I looked out on that lorry for eighteen months. Passing motorists used it as a rubbish tip. Its tyres began to sink into the road. I complained to an environment officer at Hammersmith Council, who advised me to consult the police. I rang the police, who suggested I complain to the council. I duly phoned the council again, and learned that the removal of the lorry was the responsibility of the police. I retired, bewildered.
Then, one afternoon, the Features Editor of the London Evening Standard called to ask me to write a column for the following day. I could choose any subject I wished. Thus it was that I penned a eulogy to Brian’s lorry, with its array of rusty cookers, battered television sets, threadbare clothes and worn-out electric and gas fires. I loved the view from my window, I declared, for it reminded me of the vanity of human aspirations and the transient nature of modern technology. I thanked the council and the police for their splendid obtuseness, for without their indifference I should have been deprived of the melancholy vision I delighted in each passing day.
My heavy-handed irony must have irritated someone in authority, for I awoke the very next morning to see the lorry being tugged away. Such, I told myself, is the power of the printed word.
As he became fatter and fatter, Brian developed into a philosopher. He would hold court from a wobbly chair on the doorstep, expressing opinions he had read in the editorial page of the Sun, his favourite newspaper. He usually had a couple of cronies to sound off to before drink made them incoherent or incapable of listening, or both. He cursed me, playfully, as a wishy-washy liberal, though he always praised Circe’s beauty and envied her slimness. Whenever I returned from Romania, I brought him back a gallon of ţuica, the lethal plum or apricot brandy I find undrinkable.
Brian died in his sleep, and the one-eyed Serb sold the filthy dosshouse to a man who, after two dedicated years, has transformed it into something palatial. Gorky’s desperate waifs and strays would not feel at home in it.
Circe and Cleopatra
In 1995 I decided that I wanted to learn Romanian. I also decided that I needed a teacher. I already knew a few basic words and had followed a course on two cassettes, but now I needed to be guided through the language’s tortuous grammar. I phoned an acquaintance at the Romanian Embassy, asking for help. There was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London who might be interested in giving me lessons, she said. She would make enquiries on my behalf.
My tutor turned out to be a beautiful, raven-haired young woman called Cleopatra. Was Cleopatra a common name in Romania? ‘No, no, no,’ she laughed. ‘It was my mother’s idea. I prefer that you call me Cleo.’ The shortened version, she added, was less of an embarrassment to her.
She came to the house every Wednesday afternoon for several months. We worked at the kitchen table, with Circe – who approved of her – sometimes curled at her feet. She often brought newspaper or magazine articles for me to translate into English. With the aid of A Course in Contemporary Romanian, I managed to construct sentences that sounded as if they hadn’t come out of a phrase book. She was patient when I committed ludicrous errors, and praising on those occasions when I saw chinks of light in the linguistic darkness.
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Early in 1989, I received a letter from the Literature Department of the British Council inviting me to visit Romania. I accepted the invitation and flew to Bucharest on a fine Sunday in March, having first deposited Circe at the kennels Michael Gordon had recommended, and where she was known as by far the most voluble and certainly the most energetic of all the dogs the staff had ever cared for.
I set off in more or less total ignorance of the country and its customs. I had no idea, then, that the language would be so approachable and so appealing to the ear. And although I was aware that Romania was currently in the hands of a dictator named Nicolae Ceauşescu, I had no knowledge of the extent of his wickedness. He and his wife, Elena, had been in England in the 1970s, courtesy of the Prime Minister, James Callaghan. The bizarre, diminutive couple had stayed in Buckingham Palace, and the Queen had bestowed upon him the oldest and highest honour in Britain, the Order of the Garter. That much – or rather, that little – I knew.
I was met at the airport by a young man in a long black leather coat who informed me that I was the guest of the Romanian Writers’ union . As the week progressed, I began to wonder what crime I had perpetrated in order to attain this dubious honour. The young man told me he was a television playwright. I was not immediately suspicious of this claim since I understood nothing at that time of the curious workings of Romanian television. I would soon discover by switching on the TV in my hotel bedroom that the screen was blank for most of the day, only coming to dreary life at four in the afternoon with the transmission of parliamentary proceedings. I watched Ceauşescu as he droned on and on from the podium for the regulated two hours. Every ten minutes or so, the toadies in the hall afforded him a standing ovation, as if on cue. Here was television drama of a sickening, soporific kind.