My Childhood

I was born and raised in a loving family, surrounded by relatives who pampered me as much as they could. My mother, Zizi, extremely careful, orderly, and dedicated to the family, was the reliable pillar of the house. My father, Jean, a severe and pragmatic man, taught me what discipline, responsibility, and moral integrity meant.

Around them revolved a small feminine universe that was to strongly mark my first years. There was Mama Linica, my maternal grandmother, a constant and loving presence in my life. Then there was Draga, my mother's younger sister, who had no children and poured out all her maternal feeling on me, treating me like her own son. Finally, Marioara, Zizi's older sister, played a crucial role in my existence. She was the one who convinced my mother not to abort when her first reaction - barely married and with her husband concentrated on the front due to the war - was to "get rid" of the child by getting injections for spontaneous abortion, a widespread method then. Marioara, who could not have children, had promised my mother that she would adopt me after birth. But after she brought me into the world, my mother changed her mind, and Marioara had to resign herself, offering at least to baptize me and take me under her care in her comfortable villa on Cazărmii Street. Thus, I spent the first four years of my life in my godparents' villa, surrounded by the love of Maria and her husband, Luca.

In this context, my father had to carefully find his place among four women, each involved in my upbringing, trying to cultivate the masculine side he felt threatened by their excessive care. Father did not manage, however, to prevent the Christmas and Easter celebrations where I was dressed in dresses and had to recite sappy poems — things that, to his despair, I liked.

My father strove to offer me a more realistic and tougher vision of life, trying thus to balance my protective universe, "softened" by women. He sent me to colonies, camps, and trips, convinced that if I wanted to become a strong and independent man, I had to socialize in groups of boys and become as independent as possible. On all these occasions, I manifested as a timid child, not attracted to aggressive games, football, or the inevitable fights between boys.

Late, I realized that in my formative years, it was very important to have had a masculine figure, primarily the father, to relate to and take as a model. If I had only feminine models, the tendency was to identify with them, especially if the relationship was very close and exclusive: mother, grandmother, aunt. A "too much" feminine presence did not allow me to form a decisive masculine identity.

I did not have a close relationship with my father, who did not manifest his love for me in any way for fear of falling into a facile sentimentalism and fueling effeminate excesses. I was afraid of him because he was the only one in the house who punished me if I made mistakes, but on the other hand, I respected his opinions and tried to follow his advice as much as I could. Moreover, in the secret kitchen where my character was formed, father was always a model, but I never admitted that. The fact that father was very busy with his affairs to deal with me constantly made me seek this love elsewhere: with my uncle Radu, Draga's husband, with classmates, or with dominant masculine figures. Also for this reason it happened that I manifested attraction to other boys or to male adults, which today I understand as a deep need for paternal closeness.

Father saw any deviation from virility as a major threat and felt the duty to "cure" me if that were the case. This obsession was transmitted to me. It followed me all my life, in the form of a persistent fear of being — or becoming — homosexual, even when there was no real reason. In adolescence, I analyzed with suspicion every experience, heterosexual or not, looking in that for the confirmation of my manhood. Father's desire to know me "alright" had turned, in my mind, into a permanent struggle with doubt.

And yet, all these tensions — which I was to truly realize only later — intertwined with the pure joy of early childhood. My immediate world began to widen at five years old, when I stepped for the first time into the yard of the kindergarten on Izvor Street, at the foot of Dealul Spirii. I was taken there and brought home by Ileana, the Russian woman hired by Mama Linica to help her with house chores. Among the children at the kindergarten, I noticed Didina, a blond girl, timid and very pretty. My preference for Didina manifested by monopolizing her adored little hand during walks outside the kindergarten. At the end of the program, the parting from Didina was dramatic for me — I returned with Ileana home grumpy. I cannot say that Didina responded to me in kind, but that did not stop me from being in love with her.

Children's Games

My childhood was that of any child from a peripheral Bucharest neighborhood. I had my circle of friends formed of neighbors' children. The yard of my childhood was a small universe populated by characters who, each in their way, shaped my gaze upon the world.

At the back of our yard lived the Ciobanu family. Four souls: the two spouses and two boys, Nelu and Titi, lived in a single small room of five square meters that was bedroom, kitchen, living room, workshop for the father, and study room for the children. Today it's hard to imagine such a situation in our cities. We can probably find it in Latin America or far Asia, but in those years in Romania it was a common situation. They all lived on the earnings of the father, a neighborhood tailor who smoked continuously, a respected artisan among neighbors who received orders from neighbors, orders that usually concerned repairing or transforming existing clothes. Rarely did he happen to cut and make new clothes. Nelu was two years older than me, Titi two years younger. Their mother kept them quite tight; they weren't allowed to play with just anyone, I was in the category of those permitted. They were good children, I would say well-educated, talking about that minimum education, usually mixed with respect for parents and sometimes religiousness, received in peripheral neighborhoods and which prevented children from dealing with theft and robbery, as frequently happens nowadays with neighborhood children.

