Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Doina RuSti

clips. Bucharest was full of hairpieces. Even men who hadn’t yet gone bald preferred to wear them. Wherever you looked, you would only see shaved napes, but under fezzes, fur hats or striped shawls there were always the hairpieces that had driven men mad and had changed the tastes of women. The merchants and the common folk bought them from Turkish shops and the wealthy ordered them in from Braşov. Doicescu, however, had fine tastes, those of a picky man. His were made by Fabio the Florentine himself who went down in history only for Doicescu’s hairpieces. Manda had ordered this headpiece just in time. He left the hookah aside

and sipped from the coffee which had cooled down, just as he liked it. He casually went back to his scalp and felt it with his fingers to notice, as he did every day, how feeble it was. Then he fixed his hairpiece with special care to cover the hairpin properly. The skin on his head was almost white, a oneday shave tobetter show the lock of hair positioned between the crown and forehead like a leech made of tar. You couldn’t say they were real bangs, but rather a thin band, as if a painter’s paintbrush had passed over once. The hairs stood aligned over the two stripes that crossed his forehead. If you looked at it from the side, the small lock seemed like a snake’s head resting on the snowy bald head.

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