The Uninvited Guest by John Degen Page B

policemen who possessed such a fine and mysterious set. But there were games they did play very well. Because Nicolae’s father was in the Party when it meant something to be in the party, Nicolae had, in fact, little to fear from the regular police. The Securitate were a different matter, but drunk as he was and with a visa in his pocket he chose to ignore the danger.
    As young men, Nicolae and his friends would go out into the city at night, walking the streets long past curfew, and crossing into different police zones. They didn’t care. They could run fast—they all played handball, some on the under-19 national team, and had the legs of young athletes. Not too many policemen, fat or otherwise, were any match for them on open ground, especially with all the fences to jump and gardens in which to hide. Occasionally, the boys had too much to drink and didn’t see the police coming until it was too late. The police played a trick they favoured, approaching curfew breakers in a car without lights on. They would wait until the car was right beside the young drunks, and then they would switch on their headlights and turn across the road to stop them. It was a ridiculous sort of ruse because as soon as the boys noticed a car approaching without lights on, they knew it was the police and away they would go on their legs. But sometimes drunk beyond all sense, and singing, they didn’t hear the car approaching. The trick worked well enough on those occasions.
    With these young sons of privilege, interaction with police after curfew was little more than a warning, the playing of a game about power. The police wanted the boys to understand that state authority had some control over them, even them, national-level athletes and the sons of Party members. In fact, each side played a little game at night in the quiet streets of Bucharest, both the drunk young men and the police. If the officers suspected the boys were well-connected, and they would have to be to be engaged in such risky behaviour, the police would hold off asking them for identity papers for as long as possible. In that way, they could treat the boys a bit more roughly for a short time. They could push them against the wall and shine torches into their faces. They could order them to be quiet and tap the barrels of their weapons to let them know they meant business. All this the police could do until they discovered who the young men were, but after, they would have to be more polite. So, for the bored and proud officers, there was great advantage in not immediately knowing the names of the drunks they stopped in the streets. And for Nicolae and his friends as well, it was amusing not to volunteer too much information too quickly. Later, of course, Nicolae would not believe dealings with the police were so amusing, but at the time he was just a foolish adolescent with too much time and too little responsibility. He enjoyed the late-night interactions. He especially enjoyed the running away, because he had the young athlete’s pure love of running. There was a coolness and a moisture to the air of the city when he was running, a brilliance, and his legs sprang so effortlessly off the stone streets.
    The interrogations were amusing as well. It was a little dance they all did at those times, the police shoving the boys around and not asking for their papers until they could think of nothing else to do, and Nicolae and his friends being shoved around, protesting, giggling, attempting, each individually, to walk away while someone else was being questioned. One of the boys, a fearless drunk named Paul, would wait until one of his friends had said something particularly stupid to the officers, making them angry. It was not difficult to make these men angry in the middle of the night. These men were very sensitive to insult, and seemed, in particular, always on the watch for an intellectual slight. The young men knew from experience the favourite question