It was nearly daybreak when Leo returned. ‘They’re sending troops to Timişoara.’ Leo was cold sober though he smelled of drink and smoke. ‘Army leave’s been cancelled. There’s something big happening. Elena Ceauşescu’s now taken charge personally of security.’
‘They’re bringing troops in here too, I saw them: tanks and personnel carriers.’
‘No surprise there – always bring in troops from outside the area if you’re going to start shooting your own people. I’ll bet Timişoara’s army units are heading over here and Bucharest’s are on their way to Timişoara.’
‘What d’you know for sure, Leo?’ asked Ottilia. Speculation exasperated her. There were some who thrived on gossip, for whom rumours were more absorbing than the realities they brought wind of. Ottilia found rumours wearing: ‘They distort your responses – by the time you’ve spent yourself reacting to the rumour, you’re no longer able to react to the realities themselves…’
‘Nothing. Not for sure. But I reckon there’ll be competition for customers between you in the hospital and Campanu down at the morgue.’ Leo’s tone changed: ‘I know I’m meant to be on that plane. But I’m not going. But if the two of you want to get out, now’s a good time. I can help you.’
‘I’m not leaving. This is my home.’ Ottilia said it calmly and emphatically, the way Petre would have done.
Leo nodded. ‘Tell you what, while you’re mulling that one over, I’ve booked Capsia. I see my going-away party as a sort of rolling programme of events, culminating in my non-departure from Otopeni airport on Friday afternoon. We foregather at seven.’
Leo disappeared into the bathroom. We heard him shout as the freezing water from the hot tap crashed over his shoulders. Ottilia and I had not discussed what would happen when I left. Instead of making plans we continued to speak as if all would be well, as if we would all be here, together, the other side of Christmas. Unlike Leo, I could not pretend I would outface the police and find ways of staying behind. But if I wanted to be with Ottilia I needed to find a way of coming back. I could not imagine our life together anywhere but here; and in spite of its unreality, I had stopped being able to imagine my own life anywhere else either.
A tense, heavily policed peace reigned in Bucharest that day. Still in Iran, the
Conducător
released films of himself meeting the mullahs and outlining Romania’s commitment to the socialist path. At moments of national or international unease, new homages were found for the Ceauşescus. Thus
Scînteia
announced that the guild of artisan-basketweavers had bestowed on them their highest honour, the Order of the Golden Straw.
At three o’clock, as helicopters circled above us, they shut down the university and cleared it out. In the streets that afternoon random ID checks were everywhere, and police hurried people along whenever they stopped to chat. Food queues, obvious flashpoints of anger or spontaneous protest, presented more of a problem: move people on and you spark a riot, let them stay too long and you incubate one. Outside a butcher’s shop on Boulevard Magheru, the queue was turning dangerous. Passing by, I noticed my sardonic
Scînteia
vendor waiting with his string bag. He called me over. People turned. He was taking a big risk speaking to a foreigner in front of a hundred witnesses and the police. There was a manic, past-caring mischief in his smile and wide-open eyes.
‘
Epoca Luminoasa!
Era of Light, eh? Come over here,
Domnul
, come and queue with the happy people as they enjoy the fruits of their socialist lifestyle… come and watch as those goons, village idiots in uniforms, herd us like cattle from one queue to the next. You don’t read about that in
Scînteia
, do you?’
People laughed bitterly, jeered and shouted at the police. Someone called out, ‘Timişoara! Ceauşescu assassin!’ Behind the
Scînteia
vendor two men who had been waiting in line moved towards him. In a few seconds they were at his back, yanking him by his shoulders away from the crowd: Securitate plants dressed as normal Romanians – tired ill-cut jackets and coats, cheap rabbit-fur hats and Monocom boots. He laughed madly, a lunatic grin on his face: ‘Comrades why were you queuing? Don’t they have special shops for Securitate? Don’t tell me they’re empty too…’ I saw the furrows in the snow where his kicking heels dragged as they pulled him towards a black Dacia van. The police, out of their depth, moved to calm the crowd, telling people to get on with their wait, that there was nothing to see, but also eyeing the Securitate resentfully.
