On the night of the ninth of November I returned from walking Leo to find Ottilia hunched over the radio, straining to hear someone speaking against a huge noise, a noise distorted by the vibrating casing of my long-wave set.
It was the sound of a riot, but a riot of joy. A reporter was trying to make himself heard against a rolling turmoil of happiness. Several times he stopped to gather his own emotions – his words strewn across a debris of abandoned sentences – and started again. The pulsation of radio static, combined with the noise-barrage from the Romanian jamming satellites, meant we kept losing crucial pieces of the narrative.
We were listening to the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘They’ll all be killed,’ Ottilia said as the East Berliners hacked away at the concrete, some with pickaxes and hammers, others with forks and knives or just bare fingernails. The reporter described the police standing and watching, the border guards paralysed by the enormity of what they were seeing. An order had just come through telling them to stand aside. Many were beaming happily at the crowd, years of fear and the imposition of fear suddenly counting for nothing.
Leo and I cheered. Ottilia’s reaction was different – she really believed they would be killed, that at any moment the tanks would roll in. It was just as well it was happening in reality, since she would not have been able to imagine it: the Fall of the Wall, even as she heard it unfolding, was not something real to her. It took Leo’s expertise with a television and a cable signal box to give Ottilia what she most wanted: live images, direct from Berlin.
Erich Honecker, the
GDR
president, had resigned. He had visited Bucharest in May – I remembered his motorcade of shiny black cars seeping down the road like an oil slick unfurling over water. Only two weeks ago he was receiving Ceauşescu in East Berlin; it had been all
fraternal greetings
and
helmsmanlike discussions
. Now Honecker was gone, it was only a matter of time before the nautical metaphors turned to shipwreck and flotsam…
The news went on all night. At one point, a Hollywood actor with a German name, star of a prime-time show about California lifeguards, climbed on the Wall. A strutting, plasticated showbiz clown with a mullet, he was hoisted onto the rim of the Wall and sang so badly and so surreally that even the East Berliners pickaxing the concrete took a few seconds from their elation to gaze at him in weary affront. Leo nodded philosophically: ‘That’s the price you pay for freedom. There’s always a price…’ then tore the ring off a Becks Bier and raised it frothing into the air: ‘To Freedom!’
But the morning of the tenth of November came with the same grey corrugations of cloud, the same steely wind, the same police in their usual positions. When the
Scînteia
vendor called out ‘Read all about it… The world looks on in amazement… read all about it!’ we stopped dead and waited for what came next, squinting at the front page. Had
Scînteia
reported the fall of the Wall? ‘Read all about it!’ he said with heavy sarcasm: ‘Romania’s new tractor successfully launched at the Albanian Agricultural Fair.’
Leo snorted and wheeled himself to the car.
‘What’s up,
Domnul
?’ asked the
Scînteia
vendor, ‘first the Czechs, then the Krauts… won’t be long now before they start printing some real news over there…’ He jerked his head out towards the great concrete needle of
Casa Scînteia
where the paper was written, edited, censored and printed in one overwhelming Soviet-style building.
Leo disagreed. ‘If I was the Comrade and I’d had my evening’s
Kojak
ruined by the collapse of East German socialism, I know I wouldn’t be thinking,
Well, perhaps I was wrong about this communist business, maybe I should reconsider the Era of Light, maybe what we need’s a free election
…bollocks I would! I’d be speeding it up, I’d be coming at them harder, faster, more ruthlessly. And that’s why the dying periods of these bastard regimes are also the bloodiest, dirtiest, most dangerous. What was it Ceauşescu said last week? “Stalin did all that a man in his position should have done.”’
The Fourteenth Party Congress began on the first of December. The hotels filled with delegates from ‘friendly’ countries and organisations. The Greek communists camped out in the Athénée Palace with the French, the Serbs and various neo-Stalinist factions from the West. All the Africans were billeted in the InterContinental, which filled with Ethiopians, Tanzanians, Angolans and others, many still involved in conflicts they had forgotten the precise details of even as they slugged it out with fists in bars or spat at each other in the dim lobbies: about borders, airspace, trade embargoes.
