A Crime, a Writer’s Destiny: Doina Ruști
I was recently invited to the podcast Altceva cu Adrian Artene — a top-tier cultural event that made me feel truly at ease, all the more so as I have many friends in the Gândul newsroom. I believe it’s one of the best cultural podcasts right now. It challenged me to speak openly, to revisit painful memories, to tell stories I’ve rarely shared.
Here are a few fragments, chosen at random: Something Else with Adrian Arsene
Guest: Doina Ruști
Sequences
The Murder
That July summer haunted my entire childhood — the scent of ripe mirabelle plums, the day he died. The image of the killer is etched in my memory, along with the faces of the people in shock, and of hysterical Mițulica, after losing her second and last son. All these things came to enrich my inner world.
It was a hard time, especially right after Cornel’s death. For two years I lived with an aunt who truly terrorized me — my mother’s sister — and I eventually ran away. I managed to convince Mițulica, my grandmother, to help me. So we left, just imagine — an old woman and a foolish child (me) — we set off into the world. We came to Bucharest, with no place to sleep. Night fell on us at Gara de Nord, and eventually we boarded the train to the City of White Skins — which I’ll write about in my next book. That’s where I went to school — a high school focused on classical languages.
The Pen Name
I was lucky to have chosen a literary pseudonym — I don’t know why, but it was something people did back then. I picked a pseudonym — like the one I use now. I actually published under the name Ruști. I had this obsession with escaping the name I was given at birth, my original name...
So I chose a pseudonym. Looking back, I don’t think I would’ve fared well otherwise. I once submitted a story to a socialist magazine about a man who commits suicide because life isn’t worth living — and I didn’t realize what that meant, ideologically. And… I got a response in the readers’ mail section.
The December Revolution
I lived that moment with exuberance, with desperation, with an overwhelming desire for it all to end. For Ceaușescu to die — that’s what I wanted. It sounds horrible now, but that’s how it was then. And I used to say it aloud — I was at my breaking point.
I had quit my job — I mean, I had nothing left to lose.
He was about to leave but suddenly turned back, pulled 10 lei from his pocket and gave them to me. It was really something — I must’ve inspired instant pity. That’s how I looked during the Revolution. That’s why I was so happy, in fact. I had no money — it was degrading. I’d go to the Central Committee building because someone — maybe the new government — would send crates of salami and bottles of beer. And I went to get my share.
Interview
Adrian Artene: Welcome back to Altceva. The guest of this edition is one of the most fragrant voices in Romanian literature. And not just contemporary literature — I wouldn’t want to narrow the canvas in which I’ll be painting her today, with her permission.
Her writing is remarkable — it generates images. It's vivid, colorful, expressive. It's seductive writing and it’s your mirror.
Any book bearing her signature — and you may correct me here — is a bestseller. Welcome, Mrs. Doina Ruști.
Doina Ruști: Glad to be here!
I’m already melting, speechless, after such an introduction. I don’t know if I’ll be able to say anything more.
AA: Words certainly belong at this table, and I’m convinced they’ll be among the most fruitful — as you say on the website you carry like a business card. You’re a writer, but I’d also add screenwriter, university professor, PhD in Philology, with a 40-year teaching career.
You’ve written — according to your website — 14 novels, though I believe the 15th has already appeared. Three collections of short stories, and 40 titles translated into 17 languages. Among your successful novels — and when we say success, we mean real success — are The Little Red Man, Zogru, The Ghost in the Mill, Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven, Zavaidoc in the Year of Love, The Phanariot Manuscript, The Book of Perilous Dishes, Homeric.
Many titles — and the most recent, Ferenike.
These novels have been recognized and crowned with major awards. The Ateneu Magazine Prose Prize for The Phanariot Manuscript, Romania Literară’s Book of the Year nomination, the Ion Creangă Prize of the Romanian Academy for Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven, the Writers' Union of Romania Prize for The Ghost in the Mill, the Gold Medal of the Darvari Hermitage for literary merit — I tried to pull a few of these from your website.
