But that's another story

By Dan Lungu
 As he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and
painstakingly tweezed at the hair tufts growing out of his
ears, Mr Stoenescu remembered a joke he'd heard the day
before and, tee-hee-hee, chuckled unwittingly. There was
still plenty of time till his nephew was due. However, he had
his routines and they came first. The blare of the TV was
wafting in from the dining room. He trimmed his ear- and
nose-hair every two weeks, yet when it came to shaving, he'd
do it every morning, day in, day out, somehow out of reflex,
a reflex going back to the times he used to hold a position.
Thanks to the circumstances, he'd come to be charged with
major responsibilities from a young age, yup, he chuckled
again, he'd been appointed to a great variety of senior
positions, quite delicate some of them, but that's another
story. In the beginning he'd found it quite hard, the shaving
bit, that is, as he was only used to taking a bath on Saturdays,
in the cask, behind the stable in summer and in the heated
kitchen in winter. In the shade of the adobe wall, under the
ink-blue sky, not far from the plot where the maize plants
were rustling, he'd scrub his own back, for his father had died
in the war and male siblings he had none only sisters. His
father had breathed his last on the eastern front, yet his
mother, his sisters and himself had claimed all their lives, as
counselled by some tovarisch, that he'd died a hero's death
on the western front fighting the fascists, but that's another
story. For fifty years he'd been fresh shaved every morning,
with the odd exception. He'd scrape his straight- or safety-
razor across his cheek, carefully stretching the skin with two
fingers, whilst listening to the radio or the TV. He'd enjoy the
familiar cracking of stub, rapt in contemplation of the lather,
thick as whipped cream, revealing swathe upon florid
swathe of freshened up skin, ready to show 'em all who's top
dog. At his mother's death he was expected, according to
custom, not to interfere with the growth of his beard for forty
days. And he would have fain gone ahead and done it, hadn't
he, 36 hours into his mourning, received a phone call from a
friend warning him he was being rumoured to have fallen
pray to superstition. He'd always had friends in high places,
whom he'd do favours to in his turn. So he removed his black
armband and glided his razor over his cheeks thus fending
off trouble. It was much later that he started addressing the
issue of his nose and ear hair, when it no longer posed the risk
of being associated with bourgeois practices which would
have incurred serious problems for him. Not unlike the spot
of trouble Dinu had run into, right?
Oh well, funny how of late the smallest gestured
seemed to recall scenes long gone and whatever he touched
displayed its long, tangled roots, thrust deep and spread
throughout a past he'd thought long since consumed by dry
rot, feeding on its soil. He was, of course, in his bathroom
tiled in shades of walnut, complete with Italian basin and
shower, somewhere central, with the shade of trees
soothingly seeping in through the window. Yet he found
himself simultaneously in other rooms his life had taken him
to, like, for instance, a wooden shack, at the youth
construction site he's dipping his shaving brush into a tin
once holding sardines, now filled with cold river water, in
preparation of calling a rally with slogans dispatched from
high up. As if history itself consisted of a sequence of rooms,
not unlike an immense house with rooms opening into each
other; you go from room to room, and there's no way you
could have reached the one you're in at the moment, the one
you're having your tea or shaving in, if you hadn't crossed all
the rooms leading to it. A kind of causality he startled at the
word. That happened to him occasionally, out of reflex,
when delicate words popped into his thoughts. Time was
when such words could have landed him in trouble if, giving
free rein to his thoughts, he would have used them idly, but
that's another story. A brief, fleeting startle. Like a bird's
shadow on a child's hopscotch, he felt like saying, but there
was no one to say it to. His cheeks were now flaccid. His
bushy eyebrows, though, which could give people the
shivers in their day, had not entirely lost their volume. They
still kept something of the electricity of power. On the
whole, he was pleased with his looks. Other folks in his age,
or even younger, were already feeding the linden trees in the
cemetery. True, tee-hee-hee, in his age other folks were
presidents, but that's another story. Oh well, it had started
some time back, more precisely, after having that dream,
hmmm, what should he call it?, unusual… surreal. Since that
time he'd started remembering all sorts of things, the past
seemed closer than ever, his skin was crawling with history.

Mr Esco
(a national epopee,
coming-of-age novel and riddle)

Mr Esco was born out of a tinned fish box or out of

a jar of stewed fruit, no one knows for sure. Some claim he
has emerged from the foam of sheep-milk whey, only to be
taken for complete idiots by others. Perhaps we should side
with those holding less extreme views and talk about the
weather, or join the revolutionaries and debate the
Rumanian spelling reform. Anyway, it is important to know
that in his childhood Mr Esco was partial to a game of
noughts and crosses using a stick to trace the grid in fresh
cowpats. In his teens he quite enjoyed having lift rides in
town. Yet more important than all that is what happened to
Mr Esco and his wife yesterday around lunchtime. They
found out, completely by chance, on a zebra crossing, that
early in the nineteenth century, teller windows had been
invented. Now the moment they found out that fact, Mr and
Mrs Esco started being dragged from one teller window to
another. A clerk with decayed teeth whispered into their
ears: if the woman keeps being driven from pillar to post for
more than three times, she'll give birth to a child with two
heads and four legs. A second clerk, who'd been
eavesdropping, said: the species tends to adapt to
bureaucracy. A third one, who'd been eavesdropping with
both ears, joined in to say: tough luck!

