It was early evening, and after the city limits of Bucharest the farmland stretched for hours of flat road. On the horizon’s cloudless rim a red sun boiled. There were no animals; nothing moved or grazed. To the north-east of us, the petrochemical towers of Craiova disgorged their smoke. It looked like it disappeared, but really it impregnated the air, attached itself to it molecule by molecule, and the sky’s metallic blue was in fact a screen of pollution. That summer’s intricate sunsets were all pollution too: petrol-fume, carbon-dazzle… there was no rain and the only rainbows we saw were in the oil-slick puddles beneath the construction lorries.
There was a weak point on the border with Yugoslavia, a narrow stretch of the Danube that was barbed-wired and patrolled but not guarded. Romania shared frontiers with five countries, but an increasingly disunited Yugoslavia was a favourite crossing-point. It was a step westwards. Leo had been on three of these trips so far, but only a few of the escapees gave a sign from their new lives: coded postcards or messages that passed like Chinese whispers along the channels of the underground.
We arrived at our destination, a small town called Hinova a few miles from the border, at around nine o’clock. Leo had booked us into a hotel where we were the only customers. Leo ordered some wine and asked for the menu, which was orally transmitted and five syllables long. After watery stew and
ersatz
, we walked outside. The shadows were closing in on the small central square. The town was untouched by Romania’s modernisation project. It exuded irrelevance: parched lawn, dry fountain, some busts of forgotten men crumbling in limestone. In the shadows of their plinths a pack of dogs lazed and snarled at the nothing that was happening. Old men sat on benches, and folk music came from a shuttered café. The town’s only modern building was the Party headquarters, a small breeze-blocked square iced in grey concrete, with faded flags and rusty slogan boards.
We met the others in a car park on the edge of town. Vintul, Petre, three other boys and two girls, only one of whom I recognised: Mel from that night on the Boulevard of Socialist Victory. Tonight her name was Ana. Each had a rucksack wrapped in bin liners strapped to their back and was full of nervous courage and big talk. Only Petre and Vintul were calm, Vintul because he was in charge and focussed, Petre because he seemed to float above it all. He shook my hand and smiled. ‘I’m sorry about the other night…’ I began. ‘Not now,’ he said, ‘and anyway, it’s all finished, I have already forgotten.’ Our friendship remained, I was sure of that, but he had withdrawn a little, whether to protect me or to protect himself I could not tell. My acquaintance with Cilea troubled him enough to ask if I knew her father, but he relaxed when I told him I did not. In any case, I was unlikely to meet him now.
We separated into three groups, me and Leo heading off first and Petre and Vintul each taking some of the others in different directions. We walked for about an hour across terrain that looked as anonymous as motorway hard shoulder, before reaching a range of bare, tinder-dry hills that took us to the edge of thick woods.
We walked carefully, stopping every twenty yards and waiting, listening out. The wood looked made of shadow. As we entered, the temperature dropped suddenly and our steps were padded with springy undergrowth.
‘Fox traps,’ whispered Leo, ‘they’re not for the foxes.’
At last, about two hundred yards into the wood, Leo brought out a torch. There was a path of flattened nettles and brambles, and great coils of bindweed thick as a child’s wrist. There were plants here that existed in permanent shade, like those fish that live miles below sea level, fleshy and filled with darkness. ‘Wolf shit.’ Leo aimed the torch’s beam at a pile of whitened, chalky turds. The torchlight made the ground sway beneath us. I tripped and as I fell forward I caught sight of a fox trap, gaping and rusty, the fanged zero of a shark’s mouth. People had been caught in there and bled to death or, if managing to free themselves, hobbled home, bones crushed and flesh gouged. A hand steadied me from behind and covered my mouth before I could call out. Vintul had come up suddenly from behind us, poked his stick into the trap and snapped it shut. He had been behind us all the time.
Eventually we reached the end of the forest, and before us in the gloom rolled the Danube, thick and dark and oily. Against the moonlight, standing a few hundred yards upstream, was a single watchtower with its lights out. Between it and the water stood a twelve-foot screen of barbed electric wire. We could hear it buzz, a thin insect hum.
