Burying the Typewriter by Carmen Bugan

Author:Carmen Bugan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-057-4
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2012-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

An Audience with My Father

at the Rahova Prison

My turn to experience a miracle now. I thank God for my being the firstborn child of the family. The village policeman comes asking for me one day. He says that I am to go and visit my father at the Rahova prison, where he is held for “questioning” before his trial. My cousin Fănel is to accompany me, since I am still too young to travel by myself across the country. I am happy he is coming along. He is one of my favorite cousins. I have no idea how and why this happens, but when I ask if my sister can come along, I am curtly told, “She is younger. Now, would you like to see your father?”

Sometimes you can love even an enemy!

I want to impress my father, to look sporty and strong. Perhaps he will notice how much I have changed since he drove away without telling me that we might never see each other again. It is nearing October. Flower women sell chrysanthemums the color of dirty whitewash, heavy with the first cold rains. The street corners smell of the autumn leaves piled by the wind at the foot of fences. But it’s not time for coats yet, so people are wandering about in their pullovers. Over the summer I turned thirteen and I have been taking care of the house like a grown woman with responsibilities. Despite being treated like “social garbage” at school because of Dad, I feel stronger, taller, more solid in my belief that I can take the reins of suffering and keep going. Having abandoned Dumas, Malory, and Brontë, I am reading Schopenhauer (or rather about his philosophy through the poetry of Mihai Eminescu), Maupassant’s stories, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Lucian Blaga’s poems of the heart finding itself in the pulse of a village, and I move about gravely.

I want to tell Dad that thanks to him I feel the weights on the scales of the world: Securitate men asking questions are just Securitate men asking questions in the end. Managing without him and without Mom, and with Cătălin oscillating between living and dying, I am becoming fully equipped to speak out for the merits of cynicism. There is no revolution, no one is saved, we all crawl toward death and exploit each other on the way. I see the world for what it is, without the protection or at least the framework of my family. Ah, but there is God, and he is more often there to punish us for things we do not do, or we do not know how to fix. In vain I fall on my knees rehearsing the prostrations I learned from Bunica Anghelina: she said that God answers the honest prayers, the face level to the ground, the passion in front of the burning oil candle.

I am freakishly cheerful. As I board the train to Rahova prison in Bucureşti with my cousin Fănel, I am sporting a brand-new blue running suit with white lines along the sleeves and legs.

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