The Bucharest Writers’ Association Prize for Zogru, the Convorbiri Literare Magazine Prize. Many, many awards.
And I’d like to start our conversation in a lost village of the Danube Plain — Comoșteni — where, as you’ve said, you first tasted the fabulous world of childhood.
Doina Ruști: Any childhood is fabulous, why not say it? So of course I also fall into this category of the fabulous ones.
But in Ferenike, I actually return as a character, more than anything.
And that’s what I liked most about Ferenike — becoming my own character.
Last year, a monograph came out, a critical book about me. I was very surprised.
And guess what the title was? Ruști as a Character in Her Own Books.
And I thought, well, look at that — I’ve become a character, why not go all the way and truly become one?
So in Ferenike, I really am the book’s character.
My present self — not a return to childhood, not the tone of childhood memories — but rather an attempt to reconstruct events that, step by step, build the portrait of Ferenike.
Adrian Artene: Did you ever feel that your character sees herself as being slightly wronged by you?
Doina Ruști: Who knows? No, no, I never had that feeling. It's enough that I feel that way in real life 😊.
Any artist is dissatisfied, carries a sense of persecution. If you don't put passion into what happens, literature suffers.
But in the pages of the book, no, I don’t think I had that impression — because Madame Bovary, c’est moi — and here, I truly was the character of the book. And I’d say I placed myself in a situation that was convenient both for the reader and for me.
AA: You showed her maternal care. But you placed the character in that world, in Comoșteni, where, as I read somewhere, people used to believe for a long time in a spirit of the Jiu River — one that demands a human life from time to time.
There are, in fact, legends from that region, telling of the deep cry of the waters that can sometimes be heard — a cry that foretells death.
Your novel Ferenike also speaks of a murder, and perhaps places you in the landscape of childhood pain — but pain that you chose not to present as trauma, but rather dressed it in velvet.
DR: Absolutely. I believe that’s the true role of art — to soften pain.
I don't like novels in which the writer laments or recounts their misfortunes, so to speak.
I didn’t throw my pain onto my readers — whom I love dearly — but I tried to create a story, to build it, because I love the game of storytelling.
And here, speaking of space, I was indeed helped by the geography of my childhood — because I was born in the kingdom of waters, to paraphrase a well-known school phrase. Comoșteni is located right where the Jiu flows into the Danube, surrounded by marshes, not far from Copanița Island, near the Zăval Forest — a world where nature is in constant metamorphosis and gives rise both to monsters and, of course, to angels.
That’s always the case in such places.
AA: And when it creates monsters, it also creates stories. It’s a fairy-tale world in which, in Comoșteni, we find a miraculous well — the stone well — we encounter a ghost nestled in an abandoned mill, and a place where, the elders used to say, a treasure was buried.
And we discover that the real treasure is each of the people from that little village — as you’ve said, a lost place in the Danube Plain — and the treasure is... you.
Because you rose from there, with all these books that are so loved by Romanian readers.
And I’d love for us to return to that village and identify your very first piece of writing.
I know your grandmother kept you close to the household library.
You had a room — what did the library look like? Was it a room full of books?
Doina Ruști: Yes, it was a room that had been turned into a library.
Adrian Artene: Were your grandparents teachers?
DR: Yes, country schoolteachers, going back generations. My grandfather’s parents had also been teachers, and so on.
They had gathered and rebuilt a tradition. We had a room transformed into a library — I can still picture it.
There were bookshelves along the walls, but also those round, white, fragile spinning bookcases that I later saw again throughout my life in old houses — you could turn them and the spines would come to you from all directions.
There was a little ladder I used to climb to rummage through the forbidden books — because those on the top shelves were always the most valuable, even though they weren’t meant for me.
And in the same room there was a monumental stove with many columns — the kind with white ceramic pillars, what we called a “German stove.”
Two windows faced south and brought in that unmistakable light, and through them I could see the gazebo covered in grapevines.
The other two windows looked out onto the abandoned mill, which haunted me and which I later turned into a near-character in my novel The Ghost in the Mill.
