The damaged or black-and-white photographs were digitally restored and colorized from the original images.

The friendship across the street

Mircea C. was one of my oldest friends. We lived on Calea 13 Septembrie, almost directly opposite one another: my house was at number 76, while his family lived, if I remember correctly, at number 91, on the other side of the street. We were almost the same age, he being only a few months older than I was. Had our mothers known each other better, they might have taken us out in our prams together, chatting while we slept.

My earliest memories of Mircea, however, are from the vacant lot in Piața Puișor. I was there almost all the time; he appeared only rarely, because his parents did not allow him to mix with those whom they would have called the “street urchins” of the lot. We sized each other up, then each went on with his own business.

Mircea, the son of a doctor, lived in a small two-story apartment building that concealed, at the back, a row of small flats and rooms of the kind still found in our neighborhood. The entrance was through a passageway. His family occupied a raised-ground-floor apartment, which could be reached either from the courtyard or directly from the passage, through a glass-paneled door with a bell.

This entrance opened into the street-facing room, originally intended to serve as his father’s consulting room. As times had changed and private medical consultations were no longer permitted, by the time Mircea reached adolescence the room had become his bedroom. It had large windows more than two meters above the pavement. From there he could watch everything that happened in the street.

His father was a physician and ran the tuberculosis clinic on Calea 13 Septembrie, only a few houses away from ours. Mircea’s mother was a housewife. Her elder sister also lived with the family. Mircea called her Babette: a tall woman who had never married and who loved her nephew without reserve.

His parents had directed Mircea toward his father’s profession, and he was to become a very good pediatrician. We did not attend elementary school together. From primary school onward, he had been enrolled at “Mihai Eminescu” High School on Calea Rahovei, where he remained until graduation. As in my own family, his education was expected to include music: he took violin lessons, while I studied piano. Neither of us pursued a musical career. The lessons were simply part of the education our families believed they ought to give us.

I do not remember our being inseparable in childhood or adolescence. Yet the proximity of our homes always kept us within each other’s orbit. We grew up separately, but continued to follow one another’s lives even when our paths became parallel.

Mircea’s window

By the end of high school, Mircea was tall—about 1.80 meters, I think. He was well proportioned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and freckled. His face retained something boyish; his slightly puffy lower eyelids sometimes made him look as though he had just woken up. It was probably precisely the contrast between his height and his mischievous boyish appearance that charmed those around him. He was playful, knew how to approach people, and, especially with women, possessed a natural ease of communication that I lacked.

I can still see him sitting on the broad sill of the open window, his knees drawn up to his chest, like Audrey Hepburn at the window in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, wearing his inevitable pale-blue shirt, starched by Babette and matching his eyes. When acquaintances passed in the street, he called them by name. Some stopped in surprise, looked up, greeted him, and went on their way. But Mircea did not restrict himself to people he knew: unknown young women could also become the targets of his calls from above. He was attracted to girls from an early age and found it remarkably easy to strike up a conversation with them. In a sense, that window was his first balcony onto the world and the first place from which he practiced his charm.

From his room he could see, less than thirty meters away across the street a taller building. On the ground floor were a soda-water shop and a photographic studio, while on one of the upper floors lived a family with two daughters: Ileana, the elder, and Cristina, a few years younger, both very attractive. Mircea communicated with them by signs from his window, and they answered from the balcony. They exchanged telephone numbers and, one after the other, in order of age, each became a visitor to his bedroom.

A Casanova with a boyish face

This was only one of his many stories. I could quickly recall seven or eight names of girls who, at one time or another, had been his girlfriends. In those years, at least in our social circle, such a succession seemed extraordinary to me. Mircea’s girlfriends were not only pretty, but also cultivated and came from “good families.”

As I used to say at the time, it seemed to me that “girls dropped like flies.” Mircea knew how to speak to them, whisper something in their ear, and disarm them with his air of an innocent child. To me, far less self-assured in such circumstances, he seemed a true Casanova.

A Saturday with Sofița and “Vulpița”

One of Mircea’s adventures in which he involved me directly took place toward the end of the 1960s, when we often met at the numerous tea dances to which we were invited to make up for the shortage of good male dancers. One evening he telephoned me, and an almost unreal conversation followed:

— What are you doing Saturday evening?
— Nothing. I’m staying at home.
— Then come over to our place.
— Our place? Whose place do you mean?
— Mine and Sofița’s.
— Sofița? Who is Sofița?
— What, you don’t know Sofița? How long has it been since we last met?
— Since Ioana’s tea dance. Three weeks ago.
— Ah yes, of course. You couldn’t possibly know Sofița. All the more reason for us to meet on Saturday evening, at half past seven.
— Where?
— On 11 Iunie, at number..., near the roundabout. We’ll be waiting for you. Mind you: you’re staying the night.

On Saturday, at the appointed time, I arrived with a bottle of wine and a platter of savory pastries. To tell the truth, I expected a “tea dance,” as Mircea had accustomed me to. Instead, there were only the two of them and one other girl. At last he introduced me to Sofia, whom he called Sofița because of his habit of using diminutives. She was a pretty, friendly girl, plainly in love with “the doctor.”

