Moodshot

THE FISHING ROD

The Danes are the most honest people in Europe. Once, I was with a buddy, a guy named Junghi, in a fishing store. We both loved fishing, and they had all the wonders there – all kinds of fishing rods, state-of-the-art fishing gear, professional equipment. But expensive. I set my eyes on a fishing rod worth 1000 euros. Junghi tells me he knows a guy, a cop, with whom he used to go fishing when he was in Romania. The guy was passionate, full of cash. I quickly took a photo, included the price in the frame, and sent it to him. We wandered around the store a bit. Ding! Message from him. He wrote that he would give us 400 euros if we bought it for him. The store was small, with not many blind spots.

I signaled to Junghi, and we went to the counter. I started asking this and that, confusing the seller. Meanwhile, Junghi went to the shelf and took the fishing rod as if it were his own. In the middle of the room, between the counter and the store exit, there was a concrete pillar, about a meter and a half wide. I led the seller with words to the counter until he perfectly overlapped with the store exit and the pillar. I engaged him in conversation, asking about a jar of bait. As he turned, Junghi made a lateral jump, reaching from the shelf behind the pillar. He practically disappeared from the seller’s sight. The seller returned to the counter, and Junghi stood upright, holding the fishing rod in front of his chest, as if saluting at Buckingham Palace. He was so tense that it seemed like he wasn’t even breathing. I continued talking to the seller, pretending not to understand his explanations while Junghi, walking backward with small, balletic steps, headed towards the exit. I thanked the man for his kindness after hearing the doorbell ring at the entrance.

We left the store. I saw Junghi leaning on the fishing rod. We nodded at each other and went our separate ways. Winter was approaching, and it was getting colder. With the money we got from the cop, I bought a ticket and left Denmark for Spain.

THE ESCAPE

Bob was like a brother to me. When my parents had nothing to put on the table, I received a piece of bread from him to get through the day. When he didn’t have anything to eat either, we both went stealing fruits from people’s gardens. That’s why it was understood that I couldn’t leave him like that.

I climbed onto the building and lay on my stomach to be able to look into the house. Bob patrolled on the balcony like a lion in a cage. You could see the chain attached to his ankle with a heavy, rusty padlock. He nervously told me that he couldn’t reach his father’s toolbox to force it open. His father had tied him to the radiator, and he could only reach as far as the bathroom.

I advised him to find a solution if he wanted to escape. The time was approaching when his father would return from work. He disappeared into the house, and after the neighborhood echoed with bangs, I heard him screaming from inside. He reappeared on the balcony, limping. He had a semicircular wound around his ankle, from which blood was dripping. He told me he had torn off the towel rack and smashed the padlock with it. We stretched as far as we could, with me over the edge of the building and him halfway on the balcony railing. Still, we were about 30 centimeters short of touching each other’s hands.

I noticed a 15 kg bucket of paint in a corner of the balcony. Bob placed it in balance on the balcony railing. It still had paint in it, which increased its stability. I crawled on my stomach over the edge of the building a few more centimeters. Bob took a step on a stool, tapped the bucket with the tip of his foot, touching it superficially, just enough to amplify his jump. I heard the muffled noise he made when he hit the ground, and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the splash of paint rising after the impact. I caught Bob’s hand, and using the inertia of his jump, I pulled him onto the building. Only after seeing him rolling safely on the rooftop did I realize the murmur rising from below, beneath the crowns of the trees lining the path to the entrance. Dozens of neighbors had watched our acrobatics with bated breath. Among them, I saw Bob’s father making his way toward the entrance.

We stopped running behind the boiler room. Bob, panting, asked me where he could go. I didn’t know what to answer. That’s when we both knew that he would return in the evening. Neither of us had anything to eat at home that day, so we went stealing fruits from gardens.

THE BLACK DOG

When I buried my mother, may God rest her soul, it was cold. As we took her out of the chapel, slow and heavy snowflakes were falling. They were as big as fists, tempting you to reach out and grab them. It snowed like that until the end.

In the evening, I sat at home, slouched on the couch, lacking the energy to change the TV program. Suddenly, a howl echoed through the staircase. Wild, like that of a wolf. It was 8 o’clock, and all my neighbors had only children and cats. The howl came again. Long, guttural, filled with loneliness. I opened the door. I was met by a black, bulky dog, with uncertain origins but the size of a shepherd. We looked at each other suspiciously. Then I invited him in. I returned to the living room but left the door ajar. He quickly appeared and settled heavily, making muffled noises, sighing. He curled up and remained that way for the rest of the evening.

