“Dragul meu, Ai câștigat alegerile… Felicitări! Să fie într-un ceas bun. Cumva însă ne așteptam. De când erai mic mă întrebam cum ar fi sa ajungi într-o zi în fruntea acestui oraș pe care l-am iubit atât, l-am părăsit apoi și l-am regăsit mult mai târziu: haotic, dinamic, chinuitor. În fond, semnele se arătau …
The White Shirt Project#11. Crazy
The nineties were so much like the dull grey power suits that they spawned. Stiff and unadventurous they seemed, but my, what was hiding beneath that rough fabric! Linda Evangelista and the super models. These big lipped men, Jagger and Tyler, always a cigarette sticking out of somewhere. New borders defined the East and the West; still some fear loomed in …
The White Shirt Project#10. Demolition
When I was growing up, this roof had bright orange tiles. Two old sisters and their little black Pomeranian mongrel lived under it. Through open windows you could hear an old hag downstairs eternally cursing at her grandson. While out there in the city centre big demolitions carried whole neighbourhoods off, here in the north …
The White Shirt Project #9. Gone
I miss you so much sometimes. Even though next May it’ll be 25 years since that Wednesday afternoon when I said, “Let’s skip school and go bathe in the lake instead!” But I stayed on the shore and you went out swimming and never came back. I just waited there and I couldn’t believe it. …
The White Shirt Project #8. Mailänderli
Back in the eighties when I was a kid, my originally Swiss great grandma lived in the ground floor of our house. Together we’d bake these wonderful Christmas cookies “from home”, as she said. First she’d roam around the markets for a few days and obtained some eggs, some flour, margarine and sugar. Sometimes she’d …
The White Shirt Project #7. Democracy
…or how we spent the revolution/coup d’état. My memories of those days of Christmas 1989 are somewhat blurred. I remember there were rumours of unrest in the streets of Timișoara. A support rally for the communist party was organised in Bucharest. Sometime before Christmas Eve, the phone rang: dad was called to go “protect the …
The White Shirt Project #6. Oleander
Great-grandma had come from Switzerland to Romania in 1927 as a trained nanny for children with disabilities. Among the things which she attempted to reconstruct in her new country that’d remind her of home was a typically Swiss garden: with flowerbeds and gravel roads, bergenia, violets, tulips, periwinkle, hydrangea, forsythia, rose-beds and an ivy-covered fence. …
The White Shirt Project #5. Landowner
Before 1989 we were taught in school about how the incredibly cruel bourgeois landowners had enslaved and tortured the peasants. I knew that “in the old times” grandma had owned some land and a horse. It was therefore hard to imagine the most sweet-natured person I knew mistreat any living being, let alone another fellow …
The White Shirt Project #4. First Snow
One late autumn day in 1982, two couples spent a night at the Horezu Monastery with their kids. The next morning they were going to gather chestnuts in the woods nearby. But when they woke up, a thick layer of snow had covered everything, blinding white. So we went for a walk in the woods instead. …
The White Shirt Project #3. Restructured
On 2018, November 27, I got fired. One day after my 30th birthday. It wasn’t even the first time I got “restructured”, but it was a painful one. We had played “happy family” for some time at the office, now we started playing “last in first out”. It taught me that one dreams and grows …