As I moved to intervene, one of the Securitate motioned me to stay away. I pressed on as their prisoner shouted: ‘Fascists, murderers, scum!’ People were emboldened, abusing the Securitate, who were now, even with the extra four who had appeared from the van, seriously outnumbered. A rock thrown from the crowd hit the windscreen and smashed it spectacularly across the pavement. In the confusion the
Scînteia
vendor disentangled himself, ran back into the crowd and out to a sidestreet where, as I watched him, three policemen let him pass. I saw his heel turn the corner and turned back, but now the police too had disappeared, leaving this to the Securitate and their plain-clothes agents.
This was a riot in the making. The pragmatists smashed the windows and looted the shop, running out with slabs of meat in bloody newspaper. The idealists faced down the Securitate who twitched for their guns and considered their options. The crowd pushed on; stones skimmed the van, smashing its remaining windows. There was only a matter of ten yards between the people and the Securitate when a second black Dacia van came spinning into the gap, all doors open, ready to gather in its agents. As they leapt into the back, one figure climbed slowly from the front passenger seat. He wore a fur hat and sunglasses, and as his colleagues called out to him to get in, he stood and looked slowly around, taking in every detail, pausing over every face. The crowd sensed the coldness, the authority. Faltering, the front row fell back and the advance stalled. They looked and found no fear in his face.
I knew it was Vintul even before he took off his sunglasses and hat. And something about him now made me know this was what he really looked like: fair, close-cropped hair, pale green eyes and light skin. No more disguises. He ran a gloved hand through his hair, a reflex from his days undercover. He folded his sunglasses, eyes sweeping over us without emotion, and slipped them into his pocket. He passed over my face three times. Maybe he hadn’t recognised me. I breathed out. Maybe he had forgotten me. He said something into a walkie-talkie, and without waiting for a reply opened the van door. He was about to get in when he stopped short, turned again and looked straight at me, pulling the door across his body with his right hand and raising his left to make a pistol of his fingers. He closed an eye, took aim at me, jerked the barrel of his gun once into the air and smiled. One bullet. He wasn’t the type to waste them, even imaginary ones.
He tapped the roof of the car and swung inside as it pulled away.
I doubted I would see my newspaper vendor tomorrow. Where did people go after confronting the Securitate? Where could they hide? How long could they run? The policemen had crept back and were inspecting the damage to the shopfront: smashed glass, splintered doorpanels, animal blood spattered along the snow. They began to clear up. Passers-by approached them and cheered them for not helping the Securitate. A rumour was being born. By evening I would hear it again, inflated by imagination, drink and wishful thinking: the police had stood up to the Securitate, they had helped the protestors escape…
Just before five o’clock I stopped at the
TAROM
offices. If I was going to buy a ticket home, this was the time. Perhaps it was already too late. Here too there were queues leading out of the doors. Most of the wealthy foreigners had arranged their exits: embassy people, defence contractors, the merchants of surveillance equipment and riot control gear they would soon have the chance to see being used. The only people left were student travellers, young families caught short in the middle of a cheap and spartan holiday, and East Europeans from soon to be ex-communist states trying to reach their bloodless revolutions before Christmas. No one knew very much about what was happening, but they knew enough to want to leave. I waited in the queue, feeling in my inside pocket for my passport, running my fingers along its edges and pointed corners.
Eight staff were at their desks, of whom six sat and read newspapers, smoked or fiddled with their cuticles. The usual fusion of panic and lethargy dominated. On the walls, maps of Romania were drawing-pinned to cork noticeboards, and posters of churches, beaches and folk choirs curled at the corners. How many of the churches still stood, how many of the singers had been relocated to the cities, how many of the beaches were choking on oil slicks, poisoned fish and bloated dog carcasses?
In front of me was a family of British tourists – two exhausted children and their mother – who had cut short their holiday in Timişoara. They had been put on a train to Bucharest this morning and were trying to swap their tickets. What had they seen, I asked. The woman looked around before she answered, already attuned to the dangers of speaking to strangers. ‘We didn’t actually see anything – the centre was cut off the day we got there, and for two days they wouldn’t let us leave the hotel. Bloody awful. Then this morning they stuck us on a bus and drove us to the station…’ She wiped her eyes. The children slept upright, leaning against her, while her husband waved ten-dollar bills at the staff. He was learning fast, but so was everyone else. It was more like a stock-market panic than a travel agency. ‘The bus they took us in – the windows had been painted over so we couldn’t see out. It stopped a few times, went back on itself, like it was changing route or something. Then when we got to Timişoara station the whole place was under armed guard. They put us straight onto the train and that was it. Didn’t see a thing except the inside of the hotel and the bloody bus.’
