Snapshots

Another piece of advice came from a classmate whose grandparents fled the revolution in ’59. Though he had never been to Cuba himself, he told me that I should never talk about communism with anyone, under any circumstances. If a Cuban says that he or she actually likes Cuba, they are lying. No one could possibly like living in a communist state.

Maybe the most bizarre thing told to me was from an American doctor who had actually been to Cuba on a medical mission trip. He told me conspiratorially, in a hushed voice, about the loudspeakers that blare propaganda and patriotic music all night long at ear-splitting volumes on the streets of Havana. Sleep deprivation, he assured me in all seriousness, is the government’s way of torturing its citizens and making them too tired to rebel. Did you know sleep deprivation is actually one of the most common forms of torture in the world?

The officials waiting at immigration didn’t seem worried about much at all. Tanned men were dragging on unfiltered cigarettes, puffing in public with a relaxed nonchalance I hadn’t seen in many years. The smoky, humid air held us close, with the warmth and weight of an old friend.

We hired a tuk-tuk to take us to our downtown guesthouse. Our driver stowed the luggage under our feet, and motioned for us to hold onto it. I figured we were in for a bumpy ride, but as we turned onto the main road, he gestured at us to watch out for scooters. He mimed a scooter driver reaching into the open cab of the tuk-tuk to grab a bag that wasn’t held down. During the drive, he kept glancing back at us, making sure we were holding onto our bags. He grew agitated when I forgot myself and took out my phone to take a picture. More suspicion, a first confirmation of what Nak had been talking about.

In front of the Palace, two teenage girls, one with a baby on her hip, approached us, holding out bags of popcorn. I asked if the popcorn was sweet or salty (I don't like sweet popcorn). They shook their heads. They didn't understand. I pulled out my phone and typed the two words into Google Translate. They shook their heads again, lowered their eyes, and walked away. I had been prepared to buy their wares. Confused by their bashfulness, I stood there wondering what had just happened. Maybe they didn't speak Cambodian. Maybe they were an ethnic minority. Or maybe they couldn't read. I should have just bought it. By the time I realized this, though, they were gone.

Other women were still waiting for the first client of the night. It was still early, and they were adjusting their makeup, using their smartphones as a mirror, clipping their fingernails or combing their hair. Others hanging listlessly off a chair, foot tapping slowly in the air, or nonchalantly leaning against a wall, as if playing hard to get.

An empty beach in a tropical paradise is a rarity. It’s the goal of traveling to places like this. But here, it didn’t feel like a triumph. More like a sign, maybe a warning. The silence had a mass to it, muffling even the squawking of the monkeys defending their place in the trees.

The crab market began at the docks, where the waves were sloshing noisily as the fishermen heaved their loads onto shore. The contents of their bamboo traps, shells clattering, were then dumped unceremoniously into plastic buckets, which were whisked away to be sold at the adjacent market. Out of the water, the crabs writhed like insects plucked of their wings.

Squinting through the foliage, looking to spot the first ruins, I spotted a gray break in the monotony of the green. We padded through the brush, carefully avoiding roots and trash in our sandaled feet. At the clearing stood the concrete skeleton of a home, with a giant centipede spray-painted onto the wall and a staircase leading to a second floor that was now the rooftop. I tested out the stairs with the tip of my toe, and the crumbly stone turned me around. I could imagine the furnishings, the plants pruned back, and the cool breeze floating up from the ocean and in through the big windows.

The ruins here are anything but ancient, but houses don't last long once they're abandoned, especially in wet, humid climates like this. The jungle grows relentlessly, worming its way in through any opening. Storms had long ago done away with the roofs and windows. With no one to maintain the homes, moss and mold and rot, vines and leaves moved in. Only the tile, bleached by the sun and rain, was hardy enough to withstand the elements.

India is another world. The first impressions are overwhelming. The chaos greets you the minute you exit the airport in a disorienting force of scents and smells, noise and colors, faces of passersby, movement. As you make your way into the scene, you join the cast of a world unlike anything you have ever been part of before.

