Searching for Meaning Structures

Tuesday, July 11, 2000  

"I told my friend, 'I'm going to war. I've got my weapons.' And he said mildly, 'Yes, you are.' He is from Transylvania too, but doesn't want to go back. I told him he was brain washed by his parents who left in 1960. He still thinks he is not brainwashed, but I hope my trip notes will help him figure out what's going on there.

I was fearful. He dispelled my irrational fears and assured me it would be a great trip. He bought me, the worthless, a digital camera  :)"

"Things here are wonderfully interesting. I feel like I am a scavenger. An image and words/thoughts scavenger. The scenery in general is gray and dusty and run down and moldy and air polluted. Stinkiness and crippleness. But there are so many surprisingly beautiful/meaningful/moving things/details that I feel like my eyes were opened after surgery bandages had been removed. I don't understand how I hadn't seen all these things before, when I lived here. I think photography changed my life. Images that I see here tell me of a reality that I want to probe in and discover all of its richness."

"My reason/ my meaning for coming here has finally shaped up. Very rewarding. I work all day. Sleep about 4 hours. I don't have enough floppies/memory support to record all that I see. I am afraid I will miss recording important things. I should have brought more provisions.

"I struggled with figuring out why I had to come to revisit Romania. I was irritated, paranoiac, begrudging. I feared falling into cliché: here is the forlorn daughter coming home and writing again about differences in Romania before and after '89, or about differences between Romania and the USA. I loathe being cast into any clichés. I loathe asking for attention. I know it's a market for exposing cultural differences, but I've been there already, and I won't repeat myself.

"As one friend said I am like a plant that outgrew its pot, with roots menacing to break the pot. She said when you put a plant into a larger pot; you have to put it in the dark for a week or so, because otherwise the plant would die, unable to survive in the light. I thought her comparison appropriate. My time in Louisiana is like an after-transplant slow down/convalescence."

"I really couldn't find a new angle to this trip. 'Something that would be fulfilling and would develop me, otherwise why should I write about it?' I was mumbling to myself. Some said I should write about being reunited with my family.

" 'Well, my father is an alcoholic and my siblings are heartlessly taking advantage of my parents and my mother is so sleeplessly anxious and domineering and my nephew is a pain in the ass, mean…. Like no one else, so there will be no happy family reunion to write about. I can write maybe about me showing my home country to my son. 'Well then, this could be a moving idea.’

"But that didn't work either: Alex opposed traveling. He said he wanted to stay all the time with his grandparents because he wanted to bring food to the market to his grandpa. Also, the prices are exorbitant here, maybe not for an American, but certainly for a GTA like me. I feared I'd feel like a stranger in my own country. It was frustrating to even think about this. I had grand dreams of going to the seaside, then to the mountains, then to the monasteries in Moldavia, then to the caves in Caras Severin, then to Maramures to see wooden churches, then to Felix spa, or to the many caves in Apuseni mountains. I envisaged myself showing my bewildered son the white sparkling salt mountains, the cracked mud, lunar volcanoes. But I went to the train agency and the train ticket is 220,000 lei for 1000 km, and adds 22000 lei more for each extra 1000 km. A hotel room is over 280,000 lei a night. A dollar is 21,000 lei. Still, I might get lucky and attach us to some school trip to Maramures or Felix spa and that would cost only 75,000 lei.

"Also, I will take several one-day trips around Salaj county, my county, the poorest in Romania, because in the end I discovered the big secret: you don't need to have a large scope/lens. You need to zoom in. I could write wonderful pages without traveling at all for the 4 weeks I'll be here. I discovered so many fascinating details. Incredibly rich. It's beyond me how I could never notice them before. But even locals here don't notice how rich they are. So, here is my final plan that gets reinforced every minute as I advance in my work: I will write about my hometown. In the end, I'll have a thick book and a photo exhibition. I interview people I think insightful. Some come to me, some I seek. I also take photos of them, if they let me. I also take some spontaneous shots. I also take still life shots. Objects reveal something about myself to me. They confirm me that everything is the eye/I.

"I discovered something that I haven't ever experience: I make space for other people in me. I snail deep in my coil; and people enter my space. I hope I make a gift of what I've discovered in my travels to them."

"I am deeply moved to see people excited about the photos I took last summer and have given them back now. They are so thrilled and thankful and bewildered. Maybe this is what I can give them and erase my debt to Romania. As father Opris said, an interviewee, I am the flower of this soil. Then let it be so. Let me help life, regeneration, and germination. Maybe images are what they need. Discover themselves. Maybe then they'll gain self-respect and strength to smile and discover the beauty and intoxicating flavor of their bubbling humor and the bustling vitality they have.

"Overall they are rundown and dejected, but somehow they’ll pull it through. I want to be part of this. Romania schooled me for free, I feel it's a deed of honor to try and pay back with a book and an exhibition.

"I have a blast imagining how they will be gathered in the Casa de Cultura a Sindicatelor /Union Cultural Center exhibition hall and look at their own pictures and read my text, and laugh and be joyous, god damn it!

"It's like in a stable, watching a newly born calf struggling to get on its legs. Come on, do it, do it, or you'll die, my people!"

Still Walking Around, Not Finding My Place

November, 1999

On a Sunday morning I took a stroll looking for some post cards to send to my friends in Louisiana. But they have no post cards anyone would want to send there. All you could find at the stands were the supermarket or the hospital. Who would like to see the cement Zalau Municipal Hospital?! Or the Morgue?! Or Silvania, the department store? So, I took some shots, thinking they could make for pretty decent post cards.

I tried to capture the bustle of my hometown in all its poignant nuances. There is so much vitality in the way people run around carrying bundles, plastic bags with loaves of bread, or four, even five plastic flasks. They come from all over the town to the artesian fountains and stand in line chatting. The way people walk, push carts around with sacs of vegetables towards the farmer’s market, I never see it here in Louisiana where the cities seem deserted, no people on the street. You feel like in a western, the town after the bad guys shot everybody and left. Creepy….

In my hometown people look eager, worried, excited, annoyed, happy, exhilarated, pensive, boastful, perhaps nasty at times, but ardent. People smile, with such different smiles there. They smile because a glimpse of happiness broke through their strugglearnings… Here people just smile lukewarm, cover girl smiles, all alike. As if to show God loves them and therefore they are happy, calm, have white teeth and success.

my name is

by Alex, my son

may, 2000

my name is Alex.

the name I shouldbe called is gundom boy becous I started the gundom club.

the animal tha t lives  inside me is a snake becuos I strike fast.

wats in my hart is my mom becous shes my only parent.

the sound I like is the sound of a beatig drum beating.

the sound I dislik is the sound of someone screming.

the smell I love is the smell of calone.

the smell I dont love is the smell of a armpit.

I love to touch ocean water.

I dont love to touch caterpilargouts.

I love the tast of a sprit.

I dont love to tast  mud.

somthing I like to look at is gundomwing.

I dont like to see is peopel geting hurt.

my favorite memory is when I jouind the bobcats.

my most  faivorite thing in the world is my mom.  

Posing Is A Serious Matter

November, 2000

I strolled around the old cobblestone streets.

I passed by the little warehouse in which I used to hang out reading books. It was now in ruins. A little Gypsy girl walked hurriedly down the street and I shyly asked her to pose for me. I was nervous because I knew of child traffickers who sell kids into prostitution abroad and I feared she might take me for one of them. But she blushed and eagerly did so after first gracefully arranging her colorful attire, tying her scarf, placing one hand on her waist, the other one spreading the large skirt, like a peacock its tail. It was a gesture going back for generations, saying, "Look at me! How rich is my skirt! My parents can afford to buy a lot of expensive cloth! You'll be making a great match if you marry me! You'll be one of us and I'll be your pride."

She didn't smile. She knew that posing was a serious matter. On some celebration day you go downtown to the Mesesul Studio with your twelve siblings, all cow licked, white collars and ribbons, flocking around your primed mother who as an exception put on a tinge of lipstick and your father who curled his moustache freshly for the event, and there you pose the way your mother and Miss the Photographer wants you to. You have to be serious, because this is a serious matter. Your portrait will be on your mother's house wall until you yourself will have girls the age you were in that old yellow photograph, and they will laugh at your hair style and envy your ruddy cheeks with no pimples, thinking how healthy people were back then.

I found her charming, especially how she went shyly about her business. Still, few find her beautiful at home, or acknowledge her prettiness, because Gypsies are thought of as pariahs in Eastern Europe.

I put her photograph on a poster in the spring announcing one of my weekly monologue evenings and people were delighted with it. They were asking if that was me.

In a way, she is me, since my great-grandpa was a Gypsy too.

What Happens Behind This Blue Porch with Dill

December, 1999  

My sister, Mademoiselle the Doctor, and her assistant are seeing a patient--an old woman with swollen feet. She was supposed to go to the hospital a week ago, and she went, but the nurse put her in such a tall hospital bed that the old woman couldn't even climb into it, or get down to go to the toilet. They said there were no better beds, so she had to sign that she didn't want to go to the hospital and here she was back at home, with swollen feet, huge bluish cushions of feet. Back here in her squalid home.

Behind the wall are also her paralyzed son and his drunken wife, namely that they were there to help her, take care of her, but they were not in a shape to do so. Another daughter was in the middle of the room, not very amiable because of some heritage squabbles, the assistant said.

They didn't know what to do, take her to the hospital? Will they kick her out now?

"Who cares?" The assistant mocked/imitated the way doctors think/talk among themselves in overcrowded Romanian hospitals. "How old is she? Why should I put such a hag into the hospital?" They couldn't care less.

The fitter daughter was pondering loudly what to do. "Should I ask my son in Zalau if they can come to fetch her by car? Maybe he can come. How can I take her to the hospital? By cart? But the horse died. Maybe my neighbor can loan us his, but he won't before Sunday, because he is busy."

I wanted to tell her that until they decide to do something the woman would die. Slow thinking, rapidly going into death.

"Old people…. They are like old people. No one wants them," concluded the assistant.

The Fire in The Iron Didn’t Die Altogether 

Early in the morning we went to the blacksmith's and I took some shots. I love fire. My childhood memories are centered around our fireplace, with its red and yellow flames and evergreen wood smell. The warmth in the room was growing, turning into a maternal presence, as I fed the fire.

The ritual of making the fire: first scraps of paper, newspaper with Ceausescu's pictures and communist slogans, torn and splashed with gas. Then a tepee of splinters, all ready to poke through your skin, make you cry and run to your mother when she came home, to push them out with the needle from her sewing box. Then the larger pieces of wood, better to have them dry, otherwise it will be smoke and choke. Then you light the fire with the matches and blow on it, until it picks up. Close the door, don't be a bad girl, mother told you to close the door, you might get the carpet on fire! From time to time check on it, an orchestra of cracklings coming out through the half-opened stove door. Then you put in the large pieces of wood, and go and do your homework, until mother comes home.

I told the blacksmith that my grandpa was a blacksmith too, but I didn't say anything about his being a Gypsy--though I was curious if the blacksmith was a Gypsy too, since this is a Gypsy occupation--because they were horse shoeing. Two men grabbed the horse's feet, the horse was snorting, and the assistant who arranged the trip was in a hurry to get back to her Whit Sunday family reunion cooking.

Still, I lingered around a bit more to see him mold the red white iron, like dough, the heavy hammer making dainty sparkles dance, then he put the horseshoe into the fizzing cold water bucket killing the sparkles, and so turned into hardened iron, the dead fire was ready to start its utilitarian life, that is protect the horse hooves from chaffing. I believe the fire in the iron didn't die altogether, because at times the sparkles pop up during the drudge of trotting hours.  

We Have Two More Days Together

Saturday, June 17th, 2000

I am sad these days, I feel forlorn. My friends in America have forgotten about me, don't write me any e-mail…. Out of sight out of mind….

Mother contributes to this too. She came a minute ago to ask me if I could come next time for several months. She is like a child, standing in her nightgown that the rich people of the West threw away and she, poor beggar here bought—yesterday she got her pension and was upset because with the inflation nowadays, somehow Geta, the woman who merely sold papers all her life, got more pension than she, who worked as an agricultural engineer. Unjust, she says.

She bought two bags of pufuleti/cheese chips for the kids, as pension celebration gifts.

I told her—because she says it is hard for us, Alex grows and needs more and more food and everything—I told her, we have two more days together, should we start crying already and spoil them? Could you go and tell Alex a fairytale, because you see how I neglect him with all my work.

She went sheepishly.

Candles

June, 1997

When I entered the Orthodox cathedral, it was still full, though people were getting out of church. They were lined up along the chairless hall to take communion, I think. Our religion is confusing. It's excruciating to stand up for hours through a plaintive sermon. There were some throne-like chairs along the walls, meant for old people, but the middle was empty. The place was impressive, grand, meant to put you into your place. Awe. Fear. Insignificance. The ceiling tall, darkened from smoke somehow, but lovely with its beautiful stone embroideries.

