Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu (en)

At Grindu seemed to be different. Invigorated by the sun, we had escaped from the enclosure in semi-freedom. Here, too, there was a “favoured” hut for the dying, the unfit, a sort of elephant graveyard. There were people suffering from hepatitis, typhoid and other diseases that brought the sick to a very advanced state of physiological decay: in the morning, as if from the belly of a huge monster, beings would emerge from this hut that one would not believe to be human. Here I was to spend some of the most beautiful moments of my prison life, if any […]

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I.D. Sârbu’s sense of humour was the source of many a frown. He told stories, he invented, he laughed. He graded his effects with erudition, transforming soldierly jokes into subtle morals, with the knowledge of a winegrower who ennobles wine. Sometimes he’d pour water into the wine. He praised gossip as a literary genre, like the hymn, the ode or even the epic, which, at least in his case, was similar in size and richness of episodes. The good-natured cleverness was eventually transformed into self-irony. He told us how, in the Cluj of his youth, he used to meet the […]

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