Then there was Sandu — the boy of Paraschiva, a corpulent Transylvanian woman lost in Bucharest, married to a Bucharest man who had either died or left her — I never found out — leaving her with a small boy. Paraschiva lived in two small rooms off a little hallway in our yard, being the first in the row of ten tenants. She lived from selling borscht in the neighborhood. She wasn't the only one doing this, but customers preferred her for quality and the cleanliness of the manufacturing process. Every day, she washed her borscht barrel at the fountain, in everyone's sight, both inside and out — then she scalded it with hot water heated on the stove. Placed in the house, she filled it with hot water poured over small bags with bran and cornmeal bought from the market from the same supplier. She added salt and a few twigs broken from the sour cherry tree in the yard — the one that, in June, blessed us with large, juicy, and sweet sour cherries — called Armenian. Stirring the composition daily, the borscht was ready in a few days. During the morning in our yard there was a back-and-forth of housewives armed with bottles — they too scalded — ready to be filled with Paraschiva's borscht. Sandu started school together with me, but when I returned to school in the fourth grade, he was in the third grade: in the meantime he had stayed back a year.

On the extension of Puișor Street, near the Spirea Veche neighborhood church, lived the Bobin brothers — the children of a barman. The elder Bobin, named Costel, was deaf-mute, but he had adapted to the group and we with him, without taking into account his infirmity. The younger Bobin, Florin, was a "sweetheart of a boy" with blue eyes, shy as a maiden.

Girls in the group we did not have, although in the yard there were two older ones: Geta and Marieta, who did not mix with snotty ones like us; they had other friendships. Marieta was the daughter of Andrei, a small and fat bonom who lived next to Paraschiva, in an apartment similar to Paraschiva's. In fact, Marieta was the daughter of Andrei's wife — she had died when I was small — leaving little Marieta to Andrei. It was said that Marieta might be the daughter of Chivu Stoica, conceived when he was in prison where he had met Andrei's future wife. Geta was the daughter of the Busuioc family, one of the family's two children. Their father went in a wheelchair, having his legs amputated after being wounded on the front, after stepping on a mine. Until I went to school, the two girls had adopted me as a doll and dressed me up with dresses made of crepe paper and with crowns, to the despair of my father who admonished them whenever he caught them having fun at my expense.

Thank God I had a place where to let loose! We had enough play space. At the entrance to the yard was a relatively large space in which the Alimentara from the street corner stored boxes and products intended for the garbage collectors who passed every two days to pick them up. Then there was the vacant lot on Puișor Street, attached to our yard, where there had once been a summer garden that I no longer remember, and now, after a few attempts by the town hall to transform it into a park, was at our disposal. There, football matches took place or just "shooting at the goal", with the risk of balls flying over the fence into our house yard and with the consequence of the ball being impounded by the tenants who had hung laundry in the yard.

Then we moved in front of our yard, on the street, in the intersection of Puișor Street with Calea 13 Septembrie taking advantage that there wasn't much traffic. There, occasionally, buses in breakdown or trams retreating to the depot stopped in the evening. At some point, late, I was no longer a child, the intersection became a bus terminus. Although the place was wide, if necessary, we could expand into another free land, beyond the intersection, also destined for a park, and also abandoned by the town hall. In the old days, when in this intersection was the city barrier, on its land was a market where peasants from the surroundings could sell their products without entering the city. After the city exploded at the beginning of the 20th century, the barrier moved, far away, beyond Ghencea. The market continued to exist until after the war, I remember it, but with time it was abandoned by peasants who preferred another location, more protected, among houses a few hundred meters further. Following all these transformations, that place had become a wide space perfect for play in the middle of which only the public toilet of the old market remained, well cared for by a staff who in lack of activity assisted us in our play.

Our childhood was a land of absolute freedom, in which our only concern was not to miss any moment of play. We lost our days in games that today almost have disappeared from children's lives, but which then filled us with joy and energy.

Țurca, the boys' favorite game, challenged us to compete in skill and speed. The game required two teams and provided a short piece of wood (the țurcă itself, about 10–15 cm, parallelepipedal, with sharpened ends) and bats for each player. The bat was a piece of wood of about 25–45 cm, carved like a cleaver.

The țurcă is placed on the ground by one of the teams and skillfully hit with the bat over one of the sharpened ends, so that it jumps in the air. Once raised, the player had to hit it again to send it as far as possible. The players of the opposing team had to catch it in flight or recover it as quickly as possible, to reduce the distance flown and thus block the opponent's score. It could be considered a variant of oină...

Hide and seek, hopscotch, and cops and robbers occupied our time until nightfall, when parents barely managed to convince us to return home. There were other games, many maybe forgotten today, but all had something in common: they were full of noisy laughter, small childish rivalries, and the simple joy of being together.