I don't know why I couldn't take many shots. Awe. Fear. Insignificance. I just went to the corner where believers burn candles for their dead ones or to have their prayers answered.

On the walls, some graffiti was written in pencil by the faithful: "Oh, Dear Lord, help me take the entrance exam at the university, keep us healthy and help me make peace with Cristina." "Dear Lord help me buy good blue jeans and protect us from earthquakes and calamities. Protect us from Satan's hallucinations and temptations." "Jesus, thank you for giving me a son and help, Dear Lord, our volleyball team beat CSS Arad."

I could spend a day collecting those little naive words.

Book Peddler

December, 1999

Ten years after our Revolution, in May, 1999 I went to Bucharest. In December 1989 and after '89, we often had political rallies there. Now they calmed down. The University Square was indifferent, apathetic, boring. The heroism, the ecstasy, the hope left the place. I am lucky and grateful that I have their memory in me.

Some tiny signs reminded me of those fervent days. The walls with political graffiti on them. The wooden cross commemorating the death of the young people that were shot there, still erect in the middle of the traffic. People still remember. The flowers are fresh and the candles flicker their little flame around the cross.

One step farther people buy second hand books from the tired merchants.

Books were treasured before '89. Perhaps it was shear snobbery, because in my country it was the intelligentsia that was thought much of, even if it was trampled upon by the communist power. Having an extensive library meant you were part of a tacit resistance against communism. It meant that you loved ideas, culture and civilization, and wanted to have nothing to do with the ruthless power of the barely literate communist leadership. You fought for your humanity, endured suffering and humiliation because you believed in spirituality.

Pretty often, when girls considered marriage, their mothers were concerned if the future husband wasn't well read, if he didn't have a library.

Writers and poets were national figures. Though, year by year books were less and less published. The regime thought them dangerous, writers might have given us ideas to revolt.

The stacks of books around University Square reminded me of this.

Afternoon Slumber

Wednesday, July 19^th, 2000

Nana Marie is an old, faithful family friend. When we first moved in Salaj county, we came from another place in Transylvania, a huge winery in Lechinta. There my mother got into a fight with the local communist party leaders about their Stalinist personality cult, and she got "promoted" here into this poor county. We stayed at Nana Marie's parents' house until the collective farm built a new home for us. Her mother, Nana Domnita, was soft, respectful and thoughtful. My mother is too old to cope with the household chores, so she got a laundry woman to help once a week. When we moved to town, Nana Domnita used to come to my mother with dairy products and help her with the laundry. But she died. So now her daughter, Nana Marie, a widow who raised her three kids alone, comes with the dairy products and helps mother out once a week.

When I got home, Nana Marie asked me if I had some whitening toothpaste for her son who asked her to ask me. I told her, amused, that I had brought some, but for our own use. In the end, I gave her a toothpaste tube, not really understanding what this was all about, since they have foreign brand toothpaste there too.

My Anti-Bourgeoisie Manifesto

Saturday, June 3^rd , 7:50 a.m., 2000

I don't know why I am so oppose to the middle class mentality. I think because I am part of it, or I was raised in it and found it stifling. It might sound weird to say that there was a middle class in downtrodden Romania, but there was. Middle class meant you graduated a university and socialized with only other university graduates. There was a decorum that had to be closely observed. There was a comme-il-faut way of dressing and interacting. Every hair in place, all dress creases smoothed, no displays of originality or personality, just yes man, good girlishness. Show a feeble appreciation of art and fine things, speak disdainfully of peasants and the working class.

I was reminded of this as I was taken by one kind-hearted woman to meet some bright girls that had wonderful handwork. Well, her wonderful haberdashers were shit. I didn't tell them, not to be offensive, and I tried to make them happy, so I took a nauseating middle class picture, combining a haberdashery piece, dry flowers—a wedding bouquet actually—and a pink hand with a wedding ring, that looked like a naked baby mole. That's my idea of marriage, as I've experienced. Deadliness.

I was so ill that I couldn't make myself go on with their haberdashery, so I deliberately focused on things like the rag with which they washed the floor--because I went to the toilet and liked its lung-like color and drapes--on the sewage hole--because I liked the pattern of the tiny holes--on a potato sack--because I liked its texture--and on an old, blue cupboard knob.

To me, this weathered texture means a history of endurance, of struggling poor people getting attached to their old things, of not investing in earthly vanity.

Smiling for Me

Tuesday, June 6^th , 2000

Kids in the handicapped children's institution that I made a point of visiting--because this is what Romania is famous for, handicapped kids, orphans, street kids, so I had to cover these too, I'm a serious reporter--have a great environment and housing conditions, thanks to some German sponsors. Their home looked like some mountain resort facility, much better than many "respectable" neighborhoods in Zalau. Still, somehow I perceived it as a hell. It had a lovely location, in a valley with vineyards and orchards, like a useless/discrepant/sardonic garden of Eden.

What help could the brand new Adidas shoes and colorful clothing, the clean rooms and polished wooden walls and floors be for these kids? It was hell.

There were young, jittery kids that couldn't stand still; they made clockwork-like movements/jerks. They were hollering, like little beasts. It was potty hour: they were lined up in the bathroom on their pots. I felt sick. The student nurses that I was on the trip with got out of the building fast, like from a horror museum, but I had to stay longer, to grapple with what I saw.

Grotesque painting exhibition. Imagine all kinds of jerky movements, grins and slobberings. One little girl had her knees in the back. "She has an incredible will to walk and stand," the nurse said about Delia. "She could barely walk when she came here."

From time to time one child uttered an unbearable hollering. The nurses tried to hold him and calm him down and managed to for a while, but then he'd start again. How can you help him, if he doesn't say what pains him? How could they work in such a place? Hell is nicer than that, I assume. And more logical. No, it's not logical either, but biblical imagination was fairytaly compared with this collectivity.

The nurse said that the hollering boy was Gusti, and he was 25 years old, though he looked like a four-year-old kid. They had to tie his hands because he was scratching himself till he was bleeding. Made me very, very ill.

On my way out, I met Victor, indeed a victor, hanging out on the porch. His smile reminded me of my own ability of getting out of misery by pulling my boot straps. You have to smile, you have to be happy that you are alive because it is beautiful to be alive and smile at absurdities.

You aren't even aware of all the absurdities you are subjected to.

Harmless Gypsy Kids in the Slums of Bucharest

and

Gray Dragging Life

November, 1999

Plumbuita Monastery is a place on an island in one of the poor districts of Bucharest. My deceased husband used to go there to seek spiritual guidance from its monks.

Walking around there is like going into the projects somehow, but still wherever you go in Romania you feel safe. People don't have guns and are not into mugging you.

I get near the brim of the lake. Sordid. Beer bottles, cigarette packages, pieces of rags. Some kids splash around in the water surrounded by concrete walls. Other people are washing their carpets. The foam splashes around on the grass and floats on the lake. The water is covered with scum, thick scum. Stagnant water. Disgusting. On the other side of the lake, you can see the hills of waste and the smoke coming out of the incinerator/garbage crematory. I walk along passing a few lonesome, poor looking people. A cross commemorating a young boy who had drowned there five years ago. A dry wreath of flowers.

Some dogs run after kids. Sordid. I get across the field that smells dizzyingly of wild flowers and bitter herbs. I get near the place where the monastery gate was. I can't see very well because bushes block my view. I get near; a rusty chain ties the two gates shut. Everywhere wire fence and barbed wire.

I go along the fence under the apple trees' shade in the tall grass, fearing I might step into a hole or get bitten by some snakes, but nothing happens. The smell of the flowers gets even more dazzling under the hot midday sun.

I pass by a young couple lingering in the grass, debating how much they love each other, and who loves more. I feel like I've intruded, so I look at the bush leaves. I walk, walk, walk hoping the other gate is open. I look again through the grown bushes to the rusty chain and iron lock. Shoot.

I walk around the fences. Now the sidewalk turns into a path, obviously seldom used because of the weeds leaning on it. Okay, that's it, the path ends on one side in a courtyard with barking dogs and on the other side in an abrupt slope with hills of garbage and flowers growing through rusty boxes, car chairs…. I run down the slope into the dirt road.

Small houses, with tall fences and dogs, dogs everywhere. I ask a woman who walks hastily with her plastic bags, I ask her where the entrance to the monastery is, and she points me to. "Go ahead, then turn to the left. Walk up some stairs and then there will be the larger street that leads to the monastery." I follow her advice, furtively taking photos of these shabby, Balkanic homes. Half-naked kids want me to take their photos. I do, then they follow me, and I take more photos. I finally get to the main street. Now adults want me to take their photos. It feels dangerous, so I just walk faster and faster, until I enter the monastery enclosure.

Some kids play chess on rubber tires. Time flows slowly here. In the monastery, no one is around. I look at the shabby chapel. There are some plastic chairs. I sit in one of them. I look around and this place seems dead.

The pain of my curse reached them. Crooked monks killed my husband with their advice.

I finally get out. I pass by a quarreling group. They are quite violent, cursing each other, rushing up and down the street. They are harmless, just some small kids and angry mothers. Lower on, at a water well again someone is rinsing their clothing. Balkans. Dirty and colorful Balkans. I'm glad I'm out of there. I drag my feet towards the tram stop. A group of workers sit tired around the sewage cover. Gray dragging lives. I'm glad I got out of this space.

I hope I'll never be back. I need air and vast spaces and silence. I need the highway and the car gliding in the darkness. I need America. My new country.

Sly Fox Carpenter

Monday, 29^th May, 2000

This carpenter had arrived early in the morning at the mill with his cart and white horse. He grumpily let me photograph his horse, then allowed me to take his portrait too. He was charismatic. But so grumpy!

Gradually he warmed up to me. He was upset on the whole world. The electric power went out, so they had to hang around until it started working again. He was cursing the high level corruption, a bunch of thieves who took his money, and he won't vote for any of them because they were all a bunch of thieves. Even God didn't care a shit about anything, and what a thing was this to cheat on poor people's money.

One other hanger around, a woodsman/forester didn't agree about God's indifference. He said maybe the carpenter was not worthy of His kindness. All of us, for that matter.

Anyway, the carpenter's face lit up when he saw himself on the screen of the digital camera—the way I go about my business is that I show them on the spot what I did on the small digital screen, and then ask them for their names and addresses. They ask me, "How much will the shot cost?" I say, "Nothing," though I should say something, 3,000 lei, which is 7 cents, as it is at the photo studio, but I say, "Nothing." They write down their names and addresses, and smile.

Only men here are annoying. You never know when they'll start making a pass at you. This one, the carpenter, said, when I asked him if he could render me a service and hold my floppy disks for a second, he said he'd gladly render me a different kind of service, too. He resembled a sly fox when he said this.

All I could do was to smile and ignore him.

A friend said he looked like Clark Gable, sure of himself and his charm. I didn't see him in that light, this are my hometown folks, but perhaps it is so.

Twirling and Play A Fast Tune

Monday, June 5^th, 2000

I knew I wanted to have some dancers and musicians dressed up in their paraphernalia, so I contacted a prestigious folk dance group. But, alas, it was dreadful.

All of them were looking straight into the camera, especially the fiddler. They would take no directions. I liked their morose expressions, rough guys, but I was so unhappy that I'd failed them.

I told the fiddler, who stayed for a few more shots after the rest of the group went to rehearse, 'How unnatural! No one stays in parks in folk costumes dancing, posing for a photographer.' He said mildly that I was the one who chose the setting.

I was worried then because the Gypsies were swarming and I feared for my equipment, and Alex was in the trees too, though I asked him to watch the bag for me.

But now I feel so bad. I want to make shots with them dancing, twirling, laughing or being excited. I want to have blown up skirts and ironed shirts and sweat on their faces. And I want the fiddler to play a fast tune!

I was sitting there in their rehearsal room, waiting for them to trickle in from their work, and I was watching their legs. Muscles and protruding veins. Several of them were rehearsing their steps, to improve, or out of pleasure. I loved the kicks and the trots they were making, like gracious horses. I want to shoot that. I want to these workers rehearing folk dances.

This is alive! They do it because it's fun, I hope, not because they want to travel abroad, or maybe both. I can have a shot with just feet and legs dancing at the rehearsal. This is folklore. What I did today is a shame. It's like a dead piece in a museum. I failed them. But I am learning and I'll go back. Still, I feel so very bad.

Friday, June 16^th, 2000

Finally, I took proper shots of a teenage folk dance group. They had no permanent rehearsal hall. At times they had to rehearse in the street, but the mayor didn't let them, saying they disturbed the public peace.

The instructor was angry because the officials didn't let his group travel abroad. The dancers had been invited to many festivals in France and Spain, but they didn't get visas. No explanation.

