Outside Cilea’s flat the guard waved me through. He was no longer in uniform either – he too had taken the precaution of going civilian. I had first seen him that May Day afternoon when Cilea and I had repaired here for sex and chocolate. It felt like a decade ago. It was certainly a regime ago. In front of me was a courtyard of shivering, denuded trees, shovelled snow, empty window boxes and verges of dormant grass. I must have been standing there, taking it all in one last time, because he knocked on the glass of his sentry box and shooed me in.
Cilea’s living room had been turned into a centre of operations. Manea Constantin was reclining across a deep sofa, his head resting on Turkish cushions, his leg in plaster from heel to thigh. Two televisions were on simultaneously: one showing German satellite TV footage of the events just a few hundred yards away, the other showing the TVRom testcard and playing patriotic songs. One of Manea’s men was feeding papers into a row of shredders, while another stuffed the chewed paper into black bags. There was no sign of Cilea.
Constantin had telephones at his side, lights flashing like the rotating beacons of police cars. Next door I heard the low calm voice of Cinzia taking messages. Manea nimbly swerved his plastered leg off the sofa and made room for me to sit down.
‘Your leg?’
‘Yes, that has been something of a… a bugger, you might say. Tripped down the ministry steps on my way to an emergency meeting with the Comrade, I’ve had to cancel all engagements for the foreseeable future.’ He gave a wince of pain so false it might as well have been in inverted commas. ‘Can I get you a drink? A whisky perhaps?’
One of the phones flashed its green light. Cinzia answered. Manea levered himself up and opened an elaborate peasant cupboard which had been gutted and customised into a drinks cabinet with mirrors and cocktail shakers. The sunlight, angled through the half-tilted blinds, caught the glint of his library of malts.
‘Shouldn’t you be out there giving the Comrade a hand?’ I asked sarcastically. He feigned not to hear and poured a pair of daytime measures. ‘Where’s Cilea? You moved her out so you could set up your headquarters? Well, at least you can tell me what’s going on out there.’
‘It’s difficult to say what’s going on, I will be honest with you, very difficult… this is all unforeseen and I know little more than you…’ He looked at me to make sure I knew he was lying, which was his way of telling me a sort of truth. ‘…but I think the Comrade is facing some trouble. I’m afraid,’ motioning to his leg again, ‘I will have to – what do you say – sit this one out. Literally…’ His dry laugh was not without some real pleasure. He knocked back his drink, refilled the glass. He became serious again. ‘Cilea has gone. She left for Paris last week. She wanted to see you.’
‘Not enough to come to find me… last week? Sounds to me like she’d had plenty of advanced warning of this, er…
unforeseen
uprising…’
‘Yes, well… she read the signs and chose to leave. It’s what you should have done. I will always regret that you and she did not stay together. You might have been happy back in Britain, away from all this.’ The red light on the phone flashed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘this call I have to take.’ He picked up the receiver and listened. ‘Da,’ he said simply.
Yes
. Then in reply to someone querying him, he repeated it brusquely and rang off. ‘Look, I had a reason for wanting to see you and it has nothing to do with saying farewell. It is a warning. When the Comrade falls there is no guarantee that what comes after will be substantially better, not to begin with at least. What concerns me, and it should concern you too, is that when that happens all sorts of people will return to Bucharest. The regime had its problems, but it kept some control over the criminal class…’
‘Mainly by taking its place…’
‘Maybe, maybe… there’ll be time to address that in due course, but the moment the borders open and the government collapses, they’ll be back…’
‘Who’s
they
?’
‘The gangsters, dealers, traffickers, the pimps and fascists, the Jew-haters and ethnic cleansers… you’ve seen it starting already in Yugoslavia, or whatever it’s called now, and it’ll happen here.’
‘What’s that got to do with me or Leo?’ I knew where Manea was going with this, but I wanted to hear him say it.
‘Florian Belanger is coming back. That’s what they’re saying, and I believe it. I always knew he would. That’s why I sent Cilea away. When he does he’ll be richer, more powerful and more ambitious than ever. He’ll have his scores to settle: with me, with Leo, but also with you. Cilea was besotted with him from the start – I hoped you’d take her away from him, and maybe you did for a while, I don’t know – but he’ll be coming back for her. He won’t be happy to know she’s been with you, and when he finds out you’re Leo’s friend he’ll have plans for both of you. Maybe he knows already.’