I participated fully in these games, but - unlike others - I also had other obligations that mine held dear: piano lessons with the teacher and practice sessions to prepare these lessons for which mine insisted I do at fixed hours. Of course, I did not willingly give up play, Ileana came to the yard gate and called me in her broken Italian: "Vieni qua. Fai presto.", snatching me from the world of games as if I were kidnapped from a wild sea of happiness. I conformed, with regret, to the call. In this way, the antipathy for the odious music lessons imposed by father gradually settled. I understood their value much later and remained with the regret that I didn't take more advantage of those hours, but it was too late.

Indeed, only late, when the glory of that childhood turned into memory, did I understand the value of those imposed, their role in my modeling, but not without a regret mixed with tenderness: I did not take enough advantage of those hours, I did not know how to treasure what my parents projected onto my future.

Important Decisions for My Future

Looking back, I realize that, although father did not always succeed in withdrawing me from the care of my four "mothers", he was the one who, in key moments, traced the direction of my path. In those nineteen years in which he had the power to decide my fate, the last word in important decisions always belonged to him.

His first notable decision came when I turned four: I had to learn an instrument. He chose the piano. They bought me a Schiedmayer upright piano, black and shiny, with a bronze plate and elegant candle holders, which was tuned by a specialist — a sonic jewel. They had also found me a teacher, Mrs. Teodorescu, who lived on Sirenelor Street, a five-minute walk away. I submitted without resistance, I was diligent at lessons, probably also to please father, and everything seemed to go on the right track.

Father, to attract me more, had bought me a book for children about great composers, in which were presented briefly, with illustrations, both the life and the work of each of them. On the book cover were the portraits of Mozart and Beethoven.

I remember perfectly: it was a Sunday morning; I was pampering myself staying in the large bed, with my head on father's chest, both in pajamas. On Sundays father didn't go to work, but he had taken the commitment to mother to do the market shopping in the morning, to spare grandmother. I think he liked the atmosphere in the market at the early hours of the morning. On that day however, something changed his program: he preferred to laze with me in bed, reading to me about composers from the book just bought. He held the book in hand, ready to start, when I, with eyes on the cover, put to him the question that troubled me at that moment:

– Father, who is the greatest composer: Mozart or Beethoven?

He sighed, as if he hesitated to give a too categorical verdict, then answered me with a slight embarrassed smile:

– You know? The greatest composer was Beethoven, but Mozart was a genius since childhood.

So it remained for me, for years on end: Beethoven, the greatest; Mozart, the precocious genius.

In the summer of the same year, father decided that I must do sport and chose for me to learn to swim. He swam very well and repeated to me that he had learned to swim at four years old in the swimming pools on Margaret Island in Budapest. I was four years old, I had to follow his example.

Bragadiru Swimming Pool

Near us was the Bragadiru Swimming Pool. Taking Puișor Street to its end and descending on Izvor Street – in winter our favorite sledding hill - at the bottom, you made the first left on Dr. Staicovici Street and reached the entrance of the pool. Its name came from the beer depots of the Bragadiru family nearby, where the crates were kept cool in galleries dug into the hill. On the other side of the pool was the tennis base of the National Bank, known later as the Progresul base.

Built with good taste, Bragadiru was an oasis of relaxation for everyone. The entrance, on an alley shaded by tall trees, led to the ticket office. After buying the ticket valid for the whole day, you entered a yard surrounded by changing rooms and individual cabins. Using the changing rooms was included in the price. You entered, took off your street clothes, knocked at a wooden window; the lady from the changing room hall opened and gave you a hanger on which you placed your clothes. You received a metal token that you presented at departure to take your clothes back.

After you left your clothes, you entered the premises of the swimming pool itself. Here were two basins: the main, Olympic basin, bordered on the long side by a strip of beach, and on the other side, another row of cabins. The basin had the bottom in a slope, from 80 cm up to 4.5 meters, and was surrounded by several showers. Laterally, on the right side, were two springboards with different degrees of difficulty.

Further on, but separate from the large basin, was the children's basin, with water up to the knees. Climbing a few stairs next to the children's basin, you reached a platform where you could sunbathe. Beyond it was another large basin, with water for heating, surrounded by a fence that prevented public access. The clean water with which this basin was supplied, heated by the sun, was used to refresh the water in the two basins. The water was changed, normally, at two days, maximum at three. The greatest joy for us was during the week, when it wasn't crowded, and when we caught the day with "new", clean water, to play tag under the clear water…

Also on the left, but lower compared to the general level of the ground, was located the pool's buffet. In the old days however, up on the hill that bordered the pool, a restaurant with a terrace functioned. I didn't catch it, anyway I wouldn't have frequented it.

But how did I reach Bragadiru Swimming Pool for the first time?

