Excerpt
In summer the house filled up. The large family swelled even
larger. For weeks our sisters’ friends and classmates vacationed
with us. Teachers visited our much older brother as well,
even some who taught us at school. It felt strange seeing them
“in civilian clothes,” sometimes lying in bed beside our brother,
as though characters had stepped out of a book’s pages. That
was when I learned that the same person, in different places
and under different circumstances, can represent entirely different
things.
Life was never dull. Perhaps I could even call childhood beautiful,
had our father not been so terrifyingly aggressive and brutal.
But because of that, beauty always remained a conditional memory,
one that can only be recalled once we first accept everything
that came with it.
Now I know: childhood is not an idyllic beginning but a labyrinth.
It is difficult to escape not because we become lost, but
because every path seems familiar. And perhaps that is why we
return to it again and again — not from nostalgia, but because it
was there we first learned that danger and wonder are often simply
two names for the same thing.
I began writing early, at a time when I still did not know exactly
what writing was for. I only felt there was something inside me
that could not fit anywhere else. I sent my poems to a national literary
competition and won second prize. At thirteen, the Bucharest
children’s magazine Jóbarát published my poem Dictionary. It felt
good. Not because of glory, but because it confirmed something
for me: what I carried within myself had shape, language, weight.
I was consciously preparing for a literary life while the outside
world knew nothing of it.
The children of the street knew nothing of this side of me. Among
them, I was the Indian chief. Our wars were imaginary, fought
against neighboring streets with shouting, running, sticks. I never
fought. Yet the question always stirred somewhere inside me: what
would happen if the situation ever became real? What could I do if
retreat were no longer possible?
Libros Libertad 