Andrei Ciurunga – a creature as frail as he is generous
Next to me slept an emblematic figure of Romanian prisons, Robert Eisenbraun, known as Robert Cahuleanu or Andrei Ciurunga. Small in stature, frail, with a small piece of nose, instead he wore glasses with lenses like the bottom of two glasses, he had 22 dioptres, you could hardly see his eyes, when he lost his glasses he acted like a blind man, this creature was as frail as he was generous, with a great artist’s soul.
He always wore a cloak, the fur soothing the wounds of his body and my friendship the wounds of his soul, as he said. One night he woke me and asked me to scratch his back. I woke from my sleep, reached under my coat and when I went to scratch his back, I found something soft and horrible. I took it in my hand: it was a mouse, sheltered in the warmth, crushed by his squirming, to which he told me that soon vipers would grow on his chest.
I loved him enormously for his intransigence, he excluded any compromise in life, witness his conscience. He had been condemned for his patriotic creations, and at my insistence he recited to me from “I am not guilty of my country”, a poem in which all the hatred of a strangled people raged, who were not guilty of loving a great country, round as a loaf of bread. I’ll quote just one verse: “I am not guilty of having enraged the jackals, and of having cried out with an aching soul that I would not exchange one Ceahlău for all the Urals, and that I hate the Prut Boundary”.
It was the desperate cry of a man torn from his homeland, Cahul, and forced to live far from his sacred graves. He is also the author of the poem on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, in which he says that the Danube flows into the sea on a new arm through which blood flows. A poet of great sensitivity, he wrote short poems, a new genre, the decastih, full of spirit, of incomparable beauty, full of a sublime lyricism, but so searching, so natural, that they touched us especially, who were hungry for soul food. He has earned an eternal place in my heart. I miss you, Robert.
(Aurelian Gulan – Victims and Executioners. Memories from the Gulag, Criterion Publishing, Bucharest, 2010, pp. 307-310)