The Romanian Question

I BEG YOUR PARDON

Speaking after his inauguration in Bucharest’s Atheneum concert hall, Iliescu was unapologetic about his government’s role in dealing with street protests last week, although he admitted there had been excesses.

Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990

THE MANNERS OF these people, with their casual discourt-esies and easy racialism, soon made Jerry as uncomfortable with the 50s as he had been with the 80s. What had changed? He was getting fazed again, almost as bad as he had become by the early 60s. “Arse that way, elbow that,” he told himself ritualistically as he made his cautious progress - some lemming to its cliff - back to his Royal Albert.

He was experiencing a certain amount of deterioration. As he pedalled, the mist grew warm and began to stink, reminding him of the wartime factories of Newcastle, of heavy locomotives panting in the steely evening light; the only colour the vivid flames of furnaces and mills. He had no idea where he was.

“Time travel had for too long been a matter of instinct, its secrets the province of romantic bohemians and crazed ex-perimenters.” Bishop Beesley spoke from somewhere at the centre of his steam-driven orrery, from some unlearned future. “It’s high time we brought System and Intellect to the Question of Time.” He pronounced some reasonable imitation of what he guessed was the current mode. Or was it post-mode now?

Jerry was beginning to sense his bearings. Somewhere from the late 80s he heard a howl of terrible xenophobia as a thousand intellectuals turned their hatred on the Unavoidable Present and many thousands of Muslims expressed their anger with two hundred years of insult which they had previously pretended to themselves was only the province of the ignorant and ill-educated amongst their neighbours.