The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness Page A

revolver. Even the garden attendants had a paramilitary air. The
nomenklatura
had their own shops and clubs and travel agency, their own schools and spas and restaurants. Apparently they even had their own greenhouses in the Botanical Gardens.
    Inside was a plant that flowered every decade. We were catching it just at the end of its span, turning inwards, readying itself for another cycle of sleep. There were insects that lived half a day, whose existences were frenzied miniatures of life, and there were plants, like this one, that existed a hundred years, but lived only for a week every ten. This one crammed all its life into a few tight petals around a delicate stamen. To me it didn’t look like much – one part flower and three parts reputation – but it was sufficiently rare for the greenhouse to be empty of any other form of botanical life. For the remaining nine years and fifty-one weeks of the decade, viewers had to make do with a colour photograph stapled to a wooden frame. A notice alongside announced proudly that other examples of the plant were in the
Tuileries
and the Oxford University Botanical Gardens. In a glass case to the right, a faded newspaper image from 1979 showed Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu bending over it, and a sepia photograph of Queen Marie of Romania holding the infant plant, or one of its ancestors, in a terracotta pot. We stood there in the glass room, perspiration beading on our bodies, as an attendant ladled water over a tray of burning coals. My skin prickled in the swaddling heat. The place smelled musky, like a bed after sex, the air twice breathed.
    Later, I tried to kiss her mouth. She turned away. ‘Please don’t try to kiss me.’ Not hurt or offended; fending off clumsy advances was just par for the course.

    It was early evening when Cilea took me home, her driver’s eyes, half-shielded by a cap, looking me over in the rear-view mirror. At Calea Victoriei we became stuck in human traffic: a long queue of people walking slowly down the avenue, hemmed in on all sides by soldiers blowing whistles at them. They marched to an unseen, unheard band, in step to some collective hallucination, half there and hollowed out with boredom. Some had poles in the air, others raised and lowered their fists in unison. A woman with a loudhailer and a stopwatch was growling orders at them to stop and start and wave their arms at precisely timed intervals. She was dressed in a tracksuit, looked like a cross between an Olympic shot-putter and an army major, and was probably both. ‘They’re rehearsing,’ said Cilea, ‘for May Day.’ The bull-jawed woman stomped over to the car and looked in. The driver flashed some paper at her and she nodded, backtracked and yelled something at the soldiers, who parted the crowd to let us through. As we passed she saluted. I looked back to see her watching us, full of admiration and disgust.
    Cilea dropped me off outside my house with a kiss on the cheek and a wave. That was it. The whole afternoon, so promising, had sunk into anticlimax. The wine had given me a headache and my mouth clicked with dryness. I took a long deep breath before going into the flat.
    Leo lay on the sofa wearing my dressing gown. His eye was still oily and closed over, but his mouth was cleaned up. He let out a long rolling fart, muffled by the towelling of my dressing gown, and lolloped sideways off the sofa. Through a slit in the gown I saw his swollen balls the colour of boiled ham and a boot-shaped bruise on his inner thigh. Two cigarettes lay in the ashtray, and a cold
cafetière
half-full of sodden coffee grits stood beside a British Embassy mug.
    ‘There’s a hell of a show on Calea Victoriei…’ Leo said, putting on the kettle, ‘some big woman, a Brezhnev in drag, making all these poor sods march in step. Looks like a wake.’
    ‘It’s May Day. They’re rehearsing for the parade.’
    ‘No shit? Thanks for that. Been here a few weeks and already telling old Leo the