MEMOIR
The Railroad Apartment
Bucharest — Austrului Street, 1960–1971
This was not the first apartment. It was the one where I grew up. I remember a warm afternoon arriving with my mother to this place, way across town, and opening a green gate to a large courtyard. What seemed a long path led to a two-story building where we entered through an unusual vaulted wooden door. It led down to the half basement apartment where my father and his parents lived.
A woman whom I did not know then but who was my paternal grandmother opened the door. The way she looked was a bit unsettling, as I had never been close to “old” people before. I remember that she smiled. My mother and I were led to the front room. It was quiet and rather dark. It had plank wood floors and a painting of chrysanthemums hanging on the wall.
I don’t remember any of the conversation. There was another woman there wearing slippers, who later I found out was my father’s sister. I must have known we were to move there, as after a while I went outside into the courtyard paved with river stones and met another kid, a bit older, and told him so. He made me feel welcome and it lifted my spirits. I was five years old.
I don’t remember moving.
In the US, it would have been called a railroad apartment—four rooms lined up one behind the other. The front bedroom had five narrow windows set in alcoves and led into a middle (I guess living) room in which you entered through the vaulted door. This room with dark furniture led to my grandparent’s bedroom with their bed set in an alcove across from my grandfather’s heavily sculpted dark desk. This room was connected to the kitchen. All the rooms were quite large — or at least so they seemed to me. The windows were chest high inside and close to the ground when seen from the outside.
The kitchen held a large table in the middle and a massive cooking stove on the side with a window. It also housed the bathtub with its towering gas heated water tank next to the cold water sink. The floor was a rather interesting-looking, speckled dark surface that must have been cement.
The toilet was in a narrow corridor off the kitchen. Both the corridor and the toilet were unheated and had the same dark, speckled cement floor.
My bed was in the grandparent’s room on the other side of the alcove that housed their bed. I can’t remember my first bed.
Eventually, changes were made to the apartment. The wooden plank floors were replaced with hardwood parquet. My parents’ room got new furniture. It was light in color and beautifully finished in walnut veneer. The upholstery of the two “mid-century” armchairs by the coffee table was light green. All the furniture in the middle room was repaired, restored, and polished with linseed oil to a deep satin-like black finish by a man who worked shirtless and had a scar on his back.
Next, the tiled floor to ceiling stoves where taken apart, the broken and burned out thermo bricks replaced and rebuilt with the original ceramic façades, green in the front (parents’) room and yellow in the grandparents’ bedroom. The middle room got a rebuilt ceramic open face gas fireplace.
We lived there with my father’s parents. My grandfather was an electrician who had the magic aura of being the one responsible for the Christmas display in the department store that still carried the name of Galleries La Fayette. He was a very kind and quiet man who cherished his 1930’s Pioneer American made radio. Somehow he managed to keep finding power tubes for it.
He listened to choral music whenever available. In the evening I used to sit by the radio next to his hanging hernia belt and listened together with him to the evening children story read by actors. Later I listened to radio plays broadcast every day. I remember being terribly frightened while listening to Peer Gynt, or classic German plays by Heine, Goethe, and Schiller — terrible things I could not understand were happening but I knew there was tension and suffering.
I knew that because there was tension and suffering in the house when my father’s sister would come. Most often things started okay and I was quite happy to see her, but too often the visit would descend into shouts, anger and scary body language. I never quite knew the reasons, but there always seemed to be one. It would end with my aunt leaving the apartment in obvious huff and her mother suffering palpitations and needing to gasp for air.
My aunt was unmarried and people referred to her as a beautiful woman. She traveled quite a bit behind the iron curtain — Budapest, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Karlovy Vary. She brought back trinkets that never seemed to be of much use. Looking back I think she bought what she could afford.
One day while I was on the bus, passing by her place of work as it let out in the late afternoon, I saw her on the arm of a rather tall man with a hat. She was wearing one of her scarves from East Germany. Next time she arrived at the apartment I exuberantly announced, “I saw you with a man!”
I was happy since I always worried about her being lonely. Let’s say that was not the thing to say and I was accused of spreading wicked rumors and it all ended in the all too familiars shouts and exit in a stormy huff.
The opposite happened when my grandmother’s brother showed up. A very round bow-legged man with a round bold head, who walked leaning onto a cane and always, always found a way to cheer up the whole place. He was, by training, a pastry chef — or so I was told. There were times when he would disappear into the kitchen and amazing things would come out.
Story was, he used to have a restaurant before the communists took over private commerce — but somehow this was never really confirmed. This great uncle had a son from a previous marriage, a doctor, but ultimately there was very little I knew about him. He had died of cancer from being exposed to the X-rays he performed on his patients.
