The train slowly pulled out of Gliwice station. Leaning at the window of the empty compartment where I was, I waved to Elsa, who had remained on the platform, with her delicate silhouette and a smile on her face. She waved back, as if wanting to promise me that we would see each other again. I watched her until her figure disappeared in the distance, along with the train.

In the empty compartment, I sat down and tried to relax: I took off my shoes and stretched out comfortably. Although my breathing had calmed, my thoughts continued to flutter restlessly, like birds unable to find a place to settle. The events of the last few days returned to my mind as blurred and disorderly memories.

Visiting Elsa

I had been working for only a few months, at the factory, and this was my first leave. It had been shortened to only one working week, because I did not yet have the seniority required for the standard two weeks. I decided to take a trip to one of the socialist countries, the only ones I was allowed to visit if I had an invitation. I chose to go to Poland, to see Kraków and Warsaw, but the unspoken purpose was to see Elsa again, of course only if she agreed. I wrote to her, and her reply, full of enthusiasm and accompanied by the official invitation, convinced me that it would be a memorable journey.

In order not to miss the opportunity of crossing Hungary by train, I decided to stop for two days in Budapest and then cross the border into Poland. And here I was now, at the end of the 1967 holiday, on my way to Warsaw, my last stop, after three full days spent in Gliwice in the company of Elsa and her family.

The city of Gliwice itself did not impress me very much, but its surroundings concealed places full of charm.

Kraków, on the other hand, won me over. A lover of history as I was, I set out determined to visit the cathedral, the royal castle on Wawel Hill, Rynek Główny — the city’s central square — full of tourists and medieval shadows, all tourist destinations I had dreamed of reaching. I rushed through all these places, because I had only a few hours before returning by commuter train to Gliwice. I was left with the image of a city breathing history, with its paved streets and noble air, an open-air museum with echoes of carriages and the scent of past centuries.

On another day, Elsa and her friend, Vlad, took me to Chorzów, a large city near Katowice. We spent a few hours at Spodek — a complex of multi-purpose arenas — and in the Silesian Park, an immense area with a planetarium and a cable car from which the city could be seen as if in the palm of one’s hand. I think they had chosen that place precisely to cheer me up and to show me the “places of the heart” of Silesia.

Everything seemed fine and pleasant, except that this friend — or fiancé — of Elsa’s, otherwise a civilized man with whom one could discuss intelligently on various topics, could not become sympathetic to me; deep down I did not like him. It was not my business, of course: he had to please Elsa, not me. But in my thoughts, where Elsa had a special place, I replaced him with a man better suited to her, with traits somewhat... closer to mine.

Vlad was a sound engineer at the local radio station in Opole, a city not far from Gliwice. He smoked a lot, knew modern music, could tell jokes, but his declared antisemitism unsettled me. He believed that all Poland’s problems, poverty first of all, came from the Jews who had remained in the country after the war. During my later visits to Poland — in 1968, 1969 and 1973 — I would come to understand that antisemitism was not only Vlad’s opinion, but a real state of mind in the country, maintained by propaganda and by political pressure on the population. This atmosphere, especially in urban and intellectual milieus, sowed fear and suspicion in society and led to the stigmatization of Jews. Antisemitism had almost become a state policy, an excuse for collective frustrations. Vlad, like many others, had fallen into this trap. Moreover, only a few months before I arrived there, Poland had broken diplomatic relations with Israel after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The Jews who remained in public positions were then marginalized or forced to emigrate.

I knew that the Jewish question in Poland dated back centuries and was extremely complex. Since the Middle Ages, when Poland’s rulers had opened the country’s gates to all Jews persecuted elsewhere in Europe, the share of Jews in the population of permissive Poland had reached almost 10% before the Second World War, then falling dramatically after the war. Of course, I did not know many aspects of the coexistence of Poles and Jews over the centuries, which the Poles themselves did know, but I found it difficult to understand how, in 1967, a minority population of under 0.1% could cause problems for an entire country.

