Midus

Publicat la 18 noiembrie 2017

I grew up in a dystopian society in an Eastern European country.

Snow covering the earth with thick blankets during long winters, and bathing in the Danube all summer long, were common things in those days. Sandwich biscuits with cocoa filling, wrapped in a sunny yellow package, were a delight during long summer holidays spent by the pool. Those were the first years. It was just the beginning of my life. It was also the beginning of the end of an era, the end of a dystopia I used to live in without even knowing that word back then: dystopia.

School started just fine, and the bus used to carry my classmates and me from our neighbourhood to school and back home. I remember those fat buses with their noisy engines. When they accelerated, we used to sit on the back seats and shout at each other, but no one could hear a thing!

Then the buses were replaced by newer ones.

Wow! Sleek, elegant, slim, shiny! And suddenly, two new versions were roaming the same old streets. Their diesel engines were so silent, so smooth! Within a few years, these shiny buses became crowded, and larger articulated buses came along. The industrial city by the river needed a large workforce, so the buses carried workers alongside schoolboys and schoolgirls like us.

In time, the buses became so crowded that one day I was literally swept along by the crowd, and by the time we reached our destination, my feet hadn’t even touched the floor!

Those were the last buses to be seen regularly on the streets. Then, one day, I had to walk about four kilometres. That was the distance between my home and my school, the oldest school in town, established in 1884. Buses no longer roamed the streets unless it was time to carry workers to and from their shifts.

So children, and everybody else, had to walk according to their daily routines and needs.

Winter. Snow.

I was walking towards my school, watching my steps, when I noticed something green in the snow. I bent down and picked up a wristwatch with a metal bracelet. It had a round, green dial decorated with vertical, wavy patterns. Its hands were golden. Its brand was the same as mine: Luch, a Soviet watchmaker.

My own golden watch had a square case, a mother-of-pearl dial, and golden hour markers and hands.

I was fascinated by watches. I had a genuine technical curiosity about how things worked, and whenever I got hold of an object that caught my interest, I would try to take it apart. I didn’t realise at that age that watch mechanisms required specialised precision tools. Without them, my curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I ended up damaging the delicate mechanism of the little Luch, tangling its hairspring.

I kept the watch.

A few years later, when I was in the eleventh grade, I qualified for the national vocational skills competition. It was held at Electrocontact, in Botoșani. A classmate and I were accompanied by one of our teachers, a woman who was actually an engineer and taught us one of our technical subjects.

The journey by train took us from early morning until late in the evening. It was spring break, and the weather back home was sunny and pleasant. It remained that way until we passed Bucharest. After that, the sky began to cloud over. Somewhere around Bacău, it started raining.

By the time we reached Botoșani, it was snowing. There was already about twenty centimetres of snow on the ground when we stepped off the train.

Our teacher, dressed for the spring weather we had left behind, was certainly not prepared for that.

The long journey gave us plenty of time to talk. We hardly knew each other outside the usual teacher-student relationship. Before becoming a teacher, she had worked as an engineer at the railway carriage factory.

At some point, she told us about a winter when heavy snow covered the town. On her way to work, she had lost a wristwatch given to her by her husband.

She described it.

I listened.

A woman’s watch. A metal bracelet. A green, mother-of-pearl dial.

I remembered the little watch I had found in the snow years earlier.

Could it have been hers?

The route she used to take to the factory was the same one I walked every day to school. There had been a winter with snow up to our knees. The watch I had found was a woman’s watch, with a metal bracelet and a green, iridescent dial.

All the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit.

What was I supposed to tell her? That I might have found her watch? That I had taken it apart and damaged its delicate mechanism? That I had managed to tangle its hairspring?

I felt ashamed of what I had done. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure it was her watch.

I would have liked to have enough money to have it repaired and give it back to her. But I didn’t. And I didn’t have the courage to ask my parents for the money. I knew how hard they worked for it, and how easily such a request could have turned into an uncomfortable conversation.

So I chose to leave the watch lost.

I never told her about it, even though she continued to teach me in the following years.

The watch eventually disappeared from my own collection, too. I no longer have it.

Perhaps its destiny was to be lost rather than worn.

I was nineteen when the Revolution came. Everything changed.

A Western-like world was promised instead.