asked Miruna in a whisper what kind of tale she would like to hear. She said she already knew the story of the famous Captain Christou Sava, who died at sea during a storm in the embrace of the sirens he had dreamed of his whole life long, and she did not want to hear the story of the brave Greuceanu again, a tale she knew very well, a classic in fact, or Ion Creangă’s story “White Arab,” which was now available on long-playing vinyl disc, or that of the heroic Muscel regiment that was decimated at Rahova, then at Turtucaia, and then at Odessa, in three different wars. Nor did she want to hear again the tale of Vlad the Impaler and his cruel justice, nor the story of the miracle-working Saint Filofteia, who sleeps for all eternity beneath Argeș Monastery. She did not want any of those tales. Miruna knew them all. Grandfather closed his eyes, trying to bring to mind something else. And when he gazed once more around the room, his eyes settled on Grandmother’s dowry chest, on which was depicted the crossing of the Danube in 1877 and the reunification celebrations of 1918. He remembered the time he went off to the front at barely twenty-one years of age. So Grandfather told us a tale that day, and even now I don’t know how much of it was true and how much was fable. Miruna gazed at Grandfather’s face and listened. Every so often her fingers toyed with the tassels of the quilt. At the head of the bed was Grandfather’s sheepskin jerkin with its unmistakable smell of walnut shells, not yet having imbibed the odor of medicaments. I was sitting at his bedside on a three-legged stool, my head resting on his hand, and he was speaking. Grandmother was waiting, and for a moment, just a moment, time seemed to stand still only for us.
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