Artemis Artemis graced me with abundant verdure the days when I celebrated glorious, free ancient spring charms ravines with oleanders deep chasms filled with the song of Eros a meaning as easy to decipher as kissing the soft mound of a woman time of the vernal equinox truth, no less important than my sexual arousal deep in moist caves where my mind always ran what I always wanted innocent shivering lip of the virgin just before a kiss like the other side of the sky where something hides as close as in my soul like a wishing fountain full of coins dreams that appeared before the end of a day’s toil another martyr another sacrifice another blessing
…unimaginable—slipped like a cold draft between the ancient walls, disturbing the settled kingdom of silence scented with incense, centuries- old furniture, glue and leather-bound books, and reached us, first-year theology students, whom the authorities had ordered—for the first time in the country’s history—to report for shortened military service. Standing there, looking at one another in confusion, with bitterness thickening inside us, we felt that a new will, a new blind and impersonal force, was sliding into our lives. We packed. Then each of us set out for home by bus, train, whatever he could find, so that the next day he could report to the draft board corresponding to his place of residence. There we underwent the examinations. Naked, we had to stand before the officers seated at a long table and the military doctor, who declared every recruit fit for service. Afterwards, hundreds of young men lined up in the courtyard, waiting for their names to be called and for the slip of paper to be placed into their hands, before setting off toward the station with their wooden suitcases under the supervision of a corporal. I was sent to Sfântu Gheorghe. The barracks we entered resembled nothing I had known before. There was no sense of home within it, but neither was there outright cruelty—something even worse filled the place: walls built out of a peculiar indifference, a world in which suffering was not punishment, but a natural condition. The company assembled from Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant seminarians seemed like some grotesque metaphor, as though the many stories, ideas and hopes hidden behind different religions had all been stripped bare at once, only to freeze together into a single common experience: subjugation. Among the officers there were some who treated the whole thing as an amusing game; for others it seemed almost a ceremonial duty to show us—those who spoke about God, prayed to Him, followed His commandments—what it was like when not heaven commanded, but they did. And we, who until then had believed the suffering of the body to be only temporary, now discovered that the suffering of the soul was far slower, far more insidious and enduring.
This time, like no other, I think of you lonely soul, stranger passerby. Friends and lovers were around you (am I right or your eyes were saddened?)
Not even one lover or a friend who in an hour such as this hour would shake your hand. (Can I protect your legacy from the false fame?)
No one stood close to you, no one was there even one you might dare call your friend your Fate’s provocation, your shriek in the silent loneliness that scares you.
Hideously alone, with the chiton of your dream permanently ripped you marched to a famous country that vanished in the deep heart of infinity
