The frost seemed to weigh on us. Nobody would move, so any warm won’t get lost. We were all quiet. Nobody was taken “at the middle” … We traveled 4 kilometers. I begin to feel that my water boots pinch me. What would this mean? Did my feet gain more feathers? I touch my boots. It was firm as a plate. It contracted. I was still feeling my feet. I was cold, so cold that my bones hurt.
I ask Heni, the fellow besides me, if he is cold too:
– What do you think?
What should I think? I was among the youngest and I was ashamed to complain about being cold. And how much I wished I could cry. So much pain I felt on my feet as if my heart was folding from coldness. I felt I could not take it anymore. The frost was unbearable.
In that moment a few helpmates called out the driver. The car stopped. About 10 men got off and started to run, slowly, behind the car. It felt like someone was pulling us our feet …
After two kilometers of running, although we didn’t warm up that much, we were tired and steam was going out of us.
At a moment of time I felt as if a needle crossed through my ear. After this I could not feel …my ears.
I got out of these at the lowest price, only my ears were frozen. At the fellow Bob the nose got big as an American potato. It had frozen up. Others left with their hand fingers frozen, feet fingers …
After this “warming up” we had, other changed us, now they were running after the car. Our care assembled with the cyclists car from the cyclic cross – the one with the spare parts – just that in here people were running due to the coldness an not for the love of sports …
When we got at the mine, some of us had more “rounds” taken, others just one. We were all walking immobile as robots to our groves.
After 500 meters of grove, I had the feeling I was “thawing”. It seemed my ears were made of flour. All the time it felt like something white was flouring from it.

I got at the appealing board, I could not say I was tired … No …I was good for nothing. When my ears thawed, I had the feeling it split off from my head. I already had aches pulps, than at my feet …
I was looking at my fellow near me. The light was too fainted. He had something white at his feet, first I thought the paper got off from the boots. That’s how it observed at others too …then at me …for real …what I could see were the stockings.
To all of us the boots busted from coldness …
It was not much time left until we busted too, the same as the boots … Now, you tell me, is it possible to relate and redeem with enthusiasm about working men and their work?
I don’t know what else to tell you, for so much time we were being fed with ideals and goals that from what you are saying, I almost forgot we are humans, that we still possess human qualities.
I don’t mean to make a thesis about working men, the friend with same name as Buia, Thomas, continued, about their work, maybe I am wrong, or maybe where I was working was worse, and if you truly believe me I haven’t been to many places and some I can’t even explain, not even now.
– For example …
– Well … at the village, a house with two or three rooms was up to anyone by those times. In the city, to have an apartment house, after 20-30 years of work, was something amazing, a fortune … There are more of these left, but believe me that at the sadness I am filled with, accumulated with the one that each working man feels, there’s no place were that much sadness can fit.
– Forgive me, I know what’s in your soul and I didn’t wish to harrow your scar worse, but what you told me today, although I’m not strange with this things, I didn’t quite think at this in such way. In other words, this reality never got to me, never strike my eye. I was complacent with the weather forecast “taken” from Television. I didn’t know there were countrymen that can tell the exact weather, without listening it to the radio or TV.
– You see, shouldn’t you make yourself a countryman, slowly, slowly!

– I would become if I had a small part of “country” with which I could call myself a countryman.
– Yeah! The land is not enough for everyone, at least if it would get for the ones that love it, but the adjudication wasn’t made like this, not today and not long ago …
– Maybe it won’t be bad if we talk about other things too, as about politics, after how “THEY make” politics we are kind of a disgusted. Sometime we were 16 millions employers, now if they are left 6 millions. Two million Romanians “went into the wide world”, looking in other place what they aren’t given here. From this reason families and ancestors are being disunited, sadness is being caused as for when you loose someone close. Some were talking that the current governors want the reunification with Basarabia “so that the country would overcrowd at the level of year 1989” being that today even the “natural admixture” is negative.
– Mister Buia, the citizen teacher stops him, of these things, the way it was mentioned earlier, we are disgusted, and its better if you tell us something from this village so that we could forget the fact the some unfulfilled people lead us.
– If you want, why not? I hope I can tell you an experience that would amaze you. Us, the ones from around here, we are close enough to Baia, that’s why not few people have a job in the city. That’s how the man that lives in the house in front of which we are passing now used to be.
– Wait, wait, why do you speak with “he used to be” when I see him in his yard?
– Who you see inside the yard is not the person that built the house, whom was its owner, he died four month ago. He is someone else.
– Why did he die? … One of the listeners thinks with his voice loud.
– This I was planning to tell you, because the person that I’m talking about was with a few years younger than me and he didn’t even work at the bathes ever. The man who’s this beautiful house was, was a convinced bachelor. He was never married …
– Wait a second Sir; I can see there are some children in the yard!
– Yes, you are right, but they, the kids … you know what, I think you have to have some right otherwise you will cut my story in the same way the life of this man I’m talking about was cut, Buia tries to “set them aright’.
– Sorry …