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Addenda: Do you live in a house with a yard or in a block!

text: Maria MĂNESCU

Until the age of 11 I grew up in the courtyard, in a house-wagon in Obor, built by my grandfather when he was a "colonial" merchant, between the two wars. Our house occupied one of the long sides of the huge U-shaped courtyard, the other had originally been a front of "garsoniere" for the "shop boys". Only at the far end of the courtyard was a building with a ground floor and a first floor; on the ground floor was the garage where Daddy kept his Ford pick-up truck in which he used to carry his goods and his five children on his annual trips to the sea, to Carmen Sylva, and to Câmpulung; upstairs, above the Ford, was the apartment he kept for himself and Maia, a veritable nest of vultures from whose veranda he could see the whole courtyard up to the gate. The yard was paved with river-stone.

But I didn't catch all that, only the house and yard that I dream of to this day. Because by the time I, the youngest of the family's children at the time, showed up, the house had been nationalized for years, only one of the shop boys was left, the others had left because they no longer had a shop, because tenants had been brought into their studio apartments. Tataie had been declared an "enemy of the people" and a "scoundrel". He, the 15th child of a peasant family from Dor Măruntul Ialomiței, left home at the age of 11 with a penny in his pocket, he, who had apprenticed here and there and taught himself both his trade and good manners, until he became one of the most respected merchants in the neighborhood, a member of the Obor Black Front Association and a shareholder in the Obor Halls, he, who had fought at Turtucaia and had been taken prisoner, being reported missing for two years.

But I didn't catch all that. I grew up in a yard full of strangers. All sorts of people now lived in the studio apartments once built for my grandfather's boys. A motley community with a certain degree of quaintness overshadowed by promiscuity. In the yard they quarreled and made up, in the yard they cut the pig, after chasing it through our garden until it was well worn out. They all lived together in the same yard with my mother, the "madam", as the new tenants to whom the communists had given houses called her in their zephyr. Other people's houses. But they came to mom when they got sick or needed advice. As my mother didn't want to move out of her parents' house, we remained tenants in our own house until it was demolished in the 70s.
But the yard!!! The yard had everything. Ivy canopy, horse trees, cherry trees, cherry trees, apple trees, flowers, a flower basket, and an old walnut tree where my brother and Dad had crafted a wooden bench hidden in the foliage. I learned to read there.
We used to gather in the yard all the street kids and a few from the blocks. I had friends who were children of gypsies, we hadn't heard of Roma then, neither we nor they. My mother often gave them food, dressed them. I had friends who lived "in the block", two steps from us, on Mihai Bravu, in the blocks built in the 60s. We used to play together, the kids from the block with the kids from the yard. We also used to go to the green spaces between the blocks, because there were stone slides there that fascinated us.

At school, the first question was, "Do you live in the yard or the block?" In summer we played hide-and-seek in the courtyard, or "façea" as we called it, "milk milk" and "poarca" until late at night. In winter we would gather our sledges, tie them to each other and set off in long lines, hoofing through the streets. Or we'd make a big sled in the middle of the yard, and we'd sled hundreds of times until all the tenants went crazy. It was probably our little revenge for the harsh words they'd throw in my mother's face when the alcohol and drunkenness of popular power got to their heads.

I didn't grow up with a tire iron. Mom quit her job to raise us, but she gave us free rein to play. We were free as only children can be. We lived in a childhood bubble where nothing touched us.

We were 11 when our house was demolished. And we moved into the block. The blocks were new, the groups of kids took longer to form. But my classmates from the new school had lived there for many years and they all had the keys. Same games, plus badminton. But not next to our block, next to the school. A community of kids where I was seen as an outsider because my mom was home and because we didn't live on the same block.

No matter how hard I tried, nothing was the same. I am left to this day with the nostalgia of our generous backyard, where we played with all the kids on the street in an unimaginable bustle.