***

After that, she went online to look for the news story a couple of weeks earlier. Maybe they just looked very similar, she thought, though she could swear they were the same people. She searched for lovers’ bench, then for the name of the street, then for the old couple. Nothing came up, there was no lovers’ bench story in the online archive. She gave up after a while, after all local news websites were not exactly known for their search functions.

The next morning, she found the case file at work.

A long stone structure along a pedestrian route...

She scrolled down.

There it was, in the form: BENCH

After the coffee break, she decided to look at the news station archive again. Maybe she had been too tired the night before.

And there it was, aired exactly two weeks earlier.

LOVERS’ BENCH: COUPLE RETURNS TO THE PLACE WHERE THEY FIRST MET

She watched it again. She had remembered correctly. The same woman and the same man, staying close to each other, smiling, telling the reporter that this was where they had first met.

She thought about the report from the night before. Hiring actors for local news now? That was pretty sad. Couldn’t they find real people anymore? And airing the two stories only two weeks apart? Surely, she couldn’t be the only person who had recognized them.

In any case, she was relieved that at least her memory was not playing tricks on her and went back to work.

Claire called a few days later. They talked about Claire’s volunteering and the trip she was planning for the end of the year, a long-awaited trip to Africa. Just before saying goodbye, Claire remembered something.

« Ah, le petit muret… tu te rappelles ? »

She had passed by it the day before and recognized the street from her story.

« La rue est magnifique, mais le muret n’a rien de très romantique. Il y avait plein d’enfants dessus. »

She laughed.

« Peut-être que ton histoire était meilleure. »

They said goodbye, but for the rest of the afternoon she kept thinking at what Claire said: “le muret n’a rien de très romantique”

After a salad dinner and a glass of white wine, she opened the computer again.

How could she find out whether the man and the woman had appeared in other news stories? And who were they, anyway? She couldn’t quite say why she was so interested.

Maybe I’m just bored, she thought.

Still, it was as good a way to spend an evening as any.

She started with the woman. It took less than twenty minutes to find her in another report from the previous year. She was standing outside a pharmacy, complaining about the new parking restrictions on the street. Same short gray hair, same glasses, same voice.

There you go.

At the bottom of the screen, a thin band appeared for a few seconds:

ELISE MARTIN - LOCAL RESIDENT

She searched for the man next. He was harder to find, but eventually she spotted him in a story about a neighborhood petition against cutting down several old trees. Same cap, same impatient way of speaking.

PAUL RENAUD - LOCAL RESIDENT

She leaned back in her chair. So, they were real people. Probably the kind of people who knew the local reporters and loved being on TV.

That explained quite a lot. Or at least enough for one evening.

For the next two weeks, she had no reason to think about Elise Martin or Paul Renaud. There was plenty of work at the Department, including a complicated case involving a school corridor that was used for storage during the holidays and as an emergency exit during the rest of the year. She eventually called it MULTIPURPOSE ACCESS AREA, although she was not particularly happy with the name.

On Thursday, an email arrived from the General Hospital. She recognized the case, it was the patch of ground behind the building. SERVICE COURTYARD.

The email was from a woman who worked with the hospital volunteers. Apparently, following the Department’s classification, Facilities had taken responsibility for the area and the dumpsters had been moved closer to the wall, parking spaces had been marked for delivery trucks, and a sign had been installed to prevent unauthorized access.

The woman asked whether the classification could be reconsidered. For years, patients and their families had used the space to get some fresh air and a place to be alone for a while. The hospital had very few places where people could sit outside, and now they were being told that the courtyard was reserved for service vehicles.

She opened the original complaint. “People sit there, wait, smoke, cry.”

Too many of them cry, apparently.

She remembered passing the place on her way home and seeing the dumpsters and the delivery truck and no patients. Actually, no chairs or benches or nothing where they would even sit to rest.

She read the email again. Perhaps SERVICE COURTYARD had not been the best choice after all. She could change it to PATIENT REST AREA, although that didn’t seem entirely right either.

She asked her supervisor.

He looked at the original complaint, then at the photographs.

“The classification is correct. If the hospital wants to change how the space is used, they can submit a request. That’s not our responsibility.”

She supposed he was right. Her job was to name things, and she had named it.

She sent the response to the volunteer. Another successful resolution. Maybe.

A few days later, she called a Romanian friend from high school. They hadn’t spoken in months, and there was plenty to catch up on. Her friend had recently visited their hometown. The old cinema had been demolished, a supermarket had opened where the bus station used to be, and the little park behind the library was going to become a parking lot.

„Mai ții minte părculețul ăla? Unde stăteam după ore?”

Of course she remembered. They had spent entire afternoons there, talking about things that seemed terribly important at the time.

„Acum vor să facă parcare acolo. Cică nu-i folosit.”

„Ce prostie! Și eu am avut un caz asemănător la serviciu. Un părculeț în spatele unui spital, unde ieșeau pacienții și familiile lor. Stăteau acolo, mai fumau, mai plângeau… Acum nu mai au voie să intre.”

„De ce?”

„O încurcătură administrativă.”

„Măcar copacii i-au lăsat?”

„Nu știu. Sper că da.”

They spent another twenty minutes remembering people from high school, trying to work out who was still living in town and who had moved away.

That evening she had a few things to buy and the supermarket
near the hospital was usually less crowded. She passed the courtyard almost
without thinking.

There were three benches under a row of trees, and a narrow path led from the hospital’s back entrance to a small patch of grass. A woman in a hospital gown was sitting on one of the benches, holding a paper cup. Two men were playing chess at a little concrete table. Someone had planted flowers in three old metal buckets along the fence.

She stopped.

How on earth had they managed to change it so quickly? It had only been a few days since the email from the volunteers.

She looked around. Benches, a path, trees, even a little table for playing chess.

Impossible to have done all that in the last few days, even if they managed to get it suddenly approved, she thought.

She tried to remember exactly what she’d seen last time she passed by few weeks ago. There were the dumpsters by the wall, the truck, the two men unloading boxes. She was quite sure about those. But has she seen the trees? She doesn’t remember the tress. “They could have been there, still, I suppose …”

She stood there for another minute, rather annoyed that she couldn’t make sense of it, then continued toward the supermarket.

— to be continued

Note: images are AI generated.

TIME DOES NOT DIVIDE EVENLY. SOME INTERVALS ARE TRICKY.

NO MECHANICAL FAULT HAS BEEN FOUND.

Mornings were usually quiet. She liked waking very early and making coffee in her little red enamel pot. She had had it for so long that it seemed to have always been there in the kitchen. The enamel had chipped near the handle and a black crescent of metal showed through. Vasile had bought it the year they got married. At least she thought he had. Some mornings she remembered buying it herself in Brașov. Memory had become unreliable in small, unimportant ways since he died.

At six she drank the coffee at the kitchen table.

At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.

At six-thirty the cat left.

At seven she opened the door to Vasile’s workroom.

No one remembers exactly when Elena became a watchmaker.

This is already strange, because everyone in the village remembers when Vasile became one.

It was in the winter of 1987, according to Petru, although Leana insists it was the following spring. Marin claims to possess a watch repaired by Vasile in 1985, which would settle the question if the inscription on the back did not bear the date 1991.

Such discrepancies are common in matters concerning watches.

What is certain is that Vasile repaired them.

He repaired alarm clocks, pocket watches, cheap Russian wristwatches, a Swiss watch that belonged to the pharmacist’s father, and once, according to a story no one entirely believes, the clock in the church tower.

Whenever a watch stopped, they came to him. And they were always pleased when, two or three days later, Vasile handed it back across the table and said in his slow, gentle voice:

“It’s done. Works fine. There was nothing wrong with it.”

And invariably:

“You don’t owe me anything.”

People protested, and he waved them away. In the end, something from somebody’s garden always appeared on the porch: a basket of tomatoes, two bunches of onions, a pumpkin in the fall, a jar of jam. She would make him one of the sour soups he liked, using whatever happened to come their way, and everyone was happy.