The rhythm of the music was catchy. The clarinet player was shy but loved performing. He would not look at me, and would play with gusto, listening to his music intensely.

I hope I captured some of the fun they had. They were lively kids. The rain came and we had to go home. They were splashing through the ditch water and rain, boys splashed girls, and girls giggled and screamed. Lovely sight.

God's Creation on The Site of Decrepitude and The Entrance Into Another World

Tuesday, 30 May, 2000

I had a lovely time in the cemetery today. I practiced zooming and focusing. Goes together well with thoughts of after life, and enjoying being alive, and confined in your condition.

I took shots of flowers because this is the secret of life, I decided. Unfolding the beauty of bloom.

One friend here, mocked me saying I needed not go to Romania to have this experience. He said he had a similar experience with his wife, being stoned. On a vacation they discovered the beauty of stones, and started to fill the trunk with rocks, and they were at it the whole night until they finally got sober in the morning, and the car could not start. Its belly was like the alligator's, rubbing the road, so heavy it was.

But let my own vision of banal/eternal juxtaposition be.

There, in the cemetery, I discovered how it was to be just me and the object of my observation. There was no interference, of my own body or anything else. A pure moment.

I stayed there for about an hour, but didn't feel time passing. Concentrating on an image, make it perfect and telling. The surprise of meeting the image. It was delightful. I was in my own lovely world, admiring God's creation on the site of decrepitude. Feeling like a citizen of the world. Why did it have to be in a cemetery, at sunset? Dunno. I felt so part of the universe, of the earth, I felt no customs officer could stop me in my way, from then on. I was a citizen of the world, a precious being.

There was an old woman there, cleaning the tombs, or only her own, her husband's I mean, so I felt safe.

I edited the setting a bit. For example, at the peony bush I pulled out a white flower I thought would take away from my faded pink delightful flowers. I loved how they were half-faded.

I couldn't take the photo of a bee on a flower. I had almost focused when she flew away. I am not afraid of the camera anymore and I am fast in working it.

I loved the well. It is like the entrance into another world. Hell or heaven.

Mother looked at the cemetery at the end of the day and said the photos were beautiful. She even said thoughtfully that the well was interesting.

Dutiful Latchkey Kids

Thursday, July 13^th, 2,000

The kids looked lovely. They were shy and curious, so I asked permission to get some shots of them and the teacher let me do my work, going on undisturbed with her teaching.

It felt so enchanting to be in a classroom. They had on the wall silly nursery rhymes to help them learn the alphabet. I loved and loathed their checkered uniforms. I remember the days I wore one. When it was cold, I had to buttress it with pullovers because nothing was allowed on top of the uniform, all goes beneath, like hiding shit under the carpet, faithful to our whole political system.

Everything is fine, nothing different, all is controllable.

Still, they looked sweet in them, especially the little girls with their lace collars. They are all latchkey kids, their parents too busy struggling to gain money to feed them. In Romania school ends at one o'clock, so they go home, warm up their food, eat alone, and do their homework.

The Corn Shucking Weight-Lifter Ex-National Champion

Thursday, July 13^th, 2,000

I met him in the backyard of Father Opris. Father was tired of talking, he was recovering after a stroke, but felt so grateful that I came to interview him. Most of the time he is just sitting around there. I saw someone in the backyard and I told him someone was walking around in his backyard, poor old man, burglarized right now, while chatting with me, and oh, my expensive cameras. And he said, "Oh, it's just a man who came to shuck my corn." So instantly, I said I'd like to take some shots of that. Yes, surely, he said amused and shuffled to the back yard, through the kitchen. The man was also amused and intrigued. But very helpful, he moved his corn baskets outside from the dark cellar where he was working, and did whatever I asked him to, look up, look down, don't smile so amused, shuck some, please, take a better looking corn cob, please, very well.

We befriended each other. It came out he was a weight-lifting champion, but after '89 was fired like thousands of other workers from the Armatura plant that didn't have the money or interest in sponsoring sports clubs anymore.

Now he was shucking corn to get his meals. He told me softly it was unjust to be disposed of like that. He brought millions to his sports club and the bosses pocketed the money and here he is shucking corn.

I asked him about his parents and he said his father came once to see him training and when he saw him lifting, he fainted.

The Precious Burden Of My Life

Wednesday, May 31st, 2000

I often see Gypsy girls on the street and I should be bolder and just ask them and they will pose because they like posing. Yesterday I was downtown in the bus stop, and a group of them with long skirts and lucky red bows in their hair crossed the street running. I don't know why I didn't take a photo of them—other people were crossing too and blocked the view—but it was a bliss-fleeting moment, them running giggling and the skirts flowing in the wind.

Then there is another one with a white skirt. As a rule they are vivid, with red and yellow or purple, orange, but this one wears a white skirt and the regular plastic slippers and she plays soccer in her yard. It is unthought of that a Gypsy girl should play soccer! And with such abandonment.

I finally braced up and asked this young couple to pose for me, and they eagerly did so.

The way he leans on her, their gaze tells me, "I bought her, married her because she's beautiful, but now she's my property, my property, the precious burden of my life."

Don't let their serious looks deceive you. Though they seem at least 21, 23, they are teenagers. Maybe it's their clothing. Maybe the worried faces? The stance? Yes, maybe. They want to be respectable, they want to take their place in the community, they want to count.

Take Me with You to America in Your Luggage 

Saturday, June 17th, 2000

When I went to visit Nana Marie in Badon, the village in which my parents were known as Mrs. and Mr. the Agronomists, I knew it wouldn't be a simple affair. I went on a religious holiday, Whitsunday, to find that the whole village was more or less groggy. They eat bad food there--our meal: powder soup, entrails with macaroni, pasted cookies sprinkled with coconut--and drink palinka, a very strong plum brandy, 70 proof.

After lunch her brother-in-law, Silviu, who joined the family reunion with his wife, Ileana, gave me an interview about his whole life at his initiative. He said he always thought that those people interviewed on TV did a poor job, and he thought he should one day get to tell the story of his life on TV too. I told him what I could do for him was to tape his story though I was doubtful that anything would come out of it, because he is very hard to understand. He speaks like a tape recorder on fast forward, tucked under a pillow. So he told me about how they found themselves forced onto the collective farm, and how he watched the '89 revolution on TV. We spent two lovely hours like this.

The shots of palinka, "Drink some more, drink some palinka, please!" mellowed him.

His wife, Ileana, started to sing a Romanian hit, "Take me with you, take me to America in your luggage." I tell you, I'd have to have huge trunks to fit Ileana in them, even after I'd sliced her.

She was insistently asking me about a soap opera intrigue, as if it were a documentary.

"Is it true what happened in the Saint Supplice?" mother told me the soap was actually named Sunset Beach. "Is it true that Robert killed his wife to marry his sister-in-law? Oh, my God, blast him dead!"

"Oh, she believes everything," her husband said lovingly. "Films are for fools." Then he started crying. He was lamenting that in the past Wesselenyi, a Hungarian noble who lived in my hometown and was a cultural Maecenas, built the lyceum for Romanians while today "Our own people hate us and destroy our own country." His wife cautioned him unwittingly/incongruously to watch his mouth--"She loves Hungarians!"--and changed the subject to one that was on everybody's mind, the drought. "How is it in America?" Her husband said that one neighbor had a son in the U.S.A. and he said that in California there were 6 months without rain. "We're dying here. It's raining everywhere, but here there is no drop of rain. They said on TV that the grain is ruined and we should irrigate the rest of the crops. In America they irrigate with helicopters."

"He came from America on the 6 o'clock train," his wife made fun of him. "He knows everything about America." "Don't make fun of your man," he scolded her softly. "Her legs pain her because she doesn't show them to me more often." I was amazed to see this couple being so pleased with each other. "She takes me to America!" announced Nana Marie suddenly. "She'll invite me there and I'll sell everything and go there and cook for her! Say it is so!" "Yeah, sure."

The people that asked me to get them across the ocean actually don't want to live in America. They want to make money and go back home, build handsome houses, and be respected/envied for their good fortune.

After they drank more palinka, Silviu decided he wanted me to photograph him riding his horse that was still in the pasture. He went in a hurry to fetch it though Ileana said he would just go nap.

We, the women, went slowly across the village. People were chatting sitting on the logs along the ditches. They were looking at us suspiciously since they didn't know me as an adult.

We lost Ileana on the way because she ran after her geese roaming in the ditches, then she slipped into gossip with a woman who called her closer to her fence, about who kissed or didn't Lucica's husband at the wedding feast.

It took Silviu a while to bring the horse from the pasture, but he showed up in the end. He wanted to impersonate Voievode Mihai Viteazu, heading towards the Turkish army, sword in hand! He even fetched some wooden sword from the barn. Then he started his climbing maneuvers to mount the horse, constantly falling down, his feet slipping, because he didn't want to harness the horse. Finally, he got on the horse and started pulling the mane, as reins! "Shoot, shoot!" Silviu said eagerly, thinking himself in a historical movie. I feared the horse would smash him into the earth, so I woke Ileana up from her nap to see what was happening to her husband.

"You, handicapped nut! Get off of the horse immediately! You mother fucker! Get off the horse, I say!" Silviu, ashamed, got off the horse.

In the middle of this public humiliation a brigadier showed up to present his kind regards to the daughter of Mr. the Agricultural Engineer. He had to assure me that father was the sweetest and most correct man on earth and no other engineer was like him, and the whole village deplored his retirement and the tumbling down of the collective farm. Ileana, to cheer up Silviu, organized a shooting session. They put a bench in the middle of the courtyard and sat on it mighty joyously. The Brigadier joined the party, but sort of like, "Here I am, posing for Miss the Agricultural Engineer's Daughter. I have nothing to do with you silly people in nightgowns and straw hats. It's just me and her!"

Then Lucica, my hosts' daughter came from vecernie/vespers, and she was annoyed that I wouldn't stay with her and come for one day at least. What was that just an afternoon?!

She asked me what I was doing now. I told her shyly that I wrote books, fearing she wouldn't understand, or would make fun of me. But she said, smiling understandingly and proud that the little girl she jumped on sofas with to see who could jump higher, now was a writer, "Someone has to write books too, right?" She was marveling. And then, smiling sunnily, "How is life in America?"

It became obvious to me that there was a living myth about "Americans" in the villages. By the beginning of the century many peasants who had come and worked in America and then went back home told stories about life here to their kids and grandchildren. They were called "Americans" by the villagers.

Were I to move back in the village of my childhood to raise geese, they'd call me, Ella Americanca.

Nana and Badea Balabuc

Sunday, May 28^th, 2000

This couple lives in Hereclean, where I went to primary school. My parents knew them since they worked there. I met the Nana Balabuc in the market where she was selling dairy products and she invited us to visit them.

We walked a bit towards the bus stop and then hitchhiked. Quite soon we were offered a ride. They dropped us at the curve in Fagadau, or the Herecleanul Mic as they call it. The pub was swarming with lively young men drinking on the terrace. We crossed the bridge over frothy water and I told Alex how I used to go to school up the hills and had shiny rubber boots. I loved to walk uphill in the ditch water when it rained. One year the valley flooded and mother came to take me home with the cart, and she took other kids too.

The village looked deserted. It was Sunday afternoon. Only goslings and fluffy chickens were chirping in the sun, led by stout mothers. We passed by a farmhouse in ruins with a silo/grain elevator/crop keeper, I don't know what you call it. No dictionaries in this room.

A biker passed by, so I hurried Alex, afraid the biker might lynch us, but no, he didn't. I told Alex agitatedly he should move faster with handing me the film and the floppies because it was combat. They might kill us. I asked him to stand guard on the sidewalk. He squatted and watched grimly up and down the road.

Then we asked two girls who were carrying water from the well in buckets, where Balabuc Lisandru lived, because I'd lost their written address. I'd gotten it in the market. My mother had introduced me to a woman who sold dairy products. When I asked the woman her address and her name and she said, Balabuc Lisandru. I stared at her because it was a man's name, and I said, yes, but I asked for your name. And then she finally said Florica. Other women I talked to reffered to themselves in the same manner. They live in the shadow of their husbands, or they just pretend to. Wherever you go in apartment buildings, you see just male names on all the doors.

We had to walk all the way uphill because they live at the end of the village. It was terribly hot. My brains were melting because my straw hat fell over the fence in the church pasture, and I couldn't find a hole in the fence to pass through and retrieve it.

Once we arrived at their place, we were treated to cakes and soft drinks. I talked a bit with the man about my parents. I couldn't concentrate because of the TV noise. It was again some lottery, some silly contest to make them think they'd gain money and go to the Bahamas.

