The birthplace of my traumas

 This is the birthplace of the traumas that formed me. I wander among fears, memories, and nostalgia that aren't mine. Yash — my mother called it Yassi; my father didn’t call it anything at all — he had no reminiscences and no longings. Between the colorful Roma women who still sell fruit and flowers, and the courtyard of the police station where the pogrom took place, magnificent theaters and churches, tram cars that seem to date from that era, and the terror that someone might shoot a bullet into my head.

I, whose identity is a suitcase, who believes more in mushrooms than in roots, find myself in a mechanical movement of the soul, rummaging in folders in the archive, wandering among graves, trying to locate addresses and names — what for?

The Jewish cemetery looks largely like a jungle; the roots have gripped everything. And what difference does it make if I see a grave with the name Haldengreber, or Lazar, or Kahaeni, or Ornstein? And every movement backwards — there, or in the city archive — produces more names and connections and threads and knots and wire and needles. In the forest of graves I adopted an anonymous grave and knitted beside it. It belongs too.

The birth certificate of Aunt Regina, my father’s older sister, was found. Everything else — not old enough for the archive — is still filed at the Ministry of Interior. Documents like ghosts, continuing to wander between departments. They lived at 44 Helena Doama Street. I found an old ruined house there — theirs? Not theirs? Does it matter? I have no idea how they survived the war. My father’s past was screened off by a heavy; I never dared cross it. I knitted among the ruins of the house.

My mother’s home address I could not trace. I was left with the knowledge that they lived on the parterre floor, in a street near the trams, and from the window you could see the legs of those walking on the sidewalk. Nowhere did I encounter my mother’s aubergine salad or her bean soup, but the smell of garlic was in the air, and dill was used immoderately in an unabashed fashion.

In the square, an older man followed me, and just before I pulled out the needles and wire, he began talking to me in Romanian. English? I asked with an expression of incomprehension. He nodded, as if I were a clown who fails to recognize him and is playing the fool, and continued talking, almost angrily, putting his fist against my cheek with gentle, affectionate humor. He looked at me convinced that I was someone he knew. I too recognize that kind of face — it reminds me of an old friend of my parents who had already passed. He continued speaking in Romanian to my blank stare, and finally shook his head in a gesture of no, no, no, took a few bills out of his pocket, gave them to me, and left.

I knitted in someone’s ruined house, and beside someone’s grave, and in the archive next to many folders and birth certificates and registers of deaths and marriages, and somehow I took leave partly from memories that aren’t mine.