Impex "92, 1993
by Radu Cosaşu
excerpt Big scandal occasioned by Remembrance Day and Independence Day (Yom Ha-Zikaron, Yom Ha-Hatzmaut), because the Minister of the Armed Forces ordered 40,000 Israeli flags in Taiwan instead of the domestic industry, preferring foreign silk,and this friend of mine who tells me about the scandal, hanging a small flag on the hood of his car, in a city all the windows and terraces of which have been bedecked, suddenly asking me: "…You think someone makes us put up these flags? Why don't you leave Romania and come over here?""Because I like it there!" I reply calmly, considering we haven't seen each other since we went together to the stew, I guess it was in "46, and then we squabbled at the corner of Dobroteasa street about who had known better what to do in bed with his woman.You have no idea how they eat there in the morning, I was looking for a table to have coffee while devouring Liberation and L'Equipe when the siren started to wail announcing Yom Ha-Zikaron, the Day of memories left "from all the misfortunes we have been through," all rose and stood still by their salads, cataifs, French fries, omelettes and croissants on the tables, the drivers stopped their buses, all the passengers froze on their feet, the whole town remaining motionless under the howling sirens meant to frighten it, and to make that fright hurt…and I enter – as the world is coming round soon after the holocaust siren – the little hall of an exhibition open on this boulevard, between a shoe store and a jeweler's;there are 20-30 nonfigurative paintings from which I can figure out nothing except that their author, who is sitting alone in a corner reading Liberation in a raffia chair is indeed, as written on the poster, the very same with whom, in "56 or so, I had spent a night at Pelisor from which neither of us made out a thing, as much as we had been drinking, as much as I had won at a poker game that had drawn out past midnight, with her kibitzing me and holding her leg next to mine under the table all this time,because of a French writer who, right in the next room, separated only by a door, was struggling to make love to a floozie from Sinaia reciting from Baudelaire as clearly as he could,it was impossible for us to concentrate, there was no autonomy of the esthetic, the less so of the erotic, we could not knock at their door like brutes, we could not be allusive either, declaiming from Eminescu in our turn,we withdrew each on one side of the bed and talked about Budapest, from divergent standpoints, with her in favor of a revolt in Romania as well, and me against it, and we chanced into each other – why should we only chance in Pasternak? –with her goading me with just one word of love: "coward! coward!"and me being thrown out of all editorial offices a week later, accused of furthering the idea of counterrevolution even in bed, and that man staring me right in the eyes, harsh and sincere: "I thought you wouldn't ask for proofs we know everything…"with her leaving, at about the same time, for Vienna, as someone told me who was living in the same house, near the Slaughterhouse, where I had run to see her after my condemnation to unemployment, to ask her what…?now, while I'm gazing at the walls, I feel her watching me from behind her newspaper, the mere look of a painter assessing the only visitor of the exhibition, I hope I'll remain nonfigurative to her, I go out in the street, a Mozartian spy singing to myself, "And in Spain one thousand and three… milla tre!" a schizo-FRENI-st who can combine Le Nozze diFigaro and the Ballad in F.
Impex "92, 1993
by Radu Cosaşu
Impex "92, 1993
by Radu Cosaşu