When I think of the cabbage rolls of my childhood, the masquerade ball from third grade comes to my mind. I was a princess, because I only had my own self (sic[1]), a blue floral dress and the glossy shoes, a few sizes too big, left from my sister, at hand. I made an elegant mask out of a cardboard covered with imported chocolate tinfoil, attached to a stick with glue. For the curls, I used my mother's hair curlers, some pink and hard plastic rollers with which I prepared the cabbage rolls in my hair the entire night.
[1] A word meaning so, used in parentheses in a reproduced text to show that it is rendered accurately, although it appears to be erroneus.
Daniela Toader
Do you remember? My napkin collection. Leaves. Flowers. Monkeys. In a few years, the savanna. That place I always wanted to go to. Dreams, you say? My badge collection. Hero of socialist labour. Unit commander. Killed in the line of duty. At the same time, my collection of Pif magazines. We used to buy them, look through them, add some grass and dirt that we had plucked, a few small stones, a bit of red brick sauce and we enjoyed the most delightful cabbage rolls on earth. Then our parents would call us into the house and we would go to sleep. Do you remember?
Ionuț Tuhoarcă
Because my grandmother used to tell me: Here, take this, so you have enough money for a cake or for a math notebook, but don't let her see it. "Her" being my cousin, who was watching us through the door hole and grinning. I got them. Because I was like all other people. When someone asked me whose child I was, I answered accordingly: Firița's or Blăgelu's. Because when she made cabbage rolls, she smacked her with the spoon over her hand. And she put them nicely on my plate. Him first. Because she would not even give it to the chickens. Because her back hurt. And she would have liked to have help.
(Translated by Claudia Cioplea / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.