Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Solenoid [Excerpt] Translated from Romanian by Rodica Guja Chapter 8

weeping willows, eternally bending over. On frightening evenings with clouds taking monstrous shapes I would go down towards the lake and sit on a bench. I would sit there for hours looking into the coffee coloured water and mumbling the lyrics my mind was packed with – Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont… I was borrowing books from the neighbourhood library at the time, the one next to the grocery store, apparently never visited by anyone except for me. I happened to enter the library loaded with bags of potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers. I would leave them in the little entrance

I bought my house in 1981 for the price of a Dacia 1 . I was living with my parents at the time, on Ştefan cel Mare 2 , in a long apartment buildingwitheightentrances connected to the Militia Headquarters. Ihadspentmy childhood in the Circus Park and later, in adolescence, I used to often go back to the sun-drowsy park in order to sink within its heart of shade and sparkle, towards the lake full of bulrush and 1  One of the two brands of au- tomobiles produced in communist Romania. The price of a Dacia was around 70.000 lei (approx. USD 5.000 at the time) or about 30 monthly av- erage salaries 2  Boulevard and neighbourhood of Bucharest where Mircea Cărtărescu actually grew up

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