When that luridly dressed woman approached him

he was on the Copou hill, not far from the tree once wrapped
in yellow polythene, a tree that had shaken from the
foundation his confidence in the present. It was a beautiful
day, with marine overtones, and he felt as carefree as a
seashell. Wrapped in penumbra, as if the sun had been
shading its light from somewhere round the corner or
through a filtering cloth, the street, the houses, the people
had acquired a sort of strange imponderability, verging on
oblivion. A snug, stale happiness was oozing forth from each
and every thing. Only in dreams can one experience a state
confusing and at the same time so real, akin to the happiness
distilled from repeated defeats through a subtle effort of self-
deceit. The luridly dressed woman seemed to comprehend
all those things and that's why she appeared to be walking
differently. Briskly, not languidly. Lovely weather for a
stroll, Vasya, she said, with the most natural air in the world,
bloody bitch, as she came to a halt. A routine statement, by
the sound of it, yet one that thrust him into the past, far into
the past, too, back in the days when he was incredibly young
and favoured being called Vasya rather than Vasile, the days
when, in order to secure a career, one was supposed to like
vodka rather than wine at the communist party functions.
Quite, he replied, as he made panic-stricken efforts to place
her. Still, it may well rain tomorrow, Vasilicã, she added,
watching without a trace of concern the sky furrowed by
long, whitish rib-like clouds. That second intervention threw
him even farther back in time, back in the days when his
mother, the only one calling him Vasilicã, used to divine next
week's weather in the gizzards and entrails of birds. He
became imperceptibly flustered and, unsteady on his feet
like a boxer in the wake of two unexpected blows, felt the
need to sit down on the bank. Yet that was not all. The
tranquil, petty bourgeois dream, was getting rough around
the edges, acquiring the makings of a nightmare the kind
favoured by explosive or at least metaphysical natures. He
was tempted to say revolutionary, but the word had long
since lost its glamour. Basil! The women called out to him on
the verge of hysteria. Whereupon he gave a visible start.
That's how he's been known among writers and artists, in the
days when he'd held one of the positions. In the seclusion of
their eccentric studios he'd allowed them to get chummy
with him, and they'd come up with that frenchified name for
him. You're a true Esco, Basil, you've made history, the
woman had added in a no-nonsense sort of voice. You've
done good deeds, you ought to start writing about them, she
added on a prophetic note, record the truth, that is…
Although the woman did appear mad to him, her madness
was not entirely without method, as the Bard would have put
it. The idea of writing his memoirs first irked him, than
gradually came to win him over. The woman laughed and lit
a cigarette with matches made in Brãila. Then she told him
indifferently: there's history you make 'cause you want to,
and there there's history you make in spite of yourself. Mr
Stoenesco was astounded by the weight of her words, yet not
for long, as the luridly dressed woman added: they are like
the left and right legs. History needs two legs in order to be
able to walk, and what they have in common is the place
where they converge… And where's that? Piece of cake: in
the ass. And the woman started shaking with laughter,
choked on her own cigarette smoke, coughed, waved
goodbye to him and left, bent double with laughter. He didn't
know what to think of the whole thing. Never before had he
come across such frivolity and impudence.
The woman had already covered a fair distance
when she turned on her heels and walking backwards she
called out to him in a jocular tone: try not to force any
interpretation upon my words, I'm not even remotely related
to the Austrian Jew. And she started laughing again. See it as
a random occurrence and nothing more, one in a series with
no logic to it, she added. We'll meet again, anyway, won't
we? she almost screamed, as her voice, muffled by urban
murmurs, had lost some of its vigour. Anyway, he was not
sure he wanted to see her again.
In spite of her advice, he couldn't help interpreting,
or rather his mind ran away with him without so much as by
your leave, and he reasoned that it was not by chance
everything had unfolded under the tree once wrapped in
yellow polythene. His ears started ringing with the syntagm
historical requisite and he shooed it away like some
annoying fly. His mind conjured up the image of one of those
metallic green flies buzzing around faeces, but he also drove
that image out of his head, despairing of his inability to come
up with his own words and images to say what he had to say
while his own mind took ample advantage of the things
others had said, things he failed to find anything beyond
anything but a vortex, a void. There was no root there to hold
on to, not a vine, not a straw, not anything but a hint of panic
and dismay. That's what it meant to be alone, he managed to
cogitate, and couldn't for the life of him figure out whether
those had been his own words or not. O the feeling of having
time swept from under one's feet.

