‘What are you doing here?’ he asked the soldiers.
But they did not understand him. However, the pilot who had announced to his boss — falsely it seemed — that their helicopter could be blown out of the sky at any moment, suddenly reappeared. He translated Jimfish’s question for the soldiers, who were most amused and gave this answer: ‘We are here to shoot the dictator and his wife.’
‘Without a trial?’ Jimfish was shocked.
‘Of course there is to be a trial. The dictator and his wife will be charged with treason, fraud, murder and embezzlement. When found guilty they will be executed.’
Jimfish felt more confused than ever. ‘But then this is not a revolution, it’s a military coup.’
‘You’re a simple lad,’ the soldiers told him, ‘and you can’t see the difference between a coup and a revolution. Where have you been all your life?’
‘I come from Africa,’ Jimfish told them.
‘Ah, well,’ they nodded, ‘that explains it. In Africa you have a coup every day of the week. That’s to say a violent, undemocratic takeover of the state, often by disaffected military men. Our revolution is very different. It’s a spontaneous democratic uprising, led by and for the people. Anyone who calls it a coup is a counter-revolutionary simpleton and will face the same fate as the dictator, if this simpleton is not careful.’
Jimfish still failed to see the difference, though he was too polite to say so. He was keenly reminded of his own country, where show trials, run by supine judges, reduced legal tribunals to loyal mouthpieces of the regime and turned judicial chambers into kangaroo courts. His puzzlement must have been clear to the soldiers, who were gripped by a burst of missionary desire to enlighten this benighted African. When Jimfish offered to leave the house, they insisted he stay and see how much better things were done in Europe. So it was that Jimfish had a seat at the events that now unfolded.
First, the soldiers drew lots as to which of them would serve in the firing squad. Then they selected the wall against which the guilty pair would be shot the moment their trial ended. Next the haggard defendants were led into the courtroom to face the military judges. A lawyer, brought from Budapest to represent the prisoners, advised them to tell the court they were mad. Nicolae refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court, while Lenuţa — who was, it seemed, more widely known as Elena — said little.
Arriving at the verdict took no time at all.
Jimfish watched as the condemned prisoners were bound with rope and marched to the appointed wall. The firing squad took a few steps back and then, apparently unable to wait another moment, the soldiers wheeled, opened fire and kept shooting. Other soldiers appeared at upstairs windows and joined in the fusillade, so that, for long moments after the first shots knocked Nicolae and Elena to the ground, dozens more bullets continued to buffet their bodies, making them shake and quiver as if alive.
Finally, silence settled and the bodies were carried away to be buried in unmarked graves. All those who had taken part in the execution wished each other a very happy Christmas and said it was the best gift they could have had. Jimfish briefly wondered if he should have said something about the diamonds of the Emperor Bokassa, which Elena had in her pocket, or the moon rocks from Richard Nixon that Nicolae carried, but he rather feared the soldiers would immediately dig up the bodies again.
Terrible though the scenes had been, he tried to feel grateful for being shown why a military coup was not to be confused with a revolution, and exactly where a fair trial differed from a kangaroo court. But the knowledge was bitter. He had begun to see that such things depended on a triad of useful principles: first — on who had the guns; next on who was dead when the shooting stopped; and last but most important: on who was in charge of the words used to talk about what had happened when it was all over.
CHAPTER 11
Bucharest, Romania, Christmas 1989
Jimfish flew back to Bucharest, on Christmas Day, aboard the same helicopter in which he had begun his journey with Nicolae and Lenuţa-Elena. He landed once again on the roof of the Party Headquarters to be met by the same generals, Securitate officers and Communist Party functionaries who had waved goodbye to the presidential couple on their last fateful journey. They all wore the same hats, yet they were now very different. ‘Viva the revolution! Romania libera!’ they chorused, waving their hats, much as they had done just hours earlier when they chanted ‘Ni-co-lae Cea-oooo-şes-cooo… Romaneeeeaaah!’
The change in their demeanour was nothing short of miraculous. They had shed their Party badges, unclenched their fists and went about hugging each other in an ecstasy of self-congratulation. Gone was every trace of banners and bunting, along with portraits of the beloved leader. A lifetime’s solemn, sincere, dogged attachment to the Party had vanished overnight.
So complete was the transformation that Jimfish’s head began to spin like a giddy top. The men who led this revolution were surely the same officials who willingly murdered, harried, spied on and lied to the very people in the square all through the long rule of the late dictator. Who had flinched in horror when the crowds dared to boo the Genius of the Carpathians and who fled for the roof when the crowds, revved up on the rocket fuel of lumpen-proletarian rage, invaded Party Headquarters.
When Jimfish asked them what they felt about Nicolae and Elena’s show trial they looked at him as if he were quite mad. When he admitted that he had been saddened by the firing squad in Târgovişte, they laughed outright. Was he, they demanded, a counter-revolutionary?
‘We fought for freedom and defeated the tyrant. Finishing him off was the best Christmas present in the world. We have given the people what they wanted: the dictator is dead. Anyone who can’t see that is an enemy of the revolution.’
With that they beat Jimfish savagely about the head and might have killed him had he not run into the very lift that had once saved Nicolae from the angry mob. The lift descended to the ground floor and Jimfish escaped into the giant square in front of Party Headquarters, where a vast crowd was still camped in their threadbare coats, cold and hungry, watching on a large screen scenes from the execution of Nicolae and Elena, replayed day and night, as if this were all the food they needed, and the images of the bloody end of these two monsters was also the end of tyranny and terror. While to Jimfish — ashamed though he was of his negative thoughts — it seemed as if the way the Ceauşescus had died, rather than killing off the past, had given the old demons a new lease of life, free to haunt the country for years to come.
As he turned away from the ghastly images, a tall, elegant black man in a dove-grey tunic, wearing on his head a leopard-skin toque, offered Jimfish his silk handkerchief.
‘Wipe the blood from your eyes, my friend.’
The stranger wore heavy black spectacles and he carried a wooden sceptre, surmounted by a leopard.
‘How sad to find these crowds rejoicing at the murder of their Great Leader. We would never allow this in Africa.’
For the first time since the loss of Lunamiel, the murder of Jagdish and the shooting of Soviet Malala, Jimfish felt happiness rising inside him like the sun and he grasped the other’s hand. ‘My compatriot! I’m from the Mother Continent, too. My name is Jimfish of Port Pallid, a tiny town on the eastern coast of South Africa.’
The other lifted his sceptre in salute. ‘And I am Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga — which is to say, “The All-powerful, Earthy, Fiery Warrior Who, through His Endurance and Inflexible Will to Win, Moves from Conquest to Conquest, Trailing Fire in His Wake”. I am the embodiment of Zaire, a country twenty per cent bigger than Mexico and very, very rich in diamonds and minerals. You may call me the Great Leopard.’