Motto:
"We live in Romania, and that keeps us busy" -
Mircea Badea, TV commentator
The launch of the book honoring the life-time achievement takes place in the schoolâs chemistry lab. On the back benches - literally long, wooden benches - sit the second-rank guests: some researchers with the Institute for the History of Literature; the writerâs illegitimate daughter; the village mayor, who is also heading the local subsidiary of the ruling party; and the County head of the Culture Department.
With all the equipment for testing the properties of the sulfuric acid on the desks in front of them, one may rest assured none of these people will try it on the desk wood to see if the acid really works through it.
These are reasonable people, not naughty schoolchildren.
The panel sits behind a table adorned with a red cloth, the same red cloth of which the former Romanian Communist Party flag was made of, and which someone found cast in an old closet. On the panel sit the honor guests: the County prefect; some now famous villagers, among whom the horseshoe maker Tache. He bought the local factory for transmission chains and turned it into a cluster of Turkish baths. Also on the panel sits a former famous TV star, which now is out of contract.
On the right-hand wall hangs the Mendeleyev Table. The Zinc is missing, as the night watchman stole it to drink it.
From the third row of desks to the back of the room, one can see no chemical lab paraphernalia, only the clean wooden desks, behind which sit the schoolâs teachers.
They are middle aged women, with worn out sweaters and apparently melancholic gazes, which in fact are void of any thoughts. The retired teachers are there too, wearing Siberian-style hats under which one could imagine the untended hair.
The program of the meeting was set up by the writerâs daugh
