Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

warehouse which filled the neighbourhood with fresh resin smell. But Maica Domnului Street did not lead directly to that area, it went askew towards Colentina. I crossed the railway beyond the park, the one I’d never seen a train on, and, like I had imagined, I was greeted by a place like no other in the world. When one is four years old, every new place is so. The state of hallucination and dreaming accompanies one always until the memory tracks get printed on one’s brain. Any new landscape is fabulous and unusual in itself, regardless how common it were in truth, because “in reality”, “in truth”, “as it is” are still phrases without meaning for onewhoperceives reality the way we later live in our

first memories or dreams. Maica Domnului Street has always seemed to me like a tentacle of a dream in the world that is awake or, if everything exists on the inside and reality is a mere illusory artefact, as a flicker arrived from the deep and submerged childhood. On Maica Domnului there is no “normal” house and person, because normality itself ceases here. There is also no normal weather. When you enter this track, this channel from another world and another life, the climate changes and the seasons turn upside down. Here there’s always, like I wrote before, a putrid and luminous autumn. The asphalt strip placed who knows when over the formerly cobbled road

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