Vasile had been dead for a year, and she still hadn’t managed to really go into the room with the watches. Now and then she had opened the door, just to look, perhaps to take something, but she always closed it again quickly.

Then, one morning in April, she carried her coffee there in the small red enamel pot.

Everything was still in the same place: the magnifying lenses, the tiny screwdrivers, the tweezers, the little boxes of gears, springs, and screws. And the watches, of course, the ones Vasile had begun collecting over the years. He found some at flea markets and others were given to him by people who no longer wanted them. Some he had repaired and they still worked. Others looked as though they had never worked at all.

At first, she went in only to tidy up. But every time, the hours passed and she was still there.

She turned the tools over in her hands, trying to remember what Vasile had used each one for. She opened watches and followed the tiny gears without understanding much. Sometimes she picked up one of the lenses, fitted it to her eye, and stared. Still, none of it made much sense.

Until one day she opened a watch and, for the first time, knew where to look.

Slowly, little by little, she learned how to take them apart and put them back together. Then she discovered which gear was supposed to touch which, and how very little force could already be too much. Eventually she learned how to clean a mechanism without hurting it, how to straighten a spring, how to recognize a worn tooth.

And, perhaps hardest of all, how not to rush into doing something simply because she could not immediately find the problem.

She learned to wait.

Vasile had once told her that people broke most things because they had no patience. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she was beginning to understand.

After a few months she no longer had to look twice to know whether a piece had fallen properly into place. Sometimes she could simply feel it under her fingers.

With time, she began to hear the watches differently too and realized that not all ticking sounded the same.

Some watches ticked in a hurry even when they kept perfect time, while others always sounded tired. Some had a round, peaceful ticktock. Others scratched at your ears even after you stopped them.

Vasile’s watch did not make any sound at all.

She left it where it was.

By June, the room with the watches had become part of her mornings. One day, after making coffee in the red enamel pot, she turned on the radio and found the station Vasile used to listen to, the one that played old Romanian romances.

She carried her coffee into the room and looked at the table where Vasile’s watch was still waiting. She pulled it closer, picked up the magnifying lens and started to investigate the mechanism.

A song she knew came over the radio and she began to hum.

The mechanism was immaculate. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing. Every wheel meshed perfectly with the next. The spring held tension, the balance moved freely. Still, it wasn’t ticking. Or was it?

She put it back on the table, turned off the radio and listened.

There were five watches on the table and another seven clocks on the walls. They weren’t ticking together. That was normal. But she realized that every few minutes all stopped at the same instant and the silence lasted perhaps a second. Then they continued.

She listened for a while. It happened eleven times. She wrote the times down.

7:17.

7:26.

7:31.

7:37.

7:52.

8:01.

8:16.

8:28.

8:33.

8:44.

8:57.

There was no pattern she could see.

She decided it was best to stop now. She had to go to the grocery store anyhow and maybe visit Tina on the way back.

The next morning, she looked at the paper again.

There were twelve times written on it.

The last was:

9/19

She was certain she had not written it.

For a while she stood at the table with the paper in her hand. Then she looked at the clocks on the walls, at the watches scattered among the tools, at Vasile’s watch lying open on the table.

It was still silent.

She thought about crossing it out.

Instead, she made coffee.

At six-twenty she fed the cat that wasn’t hers.

At six-thirty the cat left.

At seven she opened the workroom.

She worked as usual.

A little after nine she found herself looking at the clock on the wall.

9:03.

She went back to the watch in her hands.

At 9:08 she looked again.

Then at 9:11.

This annoyed her.

She put down the tweezers.

“Ridiculous,” she said.

Still, she waited.

At 9:19 every clock in the room stopped.

Not gradually.

Together.

The silence was so complete that she could hear a truck changing gears somewhere on the road and, farther away, someone shaking a rug from an upstairs window.

Then, from the table came a single tick.

Vasile’s watch was still lying open in the corner of the table.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

She waited for the second hand to move.

It didn’t.

Outside, the truck she had heard earlier disappeared down the road. Someone closed a gate. A dog barked and another one answered, then a third dog answered that one, farther off, and then a fourth, and the sound kept going out across the village without arriving anywhere. A bicycle went by the house. Another passed behind it. Somewhere a woman called a child’s name twice and got no answer.

Vasile’s watch kept ticking, its hands motionless.

She looked at the wall clock.

9:19.

Then at the little alarm clock on the shelf.

9:19.

The coffee beside her had gone cold.

When she looked up again, the wall clock said 9:20.

The other clocks had started too. She had not heard them begin.

Next Tuesday morning she ran into Petru outside the grocery store. He was carrying milk, bread and a plastic bag of tomatoes.

He looked tired.

“You look terrible,” she said.

Petru sighed.

“I have to go all the way to Mocănești, and God knows when I’m supposed to find the time.”

“What happened?”

“My father’s watch broke. That old one, you know it. Means a lot to me. I heard there’s a good watchmaker in Mocănești.”

He sighed again.

“God rest your Vasile. I could really use him now. I barely have time to breathe, never mind going all the way to Mocănești and back, then making the trip again to pick the thing up. I just hope that fellow is half as good as Vasile was and can figure it out.”

She looked at him.

Petru was sixty-one years old.

As far as she knew, he had no job that required being anywhere at a particular hour. His children had moved away. His wife had been dead six years.

“What are you doing with all your time?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

This seemed to trouble him.

“Bring me the watch.”

Petru stared at her.

“I thought Vasile fixed watches.”

“Vasile is dead.”

“I know.”

It was too difficult to explain. In truth, she would not have known exactly what to explain. Perhaps Vasile had taught her, and she simply hadn’t known it. She had been beside him all those years, watching him bent over the table, listening to a watch before he opened it.

“Bring it,” was all she said.

Petru came that evening.

“I won’t make it to Mocănești before the end of the week anyway. Keep it a few days. If you figure it out, send word. You’d save me that whole trip. I’m so busy these days, the last thing I need is to waste time on the road.”

He left the watch on the table and went home.

It was an old watch, with a yellow face and a brown leather strap that had been replaced many times.

At dawn the next morning, she got to work.

Before opening the watch, she held it to her ear.

Nothing.

After a few moments, she put it down.

“Strange,” she said.

It didn’t seem broken.

She opened it carefully and began cleaning the little gears. After a while she realized she was humming.

She stopped, her mouth slightly open.

She had not sung in many years.

The song was one her grandmother had taught her. It was not a lullaby, not a song of sorrow, nor one for dancing and celebration. It was all of those things together without quite being any of them, a song that emptied your heart and filled it again and somehow left you clean.

She worked on the watch for several hours, slowly, with the song inside her.

She found nothing wrong.

After cleaning the mechanism, she put most of it together and went to make herself a coffee. She left the watch on the table, the face still open.

Petru will have to go to Mocănești after all, she thought. I don’t know what possessed me to think I could repair watches now.

When she came back, she put the face back on and wound the watch.

It began to tick.

She gave the watch back to Petru the next day.

“You fixed it!”

A broad smile spread over his surprised face.

“There was nothing to fix,” she said, a little embarrassed. “I cleaned it, that’s all. If it stops again, I’m afraid you’ll still have to go to Mocănești.”

A few days later, on her way back from the market, she saw Petru standing at the corner talking with some neighbors.

“Good day! The watch is working beautifully! I’m telling everyone about you!”

“Don’t. There’s no need. I told you, I didn’t even repair anything. I barely know what I’m doing. Don’t go sending people to me.”

Petru laughed.

But he did tell everyone about her.

A few weeks later, Leana appeared at her gate with a small watch on a gold-colored bracelet. Her son had bought it for her birthday.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It runs fast. Keeps fooling me. I look at it and panic because I think I’m late again.”

“How fast?”

“I don’t know. Five minutes, ten. Maybe more. I don’t know anything anymore.”

She sat down with a sigh.

“My son keeps asking me to come to the city.”

“So why don’t you go?”