In the silence of the empty compartment, I let these dark thoughts fade and returned one year back, to the memory of my first meeting with Elsa, when, for one evening, I felt that the world was mine. What a magical evening that was...

“Nostalgia Canaglia”

In the summer of 1966, after defending my diploma thesis at the Polytechnic and before the military service that was to begin in September, I decided to go to the seaside by myself. As in the last years of university, I had no romantic arrangement that might have sweetened my holiday through someone’s presence. I rented a room in Soveja and, every morning, took the trolleybus to the beach at Mamaia. I spent the day on the beach, had lunch at the beach canteen, dined in the evening at a restaurant on the promenade and then returned to Soveja on the last trolleybuses. The next day I repeated the same routine: beach, canteen, beach, restaurant, sleep.

One evening, in the garden restaurant where I usually had dinner, a noisy group of Poles appeared, mostly girls. The waiters hurried to prepare a long table for the group. As usual on such occasions, curiosity was strong and everyone’s eyes turned toward the staff’s preparations, but also toward the Poles. I too watched the group attentively, focusing without much enthusiasm on the girls. Young, pretty, but somewhat too plump for my taste — short, heavy thighs, tomato-like noses, with features that did not seem refined to me at all. I have always been overly fastidious about women, looking for that feminine ideal which existed only in my mind.

And then I saw her: a blond silhouette in a two-piece outfit embroidered with pink lace flowers. When she turned her face toward me, I felt time stop: large blue eyes, a slightly upturned nose and red, full lips. An almost perfect body: long, beautifully shaped legs with slender ankles, round and generous breasts, perhaps only a faint hint of a small belly — but the fault-finder in me fell silent. “Now that is a Polish woman!” I told myself. “She could easily pass for Swedish!”

I could no longer take my eyes off her. I think that, at some point, she noticed me too: a solitary man at a table, watching her insistently. She smiled slightly and continued her conversation in a loud voice, in Polish, with the others in the group.

When the orchestra began to play, I went straight to her table and invited her to dance. With a quick gesture, I asked the group’s permission to “abduct” her for a few minutes. Then I addressed her directly. She smiled and accepted without hesitation, probably eager to dance, no matter with whom. On the dance floor, I discovered that we synchronized well, although neither of us was an expert dancer.

— “Luca,” I introduced myself.

— “Elsa,” she replied.

We tried to find a common language, and she, on her own initiative, spoke to me in Russian, with a naturalness that surprised me. “Good,” I thought, “Russian is the universal language of the East,” so I answered in Russian, reproaching myself inwardly for not having made a greater effort to learn Russian better in high school. After the first dance, I asked her for the second as well, and she accepted, then another, until the orchestra took its usual break.

At the thought that she would return among her friends and that someone else might steal her away at the next round of dancing, I invited her to walk along the promenade, just at the edge of the garden restaurant. She accepted, and we set off slowly along the asphalt promenade, among groups of tourists. I disliked the crowd, so I suggested we go down to the beach. We took off our shoes and, holding our sandals in our hands, walked barefoot through the fine sand, crossing the beach toward the sea.

When we reached the shore, the warm water and the full moon lent the moment a special charm: we splashed our feet under a full moon perched like an enormous silver medal in the starry sky, reflected in streaks on the surface of the sea. The small waves, rolling gently, climbed toward our knees, wetting my rolled-up trousers and coming dangerously close to Elsa’s skirt. When a higher wave rose from the open sea, I lifted her in my arms, pretending to “save” her from an involuntary bath — in reality, only to feel her breasts pressed against my chest. She did not resist, and that gave me courage. I took her by the hand, helping her out of the water and onto the wet sand. Time had passed unnoticed and we decided to return to the restaurant garden for another round of dancing.

On the way, she told me she was a Russian language teacher in Gliwice, that she lived with her parents and that she had several times been to Moscow for further training. She spoke impeccable Russian and knew all the Russian classics. Embarrassed, I apologized for my clumsiness in speaking Russian.

