The Girl From Bucharest

I remember the coat better than I remember Ceaușescu.

It was black wool, almost ankle-length, with a velvet collar and buttons that had been replaced twice because I was forever losing them. The lining was wine-red. I had bought it years earlier from a woman who told me it had belonged to her sister in Paris, although I never believed her. Everyone sold Paris in those days. Paris could be a lipstick, a cigarette, a story about somebody’s cousin.

On the early morning of the twenty-first I stood in a queue for milk. For Petru, you understand. This, it was a kind of entertainment for me.

In Bucharest people joined queues almost instinctively. If there were twelve people standing outside a shop, everybody joined first and asked what had arrived second. There were rumours from Timișoara, but even they were rationed; everyone only had a little gossip and nobody knew where it came from.

A woman ahead of me said people had been shot. A man behind me told her to shut up.

Nobody left the queue.

It was still dark, of course, and it was very cold. I remember that because Ilinca hated the cold. She would put her hands under my blouse without warning and press them against my stomach, laughing while I swore at her, javră nenorocită. She was forever cold and forever touching me. In summer she slept with one leg hooked over mine. In winter she climbed inside me by degrees.

I loved her.

Oh, I know you like to distinguish love from desire because it makes you feel civilised. You imagine desire to be the animal thing and love the Godly thing which arrives later, carrying ciocolată and remembering anniversaries. I have never understood this. To desire someone is to be convinced, however briefly, that the universe has made a grave error by permitting them, whoever they might be, to exist separately from you. I wanted Ilinca. Therefore I loved her. And in winter, I wanted her inside me.

In the apartment the fucking televizor showed the rally in the square. At the time I was staying in Petru’s apartment near Piața Romană. He was neither my friend nor particularly pleased to have me there. The room was cold enough that he wore his coat indoors. I remember that morning there was one luxurious little lamp on, although it was daytime. I suppose Petru didn’t like the dark, although the sky had that grey colour Bucharest sometimes gets in December, as though someone has breathed against the mirror of the Dâmbovița. Then, it can be sunless and perfectly grim all day long.

Ceaușescu appeared on the balcony. People waved banners. He spoke. Then something happened. I cannot identify the precise second in which fear changed sides. But I could smell it. There was a noise from the crowd. Confusion. His face altered. That interested me. There have always been men who mistake a balcony for immortality.

I slept.

*

Petru was cooking. Eggs.

“You should stay here tonight,” he said.

“I’m meeting someone.”

“No.”

It was not a command. It was the sort of no people use when they believe reality itself has already settled the question.

“I’m meeting someone,” I repeated.

“Sofia, there are soldiers in the centre.”

“Yes.”

“They’re saying people are gathering at Universitate.”

I buttoned my coat.

Ilinca lived south-west of the centre then, in a small apartment whose stairwell always smelled of boiled cabbage, wet concrete, tobacco and something sweet I could never identify. Her telephone had not worked properly for three days. We had agreed to meet at eight.

I went outside. Bucharest already felt different. That is another thing revolutions have in common with desire. The physical world remains exactly where it was, but suddenly everything means something else. People moved quickly. Small groups stood at corners speaking in low voices. A tram passed almost empty. Somewhere a woman was shouting from an upper window. I saw two boys running and could not tell whether they were running towards something or away from it.

Along Magheru there were more people. Someone was smoking a Kent. You noticed Kents. They were practically a secondary currency then. A packet could persuade doors to open that ideology could not. Most people smoked Carpați or whatever they could get, harsh cigarettes that seemed designed principally to remind you that pleasure was decadent.

Near Universitate I heard chanting. At first it came in fragments. Then there were enough voices that the words became distinct. I should tell you what they shouted. I can’t remember. Sometimes I remember Jos Ceaușescu! Sometimes I remember only noise. Sometimes I think I remember them chanting Ilinca’s name. I can’t remember.

The centre was filling. Young men climbed onto things, athletic, agile as lovers fucking in the springtime. People who would normally have crossed the street to avoid one another were suddenly speaking as intimates, whispering sweet nothings in each others' ears, about how nothing would ever be the same again, for either of them. Trembling. Everyone trembling. Even after the first muted little death of this revolution, fear had not disappeared. It had multiplied until there was too much of it to remain private.

I kept walking.

The sensible route became impossible, so I turned into the ganguri and smaller streets. I found a passageway I had fucked a man in. More than once. It still smelled of his cock, or perhaps his cock had smelled of alleyway. Debris and rain and granite and blood and electricity and cock. Fuck you, I know what you’re thinking, porcule.

Twice I was told to go home. Once by a policeman. Once by an old woman carrying a shopping bag. The old woman frightened me more. I think she recognised me. I think I recognised her, from long ago. I saw her eyes begin to widen. I began to run.

By nine I reached Ilinca’s building. The stairwell was dark. I climbed four flights and knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

“Ilinca?”

Silence.

Her neighbour opened her door three centimetres.

“She went out.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where?”

The woman looked at me as though I were stupid.

“The centre.”

Of course.

I ran downstairs. I remember reaching University Square again. I remember the crowd. I remember seeing Ilinca in a pale scarf beneath the lights of the Intercontinental. I remember pushing through people towards her. I remember her seeing me and becoming furious. I remember her saying, “I told you not to come.” I remember kissing her. I remember the taste of cigarettes. I remember her hand closing around the velvet collar of my beautiful coat. I remember thinking, absurdly, that she was going to tear it.

And I remember, with equal clarity, never finding her at all.

Both memories have survived.

They cannot both be true.

Later there were vehicles and shields and men moving in formation. There was screaming. The barricade was broken during the night. People were beaten and arrested. People were shot. People were tortured. People become bodies. Bodies were cut open, blood flowed through the streets of Bucharest. I remember the blood. But I will not pretend that I understood history while it was occurring. Almost nobody does.

I wanted one woman. That was the scale on which the world made sense to me. It still does, even after all these years. Call me obsessive.

I still remember the small silver hoop in her ear, and how I let my fingers travel down the side of her neck. I knew the soft field of skin. I knew exactly where her pulse lived. She always shivered. It nearly finished me, every time. I remember one stocking abandoned beneath the radiator. Her lipstick on the rim of a glass. The sound she made when I kissed the inside of her wrist. Her nipples, hard in my mouth. The night she licked my pussy, purring like a cat, until I died, over and over. The night we fought, she pulled out a fucking knife and nearly stabbed me before we came together, kissing and shaking on the floor. The night I shared with a man, a complete stranger who said he was a footballer we met in Salon Roșu. Ilinca was annoyed we never met him again. What makes you smirk?

Fucking is supposed to make people forget themselves. For me, it has the opposite effect. Fucking is the only thing I remember.

That night in Bucharest, the country began tearing itself apart. In the weeks – or was it months? – that followed, I sometimes joined in. And sometimes I didn’t. Perhaps you would have thrived there – fed on it. Become fat on blood. You could have conquered a city, started a dynasty, made the underground your very own toy-box full of all your favourite pretty things.

But as for me, I got bored. I left. I can’t remember if Ilinca came with me. If she joined me in person, anyway, on that long drive west.