On a Tuesday, Mr Esco, traipsing along in his flip-

flops and whistling merrily, left his house in order to buy
some bread and accidentally found himself in Bucharest. So
reluctant was he to go back, that he decided to stay, started a
family got a job and in dew time lost it. He'd always had the
feeling the city was full of ministries, buses, statues and
rushing people. One was hard put to find a quiet corner
where one could take a leak. Although he'd gone to great
lengths to buy a hat and a tie, no one wanted to employ him,
so he went on living happily with his family. Once, a fellow
with a missing tooth and a gold tooth to make up for the gap
offered to pay him for standing eight hours a day on one leg,
but he declined on account of not liking the fellow's face. So
as not to lose touch with reality, he started going out to the
corner beer place where he soon made lots of friends, people
and dogs alike. As a rule, he stayed in touch with reality
together with Mr Ov and Mr Ovici, living in Bucharest on a
temporary basis and keen to make a name for themselves.
Actually, Mr Ov was on his way to Paris, where he meant to
perfect his philosophical system, but he'd felt the need for a
phenomenological stopover. This gentleman was fond of the
traditional local pudding and equally fond of the Calea
Victoriei avenue, where women would stroll, boobs reaching
up to their chins, like a bad case of tonsillitis. Mr Ovici, on
the other hand, collects cities. As soon as he visits them, he
pins them to his lapel, medal-like. Of course, he's a most
distinguished gentleman he goes to sleep wearing a bowtie
with his pyjamas yet when he's had a couple of beers, he
changes into a complete ass, going so far as to claim
Bucharest is made up of a bunch of Turks and another bunch
of Greeks and Armenians, while the rest are frauds, farmers
and a long list of assorted f-words. Mr Ov is trying in vain to
argue with him to the contrary, because Mr Ovici forces his
nose into the beer mug by pulling at his ears and declares:
My name's longer, so I'm right.

