In the same direction

[Raluca Enescu]

This is the short story I wrote for A Sea of Words international short story competition- 2009. It tells the story of an ironic (non)-encounter; between a Gipsy boy and a racially prejudiced Romanian girl. Enjoy :)
(This translation is bsed on the one made by A Sea of Words, but slightly modified)

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Thursday. An empty metro station, drenched in an unreal, golden light. On the platform, him and her, very close to one another, both looking straight ahead. Him– dark brown hair, olive complexion, strongly built. You feel warm just looking at him. And, by the way that he stares into space, it seems as though his soul bears an undefined fear; a strange sadness of a man misunderstood – as if the whole world had treated him cruelly and unjustly, and perhaps only the girl standing next to him, her gentle being, her presence could ever confort him. Her – blonde, dainty, delicate, dressed in a puff of blue. She surely needs him, to protect her from this big cold world... They are not touching; and yet, standing there and drawing breath together, they could hardly be closer than you see them now. Behind them, the graffiti on the wall reads: “Love is not when we look at one another; love is when we both look in the same direction.” To their left, an old drawing-room mirror reflects their transfigured profiles: a woman with delicate features, with dark brown hair and olive skin, next to a strongly-built blond man. Instead of the electronic clock that you see usually in every metro station, an immense butterfly with blue wings.
“I made a collage from your photos. Do you like it?”
The man put his hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting at the computer.
“It’s interesting... looks a bit like a Surreal painting.”
“You think?”
“Yes, that butterfly on the wall is very Dali. And I like how you’ve placed them... it’s as though they’ve known one another for ever.”
She leant her head back a little.
“I have an idea. What if you talked to the people from the exhibition, so that they would display this one as well. What do you say?”
He laughed slightly, shrugging his right shoulder. He always did this when he hesitated.
“I really don’t know, but why not? I like it a lot. But still – to take two people who don’t know one another and to put them on display in a picture that portrays them as lovers... Who knows?”
She began to laugh as well.
“Does it really look that convincing? If we just show people the pictures that I used, I don’t see how it could be a problem; I mean, it’s like literature, isn’t it? You see people on the street, then you use their image to make something that’s totally fictional – nobody could really think that it’s anything else.”
“Of course not, that’s not what I meant. Nobody could think that sthis eerie little something with a butterfly on the wall is just a picture that you took somewhere...But it’s art, and that’s the problem. Art doesn’t have much to do with rational thought – art plays with people’s moods and feelings. So that guy and girl in your collage look so intimate that it’s hard not to ask ‘what if they were?’ Do you understand?”
“I see Speaking of which, who are they really?”
“Not a clue; some people I saw a few days ago on the street and I thought they looked interesting. I snapped him yesterday, it was by the University at a bus stop. I saw her down in Dorobanţi. Where all those wannabe chic cafés are, you know? The mirror is from an antique shop, not from around here – could be from when I was in Salzburg if I remember right; and the butterfly is very old...”


