Bucharest.

The first half of the year, after the fall of communism, was for me a confusing time. My mind kept trying to put things in order and couldn't. I'd had a strange dream.

I'd dreamed myself in the garden down in the valley, where my grandmother grew vegetables and flowers. Actually, I wasn't in our garden but in the one next to it, old Dumitru's — the miller, my grandfather's brother. I couldn't see the mill, though I should have. Behind me was a white, shining presence, a woman, and I was holding a basket of Easter eggs — only they weren't dyed. One egg rolled out of the basket and fell into the grass. I bent down and picked it up out of the grass, turned to the woman of light behind me, and said: "Nothing happened to it." Then I set it carefully back in the basket, where all the other eggs had cracked shells. I felt an urgent need to decipher this dream. Influenced by Jung, perhaps, I knew my subconscious was telling me something important — something that, in the din of messages and events of January 1990, had escaped me. I had to know what. Naturally, my first thought went to the Romanian political scene, where events kept unfolding that seemed not to connect to one another, and my mind — used to interpreting social facts and phenomena — was at an impasse. All the more so because the dream — I remember it well — had come to me the night before the 12th of January, a day of national mourning to commemorate the dead of the December revolution, begun in the morning at St George's Church in Bucharest and ended in the evening in a vast demonstration to bring down Ion Iliescu's FSN.

Every interpretation I gave it collapsed, one after another. The dream was short and clear. It had shown me, beyond doubt, the archetype of the Mother Goddess, radiant in the Eden of childhood — but there was something more. The powerful symbol of the Easter egg, white, as if wrenched out of the basket I held in my hand — that was me, cast out of my nest. My destiny seemed to be in danger. My subconscious was warning me, but at the same time telling me I would have the strength to come through the events unharmed. And if I wasn't quite "in my own garden" — which meant a certain insecurity — I was at least in old Dumitru's garden, one I'd known well since childhood. The mill I couldn't see but felt present meant that things would not return to their normal course within any foreseeable time.

Our existence in Bucharest ran by fast, like a torrent. Five years of squandering ourselves in a world that kept composing and decomposing itself. An anomic society, values turned upside down, individual sediment turned into courses of action, revolutions and counter-revolutions, social violence and conflict inside very nearly every individual. Capitalism was reconstituting itself, and that had its tragicomic notes, however you looked at things. The culmination, for me, was the June Mineriad — that catastrophe which bore witness that, for the interests of an oligarchy, no effort was spared, not even that of throwing a country into civil war. Our good luck was that no ethnic or religious foundation could be found for it.

What's certain is that the day they brought the miners up from underground, loaded them onto trains and hauled them to Bucharest to "sort out" (!) the University Square movement — the 13th of June, 1990 — was for me, literally, a day of terror. I knew a primitive male mass had been activated and given free rein to run wild, with the illusion that it was the saviour of the nation, an illusion driven like a nail into its "collective brain." I had one obsession. To keep Felix talking on the phone. To convince him to stay home. I was right, because the offices of "Zig-Zag" were ransacked by the "miners." Felix complied, within the limits of what he could manage, but he surely knew there was no point resisting that black tide.

Even though I knew perfectly well the miners had been nothing but pawns, I could no longer go back to work. I took my paid leave, plus the maximum of unpaid leave, and left for Bucharest to look for a new job.

The summer of '90 was beautiful. Felix was living in a studio flat near the Polytechnic. I savoured the atmosphere at "Zig-Zag," the weekly made famous by Ion Cristoiu, the enthusiasm of journalists making a "free press," the colourful, novel, captivating Bucharest of the summer of 1990. Only one event disturbed that summer. Our flat in Petroșani was broken into — by "miners," of course. By autumn, I'd transferred Alin to the computer-science high school in Bucharest, managed to come through an interview for a post at the Ministry of Culture, where Andrei Pleșu was rebuilding his team, and we became "emigrants" in Bucharest for the next three years. We rented all over Bucharest, from Drumul Taberei to Doamna Ghica and Parcul Tineretului, with a somewhat longer stint in Crângași. We gave up the flat in Petroșani, were allocated a unit in the unfinished blocks toward Piața Alba Iulia, and became the first residents of block J5, in 1993, in a rather gloomy October. The decision to move was quick, and — naturally — it was Felix who made it.

"No sense moving again, to the devil knows where!" he said. "We'll manage somehow!"

We packed our things, shaking each garment free of any cockroaches, which quite literally ruled the flat Mircea Ghițulescu had let us live in while he was director of the National Theatre in Cluj.

That was when Felix abandoned "Erika." He told me Mircea Ghițulescu had asked him to leave her with him for a while, that he needed a typewriter. Even now I can see her before my eyes, abandoned and sad, on a balcony that looked out over Parcul Tineretului.

The first night, we made our bed out of our own clothes, layered on a sheet of plastic, straight on the concrete screed. A little while after we blew out the candles, billions of mosquitoes — gathered from all the unfinished blocks that filled the area between Piața Unirii and Piața Alba Iulia — invaded us. A black swarm so dense you couldn't clearly see the walls of the room. They had come in through the water pipes in the bathroom and the kitchen. We fought them hard all night long, with torches of twisted paper and rags we set alight all through the flat.

The flat was in "Ceaușescu's civic centre." It was a very "romantic" alternative to our wanderings through so many of Bucharest's nooks and corners. First of all, it was unfinished. We managed to fit it with new joinery and a metal door, a very solid one. Since it was on the top floor, we knocked a hole in the kitchen ceiling to make a flue and bought a diesel stove. Felix was amused by the idea that we had central heating — this because we'd torn down the wall separating the kitchen from the spacious, two-metre-wide hall. We tapped into the building-site electricity, on a "flat rate," and got our water from a public tap in the neighbourhood. We rigged a pulley on the balcony and hauled the water up to the sixth floor in white canisters, twenty litres each. We had about ten of them.

