about thirty minutes. It is dark and cold. Being here with Alexandru is something I’ve wanted to do since we met in New York years ago. I was fascinated by our first encounter. His name is the Romanian version of my name. His father came from the same part of northern Transylvania as mine. After the war and the horrors of the Holocaust, his father moved to Bucharest, while my father made his way to Argentina. I was named after my maternal grandfather, Avrum. Alexandru, too, was named after his grandfather, Abraham.
We used to joke in New York about each other being “The Other”, as in the Borges story.

Alexandru is so happy we are here. He stops the car on Strada Eminescu. Getting out of the blue Dacia, I notice all the cars parked on that block are also blue Dacias, except for one that is black. Alexandru sees the same thing. “A traitor,” he laughs.  He is trying to carry all the bags, but I am able to convince him that it wouldn’t be good for his back. The apartment house is a gray concrete building, probably from the late 1950’s. We get in the elevator and go up to the fourth floor, to apartment number 17.
The first lock took eight turns to open. The second lock only three. What would become for me the characteristic smell of this place assaulted me for the first time. Still now, as I write this, I can smell that nauseating, unidentifiable smell. Then, standing in the hall in the dark, I regretted coming to Romania at all.

I mentioned to Shelley that I was writing about following Borges’ ghost. She told me that in her new book she was creating a hero who lives among ghosts. This is what the character says:
“There are so many ghosts where I live and they are more present for me than the living. I have always heard them louder, seen them sharper and longer. The oddest part is that in the world of ghosts, I’m alive.”
Shelley tells me that she started seeing what her character looks like after I wrote about its existence in my book. By being in this book, her character became “real” to her.
I thought about the two Borges and how much they changed in fifty years. The young Borges becoming the old Borges. The one who could see and the blind one. I sat with them both, watching the universe change through a slow winter sunset.
      
Alexandru apologizes. “This place is all I could find that has heat and electricity all day long. We are lucky because this is the embassy neighborhood and they have special gas pipelines.” “You don’t need to apologize,” I say. “We’ll be fine. We just need to clean the place and I am sure in daylight it will look much better.” The light was dim. Shelley looks at me and tries to smile. What is wrong? Where are we?
“I rented the place from a woman who needed the money. She went to live with friends,” Alexandru assures us. It is a common practice here. Pensions are as low as thirty dollars a month, sending thousands of retirees begging in the streets. Alexandru left us to settle in. I open the window and take a deep breath of icy air. The night is very quiet. Someone is burning wood in a steel drum at the corner.

Shelley and I sat for a while on the sticky plastic-covered red sofa.  There are dirty ashtrays everywhere. All the furniture is covered with faded red rugs. The dishes are almost all cracked. We found several small objects arranged like a shrine on a piece of dark wood in the kitchen: canning jars left open with some kind of thick, dark liquid inside, faded pictures of saints, a tube of lipstick, two empty perfume bottles, a dried out scrap of soap, and a plastic utensil I couldn’t identify. They were all covered with a patina of grease. The only clean object in the whole apartment was high up on an archway facing our bed. It was a big framed photograph of a pretty little girl with a rosary hanging from it.

Marianna was born in Bucharest in 1961. She lived with her mother on Strada Eminescu 252, apartment 17. When she was sixteen years old she was kidnapped by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Her mother hadn’t heard from her for twenty-five years, when she resurfaced in East Germany, where she had been sold to a prostitution ring by her captors years ago. In 1990, three months after the revolution that toppled the dictator Ceausescu, she came back to Romania to see her mother. They lived together in apartment 17 for four days until March 27. That morning, Marianna committed suicide by injecting herself with an overdose of heroin.

There is a small bronze plaque on a bare wall on Boulevardul Dacia, two blocks from apartment 17. Mircea Eliade once lived here. In The Myth of the Eternal Return he wrote that there’s an ancient belief that each thing on Earth connects to its sacred, celestial other.

It is a small house with a small dead garden. Standing in front of it, I think about Alexandru and me. Our strange relationship through time, our Transylvanian blood, sometimes Romanian, sometimes Hungarian.
It is snowing. People are coming out with pots and jars full of stew from a small kiosk where a charity institution is running a soup kitchen. Gypsy girls are burning garbage on the corner to keep warm. What am I doing here? Where am I?
I should ask Alexandru.

There are no shutters on the windows of our apartment here, just a very thin curtain. I can’t sleep. The moon comes out from behind one of the buildings across the street. The smell of the apartment, like a lethal antiseptic trying to cover up decay, is gradually becoming a familiar presence.
Shelley fell asleep and I did soon after.
The telephone is ringing. Alexandru wants to have breakfast with us.

We are in Casablanca, a small café downtown. Alexandru is upset. He couldn’t sleep. It is his first time in Bucharest in many years, the first time since his parents killed themselves in the same room in which he is sleeping now.
His father had been very ill with Parkinson’s disease. In Ceausescu’s Romania it was impossible to get medicines if you weren’t part of the official circle. Alexandru tried to mail him the medicines from New York, but they disappeared in Romanian customs. His parents’ apartment didn’t have heat and the electricity was restricted to just a few hours a day. They barely had any food to eat. They took a fatal overdose on the night of November 16th, 1987.

It is the first time Alexandru told us his parents’ story.  When he had spoken about Romania in the past, he talked about the suffocating repression and the Securitate’s control over everything and everyone. He told us the story about Ceausescu and his wife Elena being decorated and getting honorary doctorates in the United States and Europe because of their supposed stand against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile at home, they were torturing and starving their whole country. He talked about Ceaucescu’s fifty-four palaces and his government building complex, larger than any other in the world, and about the systematic destruction of ancient villages all over Romania, the demolition of medieval churches, and the disappearance of thousands of people. 

We sat in silence for a few minutes and then left the café. There is a synagogue across the street, a large building with a stone facade. It is empty and cold. The caretaker is lighting candles. We talk for a few minutes. He says that his family emigrated from the Pale to Bucharest. For a moment we all look at each other. Shimon the caretaker, Alexandru, Shelley, and I. We are all children of immigrants from the Pale.
Shimon’s grandparents came to Bucharest from the Pale through the Gara du Nord train station in 1902.
Alexandru’s grandparents came to Bucharest from the Pale through the Gara du Nord train station in 1905.
Shelley’s grandparents came to the US from The Pale through Ellis Island in 1907.
My grandparents on my mother’s side came to Buenos Aires from the Pale through the Hotel de los Immigrantes in 1905.

“Bucharest doesn’t look like Buenos Aires,” I tell Alexandru. He wants to go to Buenos Aires with me “to close our circle.” He’s feeling better. It is snowing again. We are moving on.
“To Mircea Eliade’s dead garden?” I ask. ‘Where else would we go?” he replies.

We lived in apartment 17 for one week.