Vintul now made an owl call. Silence. We waited. Then a reply came from across the water. I saw the flash of a torch on what I assumed was the opposite bank. It was hundreds of yards of water away. Vintul made one more call then there was nothing.
‘Have a breather. We’re waiting for the next power cut. Stay by the trees.’ Leo was puffing, bent over and with his hands on his knees. The others sat and waited on the edge of the wood. No one spoke, nothing moved. There was only the sound of the wire, the deadly voltage coursing through it.
Finally the current stopped and the wire shuddered. A little beyond it, thin razor wire, its edges catching the light, flashed then disappeared back into darkness. This was a well-chosen spot, as close as it came to being safely unobserved. There were holes in the wires, carefully made and easy to reset when the operation was finished. Vintul went first. With strong pliers, he began to untie the electric wire – ‘have to keep the wire connected between operations, or the circuit breaks and they’d know it’s been penetrated. Then we couldn’t use it again,’ Leo explained. ‘Every break in the circuit sets off an alarm.’ Slowly Vintul loosened the wires and opened a few feet of electric fence and parted it. He climbed through, and did the same with the razor wire. With the moon on the river and its light being reflected he was dangerously silhouetted, but he worked fast. A few minutes later he had made a series of holes in the wire large enough to pass through. He crawled to the riverbank, stopped, then turned around. The route was clear.
The current was strong. We could see the water twisting fast, catching the light in flashes, the river’s muscle flexing. I watched them go, two of the boys first, then the girls, and then the last boy. The water closed over their bodies. The two high-fiving boys, all bravado gone, looked terrified. We watched them all slide in, holding back cries as the cold water filled their clothes and shoes, weighed them down. One of them seemed to float rather than swim, silently letting herself go downriver. Then they were gone.
Vintul was back on the rocky bank and mending the electric wire. They had lost a few minutes somewhere along the line, and it was a race now to rejoin the broken ends of fencing. He was just in time: a few seconds after pulling back his hands, the current started again, its electric dirge drowning out the slop of water against the banks.
Petre smiled and embraced me. ‘Your first mission! We will toast it soon.’ Then they were gone, back into the forest. He and Vintul would follow the river as it pulled back inwards, then head deeper into Romania, towards Vânju Mare. ‘There is a small village where we know people. We will make our own way home,’ said Vintul, and turned to go.
Leo and I headed back to Hinova, the light gathering faster than we could walk. When we reached the hotel it was nearly 5 am. We passed the unmanned reception and went to our rooms.
‘Why did you want me here, Leo? What good did I do? I just stood around and watched…’
‘You did a great job,’ replied Leo, ‘…you
stood around
, yes,
but you stood around getting implicated,
and that’s much more useful to them, to us, than anything you could actually
do
… besides, you’ll be up to your neck in it soon enough, so you may as well take a back seat while you can.’
After breakfast we drove through the villages of Craiova county and the vineyards of Segarcea. After the grey privations of Bucharest, it was a shock to see such fertility. Everything grew. On all sides there were tomatoes, corn, cabbages; orchards heavy with fruit and bright fields of vegetables. The earth threw it all forth, and the sun ripened it generously. In the vineyards the fat white grapes hung on their boughs, the vines rising in perfectly aligned terraces. Melons the size of footballs lay on the earth, umbilicals ranging off across the dark soil; greenhouses and polytunnels stretched off into the distance. ‘All for export,’ Leo saw me scanning the fields, ‘most of the poor sods in the factories have never even seen a melon, except in
Dynasty
. This is naturally a land of plenty; it’s the bloody destitution that’s artificial.’
A week passed and Petre failed to make our appointment at the Carpathian Boar. Vintul made no contact with Leo either, though he had promised to ring the next day. I looked for Petre at the music lectures but there was no sign of him. He missed the first
Fakir
rehearsal, then the second. The concert scheduled for the beginning of July was cancelled.
Cilea still refused to see me. Something had happened that night, something other than Nicu Ceauşescu’s humiliation, but I could not make it out. Coincidence had placed them all together in that terrible disco – the Serbs, Nicu, Stoicu, Manea and Cilea – and the fluke of my last-minute decision not to leave Bucharest had brought me there too, and with me Leo and Petre. Had that chance grouping set something in motion whose consequences were being played out without our knowing what they were? Cilea was avoiding me, Petre had gone, Leo brooded and hid away in his flat.
