The conference, debates, and poetry readings were to start up again around 4 p.m. In the meantime, we all spent our time as we pleased: unending discussions, prolonged drinking sessions, a nap, or both. While Ioana recuperated from the fatigue of the voyage: driving her old Renault 14 (which, kilometer by kilometer, got closer to giving up the ghost) was a real exploit! In the hills especially, the engine, out of breath, huffed and puffed...Vasile and I had decided to go for a stroll, with no precise destination in mind. Rather affluent, at least seemingly, S--- was very much like any town in Western Europe, a fact my friend pointed out to me.

Around the main town square, the prostitutes-no, I will not say "whores", I hate that word-were looking out for prospective customers. "Just right for tea-time" said Vasile with a sense of humor that, for once, I did not appreciate. We were talking, in French naturally, since my knowledge of Romanian is limited to a handful of words (some of which are not that polite !). Vasile explained how one of his manuscripts, confiscated under the dictatorship, had been miraculously found in the files of the Securitate. It was a violent critique of an imaginary totalitarian regime in the form of a parabola by which the censors had not been deceived: "Razbunarea calicilor" ("The Revenge of the Paupers"). It had just been published after more than twenty years and had been warmly received by Romanian critics and billed as the novel of a whole generation. Vasile felt like he was rediscovering a youth confiscated by the dictatorship; making it a somewhat bitter rediscovery. His novel was going to be published in Russia, translated by our friend, the poet Alexandre Karvovski. We planed to translate it into French together.