Erdély induló : PART THREE

My mother decided one day to meet up with one of her friends, who she last saw in 1975 or so. The vast majority of people my mother knew left for Canada, the States, Sweden, Germany and Israel, so it was quite exciting for her to remember the past with her old colleague from med/dental school.



They found my mother's old apartment from when she was really little while her father was at war in Korea. She tried to climb out of the balcony once at the age of three. It was one of the many stories my mom told me of her climbing out of a balcony.



This was the last place my parents were before they left Romania. It's still a police station. She remembers watching my dad get interrogated. "They hurled endless insults at him, and threw things in his face, and I just sat there saying nothing," she told me. A sympathetic bureau official gave them a visa to leave, and the next thing they knew, they were on a plane to Israel. A year later, they made it to Toronto.



A back alley caught my mother's eye. Turns out a childhood friend lived there, a Romanian girl she used to play with, whose name escapes her. The remains of the house were the greatest signs of decay that Tirgu Mures had to offer.





This is where the cool kids hung out in the 60s. It's now marshland and illegal to swim in it due to pollution. I'm trying to look like my dad in his Kafka phase, circa 1966.

There's a ferry on a zipline that can take you to an island, but it'd be prudent to take your own boat, as the ferry driver drinks a lot and sometimes forgets to bring people back.



The abandoned pool, where my father used to teach swimming. Now a place where children in bicycle gangs pop wheelies endlessly. Wild dogs fuck each other in the boiler room. There must have been people living there, as I found dilapitated mattresses beside the boilers. The pictures have gone missing, but you don't really want to see them.



Down the way is a small Gypsy enclave. The Roma people, as they're known officially (Tsigani Bozgor if you're a dick), live poorly in the cities, but quite well in the country villages surrounding the towns. There were people outside of these houses we saw, but I was unwilling to photograph them, in consideration of the fact that they've been exotocised heavily ever since cameras were invented. They're usually a very cheerful, vibrant people, but the folks I saw living on that stretch by the pool carried a serious look of discontentment and dissatisfaction on their faces, as if life itself were a tedious chore.



No matter who you are in Tirgu Mures, you spend your weekends at...um, The Weekend, a giant outdoor swimming centre, with bars all along the walkways and watersport docks on the river. It used to be a field when my parents grew up there, but even then, it was called The Weekend and everyone showed up.

The poster supports President Traian Băsescu, who was being put to the test with a national referendum on his proposed impeachment. He was on the docket for a series of unrelated, low level corruption offences, but since corruption, theft and neglect are national pastimes, no one cared, and his impeachment did not stand.

More tomorrow. Check out PART TWO and PART ONE.