“His verse was always warm and calling for physical love, love of country, love of man…”
Even from nearby, the Stoenești colony was invisible. Someone who had been there before kept pointing it out to me, but I still couldn’t see it. Some barbed wire, two stables – one taller, the other shorter, a pipe running over a gutter… and that was it. When the cloud of dust stirred up by the column had cleared, I seemed to catch a glimpse of a building on the left side, which looked like an unused poultry house. There were four more prairies in the four corners of the pen, but against a backdrop of grey earth, they faded into the darkness that descended upon us. So a quantity of beams, lots of clay and barbed wire. […]
Counting was done in the hut at the end of the bed. The guards could go through the arithmetic forks three or four times, because we didn’t care. They’d get it right in the end and the count would come out. It would have been easier for them to have made a lathe, so they could count us like sheep. But for that they needed the intelligence of a shepherd…
The doctor managed to frighten the officers with an outbreak of disinterment. The danger was real. Large quantities of lime and a small amount of medicine immediately appeared. Now, the henhouse had to be attended with a mask on. The lime fumes, plus whatever they wanted to remove, took your nose off.
Interestingly the typhus and leptospirosis microbes acted selectively. Not a single… snitch to be found in our shed! It’s like natural selection for intelligence and character. A school with a universal profile could be opened in Stoenești. The main teachers and substitutes gradually came into service. We’re learning. The Omescu – Mihalcea tandem deepened the knowledge of French, of course with secondary pupils. Father Vasilache, the former Metropolitan’s announcer, was listened to for English lessons. He didn’t know the language, but he had memorised a lot of words, learned during the translation of the Bible, which he had once done. You could study mathematics with the engineer Doru Novacovici. […]
The weather was hardening. Under a sky the color of a shirt unwashed with the moons, we continued to concentrate, in the shed, and to study. Freedman was an exception. The cold had brought him to the brink of madness. We nicknamed him “the hangman”. To keep warm, he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, swaying continuously. Otherwise, he was almost normal. He even tried to make poems, like Robert. He came out with a kind of stilted, puerile, vain prose. Neither did Ion Omescu, with all his superior intellect, have that spark that enlivens words and turns them into spiritual food for the many. A quality that only Robert’s (Andrei Ciurunga) verse – with simplicity and finesse, sometimes even humour – had. I was trying – and I was not the only one – to learn his creations, but Ionel Diaconu surpassed me in this respect. I was learning them without any intention of future, just like that, for the beauty of the verses and the sparkle of that mind that lights up even in the darkness of Stoenești. The noise didn’t bother him. We would play bridge downstairs, right under Robert’s bed, argue heatedly. All the while, upstairs, with half-closed eyelids, and sometimes with the blanket pulled over his head, staring at the ceiling and not seeing him Robert gave shape to his thoughts and feelings. When all was done, even he being satisfied, he would share with us, at the first opportunity, his fresh creation, all done and retained by that phenomenal memory.
In the morning, when he was “under the weather” and his lyrics were coming out lame, he would come to me and say:
– Boy, I’d love to beat a guard now, before lunch!
I’d look at him and laugh. He must have weighed 50 kilos, prison outfit and all – about half the weight of the most slender of guards.
– You know something, Robert? You beat me and you’ll get over it.
And I’d offer him my stomach to tickle with his anaemic kicks. That would calm him down and give him the courage for the lyrics.
How much energy he had in his body was barely visible in his restless sleep. What dreams were running through his restless mind? What unfulfilled loves had he left behind? His verse was always warm, calling for physical love, love of country, love of man…
There was no detachment in his poetry and in his life. Poetry was part of his joyless existence: 18 years of hard labour for the guilt of being a poet! And that was the second part, after another four years, also in the canal for poetic mercy.
Let me give you an example of how immediate reality was transformed into poetry for Robert. After a total eclipse of the sun, which we saw in Stoenești that spring, we soon came up with a poem that both I and his other friends immediately learnt. I reproduce it from memory to give you an idea of what many of us saw – and what the poet, impressed by the celestial phenomenon, saw:
Today, in the warm hour of the mature day,
the sky has grown dark,
as if the Lord, at high noon,
stood between the earth and the sun,
…and cast over the whole hemisphere…
his high and stern shadow,
the heavy shadow that fell from above,
as when Jesus died.
Overwhelmed by darkness, we do not yet know
of the deep wrath of heaven,
or a grim message of death…
Perhaps in the cosmos, somewhere far away,
exhausted, with his shoulder under the cross,
… unable to bear it with his knees,
another Jesus has collapsed in a heap…
Lord, make light so that we can see!
(Iancu Saul, Handbook for Victims, Cucuteni Publishing House, Bucharest, 1996, pp. 120-124)