Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Doina RuSti

even from the first bars. The city in the song was like the hidden whisper in the linden flower. Between its walls all suffering melted away, erased from the Book of Destiny or from other books copied after that. And the city, that city of light hearts, was none other than Bucharest. Then the rumours began to spread, supported by the hissed whispers of the Greeks of Fener, the only one who had travelled the roads beyond the Danube, where the Wallachian city lay. For instance, everyone knew that, as soon as you cross the bridge, which is also the only entrance to the city, you realise that your whole life up to that point wasn’t worth two cents. On the streets paved with oak

wood, steam swirls around from the silver stoups in which elixirs, perfumes and ointments boil all the time, for the city doesn’t live off the labour of the earth, nor off its numerous shops, but off a continuously renewed aroma, off that warm breath which invades all the pores and makes any newcomer forget everything they’d lived before as if they were instantly transformed into an Emir with sapphire eyes, into a Nabob with carriages andpalaces, intoaGovernor, a Polkovnik or at least into a scribe of the lordly suite. But there were also many who spoke of the people walking in streets, bemused, drunk with love or stuffed with the sweets that they dreamed of, tortured by their own desires, eating

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