The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Read Free Book Online Page B

Leo worked on his book about Bucharest. The longer I knew him, the more frenzied his writing became. He could not keep up with the city’s obliteration. The place was coming down faster that it could be described. In the eight years he had been here he had watched nearly a quarter of old Bucharest go down: churches, monasteries, private houses and public buildings. It survived in guide books and memoirs, and in the trove of notes and photographs that lay heaped on Leo’s dining table, waiting to be turned into prose. The prose, meanwhile, went from topical to commemorative in a fraction of the time it usually took for such transformations: months, weeks, sometimes days. Leo had begun writing a practical guidebook for a travel company, but had finished up composing an urban elegy, a memorial to a place gone or going at every cobble and cornice.
    Against the wall a metre-square map of Bucharest, stuck with lines and clusters of coloured pins, was attached to a cork board. ‘Red pins are the walks taken, blue pins are the walks yet to take. Black one are the walks you can’t take any more – the lost walks.’
    ‘
The City of Lost Walks
… is that really your title?’
    The finished sheets of his book lay piled on his dining table, indexed
quartier
by
quartier
. I read the names aloud: Dorobanti, Dudesti, Herastrau, Lipscani… while Leo sought out the pages that described where I lived. He handed me a typewritten sheet with lines and arrows in red in the margins:
The building next door, the nineteenth-century Hotel Particulier that once belonged to the Cazanu family, now houses the Union of Artists._]

    I knew of no Lutheran church, and though I had not visited every street and square, I recalled no spires mounting the crowded, crane-ridden skyline I saw from my balcony. As for the mosque and the Ottoman workshops, I could not even place where they might once have stood; the nearest I had seen to a minaret was the brick chimney of the clinic incinerator. For people like Leo, however, the city’s redesign had not succeeded in obliterating the place’s memory of itself; the old town ached in Leo the way a lost limb aches on amputees, pulling on the vacancy it once occupied.
    Half of the information in the paragraph had been crossed out in red; then, alongside it, in copyeditor’s shorthand, Leo had defiantly marked STET .
Stand
– it was only the words that stood, and only through them that the place now would.
    With his racketeering money Leo bought books and paintings and icons. He salvaged from the wrecked buildings, buying job lots of furniture and art from the demolition men, going out with the Lieutenant in a van camouflaged as an ambulance and stripping condemned buildings before the wrecking balls and bulldozers arrived. What he didn’t want he sold on or exchanged at a mysterious place I had never seen and which was called, simply, ‘Shop 36’. It was better known by its more evocative nickname,
le magasin de l’ancien régime
, where the detritus of old Romania found its way to be sold to tourists, gangsters and Party hacks.
    It was as if all that was being destroyed around us was being stored in Leo’s flat, where everything belonged to some scattered or abolished set: from unpaired candelabra and antique chairs to erotic photographs, from unframed canvases to paintingless frames. It was all there, a gilded flotsam of salvage, and it occupied every surface, filled every drawer, teetered over every edge. The paleontologist Cuvier could reconstruct extinct species from a femur or a shin bone. Perhaps Leo might rebuild Bucharest from the glittering remnants he had crammed into his flat? The icons, the paintings, the paving stones and shop signs were all tagged and logged and shelved; there were clothes and jewels, old mirrors, street-signs… a small mother-of-pearl box with a forgotten saint’s fleshless finger sat on top of the only item in Leo’s front room that was not antique: a huge smoked-glass