That June morning, I was sitting on the steps of the house, rejoicing in the still gentle sun, raw green forest and silence, in which only the soft buzzing of my mother’s embroidery machine could be heard from the house. I must have had an exam of some sort as I was at home and not at nursing or other jobs that were endless in the summer. I was enjoying that late morning, aware of its rarity, when a shrill voice called at the gate:

– Well, wife, are you at home?

It was Badei Giorgiy, the Old Man “from the mountain”, dressed in “men’s” clothes to go down to the village. I could tell he had already been to a pub of some sort by the redness on his cheeks, which protruded from his bushy beard, a sign that he was in the mood to tell a story. My first impulse was to run back up the stairs, but, unable to explain why, I stayed to meet him. Maybe because I knew mom had work to do and I didn’t want to expose her. He approached me with a smile, happy to have found a companion, looked at me tenderly, then pounced on me:

– How did you sleep, miss? What did you dream about? Has the vacation started? Are you home alone?

He asked questions in one breath, used to not getting answers. I looked at him, my dear, as he embodied the beauty of the moment I was enjoying, then I looked at his white clothes, a little dirty because he had come down with it after his wife’s death. When I could show my impatience, he sat down on the lowest step and in complete silence took out a package of Mărășești and lit a cigarette. As always, he held a cigarette with one hand and scratched his beard with the other with a passion that I would understand much later. As I looked from the top step at the blue smoke dissipating into the yellow-green of the day, I thought that in fact the Old Man—for that was what everyone called him, even the oldest ones like him—was somehow necessary in a landscape that made me happy like a wound that would give it depths. Therefore, when he began to speak, I was more reserved, willing to listen to him, although he repeated the same stories about the vast lands that he owned and traveled all his life from one land to another. In all the stories he was somewhere on the road, on a trail or path, on foot or on horseback, never standing still. He almost did not mention either his late wife or his adopted son and daughter-in-law, who did not have time for him even on Sundays. I heard snippets of his stories every time I passed my mother’s embroidery machine, where he often placed and repeated them to her while scratching his beard.

For a long time I thought he was ever welcome, and he looked only from that hospitality of a place that would not allow us to say or do anything that would hurt such weaklings as we, and the Old Man, in spite of his stories, was lonely and, most importantly, he was old. When he sat down on the steps, at my feet, I already learned that he was a kind of generous usurer, who lent money to all the neighbors, from the hill where he lived to us in the valley, from his former fortune, partly converted into capital. The interest was to be received in their houses, and the interest varied from house to house. For example, it was too big for my mother, because she was always at home and embroidering in a makeshift workshop, so she had to listen to her story and bring her the desired plate of soup. The neighbors received him with a joy that diminished according to the frequency of the phenomena, and all predicted that he would die on the way, not knowing that it was his very dream.

The day I am talking about was unforgettable, but not only because he was so perfectly integrated into the landscape that I listened to his voice rising through the smoke he was exhaling, without making out what he was saying, as if you were listening to water or wind. Then I fully realized how brilliant his decision was, how he turned the houses on Khusadis (the hill we lived on) into a network of debtors whose hospitality he bought. So he was definitely their guest, especially in summer, and sometimes in winter because of the kitchens where food was prepared. So he had a reason to go down to the village. After a while he got up “to go out to the hill,” on the bank where his house was. I wondered how many more stops he would make and mentally counted the houses he would meet on his way. According to my calculations, it turned out that he would return home only when it got dark, because at noon he was going to take him to his aunt Onita, who offered him polenta with sour milk, and he took dinner to his aunt. John, who hastily slapped it on the table before tending to the animals of the large house he had. Only with the first stars will he reach his little room, lie down on a bed of straw and, late at night, wake up and think that his days are much shorter in summer. He always remembered this thought of gratitude: that he could walk, carol around his neighbors, on the paths between them… and this thought was his form of prayer.