Meeting Dezideriu

Father, a great fan of swimming, had befriended Dezideriu, the reputed swimming teacher from Bragadiru Swimming Pool. When I met him, he was a man at about 55 years old, with skin burnt by the sun — black as pitch — from head to toe, at first sight ugly as a monkey, tough in relationship with children, but whom children loved to madness. Cohorts of children came daily to take swimming lessons from Dezideriu. They surrounded him constantly, especially the girls, to ask him who knows what, in fact to give themselves importance. With work in his cabin in front of the basin, he chased them jokingly, they returned after a few minutes, he chased them again, and so on all day. At the end of the day they left home enthusiastic about the progress made, because "so said the teacher".

Father presented me to Dezideriu and gave me into his hands, retreating, because the teacher forbade parents to assist at the "baptism" of children in the chlorinated water of the basin. Dezideriu's method was direct and merciless: he caught you by one hand and threw you into the corner of the large basin, where the depth was four meters. You had to manage. You struggled with hands and feet, swallowed a few gulps of water, until you reached the ladder or the edge of the basin, to hold onto the rope that surrounded the basin. There you received the teacher's short approval, which was worth gold. Those who did not succeed were pulled out by the teacher before they drowned and then followed a different course from that of the brave ones who managed from the first shot.

Passed the fear of deep water, began the lessons of breathing in apnea: you went down into the basin holding onto the ladder, and Dezideriu put a black foot of his, with a white sole, on your head, pushing you under water, where he held you as long as he thought you resisted. When he let you go, you darted from the water, with mouth and nostrils wide open, as if to swallow at once all the air in the world. Then he passed you to the children's basin for "float" lessons: floating on the belly, with alternating breathing on one side or the other, then floating on the back. That's how it arrived, finally, at learning swimming styles: first breaststroke, then crawl. Schooled by Dezideriu, after two weeks you could consider yourself a swimmer. But for father that was not enough. Dezideriu told him that I had talent, which gave him wings to fly with me towards an objective of his life that he had not reached: I had to become a swimming champion.

The swimming pool had become part of my secret map: from home I left for the pool directly in trunks, with sneakers on feet, using a shortcut through the wood depot across from us, crossing a railway and squeezing through holes in the fence made by other "offenders" bolder than me.

A few years later, when I returned to Bucharest, after the year spent at Steierdorf, father contacted Leo Ungur, former champion and an excellent swimming coach — he had made his wife a champion — and convinced him to take me in charge for improvement. It was a period in which I trained with Leo and his students at Bragadiru Swimming Pool, but also in winter at the covered pool in Floreasca. Leo liked how I swam, I liked swimming, but I didn't have the stuff of a champion. I lacked that "I don't know what" called will, perseverance or "gritting of teeth", necessary for a true champion. I abandoned the training as soon as school required my increased attention.

Bragadiru Swimming Pool was an island of my childhood, with the buzz of children, with the smell of chlorine mixed with Nivea cream and with strident voices that rolled like waves.

Only in high school did I return to swimming competitions: the physical education teacher, Bibanul, wanting the high school to be represented at the city swimming championships, asked me to participate, knowing about my antecedents with Leo. I participated without any kind of previous training; I didn't come out last, but neither first, and here ended my aquatic sporting activity.

Seaside Vacations

I must admit that the pleasure of swimming I owe to father and his example. He swam perfectly and had resistance for long distances. Even before going to school, in summer we went to the sea, always at Vasile Roaită, a resort at the Black Sea, named before the war Movilă, then Carmen Sylva, today Eforie Sud. Vasile Roaită was the name of a so-called illegalist, proven later a collaborator of the Siguranța, but we didn't know that until later. It was the popular resort, accessible to everyone either with union tickets, or as a guest at locals, or, whoever could, slept in two-star hotels. You could eat at the canteen, you did mud at the "ghiol" (lake) with relatively little money. We — that is father, mother, and I — when we didn't have union tickets, went on "own account", sleeping in locals' houses, as much as possible near the beaches or the lake. This distance was important, especially because of the return journey at lunchtime, when the heat was maximum and we were tired after a morning of beaches, frolicking in the water, and exposure to the sun at the lake. We barely dragged our feet waiting eagerly to get home, in the coolness of the peasant room, smelling of lime, to take a nap. The house was modest, had two-three rooms with rudimentary outbuildings. During the summer, the owner's family moved, with young and old, into some barracks erected in the yard. The general atmosphere was quite poor, vaguely unsanitary, but it was faced with good cheer.

