‘Trofim’s under house arrest. It’s all over town. Ozeray called this morning.’
Trofim’s letter accused Ceauşescu of mismanaging the economy and instituting a Stalinist personality cult, of emasculating the Party and imposing third-world living conditions on the country. It expressed support for strikes and protests and finished by calling on Ceauşescu to stand down. In a final rhetorical touch it concluded:
The megalomania of a single individual has reached terrifying proportions: we are now witnessing not just the disgrace of communism but the destruction of a nation’s culture
. Trofim was the chief signatory, and there was little doubt that he had authored the letter, calling for Romania to join Gorbachev’s train of reformed communism. Trofim’s Writers’ Union speech had been the joke, but this was the punchline. With the help of Ozeray and a few others, he had choreographed it all.
‘Canny old sod,’ said Leo, ‘he’s pressed all the right buttons: liberal, one-party socialism to keep the Russians on side,
Perebloodystroika
and all that, and just the right amount of dissident derring-do for the Yanks and Europeans to stick him on a pedestal. Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s people in Washington and Moscow thinking “Sergiu Trofim, now there’s a man we can do business with…” The old Stalinist fox turned reformist hero. Jesus.’
‘He’s finished isn’t he?’ I said, ‘political suicide. He’s already under house arrest. What else are they going to do to him?’
‘Not much. Look: five big communist chiefs write a letter to the world press. It’ll be on all the radio channels tonight: World Service, France Culture, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Moscow. It’s all round Bucharest already, probably the big cities too: Cluj, Braşov, Timişoara. The embassies, the consulates, the universities… They’ll shake him up a bit, maybe move him to some factory town with shitty restaurants and no library, make him sweat, but that’s about it. If they put him in prison they’ll make him a martyr. He’s seventy-three – that’s young for communist leaders – and he’s a well-known Party statesman. There’s a few years left in him.’
‘What about the others? Who are they?’
‘Four top-ranking but marginal ex-ministers. Stanciu, Ralian, Slavnicu, Apostol… I only know Apostol to talk to. Good bloke in his way.’ Leo tooted the horn and overtook a cement lorry. ‘Designated successor of Gheorghiu-Dej back in the sixties. Suddenly found himself out on a limb, all his allies rooting for our Kojak-loving comrade, and condemned to a life of ambassadorial postings in places like Venezuela and Bangladesh. And I know Ralian’s daughter, sort of. Apart from that, they’re just names.’
The evening’s radio news was full of the story. On the
BBC
World Service, a segment of the main news bulletin was devoted to Trofim’s letter. Radio Free Europe gave it an hour-long ‘Focus on Romania’ programme, with potted biographies of the authors and rolling commentaries from seasoned communism-watchers. Voice of America joined in with an eight o’clock ‘Special Report’ on Ceauşescu’s Romania. Radio Moscow had the
coup
: a recorded interview with Trofim in Russian, apparently given three days before the letter appeared, in which he reiterated both his opposition to Ceauşescu and his own credentials as a loyal but liberal communist. It was the most explicit sign yet that he had Moscow’s backing.
‘Bloody hell. I’ll tell you what’s going on…’ Leo tuned the radio, chasing every sliver of the story across the airwaves, but he didn’t get the chance. It was Ottilia who spoke next: ‘That interview was conducted by the head of the Bucharest
Pravda
bureau, with the Russian ambassador in attendance, in Trofim’s flat last week.’ Leo and I looked at her, astonished.
‘How d’you know this? You’ve only know him a few weeks.’ I blushed with jealousy, and then at the obviousness of my jealousy: blush overlaying blush.
She smiled and kissed my swollen mouth. ‘Trofim is now untouchable. They may keep him under house arrest and watch him carefully, but Ceauşescu knows that if he harms him, the Russians will act. In the end he’ll have to let him be.’
‘Genius!’ Leo clapped his hands in admiration. ‘The crafty old bugger. I told you, he’s trying to make a comeback!’ Leo went to the fridge and returned with Ukrainian champagne. ‘This calls for
Sovietskoi
fizz.’ Then, to me, ‘go and get some glasses and take that smacked-arse look off your face!’
That night we joined Ozeray at the Athénée Palace Hotel, where he was finishing a long meal with one of his diplomatic dining circles. He smoked a cigar, surveying the debris-strewn table and its inebriated diners like a commander taking stock of his exhausted army.
