cabinet with a state-of-the-art television, video and hi-fi system.
The walls were papered with photographs Leo had taken of the destruction, not just in Bucharest but beyond, where ancient villages were being razed and old towns all over Romania were being flattened by Ceauşescu’s architectural pogroms. Using his network of informers, Leo amassed evidence from across the country for news agencies in Europe and America. The clippings – from
Le Monde, The Times, Die Zeit
– he kept in a row of scrapbooks on his desk. Shelved nearby was a run of video boxes of action films and horror movies, sequels, prequels and spin-offs:
Rocky, Rambo, Friday 13 th , Indiana Jones
. Inside the boxes the spines of the cassettes were marked with a date and a place. These were the films Leo or others had taken of the razing of villages and city streets, the churches and the monasteries.
His flat had become the city’s hidden visage, like a backwards portrait of Dorian Gray: as the place itself disappeared around us, so Leo’s apartment grew in compressed splendour.
‘These places,’ Leo said to me one night, pointing at a tiny glass-covered arcade of shops in Lipscani, ‘these places are as much under threat as the rain forests or the Galapagos…’ A double row of tiny workshops, each with a different trade, twisted to the left, then opened onto a regimented precinct where all the shops had numbers. Six years ago, there had been a stone courtyard with a fountain and a street theatre where the city’s musicians, from students of the conservatoire to passing gypsies, met and improvised. Leo claimed he could still hear them. He put his hand on my arm: ‘Listen,’ he whispered, closing his eyes. At these moments Leo would go into a kind of trance, tuning into something that for him was still going on. His belief in the continued existence of lost places was not just a way of speaking.
The lights were on in a nearby bakery, and the smell of rising dough and warm ovens drew people in, ready to sleep outside for their chance of fresh bread. It was past midnight, and we were using an old map, made in 1920, to navigate the unlit streets. ‘This is how you measure what you have against what there was,’ Leo said, ‘you walk it, what remains of it, you hear the clamour of all that’s gone. It’s your listening that brings it back.’
We always used old maps or guidebooks, from the 1890s, the 1940s, the 1960s. For Leo, an occultist of place, each gone epoch could be recalled and for a moment brought back. We would cross the dark, cold, kitsch-marbled squares of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest using a map that told us we were in a bustling side street full of cafés and cabarets. We walked the length of a wide, new-built avenue following a map that claimed to take us through a web of twisting alleys between two blocks of the brewery quarter. Around us the uniform grid of main roads stretched emptily, but for Leo we were brushing the sweating walls of a
ruelle
, dodging broken glass and with the smell of smoke and hops in our nostrils. He marked out his lost walks on the new maps, overwriting their expanses of blankness and thuggish symmetry with the old streets and buildings, plotting his itineraries. The maps came to resemble geological diagrams, where time was expressed in layers, and where, for all their passing, for all their irrecoverability, all periods existed simultaneously.
On my second nocturnal expedition with Leo to the depths of Dorobanti, we came upon men and women roasting a pig. They drank wine from barrels and sat and talked or danced in lamplight to accordions and fiddles. It was like a dream scene. Nobody spoke, just danced or sang or gestured, offering their food and drink, celebrating something which was never made clear. Passers-by like us happened on it by accident and were amazed. Like me, they thought at first they were dreaming, but Leo was convinced that we had stumbled in on the past, that we had
crossed over
,
The walls were papered with photographs Leo had taken of the destruction, not just in Bucharest but beyond, where ancient villages were being razed and old towns all over Romania were being flattened by Ceauşescu’s architectural pogroms. Using his network of informers, Leo amassed evidence from across the country for news agencies in Europe and America. The clippings – from
Le Monde, The Times, Die Zeit
– he kept in a row of scrapbooks on his desk. Shelved nearby was a run of video boxes of action films and horror movies, sequels, prequels and spin-offs:
Rocky, Rambo, Friday 13 th , Indiana Jones
. Inside the boxes the spines of the cassettes were marked with a date and a place. These were the films Leo or others had taken of the razing of villages and city streets, the churches and the monasteries.
His flat had become the city’s hidden visage, like a backwards portrait of Dorian Gray: as the place itself disappeared around us, so Leo’s apartment grew in compressed splendour.
‘These places,’ Leo said to me one night, pointing at a tiny glass-covered arcade of shops in Lipscani, ‘these places are as much under threat as the rain forests or the Galapagos…’ A double row of tiny workshops, each with a different trade, twisted to the left, then opened onto a regimented precinct where all the shops had numbers. Six years ago, there had been a stone courtyard with a fountain and a street theatre where the city’s musicians, from students of the conservatoire to passing gypsies, met and improvised. Leo claimed he could still hear them. He put his hand on my arm: ‘Listen,’ he whispered, closing his eyes. At these moments Leo would go into a kind of trance, tuning into something that for him was still going on. His belief in the continued existence of lost places was not just a way of speaking.
The lights were on in a nearby bakery, and the smell of rising dough and warm ovens drew people in, ready to sleep outside for their chance of fresh bread. It was past midnight, and we were using an old map, made in 1920, to navigate the unlit streets. ‘This is how you measure what you have against what there was,’ Leo said, ‘you walk it, what remains of it, you hear the clamour of all that’s gone. It’s your listening that brings it back.’
We always used old maps or guidebooks, from the 1890s, the 1940s, the 1960s. For Leo, an occultist of place, each gone epoch could be recalled and for a moment brought back. We would cross the dark, cold, kitsch-marbled squares of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest using a map that told us we were in a bustling side street full of cafés and cabarets. We walked the length of a wide, new-built avenue following a map that claimed to take us through a web of twisting alleys between two blocks of the brewery quarter. Around us the uniform grid of main roads stretched emptily, but for Leo we were brushing the sweating walls of a
ruelle
, dodging broken glass and with the smell of smoke and hops in our nostrils. He marked out his lost walks on the new maps, overwriting their expanses of blankness and thuggish symmetry with the old streets and buildings, plotting his itineraries. The maps came to resemble geological diagrams, where time was expressed in layers, and where, for all their passing, for all their irrecoverability, all periods existed simultaneously.
On my second nocturnal expedition with Leo to the depths of Dorobanti, we came upon men and women roasting a pig. They drank wine from barrels and sat and talked or danced in lamplight to accordions and fiddles. It was like a dream scene. Nobody spoke, just danced or sang or gestured, offering their food and drink, celebrating something which was never made clear. Passers-by like us happened on it by accident and were amazed. Like me, they thought at first they were dreaming, but Leo was convinced that we had stumbled in on the past, that we had
crossed over
,
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