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‘particular skills’ Leo mentioned when I confronted him and asked him outright why I had been picked. Even so, looking back I would find it hard to explain the peculiar disengagement between my own life and the life around me, with its shortages and routine repressions or violence.
Hard to explain?
To others certainly. But it was not hard to live. Oppression makes its own normality, levels off amid the everyday. It breaks the surface of our existence, and then our existence closes back over it, changed and not changed by the violence inside. Soon I was shopping in the diplomatic shops, swimming in the diplomatic club, doing the rounds of the western party circuit. I went to the city centre’s pseudo-western bars, where cocktails that were parodies of American cocktails were made by waiters who were parodies of American waiters. I was attuned to the place’s duality; to its duplicity.

    My home attachments fell away – mostly from disuse, but always helped by the Romanian postal service and telecom network. I never broke contact with home – it was nothing so deliberate. It was more like a loosening of the moorings coil by coil until one day, without noticing it, I had drifted out of sight of land. After some desultory letters my relationship with a girl from college dwindled into an exchange of half-hearted recriminations, then into nothing, or at any rate no letters. With my friends, our lives had become so different we barely described the same world to each other when we wrote. Ionescu let me use his fax machine to deal with the solicitor in charge of something called my parents’ ‘estate’, and with Deadman and Sons, ‘tailor-made house clearance solutions’. I was due to supervise their tailor-made clearance in July. It was a task I dreaded more than all the militia, Securitate agents and police dogs in Romania, because if, as I hoped, I had begun to float free, that house remained my dragging anchor.
    I could never have felt homesick, not after the home I had come from, but I might have felt violently transplanted, especially in those first weeks. Or afraid. But instead it was curiosity that consumed me. Here the lack of options was balanced by the fact that everything you did had consequences. Leo told me one evening: ‘You’ll like it here. The margin for manoeuvre is very narrow but very deep…’ But I had known that from the moment I set foot on the sticky tarmac of Otopeni airport.

    When I left home in 1987 to go to college the October after the strike ended at Wapping it was not freedom I found but drift, a sufficiently plausible imposter to have me fooled for the first few months. I even believed that university would let me make good on all the dashed promise of my parents’ lives. My father had wanted to be a journalist, my mother a teacher. In a different generation they might have done so: certainly in a different social class.
    They came close, at least in terms of physical proximity, the kind of proximity that emphasises only unbridgeable distance: he in the printing works and she as a supply secretary, working from school to school on short-term contracts for the council. Twice she worked at my school for two weeks at a time. I remember one day finding her during the lunch break eating her sandwiches from a Tupperware box, alone and apart from the full-timers who chatted and laughed and smoked together. Her hands were trembling – he had already begun his war on her, his relentless, vengeful campaign of belittlement and diminution – and she looked at me and smiled uncertainly over her sandwich. She looked absurd and pitiable, but school was no place for pity so I looked right through her and passed by.
    ‘Wasn’t that your son?’ I heard someone ask her behind me. I didn’t hear her reply.
    She never mentioned what I had done that day. We never spoke about it until a year later when, on my twelfth birthday, he had knocked off from work early to come home and start drinking. She