Leana began listing everything she had to do. The chickens, the garden, the beans that needed picking, the jars she had to put up for winter. She certainly didn’t have time to go to the city. Besides, she felt bad telling her son that the watch he had bought her no longer worked properly. Perhaps she had broken it somehow.

The watch was, indeed, running a little fast.

The watchmaker opened it, cleaned it, and adjusted the mechanism.

A fine rain fell outside that day, and she worked for a long time with the window open. She liked the smell of wet earth.

When she put the watch back together, she held it to her ear for a while.

The ticking was quiet, like the rain falling in the yard.

Leana came for it the next day.

“I managed to fix it. It keeps time now.”

“Thank God. The last thing I needed was a watch making things worse.”

A couple of weeks later, Leana’s house stayed locked for several days. The neighbors said she had taken the bus into the city to visit her son.

When Leana came back, she stopped by with a box of chocolates from town.

“I hadn’t been to see him since spring,” she said. “I kept saying I’d go when I finished everything.”

“And did you?”

Leana laughed.

“No. The beans are still unpicked and the jars still empty.”

She shrugged.

“And nobody died.”

After Leana, others began to come.

At first there was one every few weeks, then more and more often. A watch that ran slow, one that stopped at night, another that worked perfectly for several days and then suddenly began rushing ahead.

At first, they came because Petru or Leana had sent them, but slowly word spread that Vasile’s widow had started repairing watches.

She protested every time that she was no real watchmaker and that anyone with a serious problem would be better off going to Mocănești.

But people insisted she try first. If she couldn’t fix it, they would somehow find the time to get to Mocănești.

Slowly, she became less “Vasile’s widow” and more and more “the watchmaker.”

That was how Marin arrived at her gate.

He came into the yard in a hurry and, before even saying good morning, took the watch off his wrist.

“I heard you know what you’re doing.”

“Not really. People talk too much.”

“Maybe so. Still, have a look at it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it stop?”

“No.”

“Run slow?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fast?”

Marin thought about it.

“No. Not that either.”

“Then why did you bring it?”

He stood there for a moment, thinking, then said quietly:

“Because there isn’t enough time in a day.”

“There’s as much as there ever was,” she said.

She laughed.

“I repair watches, Marin.”

“I know. But people say...”

“People should mind their own business.”

She took the watch anyway.

She opened it twice and found nothing wrong. She left it on the table until the next morning.

Some children were playing outside in the street. They ran around and shouted and laughed loudly.

The watchmaker worked with the window open.

When she put Marin’s watch back together, its tick was short and lively, almost as if it jumped.

She listened for a while.

“Strange,” she said quietly. “I could swear you sounded different yesterday.”

Marin came that evening.

“There was nothing wrong with it.”

“But you opened it?”

“Yes. Opened it, cleaned it.”

She handed it back.

“And now?”

“Still nothing wrong with it.”

A few weeks later she found Marin at the edge of the road with three children gathered around him. He was showing them how to make a whistle from a small branch, and they were watching every movement of his hands.

“Marin, don’t you have work to do?”

“I do.”

He scraped a little more bark from the branch and held it up to the light.

“But I’ll show them this first.”

She started to leave when she heard him call after her:

“You were right, you know! There was nothing wrong with the watch!”

All the way home, she thought about Marin.

She went directly into the room with the watches.

The paper from June was still there, with its eleven times and the twelfth she had not written. She looked at it for a while, then moved it aside.

Vasile’s watch was lying open in the corner of the table. She fitted the magnifying lens to her eye and examined it again.

The balance. The spring. The gears. Every tooth exactly where it should be.

Nothing.

She turned it over in her hands and looked at it once more.

Still nothing.

“There is nothing wrong with it,” she said.

The words sounded familiar.

Vasile had said them hundreds of times.

There was nothing wrong with it.

Elena looked at his watch for a long time.

Then she closed the case.

Perhaps he had simply been telling the truth.

The subway was more crowded than usual, but she still managed to find a seat next to the door.

She liked to sit and watch people. Most of them were looking at their phones. Some had headphones on and stared into the void. A few stared into the void without any phone or headphones visible. Even fewer were having a conversation.

She would choose a few and give them names. Then she would imagine where they were going, and why.

She didn’t like to imagine the obvious.

The woman in the business suit, for example, looked anxious and kept checking the time. She was probably going to a job interview, for a job she might or might not be qualified for. She named her Anna. Anna was very rich and loved ice cream. An ice-cream truck was waiting for her outside the next station. Anna would climb into it and drive slowly through a neighborhood where she knew the names of all the children living in all the apartments along the block.

Sometimes, in the evening, she wrote down the stories she liked best. The evening part was also when she chose the language. She knew several and rarely had a chance to use most of them, so she alternated. Some evenings she wrote in in French, others in Italian, and at least once every week she wrote in Romanian.

The stories changed slightly depending on the language. Some gave her more words to work with than others.

By nine every morning, she was at her desk at the Department of Unnamed Things.

The name was more interesting than the work. Most days she answered emails and corrected forms. But last week was better. She had two new cases: a space between two buildings that was too narrow to be called an alley and a staircase that ended above the pavement. Her job was to find a name for them. Once named, they could be entered into the system. That was considered a successful resolution.

Today they received a complaint about the patch of ground behind the General Hospital. It appears on every city map but has no official designation. People sit there, wait, smoke, cry. Too many of them cry, apparently.

She entered in the form: SERVICE COURTYARD

On her way back from work, she passed by the General Hospital Tucked behind the main building, the dumpsters stood in a row. A truck was parked next to a delivery door, and two men in blue overalls were unloading boxes.

After a simple dinner she turned on the TV, in time for the local news. An older couple is telling the story of their lives. “Right here, on this bench, we meet for the first time” the woman says. It looked somehow familiar. Or maybe it was the alley. A solitary bench on an alley with oak trees, somehow odd to find it there. You would expect benches in a park. Then she remembered. It was case she had few weeks ago, at the beginning of spring. A long stone structure in a narrow pedestrian lane. She named it BENCH.

She smiled as the report ended with the old couple standing beside it, looking at each other more than at the camera. Someone in the neighborhood had hung a small sign on the tree beside them: LOVERS’ BENCH.

The next day she met Claire for coffee.

They had known each other for years and had somehow kept speaking French together, even though Claire spoke perfectly good English. It had started as practice and then simply became the language in which they knew each other.

She told Claire about the news story.

« Il y avait ce couple, très vieux maintenant. Ils se sont rencontrés au même endroit il y a… je ne sais pas, quarante ans peut-être. »

« C’est mignon. »

« Oui. Et je connaissais l’endroit. J’avais eu le dossier au bureau. »

She tried to describe it.

« C’est dans une petite rue piétonne, avec des chênes. Et au milieu il y a une longue… »

She stopped.

She searched for the word and couldn’t find it. The word bench came in English, but she wasn’t speaking English.

She moved her hand horizontally over the table.

« Une sorte de muret en pierre. Assez bas. Les gens peuvent s’asseoir dessus, mais les enfants montent aussi dessus, les vélos sont souvent appuyés contre… »

Claire stirred her coffee.

« Un muret, alors. »

« Oui. Un muret. »

They ordered another coffee and started talking about something else.

The next few days brought easier cases, like the narrow strip of grass between a parking lot and a row of garages that she called GREEN BUFFER, or the wooden platform beside a bus stop. She named it BOARDING PLATFORM.

On Friday, the first case was about eleven minutes. Every afternoon, a factory stopped one production line while the morning crew left, and the evening crew arrived. The eleven minutes appeared on payroll reports, safety records, and production schedules, but each department called them something different. She named them: SHIFT TRANSITION.

The second one was from the History Museum. They sent photographs of a glass case containing objects that had been donated but didn’t fit in any collection. A brass key, a child’s shoe, three postcards and a broken compass. She thought about that one longer. STUDY COLLECTION, she finally typed.

For reasons she had never been able to explain, the Friday cases were usually the best ones.

