was treating her like someone bereaved, I thought, watching them talking out of earshot, up against the huge window of his office. Ottilia faced him, but it was he who looked away as he spoke.
‘I want you to be here for this. I want you to see, make sure I’m not making a mistake’ Ottilia fetched me and took my hand. I could see what Manea was thinking: that I had left his daughter for her.
‘I’m here as Ottilia’s friend,’ I said to clarify things, ‘to help her find out about her brother. That is my only connection with any of this.’
‘Your
only
connection… how can you be so sure?’ Manea sounded amused. Then, suddenly businesslike: ‘There were two bodies found downriver from a border post downstream from the Iron Gate. They were taken to the morgue and cremated immediately. Fortunately – if that’s the word I want – photographs were taken but there was no autopsy done. There was no need. I have had the photographs sent here at some trouble to myself. You will see that there are visible signs as to how the individuals died. I would like you to be ready for that.’
‘Comrade, I have been a doctor in the people’s health service for five years. I am ready for most things.’
Manea smiled. His assistant came back in with a brown envelope. It was ominously thin. Whatever story the pictures told, they told it quickly and unambiguously.
There were three photographs. In the first, two bloated grey corpses were arranged on a muddy riverbank. Scattered rubbish lay around: plastic bags, paint tins, a dark scud of foam. The bodies had been placed side by side and neither was recognisable in the sludge, their faces indistinguishable behind the dirt and the folds of slipped skin. One had a coat or jacket unzipped, his face hidden by a square of dark material. The next image was clearer: the uncovered face, short hair, eyes were open and filled with mud. That was neither Petre nor Vintul, though as I looked closer I recognised one of the high-fiving boys whose name I had never known. I had heard his shuddering intake of breath as the cold water enveloped him. It would have been one of his last.
In the next photograph the bodies had been cleaned up a little. It was more for identification than out of respect: beside their heads stood a bucket, and their hair was parted and still wet from having it emptied over their faces. Some of the mud had washed away, revealing on one of the bodies a large messy incision where I thought I had seen an unzipped coat. It was in fact parted flesh, a deep serrated cut from the collar down to the bottom of the rib cage. He looked half-climbed out of his skin, thick flaps of blood-drained flesh opened out into a crevasse filled with mud and sludge. Up close now, the skin was white as moonlight. The eyes were closed and part of the face eaten away by animals or by fish. It was the second boy. What had really become of Mel, who had set off with them, or to the two others? Petre and Vintul were not there to ask. This cleared up one mystery: these were not their bodies. But it brought us no closer to the answer.
In the third picture, the two faces were side by side on a morgue slab. It was the slab’s texture that caught my eye: craggy concrete, pocked with holes and discoloured with seepage. A lit cigarette was balanced on the edge beside one of the faces, still smoking. Someone had cleaned the boys up and used a flash. Their skins were matt, absorbing the shock of magnesium light that rebounded against everything else: the surfaces, the scissors, a scalpel nearby, the kidney dish, the glass beakers.
I stupidly tried to shield Ottilia from all of this, but it was myself I was trying to protect. Ottilia saw this all the time, but I felt sick, stunned too by the violence of it all, violence that no amount of stillness and expressionless death could hide. Ottilia just looked at Manea and shook her head. Once she had ascertained that neither of the dead boys was Petre, and the convulsion of relief had passed, she became the clinician browsing through yet another library of death.
‘Bloating, skin loosening… this is obviously a drowning. Can’t see any other marks.’ Then she pointed at the more damaged of the two bodies. ‘This isn’t straightforward though: looks like a messy slice through the sternum. A big, deep cut. He’d have had to be carried by a strong current over something serrated. Another half an inch and he’d have been disembowelled. He was alive when that happened. Not for long. Rapid blood loss. No sign of a bullet wound.’ She pushed the photographs away. ‘But I didn’t come here to help you with cause of death.’ She smiled the same ironic smile I had seen the day we first met in the hospital.
‘That’s what we thought, pretty much,’ Manea said. ‘I’m happy your brother is not among them. Any idea who they are?’
‘None,’ Ottilia replied without blinking. There was no reason she should have known; Petre kept that side of his life separate. I would find out later if she was lying.
