Time passed quickly in the bustle of bars on Obor. No one talked about anything but the bombing, the way that a few years earlier they’d talked for months only about the earthquake and the fall of the Carlton block, which acquired the melodramatic proportions of the sinking of the Titanic, by means of the ridiculous waltz played on every accordion. Little by little, the tall glasses of liquor turned rosy, and the color passed into the whites of the eyes of those on the smoke-blackened benches. As evening began, the trams crisscrossed in the piaţa, clanging deafening bells. Tataie and the girls left the bar at five in the afternoon and walked along Mihai Bravu, winding into the lonely slums, where flocks of children played ball on the street or poked through the mud, until they came to Rădiţa’s house, where they spent the night. Nenea and Uncle Florea were on the Russian front, and Rădiţa, who had a small shop no one entered, in spite of the beautiful cases full of porcelain dolls, had been left alone, scared, crying night after night, waiting from morning to evening for word from the front that her husband was dead. They listened to the radio for a while, but they couldn’t get any information from the propaganda programs. The country was occupied by the Germans, or at least that was the reality behind the beautiful words. They slept piled into two beds, without undressing, and the next day they went back to Tântava, where the girls would stay until the war was over.
In March of the next year, it snowed wet and unusually large flakes over the roughly three hundred houses in the village, “lamb snow,” as they called it. People were annoyed, because they had to wear their heavy clothes and wool hats again, when they had thought they would move on to lighter wear. They were also afraid a frost would catch the budding trees and there would be no fruit in the summer. Maria was standing in the oven, stirring a hanging pot. The oven was made of clay, with a great yellow fire, a wood floor and a sooty window as big as a hand. The back was lined with reeds, which wild bees filled with black honey in the summer. Above was the chimney, where the smoke rose from ashen twigs that were almost always damp and full of caterpillars and spiders. In the oven, with her face hot from the fire and watching the smoky arabesques in shafts of light, Maria felt like she was inside a rounded, tender belly. It smelled like mămăligă and mouthwatering stew. She was just stirring some mămăligă when she heard the dog, Roşu, barking like he was possessed. The dog, swith fur the color of fire, had its own strange and moving story. For a time, there were always Germans in the village. They would come on their motorcycles for a beer at the bar in the center of town, next to the footbridge where Băcanu Village started … People didn’t love them or hate them; they became used to them. Only in the years that followed, when the German soldiers were replaced by Russians, did the villagers begin to miss them and speak of them fondly. The Germans had treated the locals well. They paid for what they drank and ate, down to the last penny, and they played with the children and gave them chocolate. The charm of their blue eyes would stay with the Tântavans, in contrast to the Russians, who behaved like wild beasts. Rapes and robberies came one after another with the Russians, and not even the movies with dumb, evil German characters, nor the propaganda for Soviet heroes, nor the slogans like