That evening she turned on the TV while washing the dishes. The local news was already on. She was not really listening until she heard the name of the street. The one with the oaks and the lover’s bench. “They really like that romantic story, playing it twice in couple of weeks” she thought as she turned toward the TV.

The woman was speaking. “The little wall should be left alone” she said, “it doesn’t harm anyone and I’ve used it many times to rest”. The man beside her disagreed. The stones were cracked, skateboarders had chipped the edges, and the city should either repair it properly or remove it. They interrupted each other more than once. The reporter called it a neighborhood dispute that had been going on for years.

She dried her hands and came closer to the television. She knew those faces, the old woman and the old man. Only, she knew them as a couple, a loving couple - not as angry neighbors.

She stayed in front of the TV until the story ended.

… to be continued

Note: images are AI generated.

Part 1: Ceasornicara - by Notes from Elsewhere

I-a dat ceasul înapoi lui Petre a doua zi.

- L-ai reparat! Un zâmbet larg i s-a întins pe față.

- Nu era nimic de reparat, a răspuns ea, puțin încurcată. L-am curățat și atât. Dacă se oprește iar, din păcate tot va trebui să mergi la Mocănești.

Petru și-a pus ceasul la mână, l-a apropiat de ureche și a dat mulțumit din cap.

- Merge. Asta-i important.

Peste câteva zile, venind de la piață, l-a văzut la colțul străzii, stând de vorbă cu doi prieteni. Râdea, vesel și destins, cum nu-l mai văzuse de mult. Nici nu părea să se grăbească undeva.

Când a zărit-o, a ridicat mâna.

- Ziua bună! Ceasul merge de minune! Să știi că dau sfoară-n țară!

- Lasă, bade Petre, nu-i nevoie. Doar ți-am spus că nici n-am reparat nimic. Și nici nu prea știu ce fac, nu-mi trimite oamenii pe cap.

Petru a râs.

- Dacă nu știi ce faci, să tot nu știi așa!

Ea a dat din mână și și-a văzut de drum.

Dar Petru s-a ținut de cuvânt.

Peste câteva săptămâni, coana Leana a apărut la poartă cu un ceas mic, cu brățară aurie, pe care i-l cumpărase băiatul ei de ziua ei.

- Nu știu ce are, merge înainte. Tot timpul mă păcălește. Mă uit la el și mă sperii că iar am întârziat.

- Cât merge înainte?

- Nu știu. Cinci minute, zece. Poate mai mult. Nu mai știu nimic.

S-a așezat pe scaun, oftând.

- Mă tot cheamă băiatul la oraș.

- Păi de ce nu mergi?

A început să-i povestească câte avea de făcut. Găinile, grădina, fasolea care trebuia culeasă, niște borcane pe care trebuia să le pună pentru iarnă, o perdea de spălat, două drumuri până la primărie. Nu avea ea timp de mers la oraș. Și, pe deasupra, îi părea rău să-i spună băiatului că ceasul nu mai mergea cum trebuie. Doar el i-l cumpărase. Poate îl stricase ea cumva.

Ceasul mergea, într-adevăr, puțin înainte. Ceasornicara l-a desfăcut, l-a curățat și a potrivit mecanismul. Afară ploua mărunt în ziua aceea, iar ea a lucrat mult cu geamul deschis. Îi plăcea mirosul de pământ ud. Când l-a montat la loc, l-a ținut o vreme lângă ureche. Tic-tacul era liniștit, ca ploaia care cădea în curte.

Coana Leana a venit după el a doua zi.

- Am reușit să-l dreg, merge la timp, i-a spus ceasornicara.

- Slavă Domnului. Măcar de ceas să nu-mi mai fac griji.

După vreo două săptămâni, casa coanei Leana a stat încuiată câteva zile.

I-au spus vecinii, luase autobuzul și se dusese la oraș la băiatul ei.

Când s-a întors, a trecut pe la ceasornicară cu o cutie de ciocolată de la oraș.

- N-am mai fost la el din primăvară, a spus. Tot ziceam că mă duc când termin treaba.

- Și-ai terminat-o?

Coana Leana a râs.

- Nu. Fasolea a rămas neculeasă și perdeaua nespălată.

A ridicat din umeri.

- Și n-a murit nimeni.

După coana Leana au mai venit și alții. La început câte unul la câteva săptămâni, apoi tot mai des. Un ceas care rămânea în urmă, unul care se oprea noaptea, altul care mergea bine câteva zile și apoi o lua iar înainte.

La început au venit trimiși de Petre sau de coana Leana, dar, încet-încet, s-a răspândit vestea că văduva lui Vasile se apucase de reparat ceasuri.

Ea protesta de fiecare dată că nu era ceasornicară adevărată și că oamenii ar face mai bine să meargă la Mocănești dacă aveau ceva serios de reparat. Dar oamenii insistau să încerce ea mai întâi. Dacă nu se putea, și-or face cumva timp să ajungă și la Mocănești.

Încetul cu încetul, devenise tot mai puțin „văduva lui Vasile” și tot mai mult „ceasornicara”.

Așa a ajuns și Marin la poarta ei.

A intrat în curte cu pași repezi și, înainte să spună bună ziua, și-a scos ceasul de la mână.

- Am auzit că te pricepi.

- Vorbește lumea prea mult.

- Așa o fi, da’ totuși uită-te puțin la el.

- Ce are?

- Nu știu.

- Se oprește?

- Nu.

- Rămâne în urmă?

- Nu cred.

- Merge înainte?

Marin s-a gândit.

- Nici asta.

- Atunci de ce l-ai adus?

A stat puțin pe gânduri, după care a spus în șoaptă:

- Pentru că nu-mi ajunge ziua.

Ea a început să râdă.

- Eu repar ceasuri, Marine.

- Știu. Da’ lumea zice...

- Lumea ar face bine să-și vadă de treaba ei!

A luat totuși ceasul. L-a desfăcut de două ori și tot nimic n-a găsit. L-a lăsat pe masă până a doua zi.

Dimineața, niște copii se jucau pe uliță. Alergau după o minge și se certau de mama focului dacă fusese gol sau nu. Unul râdea atât de tare încât îi molipsea și pe ceilalți.

Ceasornicara a lucrat cu geamul deschis.

Când a pus ceasul la loc, tic-tacul îi era scurt și vioi, parcă sărea. L-a ascultat o vreme.

- Ciudat, și-a spus încet. Pot să jur că ieri suna altfel.

Marin a venit seara.

- N-avea nimic.

-Dar l-ai desfăcut?

- Da, l-am desfăcut, l-am curățat.

I l-a dat.

- Și acum?

- Tot nimic n-are.

Peste câteva săptămâni l-a găsit pe Marin pe marginea uliței, cu trei copii strânși în jurul lui. Le arăta cum se face un fluier dintr-o crenguță și copiii îl urmăreau cu ochii mari.

- Marine, da’ tu n-ai treabă?

- Ba am.

A mai cioplit puțin crenguța și a ridicat-o spre lumină.

- Da’ stai să le arăt cum se face.

A dat să plece, dar l-a auzit strigând în urma ei:

- Să știi că ai avut dreptate! Ceasul n-avea nimic!

Tot drumul spre casă s-a gândit la Marin și la ceasul lui care nu avusese nimic.

A doua zi dimineata si-a făcut o cafea în ibricul roșu și a dat drumul la radio. A cautat postul pe care îl asculta Vasile, cu romante vechi.

Și-a dus cafeaua în camera cu ceasuri.

Pe colțul mesei mai era încă unul dintre ceasurile lui Vasile, desfăcut, așa cum îl lăsase. Nu se atinsese niciodată de el. Nu știa dacă fusese stricat sau dacă Vasile pur și simplu nu mai apucase să-l termine.

L-a tras mai aproape.

A luat lupa, apoi penseta cea subțire și s-a uitat la mecanism. De la radio venea un cântec pe care îl știa si fără să-și dea seama, a început să fredoneze.

Notă: Povestea este scrisă în limba română. Dacă o citești în engleză, traducerea este generată automat de Substack și poate conține formulări neclare sau inexacte.

