At the meeting, I sit next to two trustworthy ladies and tell them: ?Watch this, I?ll read every other line and you?ll see nobody will tell!? And so I do. Nobody wonders, nobody protests, smile, or ever notices anything. The ladies start giggling. I feel like bursting out myself, and I?m having a hard time reading now, still skipping lines. The others turn their heads, daunted. What scares me is not the potential consequence, but the hysteria of my own laughter. If I were a psychiatrist, I?d have myself shut up immediately in the ?demented? ward, under the ?dangerous? category. But after all, the madhouse might not be that bad? (On this thought, the fright goes away.) Lunatics like me put a lock on their doors ? or others do it for them, whatever ? and good bye big mouths? But what if the lunatics are obliged to sit in at political training sessions? (On this thought, my laughter dies out.) (133)

POTATOES

In the gloomy years of the black decade, I would go to Merisor in Piata Amzei to buy potatoes. Each of us had the right to buy two bags of potatoes of three kilograms each. We would wake up in the morning, around five or six, it was cold and we would queue in front of Fortuna where, sometimes, we would even stand in queue twice so that we could get more. I remember the darkness, the humiliation and the garbage from the marketplace. Although, even then, the whole thing turned into a comic adventure.

The thing that made me realize the actual state of degradation in which we found ourselves happened in Piata Matache. I was the only one in the queue, the shop assistant was drunk, and, at a certain moment, h moved away from the heap of rotten potatoes. Then we started rummaging and choosing what was relatively good in the heap of garbage. Suddenly, as if woken up from a dream I stared at a lady dressed in civilized clothes, let us say a bourgeois. We looked at each other and shuddered with horror that we got to the point in which we rummage around in garbage. After I filled my bag, I paid and went home. It was not free, I had had the right tot choose, after all the man was not completely drunk. (I. N., 7)

There was a food shop round the corner of Leonida street, on Tunari. Its chief, big-bellied Vali, adored my father. Once I took a 5-10 liter aluminum can of thin sour cream. It flowed like water. According to Pastorel Teodoreanu's recipe, my mother used to pour a thin layer of maize flour at the bottom of a pan. She put a two-fold gauze above. Then she poured an equal quantity of sour cream and left it until maize absorbed water and the sour cream got thick. We gave the maize to a neighbor who had poultry. This way we prepared the sour cream for "pasca" (sweet cream cheese eaten at Easter).