I looked on the wall and I saw the picture of a little boy I'd been a classmate with in first grade, the son of the old man. He was sleeping or working. I don't remember, I know that the old man leniently/genially put a beautiful leather vest on to make my photo more colorful, though it was out of season, we were melting, as I said, but you know the story of the anthropologists coming and disturbing the natural order of things. So did I.

They had a large animal farm, so we went and chased around his sheep, round and fluffy, the annoyed turkeys, the ready-to-flee guinea hens, and then we moved to the sucking piglets and weak legged calves.

The grandchildren, especially the 4-year-old boy, were eager to get pictures of everything, including themselves. I noticed that the camera didn't love the little boy's face. There is such a thing. When I looked at the photos he was not interesting to look at.

Alex was morose and bored because that's what's a cool guy in America. How can one be so little and so often morose and bored? It's disheartening. This attitude ruined the childhood thrill that I struggled to provide him with.

When we got to the piglets, the kids' father, my primary school classmate, came to shake hands; he was a big fellow now, lovely to look at, healthy, shining face, active.

We didn't get to talk too much though we were excited to see each other—imagine seeing someone when he was 7 and ugly and then suddenly turned into an attractive grown up man, nothing in between. His wife, within whose car we were supposed to get back to Zalau, was in a hurry because the hot water at their town apartment didn't last late into the evening, and she had to bathe the kids and prepare them for school.

It came out that my classmate wasn't coming with us to town because they had to split family responsibilities, he earning a living on the farm, and his wife rearing the kids in the relative comfort of a town dwelling and better schools.

They were not at all afraid to speak. They praised my father to the skies. The best, the kindest, the patientest. They demolished in return the reputation of the kolkhoz's ex-president, and as we went down the road—no I told the priest later about the kindest and he said smiling, "What did you expect? They couldn't tell you about him having a sweetheart, or anything bad for that matter. After all, you're his daughter, aren't you?"—so, on our way back, we stopped because the daughter-in-law was talking to someone on some errand. As the kids picked up unripe plums from the trees, an old, smiling, slightly hunchbacked woman, dressed in black who was eating prescura/communion wafer I think, passed by. I liked her and took shots of her as she was patiently listening to my moving her around. She said, "Tucu-ti talentul/ Oh, I'd like to kiss your talent." It had some biblical connotation, but I still puzzle about what she meant.

Then we had to jump in the car and the daughter-in-law asked if I knew who was that woman. I said, no, though I realized when I'd taken down her name and address that she had the same family name as the kolkhoz president.

His sister, she said. I didn't make any comments.

I still liked the woman, so what if her brother was a scoundrel? Then she asked me if I liked her. I said she was interesting. She said that to her the old lady seemed two faced.

That's about it. You can never go home. Go ahead, girl.

King Lear's Queen and Her Piglets

October, 2000

I can relate to this mother pig's fatigue and worry. She fed them, now she wants to take a mud bath.

Maybe something else is happening in this picture! Maybe she is King Lear's Queen, scurrying them away from his wrath, changing Shakespeare's play.

Maybe the butcher is behind them, and she tells them, "Let's run, my children! They'll take us to the concentration camp. Run for dear life."

Or maybe its commencement day and she lets them go out into the large world, wishing them good luck and asking them to remember her advice: "Be kind to each other and don't forget that you'll always have a home and a loving mother waiting for you, but now go into the world and make your fortune."

She doesn't know they'll all end up being sausages.

Hay Cart

Friday, June 28, 2,000

Waiting for my sister to finish talking to her patients, so that we could go around the village, I took a picture of an old couple on a cart loaded with hay pulled by a cow.

They were laughing merrily. "Look at us, two old cunts on a pile of hay!" they said to an intrigued passerby. "An American photographed us once because he said he'd never seen a cart pulled by only one cow. What can we do? Actually, we can't afford two cows. Hey, lucky us to be pulled by only one cow!" they said amused to another passerby. "We're being photographed again!"

It was like a happening, a street performance. The camera made them resonate. Brought them joy.

Weed Mower

Friday, June 28, 2,000

We passed by a mower, and I asked him to let me take a shot and he accepted, shy and sad. The drought was killing everything, he said.

My father made fun of me, "What was he mowing there? There is nothing to mow! Was he mowing the weeds?" He was mowing the weeds, actually.

Father is at times surprising.

The Gypsy Caravan 

In the morning I was eating my breakfast and father came hurriedly into the kitchen, dropped the buckets of fresh water and said excitedly, "Come and take a photo of the Gypsy caravans out in the street. Come, come!"

It was great to hear that from my father, who seems so opposed to my activities! Ever since I left for home I was looking to get a caravan shot.

I had no possibility to stop the bus to take photos of three Gypsy caravans. One of them had a baby colt in the cart! They were either afraid that it might die, or it was stolen. Or both.

“ I have to catch the Gypsy caravans! I have to!” I was thinking as we entered Transylvania, it was dark. No lamp along the road, it felt like we went into a savanna on a bumpy safari, all mysterious, immense, and quiet, deadly quiet. Along the road there were often, I saw about four of them, campfires. The Gypsies stopped their caravans, unharnessed their horses, and were cooking around the campfire.

But now, I adjusted my camera and started to work it. The Gypsies noticed after a while and one guy took his child in his arms and asked me to take pictures of him. Then he begged, "Give me 5,000 lei for a palinka shot." We're talking about 7 o'clock in the morning, and he wanted his palinka shot. I told him I had no money, I'd just woken up. He was not happy. A woman with a raggedy scarf sitting in the caravan's front seat, actually a mere horizontal plank, placed like a bench, said nastily, "Then don't take pictures anymore." And they all started yelling, so I ran away, and closed the gate.

Father scared me. "They can smash your camera! Like it happened at Constanta when a photojournalist came uninvited to a policeman's birthday party. I've seen it on TV!"

Mud Brick Makers in the Gypsy Quarter

Friday, June 28, 2,000

Then we went to the Gypsy ghetto. My sister's medical assistant said they were all converted to Baptism. They were trying to better their lives. The Baptists brought them clothing and food packages from abroad—America, I assume.

The ten-house village was full of young women with kids clinging to their skirts, old grannies, and some skinny dogs. My sister never saw them before. I beseeched her, "These are your parishioners, how can you not know them?" The assistant said, "She's probably afraid. 'Oh, how can I go to the Gypsy slums by myself?!' I go every week. They know me and never harm me. They are really tame."

I took pictures, on and on, everybody asking for one.

We went to see the mud brick makers, at the end of the village. They were but two, a couple. The whole village followed us. The woman was waist-deep in the mud and she was quickly pouring mud into a wooden frame. The man pulled the rectangular frame to add to the pile of mud bricks and turned it upside down, letting the brick sun dry. He brought the frame back to the woman and took the next one that was full, dragged it, placed the mud brick out to dry, and then again. His grandson came in his mother's arms, and the old man started to play with him. They loved each other tenderly.

We went back across the village. The assistant chatted up a young man, leaning on the fence, so that I could take shots without having them pose, getting them naturally. The man was saying that he being the older son, and his mother the matca/ queen bee, he didn't go with the other men from their village to work in the South, but he went to work in Recea, for a miser boss who doesn't give him enough food and is totally unbearable, because his mother wanted him home.

His wife left him, he informed the assistant who already knew his stories and was provoking him into talking for my sake. He came home happy with her, "Here is my bride, mother!" But she left him very soon, in a week or so. Still, it was better that way, he said sadly.

"She was a white girl, slightly handicapped," the assistant added. "These Gypsies are not like us. They just meet and then go home together, ready to see if it works. If it doesn't, they split again. No marriage license, or church ceremony. They just move in."

We need the different to have whom to disdain.

Aren’t You Going to Feed Me?

June 1^st, 2000

Again, I had the feeling that people here are so overwhelmed by misery that they don't have an eye for all the beautiful things around them.

It is so, because we were in Creaca, I think, and Marta wanted to stop by a school to talk to a fellow teacher for a few minutes. I went straight to a stork's nest I saw on an electricity pole. Then I saw a wooden church and tried to get good shots—in spite of the pile of dried wreaths and fake flowers and ribbons cluttering the viewer—and of the nasty kids who came to the fence from the nearby street, laughing spitefully that someone was taking photos of the old church.

There was a tired horse in front of the church, waiting for his master to feed him.

Well, neither Marta nor the other teachers told the kids to look at the lovely wooden church!

They are spread all over Salaj County. Some of them are even 500 years old. It's like in Harghita County, where mineral water splashes the road from the fountain. They don't have the money to bottle it.

A Celebrated Donkey

June 1st, 2000

We went to Traznea, where there is an ugly cement memorial for the 80 or so Romanians killed by Horthy, a Hungarian fascist, in 1940. That was irritating. The poor teachers were quite about it. One—not Marta, but equally kind and thoughtful, but more conservative and stiff—told the kids in the bus that, "Now we will get off and be respectful of the death of these people." She didn't say by whom were they killed, she just stressed that they were Romanians, and that, "The village people will be watching you and expecting you to behave reverently."

The monument was dreadfully ugly. I had first heard about it when we came home from the USA. After we crossed the border the driver told us about it as we were passing through Ip, which had had the same event and its own eyesore monument. He said in the silence of the whole traveler group, all Hungarians, that he couldn't understand why people massacred each other.

Anyway, I looked at that ugly, concrete rectangle/junkyard combination, and I nodded when the teacher told me they'd love to have a class photo on the steps.

Then, until they went up there and sang something for the glorification of brave, eternal Romanianhood, I took a picture of a donkey that passed by. I wanted to take it before the choir sang, but it was impossible since the kids flocked around the donkey, though they were told to behave like at a funeral. It was a riotous moment.

When they finally went away from the donkey, the owner teased me saying that I was trespassing because I didn't ask his permission to take a picture of the donkey. I told him, "I haven't taken any because of the kids' interference, but could I take one now?" "Of course, this is a celebrated donkey. No, he is not a mule. He was in an American photo and my bivoli/water buffalo too. They bring me luck. Each time I get out on the road with him, people take our pictures."

I took the donkey's picture, then the chirping first graders sitting on the ugly steps and then...

I fall asleep again.

The Patience of the Artist Painting Frescoes

Wednesday. 24^th , May 2000

I took pictures that I'd always wanted to have for the first essay that I wrote about Transylvania in 1997. At that time, a Chinese American photographer had taken beautiful shots of the interior of the church, but she never gave me copies. They were on slides, anyway.

I spent a lot of time with photographing the church's murals, trying not to shake because I had to lie on the floor and look upward in the dome, since I couldn't use a tripod. I took cushions from the pews and rested on them in the coolness of the church. It felt like I was in Rome, in the old ages, looking at Greek frescos, somehow.

The patience of the artist painting, painting icons, frescoes.

***

I was chatting with the priestess in Recea and I told her that my legs hurt when I spend 8-16 hours in front of the computer because I don't always place them upwards, or at least horizontally. To this, the priestess said she knew a church painter who was exactly like me, forgetting about himself, until he put/pinned down his idea. She cooked for him and brought him warm food, but he'd say from the scaffolding, "Put it there and I'll eat it later, because I have to finish this tiny bit." "It goes like that with writing too," I confirmed. "Just a tiny bit, just a paragraph more and it gets to be 10 hours before I move from the keyboard."

Me, Father Opris, the Worthless

Thursday, July 13^th, 2,000

The priest was frail the second time I came to take a shot of him in his regalia. We thought of getting him into the church since it was just across the street. The back gate was closed with a latch/hook that was so high we couldn't open it, but a kind soul in a tall buddy, unlatched it for us since he was actually going to read the gas meter at the church. And we shuffly-shuffed on the porch of the church and the priest said he was not tired, I should do my work, with much delicateness and sensitivity. Which was lovely.

A guy came by with a briefcase and approached Father Opris while I was setting up my lights, aperture, and focus. He was whiny, but hurried and intense. Finally, he went away, after Father Opris answered his question of was he well? with, "Yes, I have a beautiful deed happening to me today; this young woman is recording my words and taking pictures of me, the worthless."

So, I, the worthless, finally got to take the pictures. Father told me that the guy—he probably went into the church to pray between business appointments—the guy had written a book about the Guruslau war during communism and dedicated it to sweet mother Elena Ceausescu. I might have totally misunderstood, maybe the book was about Elena Ceausescu, the jest/gist of it is that the guy was in deep shit, now after they killed Elena. I said so to Father Opris, and he didn't dispute it. But my logic is faulty faulty faulty, just jumps like a frog to conclusions. 

Knocking Uselessly for Years at Doors That Never Open 

Sunday, June 11^th, 2000 

We went around with my niece, taking pictures of old churches and doorknobs and door knockers. I was making fun of her, "And here came my aunt from America, and all she was interested in was doorknobs. Very peculiar. I tell you, girls, Americans are crazy."

