I can?t remember how much I made in those two hours but at a quarter to twelve, I was busy polishing my shoes and was rushing to make it on time to the party I had been invited at.             The New Year?s Eve caught me on the way to the party, on Mayday Bd., where I got bombarded by fireworks being thrown for joy from up the balconies. And what were they supposed to target if not the only car just passing on the street at that hour?

Five years later, on a day in December, I was racing down Dorobanti Drive in a noise that, hadn?t I been so scared, might have reminded me of the fireworks on that New Year?s Eve night. Except this time they were shooting real bullets. (129)

TELEGRAM

They used to call them telegrams. At first such telegrams would only be sent on Ceausescu?s birthday, or on his wife?s. There was no such thing as a standard text or wording. You only had to glorify their work and achievements. But somehow most telegrams ended up reading like: ?We are proud to be headed by a leader who reinvented himself to make his life and work identify with those of his people, throughout glorious, if strenuous efforts made so that this would become a genuinely better world with fair opportunities for all.? Nobody really bothered to read them.

They didn?t dare introduce the telegram system in universities from the very beginning. But when our turn came to send them a telegram, at first the students in the hall were all radiant, but after the hideous telegram was read out loud, nobody knew what to do. I was sitting in the front row, so I made as if to clap my hands and everyone started in standing applause. (S. R.-B, D. R.-B., 137)