Diminețile erau de obicei liniștite. Îi plăcea să se trezească foarte devreme, și să-și fiarbă cafeaua în ibric. Avea un ibric roșu, probabil îl moștenise, i se părea că fusese dintotdeauna în bucătărie.

Dar ea nu fusese dintotdeauna ceasornicară. De meșteșugul ăsta se apucase abia după ce rămăsese văduvă.

Lui Vasile îi plăcuse să repare lucruri de când era tânăr. Radiouri, lămpi, râșnițe de cafea, chiar si câte un cuptor care nu mai voia să se încălzească, dar doar la bătrânețe se specializase în ceasuri.

- Când te-a lăsat vederea, te-ai apucat de ceasuri? râdeau vecinii.

Dar tot la el veneau când li se oprea vreun ceas și tot ei se bucurau când, după două-trei zile, Vasile li-l întindea peste masă și spunea cu vocea lui molcomă:

- E gata. Merge. N-a fost mare lucru.

Și, invariabil:

- Nu trebuie să-mi dai nimic.

Oamenii protestau, el dădea din mână. Până la urmă tot apărea pe prispă câte ceva din grădină: un coș cu roșii, niște ouă, două legături de ceapă, toamna câte un dovleac sau un borcan de zacuscă. Ea îi făcea câte o ciorbă acră, așa cum îi plăcea lui, din ce se nimerea să primească, și până la urmă toată lumea era mulțumită.

Vasile murise de un an și ea încă nu reușise să intre în camera cu ceasuri. Mai deschisese ușa din când în când, doar să se uite, poate să ia ceva, dar o închidea repede la loc. Acum se hotărâse, în sfârșit, să facă ordine. Rămăseseră după el toate lupele, șurubelnițele minuscule, pensetele, cutiuțele cu rotițe, arcuri și șuruburi. Și ceasurile, desigur, cele pe care Vasile începuse să le strângă de cativa ani. Le găsea prin târguri sau le primea de la oameni care nu mai aveau ce face cu ele. Unele le reparase si mergeau, altele păreau ca nu merseseră niciodată.

La început intrase doar ca să facă ordine, numai că, de fiecare dată, treceau orele si ea era tot acolo. Întorcea instrumentele pe toate părțile, încercând să-și amintească la ce le folosise Vasile. Deschidea câte un ceas și urmărea rotițele fără să înțeleagă mare lucru, chiar mai lua câte o lupă, o potrivea la ochi și se uita, dar de înțeles tot nu înțelegea. Până într-o zi când a desfăcut unul dintre ceasuri și, pentru prima dată, a știut unde trebuia să se uite.

Asa, încetul cu încetul, a învățat să le desfacă și să le pună la loc. Apoi a descoperit care rotiță trebuia să atingă alta și cât de puțină forță era, de fapt, prea multă. Pana la urma a învățat cum să curețe un mecanism fără să-l rănească, cum să îndrepte un arc, să recunoască un dinte tocit. Și, poate cel mai greu pentru ea, să nu se grăbească să facă ceva doar pentru că nu găsea imediat problema. A învățat sa aștepte.

Vasile îi spusese cândva că oamenii stricau cele mai multe lucruri fiindcă nu aveau răbdare. Nu-i dăduse prea mare atenție, dar acum începea să priceapă.

După câteva luni nu mai trebuia să se uite de două ori ca să știe dacă o piesă intrase cum trebuie. Uneori o simțea pur și simplu sub degete. Cu timpul, a început si să le audă altfel si a realiza ca nu toate tic-tacurile erau la fel. Unele ceasuri băteau grăbit, chiar dacă țineau timpul corect, în timp ce altele păreau mereu obosite. Unele aveau un tic-tac rotund și liniștit, altele te zgâriau la urechi chiar și când le opreai.

Ce lucru fără niciun folos, se gândea ea câteodată. Cine mai are nevoie de ceasornicari în ziua de azi? Toată lumea se uită la telefon.

Într-o zi s-a întâlnit cu badea Petru la colțul străzii. Au intrat în vorbă, ca de obicei.

- Da’ ce ești așa abătut? l-a întrebat ea.

Petru a oftat.

- Trebuie să mă duc până la Mocănești și nu știu când naiba să-mi fac timp.

- Da’ ce-ai pățit?

- Mi s-a stricat ceasul de la tata. Ăla vechi, îl știi. Țin mult la el. Am auzit că-i un ceasornicar bun în Mocănești.

Apoi a mai oftat o dată.

- Dumnezeu să-l odihnească pe Vasile al tău. Tare bine mi-ar fi prins acum. N-am timp nici să suflu, darămite să fac drumul până la Mocănești și înapoi și după aia încă o dată să mă duc să-l iau. Sper numai să fie omul ăla măcar pe sfert cât era Vasile și să-i dea de capăt.

- Păi, bade Petre, până găsești dumneata timp să ajungi la Mocănești, nu mi-l lași mie? Să văd ce pot să-i fac.

Petru s-a uitat lung la ea.

- Da’ ce, te-a învățat Vasile meșteșugul?

Era prea greu sa ii explice, si pana la urma nu ar fi știut exact se sa explice. Pana la urma poate că o învățase Vasile și ea nu știuse, doar a fost lângă el în toți anii în care a stat aplecat asupra mesei, ascultând un ceas înainte să-l deschidă.

- Adu-l, a spus doar.

Petru a venit spre seară.

- Până la sfârșitul săptămânii oricum nu ajung la Mocănești. Poți să-l ții câteva zile. Dacă-i dai de cap, trimite vorbă. Tare bine ar fi de m-ai scuti de drumul ăsta, că la cât sunt de ocupat, numai timp de pierdut pe drum nu am.

A lăsat ceasul pe masă și a plecat.

Era un ceas vechi, cu cadranul îngălbenit și cureaua maro schimbată de multe ori.

A doua zi in zorii zilei, s-a apucat de treaba. Înainte să-l deschidă, a dus ceasul la ureche. Nu se auzea nimic. După câteva clipe, l-a pus jos.

- Ciudat, a spus.

Nu i se părea stricat.

L-a desfăcut cu delicatețe și a început să curețe rotițele. La un moment dat și-a dat seama că fredona. S-a oprit cu gura ușor deschisă. Nu mai cântase de foarte mulți ani și rămase așa câteva clipe, mirată de amintirile care dădeau năvală.

Cânta un cântec pe care îl învățase de la bunica ei. Un cântec care nu era de leagăn, nu era de obidă, nici de dans sau de petrecere, era de toate la un loc fără să fie de niciunul, un cântec care îți golea inima și o umplea la loc și te lăsa curat.

A lucrat la ceas, încetișor, cu cântecul în ea, câteva ore. Nu găsise nimic stricat, așa că, după ce a terminat de curățat mecanismul, l-a montat la loc și s-a dus să-și mai facă o cafea. A lăsat ceasul pe masă, așa, cu cadranul încă desfăcut.

Badea Petre va trebui până la urmă să facă drumul la Mocănești, s-a gândit ea. Nu știu ce-a fost în capul meu de mi-am închipuit că pot repara ceasuri acum...

Când s-a întors, soarele ajunsese pe masă și o rază se prinsese chiar în mecanismul desfăcut. I s-a părut că dansa pe melodia bunicii.

A pus cadranul la loc. Raza dispăruse înăuntru și, pentru o clipă, s-a gândit prostește că poate rămăsese acolo și cântecul.

A tras rotița și tic-tacul a început să se audă.

Era unul vesel și săltăreț.

….va urma

Notă: Povestea este scrisă în limba română. Dacă o citești în engleză, traducerea este generată automat de Substack și poate conține formulări neclare sau inexacte.

The dream began on a Tuesday in March.

Every Tuesday night he dreamed exactly the same dream. At first, he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the dream had begun a few weeks earlier and he had simply failed to remember it. He remembered very few dreams and, in general, paid them no attention. But on the morning he woke with the unmistakable feeling that he had been there before, he began paying attention. After that there were no exceptions. Every Tuesday night he dreamed the same dream.

