Suicides were occurring daily. One of the first was of the Youth Movement leader, decorated last June by Hitler. Unable to account for a missing twelve million lei, he had shot himself. The police had gone on strike. Their work, they said, was too dangerous. Those who were in power one day, were in prison the next; those who had been in prison, were now in power. The Guardists had taken over and patrolled the streets with revolvers in their holsters.
As the motor-cyclists roared past, the salesman raised one eyebrow and one shoulder. Who these days would buy such a symbol of private wealth as this Hispano?
Bella, when she telephoned that morning, had said: ‘These Guardist police are worse than no police at all. All they do is go round the offices collecting for party funds. And not only the Jewish offices, either. They don’t care whose money they take. They call it cleaning up public life, but even if you find a burglar in your house, you can’t get a Guardist to come and arrest him. I hope you’re staying indoors. Things’ll settle down, of course, but, if I were you, I wouldn’t go out yet awhile.’
Had Harriet taken Bella’s advice she would, like Carol’s financiers and Chief of Police and Chief of Secret Police, have been a prisoner in her own home. As it was, made restless by insecurity, she wandered about the streets and went each day to meet Guy as he left his classes. She imagined he would be less liable to attack if he were with a woman.
Stories were going round that thousands of people had been arrested and thousands executed.
People caught leaving the country were sometimes arrested, sometimes merely stripped of their valuable possessions and allowed to proceed.
‘That Ionescu’s gone,’ said Bella. ‘Him that used to be Minister of Information. He overbalanced trying to face all ways at once. He became a Guardist but he knew he was for it. His children were carrying little fur muffs. Muffs! – at this time of the year, I ask you! Naturally they roused suspicion. The customs men tore them to pieces and found them stuffed with jewellery and gold. I always thought him too clever by half.’
Another who went was Ionescu’s mistress, the singer Florica. She reached Trieste and then turned round and came back again. She was reported as having said: ‘I thought of my country and knew that at such a time I could not leave it.’
But, as Bella pointed out, she was a gipsy and no true Rumanian, so her behaviour was, as one might expect, peculiar.
Harriet, as she walked about in the sticky autumnal heat, saw no open signs of persecution, not even of the Dâmboviţa Jews. What she did see, daily, were processions of Cabinet ministers, civil servants, officers of the armed services, priests, nuns and schoolchildren following the most impressive funerals. For the Guardist leaders were busy disinterring their Martyrs. Raised in batches to which were given heroic names like the Decemvirü and the Nicadorii, the bodies were paraded in giant coffins all over the city and reburied with ceremonies that must be attended by any who hoped to maintain any sort of position in public life.
Down in the Chicken Market Harriet found a memorial service being held over the spot where Calinescu’s murderers had lain. The trembling old peasant who sold her a cabbage said that among the mourners were ‘the greatest men in the world’.
Who were they? she asked and was told: ‘Hitler, Mussolini, Count Ciano and the Emperor of Japan.’
After the ceremony the site was roped off and spread each day with fresh flowers, to the inconvenience of the market traffic.
‘The great day, of course,’ said Bella, ‘will be when they dig up His Nibs at Fort Jilawa. They’ll wait till November, the anniversary of his death. Then, Nikko says, trouble will really begin.’
The papers announced that the demand for admission to the Iron Guard was so great, the list had to be closed.
Among those who appeared in Guardist uniform was the Pringles’ landlord, who was also their next-door neighbour. In the past, when he had met Harriet on the landing, he had greeted her courteously: now, in his green shirt and breeches, his moustache sternly waxed, he stared over her head and she began to fear him. He might have – almost certainly did have – a key to their flat. She remembered the mysterious disappearance of the oil-well plan. He had been one of her suspects. If he came in while they were out, he would almost certainly discover Sasha.
Once or twice, when she left the flat, she saw a man dodge out of sight on the lower flight. She spoke of this to Guy, who thought it would be some agent of the landlord. Embarrassed at having English tenants, he might be seeking an excuse to break their agreement.
She said to Despina: ‘Keep the front door bolted. If the landlord wants to come in, do not let him.’
‘No, no, corniţa,’ Despina assured her, appearing to understand the whole situation. ‘If anyone comes, I do like this …’ She opened the sitting-room door a crack and put her nose to it. ‘If it is the landlord – pouf! I do like this.’ She slammed the door shut. ‘He is a bad man,’ she added in explanation. ‘He beats his cook.’
There were now four meatless days in a week, but even on the other days meat was hard to find. Despina would be away for two or three hours queueing at market stalls and often, on returning, would hold out, with a dramatic gesture, her empty basket. ‘In the market today, no sugar, no coffee, no meat, no fish, no eggs. Nothing, nothing.’
Watching the processions, the daily pageantry amid utter confusion, it seemed to Harriet that the whole country had succumbed, without any sort of resistance, to a lunatic autocracy.
She said to Guy: ‘Everyone in Bucharest is trailing round after these Guardist turn-outs. Why is there no opposition to it all?’
‘There’s no chance of any active opposition,’ he said. ‘The only people with the moral fibre to oppose anything are in prison. The Communists – but not only the Communists: the Liberal Democrats, everyone and anyone likely to show a spark of revolt: they’re all in prison.’
‘What about Maniu?’
‘What can he do? Anyway, from what I’ve seen of him, I should not think he’s much more than a showpiece: Rumania’s “Good Man”. He was the leader of the Transylvanian peasants, and Transylvania is lost. You must realise that this new dictatorship is much tougher than the old. There are not only prisons now, there are concentration camps: and there are these young men trained at Dachau, all waiting for a chance to beat someone up. Yet,’ Guy added, ‘there is opposition of a sort. A typical Rumanian opposition. Satire. It’s the most difficult sort to repress.’ He told her how in the Doi Trandifiri, the meeting place of intellectuals, there was proof that the liberal sanity of the past survived. Deathly fearful though people were, there they were still able to laugh. They had nicknamed the Iron Guard ‘le régime des pompes funèbres’ and a great many funny stories went round about Horia Sima and his visions. Sima was in conflict with Codreanu’s father who declared that his son’s spirit disapproved of the present leader and had appointed his father as his vicar-on-earth. The old man had to be put under house-arrest and, knowing he was in danger of assassination, he said he preferred to stay indoors as fewer accidents happened there.
‘There’s opposition, too,’ said Guy, ‘from a much more influential source – the German minister. He’s tired of all this marching and singing “Capitanul”. He wants the country back at work. Several big industrial firms have had to close down because the directors are in prison and the workers are all in the Iron Guard. The financial situation is chaotic, Carol banked all the national wealth abroad in his own name. Now it’s frozen. On top of that, the Guardists want to start a full-scale persecution of the Jews.’