Paromita’s Reviews > The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceausescu's Romania > Status Update

There’s something I still don’t know to this day, though: is there a form of laughter that is more profoundly sad than weeping? A laughter that has fallen on its head, tumbled upside-down into an abyss? At any rate, a laughing fit is harsh and cutting, it hurts inside, it is an attack, an extravagance, an outbreak of all sorts of things – but it is no outbreak of joy.

But what remains incomprehensible to me to this day are my fits of laughter. I often felt compelled to laugh at the most inappropriate moments: when something valuable dropped to the floor and shattered, when someone fell and hurt themselves.

I think one can be just as alarmed by unexpected tenderness as by unexpected violence.

Superstition,... is poignant. There is something magical about it, it is basically poetry – the poetry of people who do not write. These are connections that transcend themselves and are dauntingly beautiful, linguistically and figuratively, when I look back on them today. But when you practise superstition, there is nothing poetic about it any more – then it is a reality just like any other.

Darkness is eerie, because it encloses you and you drown in it – your surroundings disappear, you can’t see yourself. ..In sleep, you are taken away from yourself. But we’re lucky that in sleep we don’t feel the uncertainty of the night. When you wake up, it’s over: you are yourself again, you’re like new. And if you don’t wake up, you’re dead. ...Darkness shows you what death will look like when it comes.

In response to such slip-ups, my grandmother would also sometimes say: don’t think where you shouldn’t. Where, she said, as if when thinking one went to an actual place – down an overly long street or into an unfamiliar room.

Perhaps I turned away from potential allies because I knew that what was inside my head was forbidden, because I didn’t believe myself to be capable of being normal. Because I did in fact know that it wasn’t normal to think that plants walked around at night, that life threads our breaths on to a chain and measures them, that the Earth gobbles us up. It was surreal.

When you write down your childhood, it becomes worse than it was. There is a sleight of hand at play in the child’s perspective in literature. There is admittedly a lot that is real in there, but it’s all conveyed through words arranged in sequence ...– whereas when you were living through it, everything was mixed up: one experience on top of the other, simultaneous and piled up.

As for people like us, we set our minds to work in order to escape how we are feeling. But we are no different to my mother; we simply put up different defences. For my mother, working was her natural disposition. It was mechanical, she didn’t get tired; she was both entirely absent and completely present while doing it.

If I had been born elsewhere or had different parents, I would muse every now and again, would I now be a different child? Or would I be the same child, regardless of who my parents were and where I was born? Would I always remain the same child, fused to my skin, regardless of what I wanted to be and how many plants I ate? Does everyone remain fused to themselves?