There were also lots of jokes about the Trabant. Here is just one: A BMW asks a Mercedes scratching against a tree what?s happened. The Mercedes says: Last night I got all raided by small Trabant bugs?Or another one: Question: Why shouldn?t a Trabant have safety belts? Answer: So nobody will mistake it for a back-pack. Or ? Question: Why does the Trabant have a logo with an S on the bonnet? Answer: An S logo is always better than nothing at all. Of course the Trabant drivers had to come up with something in defense. The Trabant is like a brothel: You?re ashamed to be seen going in a Trabant, but you?re having such a good time inside. (129)

My new passion of asking father and my aunts about the house (the news of my father?s cancer was broken on me together with the announcement that the house was to be demolished) was due to the threat of demolishing. When I came back from the seaside, I hurried to do two things: one, I managed to take father out of the house before it was demolished: I exchanged it for a small block apartment; second, I tried to persuade people here and there to leave the house untouched, but that didn?t work.

Around the same period, I noticed in many of my acquaintances similar developments in their relationship with the neighbourhood and the city. It was then that the pride, or responsibility of being a Bucharest inhabitant, came to light. Besides the fact that we felt violence was done to the roots of our identity, there was also the story with the witnesses. All of a sudden, people ? either specialists or common folk ? who had previously appreciated new and simple things, took to contemplating the old areas of the city, to walking and taking pictures. Paul Petrescu was taking an endless number of photos of the Mosilor Road. I had a friend, a stage set designer and painter who worked for the National Theatre, Motu Zenov was his name. His friends were artists like him, and he was famous for hosting the last tea parties in town, for owning the integral Presley collection, and also for his basement workshop, so he was like a magnet for the people who knew him. Zenov got into bloody hot water, as he was in love with Bucharest and began to take pictures of street corners where was usually some pub or shop. When the demolishing began, he?d run wherever there was still some house standing, before it was taken down. At some point, two comrades came to the theatre and put him in their car and went to his house, and searched everything, but could only find the letters and films. They confiscated the camera and all the films, took him to the police station where they kept him for three days. They returned the camera, but not the films.