AA: That’s one of your most frequently nominated novels — showered with literary recognition and deeply loved by readers, like so many of your works.
As I searched to understand how God managed to sprinkle so much talent in that village, nestled between the Jiu and the shoulder of the Danube, I discovered that the school in Comoșteni (nothing is accidental, it seems) was built through the efforts of teacher Ion Stănculescu — your great-grandfather — who had been inspired by Spiru Haret.
It turns out your great-grandfather contributed to the reform — in fact, to the very founding — of education in that area. And to this day, the school is a source of pride, a defining part of the local community.
Doina Ruști: The building still exists, but the school has been abandoned, and the village is nearly depopulated. The school deserves to be preserved — it's an old building.
I was born just as Stalinism was ending, I believe (I was born in 1957), and I caught glimpses of life from before the Communists came.
Next to us was the Cultural Center, also built thanks to the efforts of the village schoolteachers, including my great-grandfather. And nearby there was a castor bean field — the school’s agricultural lot.
There were even silkworm workshops at the school. I saw all these as remnants of another time.
And this idea that I was somehow connected, through my family, to educational reform — to Haret (Spiru Haret’s letters were often mentioned in our family) — mattered.
My grandfather, for instance, after finishing school, ran away from home because he didn’t want to become just a schoolteacher.
He took refuge on one of Haret’s estates in Dobrogea and spent a summer there, trying to sort himself out, until his father showed up in a carriage and brought him back.
He tried to run away again, and again, until the war came and he was sent to the front.
His whole adventure hovered over me and over the house. Because after the war — after spending seven hard years in a labor camp — when he returned, he was simply a wreck of a man.
And I only managed to get a few things out of him, shortly before he died. He couldn’t even speak about that period — he just couldn’t.
So it was on this background — of interwar legacy, Stalinist terror, and then a mild normalization under Ceaușescu — that my childhood unfolded.
And in a way, that’s how I entered life. That’s how I discovered Ferenike.
AA: You once said that in your family, everyone wrote and invented stories, that you had evening gatherings where you read or told tales.
Those were the evenings that shaped the memories you now hold of your father.
What photo of your father do you carry in your mind?
DR: I have a photograph where he’s in a group. I don’t have any photo of him alone.
At some point, my personal photographs were lost.
But in this one picture, he’s among others, kind of off to the side, holding some papers in his hand, glasses slipping slightly down his nose, standing near a 1950s truck.
I see him in the clothes of that time — trousers with cuffs, which were in style then — and, of course, with a cap cocked at an angle, worn with that sly touch. That was his time.
That’s the photograph that comes to my mind right away.
AA: I asked about your father because this book (Ferenike) feels like a kind of reparation for something that has haunted you all your life — the loss of your father when you were eleven.
And it wasn’t the kind of loss you can ever come to terms with.
It wasn’t just disappearance — he was murdered.
And I listened to you speak so gently about your father’s death — and I heard no condemnation of his killers.
DR: Oh, yes. Absolutely.
AA: Not even in this book did you seek revenge. You didn’t write to avenge him.
DR. No. That’s out of the question. No society, no world—I've said this before in The Ghost in the Mill—can be judged by today’s laws. That’s a huge mistake. Monumental. You’d have to be there, inside those events, to be able to judge a time, a crime, or a society that once was. And besides, in that world, where atrocities happened—just like today—there were winners and losers, and Cornel happened to be among the losers. That’s why I called him that—he’s a character now, I’ve long detached myself from it all. That moment tormented me throughout my childhood—that July afternoon, the scent of ripe mirabelle plums, the day he died. And the image of the killer stayed with me, the faces of the people in shock, Mițulica’s face—hysterical after losing her second and last son. All these things ended up enriching my inner world, and later I wrote many "perfumed" books, as you said. For example, in The Phanariot Manuscript, perhaps more than anywhere else, I allude to that past—even though it’s not about this personal drama—it still lies at the heart of the "perfume" of the book, in that fragrant Bucharest of the era. I’ve always tried to turn each emotion and experience into a story that preserves only the essential feeling—the scent of ripe mirabelles—while pushing to the background, where action takes place, the hard facts—like the concrete slab on which my father’s body lay, stitched up after the autopsy.
