The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Page A

he said, that the city was full of such ghostly intersections of past and present, seams of layered time ready to be mined. We spent all night there, drifting back into the grey morning in time for work.
    I thought I had been drawn into a group hallucination, but Leo assured me it was real. We spent all day arguing about it: we could go back, he said. We
would
go back, that very night. To take a particular walk, walking particular streets in a particular order, was like reciting a magical invocation. The lost walk had its syntax, its word order, like any spell. He was right. We found it again, a midnight fair in the urban clearing, and we visited it twice more before it disappeared. After that, Leo merely looked for the next thing, like the underground casino we found with a map of the catacombs, where a derelict nineteenth-century machine room beneath the Atheneum had been opened up by a Metro excavation. When we visited, it was full of men and women at gaming tables, with waiters in suits serving drinks and a pianist with an electric keyboard. It was real enough, but Leo was convinced it was part of some subterranean society, that old Bucharest was being rebuilt and repeopled underground. Leo could still find these places. He believed that they were holes in a sort of space-time fabric, time out of time, place out of place.
    To balance out the dream of the old city, Leo made me visit the new Bucharest, where whole peasant communities had been forcibly relocated to the cement outskirts. Families were broken up and moved into tiny flats, often without water or electricity or even windows. Many took their animals with them: goats and pigs rummaged around the rusty metal and broken concrete, shat in the corners, rutted in the courtyards. Cockerels, disorientated, crowed beneath builders’ floodlights in the dead of night and hens yaffled in the scaffolding. Old men with narrow eyes and calloused hands peeled potatoes and old women sat on deckchairs in peasant dress, watching the cranes stalk the strange horizon, listening to the mixers and diggers, new beasts lowing in the asphalt fields. It was a tragic transplantation. Many wandered off, back to the land, or to where the land had been. They were found, half-mad, walking the motorway hard shoulders; or, if they ever made it out of the city limits, weeping over their flattened shacks, their lost livestock. The few who stayed on the industrialised farms took jobs as machine hands or in abattoirs, or staffing the vast hangars where dioxin-filled pigs were shackled to the ground and fattened on darkness and fear.

    Everything was muffled, time-delayed. I listened to the BBC World Service, whose velvety voice of neutrality, patience and
sang-froid
assured us, in the face of the very facts it recounted, that all was as it should be in the world. There was also Radio Free Europe, the US-funded radio station dedicated to making mischief in the Soviet bloc. This was regularly jammed, and though it kept you informed about events in the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia or East Germany, it hardly mentioned Romania. What you learned was that those places about which you heard the most tales of repression were also, relatively speaking, the least repressed. In Romania we had nothing of the sort. People talked about the Iron Curtain as if there was only one, but Communist East Europe was itself a system of partitions, curtains behind curtains. In the Comecon cosmos, Romania was the dark planet.
    From the few bare sentences in the ‘News in Brief’ sections of the newspapers – a village bulldozed here, a food riot quelled there – you could deduce the clamped-shut world of Romania, and, between the lines, make out the strangled voice of rumour and hearsay, distorted, crackling with white noise, breaking up like a bad phone line. That was the sound of our everyday life.
    The silent phone calls continued. Sometimes there were two or three in one day, sometimes nothing for a week. Always the