In the morning, I felt his breath on my forehead. He tried to sniff me but got too close and touched me with his wet and cold nose. I petted his head, half-asleep. It seemed like his paws were freezing. He played with small steps, licking my hand. I opened the front door. He went out and started descending the stairs. As he descended, he whimpered. Acutely. He descended and lamented. A guttural lament accompanied his steps. At some point, there was silence. I closed the door.

I never saw him again after that.

THE MOBRA

During Ceaușescu’s time, there were only state-owned enterprises here. As far as the eye could see, all these ruins were sections where everything from nuts and bolts to train wheels was produced. Thousands of people worked here day after day. Everywhere around here, production was in full swing. And stealing was rampant.

We were in high school, but we had been stealing since we were ten, and we loved motorcycles. So, we stole a broken-down Mobra from another neighborhood. We took it one night with a friend’s truck. We decided to repair it in the shed of another friend, Kelly, under the light of a car headlight. We disassembled it and decided to rebuild it with parts we would obtain from these workshops.

Kelly lived right next to the fence of the enterprise, on the first floor. We spent a few days observing the security guards. They were fat, lazy, and drunk. After their obligatory rounds, they retreated to the fence of the compound, where they had hidden various bottles of spirits among the weeds. They each took a swig, each from their own poison, until the next round.

One day we waited for them to disperse and jumped directly from Kelly’s balcony over the barbed wire-adorned fence. We wore workshop overalls, which, thanks to the communists’ love for uniformity, did not differ at all from those of the workers in the workshops.

Inside was a hive of activity. We dispersed and each entered a section. There… paradise. Parts were stacked in piles. We boldly loaded up with everything we needed to assemble the Mobra. We left without looking back and, once we reached a less populated area, we sprinted towards the fence.

I held the ladder for Kelly, and he put his foot in the cup made by my hands. That’s when I saw him. Crouched on his haunches, with a small bottle of moonshine in his hand. I froze. The laziest security guard could become, on our backs, a hero of socialist labor. He asked us what we were doing there. I saw Kelly grab the handle of a screwdriver. I would have preferred to go to jail for theft than to have that bloated guy beat us to a pulp.

I remembered that all the guards hid their booze along the fence. I bent down and started clearing the branches of the bushes around us. I spotted, behind a thick stem, a two-liter bottle of homemade booze with a label from Valea Calugareasca. I grabbed it and made a quick left turn. I clinked glasses with him and confessed that we would come back to drown our sorrows when we got a day off from the foreman. Kelly pulled out a pack of Carpați cigarettes and offered him one. The man took it, chewed on it briefly, and lit it. He then advised us to leave our alcohol elsewhere so as not to mix it with the guards’ and walked away, swaying, with an ostentatious innocence. If I think about it, his innocence gave us the gift of a Mobra. We rode it with a clear conscience.

THE INFESTATIONS

In prison, it was like Sodom and Gomorrah. All sorts of disasters kept coming, one after another. We easily got rid of the lice. All it took was a good shave. Then came scabies. That one, brother, is not so easy to escape. And do you know how scabies spreads? Through touch. At first, I had a little between the fingers of my hands and on my feet. Just scratching once in my underwear made it unbearable. Anything I did made it spread even more. I couldn’t sleep at night because of how much I scratched. I shredded my penis scratching it. In the end, they gave us a powder, and we all applied it miraculously. Suddenly, I felt relief. It was like flying. Then came the clothes lice to bring us back down to earth.

Clothes lice are the worst. They only walk on the seams of the clothes and lay their eggs there like fools. They are small, but you can see them. There’s nothing you can do about them. You have to throw away the clothes. I had a tough pair of Nike shorts, and I didn’t want to throw them away. I really liked those shorts. It was a harsh winter, so you know what I did? I took them and put them in a pot, and I boiled them. I boiled them until the fabric almost disintegrated. Then I took them with a piece of wood, quickly took them out the window with scalding water, and left them in the freezing cold for about two days. They became solid. They stiffened worse than concrete. I brought them into the room and let them thaw for a few hours. When they started to soften, I wanted to see what was left of those lice. They were intact. They were moving. I decided to do what everyone else was doing. I started to move the flame of the lighter along the seams. You could hear them crackling from the heat. I felt a perverse satisfaction hearing them crack at the same time my heart was breaking for my favorite shorts that I was destroying. Black burn marks blurred the pattern and color. I had boiled and then frozen them mercilessly, and they didn’t even care. Many had caused great havoc outside, but in prison, those damn lice were the biggest terrorists.