Excerpt
And I nodded. Not because I understood, but because in those
days every nod was a form of survival. I did not mean to express
agreement; I only wished to avoid worse consequences. And back
in the barracks, nobody asked me anything. Silence became the
permanent environment in which I could exist, had to exist.
My days passed alike: morning drills, roll call, marches, lunch in
the popota, pebbles in the bean stew, half-washed aluminum plates
and spoons, lights out, officers shouting, the exhausted gazes of
the others, the musty air of the cazarmă. Military life became one
endlessly repeating monotony. Yet inside that monotony something
almost imperceptible but unstoppable kept growing: expectation.
Because I knew — or believed I knew — that it was only a matter
of time before they came for me. That one night, in the middle of
darkness, the order would arrive, and they would take me to prison,
to some cold, windowless place I no longer even dared to imagine,
for I feared that if I imagined it, it would become real.
Thus my days passed. In waiting. Tuesdays and Wednesdays,
whole weeks slid soundlessly into one another, yet the hours did
not pass; they only receded farther away. Walking among the soldiers,
it sometimes seemed as though no one had noticed anything,
as though I had truly succeeded in obeying the order: pretending
everything was normal. As though the words nothing, no trouble,
all is well truly meant exactly that. I lived through — and within —
a poem I had not even yet read.
And yet anxiety inhabited every movement I made. When the
captain crossed the courtyard and let his eyes drift across the assembled
ranks, it felt as though he were searching for me specifically,
or watching to see how long I could endure this existence
built upon silence.
Time passed in a crushing uncertainty. In a vulnerability that
seemed endless. And there was the thought which no longer existed
as an abstract possibility but spread through my chest like physical
pain: Life imprisonment. I went on performing the role of my own…