The story with the tree swathed in yellow

polythene had a funny enough opening. He first caught a
glimpse of it from the tram, 'twould have been hard not to see
it, a full-sized hornbeam or whatever you call 'em,
dendrology was not one of his fortes, suddenly gone yellow
like a jaundice patient, as weird as a Zeppelin shot down
bang in the centre of the city. He chose to walk on the way
back for the express purpose of watching the marvel at
leisure. He was not the only one marvelling at the sight, but
he'd stopped to ruminate on the image. Most of the passers-
by were wondering what on earth was that thing was. Was
the city hall trying to pull their leg or was that a new method
for treating sick trees. The mystery was soon unravelled by a
lady exiting the institution that hosted the strange
contraption: that was an art project. “Contemporary art” she
volunteered, smiling noncommittally as she shrugged her
shoulders in an apparent attempt to apologise. At first, as one
versed in artistic matters, as he thought of himself, Mr
Stoenesco, was fully appreciative of the joke, yet later on,
when the lady, in the grips of panic, stressed “oh, yes, I'm
telling you contemporary art”, it dawned upon him that
there was no joke and he was left, as it happened quite rarely,
speechless.
He went on home in confusion, unable to put the
story out of his mind. As he pondered the things he'd seen
and heard, his moods were swinging from surprise to
disillusionment, from bafflement to bitterness, from
revulsion to curiosity… Thanks to the position he used to
hold, the artistic movement of the city was thoroughly
mapped in his head. He was quite familiar with those who
had talent and with those who didn't. He knew the style of
each one of them as well as the more obscure depths of their
psychologies (they'd frequently plotted, hadn't they, against
the communist party injustice and obtuseness), he'd
supported them from within the system, yet try as he may, he
couldn't even begin to imagine who'd come up with such…
he was at a loss for words… well, yes, with such nonsense. It
was not that the piece lacked talent. That was a blatant case
of imposture. With a capital I. Personally, he who had
protected art for years and years under the dictatorship and
helped it survive under terrible circumstances, could only
feel disgusted. He made several phone calls. Melancholy or
cheerful voices, slightly surprised, cautious or saccharine
voices answered him and, little by little, they succumbed to
conversation. As they nattered along, he could almost see
their faces, marked by age, of course, the years like great
black oxen tread the world, don't they, he could picture their
studios like just as many forlorn shells, strewn with stuffed
birds, dry fish hands, spindles and spinning wheels, dusty
albums and old icons, strange-looking stones, brass objects,
clay pots and bulrush stems with flowering spikes, alongside
the omnipresent Moses with his little devil's horns. Not
infrequently he'd penetrated those temples of creation, both
shabby and resplendent at the same time, steeped in mystery,
where the artist, torn between unfathomable states, laid his
soul on the easel. He'd trodden that space with a hint of
shyness, but also aware of the importance of his position.
Sometimes the place reeked of stale wine and sour beer, but
that's another story. They'd been whispering things that
might have landed them in jail for years on end. They'd
grumbled against the socialist regime, talked about the good
side of bourgeois art, even about abstract and American art,
he'd been expressing support of the new generation, meant to
infuse the local scene with new blood and he'd turned a blind
eye to the religious paintings propped face down in the
corners of the studios. Some of them he'd help sell to the
Central Committee collectors, to doctors and lawyers and
even to people living abroad. During the last years of the
regime, the years of the grumbling stomachs, he's helped
them exchange paintings for salami, meat, butter, coffee and
many such things. He'd happened to mediate between
ancient, smouldering hatreds, between rancid envies, and
he'd caused anonymous notes with rabid words to go
missing. He'd been a good guy, a reasonable person and,
above all, an art lover. It was not him that said so rumours to
that effect had been reaching him under various
circumstances. It was not for nothing that, so many years
after Ceausescu's death, writers and artists had no qualms
about shaking his hand in public or allowing him into their
studios. He'd always known how to secure future favours. Of
course, back in 1990 he'd had to cope with a few delicate
months, but that's another story. After watching, his jaws
clenched rigid in shock, the broadcast execution of the
presidential couple, he'd expected the worst. His family
supported him, though. There's just the one incident casting
a shadow over those tense months in which the world had
turned upside down: being spat at, just as he went out of the
lift, the spit landing right between the eyes. The spit reeked
of cheap brandy. From time to time, in a token act of bookish
revenge, he retrieves a book of essays authored by the person
in question and, no, he does not read a certain fragment just
the dedication, which suffices. Might be that at the right time
he'll make it public if he has to. It goes without saying that he
ignored the filth the press was occasionally throwing at him.
It's not as if he'd had a choice, to be honest. The turbid chaos
of freedom, the confusing vortex of history, had twisted the
most balanced of minds, while he kept his mouth shut,
something he'd always been good at. Next thing he knew, his
generation and the one coming right after it once again saved
the day for Romania. At least that's what he thought, even if
there were opinions to the contrary. In May 1990 that
became obvious for him: positions were once again assigned
to experienced people, people he'd known for a long time.
Even if now they called themselves “Mister” rather than
“Comrade”, they were among the few able to impose a
structure on chaos. He agreed, the very young ones had been
the leaven of the revolution, their merits shouldn't go
unrecognized, yet it was only he and his peers, the ones
who'd built that country from scratch and knew it to the least
of its people, that were capable of running it. With or without
communism, they were the only ones who knew how to
organize and lead a people, how to keep a tight rein on them.
The lot who'd fled the country and those who, rightly or not,
had languished in prisons for long years, no matter how
worthy of respect their courage and suffering were, came
from another planet. He was absolutely certain that, had they
come to power, they would have thought revenge and
nothing but, whereas stability is the world needs. That was
the last mission of his generation and they acquitted
themselves well. In the autumn of 1990 he'd been himself
invited by the majority party to contribute his expertise
suggesting the steps to be taken in support of the cultural life
of the new society, while in 1991 he was appointed
consultant for art and heritage matters. Obviously he went
back to his former office. The furniture was unchanged.
People had been so busy going out to street protests and
reading the free press that dust lay thick everywhere in sight,
the corners of the room were fuzzy with cobwebs and in a
remote drawer he came across his old majolica ashtray
complete with the half-smoked Kent cigarette he'd stubbed
out in haste. He'd only kept the position for a few years. Fed
up with financial problems and the constant turmoil, he
chose to retire. He kept going to art exhibitions, keep an eye
on new talents and buy the odd painting. Keep informed, that
is.
Now that was all the more reason for him to be
intrigued by the tree wrapped in yellow polythene. It had
somehow landed there out of the blue, without anyone
planting it, without him witnessing its growth. Like all
foreign bodies with no known history to their names, it
posed, he felt, a hidden threat to be unleashed any moment.
He made several phone calls, conversed at length, listened to
tirades and laments and in the end revised the information
and drew the conclusions. It was nothing but a bunch of
rebellious students, big-headed, too, out to make an impact,
of course. They were unable to make a drawing, yet set out to
revolutionize art. They were not even members of the
Artists' Union. Serious people wanted nothing to do with
them, serious galleries wouldn't touch them with a barge
pole. That Soros guy, a Hungarian Jew gone to the States,
was funding their crap, while foreign cultural centres
pampered them. They'll run out of steam in a few years.
Alternative my foot. Who'd ever decorate their dining room
with a tree wrapped in yellow polythene? They'd never sell
one item. Experimental art… Bullshit. In their dreams.
Liberal propaganda through culture. The West had lost
interest in such nonsense ages ago.
The reactions of some old masters were just the
thing to put his mind at ease. They were sort of a guarantee
that the world was not totally out of control. A revolution can
indeed change a society, but Art, with a capital A, is actually
eternal. Pure beauty art albums in their thousands are
bearing testimony is imperishable. As he pondered on those
things he felt his soul brimming over, thrilled by an invisible
wave, pervaded by a noble uplifting feeling as he had rarely
experienced before, by the sublime faith in the perfection
and ultimate sense of art. Emotion brought tears to his eyes.