For the regime’s Pandar-in-chief, the arch-pimp Ilie, this was the busiest time of the year. He and his entourage prowled the edges of the social circuit ensuring the supply of sex and narcotics, and Bucharest’s rail stations were full of young girls from the villages who had been brought in to swell the ranks of sex workers. Ilie made more from the Congresses and Party conferences than his whole year’s income put together, turning Bucharest into a vast incubator of venereal disease as the local strains met and crossed with foreign exotics. Leo said that VD brought out the good communist in everyone: it was the only thing that really got shared around.
But the city was dead at the core. Helicopters patrolled all day; at night the cylinders of white glare from their searchlights swung through the sky and scraped the empty streets. What they would have seen with their pilot’s eye view was this: a cold, unpeopled city whose tightening rings of fencing resembled the circles of gunsights, and in whose crosshairs lay the party HQ.
The frosts had taken hold, a carpeting of white powder in the early morning and trees with their crystals of icicle-fruit. The first snow was a hesitant white glitter that had melted to grey kerbside sludge by midday. ‘It’s just a first sowing,’ the
Scînteia
vendor told me on the morning of Congress’ Grand Opening. Snow as seed – everyday language stayed close to the soil even as the people who spoke it were uprooted and herded into concrete shells. The next day it took hold: a dense crop of whiteness spread shin-deep over the city. In the Piaţa Republica the gritters started harvesting it, leaving a stubble of salt and cobbles in their wake. The parks were desolate.
On the third of December, the Iraqi embassy hosted a reception for the Arabic translation of Ceauşescu’s
Socialism and the Scientific Society
. ‘The hottest ticket in town,’ Leo boasted, waving his embossed invitation.
Ottilia and I dropped him off and went to the Palace of Light cinema to see Buñuel’s
The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie
, a surreal, political satire on capitalism that looked very much like a surreal, political satire on communism. It must have been the director’s political leanings, rather than the film’s content, that got it past the Romanian censor. In the film, people who looked and sounded much like Politburo members and their spouses gorged themselves on Capsiaesque food. Their shallow patter set off the only thing about them that was deep, or at any rate deep-rooted: porcine greed, fear, and a lethargy-blunted viciousness of spirit.
The auditorium was an ex-theatre with boxes and piebald velour seats with
art nouveau
ashtrays set into their armrests. You watched your films through a
Carpati
fug that barely covered the smell of chewed garlic bulbs and Tsuica-breath. The film was certainly getting a reaction, but I doubted the censor would pass this one again.
The audience of students and workers cheered when the bourgeois were shot and booed as the fine food passed their bourgeois lips in scene after scene of fine dining. From the back of the cinema, there were cries of ‘Down with the Pigs’ and ‘Ceauşescu Bloodsucker’. When a particularly odious snob slurped her soup on screen, a man called out, ‘Elena! Hurry up, the next course is coming!’ The laughter was uproarious.
Suddenly the side doors of the cinema opened, and in the lit doorframes Securitate stood and blocked the exits. ‘Get back into your holes!’ shouted one voice in the crowd. Others laughed, ‘Rats’, ‘Nazis’, ‘Thieves’. The doors shut and people cheered, but only the naive thought the Securitate had left. After the film, the Securitate combed the aisles demanding ID; now that the houselights were on only a few defiant protestors continued. One boy walked up to the Securitate pair at the exit and challenged them, waving his arms about and brandishing what looked a Party card.
It was my student Oleanu, the class informer, undergoing a cross between a Damascene conversion and a nervous breakdown. ‘Why do you do this? Is this socialism?’ He shook with fear and anger, waving his Party card in their faces, ‘Is patrolling the cinemas socialism? Is state-sponsored fear socialism? Is this what Lenin wanted?’
This was the boy who toed the party line on every debate from the social function of literature to the use of adjectives in a poem; the boy who censored what he read before he read it, edited his thoughts before he thought them. Now here he was, risking arrest, expulsion from the Party, the loss of his mapped-out career. I tapped him on the shoulder. For a moment he didn’t recognise me, blinked and pushed his papers at me. I led him out to safety.
‘Oleanu,’ I said, realising I had never known his first name, that he was one of those people who didn’t seem to have one, who would never get close enough to another human being to put it to use. ‘Can we take you somewhere?’
