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 …

– So, the young enough man had a job, “long live that” … at the Municipal Council from Baia. He was the person that distributed the inhabitants in the new apartment houses. He was so nice and courted by women that we can say he could not bear with them and not few of them “slipped” in his arms. Maybe also his job could have facilitated this matter, but he was indeed a handsome man, communicative, very charming, how maybe any woman would wish her man to be and something that we cannot pass over, he had a very good financial situation. He had his own house, life, fortune, what else, he did not miss anything. He built this “little house” as a jewel “openly” how they say in here if the house is faced south, with a particular finish. I don’t have to remind you about the orchards and others.
Our Pavel, that was his name, I think he never tasted plum brandy or wine from other places than the ones that he made and he used to make it the way he liked it. There’s no use in telling more, he had everything and mostly everything a person could wish for … or a woman of those that “throws herself in his arms”. Not few were from those that may have seen Pavel’s fortune and maybe only after that they taped him, or they “got warm” after Pavel. He was close to 50 years old and Pavel lived all his life in pleasures and parties with women, each one of them different than the other. Maybe what surprised people from the village were Pavel’s “breaking up” of these women? Breakings up that were spent in silence, in such way that not even one neighbor heard any hard words, rude things or words that were calling out from Pavel’s place. With about two years earlier “he felt” for a very beautiful woman, a charming woman, that was behind any gossip that wasn’t admirable. She was about 35 years old. A pleasant woman that knew her value and importance in the society. She was the kind of woman to “be seen” anywhere. Suddenly for the first time in his life, Pavel felt in love with her. Thinking about how many women crossed his “doorstep”, have brightened his life and spent unforgettable hours together and each time he knew how to get away to come back to his bachelor’s, to don’t get married with any of them, now it seemed he became immune to these things. This late falling in love for this woman seemed absurd. Against all these Pavel was deeply in love, when he separated from her a state of mesmerizing used to get into him and a fact was sure: if she asked him to get married, Pavel wouldn’t think a minute about it.