“What’s that?” Robert asked, pointing to an open door on the side of the former Cultural Center of the village. It was a non-descript door on a decrepit building that used to be the village cinema, the place where everything that could pass as a show happened, where celebrations took place, and where the occasional meetings were organized. When I was much younger, four or five, I’d come here with my aunt. The only movies they’d show were Indian ones, but it was a movie, not an hour of botched up news followed by communist propaganda, so I went every time.
Right now, the Cultural Center was rented out for the occasional wedding. They’d also started to host a poetry contest, as, long before World War II and the Communists, the local boyar had had a poet son who’d given the name to the village. He’d died young, so there wasn’t much of his poetry left, but because one of the country’s most famous poets had called him the “Silver Lyre,” everyone knew him. The other awe-inspiring wonder the Cultural Center was home to was the village library. Small, crowded, smelling of old, dusty books, you could easily overlook it. Most kids didn’t even know it existed, because it wasn’t really advertised during the summer.
“Library. It’s not very large,” I explained quickly, not wanting him to be disappointed. A few years back I went there with the same aunt who took me to Indian movies. She’d borrowed a couple of books through her own subscription, so I’d seen the inside of the library. From the outside, it seemed to not have changed much at all.
“Can we get books?” Robert asked, pulling me out of my memory tour.
I wasn’t fourteen yet, so I had no ID card. Robert had it, but he’d left it home. We went inside though to find out exactly what we need and then ran home to get the papers and the meager payment the librarian required. I came back with my grandma’s ID and that was it.
A lot of my childhood memories involve two Romanian villages, about twenty kilometers apart from each other. My maternal grandparents lived in one, and my paternal grandparents lived in the other. I chose the one where I had the most fun as one of the main settings in this novel: Sihlea, Vrancea County. It’s where my maternal grandmother (my only surviving grandparent) still lives.
In the first part of the story, main character Edi spends a lot of time in this village. He does everything I did as a child: climbing trees, playing with kids gathered there from all over the country for summer holidays, playing at the creek, going all the way to the forest and picking up corn to boil or grill on the way back, looking for hidden gems in the village library, and generally not sitting still for too long.
As he grows up, I tried to explore everything I felt: that the village got smaller; that the creek wasn’t the most exciting place in the world; that the village was suddenly filled with bars and people waiting aimlessly for their lives to pass them by.
At one point, they closed down the village library. The remaining books were transferred to the local school, making them available to students only. That was a big hit for me, and I tried to explore it through Edi. After that summer, I had Edi spend less and less time in the countryside. The truth is the village would be extremely boring after the age of sixteen. As kids grew up, camps, trips to the seaside, staying home and hanging out with friends became more enticing.
As you read Edi’s adventures, you’ll be able to piece out the history of this little village from before the Communist Regime, through its evil snatching of all lands from peasants, and later through all the changes that followed the Revolution of ’89. You’ll see the village turning from the best place in the world, a paradise of sorts, into a small, dusty old place where the character rarely wants to go.
Unfortunately, this was the fate of a lot of Romanian villages. We won’t count the highly touristy ones here, or those close to larger cities or the mountains where vacation homes were built. The average village, even those like Sihlea, where an important piece of Romanian literature history came from, where a poetry contest was held every year, lost their shine.
Thanks so much for having me over, Layla! Always a pleasure to visit your blog!
My favorite way to spend the summer was at JROTC summer camp at Fort Devan’s Massachusetts. Over the course of three weeks we learned repelling ropes course, obstacle course, land navigation, water navigation and survival, jump tower, we fired m-16s and learned how to assemble and disassemble them, including how to do it by feel while blindfolded. I got to meet a lot of amazing people from different high schools that were also part of the JROTC program, some army, some air force, some navy, some marines and even some coast guard. Each morning we got up early for PT, showered, ate in the mess hall, and started whatever training session they had in store for us that day. I’ve learned how to get a team through water obstacles as well as land ones, ate MRE’s (meals ready to eat) under a tree for lunch trading chicken a la king for Spaghetti with meat sauce. Learned real fast never to try to eat the reconstituted hamburger, though how anyone could think soaking it for 30 minutes in water was going to make it palatable is beyond me. We had courses in first aid, including field training and how to turn parts of the uniforms and belts into a litter, we learned how to navigate in the dark. I have so many fond memories of being at camp and the one thing it taught me was that every problem had a solution if you were willing to work hard enough to find it.
Oh, wow, that sounds like something I would have gotten addicted to. But I guess it's called survival if all you eat all day is fruit you pick and grilled corn that you "borrowed" from the fields you passed by! LOL. I picked up important life skills like milking a cow, finding all the chicken eggs, and... climbing trees.