AA. You were present at that autopsy, and that’s when the second chapter of your life began. You decided to leave, to seek freedom—to reclaim your freedom through writing. But before that, you once told your mother you wanted to become a pastry chef.
DR. Yes, of course. There was a long period of confusion before I found my path, and among the essential experiences that helped me was one I’ve written about in Ferenike—my encounter with a coppersmith. That meeting meant a great deal. I was with Gică, looking for the killer, tracking down witnesses. We had found some coppersmiths—potential witnesses to the crime—and finally managed to locate them, since they moved from place to place. We sat and talked. Of course, they were wary—nobody wanted to get involved in the filth of a crime committed by the system. And while the others talked about the murder, one of them came over to me and said something I remembered for the rest of my life. He asked, “So, young lady, what are you going to do now? Will you go chasing the men who killed your father—or will you go on with your life?” That’s what he said. And I recalled that question again and again over the years. I realized he wanted me to choose the second option—and that’s exactly what I did.
AA. You were 11 years old—the same age as Lizoanca in Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven, a different book, of course. Eleven. And, as the coppersmith put it, you had to begin a new path. You decided to take your life into your own hands. Your grandparents supported you financially, and you ended up living with several “terrifying aunts”—as you call them. What did that phrase mean? “Terrifying aunts.” Is that when you also developed your dislike for tomato paste on bread?
DR. No, that came later, in the 1980s, when the hunger years began. But yes, it was a hard time—especially right after Cornel’s death. For two years I lived with an aunt—my mother’s sister—who really terrorized me, and I eventually ran away. I managed to convince Mițulica, my grandmother, to help me, and we left together. Can you imagine? An old woman—a crone—and a stupid kid (me), setting off into the world. We came to Bucharest, found nowhere to sleep, spent the night near Gara de Nord. Then we took a train to the White Skins’ City—that’s what I’ll write about in the next volume. That’s where I went to school, a classical languages high school. Mițulica had many friends there, former colleagues from teacher training, mostly Latinists—professors like Băran, Condurache, and also Raicu, Arșinel’s uncle (the world is so small). That’s how I passed my time in Copou, studying Latin and Ancient Greek at the Ibrăileanu High School in Iași. Later, I continued with university, where Simina Noica was blacklisted. I had already met her during high school—I used to visit her on Sundays, probably terrorizing her—I went every week to work on translations and prepare for university. Then one day she disappeared. No one would tell me where she was. They just looked at me with wide eyes and said, “We don’t know.” But she had fled to France. And that whole period afterward I was truly on my own. I moved from one lodging to another—worse and worse each time—supported by elderly people who had also been through trauma and whom I knew from Comoșteni. Because during my summer holidays in Comoșteni, I often met people who came there as if on vacation—it was a kind of refuge. I realized much later that many of them were former political prisoners, with nowhere to go, who came for a week or two. That village had become a refuge—because the house was big, and because there was water everywhere—it was the kingdom of waters, as I once said.
AA: Have you ever considered crossing the Danube and leaving Romania behind?
DR: No, I never had that intention. Not only was I deeply attached to this place, but during my childhood, some uncles of mine left for America and now they live there—the Popișteanu branch of our family. I don’t know... The stories they told me, especially one horrifying tale, stayed with me: on the very first night after arriving in New York, the first ones who had fled—one of them a man and a mathematics teacher—witnessed a terrifying event: the teacher was accidentally shot and killed by some thieves. That story alone gave me chills. Plus, there was the kind of education I received: I lived in a communist country, where you weren’t allowed to have contact with foreigners, and just the thought that I could be accused of that frightened me. Beyond that, the Danube was very friendly. We used to go often to Copanița and meet the Bulgarians there—it wasn’t a big deal. And there wasn’t much allure in Bulgaria either, so I didn’t see a way forward in that direction. Then there was the poetry of the place, and I felt a responsibility to carry on the history my people had lived through. Even later, after the Revolution, when I was looking for a job as a Latin teacher, I had an opportunity in Bologna, but I realized I couldn’t live there even for two minutes—because I’m a writer. And look at all the writers who left: a writer is bound to their language, to their community, and especially to that inner thrill which, in my case, is called Ferenike.
