Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

hall next to the door and I would go in the shade of the room full of books. The librarian was a discreet man, as insignificant looking in reality, as concrete and present in countless dreams of later. The books, aligned in alphabetical order, were for me like those boards with postal boxes that occupy an entire wall at the ground floor of apartment buildings. How many times I had wished, when I was a child, to have the keys to all those boxes! I would have spent my mornings reading letters and thus getting into the intricate and sad lives of all people. I sometimes managed to take one out through the thin gap with great difficulty, using a little stick and inserting my fingers as deep as I could

into the dark space, terribly frightened of being caught. I would then read about diseases and funerals, requests for loans, indecent proposals and divisions of land plots. And I finally had all the keys now! Each book was a gap through which I looked within the skull of a person. There were as many skulls with the boxes of intelligence, courage, pride, melancholy, shrewdness separated and numbered in indelible pencil. I was opening each book like a surgeon who was to operate on a skull, but in addition I had the amazement of a doctor who would find something different than the usual circumvolutions and the usual grey-brown substance irrigated by trees of blood vessels in each dura

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