He was a young man with a bright future, nothing would've foreshadowed misfortune. At 18 years old, despite losing his leg in an accident, his great love for the mountains remained the same. So, with the prosthesis, he started climbing and climbing. And he wouldn't stop. He saw the entire greatness of nature through his magical lens. An Edelweiss here, a Bluebell there. Sometimes, he even saw the Milky Way, not only with the corner of his eye, but in its entire grandeur. It was his thousand-star hotel ceiling.
Ionuț Morariu
I killed a man in the mountains. That's the whole story. I don't regret it, even if every soul represents a planet. With its own geography. And you need a map to unravel its meaning. The dead has waters, hills and plains. But the most beautiful ones are the mountains. Because at the mountains, even the meaningless death of a meaningless man acquires enormous dimensions and every soul is a planet. I killed a man. I hanged myself from the top of a fir tree. And, as any other man, I threw up final words, ultimate and supreme. The mountain came to Muhammad in the end.
Marian Bircea
He was my friend, a brilliant student, a biospeleologist, Romanian's great hope at alpinism. On Christmas Eve, he had set off properly equipped from Gilău commune towards home. Lots of snow. At Iara commune he vanished. We started looking for him the next day while it was snowing. We found him covered in savins and with a beautiful smile on his face, sitting under a fir tree near Buru village. He comes into my mind every time I see motorized, poorly equipped or rebellious tourists writing stupid reviews. The mountains don't punish anyone, but they most certainly don't get over the lack of respect and ignorance.
(Translated by Cristina-Andreea Dobre / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.