Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Solenoid

even in those times, but the old man’s story left me breathless. The second school class had gone and so would the entire day. I couldn’t care less about it. The old man was delirious, I knew that, but I knew better than anyone that delirium is not a waste product of reality, it is a part of it and sometimes its most precious part. Besides the house, I was buying a story – its handbook or instructions manual. From then on, I would be the owner of a house that was built, albeit in the imagination of a ninetyyear-old senile man, above a giant coil buried underground, as if Uncle Mikola, in his unexplainable magnanimity had given me his own brains under a glass bell, with a ship

shaped house built on its hemispheres. “On September 12th 1936 I finished the house, young man. Itstoodalone,beautiful like a pearl, in the middle of thewaste lands and shanties of Tei. It was painted and furnished on the inside too, all the framed paintings and pictures were hung on the walls, the precious carpets (now worn-out rags) were shining in lively shades… The black iron stems at the windows sprouted young buds and twigs… It was a wonder you could fall in love with like you would with a woman with large hips, generous thighs… I had a house on the ground, but I never enjoyed it, sir…” Because the woman proved to be frigid. The solenoid, whatever it could be used

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