Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

of loneliness and, naturally, were flowing into my dreams, homogenizing my inner life. Two of them have deeply impressed me to the day. The first story (by whom? I never knew; the names of the authors were merely a negligible hieroglyph on the cover) was about a peasant fromremoteSiberiawhowas sleeping in his hut next to his woman while biting frost was coming in through the logs, bringing snowflakes. The peasant woke up a little before dawn and could no longer feel the woman next to him. He thought she went out for necessities and went back to sleep. But when morning came and he saw she hadn’t returned, he went to the porch closing his nightgown. What he

saw left him speechless. In the snow fallen overnight, so clean that even God wouldn’t have dared step in, one could see the woman’s footprints going from the house threshold up to the middle of the yard, where they suddenly disappeared. All around the snow was untouched. The last sentences of this story, which didn’t give a soothing explanation of what had happened like many others, left the peasant staring into the sky with a dumb look. The second was about a convict who had been rotting in a jail cell for years. He was convicted for life and guardedwithsuchharshness that the miserable man was certain he would die in his dungeon. But one night he heard some faint knocks in

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