My Europe: Bucharest-Trilogy

0
333

To understand Bucharest, even its inhabitants is not always easy. The town is as idyllic as uniform as elegant as you expire. An approach in three steps by Catalin Dorian Florescu.

In the last two years, I spent two months in Bucharest, on the trail of a new novel. In the decades before that, I had no real connection to this city, I was not grown up and I have no memories of Association. Today, however, it looks to me quite different.

Bucharest makes it easy for you to like them: their elegance, already takes decay and neglect is true. Hardly, she looks sophisticated, a slum on the shows-like area. Hardly prevail silence, and even Idyll, noise, Hurriedness and uniformity report. Not for nothing was still in the talking interwar period of Bucharest, in the Plural: Bucurestii.

Today, this is appropriate, because there are a variety of faces in this city. It consists of several nested or parallel existing worlds. Without you include all, you can’t respond to this.

So how Bucharest could also see Romania as a diverse and contradictory, clearly European but with one leg in the Orient standing.

Piata Nattiunile Unite

With the head and the heart full of impressions, I returned recently from Romania. In order not to compress into a formula in order to comply with the open character of this country, I found a list of memories. It forms as a whole a subjective mosaic, a Collage of impressions, the Supplement. Because Romania, like Bucharest, is to perceive the purest prompt, to feel, to values without premature. But you have to at some point, if the conditions are too clear, unfortunately, also do this.

My memories I would like to present dosed in three Parts. Here is the first part.

– In the early spring, on the way to Bucharest, I took in Sibiu (Sibiu) together with friends at a vigil held for months, every day at twelve o’clock, in front of the local headquarters of the ruling PSD. For exactly a quarter of an hour, the participants – between a few dozen and several Hundred in silence, the traffic flows past slowly up to you, the pedestrians have to go around them. Some of them to join spontaneously. It is a powerful silence, one perceives, whether you like it or not. The movement says: “We see you!”. Refers to the corrupt politicians and businessmen, with which the country is abundantly blessed. The Silence of the people has, for once, his sense.

– In Brasov (Kronstadt) I met a day later, Sonja, the Swiss Director of a children’s home, which she founded over 25 years ago. You are not away from this country, to very your life with that of the children is crossed. Once she was arrived in the cold and fog on a November evening in a city and a country, can you remain indifferent. She has created something that few are able: to provide protective and persistently in front of the vulnerable life. For dozens of children and young people she is a mother. She told me that one of their employees was in the hospital. The Team members alternate to your bed, bring food and toilet paper, and contact you if necessary. So this is in the national Romanian hospitals. Sonja was asked by the only nurse on the Department, to monitor the Infusion. Doctors and nursing staff, professionals of all kinds from Hiking. It is to be bled, determined not Dracula is responsible.

The Parliament building in Bucharest

– As if had formed a glacier, released in the Winter, the waste carpet on the way from Brasov to Bucharest. In the beautiful Carpathian valleys, leaving behind the man with a trace of indifference. While I was on the capital supply, drove an endless sheet metal column in a walking pace in the opposite direction. It was Bucharest, the escape from your city, whenever you can. Several times in the year Bucharest, empties and fills again a few days later, like a heart that receives the blood and pumps. In these days of peace in Bucharest prevails, and one can reconcile with this city.

– In Bucharest, the flowers, the kiosks are open until after midnight. Practically on every corner a is. I’ve never seen anyone buy anything. But, perhaps, you wait here with the declarations of love until it is dark. Perhaps the Bucharest to their dead at night to the cemetery. Maybe people are trying to beautify their city and their homes in the cover of darkness. Maybe the city residents gather every day at midnight, the flower kiosks, to breathe the scent. But perhaps it is just desperation to sell anything.

Night after night, the tank car through the empty streets of Bucharest and clean from the dirt of the day. Cleaning crews with bright vests on diving in the spotlight out of nowhere and disappear there again. Drag garbage can on wheels behind her shoulders and broom, such as to grandma’s times. It is as if this city was forced to wash litte to save from decay; early in the Morning, the nightmare is over. Back to the sewers remain full of foam. Here someone seems to want to say: “Look! You’re important to me! Your city is important to me! I’ll take care of you.” While many politicians hands in innocence washes away the day, and whole rows of houses seeing eye to disintegrate, continues the myth of Sisyphus in the night, his endless work.

The old town of Bucharest in the centre: Cafes, Restaurants, small shops

– On the terrace of a guest house, all the tables were occupied. You ass with an appetite for the tasty, heavy food of the country. Around the back of a Gypsy girl moved from barely nine or ten years of their laps and sang. She held a Violet bouquet in the Hand, they wanted to sell, but no one paid attention to you. I offered her my bean soup in bread crust – Yes, there is something of the kind-when she was done, and a little bolder had become, saw it on the Dessert at the next table. There sat in silence for a family, it was after a sumptuous meal with the Papanasi – huge Romanian Doughnuts – employed. The girl asked if she could have. The family-in-law, and chewed. After a while, the answer came: “If we have enough for us, I’ll give you something.”

– I have read the poems, Nikita Stanescu:

“You are mine, I told them / calm them down / On the wings of the butterflies / flying stupid in the Zigzag / you are my. Wait, don’t go to sleep / Everything you don’t understand / Is related to me …”

Or: “The Prince, as he falls from horses / Crushed in the Fall of an angel / For this comprehensive sensation / blood, I today …”

To be continued.

The German writer Catalin Dorian Florescu (51), a native Romanian, lives since 1982 in Switzerland. To love for the novel “Jacob decides” he was awarded the 2011 Swiss book prize. In mid-September, his new volume of stories, “the navel of The world, Verlag C. H. Beck”.