Great Expectations

Adina Colțea
We sat lying in the grass, holding hands, and every time we looked at the same star, we made up a story. It was you who began, because you liked beginnings, and I was the one who developed the core of the story. The ending we uttered together, with our eyes closed, like a canon of happiness assumed beyond words. Time didn't exist then, only the stars gently rotating the celestial vault above our dreams. So it seemed. Then I guess you started to yawn, more and more often and longer and, perhaps without meaning to, you swallowed the universe.
 
 Dan Cazacu
You are the hope of Romania. The first Nobel Prize for Romania will come from you. Rică, the history teacher, put a heavy burden on our shoulders. There were 36 of us in that class, about 10 doctors, about 20 engineers, some teachers, one architect. No Nobel prizes came from us after 40 years. Well, Rică didn't know back then that Elie Wiesel would get the Nobel, he didn't count Palade as one of us, and he didn't even think about the Lenau graduates from Timișoara. But no one imagined that half of us would be abroad.

Carmen Amza
After the euphoria of the days of the Revolution had passed, for me it was on January 12th, my much smarter husband didn't like him since December 22nd, I put all my expectations in the one I saw as a different kind of president and in the party of those with hundreds of years of communist imprisonment. I walked kilometres to collect hundreds of signatures so that he could run for the highest position in the state. You are all frustrated, you didn't get into a position, that's why you are unhappy with us. Who the hell said expectations don't die.

(Translated by Cătălina Colibaba / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)