AA: And a writer can travel anywhere through the words they put on paper, into worlds completely unknown to those without that ability. I’m going to quote you now: “Into the boundless world of our interwar home crept the echoes of a new and cruel time. Death and Ferenike entered my life unnoticed.”
You said you were confessing something. When was perhaps the cruellest moment that reached out to you after your father disappeared when you were eleven?
DR: After that… there were many such moments, but now you’re really forcing me to rank them? Are you challenging me? I can’t. There were many. The loss of the photographs. That’s one moment I recount in Ferenike, but there were many more, because generally the path of someone who chooses solitude and accepts their orphanhood is not an easy one. And even more so for me, since I was far from home and almost unable to cry for help.
AA: When a cry for help sprouted inside you, did your imaginary childhood friend hear you? You once said you had an imaginary friend…
DR: I still have plenty of little notebooks where I wrote to him, described my meetings with him. His name was Lo. Why Lo, I don’t even know anymore—I was very young… He was a violet figure—maybe that’s why you’re wearing that jacket—transparent, omnipresent, a being who in some way preceded Ferenike. I think I killed him during high school, in the early years—I got rid of Lo.
AA: And you never searched for him again?
DR: No. He has a vague connection to the little red man in my first novel, but just a very faint one.
AA: And when Lo disappeared from your life, did you feel much, much poorer?
DR: Not at all.
AA: Or was it more of a natural separation?
DR: No, he simply melted away. He no longer had any strength, he disappeared because he no longer had a place in my world, and other characters came who strengthened my personality, gave me the kind of character I have today—quite an inconvenient one.
AA: In your memories, you still keep those shoes from the abandoned shop in the house of Aunt Eleonora, your grandmother’s sister. At one point you talked about those grey shoes with rounded toes, which you never parted from for any important event.
DR: Yes. That’s where I used to get my shoes—I rarely bought any. I didn’t have the money, and besides, I’ve always had a love for old things. Yes, Mițulica, my paternal grandmother, was born in Valea Stanciului, a village not far from Comoșteni, in a family of small shopkeepers. Her great-grandparents were vineyard owners—I knew their whole history—and they all had names ending in “-escu”: her ancestors were Diaconescu, she was born Bârsănescu, and then became Stănculescu, and so on. They had a house with a shop, of course. Her father was a grocer and died on the front, in Mărășești, during the war. After the communists came, there was no more talk of a grocery shop, and instead the space became a kind of shoe warehouse, because Lionica, my grandmother’s sister, had four daughters—and of course, many shoes. And nothing had ever been thrown away, because in our homes, you never threw anything out—you never knew when you might need it. There was a whole room full of shoes, with shelves around the walls and a sofa—actually a metal mesh bed—on which I would jump and play. And I used to go there to pick out shoes, even as a child. At one point, I found some sandals with fabulous 10-cm heels and brought them home. Mițulica said: “No way. How do you think you’ll walk in those things?” I was deeply disappointed the next day when I found them by the door—with the heels cut off. They had taken them to the cobbler—everything was handmade back then: you went to the cobbler, the tailor, etc.—and he had fixed them. She said: “Look, now they’re for you!” By then, they meant nothing to me.
Among all those shoes, there was a pair I wore for a long time—even in university—with rounded toes, in grey—a rare color you couldn’t find in stores—and with a soft, rubbery orthopedic sole. They were unusual. I called them my flying shoes.
AA: In a way, they were your talisman. You wore them to exams, at university, to meetings—you wore those shoes everywhere. And in that world of yours, which was constantly being created and recreated.
