Michael Harding: The stillness of a young woman’s gaze can be as frightening as the edge of a cliff

I was flying across Europe as the children of Algerians were killing cartoonists down below. By the time I got to Bucharest the news was on every screen, and I felt uneasy. It’s not that Bucharest is Syria, but it’s halfway there, and there is something about Romania that feels like the beginning of the road to the east, or the end of Europe.

The plane landed at 8.30pm. In the intimate arrivals lounge, burly men with black eyebrows watched me closely as I sat at a table in Segafredo drinking an espresso with as much testosterone in my posture as I could muster.

The man from whom I had booked an apartment in Bucharest by email had said he would send his driver, Marius, to collect me, so I was waiting for someone in a peaked cap to tap me on the shoulder.

Eventually an unshaven man with a woollen hat and no English walked up to me and showed me a cigarette package on which my name was written.

“Are you Marius?” I wondered.

“No,” he said and walked off, expecting me to follow.

I followed him to an indoor car park, where we got into a small Toyota. He drove into the city and pulled over to a kerb. The dirty snow on the pavement was heaped up against the walls of houses and my iPhone showed the temperature to be -16.

The driver in the woolly hat eyed me in the mirror. I eyed him back but he won.

She asked me to follow her

A young woman arrived in a fur-lined coat with a hood and high boots. She paid the driver and asked me to follow her. She walked ahead in the dark, and I carried my two bags and tried not to slip on the ice that had hardened on the sidewalks.

Behind the shelter of some trees we entered an apartment block that retained in its architectural curves and solid stone staircase the grandeur of the old regime, and I followed her boots up two flights of stairs, where she paused and began to unlock a door.

Great, I thought. My apartment at last.

But it wasn’t. Inside a stout woman in a headscarf was holding a furious dog that seemed particularly annoyed with me.

To the right and left of this hallway were open doors to her kitchen, and her living room.

I was about to protest, but then the furry-hooded woman opened another door at the end of the hallway, where I discovered an apartment within the apartment; an elegant 1950s world of big armchairs, a walnut writing desk, dark mahogany furnishings, and tiny globes of pale cream light hanging from the tentacles of an old silver chandelier.

The woman in the furry hood sized me up, and for a moment I thought we might have a conversation.

The stillness of a young woman’s gaze can be as frightening as the edge of a cliff. I didn’t know whether she liked me or wanted to shoot me.

She had dark eyes, accentuated by eyeliner beneath the lower lashes, and from inside her hood she watched me like a hawk.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “someone will make hot water work and bring heater.”

Then she turned on her heel and I was alone in Bucharest, with shadows of the 20th century in every room, and dust rising from old armchairs, and the sound of someone urinating in another apartment somewhere in the distance. But I was so exhausted that I lay down on the creaking bed and fell instantly asleep.

I had a dream

I dreamed of a horse and a young woman crossing a river. The woman was guiding the horse. The river was shallow but the horse needed her to negotiate the stones.

When I awoke the sun was shining in the window and the ice outside was melting. I could hear someone practising on a piano downstairs. The bells in a nearby church were calling people to prayer.

When I turned on the television I could find nothing at all about the killings in Paris.

I walked through the slush to the nearest church, and was drawn into the shadows where candles burned before the dark icons, and I remained there for a long while before going farther down the street to eat an omelette in a cheap cafe, where men in black clothes were smoking and drinking coffee and oozing testosterone into the still air, and then I remembered my dream of the horse, and I felt safe again and totally at home in the beautiful city of Bucharest.