— “You speak well enough, don’t worry,” she told me, “the important thing is that we understand each other.”

Hearing this, I gently drew her toward me, intending to kiss her as a sign of thanks. She suddenly turned, and my lips touched only her hair. Then I took her face between my palms and managed to kiss her. She did not resist, but her reproachful look told me that I had crossed a boundary.

When we returned to the restaurant, Elsa’s companions were standing, ready to leave. I learned that the next day they were to fly from Mihail Kogălniceanu airport to Warsaw. I looked at Elsa in despair:

— “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving tomorrow?” I whispered.

— “Would it have changed anything if I had told you? It was beautiful like this,” she replied with a sweetness that disarmed me.

She asked for a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote down her address and said:

— “Write to me. That way I will find out your address too,” she said, giving me her hand in farewell.

In front of her companions I could not kiss her, so I held her hand between mine longer than the rules of politeness would have allowed.

What remained from this meeting was a discreet regret — not so much for anything wrongly done, but for the ephemeral character of the encounter. Yet precisely this ephemerality gave it its unrepeatable charm.

After one year

Once back home in Bucharest, I felt the need not to let the thread of this meeting be lost. It gave me a sense of autonomy and maturity. I took the Romanian-Russian dictionary from the bookcase and, with it in front of me, wrote to Elsa. She replied promptly, with a warmth that made me believe something had remained between us. Then I sent her another letter and she replied again. We began to correspond regularly, short and direct letters from me, longer and more detailed ones from her. She invited me to visit her and I accepted. In time, between the lines of the letters, a new character appeared: Vlad. I accepted him painfully, but I could not be absurd and imagine that Elsa, after one evening spent together, had fallen passionately in love with me or that she could not be courted in her own country.

And so the year passed. A difficult year for me. After three months of military service, I had to undergo surgery for a stubborn little kidney stone, was declared unfit for the army and began work at the factory with no enthusiasm at all. A trip abroad came to me like a balm for the wounds left by that year. And there it was, everything seemed to be going well. It was my first trip outside the country and I was managing acceptably. I was already planning to repeat the experience in the following years.

Andrzej

We had already passed Częstochowa, and the train was advancing imperturbably along the Vistula toward Warsaw. I was alone in the compartment and had almost dozed off when the door opened and a young man in uniform entered.

— “May I sit down?” he asked me in Polish, with a respectful smile.

I gestured that he could and pulled my legs off the bench to make room for him. We remained silent for a few minutes, each lost in his own thoughts, watching the Mazovian plain unfold monotonously beyond the window.

Out of the corner of my eye I observed him: slim, not very tall, with an open, cheerful, almost childlike face. Dressed impeccably in a neat grey uniform, he seemed to be a cadet at an officers’ school. I think he too was watching me, and I sensed that he very much wanted us to start talking.

He broke the silence by asking me something in Polish. From my reply he immediately realized I was a foreigner and switched to a common language. He asked whether it was my first time in Warsaw, what I would like to visit, whether I had a hotel reservation and how long I intended to stay.

His questions were natural, but there was also an unexpected personal warmth in them. He wanted to know what country I came from, what my profession was, whether I was married. Surprised that I had no accommodation plan, he offered to help me. He was open, helpful, and his curiosity was gradually turning into a form of attention that intrigued me.

I learned that he was from Gdynia, that he was attending officers’ school in Warsaw and that he knew the city well. Arriving around noon at the Central Station, he took my suitcase and, with the confidence of a local who knew his way around, led me to a hotel.

After the fatigue of the journey, he suggested that I rest and take a shower before going out into the city. His tone had something imperative about it, but also something awkward, as if he did not know exactly how far he could go in such a recent acquaintance.

In the hotel room, the atmosphere quickly became ambiguous. What I had initially interpreted as hospitality and a wish to help turned out to be something else as well: a personal closeness, expressed without much caution. I was not prepared for such a situation and understood that I had to establish clear limits.