‘What about you?’ Manea asked me.
‘No. No idea.’ It was Ottilia’s turn to assess my truthfulness. I was learning: when lying keep it simple, brisk and decisive.
‘I thought not,’ said Manea wearily, ‘so much for
quid pro quo
. No matter. If you had known, I would have merely asked you to tell their next of kin. No one else will. This story ends here – the papers and photographs will be destroyed or put somewhere unfindable. Officially, this did not happen, these do not exist, and we,’ he swept the air with his hand, ‘have not discussed them.’
Ottilia was not finished. ‘That mutilation of the stomach…’
‘I am afraid to say that some of the security emplacements are barbaric. “Deterrence” they call it, but since it is kept secret, it can hardly deter! Parts of the river have been filled with razor wire and metal spikes and industrial-sized factory saw blades. I am sorry. I will not justify that. Let us say that their use remains a matter of controversy even within the departments responsible.’
‘There might be all sorts of words for it, but it looks to me like state murder,’ Ottilia said simply. The typing behind us stopped.
‘State murder is the fashionable term for it in some reactionary circles, though I would ask you to remember that those who attempt to cross the border illegally are breaking the law. That comes with its risks.’ Manea recited the party line without conviction. Then he brightened and said something so startling I hardly believed what I heard: ‘However it might be more of a deterrent if someone were to make these security emplacements public, do you not think?’
Ottilia knew at the same time as I did what he was suggesting – he was inviting us to do it.
Manea checked his watch. Nearly nine. The whole meeting had taken less than an hour. ‘I have a breakfast meeting. You will please excuse me. Andrei will drive you back to wherever you want to go. Cinzia will be tagging along as she has some shopping to do.’ Behind us, Cinzia, the secretary, was ready to leave. Even in the equalising uniform of the ministry typist corps, she looked beautiful. Outside Manea’s office, a group of ill-clothed, overweight and greasy-looking functionaries waited in silence, sitting apart, avoiding each other’s eyes. Regional secretaries, vice-ministers, provincial chiefs… they looked as if they both felt and provoked fear in equal measure. Another of the system’s equalising mechanisms.
In the car home, Cinzia chatted with Ottilia. I caught some of the conversation, and discovered that they knew each other from before. Cinzia asked her about Petre, and Ottilia, normally so reserved, was happy to answer her questions. Gone was her prudence, her hesitation. When the car stopped, they swapped phone numbers, or, more exactly, Cinzia exchanged her phone number for Ottilia’s address. In this country there was one private phone per three hundred head of population. The address Ottilia gave was mine.
‘We were at school together,’ Ottilia explained as we climbed out of the car. ‘Friends, not close, but friends. Funny – you never imagine that when you’ll meet again ten years later one of you will be a doctor in a state hospital and the other a minister’s mistress. She was a clever girl. Could have done anything she wanted.’
‘Explains why she’s a minister’s mistress, no?’
Ottilia smiled and put her arm around me. Though we were no further on in our quest to find Petre and Vintul, knowing those two bodies were not theirs had given rise to a strangely elated relief. The deaths of the two boys were violent and unnecessary, but they were at least not murder, except in the legal sense Ottilia had meant. For all that I was happy for Ottilia, Manea’s information had also let me off the hook. For now.
‘Sounds to me like Manea’s clean, but what’s interesting is that he’s prepared to help,’ said Leo when we told him about our meeting.
‘I got the feeling there was more to it than just helping us,’ I offered. ‘It’s as if he were willing us to get hold of photos of the border traps and inviting us to get in touch with the families. I believed him.’
‘Stoicu is in charge of border security, and he’s also in charge of the shoot-to-kill policy right along the frontier,’ Leo reminded us. ‘Manea and Stoicu hate each other’s guts. Stoicu’s Manea’s boss and he thinks Stoicu’s a thick Stalinist peasant. Stoicu repays the compliment by reckoning Constantin to be a bourgeois/a Jew/a homosexual… delete as appropriate. I can’t imagine Constantin is suddenly going to abandon his loyalty to the ideals of the Communist Party of Romania – after all, they’ve served him very nicely – but perhaps he’s trying to stir things up.’