Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence

5 The old bank robber has struck again, in my own neighborhood this time, at the Austrian bank just across from the opera, and the payoff was big. I do a rough calculation, and figure it totaled nearly a hundred bundles of five-hundred-lei notes, portraying our national poet Mihai Eminescu and a blossoming linden branch. And because there was an ad for villas in the trendy neighborhood of north Bucharest—the area that used to be the dense Baneasa Forest—just below the news article, I can’t help but go on to calculate how many villas that money could buy. Dinu would’ve considered this a case of déformation professionelle — “ un professional de training”—because he felt my work in the bank had warped my mind. I can just picture the lucky robber and his long strides as he crosses the intersection that’s usually deserted by evening, a heavy sack over his shoulder, past the little brick building that used to be a public toilet. It was later renovated to become the Rio Bar, but now stands empty, and is so covered in theater and concert posters that it looks like a gift-wrapped present. The cocky robber trips as he hoofs it across the nearby lawn, runs into the old transvestite just as she’s buckling her sandal, and her cracking voice startles him as she turns in reproach: “You graceless bitch!” The bank robber and I now have a mutual acquaintance.

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