To me the door knocker at the music school was symbolic of my entire existence in Romania. Knocking, knocking insistently and uselessly for years at doors that never opened, thinking that something important for my dreams and life was locked behind them. I thought someone evil was withholding from me what was rightfully mine. I knocked in despair, I knocked in anger, it made no difference.

They were just locked morosely.

But the habit of relentlessly knocking paid in time.

I was very happy when a door cracked open, and I escaped the land of closed doors.

Only to find out that everywhere are closed doors and door knockers. But I got good training, so I don't give up. Some open in the end.

My Sister, Mademoiselle the Doctor

Wednesday, May 31^st ,2000

I felt bad today, but I have to figure it out and go ahead with my photography because I wanted to have a good shot of my sister. She is beautiful in the blue silk suit I brought for her. At work she is always in her white medical coat/robe/habit/lab coat and has her hair in a bun, so I thought of photographing her while she was vaccinating a baby. Vaccines are her assistants' duty, but her main assistant didn't want to come all the way out here to Zalau—their practice is based at 20 kilometers from Zalau, in Virsolt, so my sister had to go.

We went there, a drab apartment, but clean. The baby was small, the lower part naked. My sister gave him the injection. I should have taken the picture, but I was paralyzed/blocked.

The mother was silently crying and said, while hugging him at her breast to calm him from crying, said that she pitied him so much. Tears were streaming from her eyes. I told her it's better to have him vaccinated. She said undoubtedly, she just pities him.

I should have braced up and taken shots of that little creature. He cried so loudly that the air was slapping my eardrums, my body, like the drums at a rock concert.

I failed my sister, but it was good training in a way, made me aware of what will happen when we go to her patients on Tuesday, to Recea. She has to be tough all the time. You could see the compassion in her face and posture.

God help us. Imagine the war photo journalists, leaning over dying people, cadavers.

Roman Ruins Visitation

June 1^st, 2000

The trip started gloomily because it was cloudy and the teachers counted on a large, comfortable bus. Instead they got a small one: three kids had to squeeze on seats made for two. The exhaust pipe's bluish emissions/emanations choked us. But the windows were open and we headed towards the ruins of Dracula's cousin, Count Porolissum.

I was dreaming about dungeons and dark cellars and underground tunnels and squeaky suits of armor, but it was different.

First, the scenery was lovely. Hills looked like covers with their orderly wheat fields and rows of corn and varieties of brown or black soil patches. The hills were blanketed with orchards and woods.

When we arrived at the ruins, we didn't know what to do. I mean the teachers. I was busy taking panoramic shots, which all turned out boring in the end, and running after them to catch up. It was a steep hill.

The teacher I liked most, Marta, pointed out a small village, Jac, between hills and said she was born there. She has a lovely smile. She is sure of herself and laughs softly. There were some horses grazing along the ruins.

They were at the gate of the famous Roman ruins when a guy with another group of kids came to tell us that we had to pay tickets, 3,000 lei a kid and 6,000 with the photograph. I said we could skip the photograph since I was able to take pictures myself. They explained to me that it was some souvenir featuring the fortress.

In the end, they haggled, the teachers saying they thought it was free, since it's a custom—on June 1st, kids enter everywhere free. But the manager/guard said his neighbor had already seen the group coming, so he'd tell on him if they didn't pay.

The teachers said the kids had no money with them, at their request, for safety reasons. In the end, the guard said they should pay for half of them at least. He didn't offer to guide, so we went past some foundations—that were neither ruined, nor crumbling, because they were fake—then under a two-toured fortress gate, then again the kids jumped around some other foundations and went to pee in the bushes.

I wanted to take a photo of the ruins, but they were very ugly. They were no antiquities—they were mere granite rocks from the nearby quarry, glued with 30-year-old cement. It was a shame. Here we were, great-grandchildren of Romans, and all there was on those beautiful hills were some fake ruins. It made a very bad impression. It made me wonder to what degree the history books falsified Transylvanian history.

Give me some time and I'll write you a vampire story about Count Porolissum who sucked the blood of first graders on June 1st. Why not? If they had the cheek to invent ancient ruins and claim they were authentic, then why shouldn't I invent my own history?

Neighbors with Yellow Bucket, Fun Boots and Woolen Socks

June 1^st, 2000

We made another stop at the next ruins, in Buciumi. After I climbed the steep hill and they came in my view, fake and ugly, I skipped them.

We got off the bus and headed towards the cement steps leading to the ruins, next to the fountain, as a peasant woman told us we should do when we got lost in Buciumi (which is like getting/managing to get lost in your own yard) and asked for directions.

The kids went freely uphill, noisy and jolly. A stout woman, dressed in brown skirts and woolen sweater, came from the fountain to scold the townish teachers. Why were the kids running around trampling the grass? Why couldn't they stick to the cement steps?

One of them was answering back mildly while Marta was listening and winking at me from time to time. The stern, akimbo peasant asked them rhetorically, who was leading the group, was it the kids or the teachers? Why didn't they have a plan for them, why didn't they instruct the kids, before getting off the bus, to hold hands?

The other teacher was pleading that the kids were confined in town where everybody was telling them don't do this and don't do that, so now they were happy to jump around a bit. But the stouty said that she herself lived in society and they should handle the students more strictly.

It was so funny to laugh with Marta afterwards. She said she admired the woman's courage and outspokenness. I said, "She seemed so angry that she might have even beaten us up in the end." Marta said it was probably so because now, after '89, peasants had a keen sense of ownership.

As I said, they went to see the ruins while I turned around when I saw them and went down in the street to drink water from the fountain and spy on the guy who was gathering grass in a quaint cart he had pulled downhill. We started to chat, and I took unusable pictures of him either because I cut off his feet, or his mouth was grimacing while he was talking, or he decided to cross his legs and lean nonchalantly on the cart, like at the photography studio in town.

Then the house owner came—an old lady, with fun boots and woolen socks, like my granny used to knit for us. The gentleman was just helping her because she had no one to help her, he said softly.

I took some photos of her. I showed them their pictures on the digital screen and she was delighted to see that the yellow bucket she carried was in the picture too.

I photographed her hands too, though she was a bit shy because they were muddy, but I told her no one would know they were hers. She was so mutely excited.

A lovely meeting. I hope to see them again. The gentleman wanted to run home to give me money to make sure that I'd send them the pictures. I told him I would like to photograph some chopped wood arranged like walls next to their houses—they already make their winter wood supply in May here. He said I should go with him, but I couldn't because the bus was leaving.

Old Folks Home

Tuesday, June 6^th, 2000

"Here in the old folks home," informed us the nursing students' group leader, "we'll see 100 old people; many of them were abandoned by their families even though some of them have two or three children."

In the office there was a strong medicine and chlorine odor. The director gave me her consent to shoot the old folks though later she was afraid and mumbled with the doctor about how those photos could actually be misused/distorted.

I was just taking shots of old folks on crutches, with missing eyes, sitting on benches.

One old lady patient marveled at how wonderful God was giving humanity such inventions as my camera. I asked her what's up and she said they just sat on benches all day. Now they were tearing apart a sweater for the cook, who wanted it to weave rugs for her daughter.

She started to talk about herself after I asked her about her family, I think. No, she started to say that she was occupying her mind with unravelling that pullover for the cook because otherwise she thought about her home. When I asked her if she still had her home, she said of course, in Poarta Salajului.

She'd had a rich husband, who had loads of land and cattle, and his family had said when they came to ask for her hand, that all they needed from her father was the girl. But the father had said, "My daughter won't leave like a beggar from my hearth!" and gave her land and cattle. And they were well off because her husband worked in Cluj at the chemical plant, and they built a big house and had two children. But then the husband died and one child was well off, good child, in Zalau, while the smaller, though he was so very handsome that every girl in the village wanted to marry him, he married—and the old woman was crying outraged, humiliated—a Gypsy woman with 3 kids! He then made her a 4th one and they all lived together in her house.

They destroyed her beautiful house. She'd had large windows with four partitions, and he smashed the windows and together with the Gypsy woman, destroyed the furniture and sold it and ruined it all, kicked his mother out in the stable and beat her on and on, threatened to kill her with the axe, even hit her in the loins with the axe and she didn't heal and now ended up in the old folks home.

She was crying, poor woman. I felt so bad. On the one hand, I was trying to justify to myself the Gypsy woman's behavior, her hate for furniture and the resentment for being rejected by her mother-in-law because she had kids and was of color; on the other hand, I was forcing myself to take pictures of the crying old lady, gnashing the teeth of my compassion, feeling awful that I was taking pictures while she was crying, but then saying to myself, if I don't, I won't make her story heard. It was painful. It was even more embarrassing to tell her that "I have to leave because the bus will leave me behind, but I'll be back, I'll be back."

I plan to go there again with my sister on Tuesday. I wish I knew what to do for them.

They were so glad about my showing them the digital photos.

The old lady said she marveled at modern devices, like the telephone. Her older son came with a buyer to sell the house, but she called her brother and he said she shouldn't let anyone talk her into selling her house better leave it to him. Asshole, I thought. And with the phone she was able to speak with the potential buyer and the buyer said he was sorry, he liked the grounds, but the house itself was in a sorry state. Meanwhile the younger son came back from the Gypsy woman who was from Iaz, she was not sure, Iaz, she said, I think, and said he needed to stay somewhere, so he occupied the abandoned house again. However, the house is in her name, still. She didn't sell it.

Before I ran after the bus, the women blessed me. Such sad old ladies. There was one with no teeth who burst into the office asking the director if she'd spoken with the mayor. The director told her she couldn't find him, but then after the old woman went to sit next to the ditch to wait for the mayor, the director told us that this old woman had no one at home back in Lozna and the mayor was happy he could shelter her at the old folks home. For a year she'd been insisting on going back to her home though no one is there to take care of her, so she keeps on wanting the director to call the mayor of Lozna to take her back home.

They have childish minds, the director said.

It came out that the group didn't leave, but went to the other building across the street where the men were.

But I got into a small ward with six beds where there were only women. The air was sickening with pee smell. Poor moribund old women. One was sick with rheumatism, she said. She couldn't stand up anymore—she just slipped/went downwards, she said softly, girlishly, raising her hands to show me how she couldn't use them anymore. Her knuckles hurt. She tried, she said, to hold things in her hands, but she couldn't anymore. Poor, poor girl. She was thin like a skeleton and hollow-eyed, and so meager in her beige sweater and her gray curls spread out on the pillow.

The nurses were hardened. No wonder in that smell and suffering. You have to survive taking care of those poor, unpleasant looking beings, and you protect yourself by hardening.

But maybe it is true what they wrote in the papers and showed on TV, that nurses are cruel to patients here. I don't know. I don't even know if I want to know. It is disturbing and disempowering. I'll go back there, but it makes me cry again. I hope I get out of here sane.

Another old woman—lying in bed with her face squashed somehow, her nose especially—said her heels hurt and she was operated on and since then they'd deformed so much that she couldn't stand up anymore. She said it was dreadful to stay in bed. The woman across the room, behind me—I had a hard time looking at her because she was a mass of flesh, a round flat body, face, and hands. She couldn't move at all, having laid on her back for the last 12 years. Before, she could sit, and she said faintly and proudly she sewed the geometrical wall cover, which I found ugly.

It was dreadful, they said. The only woman who could sit in the room, on the edge of her bed—she had the Kidnapping from Seraglio on her part of the wall—said that perhaps the only meaning of their suffering was to make others see it.

I felt so bad when one nursing student opened the door, saying agitatedly that they were leaving and I was the only one they were waiting for. The leaders waited for me, so I said some reassuring words, trying to appease their suspicions though they might actually be nasty people, as the papers say.

The doctor from the local hospital, who came to guide the students around the buildings, said he too thought of writing a whole novel about those old folks. I thanked them and told them what one of the old ladies had told me, that it was so very kind of the girls to bring them waffles and chocolates and cookies since they were sure the girls had no money themselves, but bought them anyhow, and they could have bought something else for themselves for sure since they were so young, but they bought poor old folks something.

Still, the director wanted to make sure that I wouldn't bring them bad publicity. I told her I'd be back with my sister on Tuesday afternoon. Hope she won't put Ma in that place.

We left eating our sandwiches. It was so hot. My food was lukewarm. I was afraid of getting sick here.

Patients Waiting for the Doctor. A Pity Party 

December, 1999

Every morning my sister goes together with workers and farmers and some schoolteachers on a raggedy bus, rampa-rampa-dampa, for 45 minutes on a potholed road. She gets off the bus in front of a grim, cold medical center and cuts through the 30-40 worried people that have diligently been awaiting her arrival. And she starts consulting crying babies and moaning old women. Old people, young people, little kids, and dying widows.

The main illnesses are bronchitis and asthma because in these villages the climate is foggy and damp. Nearby there is the man-made lake/reservoir Virsolt, which provides the two nearby towns, Zalau and Simleu, with potabile water. If the dam breaks, the villages will be covered up to the third floor.