I told him, as calmly as I could, that I did not share that orientation and did not want the moment to go any further. He was surprised. He had probably believed that my acceptance of his help and my polite curiosity meant a willingness I did not have.

To break the tension, I took from my suitcase a small bottle of Murfatlar cognac, which I had brought as a possible gift for a host, and we began to talk. The conversation, awkward at first, gradually turned into a confession. Andrzej spoke to me about loneliness, about his insecurities, about the feeling of living an important part of his own identity under the sign of caution and concealment.

I listened to him with an embarrassment I did not then know how to hide, but also with real compassion. I came from a world in which such subjects were treated with fear, prejudice or irony. The encounter with him forced me to see not an abstract category, but a concrete, vulnerable person, caught between the desire to be accepted and the fear of rejection.

The conversation relaxed. Andrzej seemed relieved that he had been able to say at least part of what he carried within him, and I, although still confused, felt that the episode should not be judged simplistically. Toward evening, he got up to leave. He explained what I had to do about the hotel if I wanted to stay longer and promised that the next day he would take me around the city.

A walk through Warsaw with Andrzej and Marek

The next morning, Andrzej was waiting for me downstairs at reception, together with a friend, Marek, a blond man with blue eyes and an unmistakably northern beauty. The two seemed very close, and there was an easily perceptible complicity between them.

In the Royal Łazienki Park, an enormous estate of almost 80 hectares, we walked among gardens, palaces and statues and admired the statue of Jan III Sobieski. Everything breathed an aristocratic calm and a vegetal order that pleased me.

In Wilanów Park, south of the city, we found another baroque jewel: the summer palace of King Jan Sobieski. I could not see it at length, but it remained in my mind as one of the luminous images of Warsaw.

The day ended in a modest café on Miodowa Street, near the Royal Route. There we listened to smuggled Western music and talked about Poland, Romania, the army, women and, indirectly, about things none of us named directly. I looked at Andrzej and Marek and thought how complicated it must be to live in hiding what, for you, is natural.

After another year

After returning to Bucharest, I kept up correspondence with both Elsa and Andrzej, exchanging letters at Christmas or Easter. Telling my mother about what I had seen in Poland during those few days and showing her the photographs I had taken, I felt that she might be interested in making a trip with me the following summer.

After the void left by my father, who had passed away five years earlier, my mother had remained alone and, from her salary, had supported me through the completion of my studies. Perhaps for that reason, too, I always felt the need to offer her something unusual: our trip together to Poland. But her decision was truly influenced by... a fox.

In those years, more and more Poles supplemented their income by raising animals for fur, especially white and silver foxes, but also minks, which they then sold. Romanians travelling to Poland often returned with such furs; some even resold them on the Romanian market. It must be said that the standard of living in Romania was much better than in Poland or even Hungary, and the Romanian market was extremely coveted by Polish producers.

The idea of buying a white fox fur in Poland convinced my mother to accompany me on my second trip to Poland. Since we had two weeks of leave available, we decided to stop in Prague before continuing our journey to Poland. I wrote to Elsa about our plan and about my mother’s wish, and she sent us the address of an animal breeder in the surroundings of Gdańsk, so that city became an obligatory stop on our itinerary. And, if we were going to Gdańsk, we could not fail to see Malbork, with the remains of the Teutonic Knights. On the way to Gdańsk we were to stop in Gliwice to collect money from Elsa, with which my mother would buy her furs.

You might ask: “Money from Elsa? How so?” Well, Elsa had told me already during the winter that she would come to Romania in June together with Vlad, by car, to show him Mamaia, the place she had liked so much the year before. She asked whether I could obtain for them two sheepskin coats, Alain Delon style, made in good quality in Orăștie and much sought after by many Romanians after the film Once a Thief. She sent me the measurements as well. I used all my connections in Sibiu and, with a little luck, managed to buy the two coats, although their season had already ended.