Mr Ov, of course, had not been a philosopher from

the start, he'd seen better days. In the most widely circulated
version of his biography, things are laid down as follows:
one afternoon, around 17:13, he said to himself out of the
blue: watched from above, all things become philosophical.
On the first day after that discovery, Mr Ov found himself a
ten-storied building, reclined in a basket chair and
commenced to meditate in a historically-sanctioned stance:
finger-to-temple. Still all generalizations on the 1:10 scale
appeared provincial. Next he got a train, rode all the way to
Bucharest and climbed on top of the Intercontinental,
pretending he was from maintenance. Although a terrible
wind was blowing, he stuck it out for 21 minutes exactly.
Anyway, that was plenty of time for him to realize that the
1:22 scale was just as unsatisfactory, particularly since it
wasn't even a round number, so he repaired to a beer place,
where he met Mr Esco and Mr Ovici, people who failed to
change his life. Although it's not exactly a nice thing for us to
do, let's have a look at what's going to happen in the future.
Deeply dissatisfied, he'll learn to weave baskets, make
money and go Descartes' land, on top the Eiffel tower, in
order to fine-tune his relative theory of generalization. It will
be winter and Paris will be unencompassable. On top of it
all, his temple-appended finger will be afflicted with
frostbite leading to amputation half a year later.
Disappointed and agnostic, he'll be putting off his suicide on
a daily basis for the next ten years. He'll end up getting bored
and entering politics, only to be appointed director of the
Intensive piggery not far from his birthplace.
But for the moment he's in Bucharest, the city
where personalities grossly outnumber the streets. It's
raining outside and he, together with Mr Esco and Mr Ovici,
are passionately talking about all and sundry. There's no
thing in this world he cannot elaborate a theory on, with the
possible exception of matchsticks which he has a thing
against since birth. Hadn't someone else invented the
lighter, he would have done it himself and that's for sure. But
however, that's another story.
 He blew up his cheeks and rubbed them vigorously
with sanitary alcohol, then slapped them gently the way
nurses prepare buttocks for a painful injection. He did
everything with abrupt, rush gestures, as if subjecting
himself to some Spartan treatment. To be sure, the alcohol
did sting a bit, caused his face to smart in places, which he
rather enjoyed, he felt younger, tougher, more like a man.
The military-like ritual filled him with energy. If his son,
Silviu, had only seen him, he would have told him off, in that
slightly jocular tone children reaching maturity employ to
scold their parents. Why on earth was he giving his father the
most expensive aftershaves for presents? To avoid crossing
him, he opened the bathroom cabinet, stuffed with tubes and
an assortment of bottles in all shapes and sizes, and picking
some lotion at random, he splashed it on his face wrinkling
his nose. There… Happy now? He mumbled and chortled,
tee-hee-hee, proud of the trick he'd devised. He was due
within moments, storming in as was his wont, to drop Adrian
before rushing back to work. Silviu was running a foreign
car franchise. After trying his hand at a pizza parlour and an
antique and old icons shop, now he seemed to have found his
true vocation. On Saturdays, Adrian was going out with his
granddad. Most of the time he'd entertain the boy
passionately telling him stories from his own life, so that
he'd know he didn't come from your run-of-the-mill family.
Apparently, the little one really had a thing for history, for he
was listening to him without interrupting questions.
Looking at the city with a clean-shaved face he
found it a better sight. His apartment, which he'd received
from the party more years ago than he cared to remember,
had a rare quality: each room offered a different view of the
city. Under the blazing sun the buildings seemed to be made
of molten lava and, as it streamed through the hills, the city
brought to mind a molten steel charge scared by the tiny
threadlike flow of the cast-iron grey Bahlui River. Behind
the hill, crest serrated by apartment buildings and new
church steeples, hidden to the eye yet visible to his mind
spread the rolling tar sea frozen into symmetrical waves the
roof of the Heavy Machinery Plant. It was there that the
crimson lava of the city was headed, the colossus
swallowing welding flames, ledeburite and molten iron, to
spit onto the conveyor belt pieces of massive machinery,
equipments and spare parts. That was way back in the days
when he would take his guests to the Galata hill to show
them the colossus in all its splendour. Now, watched from
above, it was a sorry sight. The proud dragon of yore was
nothing but a stranded whale rotting away and peeling off in
the sun. It couldn't even swallow the ashes of the workers'
cigarettes, as for over ten years, the conveyor belt only
turned out unemployed workers and retirees. If you actually
happened to go by train from Iaºi to Bucharest, you could see
the twilight of the country's steel and cast iron heyday, as
decay set in under the indifferent eyes of the passengers and
the government. Bloated with rust, their concrete slabs
weathered beyond recognition and rank with overgrown
weeds, the great industrial facilities were displaying their
leanness everywhere. Geese and sheep are grazing among
lathe plinths. Cows tangle their horns in electrical cables
hanging limply and pointlessly. The wind is howling as it
rushes through pipes and conduits. Caved in ceilings, broken
walls, gutted wall sockets, basins run aground upon tree
tops, dead concassors and cogwheels, their teeth ravaged by
caries, fill the beholder's soul with heaviness. Children
dressed in hand-me-downs are stealing bricks by the bagful,
while starving people are digging through the grasses
littered with plastic bags and bottles in search of scrap iron.
With a little luck they find a crankshaft or a crane hook and
they can drink for a whole week. This is the carrion of
communism, shedding dust and rust. Here and there, out of
its rotting flesh, little villas spring up, complete with neat
gardens and bristling with satellite dishes. The closer you get
to Bucharest, their number increases. Many a time he
thought that if he'd been born in Bucharest or at least gone to
school there, his life would have been completely different.
But that's another story…
He cast a melancholy glance to his watched and
made for the next room to select his suit, tie and shirt. But
instead of opening the wardrobe, he looked out of the
window, taking in another face of the city. One of those tiny
yellowish apartment blocks, among the first to be built for
the Soviet bigwigs, was where Dinu used to live long, long
ago. They say he ended up in prison because he used to sit
with his legs crossed at party meetings and kept a Siamese
cat, which betrayed a bourgeois attitude. But that was
another story. He realized that of late he'd taken to overusing
that another-story phrase, and that was getting on his nerves.
His eyes came to rest on the little church they were steadily
building in a corner of the playground behind his block out
of plastic and double-glazing panels and, taken aback, he
crossed himself discreetly.

