Andrei Ciurunga, poet of sensitivity and love for freedom

At the hospital in Sălcia I met Robert Eisenbraun – pseudonym Cahuleanu or Andrei Ciurunga – who I had heard was a great poet. His sensitivity, combined with his love of freedom, landed him in prison twice. The first time was between 1948 and 1954, and the second time he was sentenced to 18 years, of which he served three. He was imprisoned because, as he said, he was guilty of his own words. He was a small man with glasses with dozens of dioptres, withdrawn, dreamy and yet extremely virulent in his adversarial discussions. He also had a fever and was suspected of having typhoid. His talent and sensitivity, as well as his robust irony in the face of suffering, drew me close to him.

I had the chance to be among the first to hear the texts he created. Many of them come back to me again and again. In the hospital room, I could see him sitting in the corner of the room with his eyes closed, telling me the texts he had written. I can still hear one of his poems, “Faith”, which I heard in Sălcia:

To this king’s daughter under the eyelids
I would be such a faithful page
I’d protect her from mirrors and water
And the beautiful mortal dusk
And I’d wait, by the hour or by the age,
To walk silently through my forest,
When the lake trembles like a wedding tree
And the star catches the liquefied star in its fist.

[Three weeks later, in the second half of March, they decided to send us to the hospital in Constanța. [I left with Robert and 6 other colleagues. […] The next morning they took us directly to the hospital in Constanta on the tarpaulin of a security truck. The medical staff were the same, and they received and cared for us with the same fairness and dedication. We were given proper medication and good food. [Robert had recovered and was writing new poems every day. At the thought of returning to the camp and resuming the hellish life there, I found optimism again. […]

Robert lay in a bed next to me. I thought he was asleep, he was lying with his hands over his eyes. Suddenly he got up, sat down on the edge of my bed and whispered the last lines into my ear:

To the betrothal of the dream to the moon,
When under the lashes the candles burn
The stars come down one by one
Of pale silks rustling

# They make the silence of nothing
The poplars that twist from their caves
The wind aches softly as a caress
Hands that never return

And they can no longer fit
Under the deep sky of nothingness,
The soul spills like water,
Beyond its boundaries.

“How about I call it ‘Borders’, shall I?” “Of course,” I replied, “but please repeat it, for I’d like to remember it.” […] On the day we left, we were guided by the eyes of almost the entire staff of the Contagious Diseases Ward, who had come to the windows or the courtyard. I could see in their eyes the helplessness and pain they felt at not being able to stop us from leaving. […] We travelled under the tarpaulin of a lorry on the road to Piatra. Then we crossed Borcea by pontoon and walked to Stoienești. […]

The little man with the glasses wrote us a poem every day, and in the evening he delighted us with his verses. During the day we played chess. One day he would leave the board and go into a corner, where he would curl up for hours. Then he would come and whisper the words in my ear, because he knew I couldn’t hear.

One day, as we were chatting about a game of chess between Saul and Radu, Robert came and took me aside and told me the lines called “Veriga”:

I’ve been thirsty like a drought
And suffered like a famine of hunger
Sometimes I felt the summers were wasted
Waiting for my orchard of poplars.
Your footsteps have left me, bitter with grief
For not having kept them. I heard
how silence scratched my late rays
on my flat soul, like a diamond in a window.
Perhaps it was the thought that poor hours
burned away the beautiful years
that I had not fulfilled in my sorrow
existence-begun in the ancestors
I feel guilty about many things
The years, almost drunk,
stop in my matter to listen to me
prolonged in unborn descendants.

(Doru Novacovici – In Romania behind bars, Buzău Youth Foundation Publishing House, Buzău, 1994, pp. 122-123, 129-130)