Stories to Be Read at the Train Station

Alina Ilie
The old woman let a tear roll down her cheek and resumed. You see, the story took place here, on this very platform, in the summer of '44. The sun was burning fiercely, but my heart was burning even more. I didn't know whether he was dead or alive, I had only been granted an exemption from the commander to leave the enterprise until the next day. They had told me it was a state secret, but they understood the situation. That train finally arrived, and many people made me startle, but, when I saw him, I could feel my heart jumping out of my chest. I'm here, Ana.
 
 Dana Popescu
Every evening, pale and hopeless, the residents of the only blocks of flats left standing took shelter from the fire coming from the east in the basement of the small station in Borodianka. Among the white livid faces, one could distinguish the little girl in a wheelchair, accompanied by her grandmother, who would try to bring a smile on the child's face by telling her stories of happy lands, where there were no weapons, no cruelty, no war. Since the evening the child had crawled all by herself to the shelter, they all began to add, gathered around her, a happy ending to their stories.

Ionuț Morariu
It had been more than three decades since his first train ride, but the feeling he had experienced that May day, when his mother had got him on the train to save him from a world that was falling apart, was the same. Station after station, platform after platform, he was running away from life to make it out alive, trying to kill time by blowing warm air on the windows and writing three-word stories on the fogged up surface, stories which he then offered to the blonde travellers resembling her. Non despicio humilem.

(Translated by Mara Scoroșanu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)