Wednesday. A young man with brown hair and an olive complexion stares blankly into nothingness. He doesn’t feel like doing anything. Might better if he just called Mili, to tell her that he just doesn’t feel like it: not coffee, not going for a walk,nothing at all... Just to go home, pull the duvet over his head, and have the whole world just leave him the hell alone. But Mili has probably already left home by now, and anyway it would be a shame; they had not seen one another since highschool.
A cheery voice breaks into his thoughts.
“Hey there, how are you?”
“Hi...”
“Seems to me like you’re a bit depressed?”
“Oh...never mind... just stupid stuff...”
“Come on... what happened?”
“Do you really want to hear me tell my tale of woe for the next half hour?”
She nods yes, with a friendly smile of understanding– yes, bosses, lecturers, the ticket inspectors on the bus... It happens, it happens and how can you help it
“Go on!”
“I was at the cafeteria at the Uni yesterday – and then two guys sit down at the table next to me. Rockers.”
“Oh, nice.”
“Not nice, and you’ll see why. They started talking about what happened in Italy, that scandal about the rapist, Mailat or whatever he’s called...anyhow. And I can hear them – why do people take it out on the Romanians when the Gypsies are to blame; that it’s their fault that the Romanians are persecuted in Italy; that it was Gypsies too who killed that basketball player in Hungary; that the whole lot of them should be deported to India...”
Mili sighs gently. It’s not the first time that she’s heard all this.
“Oh, haven't you noticed blame-shifting is the new Romanian national sport?"
He carries on as though he hadn’t heard her.
“And then they say that Gypsies are a race of thieves and rapists; that all this political correctness will be our downfall; that you can’t be humane to people like that; that Marshal Antonescu knew what he was doing...”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted him gently. “Nutcases who are yearning after Hitler – I’ve met enough of them. There are plenty who want Ceauşescu back,too., if you really wanna know. It’s probably the price we have to pay for freedom of speech.”
“How can, how can they say that kind of thing – that ‘they won’t include in our great nation the vermin that make our country into a laughing-stock’ – can’t they see how pathetic they are?” he carried on, furious. “When they say things like 'these people will never be civilised, there’s no way to do it, send them back to India!....’How? If I were to go to them and say, ‘Look at me, I’m a Gypsy and I don’t steal wallets on the bus and I don’t rape old ladies in Italy, and I don’t stink of filth, and I got into this faculty by my own efforts’ – what would they say? I reckoned they would laugh in my face like morons – so, better not to do anything. Shut up and bear it – what else could I do?”
She squeezed his hand in hers.
“Surely you don’t take it to heart what two crackpots say? And you know you did the right thing just to let them be; I’m telling you, there’s nothing more stupid than getting yourself mixed up in arguments with halfwits. There’s no need to get upsetabout this... What does it matter to you what two idiots you don’t know might think about you? I know that you care what your parents think, and your friends... look,you have us: me, Vic, Laura... but you care about what some nobody on the street thinks? Come on, let’s go somewhere nice, have a pizza with all the trimmings,
drink a beer, a juice, whatever you want – and don’t think about this bullshit any more, okay?”
Of course... You don’t know what it means though until it happens to you – to be humiliated by people who have never looked you in the eye. And how small you feel, how insignificant, when you meet people like that who only live to put everybody else into pigeonholes... No, you can’t know what it’s like when somebody weighs you up for two seconds and then says ‘I don’t expect anything good from you, because your skin is a bit browner than mine.’ Of course when you look at it like that, it all seems absurd. Bloody stupid and absurd... But all the same... all the same...
Someone somewhere thousands of miles away, in Italy or Hungary, did something bad to someone else. Was it your fault, for God’s sake? For God’s sake... What you choose doesn’t count. At all. Because you were born a Gypsy and they’ll all stare at you... For example, that idiot with the fancy camera who chose just this moment to come along and fire off a flashlight in hiseyes...


Tuesday. A café in Dorobanţi. A blonde girl, slim and slight, with an oversized handbag, comes in hurriedly, looking for her friend. She sits down beside her, cheerful.
“You won’t believe what happened to me! I was waiting at the bus stop today and a cute guy, but really cute, came up to me. He had a camera and he’d been taking pictures of the buildings round about, the trees, stuff like that...Anyway, he came up to me, told me that he’s an art photographer and he took my picture as well. He told me that he liked the way blue suits me. So now I’m a work of art, aren’t I, huh?”
“Cool,” her friend agrees, sipping at the straw in her glass of strawberry juice. “And, you got his number or an email, something like that?”
“No, we got separated, my bus came and I was in a hurry. Well, that’s how it goes...”
The blonde girl stares into space for a moment, already smiling a bit less.
“You win some, you lose some. Yesterday some Gypsies stole my wallet. I lost my ID card and my library card, and now I’ve got to run around all week to replace them.”
“Bastards!”
“Gypsies... what do you expect?” she says dismissively.
“So you saw them when they took your wallet?”
“I didn’t see them; I just realised when I got off the bus that I didn’t have it...”
“Well then, how do you know that it was Gypsies?”
She rolls her eyes, exasperated.
“What do you think? Who steals wallets in this country – Swiss bankers? Don’t spring to their defence; just don't – these people don’t deserve it. I’m telling you – I used to think once upon a time that we shouldn’t badmouth the Gypsies, that actually we’re all the same and all of that... Do you know what changed my mind?”
Her friend interrupts her, annoyed.
“Do you really believe that the whole race is to blame for something like that?”
“In a way, you know that they are... They learn that kind of thing in their communities – begging and stealing, right from when they’re little...”
“They’re not all the same – some of them are alright really, they do honest work, some of them even go to university.”
“Oof! Don’t take their side; if you had seen what I had seen, you’d talk like I do.”
“Like what?”
“I had a neighbour, auntie Lili – a very good friend of my mother’s. She was like a real aunt to me. An amazing woman, you know the kind of person you can call at two in the morning and pour your heart out to when you’ve got troubles?”
Her friend looks at her, puzzled.
“Yes, and?”
“Well that’s what I’m telling you. A few years ago, when I was little, a little Gypsy kid who had run away from the orphanage crept up to our apartment block; he slept on the pavement by the doorway for a couple of nights, in a cardboard box. Auntie Lili, good-hearted like she was – I told you, that woman was a saint –took him in, gave him a bath, fed him, and what does the little bastard do? He ran off with all the money he could find, and some jewellery that she had from her mother, heirloom stuff. You can’t do favours to people like that...”