In the morning we got up early, when it was still a bit cool. After we ate something at home, we headed for the beach — a wide beach and, of course, free for everyone. Reached on the cliff, descending through a system of successive terraces linked by steep slopes, you reached the beach, which at that hour was still empty. The beach was sparsely populated and quite wild. The music of megaphones hung from telegraph poles, when it was, rumbled hoarsely. With difficulty could you recognize what was being transmitted. Parents chose a place near the water and far from the megaphones where they spread the sheets, then we undressed into bathing suits and for half an hour we sunbathed. When the sun began to burn, we entered the water. Mother, who didn't know how to swim, stayed near the shore, at the shallow water, and watched us. I, with father, ventured towards the open sea, without exceeding the buoys. Reached there, we started to swim in parallel with the shore, without moving away too much, so mother wouldn't worry if she didn't see us anymore. Father followed me all the time, correcting my style.

At about 11 am we left the beach and headed for the lake (ghiol). To get there, we chose the shadier streets. At the lake everything was a ritual. The cold baths establishment was on the shore of Lake Techirghiol. It resembled a swimming pool, only the protagonists, of all ages, displayed themselves parading without complexes, in the suit of Adam or Eve. In the establishment, thousands of tourists anointed themselves with mud, dried in the sun, and then cleaned themselves with salt water. The most unpleasant part was the operation of anointing on the white or red skin, heated by the sun with the cold, black and heavy-smelling mud from the excess of hydrogen sulfide. Then, at the drying of the mud, the wrinkling of the skin like in African elephants was observed.

The lake was recognized for therapeutic mud since the beginning of the century. Cold baths were the only place on the coast where nudism was practiced in an organized way. There were separate beaches for men and women, separated by a fence of cracked palings that extended a few meters into the lake to prevent visits or crossed glances. In this way, mixed meetings were allowed only in the lake water, extremely salty, where exuberance was paid with drops of salty water in eyes. The entrepreneurs however widened the holes in the fence, through which especially men could delight with the view of the "exhibits" of the fair sex, smeared with mud from the beach next door, and family men could give rendezvous at the exit from the establishment, after the end of the procedure. Good mood was unanimous, and communication extended over the fence was relaxed.

I, together with father, frequented the sector for men — although father didn't like the place, he came there for me; mother's opinion was that the mud was doing me good, especially to the lymph nodes. Father took in palm the cold and stinking mud from a box, always filled with mud brought with boats from the lake, and anointed me with it on all body, including on face. Then he anointed himself too, after which we exposed to the sun — now on one side, now on the other — waiting for the mud to dry, changing its color from shiny black to gray.

Once dried, it had to be removed either at the showers on the beach, or directly in the lake water — solution to be preferred, due to the curative properties of the salty water of Lake Techirghiol. Again dried, but with the salt that tightened our skin, we dressed and went out to wait for mother. Then we set out for the canteen. At the canteen, with fans put in all corners of the hall, finally we managed to cool down. With full stomach and the heat outside, the way home was an ordeal. On the way, parents bought from the peasants come with carts the famous Cantaloupe melons with reticulated peel. Cooled in the fountain in the yard, I ate them with great appetite when I got up from the afternoon sleep. Because of them, all my seaside vacations were "constellated" by stomach upsets.

Later, when I began to understand sexuality, I realized that the seaside vacations from those years had a role in my formation. Without being an explicit lesson, they showed me that there are situations in which it is not shameful to expose your body.

Clarification. Since "göl" in Turkish means lake, Techirghiol would be Tekir's Lake. The legend of the lake's name would be the following: a lame and blind old man, named Tekir, reached by chance with his donkey on the shore of Lake Techirghiol where he sank in mud. He struggled to get out of the mud, but the donkey, "stubborn", did not move — as if a mysterious force held him there. To his surprise, when he managed to get out, the old man discovered that his eyes perceive light and his legs, once helpless, had regained their strength. Not even the donkey was bypassed by the miracle: the wounds on his back were healed, and the body seemed rejuvenated. The story spread, and people began to come to bathe and heal with the mud from the lake shore.

The evenings we "spent" on the cliff, in a boring back-and-forth. The most frequented tourist point in walks was the restaurant where Dorina Drăghici, a star of the moment, sang with success. Once, twice per stay father took us also inside the restaurant to eat a steak. It was a holiday day.

Reached home, I fell exhausted, without the power to undress.

Other Sporting Attempts

Father made other attempts to convince me to do sport. He tried also with football: at the beginning he took me to football matches on the ANEF stadium, near our house. Often Tibi, my uncle, good friend with father, came with us too. Seated in the bleachers, I was obviously bored, or at least that's how I let it be understood. When everyone around jumped to their feet yelling, passionate about one phase or another, I sat silent in my place, having fun seeing them how they fretted.

Neither with athletics in high school did it go better. I was good at high jump because I had long legs. I used the "scissors" style of Iolanda Balaș, which however was a limited style; it didn't allow you a rise of the bar higher than the physical limits of your body. I don't remember having passed over the bar raised at 1.40 meters.

