On evenings, when the dark comes and the pale skies of Bucharest are on fire, I used to go to one of those places where dozens of old locomotives rust together like huge pachyderms that came to a desolate place to die. The old tram depots, the old steam locomotive cemeteries. Some very old brick factories, now abandoned, on desert spaces full of weeds and garbage. The water towers, which we call ”water castles” because they are so beautifully built. What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most, of the city? Around us, Bucharest licks its lips, satisfied. Drops of blood flow from them, tears flow from my mother’s eyes, she cries like a baby. We go on it but when the doors close, they catch my mother’s fingers. A very old tram is coming, the rails are roaring.

Everything is old and decolorized, like in a sepia photo. The buildings are decorated with stucco heads of Gorgons, the balconies rest on the huge shoulders of stucco Atlases, the roofs have grotesque, fantastic tin cupolas.

I am a small child, half the height of the woman holding my hand. But most of the time, I see myself wandering through a huge and unknown city with my mother. I can’t emphasize one heartbreaking memory because all my life in Bucharest is a long heartbreaking memory. What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city?Īs I told you, I was born here and I lived here all my life. I see myself in it like in a huge, convex mirror. It is a layered city, like a wedding cake, from the margins to the center you can recognize the big village it used to be until the eighteenth century-the Greek, Jewish and Turkish districts built fifty years after, then the French, German, and Italian influences of the beginning of the twentieth century, the International Style of the period between the wars, and the pervasive Communist apartment blocks built during the previous regime. But unlike Paris, it is half Oriental, looking as much like Istanbul or Cairo as like Paris, Brussels, or Vienna. Like nineteenth-century Paris, Bucharest has a subterranean life, full of mysteries. A foreigner has to spend many years here to get the zest of the city and to get to love its inhabitants. Otherwise, Bucharest might seem overwhelmingly intricate, like a spider web or a labyrinth, it might look unsettling and dangerous. Even more, you have to be born by it and look like it. You have to be born here to understand and feel it. If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.Ĭan you describe the mood of Bucharest as you feel/see it?īucharest is like the Basque language: you can learn it only from your mother.

Fantastic Tales by Mircea Eliade