You spoke earlier of your friend, the one you parted with—but then another friend came into your life, and I’m referring to Balzac. You said Balzac, whom you started reading in seventh grade, showed you the social path.
DR. Yes, it was like a secret. I think if Mițulica had caught me reading Balzac, things would’ve ended badly. But it was also a coincidence that I met him, exactly him. I needed some kind of order in the world—and Balzac gives you that. On the other hand, I wasn’t interested in literature at that time—I hadn’t yet developed literary tastes. What interested me were the facts: from Balzac you could learn everything. All the questions I had, the ones no one wanted to answer—you know, those questions—found their answers in Balzac. After that, I read in a totally random way, book after book—I think I read the whole Human Comedy, as I got my hands on the volumes… But that encounter did me a lot of good, and maybe I wouldn’t have discovered Faulkner if I hadn’t read Balzac first. It was a lucky accident, and I don’t regret reading Balzac so early. I kept returning to him throughout my life.
AA. What kinds of questions were troubling you back then? You said Balzac answered all your questions—what kind of questions were they?
DR. Naturally, I had those kinds of questions that lead straight into the forbidden world—because those were the taboos at that age. But I also wanted to understand the social mechanism—why my grandmother would say, “Listen, if you make friends with someone—kids from around here, boys, girls, doesn’t matter—you bring them home immediately. This room here, this will be the salon for conversations.” And I didn’t understand why. Balzac made that clear to me.
AA. So your grandmother had to evaluate your social circle.
DR. And I respected that. Later on, even after I finished university, my love letters would still arrive in Comoșteni, under Mițulica’s watchful eye. She would send me only what she thought was worth reading.
AA. After a prior selection. When did you start to enjoy writing? You mentioned you once wanted to become a pastry chef, then you got interested in Latin and Ancient Greek—but when did you start putting your thoughts down on paper and, instead of throwing the page away, start keeping them, thinking maybe one day you’d write a book?
DR. Well, here the family environment played a big role. There’s a period when you do things just by imitation. And in our house, everyone had literary leanings—everyone read. Cornel wrote long poems and even read them to us. Mițulica had published a monograph—there’s still a copy at the Academy Library. Gică was always writing his memoirs and tearing them up from time to time. So they were all infected with the writing bug. I started writing when I didn’t have a place at the discussion table. There was so much chatter in that house—they were always talking about so many things—I couldn’t get a word in. And I had my own things to share at that age. I remember one time I got so upset—I’d been trying to tell them about a dream that haunted me, a real nightmare—and I couldn’t, because they kept talking. So that’s how I started writing. I wrote because no one would listen. I hid that story in an old desk I kept on the balcony—the kind with lots of little drawers and secret compartments. I only found it years later, when I was already in university. I had completely forgotten about it. But from that moment on, I wrote regularly. At first, I wrote absurd little encounters, with imaginary characters—but they were stories. I had that impulse from the beginning: the story, the well-built game, the resolved conflict. I was obsessed with endings. How does it end? That’s a normal person’s obsession—and it helped me later in constructing prose.
And yes, as you say—I started keeping the stories. I think I was about fifteen when I sent my first story to a magazine. That was it. I was in 9th grade and didn’t have a clue about the world. I was alone there, in the “City of White Skins,” in Iași—that’s what I always call it, because it’s a metaphor I’ll explore in my next book, and I’m still obsessed with it. It has nothing to do with color or anything like that—it’s a metaphor tied to the book’s message. In Iași, under blooming chestnut trees, I wrote a story about a man who’s unhappy with his life and decides to hang himself, because life isn’t worth living. I was in my nihilist phase—age 15. And since there was no paper to be found, I wrote it on pink paper—can you imagine? Those little correspondence envelopes—they were everywhere, and cheap. And they came with matching paper, half the size of A4. I squeezed my writing in tiny letters to save space. On pink paper!
AA. What a paradox! A planned suicide—on pink paper!