Father bought me also skates, to go together to the skating rink, he skating quite well. I went with him, I fell a few times, I felt ridiculous and father had to cut from the list also skating.

After the failure with the piano, he had to give up making me an athlete. Fortunately, for me not to be just a catastrophe in his eyes, I studied well.

Years of Cultural Discoveries

Among the directions imposed by father to form me as a real man was also the opening of a cultural perspective through frequenting theater halls and cinemas. Near us had opened in 1947, transformed as a performance hall, the festivities hall of the "Mihai Viteazul" Regiment, across from the entrance in which the school I was to attend was located. The hall was at the beginning used also by the National Opera, left without a hall after the bombing of the Lyric Theater in Piața Walter Mărăcineanu during the war. There, near home, I saw for the first time an opera: "The Magic Flute". I think I wasn't even four years old yet, when parents took me to the opera to get me used to this type of show. Unfortunately, immediately after the war theaters had few resources for a credible scenography of this magical opera. We sat near the stage, in the first row, when on stage something happened that scared me: the Queen of the Night's servants wore gas masks and walked like that, masked, like crazy on stage, approaching the ramp. When I saw these apparitions a few steps from me, I got terrified and began to yell. Nothing could stop me and mine took me out of the hall. Fortunately, this episode did not affect my availability to accept opera shows. The next show, with Offenbach's "La Périchole", in Romanian, I bore much better; it even enthused me.

Little time after that, the Romanian Opera moved its activity in the hall of the former "Regina Maria" Theater, on the Dâmbovița quay, which it shared with the State Operetta Theater, founded in 1950. There I saw Soviet propagandistic ballets by Asafiev and Glière: "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai", "The Bronze Horseman" and "The Red Poppy", the latter marking the beginning of the dissension between USSR and Mao's China. Also there I went to a show with "Cio Cio San", the Romanian version of Puccini's opera, "Madama Butterfly".

The current seat of the Romanian Opera, from Piața Sf. Elefterie, was inaugurated in 1953 and hosted a glorious series of shows with great artists, which I followed with fidelity.

Primary School

I was sent to school early, at six years old, with a dispensation (approval) obtained from the Ministry of Public Education. It was the desire of my father, who claimed that six years was the perfect age for a child to enter the public education circuit. He himself was sent to school at six years old and, behold, everything went perfectly. No one, except grandmother and great-grandmother, put the problem if I was sufficiently mature for school; not even I myself, who followed father's desire without protests, despite the fact that it robbed me of a year of play.

At school I was every year a prize winner, so it could be believed that I was mature. In time, however, I realized that that year in minus made me feel many times inferior to my colleagues, especially to girls.

Primary School no. 128 was on Calea 13 Septembrie, two tram stations from my house, across from the garrison of the "Mihai Viteazul" regiment, at the end of an entrance, bordered in left and right by houses with small gardens and fruit trees, as were, in fact, so many in the whole neighborhood. The entrance was only for pedestrians: us, the students, and the inhabitants of the small street. If it wouldn't have been blocked by the wall of our school yard, the street would have continued and after a few meters one could have entered the yard of a school with number 129, general school for girls, on Ion Creangă Street, where mother and my aunts studied.

After I was taken by Ileana twice to school, I continued to go alone or in group, associating on way with other colleagues. My pleasure of going to school was due to the teacher Constanța Crăciun, a small, kind lady, who, although she had no children, knew how to bring us close. Leaving the school after the first grade was painful for me also because I wouldn't see Mrs. Crăciun anymore. I returned to School 128 in the fourth grade and met her again.

The Music School Episode

After the first grade I was forced to change school because my father was detached to a construction site at Steierdorf, in Banat – there I did the second grade (see the episode A Year in Steierdorf). Returned after a year with the family to Bucharest, my father enrolled me in the Music School, which accepted students starting fixed with the third grade. The school was found in the center of Bucharest, across from the Aro block, face to face with the Simu Museum — a building in the style of a Greek temple, demolished then to make room for some dull blocks. I followed the courses in piano, which I studied in private for five years with different teachers, without making great progress. I knew to play simple pieces, such as: Czerny's studies, "The Hunters' Chorus" from Freischütz, "The Triumphal March" from Aida, the toreador's aria from *Carmen* and so on.

The third grade at the Music School represented the signal of my father's failure to make me a pianist. My studies were evaluated by teachers as excellent in all subjects, less in the specialty subject, where I obtained the minimum possible grade to pass however in the next grade. I remember my colleague Vărzaru, a giant of a boy who studied the accordion and whose results were opposite to mine: maximum grade at specialty, passing grades in the other subjects. In the face of this failure, I took the initiative and decided not to continue the studies at the Music School and to return to school 128 near home. Father could only accept with resignation my decision. The piano lessons continued however another three years, until father declared himself defeated.