Another disease, this one is apparently hereditary, is varicose veins, on the legs, or gambier ulcers, as she calls the disease.

Her office is an unwelcoming, frigid room. She has a medicine cupboard in a corner, displaying a few medicine boxes. In another corner she has a weighing scale with a metal meter. A bed with a white cloth on it for the patients. A desk with several drawers full of her medical books and papers. On the desk you see several booklets and leaflets with foreign medicine ads. And that's about it. The floor is covered with a brownish linoleum.

Her environment is not very much different than the one I would imagine rural medicine to be. A dreary setting, yes, but not really so very desperate.

The patients come in, tell her in an agitated manner about their concerns, show her their huge scars, their throats, their calloused, gouty hands, or their babies' red, irritated bottoms… My sister sees them all, pats them gently, writes prescriptions, sends them to the hospital if necessary and gives them encouraging words as they leave her office.

She also goes to visit some patients at their homes.

A poor woman who can't sleep because of the continuous pains in the hip. A baby who has pneumonia, a young woman who broke her foot.

Usually she goes on working like that until late afternoon but today—because once a week, she does this—she has to go on a field trip, three kilometers away by a horse-drawn buggy over the hills, to Recea. Recea is a small Romanian village. Her patients there are mostly old people. There aren't but a few kids. Young people left for the town.

The buggy waits for us in front of the Health Center. The carriage driver doesn't say a word. He is soft and slightly happy. Red nose and cheeks like his are something you see all over the place in Romania. Alcoholism is rampant. Keeps some of them from facing a sordid reality. It's thought manly, too. Huh!

My sister and I squeeze into each other, like when we were kids and slept in the same bed, as we share the scratchy woolen cover. It's raining, so we put some plastic sacks over us and we trot. There is no car on that country road. Only the sound of the horse shoes trop-trop-trop! We pass by blue houses, freshly painted, by fields with neat cultivated patches, by beautiful fields of poppies, by lonely horses munching the grass. We trot in silence. The coachman broods, my sister waits for me to say something, I look at the hills and sky and clouds and I find my country immensely beautiful and intimidating. I just look at the beautiful horse that diligently pulls the yellow buggy and defecates like all decent horses do. Huh! I wanted to photograph it, stunned as I was at how uninhibited horses are, and how my daffodil sister has gotten used to it. Well, we trot. We pass by peasants carrying rakes and hoes on their shoulders. Protected by rubber boots and straw hats, they walk busily. They greet my sister deferentially. Other carts pass us by as well.

We arrive in Recea. It's pouring. Drenched, we run into the shabby office, the Recea Health Center. Actually it's a room in a deserted school—the young people left the village, so they closed the school—and the sidewalk is full of goose shit because they came to eat the grass in the yard. A group of old women, with black scarves knotted underneath their chins, wait eagerly. One takes a broom and sweeps the office, waiting room, and the sidewalk.

It comes out it's a pity party. This is their routine: before going to church, they want their blood pressure taken to show themselves or their family or the world that they take good care of their own health. "If I had any other kind of harmless machinery with me, they'd ask for that. If I had a sonograph/ecograph, they'd flock to it," my sister tells me smiling. "So I take their blood pressure every time they catch me here."

But she has more serious cases too. One old woman, she can't hear, she's 84 she says, peels off her cotton stocking revealing a huge inflated, red, infested wound. My sister and her assistant are worried. "But did you use the antibiotics and the unguent I gave you last week?" asks my sister in disbelief. The woman came previously because she had been bitten by a dog.

"Well, Mademoiselle the Doctor, to tell you the truth, I didn't," she says like a guilty child.

"Why on earth didn't you?!" the assistant nurse scolds her with disgust.

"Well, I went to my neighbor, Nana Letitia, and she said I should put urine on it."

I am almost fainting….

The nurse fumes with anger. "So you trust your neighbor's pissy advice more than the university educated modern doctor! What a world!"

My sister shakes her head despondently…. They clean her wound again, put an unguent, bandage it and beg her to take the medication and not put piss on it because that infects it even more.

"Otherwise you might have your leg cut off!" the nurse scares her.

"Well, to tell you the truth, Mademoiselle the Doctor, I am afraid of the unguent because Vasile a Stanciului had his nose eaten off with that! He went to have a wart cut in town and then his nose got eaten a bit and then his whole face, and he died of cancer. I don't want that to happen to me. Though I'd be happy if God the Almighty took me from this sorrowful life!"

They reassure her and finally she takes her walking stick and plastic sack and leaves.

I look at all these meek, sparrow-like old women, suntanned, glittering eyes, and bony hands and remember the days I was tiny and had nannies like them. I'd like to hear more of their stories, but the assistant rushes them, trying to protect my sister's energy.

Zalau Produce Market People

June, 1997

My father works in the market for a living. My parents are both retired agronomists. Now they buy bananas in bulk and sell them to Zalau's citizens. They also sell plastic bags, sunflower seeds, jar lids, cigarettes, coffee, vegetables, whatnot …. It's hard. People don't have money to buy anything. Vegetables lie limply on tables. A kilogram of cabbage costs 5000 lei.

My father counts the money at the end of the day. There are piles of bank notes because of the high inflation rate and Alex, his grandson, helps him. He gets 5,000 lei (less than 25 U.S. cents) a day. Maybe we'll go to the seaside, he says. I doubt it, but it is sweet of him.

Once upon a time, in the collective farm era, my father managed scores of villages. He supervised the planting of vineyards and orchards on the hills of Badon, Guruslau and Hereclean. "After the revolution the peasants uprooted the fruit trees and burned down the vines though they were noble varieties of grapes," my mother recalled sadly. "They planted potatoes instead."

I asked my father why they acted like this. Why haven't they continued to work the vineyard? "Because they don't know how," said my father. "In the time of the collective farms the peasant didn't work the land anymore. He just listened to the leaders."

It was humiliating for them, I think. This fueled their anger. Burning the vines was like erasing a past of humiliation.

I'm Proud of My Produce 

June, 1997

Then I went to the nearby permanent farmers' market. They sell everything there: vegetables, jeans, paprika, Chinese T-shirts, groceries imported from Hungary, Turkish shoes …. Mostly poor-quality merchandise because this is what people can afford. Some just look, ponder, and then buy a banana …

Some of my high-school classmates were shopping there. “My God, do they look weathered and resigned!” I thought horrified, “Perhaps I look like that myself?!” It was obvious that they didn't move on with their lives. They stagnated powerlessly, hopelessly. They looked at me sadly. "We can't even afford to go mad out of despair because we have to help our old parents and children survive. We wonder what our life is about …. When we watch all these Latin American soap operas on TV, we can dream about romance and the delights of rich life. At least we don't move while we watch, so we don't get hungry."

Onion Lady in the Market 

Saturday, 27th May, 2000

The people in the market are so excited, that they let me do my work—they pose, move around in the shade when I ask them to, laugh when they see themselves on the digital screen, ask me when they can get the pictures.

But those that I don't find interesting to photograph, bicker, "Oh, look, you, old hag granny. They took a picture of you," and they grin and holler ugly laughter.

The poor grannies are lovely, as they smile at me painfully, beautiful with their white hair and straw hats and blackened hands in front of their green onions and spinach.

Hermaphrodites in Cages

Friday, June 16^th, 2000

I knew the area. I was married and lived there for a year when I was 18, just to run away from home.

We looked for block P-83, because Malvina, my brother's betrothed lives in it and I thought of visiting her since Alex wanted to see Sunset Boulevard or something—a soap with witchcraft.

Malvina was so happy to see us. My brother Mircea was in an orange bathrobe. I left Alex there since Malvina started to feed him fries and chicken, and I went to the Contagious Diseases Hospital to take some shots of the beautiful sculptures a doctor made there. They were placed next to the fence, but from the outside they looked spider webbed by the wire fence.

Malvina said I should say I was Dr. Elena Veres' sister and they would open the gates wide. Well, it wasn't so. The porter said no, then mumbled something through the window, behind the curtain, and finally came out of her booth and I told her I wanted to shoot the sculptures, because of my book about my hometown, and she said I should come on Monday morning. I said I'd be leaving on Tuesday and what if it rained on Monday.

She regretted it, but she couldn't let me in. I told her she could call the doctor on call, she said she could and called, but she said he wasn't answering and he might be asleep. I said, "I'll wait until he gets up." She mumbled again. Then a mother with a daughter in her arms and another one after her came in and they pushed the gate open while the porter was talking into the receiver that she had a problem, there was a woman who claimed she came from abroad and wanted to stroll around the hospital yard and take pictures there. I stepped in and asked her why she was saying such things, but of course she didn't listen and she said victoriously—like, "Am I not right?"—repeating after her boss, "No," and then put down the receiver.

I asked her why she didn't tell to the doctor exactly what I'd told her. She said again in answer to my question, "No." I said angrily, "Why did you twist what I said and tell him that I wanted to photograph the patients and the court when I told you I just wanted to get near the sculptures?" She said the sculptures were in the hospital yard, weren't they? Then she smiled viciously. I asked her name and she didn't want to say it, and she chased me away. I know I told her she was a liar and I'd be back, be sure about that.

I didn't give up, so I then went and took shots of the sculptures from the street when after a while another turkey hen puffed up in her public guardian costume passed by looking nastily at me. After I finished my shots, she came from behind the fence and started to holler at me about taking photographs because this was a hospital and it was forbidden. I said there was nothing posted saying this and I would take as many shots as I wanted. People started to gather around me. She was hollering that the police patrol would show up and fine me 1 million lei. She couldn't care less. I told her they were both fools, she and the porter, but I put my camera back and left.

A man followed me, insisting—he was carrying a plastic bag of cherries in one hand—that yes, I could, and I should take shots, it was my right to do so, and inside the hospital too! I said I would be back, but the next day, actually meaning Monday. I was so angry that I forgot it was Friday.

I went around the block and got to Malvina's apartment. She was serving chipped potatoes/French fries and chicken thighs and drums/drumsticks, so I got to eat with Alex, and it was kind of her. She was so warm-hearted. I told her the adventure—oh, I forgot to say that after I circled the block to get into the staircase, the guy told me that I could go behind the hospital, where there was a garden and from its tall wall, I could take shots of the desperate conditions patients were kept in there.

He said there were poor people with schizophrenia and other diseases, and hermaphrodites, locked in cages, behind there, like animals, and there were poor people, like animals, famished, looking around to eat grass, poor people like animals who were let to go around naked in that area. And hermaphrodites.

I asked him if he had relatives in that hospital or he himself had been a patient there and he said sadly, yes. He said, "Someone has to write, to expose these people who live like animals because they are humans too."

I felt so annoyed with myself for not being able to say, "Fuck the expensive cameras, fuck the million lei fine, fuck my safety," and go and take shots of the animals and those he called hermaphrodites. I imagined fantastic creatures.

I told Malvina and she said it was not quite like that. They were for sure kept in poor conditions, but the situation in hospitals was disastrous all over the place.

The man also said that the guardian was a thief, he knew her, she was from Ortelec, and now she was a public guardian. He looked sound, but how can I tell. And his "hermaphrodites" put me on guard.

Malvina said the public guardians were previously porters at the gates of factories and now they were turned into public guardians. She said people are so very stupid here, afraid of everything, as it happened to us at work, in her sterilization section, where after I shot them with their bunkers, they got scared one day later and told Malvina to stop me from publishing the photos because it was secret. No one was allowed to go into in their sterilization rooms. What secrets?! Malvina was laughing, "Two holes in which they put surgical tools. Idiots. If you stayed around longer, you'd see more of the stupidity around here."

Somehow, I feel like I'm watching a nation dying, but still this can't be true because many, many things changed for the better. It's like in spring, when patches of green grass show through the dirty, melting snow.

I Braced Up and Said Hello to Them

Monday, July 17^th, 2,000

Anyway, so the teachers came back from the hotel, actually from the resort director's office, and I asked them to have them guard the luggage now—the kids had put their bags in piles and I was watching them while the teachers were gone—and I told them I'd go for a walk to downtown Ocna Sugatag.

There wasn't much of a downtown. I asked one passerby and she said this was it. So I walked until I reached the end of the village and then I went to the Orthodox cemetery, trying to find something to photograph, to do justice to the Orthodoxes because I'd already been in the Reformed cemetery, and my mother, with her vehement "What is the image you are propagating about Romania?" was watching me suspiciously.

The tombstones were kitschy, trying to be impressive, with plastic and waxed paper wreaths. Not many real flowers. I focused on the weathered wooden bench, with its fungi, then I moved to a rusty tin protecting a cross, and then I had to leave badly because one woman was walking towards the cemetery and again the expensive cameras, and oh, the tomb desecration and the image of Romania chased me towards the main street.

