A Dog's Life(42)

The next stop was Iaşi, the capital of Moldavia, where 10,000 Jews were massacred in 1941. I was supposed to give a talk at the university, but this had been cancelled. (On governmental instructions, no less, I was to learn.) I spent the evening with Ştefan, an expert on American literature, and we got happily sozzled in a nearby restaurant thanks to the piles of lei I was carrying.

On Thursday morning I was in Bucharest again, and the surly receptionist was again on duty. He handed me the form to fill in. I reminded him that I had completed it on Sunday. He insisted that I do so once more. I remembered that my father’s supposed date of birth was 20 April 1888, and duly recorded it. My dedicated foe seized the paper from me, but his hopes of chancing on a different date were confounded. I was all smiles.

That Friday was memorable in many ways. In the morning, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, condemned Romania’s bad record on human rights. Dozens of writers and artists who had been invited to meet me at a reception in the British Embassy that evening were suddenly disinvited by telephone. I spent the morning with two translators and my future Romanian publisher, and was picked up by the television dramatist who drove me to the University of Bucharest. On the way, I asked him if there was a gay scene in the capital.

‘By “gay” do you mean “humorous”?’ he replied.

I told him what I meant.

‘We do not have such people in Romania.’

‘There must be some in Central and Eastern Europe,’ I suggested.

‘They are all in Budapest.’

He dropped me by the steps of the university and zoomed off. On arrival at the English department, I informed a woman who is now a friend and likes to be addressed as Micky, that I had come to give a talk to the students. ‘But we were expecting you last Tuesday,’ she said. She made me a cup of tea, then phoned the head of the department, who had gone home for the weekend. The two resourceful teachers rustled up about a hundred students, who plied me with questions on any number of subjects. The authorities had given the department the wrong day for my lecture, knowing perfectly well that I would be out of town. Micky and her boss were breaking the law by allowing me to speak on the Friday. They had no written permission to invite a visitor from abroad into the English department, even though the visitor was English. They knew they were taking a serious risk.

There were police cars galore in the streets surrounding the British Embassy. Mrs Arbuthnot, the wife of the ambassador, was laughing at the thought that a mere writer should attract more policemen than she had ever seen. The palest man in the world was at the party. ‘What a pity you couldn’t talk to the students today,’ were his first words to me. The plot was unravelling. ‘Oh, but I did,’ I answered, and I swear he turned paler. ‘What did you talk about?’ he enquired when he had recovered somewhat from the shock. ‘Lots of things,’ I said. ‘Politics, the theatre, sex.’ ‘How many students were there?’ he asked, thinking of those young minds being tainted by Western decadence. ‘A hundred. Perhaps more.’

As he walked away, Rosemary – who worked for the British Council, and spoke fluent, idiomatic Romanian – remarked of the world’s palest man, ‘He’s such a wanker.’ Hearing this, Mrs Arbuthnot laughed even louder. ‘Every room in this building is bugged,’ she explained. ‘I can just see them rushing to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up that word. You’ve really put them in a tizzy.’

After the reception, I went back to the flat Rosemary rented. There were five of us – a Romanian actor and his girlfriend, and a dissident poet whose hangdog expression haunted me for years. Nearly a decade later, I learned that he had been blackmailed into working for the Securitate, the secret police. A police car followed the taxi we were in, and remained outside the apartment until three in the morning. It followed me back to the hotel.

I checked out of the Intercontinental on Sunday morning. I thanked the surly receptionist for his interesting contribution to my happy stay. Rosemary came with me to the airport. A police car was again in attendance.

I was reunited with Circe on Monday. She was stand-offish for the first few minutes, reminding me with her soulful eyes that I had abandoned her. We were barely home before she was barking to go to the park. I obeyed her loud commands, and was eventually forgiven.

One of my new friends had related a wonderfully funny and sinister story during that eventful, surreal week. It seemed that a British politician, David Steel, had presented the Ceauşescus with a black Labrador puppy named Winston. Once in Romania, the dog was renamed Comrade Corbul (‘corb’ means ‘raven’, and can mean ‘vulture’) and made a member of the Communist party. He grew into a sleek and lively animal, because of the varied diet on which he was reared. No cheap cuts for him. My friend was waiting at the traffic lights on Calea Victoriei when a state limousine drew up in front of him. A uniformed chauffeur was, as ever, in the front seat, but it was the figure on the back seat that startled him. There was Comrade Corbul, with a ribboned medal on his chest, perched in lonely splendour, the grandest of political animals. ‘I laughed at the sight, but then I choked on my laughter.’