In his opinion Bucharest is redolent with the

fragrance of bread, while in the rest of the country all statues
are carved out of the “mamaliga” cornmeal porridge, and
the only true competence of the locals is the ability to guess
what bus goes to what ministry. Mr Ov, the collector, is of the
contrary opinion that, seen from above, the city looks like a
petrol stain or, at best, with a rabbit herd, each of them a
different colour. Hence the whole argument. Mr Esco,
instead of arbitrating the dispute, takes offence and
consequently commences to trim his fingernails, whereupon
he falls asleep. Bad idea, because the argument escalates to
a fight and he misses that excellent performance thus having
to beg the waiter for an account of the story.
Next day, though, in the morning, without him even
noticing anything, Mr Esco's life took an unexpected turn. At
5.13 or thereabouts, he was hardly awake when his left hand
started yakking in Russian. Assuming the silly bugger was
talking in its sleep, he hastened to thrust it under the cold
water tap at the basin, but to no avail. Not long after that his
right hand followed suit talking in some twisted language,
Turkish by the sound of it. Then one of his legs mumbled
something in Bulgarian while the other one lamented in
Greek. As if on cue, one ear started chirping in Cuman while
the other one resorted to Latin. For a moment, Mr Esco was
at a loss, suspecting he'd swallowed the Babel Tower by
mistake. As, for the past three days, his wife had been
constantly on the phone with her sister who'd immigrated to
Italy, he had to manage on his own. Out of sheer despair, he
sneezed three times in a row and his nose replied with
“Shalom”. He panicked and started sucking on a mint,
reckoning that if the neighbours got wing of it, they'd capture
him and sell him to the circus. So he packed in a hurry and
rushed to the airport, with the intent to leave Ov and Ovici as
his local replacements in the city of Bucharest. However,
they only spoke English there and wouldn't believe that he
was a born native of Bucharest.
So he started whistling and went to buy some bread.
 After the unfortunate story with the jaundiced tree,
disappointments came in quick succession. The world he
lived in, swollen and raging like a river bursting its banks,
had been thrown out of kilter. The state witnessed helplessly,
or indifferently, to be precise, the exhibitionism of a bunch
of twerps claiming they were making art while, in truth, they
were only making a big show out of kowtowing to the west,
which couldn't be entirely put down to naiveté. He was too
old to believe anyone dispensed money for free, but that's
another story... Out of an interest which he sometimes found
morbid, whenever he got wind of an event involving the
young rebels he slunk sheepishly into the audience. Thus he
had to go to the most unexpected and bizarre places because,
as far as he could tell, the art officially educating the masses
and secretly withdrawing into itself, was now taking to the
streets, descending to the pavements, or even lower, to the
basements. It migrated democratically out of the central airy,
well-lit chambers towards the foetid outskirts where, the
way he saw it, it should have stayed forever and a day, to the
aesthetic satisfaction of the Gypsies (well, Roma, to be
politically correct), the beggars, the unemployed and,
obviously, of all the rodents and associated vermin. He'd
been taken to sordid outskirts, to abandoned factories with
broken windows and rust plump as dough, in coppices
stripped bare by the frost, among skips over spilling with
blossom-like garbage, to deserted construction sites or in
underground passages where the stench of urine tore at your
nose, to fumes-choked intersections and even to zebra
crossings, where a trolleybus almost smashed into the
artists, as an attempted sacrifice on the altar of art or, more in
their spirit, as a mere occupational hazard. He missed no
stinking corner of the city, not even the city dump where, as
he'd read in the papers, it had taken the artists lots of trouble
to gain access to, since the officials at the City Hall, where
bureaucracy and narrow-mindedness were rampant, were
hard put to figure out the philosophy of contemporary art.
No he was not fastidious, nor had he been born with a silver
spoon in his mouth or raised by a governess, with bourgeois
values for lunch, but all the same art was, for him, an entirely
different matter. After all, these angry young people were
more Marxist than the Proletkult set. The difference was that
they enjoyed more freedom than was good for their age.
What they were doing went by nice-sounding names,
fashionable English buzzwords like happening,
performance or installations, but God was his witness, he
couldn't for the life of him see where the art was. Al he could
see were boys and girls in slashed jeans, with shaved skulls
or alternately rancid dreadlocks, doing all sorts of strange
things, sometimes even potentially dangerous to their health
or the health of whoever happened to watch them. They were
counting with closed eyes, they buried their heads in the
earth and breathed through a tube, they wrote notes and
pressed them into the hands of passers-by, they cured the
hams and sausages of the unemployed in the Canta district,
they painted white the waste found in random garbage
containers, they hung themselves from crane hooks or piled
up TV sets on top of one another or else sat them in half
circles. As far as he was concerned they were nothing but
people who'd miss their vocation. They belonged, by rights,
in a circus. They let loose in the city fibreglass cows to
browse the asphalt or made jam out of the strawberries
picked by Romanian immigrants to Spain. He had been, of
course, to the famous Turkish bath, a ruin to all intents and
purposes, which the organizers did not have the basic
decency of subjecting to even token restoration. The plaster
was fallen revealing the bare brickwork, while the
woodwork was downright rotten, one being in danger of
breaking one's neck at every step. Participation was
international, yet art was nowhere to be seen. In a pool half-
filled with water, German books advertising post-war
literature were floating sealed in plastic bags. A mannequin
swaddled in phosphorescent duct tape, with slits where its
eyes and mouth were supposed to be, was glowing in a small
dark room. He'd dubbed it, for his own personal benefit, The
Statue of Liberty. In another room, a TV set was showing the
same sequence ad infinitum, with neither beginning nor end.
In a former toilet cubicle a squatting guy was holding a
newspaper or just doodling. From five or six hotplates where
pots of water had been set to boil plumes of steam were
shooting into the air causing paper-cut maps hanging from
the wall to spin. Out of a chocolate toilette bowl you could
help yourself freely. There was even a takeaway option…
Seldom had he come across such a bunch of wackos united
in the genuine belief they were making art. If you chanced to
scratch behind an ear or took off one of your shoes because
you had a pebble in it, you found yourself making
contemporary art without knowing it, the way Monsieur
Jourdain was making prose, and stood a fair chance of being
proclaimed founder of some artistic movement. No, nothing
had given him a thrill, his spirit had found no aesthetic
delight, nor any deep, life-changing message to awaken his
inner being or at least intrigue him. It was with
disappointment, even anger that he left the place. Probably
that whole bunch saw themselves as emerging from
Duchamp's urinal like Venus from the sea surf; still they
were nothing but the product of a clogged toilet bowl. Well,
he could say it openly. He wouldn't have exchanged today's
imposture for the works formerly commissioned by the
party, now shameful family secrets, so-called compromising
skeletons piled up in the musty basements of apprehensive
museums. No, he wouldn't claim they were masterpieces,
yet those artists picturing miners, oil rigs, plentiful harvests,
the glorious princes of the Romanian principalities or
Ceausescu's visit to some construction site, knew how to
hold a brush in their hands: even in that junk their talent was
obvious, it haloed the canvas. For him personally, talent
born talent that is, not the acquired or aped versions, was the
supreme argument. The rest, to put it in non-academic terms,
was just crap. He could swear that all those rebellious punks
who'd hardly ever heard of Malevich's Black Square, were
completely out of their depth when it came to the golden
ratio, they'd smear themselves to their asses if asked to mix
two colours yet, good God, they dubbed themselves artists.
The dictatorship, for better or worse, wouldn't have allowed
such things to happen. These last thoughts took even him by
surprise, so he shook his head as if electrocuted to get rid of
them.