The other girl was Laura, a friend of Sofița’s, whom Mircea introduced as “Vulpița”—“Little Fox.” Without the slightest malice, he explained that he called her that because there was something foxlike in her face. Indeed, her nose, slightly longer than usual and tilted upward, gave her a distinctive air. Laura accepted the nickname and did not seem offended by it.

Seated around the dining-room table, we talked until late. The wine ran out, as did the savory pastries and the cakes Sofița had put on the table. We were all yawning terribly when Mircea intervened:

— Time for bed! We’re going to our bedroom, and you two to the other one, he said, pointing to Laura and me.

Taken aback, I looked at Laura, who showed no sign of objecting. Had I fallen into a trap? A pleasant trap, in any case.

In the morning we drank coffee together and then parted. I never saw either Sofița or “Vulpița” again. The episode remained in my memory above all as an illustration of how Mircea arranged things: with nonchalance, without unnecessary explanations, convinced that he was acting for my own good.

The end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s found us together in the same group, made up of my new office colleagues, old acquaintances from military service, and other friends who had gathered around us. We went to the seaside together, danced at the tea parties organized by members of the group, and courted one another in every direction. On one such trip to the seaside I met my future wife.

Mircea joined us especially during periods when he was not involved in a relationship. His girlfriends at that time were cultivated, serious, witty women, with whom I too formed close friendships.

Anda and the tea dances on Calea Moșilor

A few years later, Mircea decided it was time to settle down and married Anda. They were both tall and good-looking, and made a striking couple. Anda came from a family well placed in the municipal hierarchy: her father held an important position in Bucharest City Hall. Through this marriage, Mircea’s social circle broadened considerably beyond the world of our childhood.

They lived in a large apartment in an old building on Calea Moșilor, at the corner of Carol Boulevard. There they held what we called “tea dances,” dancing parties attended by people from widely different backgrounds, including the cultural and film worlds. I remember meeting Ion Caramitru and Sergiu Nicolaescu at Mircea and Anda’s parties, the latter surrounded, as usual, by a small entourage. They were, one might say, tea dances attended by the elite.

I went to these parties with my future wife, but our lives were already moving along parallel tracks. Mircea had his career as a pediatrician, in which he had become well known in his new neighborhood, his marriage, and his social circle; I had my work, my family, and my own concerns. Mircea and Anda were with us at our wedding, but after our child was born, we stopped attending their tea dances.

People say that out of sight is out of mind. In our case, meetings became rarer, but neither Mircea nor I forgot our shared past, our parents, or the neighborhood in which we had grown up.

Divorce and a new life

In the meantime, I had left for Italy. Among the first postcards I sent from there were some addressed to Mircea and Anda.

Being far away, I did not witness what happened to them. Their circle included an architect, shorter than Mircea, with a soft blond beard, a heavy smoker, and already beginning to go bald. There is no reason to reveal his name. He was a great seducer, a true tombeur de femmes. I had often seen him at work on the dance floor, slipping passionate words into his partner’s ear. According to the accounts that reached me, he also won Anda over; they became far too close, and their relationship led to the breakdown of the marriage. Beyond that I cannot speak with certainty. Later, Anda and the architect left for America and, as far as I know, settled in Texas.

Mircea was left alone and had to leave the home on Calea Moșilor. His solitude did not last long, however. He became close to a serious young woman from their old circle, a friend of Anda’s who worked in diplomacy, and married for a second time.

Greetings from a distance

After emigrating, I met Mircea a few more times during my visits to Bucharest. I was invited to their home near Mihai Bravu. Later we would see each other at concerts during the “George Enescu” Festival. Mircea came with his wife and friends. We recognized each other from a distance, waved, and laughed, happy that we were still seeing one another. But it went no further. We no longer sat down to talk or tried to recover the years that had passed. Perhaps, after so much time, we no longer knew what to say to each other beyond a few banalities.

One day, while I was in Italy, his wife telephoned me. She told me directly that Mircea had died. His heart had given out. I think he was about sixty and may not yet have reached retirement age. His death seemed premature to me, especially for a doctor.

What remained

Mircea was, in his own way, a true friend. My relationship with him belongs fully within what I understand as the semantics of friendship, even though it never had the confessional character of other friendships I have known. I did not feel the need to tell him all my private anxieties. Mircea was more playful, less reflective, more oriented toward immediate life, toward people, and toward the pleasure of meeting. He could also be serious, but great revelations were not part of the habits of our friendship.

Our friendship rested on something else: the fact that we had known each other since our world was only beginning to take shape. A street separated us, and sometimes only the distance between his window and my house. I knew him as a child, an adolescent, a student, a doctor, a husband, then as a man who went through a divorce and remarried. I saw him “picking up” girls while seated on the windowsill on Calea 13 Septembrie, organizing meetings and tea dances, going through a separation, and rebuilding his life. In the end, only the greetings from a distance and the smiles exchanged in the concert halls of the Enescu Festival remained. I can say that, like any good friend, I was a partial witness to his life.