A group of chatting men. They were watching me, I was watching them, and I braced up and said hello to them. One especially was happy to talk to me. I wanted to know where the old salty lakes were, because they were telling me that there were some more picturesque salty lakes around the village. He was a honey talker. I asked him if there was a place where I could buy fruits in Ocna Sugatag. He said only the next morning when the weekly market opened. I took a picture of them. He wanted to go in his house to ask his son to join them, but I said the oldies were what interested me. They were in their work attire and shy about it.

We chatted more about my work and the honey talker said I should come and live with them because his son was also single. It was cute. I told him—he invited me in their home—but I told him trying not to be offensive, that I don't walk into strangers' homes, and he agreed. He disappeared for a moment and then came back with a bag of cherries for me. I wanted to pay, but he declined. He was praising the possibilities I could have in Ocna Sugatag, like working the field, milking the cow, then walking up and down the main street when I needed entertainment.

I laughed and he seemed to amuse himself too. I said goodbye to him, feeling it was a great occasion to make a friend, interview him, even pondering whether to show up later on or make him come to the resort to sit and chat, but I didn't pursue the impulse. Somehow I went ahead, cherries in hand, stopping from time to time to take shots. I went on narrow streets. I asked my way from time to time, got to the place where the market was. It was all weedy. Across it, a white church. Lower on was the view of the salty lakes. People were picnicking around them. I couldn't spoil the picture with their ugly shaped cars in sight, so I planned to come back in the morning, and find some veritable folk costume wearers.

In front of the church, there was a tired man next to a pile of baby onions and tomato seedlings, trying to sell them, probably. He was just sitting there, dejected; no one passed by him, no buyers.

Lower on where the view started, two young men speaking partly in Russian were fixing a car engine.

All of a sudden, it felt creepy again, so I went back to the resort headquarters, joining the group.

Hairstyle Trouble Gone

Tuesday, June 13^th 2000

Was a fabulous day. Maybe because yesterday I talked with two lovely Hungarian women who graciously survived their hard life. Maybe because I took the kids for a haircut and I was watching a Gypsy bulibasha being trimmed to a crew cut, hair brush and Alex and Adrian didn't know what they wanted, only mother told me that Adrian's should be cut a bit longer because he has a bald spot on one temple.

So I watched the stout Gypsy man with his moustache mustata pe oala/ handle bar moustache getting up from the barber's chair and pulling up his trousers and paying ceremoniously and I loudly ordered the hairdresser, I mean barber, "Like the gentleman, please." Solidarity with my kin, in a way, but he really looked sharp with his brush. And brush they became, both of them.

Adrian was startled each time the electric razor came near him. Alex was just interested in the mirror that made waves distorting his beautiful face. They both looked like little pumpkins. I was tickled. And as I was sitting there, pulling out banknotes, ready to pay, I looked at myself surrounded by these two fresh faces and I said laughing, "What about my hair? Nobody loves me anyway, so what about my hair? What would happen if I had it cut too?

Alex was opposed, as he always opposes change, but I laughingly asked the barber, a she-barber, and she said with glittering eyes that of course she'd cut my hair too and it would look cute. Cute or not cute I decided to renounce all surpluses that grew on me. Get to the bare bones. Make some order in this pile of accumulated matter.

And off it went, my freshly washed, shiny hair. Alex was vehemently opposed. I was laughing, as if somehow unconsciously remembering the days I had my first hedgehog style hairdo. At that time, no girl dared to have such short hair. I don't remember exactly what it was all about. I think I was annoyed with the cordeluta requirement in high school. Cordeluta is a ribbon, white ribbon, pupils had to wear on their head to keep hair in place, even if it was short. They would terrorize us with cordeluta, matriculation number, uniform, skirt length. They didn't let you enter the school if you weren't perfectly regimented.

And I cut my hair like a gosling. It was extremely empowering. I remember the dirigintele, that is the homeroom teacher, opening the door, he was a math teacher, and I was in the front desk wearing my cordeluta, and he stared sure enough on my fuzz. Hu-ha! He looked at me—he was a subtle guy, ironic, and even respectful of us—and he was bewildered at first, then he suppressed his facial expression, but then he was on the verge of laughing, and then he took a deep breath and went ahead teaching us an endless geometric formula, the square sum of catetelor equals ipotenuza la patrat. I think I also lost a lame boyfriend with this wild gesture. Also, in my childhood photos I see mother often made me look like a radish, shaving both my brother and me to improve our hair roots, she argued.

So I trotted out in the sunshine despite Alex's protests, asking me to glue my hair back and I was beaming with mischief. Let's see what Zalau citizens will do now.

Well, some took note of it, but didn't show any grins or nasties. I went home giggling at the thought that mother would faint. Alex asked why I laughed and I told him and he said this was not nice behavior, to envisage granny fainting, she, who had so many health problems. I said I couldn't stop myself from laughing, and laughing at how she would react to seeing three pumpkins trotting through the door. I could tell her, "Mother, it was so cheap, 20,000 lei, that I had to grab the opportunity and get a haircut! One dollar, and so meticulously trimmed!"

Adrian ran before us to break the news. Alex stepped in the living room next and burst into complaints that I cut my hair too. But mother was delighted! With all three of us! "Look how lovely! And practical!" and oh, how well all of us looked.

Alex was fine, since she didn't faint.

I told her that definitely the times had changed. Or perhaps the people because I was afraid that my interviewees would be put off by my hairdo, but still I wanted to challenge them. But instead they said it was very practical in this heat and I really sensed no change in their attitude. I told mother that maybe they had to put up with me because I was, so to speak, from America, and America is like in the movies, full of interesting creatures. But mother said thoughtfully that "People are more open-minded. They watch TV, and they've even seen shaved girls." And indeed, afterwards I paid more attention and indeed I saw many shorthaired girls on the street.

It felt good to think things had changed. I even went to my high school and looked my math teacher in the face. He is the principal now.

A Little Piano Kamikaze

Wednesday, July 19^th, 2000

This weekend my brother from Cluj was there with all his family. Two kids and a wife. All griffins. My nerdy nephew, a bright kid backed up by his mother's will, is on his way to becoming a famous musician. They came for a piano contest and they hope to get first prize. In order to participate they had to struggle. First his teacher said he was not prepared for a contest yet. "She's also the director of the music school, so it's not a good idea to drop her as a teacher, because she can destroy the child," Mihaita's mother said knowingly. "She can demolish the child's will and self respect through persistent bullying."

I was in disbelief, but my sister-in-law assured me that she was like that, a feared, loathsome character, sounded like an Elena Ceausescu sort of person, and who knows, it might be true, all kinds of little despots bred around here.

"Then she said she couldn't be on the Judge Committee Board and have a competing student. It would be unethical. 'Yes, but you can always acknowledge it and abstain from voting when his turn comes.' 'That's true,' she said, 'but still, no.' This being said I had to explain it to Mihaita, to have him come to terms with the decision, to make him practice more, when she called us to let us know that he'd nevertheless participate in the contest. It came out that the contest organizers asked each judge to bring a kid with them, so this is how in the end Mihaita got in the competition."

I asked her if there were any other well prepared kids from Cluj, and she said there were several, one with whom another teacher had come. This teacher was very dedicated, as if even more dedicated than the girl's mother, who was an icon painter.

It is a tough life being a musician during this present period of lack of funding. They went around the country to whatever music contests they knew of and slept in dormitories with dirty sheets and cockroaches, eating in greasy cafeterias. My sister-in-law decided it was worthwhile to pay more money and sleep in a good hotel, to make sure that the future star ate good food since they'd embarked on such an expensive career anyway.

And this is what she did, always made an effort, took loans from banks, did whatever, just to pave the way for her son. One day he might be a star. Once she had hoped the same for Madalina, my niece, but she was like me, sis-in-law said. A rebel. One day she told the teacher, who forced her to drill Swan Lake 4 times, that she had enough, closed the piano lid, and told her mother she wanted to go to Emil Racovita, the best but nerdiest high school in town. And so she did. My sis-in-law fainted, thinking my niece wouldn't make it as the music school was not famous for math and physics or any sciences for that matter, but Madi said no, I want to go to this nerdy high school, and she made it happen. Now she is so much happier, in her diligent, know-it-all manner. Now she's not an outcast as she was in music school, where people called her a nerd because she liked studying all subjects. Now all her peers are studious nerds.

Many memories of my acting entrance exams came to me as I was watching these little kids, little kamikazes. They were incredible machines of concentration and skill. And so small. Ten years old, but there were some in first grade too. They were there in the hall, listening to their competitors playing, then when they heard their name called, they stood up, stepped along the catwalk and up the little podium and made a bow and then sat primly in front of the piano—all of them were prim, except for a sloppy one—and then invariably closed their eyes and stood motionlessly for a few seconds and then attacked the keyboard in riffs. After each of them, applause and then another one came and curtseyed and got stiff and plunged on the white and black keyboard making sounds of piccolos, ocarinas. Alex was quite impressed and respectful. Even Adi, my four-year-old nephew, shut his trap up for the whole session.

The fourth grade contestants, Mihaita's age group, were playing Hessler, Cabalevski, Franck, Cesar Auguste.

I was trying to take shots, but the way they decorated the stage was lousy, with some carnival like paper arrangement. I looked around the audience. I absorbedly watched one teacher, who was hugging one of Mihaita's colleagues, a little girl with long blonde hair and a quiet smile. When the little girl went to play, she was a whole undulation show. The teacher knew the pieces by heart of course, and she would nod and wag and raise her hands a bit and lean forward and then sideways preceding the rhythm changes. You could tell how hard she was concentrating: "Hai Raluca, hai Raluca. Keep on going, very good, jump over this fence too, very good, turn right now, don't miss the break now, and push the gas pedal. Very good, slow down now, smoothly, smoothly, very good!" She was so happy when the little girl came back to take her seat next to her.

I was thinking, did I have someone to tell me, "Hai Ella, hai Ella!" when I was taking my theater entrance exams? Oh, course I did. I just couldn't tell that it was so intense for my teacher then. I was busy with my own emotions. I remember all the people hanging around the gates of the theater institute, waiting for their kids, siblings, spouses to come out through the heavy gate, exhausted but victorious, or crying, just huggable.

I didn't much like knowing that people were waiting for me outside. It felt like I was being waited upon. Made me feel guilty for those people waiting in the street. Sun or rain. Made me feel inadequate. What if I didn't win. I always won the first rounds, so it was a victorious experience. The rejection always came only after the finals on the huge listings of those who failed and those few ones who were accepted.

After Mihaita's big performance, I was happy to meet the little girl and her teacher. I took several shots and made an appointment in the afternoon for an interview. I didn't feel like photographing the family's future star, our bright griffin outshoot. Then I thought it was not fair. Why do we always photograph the beautiful? I am actually discriminating against myself, my own childhood plainness. How would it feel when you are small and an ugly ducky to see the photographers flocking around the blonde fairy tale princess? It could be very teary. Sad little ugly girls.

Finally the judges appeared, carrying cardboard boxes with the diploma/certificates and prizes. They announced from first grade upwards. It seemed that there were many first prizes. It turned out that actually everyone got a prize. Still, they were enthusiastic that the slob, Mihaita and the blonde child got first prizes too.

You could brag, Ella, "My nephew got first prize in a tight piano playing competition," from now on, to your neighbors, to your husband's stuck-up relatives, and still be bothered about your lack of parental qualities. I tormented myself, "What am I doing for my son? Here education seems better, even if the situation is a disaster. Am I a good mother? A fierce mother?"

Well, Mihaita made quite a scene because somehow his father went by car to take granny home and he had to walk which was not that long of a walk, but the idea of him the star walking uncelebrated bugged him and he whined all the way home.

Interesting a family. Power games.

Poem on My Sis-in-law’s Window

Sunday, June 11^th, 2000

In the morning I woke up and looked around.

I loved the way the light came through the lace curtain.

Tried my luck and shot it contre jour.

The eye

The brain

Direct communication with someone telling him,

"This is what I see as expressive, beautiful."

No body.

Just forgetfulness.

Intensity.

I have no body.

I am an eye. A retina.

Forever captured here,

forever given to you,

This moment of beauty.

Intense moment.

Unfit for Life I Wanted to Go to the Monastery

and

What Am I Doing Here on This Earth, My Beautiful Tree?

Friday, June 28, 2,000

The walk towards the abbey, though beautiful, as the assistant foretold, made me sad. I walked for miles. Along the paved road, houses pushed into each other, none of them beautiful, either in disrepair, or simply ugly, trying to impose by their costly largeness. Many ruins and unused plots and buildings.