He had been driving the same bus route for more than ten years. Every morning, before pulling out for his first run, he tapped the steering wheel twice with the palm of his left hand. It wasn’t superstition. He had done it on his very first day and had never given the gesture another thought.

He knew the route by heart. Every bend, every pothole, every traffic light that stayed red longer than it should. He knew the people, too. He knew who boarded the first bus before sunrise and who never appeared until midday. He knew who always got off two stops before the end of the line and who fell asleep almost every day in the last row.

He knew the house as well. An old house on a street lined with acacia trees, which he passed every morning. There were grapevines in the yard and, in summer, geraniums everywhere. He liked that house, although in all those years he had never seen anyone go in or come out.

In the dream he drove the same route.

Only there was one extra stop, directly in front of the house with the geraniums.

The bus always stopped there. The doors opened. The engine idled for a few moments. No one got on. No one got off. After a few seconds, the bus pulled away.

For the first few weeks, what occupied him was not so much the stop itself as the fact that the dream stubbornly insisted on keeping to the calendar. He mentioned it to a friend, but the conversation quickly drifted toward one of their usual subjects, and before long they were talking about Sunday’s football match, for which his friend had tickets.

He went to see a doctor, who simply shrugged.

“There’s nothing unusual about it. I’ll run a few tests anyway, just to be sure.”

The results came back perfectly normal.

He even considered visiting a fortune teller, but he was a grown man and couldn’t imagine himself doing such a thing.

After that, he stopped telling anyone about the dream.

One day, as he drove past the house, he noticed that a bench had appeared beside the road. Its position struck him as odd, so close to the traffic, and he assumed someone must have put it there by mistake. The following week a brand-new trash bin appeared beside the bench.

Only then did he realize it was Wednesday. And when he had first noticed the bench, that had been a Wednesday too.

A few weeks later, a passenger he had never seen before pressed the Stop button just as they reached the bench. Petre intended to continue to the next stop, but the man jumped to his feet and began shouting, agitated, that he wanted to get off there. So he pulled over.

He shouldn’t have stopped. It wasn’t a bus stop, and everyone knew it. But what could really happen if he lost a minute and let the man off?

Over the following weeks, a few more passengers pressed Stop as they reached the bench. Not many. And always on Wednesdays.

By June, the garden was full of geraniums and rose bushes.

Without ever meaning to, he had begun looking toward the house a few seconds before the bus reached it, as though the entire route existed only to bring him there.

Meanwhile, the Tuesday dreams continued without interruption, and nothing new happened in them until one morning he woke with an unusually vivid memory of the walnut tree beside the bench at the stop that existed only in his dream.

That day, as he drove down the street lined with acacias, he saw that someone had planted a sapling beside the bench.

“I think it’s a walnut tree,” he said, without realizing he had spoken aloud.

The woman waiting to get off at the new stop looked out the window as well.

“Strange. I never noticed it before.”

For the rest of the day, he wondered whether he had seen a sapling, or the beginning of the walnut tree from the dream.

By July, the stop had become, without anyone quite remembering when it had happened, one of the busiest on the route. At first only drivers who gave in to insistent passengers had stopped there. Then people had begun waiting there as though it had always been a stop. One morning the city installed an official sign, as though it were simply acknowledging something that had existed all along.

Acacia Street. Route 7.

A week later, she appeared in the dream for the first time.

She was coming out of the house with the geraniums. She wore a large straw hat, unusually red, and a loose white dress that almost reached the ground. Strands of gray hair escaped from beneath the brim, and from the way she walked he guessed she must have been around fifty.

She stepped out of the house and, as she passed the walnut tree, rested her hand against its trunk for a moment. Only then did she sit down on the bench beneath its shade. The bus stopped. She didn’t get on.

In the weeks that followed she was there in every Tuesday dream. The red hat never changed, but the dresses did. Sometimes she smiled and waved at him. Sometimes she sat perfectly still, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the road, as though she hadn’t even noticed the bus had stopped in front of her. She never got on.

Several times he went to bed determined that, if he saw her again, he would get off the bus and ask who she was and what she was doing there. But in the dream he could never do anything except what he had always done. He stopped. The doors opened. He waited a few seconds. Then he drove on.

On that morning at the end of summer, which was, of course, a Wednesday, he saw her before the bus turned the corner.

She was sitting on the bench, wearing the same red hat.

For a moment he wondered whether he might still be dreaming.

He pulled into the stop, and the woman stood up and climbed aboard through the front door. As she came closer and he saw her properly for the first time, he realized she was younger than she had seemed in the dream.

She paused for a moment, looking at him. Then she smiled and held out her hand. She wasn't holding a ticket, but a small white envelope.

“For you, Petre.”

That was all she said. Then she walked to the back of the bus and took a seat.

He didn’t open the envelope until that evening, after he got home.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. Just a few handwritten words.

“It’s time for a new dream.”

Field Note

REALITY LEARNS FROM DREAMS.

IT NEEDS TIME.

Grandmother had three drawers.

One for documents.

One for money.

And one for keys to houses that no longer existed.

The houses that no longer existed were very important, even more important than the houses people left behind when they moved somewhere else.

That didn’t happen very often in Ada’s grandparents’ village. It happened mostly in the city, where she lived with her parents.

In the city people moved from house to house, or from one apartment building to another, and they never seemed to care very much about the places they left behind. There was always something better: a larger apartment, an east-facing balcony, closer to downtown, closer to the forest so they could breathe some clean air instead of all the traffic fumes. Countless other reasons.

The important thing was that people moved because they wanted something better.

In Ada’s grandparents’ village it was different.

People didn’t move into other people’s houses just like that, for no particular reason, because a house wasn’t simply a temporary solution to a problem of space, light, or neighbors.

If they needed more space, they built another room. If they had money, they replaced the roof. If they had more money, they built a better cellar, a sturdier attic, or a larger house on their own land, and if things went well enough, they bought another piece of land from the neighbors. But they rarely left.

Leaving was regarded with a certain suspicion, as though you had abandoned a conversation halfway through.

Perhaps that was why Grandmother kept the keys.

Not all of them, of course. The keys to houses where people still lived were kept somewhere else and used every day, which made them rather uninteresting.

The drawer was for the keys left without doors, without locks, without thresholds, and without people coming home in the evening. Keys to houses that had been demolished, collapsed, or forgotten by relatives who had moved to the city and then farther away, to other cities where they probably had nicer balconies and cleaner air.

One had belonged to an aunt who had moved to Canada and sent Christmas cards every year, although after a while nobody was entirely sure whether she still remembered exactly where the house had been.

There was also a large, black, heavy key that Grandmother said had belonged to a house that had ceased to exist before she herself had been born.

“If the house doesn’t exist anymore, what’s the key for?” Ada asked one day.

Grandmother shrugged.

“It isn’t for anything.”

“Then why do you keep it?”

Grandmother didn’t answer. She looked at the key for a few seconds, turning it between her fingers, then put it back in the drawer.

That night Ada was awakened by a sound.

It wasn’t loud, but it had something precise and metallic about it, as though two objects had lightly touched somewhere in the house. She lay perfectly still, her eyes open in the darkness, trying to decide whether she had only dreamed it.

The sound came again.

This time it was quieter, almost hesitant.

Ada sat up a little in bed. She wanted to call out. She wasn’t exactly frightened, but she wasn’t entirely at ease either. She thought about Grandmother’s drawer, about those useless keys that opened nothing.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, holding her breath. Then the silence settled back into place.

Ada lay down again, telling herself that by morning everything would make sense.

The next morning, she found Grandmother in the kitchen. She was already sitting at the table, her hands folded.

Ada stopped in the doorway.

“I heard a noise last night,” she said.

“It happens sometimes,” Grandmother said.

“What happens?”

“The keys.”

She said it simply, without mystery, as though she were explaining why water boils or why rain falls.

“Why?”

Grandmother shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe when nobody remembers them anymore.”

Ada didn’t ask any more questions.

