I began to like Cluj from the moment I have seen it for the first time, when, after my opinion, it presented as an appealing, rather than towering city, like all the metropolis leave the impression, giving you the opportunity to discover it house to house, street to street, as if you would communicate with history, with those people that along the centuries have put their hands, soul and money to build this saucy Transylvanian city. Now I was being in a “over century affinity” and this thing was making me happy. I was trying to see those people that inhabited this city, how they behaved, how they were, how good, knowing that there the decision of assassinating Horea (today, a street name), Novac (whose torture wall still lasts) was taken. There were also bad people, but I believe that a lot were in pain from the sufferings of their heroes. Today people from Cluj are superior, they feel and understand each other better, and for their “intelligence” people are talking for a long time. From my getting off the train in the few lighted station this thoughts “grounded” me (this was also a kind of a psychic repression imposed to the whole people from the country through the missing of the street lights), in a city that is even less lighted. With a small luggage in this coldness I felt the need to “step” fast enough so that my feet won’t freeze. The city was waking up, but still the railways were empty enough. On the left side of “Horea” street, an armored car was patrolling. On the bridge over the “Somes” River the railways were going down the street with “bunches” in front of the door. The working Cluj was going on duty. Getting on the center of the city a little before 6 o’clock I did not find a door opened. A sign of fear? I don’t know, but there was nobody to offer you a tea, a coffee, a worm croissant, in such town not only that it was being unpleasant, inhospitable, it more looked like a sort of repugnance. The coldness “loved me” with a constancy to be envied. Since eight o’clock last night I was not able to feel the worm. I began to visit the graveyards with no dead men in it, the bread and sorrow graveyards with rests of candles. With the lamp on my hand in the full center of Cluj, I was reading the advertising, the imputes, the agony written in despair of the ones that have lost all they had worthful in this world at the so soon passed revolution. They mourned their sons, husbands, parents, brothers. The sidewalk from the front of the University’s Book Store was half full of crowns, bunches, BREAD, flowers and candles.

A lot of sadness … Here were murdered the youngest, the most enthusiast, those that in their short life “scientifically eaten”, and in the same time developed, the young people that in the moment of the parties oligarchy bunkers opening , tried to throw away a part of the aliments… Food that they have never heard of or seen before, causing parents and older people to break out in laughter tears. In this hanged up type of misery we were living knowing all around us. Not even biologically these children weren’t good enough. For them a fowl has never had other compounds than: head, nails and neck … Not even crest! That much food could not be bought in “IEPOCA” and even if you could, for a medium salary of 2600 lei they could buy daily only milk, bread, if you could find it, and what they would give you “on allowance”: oil, sugar and a maximum of 2-3 kg of meat/month, taken under the counter. In this case a batchler might be able to manage him-self but families have impoverished. The only amusement, officially legalized, was “standing” in line, from which in the end you wouldn’t get anything. The atrocity was that the “sitting in line” was enforced even for some inessential things like: toothpicks (what on hell did we still need that?), toilet paper, matches, and … (to hell with it!). The certitude of the products rarefaction was visible and felt by each person. Some have definitely disappeared from the market and it wasn’t about the imported products: coffee, olives or other delicacies, but imagine a country that has no …marmalade, beans, vegetables…to develop. In year ’89 “it so happened” that from April 27 until August 17 I haven’t seen any type of meat. There were some “national” fests when on allowance we could get ½ kg meat/person that for most of the times was a … BONE.
Seven o’clock. No invitation. No opened door… in all Cluj.
At the bridge over the “Somes” River the most insane tragedy took place. A guy, from a car, with an automatic weapon raked the population. Through the dead ones, two children, brother and sister, holding hands, have fallen on the pavement in front of the restaurant. The steel cross, cold as the times we were in, was blocking the alley. It was like a premonition: “who passes it, goes to chaos”. Besides the cold and black cross, there were on the sidewalk dight firs for the innocent soul of the young dead. There was a “grove” of firs planted in the memory of the young ones wedded …with death.

It was eight o’clock. A shop opened. Kind of weird to have your coffee served in a shop, for us, the … starved ones. The warmth of the coffees unfreezes our noses. It was for the first time for me, when the city of Cluj was so unfriendly and for the first time when you could not have a coffee in a restaurant, a coffee shop, or this one was in a … normal shop.
After “the view” of Cluj and the effects of “the battles” from a single side and the lies that tried to “inform” us about the truth, left me with a sour taste and with emptiness in my soul. What I was wishing for and what I got! And most of all, who had … received. Honestly, I probably “got a little worked out” at this issue but, most of the times when I tell this stories, in my mind it gets shape, with more clarity, that this revolution was a movement started and sustained buy young people only, but others have gained after their elevation and sacrifice, about whom they say that by taking over the ribbons of power became worse than some occupants. That’s why I believe that in this chapter of life, on Romanians souls, there is a hard stone and a big tribute in the contributor’s pocket, but I believe I will never talk again about this facts, my friend ends.

From talk to talk, the stories were going on with no previous invitation. A villager, a little older than us, started the telling of a story in which it seemed he retraced his memories. After the way he was relating the stories, you could feel he was reliving what he was saying, “re-entering” again in the past. He was saying: “Nobody can define or measure the situation from “Ardeal”, after the Diktat. I had nowhere to retire. The bones of my near ones have whitened in this ground, in the holy land of Transylvania. My family was here. How could I leave? Where could I go? I thought to my self that in the way that others will live, I will also live or I will die. That’s how I thought then, until I arouse with an appeal mandate. The weird thing was that the mine diggers were always mobilized outright. Seeing also others that received the appeal mandate, fellows that I met at the exposure place, almost all were buddies of mine. It so seemed, that it was an intensive and well guided action of Romanians from “Ardeal” depopulation. They sent the Jewish in Germany; the Romanians on the Russian front, the gypsies were after the Jewish to the extermination camp or in the Russian steppe. The ones that left home were: women, children and the helpless.