My Schoolmates

The return to School 128 meant finding again the colleagues whom I had left with regret two years ago. They were children of intellectual families who lived in the neighborhood, but also a few from Barbu Lăutaru Street, the "ghetto" of the gypsies in the neighborhood. Between them, we made no distinctions. In middle school (grades V–VII) we were joined also by a few girls whom we all courted eagerly, but without much success. They received at home a good education: foreign language lessons, ballet or singing, but, unfortunately, they were stuck-up, without being some beauties. Moreover, meeting them after a few years, I found that the siege of their fortresses was not worth the effort; but that only confirms the saying: "the one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind".

Our girls performed at the annual celebrations with everything they had learned at home: opera arias or light music, ballets or poetry recitations. Neither we boys were less. We had poked our noses out into the world and started to align ourselves with the fashion of the time: theater, either on stage or radio.

I had made two better friends in class: Liviu, prize winner every year together with me, lived right on the school alley, and Mihai (Michi) who lived near the school, next to the dispensary. With them I discussed all the novelties and we adapted to passing fashions.

The Musketeers' Fashion

I was in the fifth grade when, in Bucharest, exploded on all screens Les Trois Mousquetaires, a French cape and sword film with Georges Marchal in the role of D'Artagnan and Bourvil in the role of Planchet. A deserved success, for the humor both the coarse and the subtle, characteristic of French films. Whoever had not read Dumas's novel, the time had come to read it. In our class, the film had as repercussion the organization of groups of swordsmen who dueled in all breaks, to the despair of teachers. For fear of accidents, duels in school were forbidden, in pure Richelieu style. The musketeers Aramis - Liviu G., D’Artagnan - Michi G. and Athos - I, moved to the vacant land near my house to train for future confrontations with the cardinal's guards. We had swords made of polished wood and belts in which to stick them when we weren't dueling.

Sometimes, the swords were carved by us, other times they were made by parents. We put on ribbons, we made improvised hats. We dueled. We shouted "En garde!". We were ridiculous, but we were happy.

The musketeers, for us, were an ideal of manhood: brave, loyal, elegant. In a way, it was also a form of taking over a masculine model that was not that of my severe father, but a romantic one. In those games, I felt more comfortable than in football or in fights. The duels with wooden swords were a type of "civilized", theatrical aggressiveness. It was exactly to my taste.

The fashion lasted a few weeks, maybe months. Then it passed. But the memory remained. The musketeers' fashion tells us something about the way in which, even in play, we, the teenagers, sought models to identify with.

As all fashions, the musketeers' fashion lasted as long as it lasted, a few weeks or months, and other fashions followed each other in our school in the middle school years. For example, the theater.

The Magic of Theater

The Army Theater was founded in 1947. It took its name from the seat that hosted it: the festivities hall of the "Mihai Viteazul" Regiment on Calea 13 Septembrie, across from our school. After a time, the Army Theater moved into a building, also belonging to the army, on Uranus Street, across the street from the Arsenal premises. The theater was for a time led by the great George Vraca, "a golden voice", one of my favorite actors.

During middle school, at the Army Theater I saw memorable shows with great artists of the time: Storin, Manolescu, Vraca, Calboreanu. Fântâna Blanduziei, Fântâna turmelor, Vlaicu Vodă and Ion Vodă cel Cumplit are unique shows, which remained in my memory. Such plays inspired us, the 10–12 year old students, to organize shows at school. I remember that after I saw The Robbers by Schiller (with Ion Manolescu, Septimiu Sever and Fory Etterle), I started writing a play that transposed the subject of Schiller's play onto Romanian soil — the protagonists were a family of Phanariote boyars, I think I named them Mavrogheni, father with two sons. I wrote the scenes of my play in a dictation notebook with shiny green covers. For many years I kept it in the library, but in the end it did not withstand the numerous moves I lived through and got lost. At some point, we started to rehearse scenes from my play to be mounted at the annual celebration. Of course, nothing was realized, but such initiatives showed the interest that part of us had for theater — and, in general, for culture. I say culture because some of us, including me, wrote poems and were up to date with the poets of the day, be they proletcultists like Veronica Porumbacu or Dan Deșliu, or anti-conformists like Geo Dumitrescu, Nicolae Labiș or the older Tudor Arghezi and Ion Barbu.

It was an unrepeatable period in my life, a period in which I read many books of all genres, saw theater and cinema, read newspapers, was up to date with cultural life and already thought about what I would do when I grew up. The first desire was, naturally, that of becoming a director. I had realized that I didn't know to recite, so I preferred the director's work. Towards the end of school, already I had changed the desired profession: archeologist — after I discovered the beauty of history. Of course, everything gravitated around the humanist professions — no thought of longing after engineering or mathematics.

