Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

T.O. BOBE

Eyeglasses

The hardest thing is the eyeglasses. Not his. Mr. Gică still sees well. But some clients don’t put them in their pockets, they leave them on the edge of the table. The glasses look like a dead man’s remains. 1 Forgotten glasses frighten Mr. Gică. All day long, he avoids themand thehypnotic power of their empty gaze, hoping the tenor (soccer players never wear glasses) will come back for them. But no one ever comes back to Mr. Gică for their glasses. At first he would put them in a drawer, and then when that filled up, he bought a special cabinet, actually a metal locker with three sections: he kept his white workcoats in one and tossed the glasses in the other two, one after another, dozens of pairs, hundreds perhaps. Every time he opened the door to throw in another pair, Mr. Gică was frightened. It was a kind of Auschwitz, that pile of glasses, it seemed like all his clients were dead, and the dead watched him through their forgotten glasses. But the dead returned to the shop after a few weeks, with new glasses on their noses, and no one talked about the forgotten pair, as though it was something shameful, as though it was something you could only toss into a locker, in a little room at the back of the barbershop. 1  Of course, no one is buried with his glasses on. You can’t even give a dead person’s glasses away. No one knows what happens to the eyeglasses of the de- ceased. They’re left in a drawer somewhere, or, if the person was someone well- known, a senator or a historian, their family devotes a corner of the house to him, displaying his glasses among stacks of nicely arranged papers, pens, favorite books, and the dead man’s pipe.

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