Saying Prayers the Old School Way

This morning, while walking across my apartment’s courtyard, I saw a live duck wrapped in a blue plastic bag. She was a pretty duck, soft brown, her head and neck exposed, and she made fearful cooing sounds. Someone had placed the duck in the grass at the foot of a bench. Three feet away, a scrawny black cat with a twisted-bone tail, slunk toward the duck. A weathered old woman with three craggy teeth, a kerchief, a grey dress, swollen feet and broken shoes, stood nearby with a butcher knife. She gestured to us as we passed, Mihai replied briefly, and we walked on. Later, Mihai said that the woman was waiting for someone to come along that had the heart to saw the duck's head off. When I came back from the American Corner of the library, the duck and the woman were gone.

Every day, a new adventure, and every day, something more. Yesterday morning, the buzzer buzzed, I opened the door and in trooped two men and four women in dusty work clothes. The men went to knocking a hole in my wall and installing new wiring so the clothes washer could be plugged in. The women began carting out broken chairs, victims of the hot-headed Italian former Fulbrighter. During the chaos, I excused myself to go to the opening ceremony marking the University’s new school year. As I made to leave, one of the women gestured me over and then launched into elaborate operating instructions, pushing buttons on the washer, opening the soap dish, closing it, making spin gestures with her finger, and so on until finally one of the men stopped her and gestured quite simply: open the door, throw your clothes in, fill the soap container, and push this button.

The ceremony was a somber affair, a mix of Orthodox religion and officials inculcated by communist function. It was held in the Agrinomia, a large building fifteen minutes from here. The men wore black suits, a couple of limos waited outside. Inside, dark wooden panels, red carpet and curtains. Mihai and I sat in the middle of a 300-seat auditorium. The wood panels seemed askew somehow, like wrong puzzle pieces shoved into place by impatient and clumsy hands. My red chair was broken, and I kept sliding toards the floor. We moved down two seats. Mihai explained that often in Romania, the most talented people leave the country for Italy or France or Germany where they can make better wages. “And so only the most patriotic stay?” I asked. Mihai smiled. “Yes,” he replied. “This theatre, and that chair you just left, they were built by the patriots.”

And then yesterday afternoon…Nirvana! I discovered the open air market: carrots, radishes, olives, honey, and fresh leaf lettuce! On my way home, I stopped at the supermarket for feta and balsamic vinegar. Bit by bit, I am digging deeper, and Craiova is giving up her treasures. I’ve been doing yoga in the afternoons on my living room floor, my fat and greasy sofa squatting jealously beside me. I've asked around for a gym or a fitness center; yesterday, one of my colleagues explained that there are a few, but it is mostly women who go there. “And the men?” He shrugged and answered, “We die early.” After an hour of yoga, I ventured out into the main plaza. Surrounded by fountains and rosebushes and hundreds of Craiovians: kids on roller skates, teen lovers smooching on benches, older women walking arm-in-arm, men with black berets standing in groups smiling and nodding...I sat in an outdoor café as the sun set and a beautiful girl with deep set eyes came and I asked for a Romanian beer and she brought a pint bottle called Bergenbier, with Germanic old-world writing, and a speeding, bucking ATV (all terrain vehicle) on its yellow label. Here’s a youtube ad for Bergenbier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGodQAS7Urk. One was enough, and I strolled home slowly in cap and jacket, the cool night covering all of us under a blanket of ink and stars.