‘I can look after myself.’ Manea let it pass as the hollow bravado it was. I put my hand out to shake his but he hauled himself up out of the sofa and embraced me. On my way out the guard was gone.
Leo and Ottilia were waiting in the car, luggage and passports ready and engine running. I didn’t even have time for a last look at the flat, to shut the door marked ‘Belanger, Dr F’ behind me as I went.
At Otopeni airport there were roadblocks and perimeter checks. Leo predicted that the chaos would make travel easier, but he was wrong. We got past the first militia checkpoint, and our papers were examined and approved by the army guard outside the departures gate. Crowds were being held back, but we managed to pass the next checkpoint without obstacle. Inside the terminal we thought we were through – Ottilia was already kissing Leo goodbye – when I saw the notice at the
TAROM
check-in desk: all flights had been grounded. The desks had been vacated; the staff had disappeared. Our tickets were worthless. The only operators running were Air China and
JAT
, the Yugoslav airlines. ‘Beijing or Belgrade… that’s the choice…’ I turned to Ottilia, but she was gone. Three Securitate men had pulled her from the queue and were examining her passport.
‘Shit,’ said Leo into my ear, ‘I’ve buggered it up. I thought being Russian would be OK, but it’s not. It’s the Russians they’re stopping – I should have bloody seen that coming! The Russians are the regime’s enemies! Fuck! What have I done?’
I heard Ottilia pleading with them in Russian, then in convincingly broken Romanian. She looked over to me and waved me off. ‘Go!’ she mouthed as they took her passport into an office for checking.
‘Go on!’ said Ottilia as we approached her, ‘that passport’s not going to survive a proper check, and I need to be gone when they get back.’
‘She’s right,’ said Leo, ‘I did my best – couldn’t very well get her a Chinese passport could I? We’ve got to get her out of here. Take this,’ he handed me a
JAT
ticket, one-way to Belgrade. How he had got past the chaotic queues at the
JAT
desk I didn’t know.
‘I’m not going,’ I said, ‘I’m not leaving without you.’ I took Ottilia’s arm.
‘Yes you are.’ She kissed me then pulled free. ‘You’re leaving now, take that ticket and when it’s safe you can come back. Either that or Leo can make me a better passport and I’ll come to you. Go…’ She pushed me hard in the chest and was gone in the crowd, Leo lurching after her, keeping hold of her hand.
I was alone at the airport again, just as I had been eight months ago. At the
JAT
desk they said I had missed check-in, so I left my suitcase on the marble floor and headed through customs to find the same pair of uniformed thieves who had fleeced me when I arrived. If they remembered me they gave no sign of it, just checked my expiring visa against a list on their wall, stole fifty dollars and waved me through. The system was falling apart, but here, in the microcosmos of their customs booth, it was business as usual.
Belgrade was cold and wet and as heavily policed as Bucharest. I chose my hotel because of its name, its price and its proximity to Belgrade station. There was nothing Romanian about the Hotel Bucarest unless you counted the lack of hot water, refreshments and heating. From my window I could smell the wafts of pavement buffets and hear noises of transit around Central Station. I hoped there would be a television, but in that too the hotel aspired to Romanianity. I had been without news for several hours, and now, in the early Belgrade evening, I went in search of somewhere to eat where I could watch the latest images. In the station buffet a large-screen television showed rolling satellite news from across the border. The western TV crews had arrived.
Ceauşescu had escaped by helicopter that afternoon after his failed attempt to rally the troops. Army factions loyal to the president retained control of the TV station and telephone exchange, but Radio Bucharest was now in rebel hands, transmitting news and declarations by the minute. In Timişoara, Brasov, Cluj and elsewhere, the army and police had switched sides; the Securitate and some army units were resisting. Already the dead were being laid out on the pavements to be identified and mourned. Only in the streets of Bucharest was the fighting as vicious as ever. The university library was burning, its great dome smashed and the rafters poking out into the smoke. Tanks had turned their fire against the Central Committee HQ and blown holes in the facade. Ceauşescu portraits were being burned in the streets. Snipers fired from windows and bodies of civilians lay in the rubble. The Securitate were fighting in small deadly groups, but those who were caught were strung up from lampposts and left to seize up with cold or rigor mortis, whichever came first, as they swung in the breeze.
