So their clear purpose was to wipe off the traces. Typical Bolshevik mentality. When the revolution came, I hadn?t seen Motu Zenov in  years. Actually we didn?t see much of each other anyway in those years. It was either too cold, or you had nothing to bring with you on a visit, or people had simply become suspicious. Why visit? Nothing was appealing anymore, not even lovemaking. The ?80s destroyed eroticism. And after the revolution, Motu came to see me at the Institute, and I told him, ?Now the time has come for you to go and have your photos back?. It was December ?89. The ?State of the City? exhibition was organised at the Dalles Gallery. Everyone who loved the city came there and cried. But Motu knew the time wasn?t right after all. Just that in ?96 the Romanian Democratic Convention took power and Motu had his burst of naivete, so he wrote a memoir for Dejeu, in which he asked for restitution of the photos the Securitate had confiscated from him. He got his answer, which said that there were no pictures. Then someone inside told him that nothing was burnt, nothing was destroyed, everything was there, but it was decided that nothing should be returned, everything should be kept there. Which is to say that even these ones understood that photos like that were themselves a form of protest, even if you didn?t go to jail for them. (I. P., 37)

TRADING

The fair was full of machine pieces brought from Colibasi which sold like gold. One would find absolutely anything.

People would exchange oil and sugar among themselves because they were rationalized, and some needed more oil, some sugar. And then people would trade: you give me the oil; I give you the sugar kind of thing. And when somebody from the family died, one would not declare the death to the store for months. I did that myself. I did not have the courage to do that for too long, but for three or four month I must admit I took the dead man?s ratio. As a matter of fact, there was even a joke, the climax of bad luck: in the one-leu bag, the bottle of oil to break and drip on the sugar. (C. V., 129)

It was the period when the cars could drive only one Sunday and not the next. Until one to eight, cars with both even and uneven registration plates could drive, nobody said anything. Yet, at eight o?clock, policemen started to stop the cars with even registration number. It was the event, which seemed to me enormously more abnormal than anything else. (I. H., 144)