A few weeks later, one of the keys disappeared.

It was small and rusty, and Ada thought it was one of the ugliest and most insignificant ones in the drawer.

Grandmother emptied the drawer.

Then she emptied the wardrobe and put everything on the bed. She cleaned the whole room. She carried the rugs outside. She went into the next room. She emptied the wardrobe there too. Then she went into the third room. Finally, she went down to the cellar. There she began wiping every jar. She picked one up. Looked behind it. Put it back. Picked up the next one. Looked behind it. Put it back. Ada counted thirty-seven jars before she grew bored and wandered away.

That evening Grandmother invited two neighbors over. They sat beneath the walnut tree and talked for a long time, in low voices. Ada found something to play with nearby, and they let her stay, although they had sent Grandfather away to “mind his own business” when he came to ask what had happened.

They talked about the house whose key had disappeared during the night. About the blue gate. About the room that faced the sunrise. About the large tiled stove in the guest room, one of those made in Aiud by a famous stove builder. About the well, which had stood a little to the right of the house, some thirty paces away. They talked about the roof, about the tiles. Ada understood very little of what they were saying, but she listened as they rebuilt the house piece by piece, room by room.

“The cellar was very large,” Grandmother said. “Twice the size of ours.”

One of the neighbors was silent for a few seconds.

Then she said,

“It was old Dinu’s house.”

Grandmother nodded, satisfied.

That evening the key was back in the drawer, and nobody seemed surprised.

Years later, Ada was returning by train from her grandparents’ village.

The keys were in a cloth bag, tucked inside her suitcase. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had brought them.

She had inherited the three drawers and had spent almost the entire summer putting papers in order, airing out the rooms, and wiping the dust from things.

She had tried to decide what to do with the house. She told herself she could come at least during the summers, walk through the forest during the day, and write beneath the walnut tree in the evenings.

It had rained almost all day, and the carriage was nearly empty. At one of the stations an old man boarded the train and sat down in the seat beside her. They talked for a while. About the rain, about trains, about how much the villages had changed. Then they sat in silence for a while.

When the train reached his stop, the old man stood up, picked up his bag, and held out his hand.

“Dinu,” he said.

Ada watched him step off the train, his figure disappearing into the rain.

She reached for her bag. She could feel the keys inside, cold and heavy. Back in the village, she would have taken them out and counted them. One by one.

She remained like that for a few seconds.

Then she took her hand away from the bag.

She turned back to the window.

The rain was erasing the fields, the houses, the roads.

Field Note

ABSENCES HURT ONLY IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR THEM.

RESULTS VARY DEPENDING ON LOCATION.

This story is another possible interpretation of the door in Ada’s grandparent’s village (see The Door in the Wall - by Notes from Elsewhere)

The story starts the same:

But … this time Ada doesnt go asking around the village

The door was always closed and that, more than anything else, bothered Ada.

Not because there was anything remarkable on the other side. If she stood a few steps to the left, she could see perfectly well what was behind it: a field, some grass, a path leading toward the creek and, farther away, the first houses at the edge of the village.

And yet the door remained closed.

Every day during the summer she passed it several times. On the way to the well. On the way back from the store when her grandmother sent her to buy bread, yeast, or the small sour candies she pretended not to like. On the way to Tanti Tanta’s house carrying apples, eggs, jars, messages, and occasionally information that seemed far too complicated to trust to a child but was entrusted to her anyway.

Every time she passed the door she wondered what would happen if she opened it.

Not what was behind it, that was clear and visible, but what would happen. These seemed to Ada like two entirely different questions.

That summer she was reading Narnia, and the situation became considerably more complicated.

The fact that she could see a field behind the door no longer proved anything. Books had already established that wardrobes were unreliable, mirrors were suspicious, and ordinary-looking objects frequently concealed entire worlds. There was no reason a blue door in a village in Muntenia should behave more honestly than a wardrobe in England.

For several weeks she became convinced that the field was merely a disguise and the real world would reveal itself only after the door opened.

The difficulty was deciding which world she wanted to uncover.

She considered Narnia itself, it seemed like a promising outcome.

On the other hand, if she opened the door and found herself in the story of the Three Little Pigs, she would be deeply disappointed. The entire story irritated her. Everyone made poor decisions and the ending felt undeserved.

Some fairy tales suffered from similar problems. The handsome prince was rarely the most interesting person in the story and even Ileana Cosânzeana, despite possessing exceptionally beautiful hair, appeared to spend too much time waiting for other people to solve her problems.

Winnetou was more attractive. A Journey Around the World in Eighty Days also had potential. Narnia remained a strong candidate.

The summer passed. Then another one. Then another one. The door remained closed.

Ada continued thinking. She got more and more convinced that choosing the wrong story could have serious consequences. If the door opened into a world she did not like, she might be forced to stay there. Books were strangely vague on this subject.

She decided to wait until she was sure.

Years later she realized that she had never opened the door.

The door, meanwhile, appeared perfectly willing to wait.

Later she wrote down the explanation.

EVERY DOOR LEADS SOMEWHERE.

TECHNICALLY CORRECT.

THE DIFFICULT PART IS DECIDING WHICH STORY YOU ARE ENTERING.

EXPLANATION #43

YOU CAN TAKE A PLACE WITH YOU.

THE METHODOLOGY IS DISPUTED.

The first time she moved away, she took two jars with her.

One contained sour cherry jam.

The other contained soil.

The jam had been made by her mother from the sour cherries that grew in her grandfather’s garden. She never opened the jar. Years later it still stood on the blue shelf by the window, exactly where she had placed it when they finally moved into their own house, after so many rentals and so many changes of address that sometimes it took her a few seconds to remember which part of the city they had lived in during a particular year.

The house had a garden.

It also had a kitchen sink facing a window, something she had wanted for a long time, ever since seeing a woman washing dishes and looking outside in a film. The film was probably American, although she could no longer remember the title or any of the actors.

When she washed dishes, she could see the children playing in the yard.

If she turned her head slightly to the right, she could see the jar of sour cherries as well.

Every now and then she did exactly that.

The children outside. The cherries on the shelf.

The soil came from the Meadow, her favorite place since childhood. At first she went there with her grandmother, who would let her run through the grass until she was out of breath. Then they would sit in the sun with their eyes closed while her grandmother told stories. Later she began going there alone, carrying a book. Later still she went there with Ionel.

Ionel told stories too. At the time they seemed very different from her grandmother’s stories. Looking back, she was no longer sure they were.

The jar of soil traveled with her through all those rented apartments. It sat on shelves, in cupboards, inside cardboard boxes that were barely unpacked before the next move began.

On the day they moved into the house with the garden, she dug a hole behind the house and poured the soil into it.

Ionel planted a walnut tree.

The years passed. The tree grew.

One autumn they harvested their first walnuts. She placed them in a green basin and stood there for a while, looking at her hands stained dark by the husks.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Ionel asked.

“No.”

The second time she moved across seas and countries, she took three jars.

The first contained sour cherry jam made by her mother from the cherries in her grandfather’s orchard.

The second contained walnut jam she had made herself from the walnuts of their tree.

The third contained soil.

It came from the flower bed beside the walnut tree, where the children had played for years and where, from spring until late autumn, there was always a forgotten ball, a plastic shovel, or a toy soldier left behind after some important battle.

She packed it carefully in her carry-on bag.

At the airport, a security officer picked up the jar and examined it for a few seconds.

“What is this?”

“Soil.”

“Why?”

She thought for a moment.

“Just in case.”

The officer looked at her for a long time.

Then handed it back.

In the new country they rented again for the first couple of years, carrying the three jars from one home to another.

Eventually they settled in a small house at the edge of a forest. They no longer had the large garden they once had, but the woods began so close to the fence that they called them “our forest.”

The children left for homes of their own. One across seas and countries. The other across the street.

The three jars stood on a shelf in the kitchen.

Enough years passed that she sometimes had to look carefully to remember which jar held the cherries from her grandfather’s garden and which held the walnuts from their tree.

