Initial title: From Primăverii to the Theatre, with Four Children and a Notebook of Grievances
A July walk through a small Romanian city, or on how a town deflates beneath the feet of its own children
We set off at about half past five in the afternoon. The hour was chosen because, in July, Botoșani[^1] has two faces and neither belongs to it: at midday the tarmac breathes like a frying pan left on a switched-off hob, while late in the evening, around nine, a false quiet settles in, of the sort in which every car that passes down Strada Primăverii seems to be crossing your sitting room. Half past five was, as my father used to put it, the hour at which "the sun packs up its tools". He spoke of the sun as though of a workshop colleague finishing his shift, and those words come back to me every time I decide to leave the house in summer. My father was a car mechanic and he had his own way of measuring the world: in spanners, in stroke, in millimetres of play. A great many fragments of this vocabulary have dissolved into the way I look at cities. The millimetres I sometimes look for in the kerbs of Botoșani's cycle infrastructure. I don't find them, but that's a separate conversation, and one I'll come to soon enough.
We had agreed to start out from my flat on Strada Primăverii and walk, at a Sunday-afternoon pace, to the Mihai Eminescu Theatre.[^2] It wasn't Sunday; it was a plain Wednesday. But we each had one reason more to go, and several reasons fewer. The one reason more was a play we wanted to reach early, to secure good seats on the left of the auditorium where the acoustics swallow less. The reasons fewer were, in turn, the fatigue, the humidity in the air, a piece of political news that had spoilt the morning for all of us, and, further down, a refusal to take the car once more for less than two kilometres. That, I think, was the initial decision from which the rest flowed: a small form of resistance, in which I did not want to contribute yet another vehicle to the already thick air of the town.
The friends arrived one by one. Andrei with Ilinca, his daughter of eleven, holding a skateboard she is not allowed to ride in the places she would like to ride it. Mihai with Tudor, a tall boy of thirteen, already almost one metre seventy, with an adolescent's stride. And Cristi with Sara, ten years old, her hair caught up in a high ponytail, on a folding bicycle she guards as she would an exotic object. The fourth pair was me and V., my son, sixteen years old, who over the last month has grown again so that his trousers now sit short on his ankles. I saw him each evening at supper, and yet that growth I only registered on stepping out into the street, when I looked at him properly and was startled, as though only now was I seeing him as he was.
Four men between forty and fifty, four children between ten and sixteen, eight pairs of shoes of eight different kinds and eight different walking rhythms. These were, in short, the conditions of an urban design experiment which no designer in Botoșani appeared to have anticipated.