When Elsa and Vlad passed through Bucharest, they came to our home to try on the coats — they fit perfectly. We spent two days together, showing them the city, after which they left for the seaside. At parting, they invited me to come to Poland together with my mother, and the agreement was that they would reimburse me for the cost of the coats in złoty when we met in Gliwice.

After we had fixed the itinerary and the dates of the stops, I informed my Polish friends about our plans. Elsa promised us lodging in Gliwice, and Andrzej told us when we could meet him and Marek in Gdańsk, as they were on holiday then.

My mother and I set off at the beginning of August 1968, the first stop being Prague. We visited the Royal Palace, the cathedral and the square with the clock, walking along the medieval streets. The atmosphere was calm, and locals and tourists went about their business. Nothing foreshadowed the invasion by the Warsaw Pact troops, which would come two weeks later. No one imagined what was to follow, especially after the high-level agreement signed by the Pact countries. It seemed that the danger had passed. It was not the Soviets, but rather the Poles, the Germans and the Hungarians who pushed toward the invasion. I was looking, without knowing it, at a city before the storm.

In Gliwice we stayed only one day, long enough to meet Elsa’s family, who invited us to a meal. There I tasted for the first time warm beer with honey and cucumber salad with sour cream. Also there, following my mother’s instructions, I bought a set of 35 Czechoslovak crystal glasses: five different types, seven glasses of each size, from liqueur glasses to whisky glasses. The seventh glass was meant to be broken during transport or to have some defect, but not a single one broke during the whole trip.

Gdańsk

By a night stopping train, we crossed Poland from south to north, arriving at dawn in Gdańsk. We had an appointment at the hotel with the fur producer, who came with a sack full of various items, from which my mother chose a cap and a collar of snow-white fox fur and four brown minks for a rich scarf.

The next day we were to meet Andrzej and Marek. I was looking forward to my mother meeting them, and I am glad to say that she liked them immediately: they were cheerful, open and helpful. Our meetings with my Polish friends, their laughter, their slight awkwardness at first and their genuine openness afterward made us feel well received, not like strangers. We wandered through the city together, admiring the walls and buildings heavy with history. Gdańsk seemed to me, at that first sight, a city with a Germanic soul and Baltic memories, a place where history breathed from every red-brick wall and where time seemed to have left still visible traces on the façades of massive buildings. Walking along the cobbled streets, among buildings with high gables, I felt a cold light and a wind carried from the sea, bringing to mind stories of ships and Hanseatic merchants.

The afternoon all four of us spent on the Baltic shore has remained vivid in my memory: an impeccably organized beach, with deckchairs and umbrellas, a Western atmosphere that contrasted strikingly with what I knew in Romania in those years.

What remained imprinted in my mind was a game on the sand between Andrzej and Marek, an apparently ordinary tussle, but one in which there was a complicity that I perceived more clearly than my mother. For her it was only a holiday scene, two young men behaving childishly on the beach. For me, after the episode in Warsaw, their gestures had another meaning: they said, without words, something about a closeness that the society of the time forced them to keep under a veil of caution.

Malbork

After parting from the boys, with the promise that we would see each other again someday, the next day we visited Malbork. Leaving the imposing station, built of red brick — like everything with historical roots in that part of Poland — the Malbork fortress appeared before us after a few minutes’ walk, a proud, red and enigmatic stronghold: a stone book about the medieval Teutonic Knights and battles for power on the shores of Prussia. Its thick walls seemed to conceal echoes of a past that had always fascinated me.

My first memory of the Teutonic Order comes from Eisenstein’s Stalinist propaganda film Alexander Nevsky, where the order was presented in broad, caricatural and contemptuous lines. Later, when my historical knowledge expanded, I understood the impressive expansion of the Order northward, along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, as a genuine crusade against the pagan Prussians and the Orthodox Russians. One result of this Teutonic “civilizing” can be seen in the emergence of the modern Baltic countries — civilizations with strong Teutonic influences, different from the states that developed in the Slavic space.