Her husband returned with some tickets: ‘Who’s this?’ he asked aggressively.
‘Dunno, I mean… just some Brit in the queue, I just started talking to him…’
‘Yeah well, let’s just get out of here, shall we? I’ve managed to get flights for tonight and we’re going straight to the bloody airport. Sorry mate…’ He placed himself between me and his wife and said, in the tone of someone imparting hard-won advice: ‘It’s each man for himself round here.’ My smile puzzled him, then made him angry. He dragged a suitcase through the door and shouted back at his wife, ‘You coming or what?’ She smiled apologetically at me and hurried after him, a child in each arm and an Action Man with a tiny rifle sniping from her coat pocket.
I followed them out. The snow was four or five inches deep and the traffic crackled along the salted roads. Night was setting in. The weak streetlamps and the whiteness of the pavements gave the place the grey translucence of hospital skin.
At home I put my passport and papers back into the desk and flicked on the radio. The World Service said nothing about Timişoara or anywhere else, so I left the radio on and went for a shower. By the time I came out Leo was installed in my armchair watching
Columbo
.
‘Single or return?’ he asked without looking up from the television.
‘What?’
‘From the
TAROM
office… was it a single or a return?’
I opened the door. ‘So, you’ve got Securitate on your payroll now too, have you? Spying on your friends…’
‘I found out quite by chance actually. I popped in myself a few minutes later to pick up some tickets for clients, and it just sort of cropped up that you’d been. Maybe this is what you were after?’ Leo slapped a plane ticket onto the coffee table and walked out. It was made out in my name, and my passport number had been typed in: a single flight to London for the 23rd. I pushed it away. After a minute or two I came past again, took it and placed it with my passport and papers in my jacket pocket.
‘Look. Think of it as insurance. I can’t say exactly what’s going to happen in the next couple of weeks, but just hang on to that ticket…’ Leo was waving another ticket now. ‘There’s one for Ottilia too, but you know she hasn’t got a passport… not a Romanian one anyway.’
‘What other passport would she have?’ I asked, but I should have known by now what Leo was capable of…
‘I’m having her one made, a perfectly serviceable Russian one. One previous owner… it’ll be ready in time.’
‘You know she won’t come. And as for me I went to
TAROM
wanting an excuse
not
to buy a ticket, not because I wanted to leave. And now you’ve bloody given me one…’
‘Yes,’ Leo guided me to the kitchen where he opened the window to reveal six bottles of Ukrainian champagne chilling in a snow-packed window box, ‘yes, I have. Because I want you to choose, to decide for yourself. I want you to weigh things up, to stop floating in the slipstream of your own life.’
‘You should write a self-help book.’ I unhooked myself from his arm.
‘I did, and I followed every step of my own regime. Can’t you see?’ Leo did a little fashion-model twirl in the kitchen. The jacket he had chosen for this evening was a metallic mauve colour I had only ever seen on toy cars.
He popped the cork. ‘Timişoara’s erupting. While we’re at Capsia’s eating our pork Jewish style and crêpes Suzette the police will be shooting to kill – it’s either going to be a blood-soaked footnote in the history of communism or the start of the revolution. It’s the right time to be making decisions, not just for you but for everyone.’ He handed me a glass. ‘For me, for Ottilia, and if they want to stay on top, for people like Cilea and Manea… for all of them, right down to those poor frozen pawns down there.’ He pointed at the policemen stamping their feet in the snow as they sucked on Carpati, and raised a glass.
Leo stopped outside the Athénée Palace and picked up what looked like a big pot of jam from the parking attendant. Then he took me inside and told me to wait. I watched him disappear through the overlit lobby, his jacket pulsing with a new reptilian sheen as he passed under the spotlights. I waited for ten minutes. When he returned he was carrying a bag that moved. I peered in: lobsters wrestling slowly, elastic bands around their claws. ‘Capsia,’ he explained, ‘it’s bring your own starters night. The roads are blocked and nothing’s coming through.’