aici<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\u201cWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming! Don\u2019t worry!\u201d, the Americans said on the radio at night. \u201cWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming!\u201d, grandpa heard up in the attic.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t been through all that, even if I was already born; I was too young to understand it. But I have been told this with in such details, that I can see it happening every time, without having to challenge my imagination at all.<\/p>\n
The second day, the third day, grandpa was walking again thoughtful in his baggy pants \u2013 ending with golden buttons on his tartan socks \u2013 freshly shaved, though he wasn\u2019t about to go anywhere, and angry, in the living room, in front of the glass or by the Budha sakyamuni carpet which he had bought in Constantinopole (it had been woven in Brusa and had the year written in one corner:1987), on which a wooden mosaicked Mephisto reigned \u2013 with nacreous eyes and the painting would follow you no matter which side you looked at it from. This was one of my childhood horrors. Especially at dusk, I was always worried about how to cross the living room to the kids\u2019s room fast enough so that our looks shouldn\u2019t meet. It was impossible, every time. And at night, I dreamt that I passed by it and suddenly, I could no longer move my feet, with that paralysing feeling when it\u2019s impossible to run or shout. And then it started smiling at me and blinking regularly and inhumanly. (I would wake up, of course, after these dreams. I never stayed there. The painting is still there in dad\u2019s house, but it died).<\/p>\n
So, the second and the third day, my grandpa was walking anxiously in the living room ( I won\u2019t tell you precisely where, as we will never come to an end). After that, he\u2019d take out a brand new deck \u2013 and you\u2019ll see why! \u2013 of cards and play the simplest and the most stupid Solitaire\/Patience form that I have ever seen.\u00a0 After shuffling the deck, the cards are dealt in four piles. Each pile has a card above \u2013 that is, in the back \u2013 and another one under. The card above each pile is turned up. If the cards match, two by two (or even all four), then it\u2019s a win. If not, each pile is turned up, when necessary, constantly trying to find a two by two match. It may seem quite difficult, as I\u2019ve explained it; but, in fact, it\u2019s stupidly easy.<\/p>\n
Grandpa was an educated man. Now I am certain he deliberately had chosen this stupid patience just to punish their lack of imagination and legendary pragmatism. What can I tell you, the old man had hit them hard, but they stroke back. A win it was, but after a few jolly good days seasoned with Karl May long readings \u2013 grandpa had the complete series in German printed in Vienna, with fascinating bindings \u2013 there was no change in the objective reality at all, so the bloody cards were thrown in the fire. And they bought others. And so on.<\/p>\n
For a long time, we, the kids, called this patience \u201dThe American patience\u201d, even if we used it out of less reactionist impulses and, eventually, with a more easily obvious ending: \u201cI\u2018m being examined or not\u201d, \u201cthey get me a sleigh or not\u201d, \u201cthey learn about me breaking the grandfather\u2019s clock glass or not\u201d, \u201cI go unvaccinated or not\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n
In fact, grandpa did not love Americans. He loved Greek and Latin which had just been taken out of the school matters. Grandpa, who was a teacher, wished Greek and Latin were studied in school.<\/p>\n
This story with the ongoing Patience winning and the guys still not getting there, made him turn away his thoughts from the card games. So, at night, he would go up again in the attic and turn on the radio and hear:<\/p>\n
\u201dWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming! Don\u2019t worry!\u201d<\/p>\n
And Greek and Latin were still not studied in school.<\/p>\n
All this until one night. I don\u2019t want to tell you that Greek and Latin have been brought back in school since, but it\u2019s worth telling what happened.<\/p>\n
Mad about all and everything, the old man \u2013 a hardy man, as a matter of fact \u2013 grabbed the radio set and threw it out on the attic window, along with an absolutely memorable triple imprecation:<\/p>\n
\u201dYou scoundrels! Scumbags! Sons of bitches!\u201d<\/p>\n
Following a Physics law, apparently not really less objective than the whole historical process which had stirred grandpa\u2019s hysteria, the device set out to the ground by reason of gravitational acceleration proportionally applied to its mass. What I want to say is that the radio set fell with lightning speed \u2013 plus grandpa\u2019s realeased fury \u2013 and it would definetely have touched the Earth if it hadn\u2019t slowed on its way down, hitting the branches of the silver fir tree in front of the house.\u00a0 From the ground, the show could have been absolutely hallucinating: just imagine the radio cover opening from the shock and all the pieces inside scattering through the fir tree. With a bit of imagination \u2013 and a bit of remanent electric power \u2013 think of the flashing lamps here and there in the fir tree like a fantasy \u2013 and maybe with a bit of sound, too: \u201cWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming!\u201d \u2013 Christmas tree.<\/p>\n
Well, of course, it wasn\u2019t exactly like that. But that whole Philips 1930 device \u2013 they had lots of pieces back then \u2013 was scattered through the fir tree, indeed.<\/p>\n
Next morning, before going to school, grandma stopped by Mr. Zeller, a German mechanic who, now and then, fixed the Rast & Gaser sewing machine. Very helpful, he came and, after carefully having investigated the situation, he took the big double ladder which served to whitewashing the outside walls of the house and, with Vera\u2019s help, our housekeeper, he collected the pieces of the deceased from the fir tree, and then carefully set them up in the completely untouched box. Even the thick-glassed tuning dial could be placed back.<\/p>\n
\u201cHmm, what a Philips!\u201d, Mr. Zeller exclaimed in delight, a true aesthete in his job\/field. Wirklich ausgezeichnet!<\/em> And he went on working passionately, using the scoldering iron\u00a0 that spread a smell of hot pan. I think he also added some spare pieces from the Rast & Gasser or other different machines he had fixed. Fact is that in just a few days \u2013 Mr. Zeller would come round every morning now, turning this delicate repair into a great feast \u2013 the machine was working again. Perfect. Mr. Zeller, an old-fashioned family man, took no penny for this performance which, off the record, could have severely stained his biography. But things change at a terrible pace in this world. Much later, after grandpa had died, this Philips became mine \u2013 by law or by nature, I don\u2019t know – and I didn\u2019t use it for a while because I had a transistor radio. I got a cheap pick-up\/magnetic cartridge after that, with no amplifier and I was advised to use the old Philips as a speaker. It worked just lovely. It seems the Philips speakers are exquisite and unique. So I wired the new pick-up to the radio and I delighted myself listening to my first disc: \u201cKalinka, Kalinka, Kalinka moia!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Dumitru Radu Popa (USA) translated from Romanian by Olimpia Mihai pentru versiunea rom\u00e2n\u0103 click aici \u201cWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming! Don\u2019t worry!\u201d, the Americans said on the radio at night. \u201cWe\u2019re coming! We\u2019re coming!\u201d, grandpa heard up in the attic. I haven\u2019t been through all that, even if I was already born; I was too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[704,22],"tags":[592,1151,691,1116,312],"class_list":["post-5764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-29-30","category-short-story","tag-dumitru-radu-popa","tag-egophobia-29-30","tag-olimpia-mihai","tag-short-story","tag-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-1uY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5764"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6348,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions\/6348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}