Come to think of it, I knew very little about my paternal grandparents, my aunt (why she never married), and nothing of the extended family that must have existed. But as a kid you don’t always ask questions.
The apartment was a bit dark being a half basement but cool in the summer and kept warm in the winter by the massive gas powered stoves. At night the flame was turned off and the large tiled surfaces would radiate a mellow heat. In the winter the outdoor was bright with light reflecting off the snow.
One day rummaging in one of the armoires I discovered a black metal box with an elaborate key. I opened it and a strange world was revealed: four or five coins from before World War 2 showing the profile of the Hohenzollern kings, a bunch of papers, some photographs of my parents when they were younger. A photo of my father standing next to an old car that had the word DODGE on it.
He was hearing a short leather jacket and looked rather self confident with a cigarette in his hand. Also a strange identity card of my mother with a last name that was neither her maiden name nor our family name and a marriage certificate between her and a man I had no idea who he was. I put everything back.
There were a lot of kids in the courtyard’s five separate buildings, including two Jewish brothers who lived upstairs and listened to a lot of music, and two Jewish sisters who lived in the mirror building across from ours. A boy my age lived upstairs in the front building, whose parents worked at the hospital.
A whole slew of kids came from the new building at the very end of the courtyard: three brothers whose mom worked for the national film studios; the youngest of us a girl whose parents had the largest TV available in Romania; and two more girls about my age whose parents I knew nothing about and whose fathers were not friendly. All together there were enough of us to organize a lot of games. We usually got along, though now and then, one would end up going home in tears.
There were also a number of adult characters.
Two sisters, who apparently had owned all the buildings in the courtyard before the communists nationalized housing, served coffee in small fine china cups and one of them made a bit of income doing spectacular embroidery.
The man upstairs from the two sisters was a police informant and lived with his very quiet wife. His day job was some sort of instructor at the institute for the deaf that was only a couple of blocks down the street from us. Not sure what kind of instructor he was, but one time he came home with his head covered in bandages. It seems that one day, when he entered a classroom, the students jumped him, put a coat over his head, and beat him to a pulp. He probably screamed but most of the people around were—deaf.
There was a kind family of three who lived in a strange structure tucked between two buildings — the father had a few natural-cane fishing poles that he looked after with great care; his wife smoked cigarettes and was kind to us. Their only son was older than all of the other kids and was about to join the army. One day he came back wearing a uniform and we all gathered at their windows to see.
A couple with no children used to walk in perfect silence to and from their half basement apartment. I don’t remember ever talking to them or they ever saying anything to us in all the years I lived there. He worked as the manager of a bread store and apparently had been married before. We were told that during that time, there were a lot of parties with live music at his apartment. His current wife was taller and larger than him and just as silent. People said she was part of the interrogating teams of the political police — she beat up people for a living, and at times, her husband at home.
Then there was the very old woman who lived alone in a room that had once been a storage space. Her room, which was her only living space, had no windows. One day an ambulance came for her and she never came back.
The street was paved with cut stone but like all of Bucharest, somehow managed to be dusty. There were very few cars at the time and we spent our time in the street.
Later on, places along Austrului Street took on all sorts of significance. The police that came to arrest the man across the street for beating his wife. The girl across the street, who was the first one to give us a peak at nudity in the common laundry room in our courtyard. The boy who became a child actor on TV. The kid with relatives in England who had a moped. The kids a couple of blocs down who were better to avoid. The beautiful girl with a dreamy demeanor who lived in the house with round windows like a ship’s. The other beautiful girl an ice skater who lived with her mom and who later succumbed to what apparently was schizophrenia.
The apartment was a short walk away from the open market where I used to go with a shopping list as soon as I was able to handle money.
But most important, next to the market was the “Arta” cinema. It had an inviting dark interior and wooden theater chairs that did not squeak. It also offered outdoor projections in the summer. In the opposite direction from the apartment but rather equidistant to “Arta” was the other movie house “Popular.”
I spent innumerable hours at these two places. I think that is where my dreams were shaped. I went to see everything and sat on tenterhooks through the propaganda newsreels anticipating the main film. I often returned two or three times to see a movie. I saw “7 Uomini d’oro” seven times and felt the first strange stirrings looking at Rossana Podesta.
It all changed at 14, when the kid whom I met the day I first arrived at the apartment, offered me his old bike as a present. The apartment, the courtyard, the street now became a launch pad and the whole city was a reachable life point. The boundaries were pushed to wherever I could get to on two wheels. My life was no longer tied to the apartment. It now had entirely new horizons.