He looked glassily at me. ‘Looks like he’s in shock,’ said Ottilia. ‘Who the hell is he? What’s that stupid badge on his jacket?’ She peered at his Party youth pin, then led him through the double doors of the Palace of Light. Police with dogs were moving people on. We sat Oleanu in the car and Ottilia produced her emergency Tsuica. She put it to his lips and he automatically glugged down a mouthful, coughed and whimpered. He looked out of the window, then at us for what seemed like the first time that evening.
‘Oleanu – I’m sorry, I don’t know your first name – it looks to me like you’ve just had a big and very public crisis of faith,’ I told him.
‘That’s what happens when you have faith in the first place,’ Ottilia offered with unwonted cynicism, ‘it’s a stage most of us skipped.’ She swerved to avoid a herd of supermarket trolleys that had erred into the road like bemused cattle. Monocom’s windows had been smashed, and people were looting it while the police looked on. A few doors away, at one of the state bookshops, a fire blazed.
At the Arab Centre Leo was fractious and tipsy. He jabbed his finger at the dial of his watch. ‘What time d’you call this?’ Then, swinging open the passenger door, ‘And what the fuck’s Young Lenin doing here?’
Leo softened up when we told him, but Oleanu found it hard to surmount his natural fear of Leo. For him, Leo
was
decadent capitalism. He had spent so many months informing on Leo’s activities and reporting back on his lectures that now, when Leo breathed boozily in his face, put his arm around him and pushed a bottle of Chateau Musar to his lips (‘Don’t worry, it may be made by Arabs but they’re Christian Arabs and it’s fourteen per cent alcohol’), he didn’t know which feeling to give in to first: terror or embarrassment.
‘Where d’you live, Comrade? We’re taking you home,’ asked Leo.
‘No, that won’t be necessary. I can walk from here.’
‘Bollocks,
Tovarăşul
. I know where you live, and it’s a four-mile walk. As you see there’s no buses or trams this time of night, and I’m buggered if anyone’s going to accuse Leo of not helping out a Flower of the Party’s Youth.’ He rattled off Oleanu’s address, a dismal block among blocks in a suburb of middle-ranking Party members. Life was better there, but not by not much, and no longer by enough.
‘See, we all have our ways of keeping tabs, young man. Now go in and tell your parents you’re safe.’ Leo chuckled. ‘For now…’
We watched Oleanu disappear into the forty-watt twilight of his block.
‘Don’t you think you were a bit hard on him, Leo?’ I asked. Ottilia added: ‘What he did was brave in its way, a bit mad perhaps, but it must have taken a lot…’
Leo rested his forehead against the car window. ‘Maybe… maybe. Maybe Oleanu will be the hero of the revolution, who knows? What I do know is that for the last two years it’s been him informing on all we say in class, selling his fellows down the river, setting them up… who’s going to give them back the university places he took from them, who’s going to erase the black marks he put on their files?’
‘At least he was doing it because he believed in the system, or thought he did…’ Ottilia came to Oleanu’s defence but Leo didn’t let her get far.
‘And that makes it better, does it? Am I supposed to forgive him just because he actually believed in what he was doing? That makes him better than the ones who did it just for personal gain?’
‘Yes,’ Ottilia looked at him in the rear-view mirror, ‘yes, I think it does.’
‘Not this again…’ Leo’s voice was an irritated caricature of boredom, ‘believing, not believing… how many times have I been through this, and with how many people: whether it’s better to do wrong for the right reasons or do right for the wrong ones. I decided that long ago. I’m not changing my mind. I’m going for those who do bad things out of self-interest, because when their interests change, they’ll change what they do. Simple as that. The others… well, look around you…’
‘Sophistry, Leo, sophistry. Or as you prefer,
bollocks
. You say that because you run the biggest – sorry, the second biggest – racket in the city, and you’ve persuaded yourself it’s a force for good because you’re a good man and you do good things in your own small circle. But it’s still racketeering, Leo. You make a virtue out of believing in nothing because that’s what helps you live with the fact that you’re living off a system you despise.’
‘This…
system
as you call it was created by zealots like that little squirt with his Party badges and Communist Youth meetings…’
‘Maybe it was, Leo, but when the zealots had finished designing it, they handed it over to the cynics to run, and that’s why you’ve been given such an easy ride these last few years.’