The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Read Free Book Online

known as ‘the Lieutenant’: a tattooed, multiply earringed gypsy in riding britches and Cossack boots who revved his Yamaha Panther through the slums of Bucharest like an Iron Curtain
Easy Rider
. He wore a blue tunic with gold buttons and officer’s chevrons – hence his nickname – and resembled a veteran of some Mongol rape-and-pillage squad. The Lieutenant took care of logistics. He commanded an army of Poles and Romany caravaners who moved about in the night, across fields and mountains and urban wastelands, slid under razor wire and swept over electric fences, insubstantial as the dawn mist. They siphoned off petrol from the state service stations and disappeared equipment from the malfunctioning factories; they subtracted produce from the collectivised farms and re-routed flour and cooking oil from the night convoys. Inventories all over the country adjusted themselves to their passing.
    It was the black market that held the country together, kept it afloat by filling its many gaps and rectifying, at a price, its ruinous bureaucracy. It was the system’s other self, its shadow aspect. Perhaps the system even owed its survival to it, the way the wall owes its survival to the ivy that sucks it dry before becoming the only thing that holds it up.
    But Leo’s great project was not the black market. It was Bucharest and the book he was writing about it:
City of Lost Walks.

    ‘Next of kin?’ asked Leo when I told him, a month into my stay, about the form I had filled in at the ministry, ‘I’m flattered. Does that make me your guardian?
In loco parentis?
Are there any… duties?’
    There was nothing paternal about Leo, any more than there was anything filial left in me, but I could tell the idea grew on him. Such filiality as I had died with my mother. She was so ill for so long that her death was really more of a confirmation than an event. For two years we had made do with her shade, a hologram of the person who had been so tough and substantial that I never doubted she would rise above all my father’s calculating savagery. What I learned from her was that when the strong break they break irrecoverably because they never cracked, because they never accommodated themselves to what sought to destroy them.
    One day, soon after my thirteenth birthday, I came home from the park chewing my cigarette-camouflaging mints to find her rocking on the sofa, speechless, her face blank but her eyes holding a sorrow beyond what could be expressed. My father was shaking her, telling her to snap out of it and make his dinner:
There’s football on in a minute
. He had turned up the television news full blast to make his point: battleships on a churn of grey sea, helicopters and aircraft strafing the sky over the Falklands cutting to a map with an arrow pointing to a patch of land that seemed to me, even in those Union-Jacked times, to be geographically and politically utterly irrelevant. Saying so in school the previous week had earned me a caning from the religious studies teacher and a punch in the eye from one of my schoolmates. My mother had laughed when I explained my black eye. Not for long. My father had blacked hers with a quick, casual flick of his knuckles.
    Now I remember the intensity of my sorrow at her dying better than I remember her; and that was a second sorrow, the knowledge that the rest of my life would be her ebbing away: first from the places she had used to be, then from the memory of the child who had loved her. For years I would stop in the middle of what I was doing, drop everything and close my eyes to make sure I still had her image in my mind. Four years later there was only the faintest outline, blanking with overexposure. Now that its object was so faint, it was the mourning itself that I mourned, its lost intensities. They had at least reminded me of what feeling felt like.
    I had always been envious when people in books described their parents as
remote
. For me, remoteness would have been a