Les Roses sur une toile

The Rose Painting has been in my family for generations- two, or maybe three.  Always hanging against the east wall, reminding me of a distant past that I can only imagine intangibly.  Bucharest at the turn of the century was beautiful, polished, dashing, with busy streets and markets, shops full of happy customers and artists meeting in literary cafes discussing world affairs.  This is why it was known as the Paris of the East, le Petit Paris. Hemingway and TS Eliot wouldn’t have been out of place at a sidewalk cafe on Victoriei Boulevard.

It’s hard to imagine Bucharest as it was before the war. Time and history scarred the city to such an extent that reconstruction is possible only by reading memoirs, looking at photos in sepia, and vivid artistry.

What do I really know about my hometown at the time when it had a life of its own? About its stories and about its sagas? How did people cope with life, with love, with despair, with injustice, with death? Did they hope for a better future?  How did they deal with the fall of everything they held dear (freedom, ownership) and the accession to power of a new regime of state ownership and totalitarianism?

So, all I have is a painting from the era I love the most, though I can’t put my finger on it and say why I love it so much.  I guess we all, collectively, love the old and the vintage, the pristine, virgin beauty of a distant past that is now deeply set in our hearts.

I remember I was a merely six or seven and my mother and I visited a distant aunt, the daughter of the painter whose canvas is now displayed as my background. She lived in an old, pre-war block of flats in Brasov, the traditional gateway to Transylvania.  We paid her a short visit one hot summer afternoon. Tanti Lizica was old and a vegetarian.  Her flat was covered in canvas, all painted by her father, S. (Starvu) Tarasov.  The etching on the right bottom of the canvas had been blurred by the merciless passage of time.

I don’t know what happened to her, nor to her heritage.  Her father, although exceptionally talented, had never found the fame he sought and deserved, either in life or in death. However,  I remember her as the Young Woman Playing the Violin. I glance at her every time I visit my parents’ house.  Then, all the memories come back to me: my holidays in Brasov, or my childhood when I would play Doll’s House under the dining table.  I would get all romantic and sentimental thinking about the old time and wondering “what if…?”

What if that golden age had never ended?

What if the war had never happened?

What if the forest fire of Communism hadn’t engulfed half of Europe?

What if the disease of corruption and petty greed, euphemistically known as ‘the transition’, hadn’t infected our already scarred nation two decades ago, just as the Ceausescu cancer was excised?

Would we have become something different? Something better? Something worse?

We shall never know, and it is as well that we won’t.  The reality is that history cannot be altered, we can never go back and there is no point in trying.  Looking back would simply cause us to trip and stumble as we walk forward.

All we can do is look towards the future with the memory of past glories and the experience of past mistakes to guide us.