ASSIGNMENT 2

1.
I can’t precisely say when I saw the old man for the first time. After all, it may be
possible to have met him pretty often without him drawing my attention with something
specific… Our street is tiny. It unifies two bigger streets named after some people who would
have had their purpose in the country’s life in the old days. The neighborhood is quiet, empty, a
real vestige for an endangered world.
If I had stayed home in the morning, I would have seen him passing around 7 a.m. under
my window. He was walking slowly and somberly, looking up front with clear eyes and stopping
from time to time just to breathe easy. An old man just like the others. It didn’t go through my
mind, not even once, that he is ridiculous. Years ago, when I met him, I didn’t presume that this
old man is the repository of so many memories.
2.
One evening, at the beginning of July 1909, shortly before 10 pm, an 18 years old young man,
dressed with a high school uniform, walked on the Antim street with some kind of suitcase, not
too big but of course very heavy, because he kept passing it from one hand to another. The street
was empty and dark. The young man walked carefully along the walls and it was obvious that he
didn’t know the house he was looking for, because if he would, he hadn’t scanned so cautiously
all the houses’s numbers.
Eventually, he arrived in front of a house with a single floor.
“Is mister Constantin Giurgiuveanu living here?”
The old man blinked, as if he hadn’t understood the question, he moved his lips but he
didn’t answer.
“What is it?” he asked softly, as if he hadn’t seen the boy.
“But dad, he is Felix! He told us he will come!”
Lead by Otilia and followed by the old man, Felix entered in a room filled by a dense
smoke from cigarettes, where, at a round table, three people were talking.
 3.A through passing gate
A through passing gate is each step we are making.
In every moment, we are passing over us,
in the madness to find ourselves again;
and every gate we are passing,
on walk, with the bicycle or with the mind,
is another closed one behind us.
We keep in ourselves the ashes of the ones we met,
loved or hated,
and we leave a part of us in each of them…

Daytime or nighttime,
On earth or on water,
I know, for sure, that I will die.

We are coming empty and we are leaving the same,

carrying our closed gates, the passed thresholds
and the ashes that we collect for us when we leave,
and we hand them over at the last through passing gate.
Beyond it, we know nothing anymore…
 4.The breath
The words hit the sad bell,
casting out the seagulls.
A beacon is extinguishing
in the fog’s diluted milk cloth.
It stays under the bell
and the bell gains volume
through its dream’s breath.
It stays in the bell
flipping through the mountains’s loins,
adding notes,
reading in eyes and in gesture and in motion,
travelling
on the child-path of memory,
when its mother was reading
about a little girl lost in the tower,
looking for the height and the snow.