DR: You realize! I was 15 years old! That’s how it was. And I put it in a mailbox — I think it was red or yellow, I don’t remember exactly, it’s already mixed up in my mind — near one of the entrances to Copou Garden. Then, every morning on my way to school, I’d pass by that mailbox and expect a character to come out of it, words to come out, for someone to come and give me an answer there, at that box.
In reality, I was lucky I had chosen — or rather, I had chosen — a literary pseudonym. I don’t know why pseudonyms were in fashion back then, but I chose one, like the one I use now. In fact, I even published under the pseudonym Ruști. I had this obsession with escaping from my given name, from my original name, and... I chose a pseudonym because otherwise, looking back, I can’t really see myself sending a story to a socialist magazine about a man who kills himself because life is not worth living. But I didn’t know those things back then.
And… I got a reply sent to the editorial mailbox. The magazine was called Luceafărul (The Morning Star). It still exists today. I used to buy it, but of course, the teacher would bring it to school; I knew about Luceafărul, I read it, bought it occasionally. I wasn’t subscribed to anything except România literară, which was the most important at that time.
They replied to me in the editorial mailbox with something that should have made me think, namely that the prose seemed very well written, under the influence of Marin Preda. I hadn’t read Preda then, but I knew of him and that the best thing would be to come to the editorial office as soon as possible to be introduced.
I was so excited by that reply that I went and talked to my Romanian teacher, who was a very... important person in my life: Maria Oprea. I showed her the letter and she was stunned, saying, “My God! Don’t you dare go!”
And that’s how I started to enter the real part of life, which I hadn’t known before. The things I had lived at home made no sense back then. For example, I didn’t know that Aurel Păcescu had come directly from prison and that’s why he was so weak and mute. I had no idea what was really going on. I knew Gică had been to Russia, but I took it as an adventure; I didn’t know he had been in a camp and had lived through unspeakable humiliations, which he barely managed to tell me, confiding in me shortly before his death.
I discovered the communist world on my own, and Maria Oprea showed me the first path leading there — towards censorship, ideology, communist terror.
AA: Did you end up going to the editorial office?
DR: No. Well, she told me not to go. She already knew the story. You don’t realize how serious it was…
AA: And inside you, is there no regret?
DR: Not at all. Because with today’s mind, I realize it wouldn’t have ended well. If I hadn’t had that pseudonym, if I hadn’t sent it to a street mailbox, I can’t see myself at all looking back. Besides, I couldn’t publish during communism. That was just a naive first attempt; after that, there were many studied attempts. And I’m very glad I didn’t publish then.
AA: Why did you choose that pseudonym? Did you want to somehow break away from your past?
DR: Yes, it was a kind of arrogance, I thought many names were significant. I still have an obsession with proper names. I picked something... don’t ask me what — it was a thing from when I was 15! What’s surprising is that those people didn’t realize they were dealing with a 15-year-old child. They saw it was written on pink paper, but they wrote to me as to a mature person: “you,” this and that. Well, I guess people had fallen into a routine. And they invited me insistently to the editorial office.
AA: At 23, you were a teacher at a Food Industry High School in Tulcea. Looking at your path now, we see that on the Danube’s shore, you went to Bucharest, from Bucharest to Iași, then from Iași down again towards the Danube. How did you get from Iași to Tulcea? Was it by assignment?
DR: Yes, very simply. By assignment, I had a good grade average, and that year I was lucky — there were many cities available. I could have taken Bucharest, there was a middle school there. But I looked on the map, and seeing where Tulcea is (I was only looking for high schools because I didn’t want to end up in middle school — I had a sad experience during pedagogical practice and realized middle school was hard), I looked at the map and Tulcea, where I had never been, seemed to me like Venice. To walk around by boat — so that’s how I would get from one street to another by boat. That’s exactly what I thought. I was totally disconnected from reality.
And I even asked someone who told me, “Sure, there are lots of boats there.” So I went to Tulcea, and the first shock was at the train station when I got off and saw that was the end of the railway line.
Well, there were good years and bad years, but those were the years of my formation as a teacher.
