October 2024

My Life in Romania: The Path of the Camp

by Alice Ceacareanu

Our flat near the single-door residential elevator was mostly quiet except for the mornings. Should the alarm clock fail, the clonking of the residential elevator’s door closing would make up for it promptly. Soon, the smoke of the rushed fried breakfast spreading out in a swirling dance with the smoke of my mother’s Carpathians unfiltered cigarettes would ring my urgency bell: I had to run to school before the sun got too high. Everything was unusually close to where we lived. Lacking any joy or symmetry, the narrow alleys between the grey blocks guided both children’s steps, and low-flying pigeons searching for sandwich crumbs carelessly dropped on the way to school. Too small to buffer the wind whistling through the alleys, the young trees barely made their presence known. Shadowless and grey, their frozen branches and the pigeons’ flapping wings blended seamlessly with the blocks into one massive brutalist depiction of communism standing in the wind. Same as the others, I believed in it and was tremendously proud for reasons I didn’t know.

That neighborhood was a communist Petri dish. Ceausescu himself by his unlimited power ordered that place – the “Path of the Camp” – to be built from the ground up into an exemplary utopia that fulfilled every efficient concept proposed or recently acknowledged by sociology, urbanism, and architecture. From the type and number of stores to the placement of playgrounds and schools and the precise length of alleys that we, the children, had to walk to schools, cinema, or bakery, was all computed by an ever-watching sick mind. Yet, the snow or muddy footprints I left behind rushing to school calloused the alley year after year weathering the same ignorance that governed us all: I knew none of these and I wasn’t meant to.