The road wound up around hills and I was by then in an orchard when I heard horse clip-clops and dog barking approaching from behind. I froze, imagining bad things happening to me. I turned around. It was a carriage with one horse. I told the young man to stop the dogs from barking at me because I was afraid. He yelled, what? So I repeated and he told the dogs, marsh, marsh and the dogs stopped barking. I thought he'd stop at some garden, or at the trees that were cut along the road, but he kept on following me.

Some women came downhill with colorful plastic buckets full of cherries. I asked them if there was still a lot of walking until the abbey. One said, quite a bit. They asked me why I didn't ask the man to take me in his carriage. I said I was afraid. She said, God forbid, nothing evil could happen, and offered to ask the man for me and she did when she got near him, and the man took me and we clip-clopped together with a lot of jerking and wavering. The dogs weren't nasty to me. The young man said he was going to his grandma's when I asked him, thinking that if I talked to him, he'd see me as a person and wouldn't be evil to me. Also when the women came by I had wanted badly as the clip-clops grew nearer, to ask them to tell the policeman that I was going towards Bic abbey, and if something happened to me, he should look for me in the woods. These expensive cameras are killing me. So I told the young man that, "Maica stareta [the abbess] said it would be a light walk and look I've walked one hour, though I told her that I'd be there in 15 minutes, but what seems short for her, it’s long for me." I told him this to make sure he knew I was waited for and they might search for me.

Bic was a deserted village with just about 20 habitable houses. The rest were in ruins. I should buy one there. The abbey rooms are in an old school. There weren't enough kids to keep it open, so people stole bricks from it, and then the abbess took over the dilapidated building. They were sleeping in it, until the new building was finished.

I got there and no one was behind the doors. I knocked and finally one sleepy monk came out and I told him I was looking for the abbess. He went to another door and said, "Someone is looking for you," and a voice said, "She should wait in the armchair."

The place was ugly. Full of kitschy icons, all printed on paper, all wanting to look old. Maica stareta came and she was sloppy. The monk went back to sleep apparently. There were so many men's shoes around the hall that I thought there were both monks and nuns there—or nuns who wore men's shoes—but it came out the monk was a preot duhovnicesc/confessional priest—Maica stareta said.

The conversation started slowly. I was afraid I'd been lied to by the abbey lawyer in Zalau, and I'd go back without fulfilling the mission, that is taking a photo of a nun making matanii/rosary beads. But I was humble and told her again what my mission was, and she thought a bit, trying to figure out what we could do because the nuns were in the kitchen, cooking for the 30 workers who were building the abbey.

I interviewed her about the abbey and she talked a bit like macho priests talk, soothingly sing-songy, then fearfully hollering, but from time to time she would switch into her natural voice and self, and then again she'd get into a crescendo, harping against homosexuals and abortion.

It was an interesting effort to put on a poker face, feeling dual because I was trying to be fair, objective, and professional, while I found her backwardness amusing. But maybe she was right in her way. My duty as a journalist is to give a voice to everybody, so that the reader may choose, but my convictions were extremely different than hers, so that I had to silence them though I don't fuss over my convictions that much. Though I should. My poverty and the precarious legal situation I am in here on a visa student, pushed me into being often times overly gentle and even servile.

I noticed anew how in Romania people kiss hands and talk to their bosses. They adopt a tone of scared helplessness, candor, warmth, that is all fake. Scary.

The grounds were lovely—huge chestnut trees, with an animal farm and rows of potatoes and many flowerbeds surrounded by whitewashed rocks. She showed me the troica/triptych—again a paper icon meant to look like old wood. Then an old wooden church from the 17^th century with faded paintings. Ugly they were, I thought. But people adored them, she said. On Kings' Day Holiday/ Zilele Imparatilor multitudes came to take part in the service and they covered all the surrounding grounds. When they went back, the traffic got entangled in Simleu.

We tried to take the photos in the eatery where old workers were eating the soup. It seemed tasty by its smell, and it was so, when I got to eat after finishing the photographing session.

Maica stareta summoned a nun who was a gifted painter, she said, but the sloppy woman, a shy peasant, said she couldn’t do anything without a paint brush, and she left hers home, because she never painted here, but Maica stareta wanted to send her to a painting school, so gifted she had been on painting on the walls of Bocsita church.

She didn't know how to pretend to lacquer, or to do any last touch on the icon which Maica stareta brought from the wooden church. So in the end we asked for some little bottles, with one of them containing rosy tea, and I photographed maica stareta as a painter.

Her hands were beautiful, but otherwise I didn't think it was an interesting picture at all. Then the rosary beads maker showed up. Finally a tidy nun. She was not old and had red cheeks, and was shy and bright and patient. So, we worked a lot. The rosary beads she had were beautiful too. I hope the shots come out well. I was so amused thinking that the whole story might have started from a kinky editor that I don't even know, and how my photo might land in a lesbian's bedroom! But I had to control myself, not to spoil the serenity and humility of the model nun.

I was beaming that my mission was done. "Ella went to the end of the world and found the nun and got the prize. Ella is a good, tenacious journalist, she climbed 6 kilometers through woods with a heavy bag, hiding cameras. Ella is a nice person. Why does no one love her?"

The whole place was questioning me. I started to compulsively photograph the white lace curtains hanging on the clothesline in the back yard. Then I took off some unappealing panties from another line, and photographed the lines with black habits and white lace together, sensing a hidden, or a too obvious, metaphor, probably a paradox, maybe an oxymoron there: white innocence, light grace juxtaposed with black, heavy, gruesome, entrapping, stiff habits.

Maica stareta suggested that I take pictures of all the buildings there, but they were quite ugly and, by then, I'd had enough of churches. Then it came out that Maica stareta wanted me to walk back up the hill with her, back to the rooms, and then a driver would pick me up in a black Dacia car and we'd drive to Zalau because one nun’s brother was in a hurry to catch the train. So we went and though the horizon was beautiful, I didn't take any shots. I was happy, though sad and felt more and more that everyday life—promoting my work, which I actually never do, unsuccessful human relationships—made me unfit for life and I wanted to go to the monastery myself, write there in peace, have a final home, at last.

But I didn't want any nuns bickering me. I asked Maica stareta when she had become a nun and she said she had wanted to be one since she was 17, but finalized it only after much visiting, when she was 27. She studied while she was a nun, at the gymnasium/high school and Theological Institute. She loved, missed school. She said, while walking as if she could go forever, swinging canta cu apa/ a tin water can like a pendulum, that she’d never regretted her choice. Her life was fulfilled in the abbey; she managed to do both spiritual and material deeds that otherwise she couldn't have ever done. Only a prime-minister or a president could do the kind of things she managed to do for The People, she said. She saw happiness and sadness. She could advise people. She talked to so many people since she was a nun. She couldn't have done any of these by tying herself within the small family circle! Just living around a family.

I said, "How interesting! Usually people think of nuns as closed, finished lives." "Oh, no," she said almost smiling. "Life opens up for you! You do good deeds for people. Even if you sit all day and just pray for humankind, you're doing a great thing because you're praying for all people, and not just for yourself."

"My God, what am I doing here on this earth," I thought, and still think. I sat on the porch, looking at the walnut trees ruffled by wind. The Jesus Christ crucifix, who, incredibly, had a feminine silhouette, plump hips, like a woman. I saw this Jesus woman three times on the grounds and it was not a mistake. It was made on purpose.

Parintele duhovnic came from the grounds too and he didn't say anything to me, not a single word or look. I felt uncomfortable, but my mother said maybe he was not allowed to, by some Orthodox rule. I told Maica stareta that I'd go ahead down the road, towards the cemetery because I wanted to take a shot of a wheat field with poppies, so I'd get in the car as they passed by.

I was just unpacking my camera to shoot a cut off of a cliff layered with different colored clay, when the car stopped and they yelled, "Hurry up! Because I'll miss the train." I hurried indeed, but told them, "It's not my fault, I've been waiting for the last 30 minutes," and the guy in the front seat said he couldn't finish his work on time. I think he must have missed his train because he was going to Jibou and we had only 15 minutes before his train had to leave.

I got off at the Zalau train station. They went further on to Jibou. I got into a maxi taxi /a taxi van with my stag beetle in the audio cassette box. I held tightly so not to lose the bug because I wanted to bring it to Alex and Adi to see their marveling faces. Alex ignored it, but Adi was very interested.

I kept the scarf on my head, like a nun, and no one said anything. My brushy hair came out of it.

The Dark Room

"It is so paradoxical that in order to make a photograph,"

I commented, befuddled,

after my first lesson in color print making,

"an image, recording the instant of discovering,

the fully seeing,

all along revealing yourself, the being behind the camera,

it is so paradoxical that it takes so much darkness.

So much fumbling in the dark."

"Yes, but this is how life is, isn't it?"

you, my kind and inspiring mentor in matters of photography

said, while tinkering with the enlarger.

All our lives we fumble in the dark searching for an image,

for an instant,

for a full moment of divinity,

a grasp of color.

A smile. A gesture, a shape,

a shadow, a shade,

a flight, a tear, a wrinkle,

a serene slumber,

a stuck-out foot, a red, shiny cherry,

a round tree serenely reigning on the side of a curvy dirt road.

All these, and an infinity of other instants, can emerge from darkness,

like we are told that the world showed up.

Encapsulating the moment of recognition,

of breathtaking amazement in front of the beauty,

or savage inventiveness of creation.

First, you fumble in the dark to fix neatly, clearly, decisively, the borders of your image;

then you focus the image, sharper and sharper,

no blurred indecision, just crisp assertiveness,

like breathing the cold air in the winter mornings

paining when entering your nostrils.

You need the cutting edge of memory,

the accurateness of the sharp eye

to have a photograph,

an arresting photograph.

Then you put the timer on,

five, ten seconds,

depending on the lens opening

through which the light comes to bathe the paper,

sensitive paper, sensitive to light paper.

A mere second might totally change the image.

The darker your negative, the smaller your lens opening,

like the eye of a metal bird, or like an inverted fan, or flower.

Then you have to pay attention to what composes the color.

You have to put just the right amount of yellow and magenta,

if not, your portraits might have blue skin, like drowned corpses,

or purple, like drunk, gobbling turkeys

or green, like poison,

or yellow, like livid, throat-slashed chickens.

And that just won't do.

You can have purple piglets if you want,

even call them royalty, King Lear's descendants, heading to be butchered,

but still, it won't do.

And then, after every button is fiddled with,

you turn off the feeble lens light

and fumble in the silvery paper bag and take out the slick paper

and place it carefully in the easel at the 14 inch slot

and you carefully, very cautiously fold the silvery envelope back,

closing your eyes so that you don't get scared of the darkness—thinking

that you just went blind or got incarcerated,

thrown down into the dark pitfall,

and now the fire will burst out

and keep you in hellish pain forever

because you put the wrong amount of cyan

and look! her feet are blue like a cadaver.

And then you close the card-box-Fuji-paper-box,

green-spring-green-box-Fuji-mountain-green-box,

a green which you can't see or feel with your fingertips in the darkness

and then you make sure it's really, really closed

otherwise you'll have the edge of the next photo foggy red,

because the paper reacts to even tiny beams of light.

Then you push the timer button,

push the atomic bomb button

and wait wait wait.

And tziiiir it goes.

And then you fumble more, open the easel, gently take the sleek paper out,

put it in the large plastic box

and transport it in its darkness to another dark room,

where a machine of long rolls

waits to devour your sleek paper

and in a few minutes spit

your photograph through a slot into the world of light.

But first clamp the door,

yes, then open the cover of the machine

and gently place the paper, sleek side up

and gently…. Wait! push but a tiny bit!

and then the waterfall starts singing

and then the monster slit starts grabbing the sleek paper

and away, away it goes, like a child from his mother

and the waterfall sings louder

and you fumble with your fingertips, blind puppies, closer to the slit

until there’s nothing there, not even a tiny bit of paper,

and then you get out of the stingy darkness,

the waterfall rumbling your paper

and then you sit and wait and wait

look at other people's photographs,

look at how they put filters in front of one eye, crinkling the other

and green and yellow and blue and red and magenta

and fiddle with the buttons

and then fumble in the dark

and then wait, and filters and buttons,

and fumble in the dark, and waterfall,

and it goes on like that for several times

until you get your divine picture,

exactly as you remember it was like then in the first flickering moment of your seizing it,

and yes, you've captured it,

yes, you are a gold miner and yes, you are godly,

yes, you made the world emerge from darkness

and let the light be festive like a chandelier in a ballroom.

The contentment of seeing other people looking at your photo

and smiling with pleasure,

arrested by its beauty.

Divine transmission of what had seemed to be flickering moments.

Transgress time and space is what I do through photography.

Because My Creator gave photography to me.

He passed His creativity to me, didn't lock it behind heavy doors.

He passed it to you and you saw it in me and restored it to me.

You took me out of the dark room and gave me to the light,

my kind, delicate, and patient mentor.

September, 2000