In the ?80-s, there was somebody who was delegated to go to Iraq. And there, one could find coffee for a dollar a kilo. One?s daily allowance was of 8-13 dollars. You would take 12 kilos of coffee, leave one at the customs, maybe even two, depending on your connections at the customs, you would take a kilo of coffee and some cigarettes to give out at work. The rest was yours to commercialize. You could get money or goods, instead. (I. H., 54)

If one was open to discussions, one could have found where coffee was brought, not that awful stuff of coffee and chick-pea, but coffee or ness? My mum would run about desperately to find coffee or ness. (S. C., 5)

Real coffee was only ALVORADA, wrapped in a golden bag and could be found only in ?shops?. (I. H., 48)

In a store near the ?Patria? cinema, hot ness was prepared and one could have bought 3 or 4 spoons in improvised cornets to take home.

The dregs of natural coffee were a real treasure. Fresh coffee was added and that could be boiled again, and the new dregs were kept and so on and so forth. Nothing was thrown away; everything was reused. A colleague of mine who predicted the total disappearance of natural coffee, saved ten or twelve berries of coffee in an hermetically closed container for his son, still a child at the time, who, living in an eternal communism, would later on be able to prepare himself a real miraculous coffee. The father kept this savor about to disappear for his son, as one would keep a ring, a painting or a book. (7)

COLD

Freezing temperature that made everyone suffer in winter, except the privileged ones who benefited from specially devised heating circuits. Significantly, in the house of the Head of the State and in the rooms where the presidential couple worked, all thermometers were faked: they invariably showed a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius, whereas the actual temperature was of 25 degrees. (51)

We were living in the Drumul Taberei area. When we could no longer take the cold, we?d turn on the gas stove. At first only during daytime, then at night too, but we were this close to a catastrophe. We left the gas fire on over night, and at some point the gas was cut off. We were lucky not to turn on the light, we felt the smell, it was already suffocating. We opened the window and ever since we began to apply the ?miser?s method? (making love) to keep ourselves warm. (G. S., 118)