Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

owed everything to and try to save him in return. He was taken to the cell where he had wasted his youth and he asked the prison guard about the prisoner beyond the wall. But he found out in amazement that only the sky and the sea were behind that wall. The wall was an external wall, tens of metres above the waves breaking against the rocky shore… I felt the same sacred terror, thesame feeling thatbeyond the world mock-up built by our senses from cheap materials there is somebody who watches you intently, whose prey you are, who approaches slowly on its thousands of sticky threads while you are incapable of knowing it, you, who only have a bunch of antennae although you should be

able to perceive The Whole, on the night I was in the Circus Park, next to the star- reflecting silent pool with travertine borders. I had the same feeling of hopeless loneliness much later, in the autumn of 1981, when I walked on Maica Domnului 3 Street for the first time. It was a putrid and luminous autumn. I was twenty five and had no future on earth. For one year I had been a teacher in the bottom of Colentina 4 , where I knew (I know it today too) that I would retire from. I would then die without leaving any 4  Neighbourhood of Bucharest in the vicinity of Ştefan cel Mare. Colen- tina is a peripheral neighbourhood towards the north-eastern part of the city, which still has old, shabby, ne- glected houses, generally inhabited by low income classes. 3  “The Mother of our Lord” in Ro- manian

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