It was on the night of the twenty-third too that the camera crews discovered the underground torture rooms, with their tangles of piano wire and implements that looked like straightened coathangers, their exposed electrics, hose pipes and clotted blood. Strewn across the floors were the papers and box files of victims and their torturers no one had had time to burn. All over Romania documents were being fed to flames and shredders, but the really foresighted people would not be destroying papers. They would be making copies.
It was past midnight when I returned to the Hotel Bucarest. My bag had been stolen, along with all my hard currency. I appeared to have been the only victim of the burglars, but the hotel staff lost no time in blaming the influx of Romanians –
Here just a few hours and already they’ve started stealing.
The manager pointed to a notice which declined all responsibility for theft or damage. When I threatened to call the police he slapped me on the back and laughed so hard the hem of his moustache lifted like curtains in a draft. I had lost two hundred dollars – all my fare home – and my clothes. All I had left was twenty dollars, the passport in my pocket, and the copy of Arghezi’s poems Trofim had given me with the photo of myself and Cilea as bookmark.
Christmas eve in Belgrade brought rain that froze as soon as it hit the ground. The borders were open, and the westward flow of refugees was unrelenting. The Yugoslavs didn’t mind. They were just a staging post. Thousands of Romanians were arriving in Berlin, Paris, Brussels. They were filmed begging in western streets and sleeping on blankets in gyms, cresting the waves of pity. They were right to make the most of it. Within a few weeks these ‘gypsies’ were being blamed for crimewaves, muggings and disease.
I had to reach the UK consulate before midday. With luck I might be able to arrange a bank guarantee and borrow enough money to get home. The Vice-Consul was a sad-faced, gentle man who wore a summer suit and sweated tropically despite the cold. He smoked a medley of cigarettes, lighting one off the other as if trying to economise on matches. I filled in some forms and he advanced me enough to pay for a hotel and some meals. The rest usually took forty-eight hours, but given that it was Christmas it would have to be the twenty-ninth at the earliest. Did I have somewhere to stay? He recommended a two-star hotel on the next corner, popular with visitors because it was cheap and clean and had remote control TV. The Lasta Hotel – ‘I wouldn’t read too much into the name,’ he smiled tiredly. He gave me his card:
Francis Phillimore, Deputy Head of Mission
. I had heard the name before but couldn’t place when or from whom.
Outside the Lasta Hotel I was approached for money by a man claiming to be a refugee from Timişoara. I spoke a few words of Romanian to him but he was unable to reply. He spat at me and walked away: already the situation was providing new openings for fraudulent begging. At the Lasta Hotel the vaunted remote control turned out to be attached to the television with a six-inch chain, making it impossible to use without getting up and crossing the room. It was the object-equivalent of those absurd communist jokes I had laughed at and learned from over the last hundred days. I settled down on the bed with a bottle of Slivovitz and a meat pie, drinking from a tooth mug as I watched the first footage of the National Salvation Front in session. This too is stored in the perpetual present.
Behind them stands a Romanian flag with a hole in the middle. They are in a room in the Party HQ, large but already befogged with smoke. Everyone is talking at once. Papers are being shuffled, most of them blank, and one man, sitting at the centre of the rectangular table, receives faxes and telegrams, scans them and dictates responses to Oleanu who stands at his back with a dictaphone and pen and paper. The man wears the same clothes as when I saw him in Capsia: Ilinescu, head of the
NSF
, former Party chief and lately high-profile dissident, now the NSF’s undisputed leader. Manea Constantin is there, near the middle of the table: interior minister and now also information minister. He is underdressed, and to one who knows his usual snappiness of attire, the dishevelment is deliberate. He has even taken care not to shave. He has the air of someone who has been on the barricades all night, though in his case the barricades were a Turkish sofa bed, a drinks cabinet and satellite television, and the weapons were phones, fax machines and a choking shredder. Manea is at the inaugural cabinet meeting of the first post-Ceauşescu government, the only minister with two portfolios. There is no sign of his leg plaster.