Mr Esco took a look at his generation and thought

to himself: “I take a look at my generation and…” He
observed them shaking in their shoes, as if his tiny secret
antennae detected the imminence of black clouds in the
shape of army-boot soles. His knees jerked up
uncontrollably and rhythmically two-three centimetres high,
to the throbbing accompaniment of his ashplant. He's
watching her from afar, and occasionally has a hard time
making out her profile in the jumble of hands and legs, in the
melee of bodies besieging the market stalls. Parsley, dill,
tomatoes, cucumbers everything vanished into the empty-
bellied bags, hanging limp like tattered banners on a
battlefield. He made it to the kitchens. Everything was
crunched, sliced, gnawed at, diced, chewed, sucked to the
last vitamin. His was a fierce generation, born to fight. The
old folks were indefatigable vitamin hunters. Between their
sallow gums, the last sprig of cress breathed its last, writhing
in agony. In spring they all seemed to go berserk.
Translucent and bony, eyes brutish with winter, they'd tread
on each other's feet and they'd shove, devitalized, listless
gladiators. Some of them went so far as to pinch each other
or mutter oaths under their breaths. They were wicked and
helpless. Their limp hands felt every item of merchandise,
turning it on all sides, tested the vigour of fruit, rummaged
around. Then wrinkled their noses. Pouted their wilted lips.
Smirked shrewdly. They'd bargain for days on end, till the
green went limp, the fruit went rotten and had to be sold at a
lower price. They'd snap at the vitamin with trembling
hands, secured and smiled triumphantly. They'd rub their
little paws with satisfaction.
As summer approached, they'd calm down, sort of.
Only went out in the cool of the day. First thing in the
morning, they'd storm the market. Sampling, sniffing
around. With a certain politeness. Discreetly, some of them.
Around eleven thirty, a bugle imperceptible to the untutored
yet clearly discernible for their lot, called the retreat. They'd
come back at around four thirty, refreshed after their
afternoon nap. The shrewdest of the species turned up at six,
on the off chance they'd bag some produce gone bad during
the day. Which the farmers wouldn't bother to take back
home. This year, though, they seemed worse than ever.
Though spring was all but gone, their growls were still
audible. The scurry of rummaging hands went on unabated.
The herb-hunting frenzy still gleamed in their eyes. Their
vocabulary was a weedy garden.
Yes. It looked like they were in for a dry year. His
generation could sense such things. A vitamin shortage
loomed ahead. They were headed for a drought, and no
doubt about it. His instinct never failed him. That could be a
fine opportunity to make a fast buck. Holding a position was
no longer fashionable.

