Orchestra

The Place Where Nothing Happened

excerpt Loneliness tightened up around Daria Ortac. She felt isolated from the world and saddened to death. The wind was about to start splashing scarce drops into the windows. It was a sunset wind, irregularly enveloping, stirring up echoes of sound and human voices. Wrapped

Cheese Country

SeptemberexcerptsIlie only looked me up in early September, a few weeks before the harvesting of the vineyards. He had come back alone, by train. He had told some lie to his wife and run over to see me. He was coming towards me with an enamored look in his eyes, ready to

Blinding: The Left Wing

excerpt The following days, Mioara took the girls for a walk in Chishmigiu Park and treated them on a boat ride (the driver of the black car had rolled up his sleeves and was rowing across the lake, giving the ladies nice smiles from under his pointed moustache). Later

Summer

Every summer the city on the hill is drowned in green, which explodes in the church park, at the Citadel and at the Cabin and the Grove, while the green willows of the River girdle the city. The summer of fir trees and willows flaps big, unseen wings in a fervor of lofty

Donna Alba

excerpt Donna Alba reached the door with her nimble, high pace. Outside, in the hall of the floor, I caught up with her. I switched on the light and moved my hand around, trying, finding no other way, to delay her from the straight, irrevocable path that I had traced out

Return To The Interwar Bucharest

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

The Violin Player Ion Voicu

It is hard to say when the Gypsies came to Romania for the first time, and then settled for good, but the oldest documents date from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the royal charters mentioned the fiddler slaves, sold alongside the dependencies and objects from

History Of Romanian Modern Civilization, 1924-1925

excerpts XVII 1. The impact of Western social ideology preceded the impact of capitalism, in other words, the social revolution preceded the economic revolution2. The revolution led by Tudor Vladimirescu and the existence of the national party cannot be viewed as the starting

Fram The Polar Bear

excerpt XVI. THE END The blizzard howled, tumbling boulders of petty snow, gasping when hitting icy walls and cliffs or moaning and screaming along the white nowhere. You couldn't tell the sky from the earth or the ice from the water. Nature was unleashed and that

Among Insects

Beginning of autumn. Full moon. Distant hills. All the stars are bigger. An orchestra of mosquitoes in the background.  A mosquito: - I can't take it anymore! My proboscis is freezing! A spider: (Huddled in the dew, Shivering and bearing his cross): - Not even a fly

The Lord Of The Baton In the Land Of The Delta

If you had the job of a customs officer in the Danube's ports at the end of the 19th century, this meant that you had to go from Sulina to Galaţi and from Giurgiu to Corabia and, to be sure, Leonte Georgescu was not spared such compulsory travels required by his position;