Foreign Language Lessons

In our house, foreign languages had a special status. My mother, Zizi, had a good education. In the interwar period, foreign languages were a sign of culture. She knew pretty well from high school Italian, German, and French, but she was an expert in Latin. Father knew perfectly, from his childhood in Budapest, Hungarian. In this context, it was natural to learn foreign languages too.

To compensate the failure with the piano, father decided that I must know a "useful" foreign language. It is true that, from the fourth grade of primary school, I had started Russian language classes, but Russian was not to be taken into consideration: all children did it, and then it didn't serve to manage with it in the West, where father wanted to see me established.

But to me Russian, paradoxically, I liked. Maybe because it was a challenge. Maybe because it had a special sonority. Maybe because, in the subconscious, I associated it with Ileana, the Russian woman, who had been part of my childhood.

Mother and father decided that I must learn to speak French. It was the language traditionally learned by Romanians for more than a century now. Inquiring for a teacher, they found Mrs. Musceleanu, the wife of Professor Christian Musceleanu of physics-chemistry, who had been the teacher of King Mihai at the Palatine School and member in the Commission for organizing the Domnița Ileana high school. The professor committed suicide after the coming of the communists, and his wife, in lack of pension, ended up living from piano, French and English lessons, without being a great expert in any of these subjects.

She was a lady of about 70 years old, with white hair, distinguished, with an aquiline nose over which reigned heavy glasses. She had difficulties walking due to swollen feet. My grandmother had an evident sympathy for her, being about the same age. Therefore, whenever she came to us, she offered her jam on a small plate, a croissant and a cup of warm tea, with which Mrs. Musceleanu to delight during the hour. I learned words, phrases, conjugations. It wasn't something that to passion me, but I was diligent. I got along well with her because she was very permissive. If I didn't do my lessons, she didn't scold me, she didn't insist "to the end" to pronounce correctly and accepted any manual I proposed, found through the home library. I liked French and had ended up speaking it pretty well, when father came with the idea that English had become, after the war, an important language. I should have learned it too.

How to interrupt French, where things went so well? Father's solution: the foreign language hour to be divided in two — first a half hour French and in the second half Mrs. Musceleanu to teach me English. Whether she preferred French to English, or that I felt an antipathy towards this intruder, by tacit agreement, to English we dedicated only a quarter of an hour. That's why, when the lessons were interrupted on the eve of high school admission, I didn't know much from English.

This "indifference" towards English took revenge later. I remained with a kind of antipathetic towards the language, although in time it became essential for my career. No matter how many later attempts I made to master it, I only managed to improve reading and writing; speaking and understanding on the spot remained modest. Was it, perhaps, Mrs. Musceleanu's fault?

In any case, the foreign language lessons contributed to my formation. They opened to me, even if symbolically, the idea that there is a world beyond Romania. For a child raised in a communist regime, this idea was important. It was a window.

High School Admission

High school admission was my first serious exam. It was a threshold. In those years, high school admission was an important event. You didn't enter automatically. You had to take an exam. It was a selection.

Father had a clear idea: I had to enter a good high school. Nicolae Bălcescu High School, the former Saint Sava College, was one in his opinion the best. The good results obtained by me at middle school encouraged father to enroll me. The variant would have been Lazăr High School, closer to home — tram 3 left me in front of the high school, but it wasn't to father's liking: too many girls and teachers considered weak.

The road towards Bălcescu was long: I had to pass by Lazăr high school, cross Cișmigiu park and walk another fairly long street until near the St. Joseph Cathedral, where the high school was — a majestic building, with many halls, a generous yard and a performance hall in which, in those years, the Youth Theater functioned. Three quarters of an hour of road... if everything went well.

I accepted; I had no choice, but I put a condition. In view of admission, I wanted to be tutored in Romanian language — one of the exam trials consisting, in fact, of two exams: Romanian literature and Romanian language grammar — by no one else than Mrs. Maria Ionescu Baldovin, my Romanian teacher from primary school. Father was not surprised: he knew and admired this distinguished lady, with her white silk blouses, lace collars, tact and presence which, unfortunately, had moved from our school in the last year (7th grade) and we, the students, suffered very much. Latin had just been introduced in high schools and Mrs. Ionescu, who in fact was a Latin teacher, but could not practice, preferred the Latin chair at Lazăr High School.

Not only I wanted tutoring with Mrs. Ionescu, but also Liviu G., my colleague with whom, year after year, I shared the prizes at School 128. Mrs. Ionescu had warned our parents that we didn't need tutoring, that we were well prepared, but the teacher's charm and the confidence she instilled in us were worth all the tutoring money. For two weeks we went with the lessons done, to Mrs. Ionescu's house, who lived in the Aro block, every two days. During the lesson we received exam-type subjects which she corrected for us, giving us grades like at the exam.

Reached the moment of enrollment at the high school admission, father enrolled me to take the admission exam at Nicolae Bălcescu high school and, of course, I entered among the first.

Back to "Childhood" · Memoirs