Gayk is the only civilian with a rifle carrier on his left shoulder. His neck is drawn in and his morale very high. He will not be hostile towards anybody for long, but from his way of eyeing you, the direction his pointed nose takes sometimes, the air about him that he is being perennially pockmarked and the fact that his nails are uncut, you get the impression that he is ready at any time to lunge at you and peck you. Pointed at both ends and bent like a bow, Gayk always stoops slightly forward so he may dominate his surroundings more easily. He believes in being prepared against any eventuality, which is why he sleeps only in tails and white gloves tucking a diplomatic letter under his pillow, a respectable quantity of tack, and… a machine gun. In the daytime Gayk can stand no other garment except a small drape with festooned trim, one in front and one in the back, easily pulled aside by anybody with his permission. He spends his time swimming non-stop for 23 hours but only from North to South for fear of coming out of his neutrality. In the free hour that is left to him he draws inspiration from muses in ankle boots. He succeeded, early on, in giving our foreign policy a new direction, being the first to state with authority that we have to take the Transylvanians without Transylvania; he also maintained that we had at all costs to get a hold of Nasaud plus three some kilometers through the intervention of the Vatican, the three kilometers lying, however, not around a certain area, but lined up, one next to the other, lengthwise, close to the city and pointing towards the Duchy of Luxembourg, as a sign of reprimand that it allowed its neutrality to be violated by the German troops. Gayk is childless. When he was in junior highschool, though, he adopted a niece of his at a time when she was weaving on a hand-loom. He did not hold back from giving her a select education – taking care to send a waiter to her daily who would beg her on his behalf to wash her hair every Saturday and to give herself, by whatever means possible, a generalist's education. The niece, a hard-working and conscientious girl, became an adult in no time and noting, on a fine day, that she did get her generalist's education she asked her beloved uncle to release her from the boarding house and let her make her home in the fields… Encouraged by the response to her requests she did not hesitate to ask him, only a short time later, to guarantee her access to the sea. Gayk, then, instead of answering, leaped on her suddenly and pecked her countless times; this she considered to have happened without any preliminary warning and contrary to all international practice, and therefore instituting a state of war; a war in which they were engaged form more than three years and over a front that was almost seven hundred kilometers long. They both fought carrying food in the form of money; they fought with great heroism, but in the end Gayk having been made marshall of the battlefield and finding no military outfitter to put his new stripes on, decided not to fight any more and asked for peace. This suited his niece fine; she had just then grown a boil and saw her retreat cut off, the non-aligned being unable to send her the beans or gasoline any longer. They held their first exchange of prisoners at the cash register of the theater of operations and got moderate prices for them. They then convened for the signing of a shameful peace treaty. Gayk agreed henceforth not to peck anybody, settling for the quarter of a liter of grain feed his niece undertook to bring him daily with the guarantee and supervision of the Great Powers; his niece on the other hand, at long last, received a strip which was two centimeters wide and reaching all the way to the sea, but without the right to dispense with swimming trunks. In the end, however, both were thoroughly satisfied, since a secret clause in the treaty gave them both the right to raise their morales in the future to the highest possible point. English version by Stavros DELIGIORGIS
by Urmuz (Dem. Dumitrescu-Buzău) (1883-1923)