The Battle of Grunwald put an end to the expansion of the order, and a century after the Templars, the Teutonic Knights too had to accept their decline. I walked among the shadows of the Teutonic galleries with the respect due to a forgotten greatness and let myself be overwhelmed by the dimensions of this stone symbol of medieval will, discipline and cruelty.

How many of these roots pumped sap into the unnatural trunk of Nazism? How many of these symbolic roots nourished the myth of harsh order, supremacy and historical mission? I do not know. But at Malbork, such questions almost arise by themselves.

Apropos, I abruptly move from serious matters to a frivolous one. During these two trips to Poland I also discovered the roots of some personal preferences.

I formed aesthetic models related to the way girls from northern and southern Poland looked. In the north, especially near Gdańsk, I saw girls with more “Germanic” features: muscular, with strong legs and somewhat squarer, fuller faces, as if the long winter and hard work of those regions had shaped them in a particular way. By contrast, women in the south seemed to me much more “Slavic” in appearance — long-limbed, with slender legs and more elongated faces, some even truly blond, as female faces from those lands are imagined in common imagery. It is a difference that speaks to me about the mixture of cultures and the troubled history of the country, where borders swung from north to south and from west to east, ethnic influences overlapped and left traces not only in stone and literature, but even in people’s features. Of course, this was only a personal impression, a kind of sediment after the visual harassment of memory, and it may not be universally valid, but for me it shaped a vivid image of the diversity Poland had at the time.

Wandering relationships

I never forgot the care Andrzej showed me during my stay in Warsaw: his presence, discreet help, simple gestures. After the ambiguous moment in the hotel, I nevertheless retained a feeling of friendship toward him, precisely because I understood that beyond the awkwardness of the situation there was a vulnerable man, not an aggressive intention.

His disappointment was real, but I did not feel the need to turn it into a judgment. The encounter with Andrzej forced me to look more carefully at the wall we raise almost mechanically between “us” and “them.” I came from an education in which homosexuality was surrounded by fear, irony and silence. Without perhaps intending it, he confronted me with my own limits and prejudices.

Looking back, the episode became for me a lesson in maturity. I understood that personal freedom also means the right to say a clear “no,” without contempt and without humiliating the other person. I also understood that a refused relationship can nevertheless leave an important human trace, if there was sincerity, vulnerability and a minimum willingness to listen.

After the time spent in Gdańsk, the connection with Andrzej was lost — not through our fault, but because of the changes life brought us. I am sorry I did not keep in touch. I do not know whether he is still alive, because the addresses and telephone numbers once in my possession are no longer valid. If I were to meet him now, my first question would be about his life in a conservative Poland, where the police organized raids in places frequented by homosexuals. Was he forced to restrict himself to discreet gestures, caution and silence, or did he openly confront the prejudices of a society that considered love between men a sin?

My correspondence with Elsa continued sporadically for several years, until I moved to Italy. After that, we knew nothing more about each other. She lost track of me, and I... forgot her. In reality, I could forget nothing of what had been. But my life changed radically after I left: other priorities, other correspondences, other languages in place of Russian, other, always different infatuations. When the Polish memories passed rapidly through my mind, I realized how much I had evolved — not only for the better — and how many things had changed in my life in the meantime.

Elsa found me again at one point and we exchanged a few messages, but after that silence returned. My Russian had meanwhile run dry, and available time had shortened. I think I should reflect more deeply on this process that happened with almost all my former friends and acquaintances. Separations always evoke in us a bittersweet nostalgia for ephemeral moments, often “magical,” that mark key instants of our past life, golden pages in the book of our youth, to which we return again and again with affection, a tight heart and a probing mind, but also with a smile, even if we feel a small sting of regret.

In any case, separations or not, memories remain a measure of past possibilities and failures, of loves and friendships lost or impossible. They evoke a time when the world seemed full of promises, even if in reality it was not so. Time dims the dark colors and makes only the vivid ones vibrate, interwoven with longing, gratitude and bittersweet melancholy.