Pia Brînzeu, Family Journal, Manuscript

Stop 14: The family residence of Titus Olariu, Doctor of Law, on Splaiul Tudor Vladimirescu

March 15, 1944. Schniffi, my mother’s puppy, is anxious. Mother knows this means that the alarm announcing the bombardments will soon follow. She doesn’t wait for the sound of siren, but she pulls my brother out of his pram and, together with my grandmother, she heads to the basement shelter. In here, the servants’ rooms are tidy. Just as they left them when they went away. Even Grandmother, when she took the rugs down, she wrapped them in newspapers soaked in petroleum to keep the moths away, and she wrapped the china nicely, arranging it into boxes, each box bearing a label with its contents. She also took down the stained glass windows from the dining room, so they wouldn’t break in case of an attack.

Both ladies sit quietly, lost in thoughts, waiting for the air raid to end. They have no future ahead of them. They were left alone, with one child to raise, without Grandfather and without any income. How long will they survive on selling things from the house? A year or two? Still, Mother believes in her lucky star: she was born on Sunday, and those born on the day of the Lord are always lucky. Every time it has been hard for her, God has always been close to her.

They are sure that at the end of the war they will put the windows and rugs back in their places. What they do not know, though, is that, for fear of the Communists, a part of the china, silverware, and jewellery will remain boxed up. Besides, our house will end up invaded by tenants. Two of the rooms in the basement must be vacated for them, and so the boxes end up in a pile, stacked one on top of the other, in the other two rooms. Dust will slowly gather on them, the electric wiring will also be damaged, and the door lock will barely work anymore. As a child, I didn’t dare to enter the darkness and the dirt which accumulated for decades on end. But I was fascinated with the content of the boxes. I knew they contained beautiful things, but Grandmother wouldn’t let me open them. They couldn’t be brought upstairs, because there were three other sets of tenants in the house: an engine driver, with his wife and a daughter my age, a student at the Polytechnic, and an engineer. Soon my grandmother will die, and mother won’t know anymore what lies in the basement and will be too old to do something about it.

It is only forty years later, when I move back to my parents’ house, that I will have the courage to go down into the long forgotten rooms. The dried up fur of a cat, dead under a box which had fallen on it, welcomes me with its empty sockets and makes me feel like in Great Expectations. Other than that there is litter thrown through the cracked window, which gives onto the street, books from the beginning of the century, medical instruments, laces, embroidered bed sheets, fur muffs, hats, silver-handled walking canes, monogrammed men’s socks. I browse through them with great pleasure, fascinated by the atmosphere they bring back to life. I feel that I need to save their beauty, to bring them to light, to place them behind some museum showcases. I will also sanitize the rooms, which have once again become “like back in the old days”. But my zeal is excessive. Because of this zeal, the whole atmosphere of the dusty basement is lost, as it also happens with archaeological sites open to tourists, or with the objects showcased in museums. None of the people looking at them knows what it meant to find them and take them out one by one from the place where they have lain untouched for such a long time, to remove the dust thinking about the people who used them and to take a plunge into their lives, discovering other desires and loves, other purposes, vanities or miseries than those that accompany our own present.