One day she realized she was no longer entirely sure where the soil had come from.

Beside the walnut tree?

The flower bed?

Had a little of the Meadow found its way in there as well?

She placed the jar back on the shelf.

A linden tree had appeared beside the fence.

She did not remember planting one.

She blinked those pale blue eyes, like water lit over white rocks, and men leaned toward her almost instinctively. She had curly blonde hair, was thin and small, and looked like a fairy from old stories.

But she was not a fairy. She was a structural engineer and designed dams for thermal power plants.

At home she had one of those enormous drafting tables covered with white tracing paper, and across it she drew straight lines and angles so exact you got dizzy just by looking at them. Everything had to be precise. Water had to flow where it had been calculated to flow, pressure had to remain within exact limits.

“The important cracks never appear at the surface. They begin first in places nobody can see,” she used to say to anyone willing to listen, but especially to her mother.

They were living together, in an apartment with a large and sunny balcony. Every Sunday they baked plum pie. Every morning her mother watered the plants on the balcony and shouted after her to take an umbrella, even in summer. And she always pretended to be irritated, although the umbrella ended up in her bag every single time.

They lived like that for almost forty years.

Then her mother died. She did not cry at the funeral, she organized everything impeccably.

She cried only a few months later, in a supermarket, when she passed the shelf full of plum jam.

She bought a jar, but when she arrived home she saw it was already cracked. She had probably hit it against the concrete stairs of the apartment building while climbing too quickly, tears still on her face.

After that, straight lines began to exhaust her. In the mornings she would stand in front of the drafting table and watch how all those lines and angles she was supposed to draw with precision began to bend, slip into one another, slowly turning into spirals.

It was not a metallic or heavy sound, as she might have expected. If one can expect thermal plants to sing, of course. They vibrated more like the enormous organs inside cathedrals, with a sound so deep she did not exactly hear it, but she felt it climbing through the bones of her body.

In the dream she walked barefoot along the dam and felt the concrete beneath her feet vibrating together with the song. As the sound grew, the dams began to tremble. At first barely visibly. Then more and more violently, until they began to come apart slowly, seam by seam. Thin cracks appeared first, almost elegant. After that the concrete broke away in large heavy pieces that fell without sound, and the water that had been held there for years began to move in waves.

Dark, deep water filled with orange, red, and yellow flowers drifting slowly through the currents.

The thermal plants kept singing, and she took off her clothes and stepped into the water.

The last thing she remembered was the sensation of the water against her skin. It was warm and dense, almost velvety. Liquid honey, she thought, although the comparison made no sense.

She woke with a dry mouth and the image still floating in her mind: the black water, the flowers burning through the currents, and the sensation of honey against her skin. For a long time she lay there without turning on the light, trying to remember whether she had been afraid in the dream. She had not.

In the morning she went to work as usual. She took the 7:15 bus, bought a poppy seed pretzel from the corner shop, and climbed the three flights of stairs to her office. She drank coffee that was too hot from the metal mug she always kept on her desk. She unfolded the drafting plans.

At lunchtime she wrote her resignation on a sheet of lined paper torn from an old notebook.

The director asked her whether she was ill.

She said no.

Preview, chapter from the upcoming book “The Quiet of Breaking”

It was winter, and we were doing homework in the kitchen.
The oven door was cracked open, not to bake, but to warm the room. The air smelled faintly of boiled potatoes. My fingers were stiff inside the gloves my mother had cut the fingertips off.

The candle on the table was the only light. Its flame bent every time the wind found a gap in the window frame. My mother sat across from me, marking papers, her head bowed so the shadows deepened in the hollows of her face.

My little sister was hunched over her exercise book, her legs swinging under the chair.
“When is the hot water coming back?” she asked.

“Saturday,” my mother said, without looking up from her papers. “Will wash your hair then”

“And we have to go queue tomorrow morning. I heard they will bring chicken.”

I added.

“Not too early,” my mother said. “They won’t unload before nine. Take a book with you.”

She finally glanced up from her marking. “Speaking of books… have you finished reading Baltagul?”

“It’s boring,” I muttered. “I want to read Logodnica locotenentului francez.” The French’s Lieutenant’s Woman. “Why do I have to read Baltagul?”

She set down her pen. “Because Baltagul is ours. It’s in our language, our mountains, our way of telling a story. You can’t understand the rest of the world if you don’t understand first where you’re standing. Vitoria Lipan walks into the snow for the truth, not for romance. That’s rarer, and harder.”

The candle flared once, stretching our shadows long across the wall until they leaned toward each other, almost touching. My sister noticed, her pencil paused mid-word.

The flame steadied again.

The smell arrived. Not from the candle, not from the potatoes, but sharp and sudden, almost sweet.
The air smelled of oranges.

Bright. Impossible.
The kind of smell that didn’t belong to rationing winters, but to memory, to thought.

My mother went on marking. My sister bent over her exercise book.

Some nights the power would return, and the TV would hum back to life. Two hours a day, one channel, if we were lucky.

But not tonight. Tonight there was only the quiet scrape of my pencil and the slow turn of the pages.

We kept working until the candle burned low, until the pencil lines blurred and the page grew heavy under my hand.

And still the air smelled of oranges. Bright, impossible, like thought itself lingering when everything else was gone.

Excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves.

The Girl Who Wouldn’t Wait

The smell of boiled milk clung to the kitchen air. My mother sat at the table, a book open in her hands, her voice carrying the story across the small room. I leaned against the chair leg, the words sliding over me.

I loved this part of the day. The small world we made between the table and the stove, between her voice and my listening. I could have stayed there forever, wrapped in stories.

But more than anything, I wanted to read them myself.
Sometimes I didn’t like the ones she chose. Other times, I’d fall in love with a story and ask for it every night until she grew tired of it. “No more,” she’d say. “Not again.”

I didn’t know the word for it then, but what I wanted was to decide. Not just the stories. I wanted the choice. The power to return to the ones I loved, to read them again and again without needing permission.

She was a teacher. I asked her to teach me to read. “You’ll learn in school,” she said. “No need to do it before.”

But waiting has never been easy for me.

One early spring afternoon, when I was about four, I took a blank sheet of paper and laid it carefully over a newspaper page. The paper was stiff. The pencil dragged. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I copied them like someone trying to steal a secret. My hand cramped. The pencil smeared. But I filled the page.

It was not writing. Not really. It was mimicry. A child’s quiet defiance.

When I brought the paper to my mother, I felt pride gather in my throat like a song. “Look,” I said. “I can write. Will you teach me to read now?”

She looked at the page, then at me. Her voice was flat. “This isn’t writing,” she said. “It’s nonsense. Scribbles. You’re wasting time.”

I stood there, still holding the page. Something inside me collapsed. Not from shame, but from the sudden quiet where I had expected recognition.

“I only wanted to read,” I said. “You wouldn’t help. So I tried. This is all I could do.”

She softened then, her voice quieter.

“You’re not going to give up, are you?”

I shook my head.

“I need to read now,” I said, with the certainty of someone who had decided she would not wait to be invited into her own life.

Behind her, on the far wall of the kitchen, sunlight made a perfect rectangle.
It was too precise for the way the curtains hung. Sharp at the edges, steady as if cut into the air itself. Inside it, the dust in the air seemed to pause, each speck suspended, unmoving, like they were listening.

For a moment, the dust aligned, not randomly, but in crooked rows. Lines. Almost like writing.

The spoon in my mother’s hand stopped mid-stir. The clock ticked louder, each second echoing in the pause. Even the milk seemed to still, its surface holding its breath.

I blinked, and the marks blurred, but for one breath I thought I could read them, as if the air itself were copying the page I held.

I glanced back at my paper. They were uneven, bent, stubborn.

I didn’t tell my mother. She wouldn’t have believed me, and maybe I didn’t believe it myself.

The kitchen smelled faintly of boiled milk, the way it always did, as if the air had kept a memory of mornings before

An excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves, a memoir about migration, identity, and becoming.