Silviu called from outside the block to let him

know he had no time to come up. He'd drop Adrian in the
alley, by the entrance. Oh well, he'd splashed that stinking
after shave on his face for nothing. Before going downstairs,
he resorted to one last scrutiny in the mirror. Hair was all
right, the tie knot tight and plumb, colours matching, back
straight. He could have done with an extra three to
four centimetres added to his stature, but that's another story.
In the lift he briefly treated the woman next door to his theory
on apartment heating systems, known to be detrimental to
the collective spirit, as opposed to good old central heating.
As he sensed he'd been persuasive enough, he also chose to
expound the theory to Adrian, in a more accessible form, of
course. He'd been long since acquainted with the principle of
adjusting information to the listener's level of culture, from
way back in the days when he was in charge of political
propaganda in villages, but that's another story. In the city
they had their own route, comprising, as a rule, historical
monuments, or buildings that had played an important part
in his life and activity. On occasion they'd sit down on a
bench and, while the frail boy played silently with his own
fingers, a bad habit he'd acquired after his parents' divorce,
he would tell him at length about the eminent people of the
city, without leaving out his own major contribution to the
city's welfare. Their Saturday adventure always ended at the
McDonald's next to the station, where lots of the city elite
used to converge, and the child's eyes lit up at the sight of the
Happy-Meal toys. Apart from the nouveau riche, wearing
crew-cuts and rope-thick gold chains, sporting tiered bellies
and bandying bawdy jokes about, one could see doctors,
lawyers and even priests, well, the kind of people who could
afford splurging on such an outing. He would have liked
Adrian to make friends and romp around, but apparently he
was too shy for that kind of thing.
While the child, a concentrated frown on his face,
was playing with a pair of exophthalmic eyes fitted with a
device that could attach them to the padded tongue of his
trainers, according to the girl at the counter, he remembered
his strange dream that ravaged his memories.
On entering the door, he realized he was not going
into his bedroom, but in his old office. Only thing is, there's a
dentist rather than a cigarette smell inside. At the desk, in
front of a typewriter, a pre-war model, his old acquaintance,
the luridly-dressed woman. Her fingers are poised above the
keys, like beaks ready to peck at the nicely-rounded buttons.
She's all eyes and seems ready to get down to work. What's
for lunch, Siles, baby? she asks in the most natural tone.
Although it seems a routine question, the viciousness lies in
that “Siles baby”, which only his ex-wife used. Caught off
guard again he's beginning to get nervous and a wave of heat
flushes his scalp. Sausages and beans, he answers in a bilious
voice. The woman bangs at the keys: “Sausages and beans”.
Each letter has a different taste, she explains, and now, after
I've typed this combination, you to taste the food in your
mouth. He concentrates on his tongue and palate and, sure
enough, his taste buds revel in the purest sausage-and-beans
flavour, the kind you could only get at the communist party
canteen. The woman winks at him naughtily and types:
“shit”. Then pulls out the sheet, screws it into a ball and
dumps it into the waste-paper basket. He touches his tongue
to his palate and looks at her questioningly. Gluttony's not
what we're here for, she snaps at him. We're here to record
history. You've promised us a synopsis, Basil. I'm listening,
she adds, crouched over the typewriter, fingers like hail
raining down. He regains his poise and retorts:
Now then, get down to writing, do. Let's start with
the title. The Life and Times of Comrade…? Ehmmm,
Mister… Mister? From the beginning: The Life and Times
of Vasile Stoenescu or a short history of the Romanian
people from the author's birth to the present day.
Bang!
I was born in a needy family, in an age of extreme
social tension… No, that's no good. There we go: Vasile is
the second son of Maria Stoenescu, née Bujara, and Dumitru
Stoenescu, heroically fallen in the course of duty… No, no,
no! Again: few know it's going to be a momentous year for
Europe. While in Great Britain the BBC had started
broadcasting the first television programme on a regular
basis, the first analogical computer was being invented in the
United States of America, the paper clip was being invented
in Norway and Charles Seeberger was perfecting the
escalator, Vasile Stoenescu was born in a little Romanian
village…
Bang!
The beginning had been hard. Now the synopsis
started flowing like a river of erudition. He paces to and fro,
hands clasped behind his back, and from time to time,
pouting and screwing up his eyes, he's searching for the right
word. At some point he realizes he's taken off his jacket and
rolled up his shirt sleeves to his elbows, as in preparation for
digging the garden. Thus, he feels at ease and the dictation
proceeds faster. The sun sets to the rhythm of his sentences,
and in a moment of grace he comes up with the appropriate
ending:
The typewriter's clicking is history's progress on
high heels.
Whereupon he collapses into the armchair, lights
up a cigarette and asks to see the typed text. Mr Esco (a
national epopee, coming-of-age novel and riddle) he reads at
the top of the page, in the middle. Then: Mr Esco was born
out of a tinned fish box or out of a jar of stewed fruit, no one
knows for sure…
But that's another story, he cries out indignantly,
shaking his right fist.
Indeed, quite another story, the luridly-dressed
woman confirms…
And bursts into a nervous fit of laughter, guttural and
sarcastic, growing to a paroxystic crescendo, cracking the
ceiling and shattering the windows, causing the block to
collapse, demolishing the city, screwing itself into the
brain.

English translation by Florin Bican

 This text was comissioned for Critical Point Project,
with the occasion of Vector Association’s participation
in the frame of Frieze Projects.
2010
© of Dan Lungu
Generously supported by the
Romanian Cultural Institute in London