100 Steps

I wish you could come for a moment and see through my eyes, see all these images that run past the edges of language. I wish you could come with me for an hour, hear your own footsteps echoing down the stairwell, receding as you push open the heavy red door, falling silent as you step out into a different world. Today, you would see bright blue sky -- finally, after cold days of rain and heavy clouds that have sent children scampering to school under small umbrellas and thick hoods, clinging to their mothers' gloved hands. There's a school outside my window, a gradinita, or kindergarten, with white-rimmed windows. Pigeons often roost on the red-tiled roof or fly in patterns nearby, glinting grey-white when there's sun. A cement path leads up to the front door of all those years of education and cuts through a red fence that runs around the property's perimeter, separating the school from the apartment blocs. When I wake, I often go to my window and look out through the early dawn at that building. The mornings are darkening as winter nears, but still the children emerge through the dim light, trooping next to their mothers, their little feet stepping like seconds on a clock, like the seconds that will pass until they are no longer little people but big, finding their way without their mother's hand.

As you take another step, you will hear hammering, sharp strikes echoing from somewhere up above. You will pause to follow the sound, straining your eyes up past the rows of windows stacked ten floors above to the roof. A man is way up there, peering over the edge toward a pile of rubbage and boards on the ground below. You notice wires hanging around, everything just kind of a mess. You will remember that I told you the roof blew off a week ago. It had been a long story, the one I'd told you...

Last Tuesday, I had been walking home exultantly from a wonderful meeting with a new IMPACT club in the first Romanian snow of the season. One of the little beggar children who always comes up to me stepped out from one of the vendors to say hello. I was so overjoyed by the snow that I picked the child up in my arms and twirled him/her (I'm still not convinced one way or the other) around two or three times. Well, it had been extremely windy when the snow first began, and shortly after I arrived home, the wind returned with all its furious cousins. The terrace door was heaving under the strong gusts, and the trees were wipping around dramatically outside. I went to bed around 10:30 to the sound of this wind; two hours later, I awoke to the sound of crashing and shattering. Startled, I got up to investigate and walked down the hallway into a draft of cold air. Turning on the lights, I saw that the wind had blown open two of our windows, shattering one. I hadn't even known these particular windows could open, but as they were swinging wide, I was clearly unaware of their abilities. Thankfully, the shattered window was the inner of the double-pane, but the windows and their frames are so thin and poorly constructed that wind is always barreling through the cracks regardless. Closing them as best I could and assessing the broken glass, I went back to my room and opened my window to peer outside. If I had not been fully awake before, what I saw down below definitely finished the job. As it turns out, the wind had blown off part of the ROOF of my apartment bloc, sending debris careening down below into a wreckage near three parked cars. Just as I was looking down, the owners of the cars were emerging from the stairwell to move their cars out from under the mess. The view up above was even more fantastic, as a large mangled section of roof was dangling precariously off the corner of the bloc three stories over my head. Later that morning, it was quite a circus with police and firefighters hollering up from behind the red-striped tape to their colleagues on the roof who were throwing off debris and eventually sending the broken roof plummeting ten stories down to splinter on the ground.

It had been a long story, as you also recalled my waxing eloquent about the tin of hot coffee I had spilled on myself and all across the kitchen floor that same morning, though I'd proclaimed it the warmest thing I'd experienced in a week. Shaking your head and walking along the curb, you avoid the potholes that hold brown rain and nod to the older man smoking a cigarette. You walk onto a side street, past the garbage bins. You remember my telling you that the bins were new, that they hadn't been here two years ago. They are always full and overflowing on Sunday nights, various creatures nosing around what has fallen on the ground or been piled along the side. Three dogs have marked out this area as their territory -- one a doberman pinscher-type, another some kind of German-Shepard mix with a stub tail, and finally a pure-bred mutt with long, dingy white fur. As you are walking by the garbage and past the dogs, you notice a man there, hunched over in an old brown suit coat, oily grey hair sticking out from under his hat. His pants hang on him limply, and his shoes seem rather large for his feet. He doesn't notice you there, watching him -- but you wonder what he is doing, his arms reaching over the side of the garbage bin, right hand sorting through the trash with a thin metal rod. It dawns upon you that this is how he lives.

You take a few more steps and turn onto the sidewalk along the main street, walking by the corner bread shop. Adriana is there, the friend I'd told you about, the one who always coordinates her clothing to a single color. Today she's wearing yellow earrings, a yellow headband, a yellow shirt, and yellow shoes. She's thirty and married, with blond-dyed hair and a friendly exuberance that takes you in before it sends you away with fresh bread. You know she is kind by all the people who pause to visit and the ones who linger around her all day. When the weather is warm, she sits outside her shop on a cushion, one foot up on a rock, her elbow on her knee, and a handful of sunflower seeds diminishing in her palm. She offered me some when I first sat down with her there, and that was how it began -- she and I spitting shells, communicating with dramatic hand motions and laughter between all the words we couldn't say. Now she calls me prietena mea, her friend, and I stop by or wave nearly as often as I walk by her shop. We kiss each other on the cheek and laugh, asking the daily kinds of questions. Sometimes, she'll assess the forms passing on the street with a critical eye, pointing out various ones and asking my opinion, making a face or shaking her head if she disapproves. She works every other day, from dawn until dusk. On some early mornings when it is still dark, I look down out my kitchen window to her shop, and her light is surely on, illuminating the night's still-falling rain. I often stake myself out at that shop as a strange local, meeting many other people on the street that way -- and now you are one of them, walking by on the sidewalk, thinking your own thoughts, waving a hand to the woman with the blonde hair in the bread shop. You notice she's wearing blue.

Walking a few steps further, you glance at the horse plowing the small potatoe field behind a fence near the sidewalk -- and you look again. An older peasant has his hand at the plow, and a woman near him is raking the tall grass that had been cut with a scythe next to the field. Their property is a slice of land between the enclosed soccer field and Parcul Copilor, the Children's Park. What must they have thought when that soccer field went up last year, nightly games suddenly running under bright electric lights right next to their sprouting potatoes? You notice their flowers and remember that I had told you of the beautiful marigolds planted around their field in the summer, flaming orange to ward off potatoe beetles until the bitter end. Flowers also have sprung up everywhere in the Children's Park, city workers pulling enough weeds to reveal neat patterns skirting the sidewalk or to make room for beds of roses and zinnias. Metal swings and merry-go-rounds have multiplied in the playground, ticking like pendulumns and spinning like colored tops on all the sunny days. The soccer field and this park are symbols of a different, better community that is growing in Lupeni -- but the peasant plowing his field between it wears upon his back the history of the Jiu Valley. He steps upon the earth knowingly, making this soil remember all that it has held.

You pull your eyes away and step through an opening in the hedge along the street, waiting to cut across. You watch the little red Dacias, diesel trucks carrying freshly cut logs, maxi-taxis carrying people, scooters, an ATV, some sleek newer-model cars, and even a horse-drawn wagon -- and as you pause to negotiate the traffic before stepping into the road, you realize that you are standing on the edge of something much more profound.

You are standing in a different world.