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| Bucharest at night - atmospheric view from Monica's window |
Monica Manolachi is a lecturer of English at Bucharest University, Romania. She is also a writer of poetry and prose, and a translator. She is one of the excellent team of editors and translators of the Romanian international magazine Contemporary Literary Horizon (whose editor in chief is Daniel Dragomirescu) which regularly produces a print magazine with poetry, stories and articles in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Croatian, all translated into Romanian. She has also produced a book – entitled Table Talk – where she interviews a variety of writers (Romanian, British, Canadian and Dutch) and asks them about their writing history and practices.
When I visited Bucharest last year, Monica kindly took time off from her teaching and research to translate for me at the launch of my book The Midnight Man, and to show me some of the beautiful, historic and literary sites of the city.
Monica sent me this article on her thoughts and experiences during these covid isolating times.
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Monica at Mogoșoaia
Palace
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One month of isolation
Monica Manolachi
Several nights before they announced the start of the regime of isolation, I had two vivid dreams. In the first one I dreamt of a bug as big as the painting of roses I have on the wall next to my bed. It was hanging there like a shiny dark decoration. It did not move, but it looked terrible, Kafkaesque, passive, threatening. Soon after that, my agile calico cat (in real life I don’t have any, but I like them) seemed to have chased it away to the opposite corner of the room, somewhere on the wardrobe and then behind it. The bug, as big as the cat, was lethargic, in agony, like a powerless structure.
Two nights later, I dreamt I was on the terrace of a hotel room, somewhere on the fifth floor. It was a sunny spring day and I was gazing at the huge silver birch tree in front of the hotel. I suddenly see an elderly woman on one of its strongest bare branches. She seems to be a countryside woman, a rather happy peasant in her daily flowery dress, resting as if on a front-house bench. “What are you doing up here? Aren’t you afraid?” I asked her, thinking she was going to fall off the next moment. “I’m fine,” she replied with a smile. “I’m very fine here. Where else should I be?” When I woke up, I had the impression she was the ghost of someone recently perished.
A month ago I was in Cluj-Napoca, at the conference Locations and Dislocations of Theory, where I talked about the theory of transitional objects and phenomena developed by Donald Winnicott. In our panel, the dean mentioned that the University Babeș-Bolyai would suspend its courses beginning with the following day. That evening I boarded a sleeper and fell asleep reading dramatic news about the covid on my mobile phone. Next morning, after I got off the train, I felt that even the air I breathed seemed to be contaminated with the virus. After I left my luggage at home, I got out to the supermarket. I did not understand why people had panicked and were overbuying food. Several hours later we were informed that our university too suspended the courses and that we were to work from home. I had already made online groups for every course and seminar, so it was rather easy for us to adapt quickly. Therefore, I had the time to experiment with new online teaching platforms.
Today is April 10, 2020, a sunny day of spring. April is the cruellest month, said the poet. In the current context, this line seems more relevant than ever. And yet I must get to the post office. I ordered something on the internet: The Onomastic Dictionary by Mircea Horia Simionescu, a book that made quite a stir in 1968 when it was first published. I am printing a statutory declaration with the destination Piața Sudului. I wish I went to the post office by bike, but I cannot find the pump to inflate the tyres a little. I give up. I put the small rucksack on my back, not until I sneak a medical mask and a white rubber glove in a pocket. I do the zipper. Lock the door. I do not take the lift because I want to do some exercise. To exit the building, I press with the back of my hand on the opening button of the door, which I then push with my foot.
Instead of taking it on the Văcărești Avenue, a wide road with three lanes in each direction, I take it between the blocks and head to the park. The air seems fresher. I am going past several lilac bushes and cherry trees in bloom. Somebody left an empty 0.5l plastic bottle in the steel wire fence. In a car park I see a pair of blue rubber gloves on the ground. Abandoned. Orphan.
Today I watched the last episode of Arabela, a Czech series for children, which our national TV station broadcast in the 1980s. Its atmosphere, an ingenious combination of contemporary life and fantasy, seems very suitable to what the planet is going through at the moment. It seems that the world begins to change as if a magician has touched it with a magic wand. The pandemic appears to awaken the sleeping and calm down the restless, the chaosists, who seemed to have lost the meaning of life.
I do not find the restrictive measures taken here extreme. Compared to other states, with better health systems, Romanians have got it that it is better for everyone to stay in, since crowding the hospitals would lead to a greater tragedy. What I find extreme is the absurd way in which some police officers understand to apply the rules. I find it extreme when some do not see what a pandemic is and want videos of contaminated patients. It is also extreme that, to quote a physician, no epidemiologist has been part of our governments over the past three decades, in a country where 40% of the households have the toilet in the yard. What I also find extreme are the inertia, the corruption and the carelessness that have surfaced on this occasion.
For me, the isolation order came at the right time. Instead of boarding a plane to London in one of those days when “herd immunity” was in the news, I remained at home and had time to translate into Romanian Nicholas Rowe’s preface to Shakespeare’s works from 1709. However, the situation was not as easy for our relatives based in Lombardy. My aunt and my cousin have been nurses in Bergamo for many years and are now living the pandemic in the frontline. The same happens with many medical employees across the world.
There is a Romanian idiom, something close to 'to grin and bear it': a face haz de necaz. The disease and the death are knocking at the door, but Romanians laugh. Romanians laugh at home because they do not want to get to the hospital. It is not an unconscious laughter, but a serious one, emotional and therapeutic. However, the economic crisis too is knocking at the door, so major strategic changes are needed in many fields, because not everyone can work from home. But this is another story.
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