Monday. Not this month, but many years ago. A neighbourhood of looming Communist-era apartment blocks. Blue sky. The golden bracelet on the wrist of the woman with the brown handbag comes undone and falls to the ground. A boy in shorts, with scraped knees, picks up the bracelet and runs after the woman.
“Ma'am!...Ma'am!.... Lady!”
The woman turns quickly and looks him in the eyes.
“Ma'am... your bracelet fell off.”
“Oh my word... it runs trough her head. "Mother’s bracelet. It’s all I have left to remember her by. I used to have a locket with her picture, and some long ear-rings, and a cameo ring. All of them nicked by that little wretch, may God not help him wherever he may benow, roaming around with his dirty drug-addicts. That’s what happens whenyou try to do an act of kindness...”
“Ma'am your bracelet fell off,” repeats the boy with the dark eyes and messy hair.
“Thank you, my lad; this was my mother’s bracelet, it means a lot to me. Here, take this,” she says, taking a bill from her wallet and holding it out to him, “buy yourself an ice-cream. And let me give you some good advice young man,- mark my words well ; you’re an honest boy and if you keep to the right path and work hard, you’ll be a fine man one day. Never though – and remember this well – never get mixed up with Gypsies, because they aren’t human, they’re the worst sort of scum! Do you promise?”
The child looks back at her, scowling, and hands back the banknote.
“I don’t want it!” he says and runs away.


Wednesday. The steps at the National Theatre plaza. The young man with olive hair is sitting there, still staring into space. He’s talking more to himself than to Mili, who sits beside him and listens sympathetically.
“I can’t explain it at all... When I found her bracelet on the ground, and gave it back to her, and then she tells me ‘never get mixed up with Gypsies, because they aren’t human’ and I couldn’t even say to her, ‘Lady, look at me, I’m a Gypsy!’ but I just went home and cried... Mili, I cried like I haven’t cried in all the years since... Even though I know quite well that they’re wrong and that they are makingrash judgements, or that they might have troubles of their own that I don’t knowabout. But it hurts, and there’s no way it couldn’t hurt. Do you understand?”


Saturday. A little street somewhere with old houses. An exhibition of photography and digital art. The photographer is talking to a journalist.
“And this collage,” he says, pointing at the two people waiting in a metro station, surrounded by light and by butterflies, “my wife Maura made this one from some photographs that I took this year...”
Meanwhile a group of young women in brightly coloured short dresses and high-heels gather around the picture.
“Girls, isn’t that Lucia?” exclaims one of them, looking at the photo in surprise.
“Yes, that’s her! She told me that someone had taken her picture on the street; this must be it.”
“Actually,” says the journalist, joining the conversation and turning her back suddenly on the photographer, “I know somebody from that picture too. Him.”
“Wow! He’s cute! He looks... how can I say it... exotic.”
“He’s a really good friend of mine; we sat next to each other for four years in high school. I think I ought to call and tell him about this.”
“Of course you should!” exclaims one of the young women in high-heels. “Come on, let’s call Lucia as well, to come and look!
Two phone calls. Two people set out from different parts of Bucharest. A tram. A taxi. An art gallery that gets more and more crowded. The press. Interviews. The public. He and she make their way through the crowd, to look at their own faces transfigured in a work of art. Now they are standing shoulder to shoulder, his arm so close that it is almost touching hers. They don't see each other but, astonished, surprised, eager, excited as two children, for a moment they are finally looking in the same direction.