He scratches his beard take a look free gesture In fact, it was a gesture that he was clinging to in order to forget that his hosts were accepting him because they owed him money; to forget their increasingly bored looks and reactions – their conditional hospitality. The more he was visiting, the more often and harder he stroked his beard, the more opaque and tired his stories became. And this gesture later became mandatory scratching, because it caused irritation in the beard, which was accompanied by increasingly strong itching. It was also a defensive gesture, as he struggled with the idea that he himself was an itchy neighbor’s tongue, an increasingly difficult debtor to control. And not always, because sometimes he complained to his mother about the bad attitude, but immediately after that he consoled himself with a cheerful voice: Let go! And what! Pesemne thought that they would not dare to close either the gate or the door in front of him, I would say, rather: in front of the debt they have. At any rate, he had a choice between solitude and that hostile hospitality of some people who were not hospitable enough even to their elders, at least as an interest in their inheritance.

My next memorable moment with Star was when I was a first-year student. Then George ordered the bus to the nearest town only on Thursday, when it was market day. One of those Thursdays coincided with my return home for summer vacation, so when I boarded the rickety bus from the station where the train dropped me off, I barely squeezed through the greasy, agitated mass. We simply stuck to each other, united by a liquid of sweat and dust, until we became an indistinct being. With one exception, because there was a short distance between all of us and the seat in front, and only one of the two seats was occupied in that seat. In that place, by the window, sat poor George, itching and drooling over his beard, which he was already scratching with an unconscious gesture. I didn’t hesitate, but I separated myself from the other travelers and headed for the place that everyone was avoiding. The old man felt my presence, he didn’t seem to recognize me, but he smiled briefly and closed his eyes, not wiping away the saliva, continuing to scratch. True, the smell was a little more unpleasant and up close I could see a bleeding wound in his beard. Therefore, I understood why everyone on the bus looked at me with horror. I even heard some muttering: Pesemne will be as it is!

what as it ishe it came from people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as superior and different, just to them I had to be a demanding young lady in my company, particularly on the bus, where the term company was meaningless. But what they didn’t know was that Bide George, the Old Man whom everyone shunned, was my bad, vulnerable and annoying friend, from whom I also wanted to run away, but the next second I was struck by a helplessness that paralyzed me. in place. I sat next to him for about an hour, under a disapproving gaze, and did not wipe his saliva, did not stop his hand, with which he hurt himself, but I did not get up, even when other places became vacant. , but I stayed there the rest of the way. In the autumn of that year, my friend George died – he had skin cancer – but I did not see him on his last journey. Instead, when I mourned my grandmother, then my grandfather, then my father, every time I sat on the steps of the house, lit a Marășești cigarette and, surrounded by its smoke, I mourned him and Mošneag. With the thought that each of them also died of loneliness.

The beauty of the childhood landscape was deepened by the gaps left in it by the disappearance of the old people who were part of the place; who made my childhood happy. I understood the depth of the voids adjacent to any philosophy of humility, fatality, and hospitality only when I realized the frailty of the boundary—not between life and death—but between life and old age. Only then did I understand the grandfather, who, tired of old age, said: My whole life has flown by so fast and now it never ends… Because old age itself becomes a pathology, a constant and irresistible fear of falling into bed, of becoming static and horizontal, the living dead. This is what you can see in the eyes of the “old” and the “old” in the land of “horror asylums”, where one in four old people are lonely and where it is apocalyptically predicted that 50% of the population will be over 65 by 2050. All these old people, whether they wander aimlessly through city squares, or ride trams annoying active people, or loiter around country houses, want only one thing: to die when they can no longer. to get out of bed independently. They can think so little of civilized care, comfortable shelters, or other promises of worlds less real to them than the world beyond. At the official level, at the level of the United Nations, they talk about 2021-2030 as the “decade of healthy ageing”, but in the eyes of those who matter, the Romanian elderly feel the irritation that lies beneath the cancer. about which there are only points of official opinion. The fear of the terrible prelude to eternal rest – a state of dependence on others and disappearing without dignity – I recently saw it intensify in the eyes of old people who walked, holding on to frames or clinging to walls, through the corridors of a convalescent hospital. They were lucky to be there, and especially lucky not to be forever bedridden, like the sick, whose empty eyes fixed on the ceiling begged for mercy to look down on them. Among the lucky ones, my mother, supporting a cane and another muzzle, informs me on the phone day after day: Today I took 1000 … 460 … 350 steps! – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro