PART ONE — opening

My dear, I ask myself: why do I play World of Warcraft? To write a book?

Perhaps...

Any Eden is welcome.

Today I walked through the forest with a witch. She called herself a reader of cards, but to me she brought back every witch I had known in childhood.

I wanted to show Anița how the sulphur springs come up out of the earth. We lost the path, we were turning back, and just as I was explaining to the child that a forest is every bit as deep and drowning as the sea, Marieta — the goatherd — crossed our way. Full of her own importance, like a bracket of tinder-fungus lodged round and firm on the trunk of a beech, she looked us over for a few seconds.

"I'll take you to them," she said simply, and turned back the way she had come.

She walked ahead of us along the narrow path, telling us about the miraculous springs she was opening the way toward, pointing out in the thick of the forest birds' nests, badger setts, and the fresh tracks of wild boar. She stopped. A slab of rock cut clean across the path, forcing us to jump over it.

"Did you know that stone grows too? I can feel it growing," she said to the child, her hand caressing the outline of the rock through the air.

A shiver flashed through me, an unexpected joy. It rose like a geyser of light and froze in the sky for a few seconds. Long seconds, hallucinatorily long, washing away the viscous tissue of all those years in which I kept asking myself how to become stone, how to grow beneath the moon — right there, in that very clearing the goatherd was leading us toward. My mind circled stubbornly around this pivot of light, of joy... In my head I was reciting: "long ago I grazed goats in a leafing grove and in blood-soaked dusks, like dry grass I drank the springs of your brow, and I set out, yes, I set out gathering flowers from within us…"

Meanwhile, Marieta was explaining to Anița how she could cure the rheumatism of her barely fifteen years by bathing in the stream of healing water, and that she must not drink from it, because it was too salty. After the last rains, she and Costică had "seen to" the two springs through which the sulphur water came up out of the earth beneath the roots of a giant beech.

But that is not all. The same woman — a witch, of course — had gathered, a week before, mountain peonies for her teas. Was I meant to remember the Parâng as well? It seemed to me that beginning and end were merging, that I stood at the point where nothing begins and nothing ends. I saw only the arc of the spiral we keep climbing and climbing... only God knows where.

I love the sadness of this world. My time melts into the scorched dust of a country road in one long summer without end. Yes, one long, hot summer...

The world leaves its imprint underground, racing along by metro for hours on end, in that same hot summer, and my son — an albatross with two or three feathers torn out along the way — runs in his turn, breathless, at hundreds of kilometres an hour. It is a disaster... Quite simply, time ignores us! It sinks us into the void. We have no substance for it, not even when we work ourselves to death chasing wildly after some absolute truth, unique and bored with our endless chasing. And, paradoxically, inside ourselves we do not pass.

After denying and forgetting almost everything, I am flooded by an impossible love. The same as it ever was. I love my love. It was always so. I feel that only this way can my soul be saved and become time. And even if it is only a scrap of time, it is enough for me to glimpse a part of perfection, because it exists beyond all denial, beyond scepticism, beyond revolt or despair. I admit it: I am a naked, useless vanity that you ought to ignore, but since that is not quite how things go, I keep withdrawing of my own accord into the shadow of the stone that grows beneath the moon.