IN TRANSYLVANIA, IN AN ERA PRIOR TO CORONAVIRUS

Article by Laurenţiu Sfinteş - https://adevarul.ro/life-style/travel/In-transilvania-era-coronavirusului-1_5e6f6ff65163ec4271f8a520/index.html

I know that something seemed strange to me from the very beginning. Because the guest house was booked by a group of people, we were given a room in a side wing, a scarecrow in the night behind which a dog was insistently barking. All the rooms were lined up on a porch onto which the black branches of some trees prepared for cutting were falling. Nothing promising. But when I turned on the light, something happened. It wasn't the room we were expecting it to be. Someone had painted the headboard. And the table. And the chairs. Even the wardrobe. The walls were white, lacking any decorations. Simple. And on the floor, those peasant rugs.

In the morning we went outside to see the dawn. Too late. The mountain was already cut by an orange horizontal line casting light upon its hump risen above the fields and unveiling more and more of the round rocks above which, from spring until autumn, paragliders from all countries unite to glide above the depression. White steam was rising around the haystacks, it was cold and the day was hostilely biting from the skin of the cheeks. We left to visit the first town. The one with the white walls, in Alba Carolina. There were more statues than people on the paved alleys from the old citadel. And a cold wind was blowing, one which was keeping spring away. For lunch, we ate at the knights' winery. On our way back, we passed by the sapling bundles offered for sale on the side of the road. Because it was still early, we walked up the hill towards the fortress which has been sitting above the village for five hundred years. We even took a few pictures. Of the mountains, of the mists which were slowly descending, of the dark road ravaged by off-road cars.

We went to see the second town. Because the sun had come up and we had a beautiful day ahead, after a nocturnal rain, on our way through the mountains a deer jumped in front of our car, and we almost... But the rain caught up with us again. Just as we had climbed up a promontory named Cetățuia. From where the town could be seen lying at our feet, rectangular, aligned with the course of Someșul Mic, of mixed colours, clean, very clean. And that was about it. After that we descended to the Square where Matiaș receives the "Onorul Mustăcioșilor lui Secui." Or Hungarians. As one of my colleagues says, it is no longer known who is who. Then we walked into an antique shop at the end of a street crammed between walls and a sewage in the works. And some spiralling stairs. Nothing special, old book, old things, old stories, o sounding board, somewhere, isolated from the monotonous pulse of the town. And then we went to see the third town. Farther away, so far away that we drove on two motorways. One fifteen kilometres long, the other ten. Up until we arrived in a Square of the future Roses. We nervously stepped on the rugs in the Great Cathedral built on the upper side of the park. We blinked slightly as the ceramic tiles of the Palace of Culture, on the lower side, shone. And we walked around the interior of the Medieval Citadel, guarded by the solar spears of a warm March afternoon. We returned to the room with painted furniture in broad daylight. After that we went outside to see the mountain being covered by a heavy touch of darkness, which would leave on the retina only the thin silhouettes of some budding birches.

In the morning, we discovered that we had been left alone in the big house with the painted furniture, after having been alone in the house with the porch, in the garden. People had left, no one else had come. The hosts of the manor, dressed in folk costumes of the same colours as the furnished interiors, were still there, just as they were on the first evening, as though the yard was full of cars and all the room were booked. And on the way back to Bucharest, someone, on a radio station, started counting, leaving long intervals between the interventions: "Sibiu, 37, Târgu Roşu, 39, Râmnicu Vâlcea, 40, Piteşti, 43, Bucureşti, 45." Yes, there was something strange about this spring. Something intriguing, something that wanted to upend the beauty of the cold or warm or rainy days that we spent in the three cities. Will it succeed?

Vocabulary

• cramă = winery
• promontoriu = promontory 
• cutie de rezonanță = sounding board
• puiet = sapling
• mesteacăn = birch
• conac = manor