Ottilia and I stood at the bar while Leo and Ioana, going through a rare phase of harmony, danced to some ‘groper’s classics’ next door. Ozeray levered himself up, excused himself from table and joined us.
‘Trofim has been moved. We don’t know where. I’ve just spoken to Maltchev and he says they took him and drove away at ten this evening.’
Maltchev, the Pravda bureau chief, sat at the other end of the bar. He gave us a brisk nod at the mention of his name, which he obviously lipread from years of espionage training.
‘They will take him somewhere where he will be uncomfortable and hard to find. But not a prison. Apostol and the others were picked up at lunchtime.’
‘All this is information – it’s coming from the Russians?’
‘New circumstances, new alliances,’ replied Ozeray, raising his glass to Maltchev, who raised his back.
What had appeared to be selfless bravery on Trofim’s part now looked like a flawless campaign to get back in the political game, the scheming of a professional strategist. Ottilia had worked it out much sooner than I had. Trofim had tried to tell me, in his way: those stories about Arghezi, the plots and the purges, the multiple betrayals. He had not lied to me; on the contrary he had given me as many clues as he safely could. I had simply preferred to think of him as a disappointed idealist, an old statesman put out to pasture. I had felt protective of him, even jealous of his confidences. In reality he had run rings around his friends as well as his enemies. A voice behind me called out goodnight to the hotel’s
concierge
. It was Maltchev leaving with his minders.
The entrance to the Athénée Palace was a revolving door whose segments were only large enough for one person at a time. It was the favoured haunt of those who thought they were being followed, or who wanted to show off how many bodyguards they had: since people could only go through one by one, it was an ideal sieving system for a surveillance society. It worked like a prism: everything slowed down and separated out. Tailing Maltchev were two obvious Securitate stooges, clearly fresh from the provinces since they tried to squeeze into a single panel of the door, and behind them a single
KGB
minder in a coat and hat. Further back, a woman stepped discreetly in, followed by a man in a brown mackintosh and trilby. An entire eco-system of surveillance prospered on the back of one Russian journalist.
The figure in the mackintosh, whose profile I now saw through the glass, emerged from the other side of the doors and into the street. He had a beard and neatly trimmed hair, glasses and a hat pulled low down on his forehead. But there was something about him that refused the anonymity. Or is that just how, later, I would justify to myself the sense that I had seen Vintul, that I had recognised his profile, and that when I knocked on the glass and shouted his name he didn’t flinch? Anybody else would have. Was it him? I banged on the window again, but though all around him people stopped and looked in at me, he continued to walk on.
There was a bottleneck at the door. An old woman with a poodle the colour of dishwater had her suitcase stuck in the door, which jammed and left her trapped inside with her yelping dog. By the time I had passed through the revolving doors and out into the street, everyone had gone.
I ran out to the corner of Strada Episcopiei but he had disappeared. I could run on ahead to the Boulevard Magheru, but by the time I reached it he would have melted away. I turned and walked back to hail a cab. I mentioned nothing to Ottilia. As I stared through the raindrop-beaded window of the taxi, I became less and less certain of what I had seen. An unremarkable man, hurrying through an underlit lobby, whose profile reminded me, for reasons I could not grasp, of someone I had been looking for. Already his image was clouding over: what colour was his coat? Had he worn a hat? A briefcase or a bag? What colour hair? Eyes? By the time we got home to my wrecked flat, there was nothing left of him but the aura of something missed.
They moved Trofim, Apostol and the others to the outskirts. Slavnicu caved in as soon as they came to take him away – he signed a retraction and claimed to have been put up to it by Trofim and Apostol. They let him keep his Herastrau townhouse. Stanciu was diabetic, and Ralian had trouble walking, so they were put in apartment blocks, without lifts, electricity or gas. According to Ozeray, Trofim was in a one-roomed flat at the top of an unready tower block, where the only running water was what came through the roof and air conditioning took the form of unfilled window cavities.
Trofim became big news: the US and Soviet ambassadors demanded to see him, while the Romanian ambassadors to both countries were summoned to the foreign ministries to receive official protests. The French foreign minister made a speech calling on Ceauşescu to release the remaining dissidents. Trofim’s publisher came in on the act, declaring that his non-attendance at his own launch, held to full media fanfare, with human rights activists, ministers, political exiles, and a fractious array of absurdist philosophers, poets and playwrights, had created coverage that exhausted the first print run.