Leo heard the first rumour three weeks later: a German trucker, Norbert the Talker’s colleague, boasting that he had been with the same prostitute in Hamburg, a Romanian girl, three nights in a row. This girl, Ana, was new to the game and he reckoned he had ‘broken her in’. Leo asked for a description and got what he feared: the girl had a nose stud and piercings, and was under the constant guard of her Yugoslav pimp.
‘Of course it’s not her!’ I said, ‘there’s probably hundreds of those poor girls in every port. In any case, Hans couldn’t tell the difference between a Romanian and a Russian.’ There was something in my voice, shrill and desperate-sounding…
Leo and I decided to find out where Petre lived. He had told me the name of the estate, but Leo found the address on the university database. It was just as well, since the twelve identikit blocks that made up ‘Housing Estate 14’ were impossible to tell apart. A seasoned observer, judging from the mould and crumbliness of the facades, might perhaps be able to tell which of the blocks had gone up first, the way an expert might assess the maturity of different blue cheeses, but to the layperson such distinctions were impossible.
Leo parked at the base of Block Seven and unpacked a soya salami. ‘You’ll see it in glow in the dark – the bean fields are right in the Chernobyl wind.’ He waved a speckled, flesh-coloured baton from the car window, and sent me up.
In the lobby, the lift squatted at the bottom of its cage. I pressed the button, but nothing happened. I had eight flights to climb. The concrete was rough and crumbly, and the stairwell was a vortex for disconnected, discontinuous sounds: human voices, the squealing of babies, the seepage of a single TV programme ramifying identically across each floor. The walls were damp and all around me I heard echoing droplets of water. One landed on my upper lip. It tasted of vinegar and chalk.
I came to the eighth floor, and stopped to get my breath back. The smell of thrice-boiled cabbage filled the corridor, but it was better than the smell of dogshit and decaying scraps on the way up. I found the door. On a sellotaped square of card was typed:
Romanu, P.
Moranu, O.
There was no answer when I knocked so I waited, crouching at the bottom of the door. In the darkness I heard some keys rattle and steps heading up to this level. Emerging from the stairwell, pale and exhausted, in a dirty, once-white clinical coat and flat-heeled shoes, was Ottilia Moranu, the doctor from the hospital. She had a torch, and as she saw me struggling to stand up, she shone it full in my face.
‘Who are you?’ She made for the door and kept the torch in my eyes.
‘We met. In the hospital.’ I spoke in English.
‘Get away from me,’ she edged back into the doorway.
‘My friend, my colleague, Rodica… you were the doctor on duty. That terrible night.’
Ottilia quickly recovered: ‘
That terrible night?
You mean that normal, regular, standard night in a Romanian hospital you happened to visit once?’
The flat was tiny, a single sitting room/kitchen/dining room, with a bathroom and a bedroom to the side. Ottilia put on a gas lamp. In its unsteady flames, the ceiling lowered itself onto us, the walls contracted. She flicked on the light switches just in case, but there was no current.
‘Tea,’ she offered. ‘Or water?’ She lit a hob connected to a portable butane bottle. A tin of North Korean pilchards stood beside a half-loaf of bread covered with a damp cloth. We sat down, she at the bar stool in front of her food, I on the sofa bed. I made space, moving the blankets and pillow that were folded across it. A guitar case and an amplifier leaned against the wall.
‘He’s not been back for those?’
Ottilia had her back to me, her elbow on the table and the fork hovering between tin and mouth. The fish was a rust-coloured marine sludge and its smell filled the room.
‘No. No word. No one has heard anything. We expected to hear straight afterwards, and he would not have escaped, certainly not without saying something.’
‘I was there. We saw no sign that he was thinking of leaving. In fact, he headed back into Romania.’
Ottilia looked at me, surprised. ‘What were you doing with them? You’re just a tourist here. Sorry…’ she refined ‘…a
visitor
.’
I explained. Then I asked her what she had to do with Petre.
‘He’s my half-brother. Different fathers. Petre was born when I was four. We grew up together.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘He said nothing about you.’