Reflections and Shadows

Chapter One Romania. Artistic education. Uncles and aunts. A family photograph. I didn't stay long enough to enjoy the "good life" in Romania, as a man of thirty, forty, or fifty, a successful man. There were no special pastimes for young people. I had no rights, and went to high school wearing a name plate with a number, like an automobile. And above all, as long as you had no money, you couldn't enjoy the dreadful freedoms of Romania, which were invariably abuses, to lead the life of the sort of man who, if he has money, can always find people to buy. My childhood, my adolescence in Romania were the equivalent of being a black in the state of Mississippi. There were girls who came down from the mountains to work as servants, and they were treated like savages from the jungle, like slaves; they had almost no rights and immediately became the prey of the masters and sons of the house, of the neighbors. They came from villages as yet untouched by civilization, villages of Tatars and Visigoths, and they arrived in the confusion of a city full of every kind of scoundrel; they were flesh for the whorehouses, and often committed suicide, even for absurd reasons, such as having been unfairly scolded by their mistress or accused of stealing. They doused themselves with kerosene and lit a match. There was plenty of kerosene, which was used in oil lamps. Peddlers went along the street with two drums of oil, yelling, "Gase, gase." Women who kept company with a gasar always smelled of kerosene, and this made other men avoid them. Every so often certain smells that I haven't smelled since I was a child come back to me-not to my nose, like an actual smell, but to the nose's brain. Vague smells, and at the same time specific ones: the smell of autumn; of certain stores; the smell of early winter, when the weather starts to get cold: the first fire in the house, with the lamp lit at five in the afternoon. The metal stove had a special smell when lit for the first time, since the surface had been greased to keep it from rusting. And there was the smell of the oil lamp. I like smelling that odor again, but it can't be called up at will. Still, it sometimes happens that all of a sudden, for some mysterious reason, the memory of that smell comes back to me. Nothing that has been deposited in the memory is lost. Memory is a computer that all one's life goes on accumulating data which are not always used, since man is often like an ocean liner that sets sail with only a single cabin occupied. We ought to be able to use this huge accumulation of data continually, keep it functioning, combine and multiply its elements and reintroduce them into the circuit of our thoughts. So it happens with the return of these smells, deposited many years ago in the memory and now revived. Maybe I'll have the good fortune to find again other things that now seem forgotten. I'd like to be able to go back and see all the things that at the time I stored away without perceiving them, follow myself at the age of ten and judge, with the mind of today, the conditions under which I lived: discovering what, at that time, had been deposited in the computer without my knowing it. I'm very much interested in the time just before my birth, and I'm sorry not to have seen it. I have the feeling that by making a mental effort I might be able to see it. It's a time so close to me that I feel as though I know it quite well, and I'm moved whenever I think of it. Maybe it's because my parents were young and didn't know each other. I grew up without toys. My father was a bookbinder; later he set up a small factory for cardboard boxes, with lots of colored paper and a great supply of glue. The factory had the smell of an artist's studio, of collages, as well as the smell of the ink used on large wooden letters to print the ribbons of funeral wreaths. The femaleSteinberg, Saul is the author of 'Reflections and Shadows' with ISBN 9780375505713 and ISBN 0375505717.