The Sunday Times
ran an extract about the rise of Ceauşescu, in which Trofim revealed that he had been in charge of doctoring the Comrade’s war record to make him into an anti-fascist hero. He called Elena Ceauşescu a ‘barely literate laboratory technician and professional plagiarist’ and named the scientists whose work she had, over the years, put her name to. Another paper ran photographs of the Ceauşescus’ state visit: the Comrade and his wife with the Queen, hunting with a Conservative minister of Obelixian girth, and Elena receiving an honorary doctorate from the West London Polytechnic. Trofim revealed that eight universities had turned her down, and that she had at first refused to shake the Vice-Chancellor’s hand because he was Jewish.
The other dissidents were quickly forgotten. Trofim was the story, emerging as the country’s leading statesman-dissident. Suddenly American secretaries of state and British ministers, French government officials and Russian spokesmen referred to his illustrious career. He was profiled in an article in the
Washingon Post
in which Kissinger called him ‘an alert, humane realist and old school European gentleman’. In
Pravda
he was described quite simply as ‘the Party’s choice’, which was far from the case but would quickly become so when ‘the Party’ read this morning’s
Pravda
. It was a risky tactic on Trofim’s part: if there was anyone the Romanians hated more than Ceauşescu, it was the Russians. But he calculated well – the Russians were now preferable: Gorbachev represented the only chance of democratic change; and to the Party apparatchiks he was the only chance of saving their skins if and when Ceauşescu fell.
It was ten days before we found out where Trofim was being held, and when the information came out it was Ozeray who passed it on. No one asked how, but it was accurate, right down to the routine of Trofim’s guards. We had a half hour window between shifts, where the usual four-man watch was reduced to one. We also had the biggest bribe I had ever seen change hands: two bags of frozen steaks, six bottles of Johnnie Walker, a dozen cartons of Kent, three Walkmans and a hundred dollars. If the guard were discovered, he would probably be killed. In my mind thereafter that package of money, food and electrical goods came to represent the price of a life in Romania. I knew there were places in the world where life was cheaper, but this was the closest I would come to seeing it cashed in.
The terrified guard met us in the dark lobby of the apartment block, a looming, leaning edifice of wet concrete and rusty twists of metal. It was nowhere near ready, but the mixers and lorries and cranes had moved on to the next job. ‘Fourteenth floor. Flat six. Here’s the key. Please be quick. This is very dangerous for me.’
We climbed. Leo’s torch threw tunnels of light up ahead at dog turds, broken glass, the flattened, dried-out carcase of a mauled cat. On the eighth floor, a dog shivered in the corner of the elevator cubicle, a bitch suckling tiny puppies. She looked up, summoned all she had left in her of fight, and growled into the torchbeam. Leo slammed the elevator grille across her. The corridors were full of puddle water and uncollected rubbish. On the fourteenth floor, a scratching sound revealed a feral cockerel who jerked his head critically, training first one eye and then the other on us before striding into the unfilled cavity that was his home. He was probably the second or third generation of urbanised farm animals picking away at a living in the new suburbs.
Leo unlocked the door. A curtain blew in at us from an unglassed window. The flat was a shell, unplastered concrete walls and unsurfaced concrete floor. The main room was a mess of loose wires and unplumbed pipes. The stink of a full toilet came at us from a room to the side and the floor was wet. Trofim himself was lying on a mattress in the corner. We had woken him. Leo shone the torch in his eyes and he rubbed them, sat up, called out.
‘Who’s there?’
Trofim was still in the suit they had taken him away in. They had let him bring nothing. No books, no paper, no radio. His hands shook as he embraced us. His head was cut from some fall in the darkness. He composed himself and pulled up the only chair in the room and lit the camping stove. Leo took out some provisions: candles, biscuits, whisky, tins of baked beans and Heinz soups and sticks of German salami. The
coup
was three bananas which he produced with a flourish. Trofim looked thin and ragged. He had a painful, hollow cough. I remembered he had spent two years in prison during the war and six months in solitary confinement after it. He was probably better able to cope with this than most septuagenarians, but it had taken its toll. He spoke slowly, breathing hard.