“Every family has a story about baggage packed hurriedly, in a few hours, with impossible choices.” That is the only part Ileana really listened to out of the story I had read to her about of Gheorghe Drăgulinescu and her mother, the most beautiful girl in her village.
I grew up in their impressive house, about which Ileana never speaks nowadays, as if I was the only one to remember how we hid dolls in the tree branches that reached up to the first storey, the spiral stair banister on which we slid down, our hair frizzled from the static when we reached the bottom, or our games of hide-and-seek around the Map Museum. I figured this was a good occasion to have her give me more details about the time when our friendship began.
Ileana Marin was born and raised in Bucharest – in the French Quarter of it, as she jokingly used to say. She spent her childhood on the street that bears the name of the French capital, in Sector 1. She studied at the prestigious Jean Monnet School, her groceries were bought from the Dorobanți market, she went skating in Floreasca and walking along the pontoons in Herăstrău Park. Once she even jumped over the fence into the Ceaușescus residence, during an event with a lot of attendants. Her family wasn’t richer than ours, but if you tell anyone about all this, it’s clear enough it doesn’t hold a candle to poor working-class neighbourhoods like Ferentari or Berceni.
Then there was the house itself. Built in the early 1900s, with six enormous rooms, tall ceilings, stained-glass bathroom windows, spiral staircase. Ileana had a room of her own – a completely different setup compared to our flat, where two or three siblings shared a bedroom. That was where she was born and where she spent her childhood and adolescence.
Until one day, when Ileana was studying for her end-of-term Math test and her family received a letter from the CSR – the Special Retrocession Comission – based on Law 10/2001 on the Legal Status of Real Estate Abusively Nationalised Between the 6th of March 1945 and the 22nd of December 1989. It informed them that the Romanian state was no longer the owner of the house in which they lived. Oh, so the princes and princesses they had heard of when they were children would be sharing the house with them! her little sister naively thought. But Ileana knew they would be kicked out as if the house wasn’t theirs as well.
Eventually, that did not happen – the original owners, the family whose property had been abusively confiscated during the Communist regime, then maintained and rented out by the Romanian state after 1989, had no intention to come back to live on Paris Street, nor anywhere else in Romania for that matter. Perhaps they decided it would be too painful to live in the house from which their parents had been arrested and unjustly sent to prison. So, in an act of generosity, they allowed the Marins to stay there. Their joy was short-lived, though. Overnight, the monthly rent was adjusted to the going prices for the neighbourhood and for the six rooms with tall ceilings, a spiral staircase, a parking spot and a garden, located in the area of Bucharest where all streets are named after world capitals. They hadn’t thought about that part.
Within two days, they were moving out, having lived there for 20 years, to make sure the next month, with the new rent, wouldn’t find them there. The sisters’ only consolation was that their parents chose a two-bedroom apartment in a block in a neighbourhood called Vatra Luminoasă, not a one-bedroom one in Militari, like the one our family shared, where we children slept in the livingroom and had to fold back the sofa every morning or any time we had guests, even if we were still sleepy.
She never forgot the silence in the house during those two days. The luggage, ill-fitted to their new destination, far too big, with bulky furniture that wouldn’t even have made it through the doors of the lift of the new building, the dozens of flowerpots Ileana’s mother was so proud of, which she left outside the neighbours’ gates, the massive walnut-wood rocking chair they took to the old house in the village. They brought almost nothing with them in the new home, nor did they have time to sell furniture. They handed it out or stored them, with the nostalgia of people aware that a chapter of life is ending.
Her parents moved on, finding consolation in the thought that they were healthy, that they weren’t the first to be chased out of that bright house, and that their children would soon have moved out anyway.
She, however, never understood the decision of the new owners, whom she never met, though she had prepared a whole moving speech for them, nor did she want to talk about it or about their new place, where she never invited me. When she turned 20, she moved back to the neighbourhood, on a street named after Rome, on a rent similar to what they used to pay when she was in highschool and her family lived on Paris Street – the one thing about which she accepted any jokes.
During her first week at the new address, she found on the outside of the block a graffiti that could have been a piece of her mind, or her motto: “i feel like i’m not home”.
Testimony collected by Ștefania Oprina for the Museum of Abandonment, for the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.„