The neighbourhood was deserted. At night it felt like being in a forest, but our block stood next to the Vitan post office, and we could get home on the trams that ran along the old Calea Dudești. Encouraged by us, the neighbours gradually began to take over their allocated flats; we came together in an association and bought our flats, unfinished as they were. Even though only about two families actually moved in — and that not until spring — most of the neighbours began doing theirs up.

Everything had been stolen. Joinery, plumbing, and on the lower floors even the radiators and the bathtubs. To live in the centre of Bucharest as if in a forest was a real challenge, no joke. But we had a metal door, very solid, and we were able to bring in our furniture and, above all, the library we'd stored in the meantime at Călimănești — which was good. From Brăila we brought a big Persian carpet and a very beautiful oleander, gifts from Felix's mother. That was how we got through the winter, and toward the start of spring I whitewashed — in fact I painted — all the walls, and old Costică, a good-natured fellow who'd worked on Casa Poporului, laid the floor and wall tiles. Felix did the floors in planking. By the autumn of 1994, after a year of almost unbearable torment, our home had become interesting, at least in appearance — because running water, gas, and heat, other than from our "central" stove sitting in the kitchen, we still didn't have.

What else had happened to us in the meantime?

After the original editorial team at Zig-Zag was "broken up" by the paper's owner, who replaced Ion Cristoiu with Adrian Păunescu, Felix moved to "Cațavencu." I liked the magazine a great deal and bought it religiously, saying:

"Let's give these likeable lads a bit of encouragement!"

For Felix, the magazine "Cațavencu," then "Academia Cațavencu," among whose founders he counted himself, became his second nature. Especially "Academia Cațavencu."

The idea for the famous press "coup" — putting out an issue of "Scânteia" — was his; it sold three hundred and sixty thousand copies. He first proposed it to Ion Cristoiu, who was amused, but... it wasn't his kind of press. As for Ovidiu Nacu, who claims the idea, his merit is to have financed this "bluff." Anyway, what matters is that the impact of that one-off issue of "Scânteia" was a collective explosion. Queues formed at the kiosks and the paper sold out almost instantly. The layout, the headlines, the photographs were those of the established daily of Romania's communist press; the texts, though, were "Cațavencian." On the metro, in the street, people read "Scânteia" and giggled, or even laughed out loud. There were also a few who flung the paper away in fury. It was a collective catharsis, a mass exorcism.

When Ovidiu Nacu steered the magazine toward sex and pornography, Felix joined the conspirators, but he did it with regret. He had grown attached to Ovidiu and Irina Nacu.

At "Academia Cațavencu" he was part of the magazine's board, and as head of the investigations desk the third page — the exposés — fell to him. He had a remarkable sociological intuition and a firm command of interrogation techniques, having been on the receiving end of them in abundance. He was a convinced anti-communist, and for the Securitate men he held a deep antipathy. He tracked them and went after their businesses on a principle he'd firmly laid down: "Tangle 'em up, devil take it!" He rose into the top rank of the new journalists who came to the fore after 1990, and the proof of his notoriety is to be found in the pages of Corneliu Vadim Tudor's magazine "România Mare" — in that period in thrall to the communist-Securitate mafia then congealing, and to Ion Iliescu, whom Felix had declared to be a KGB man.

"We're colleagues at România Mare now, Pleșu included," Mircea Dinescu joked, when they founded "Academia Cațavencu."

We saw each other in the morning and late in the evening. Day after day. For my part, I'd become a devoted servant of the Ministry of Culture, even if the only minister I truly liked was Andrei Pleșu. In the nearly five years I stayed there, some six ministers passed through the ministerial office on the first floor of Casa Scânteii, the last being Marin Sorescu. I liked what I did; it was a resettling of cultural administration on "new principles," those laid down by Andrei Pleșu, and I upheld them, even if not everyone around me did. I roamed the country, met a great many people, and understood that, first of all, a society resettles into the riverbed of the natural through culture — through its traditional public festival, through spiritual communion. That was what Andrei Pleșu had asked me about in the fifteen minutes of the interview, and I must have answered well, because a week after that interview he hired me.

The break that came between Felix and the magazine "Academia Cațavencu" fell heavily, like a black layer of volcanic ash that had hung over his destiny for a whole decade — ever since that fateful year 1984, when he'd been thrown out of the theatre in Petroșani. He'd been naïve enough to hope the world really could have changed, though he knew it hadn't.

After a very short stint at the newspaper "Ziua," where he never quite reached common ground with Sorin Roșca Stănescu, Felix decided:

"We're moving to Călimănești!"

I resisted with all the strength I had. He had darkened inside. He'd become impenetrable. Felix no longer laughed. That was unimaginable. Okay. The Cațavencu lot had slammed him to the ground, Sorin Roșca Stănescu was a slippery character — as later proved true — but Bucharest was big, I tried to argue against this unsettling decision. He gave me a concise explanation, because I was lost in bewilderment.

"The free press is dead. If you attack a politician — Năstase, say — no problem. He can lose his post or his seat in Parliament. But if you take on a billion lei, that one wipes you out, doesn't think twice about it. And I don't intend to fall in line. I can't. That's that."

In February 1995, all sorts of buyers began wandering through our home. On the 15th of March, after settling Alin into his dormitory, I woke as if from a heavy sleep, in the clearing at the entrance to Călimănești, in Seaca. The car was packed with luggage. It was a gorgeous day.

"How the hell did you have the nerve to be born in a place this beautiful?" Felix asked me.