The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Page B

line crackled and fizzed with the static from the listening devices I knew were tapping in, and always there was the caller’s indecisive, vacillating breath. Once he – I knew it was a
he
– was on the verge of speaking: there was something there, a name, a word, the edge of a voice.
    In the afternoons I walked through Herastrau Park or visited the museums. The Museum of the Communist Party of Romania dominated them all, an empty cavernous place whose lights were on all day despite the power cuts, while the Museums of Romanian History, Natural History and Science stood dwarfed and in darkness nearby. The Party museum advertised an exhibition on the ‘Heroism of the Family’, alongside its permanent show of ‘Omagiu’ to the
Conducător
and his wife.
    The Natural History Museum offered more stimulating fare: an exhibition entitled ‘Evolution and Extinction’, illustrated with a poster of a sceptical-looking giant lizard. I had visited the exhibition twice, and bought the poster that now hung on my office wall.
    As a power-saving measure, museum visitors were organised into groups and the lights in each room were turned on as you entered and off as you left, the loud click of the switches reverberating in the high-ceilinged halls. It was like a tide of darkness following you, engulfing room after room behind you as you went. Walking past the skeletons of mammoths and brachiosaurs, their bones wired into place and clipped together with metal hinges, their skulls craned upwards and their jaws cranked open into silent screams, you felt the momentum of depletion, the world subtracting from itself faster than it could replenish.
    Bucharest’s modern parks were flat, planted with dwarfish shrubs and benches arranged to give the sitter maximum exposure and maximum discomfort. You never stayed long anywhere, harried on all sides by an invisible watchfulness. All the fountains were dry. As you walked you passed statues of one of the harmlessly dead: composers, poets, historians, scientists, evacuated from their own stories by these anonymising official monuments.
The safe and useful dead
, as Stalin called them, never shy of adding to their numbers.
    The older parks and gardens were more convivial. The nearest one to my flat, Parcul Kiseleff, was overhung with trees and criss-crossed with pebbled paths, canopied with overarching branches and set back from the street. These small groves of privacy were rare in Bucharest, and by now were only to be found in the well-to-do suburbs where foreigners, Party officials or members of the dilapidated bourgeoisie still lived. For most Romanians, leisure was rationed and policed, the regime reaching even into the slow, slack hours of inactivity.
    The old enjoyed the benefits of their irrelevance. I would stop and watch them: courteous, dapper little men who tipped their hats to passing ladies or competed with each other to give up their seats for someone older or frailer. The women brought tea in thermoses and pastries in boxes tied with ribbons, shook their heads and tutted at daring propositions, laughing at familiar jokes. Some spoke to each other in that meticulous, creaky, buttoned-up language known as
Capsia French
. Retired technocrats, ex-apparatchiks,
bonjouristes
from the pre-communist era… the police wasted little time watching them.

    It was as I passed late one afternoon that an old gentleman signalled with his stick for me to wait for him.
    ‘
Où habitez-vous?
’ he asked me. Where did I live? ‘
Ah, ça tombe bien, je vous accompagne, ce n’est pas loin de chez moi.
’ ‘That’s handy, I’ll walk with you, it’s not far from my place.’
    He introduced himself – Sergiu Trofim – and extended a hand for me to shake. It was small and dry, pocked with liverspots and missing its index and middle fingers. Drawing attention to the neighbouring stumps was a heavy gold ring on his wedding finger, set with a large turquoise stone. His sleeves finished with antique