Smog simmering the city of New Delhi in a noxious stew; later in Mumbai, our final destination, slums, jammed into every available inch of space, bordering right up onto the airport jetway. Cars clogging the roads, driving just inches from each other, absurdly close, all following the path of least traffic resistance, threading in between theoretical lanes and navigating around people, donkeys, buses, and rickshaws moving in a multitude of which ways, but generally forward in the right direction.

He spun us some tall tales about India, including the incredible claim that in his 15 years of driving a cab on the streets of Mumbai, he had never once had an accident. I asked him what the rules of the road in India are, and he replied, “What are rules of the road?” puzzled. I'm not sure if this was a question of language or culture, but when I started laughing, he did too. It was like we were old friends laughing over an inside joke, the one's laughter making the other laugh harder.

Curled up in bed, TVs from open windows in neighboring apartments blasting foreign words and music above the din of the rattling air conditioning in my room, I could barely sleep, wondering what tomorrow would bring. But I also didn't want to fall asleep. Tomorrow, the first day would be over, and I knew that I would only get to go to India for the first time once in my life.

What do travelers talk about when they talk about Laos? The most commonly used adjective must be "untouched." It always seems to be described as one of the last pristine, unspoiled places in Asia, maybe even the world. For those who feel that Cambodia was better 15 years ago, and Thailand was at its peak three or four decades ago, there's still Laos.

Yes, life in Laos does (still) move at a different pace. The Mekong winds through the country with a gentle steadiness that sets the rhythm of Laotian life. It's a place where no one is in a rush. (The joke here is that the official name "Lao People's Democratic Republic" stands for "Laos—Please Don't Rush.") The sleepy capital, Vientiane, still has unpaved roads in the downtown. In the mountains, the indigenous Hmong and Khmu peoples still (mostly) live off the land as their tribes have for as long as anyone can remember.

One night at dinner with a Lao family, I cautiously asked what they thought of the United States and its role in the Secret War. We’d been talking about politics and the atmosphere was open, so I thought I could float the question.

I wanted to know what their father thought, a retired army officer seated at the head of the table who we were told had lost his left hand in the war. But I couldn't find a way to ask.

The waterfall drops abruptly off the southern cliff of an enormous canyon, where the jungle breaks off, opening up to air and sky. Twin cascades tumble to the bottom. The source of that rush of water is unseeable, but it is there somewhere in the jungle.

Here the lay of the land is deceptive. It’s hiding something. Or more to the point: it has something to hide. This is the source of its enchantment.

If you were lost in the maze of the jungle, trying to follow a stream of running water to the lowest point and a way out (all water eventually travels to the sea), you might walk over the edge, and, blinded by the sudden light, step onto the air and fall in a shroud of mist into the belly of the canyon.

I stand on the other side of the canyon, watching from a safe distance. This is the kind of landscape that seduced explorers into giving up everything for the chance to know it. The world has since been mapped to death. I didn’t know there were still places like this left.

January 2017.

In the late afternoon, the colors of the coast had become swollen and rich, as if ripened in the sun. The air was the same temperature as our bodies, the water even warmer. Trees edged out of the stones claiming their place in the sun, and the rock was streaked with vibrant reds, purples, and oranges so bright they looked almost man-made.

It was as if every rock, tree, and grain of sand fell in just the right spot, making for an infinitesimally unlikely perfection and throwing doubt on the principle of randomness that we know governs the natural world. It can never feel the same when humans have sculpted the scene into something beautiful. This becomes something aesthetic, pleasing, but never perfect. And secrecy preserves this kind of original perfection.

A wave of emotion washed over me, and I recognized it, for once, as bliss, that elusive relative of humdrum happiness. We looked at each other and laughed, shaking our heads. What luck. What a privilege to be here.

As we paddled through the mangrove, ducking under branches and trees, we seemed to be making up the way as we went. It was a maze, and if we were to turn back, we might catch the trees in the act of hastily weaving their roots into a curtain and drawing it across the channel to block the way out.

We also spied a family of macaques paddling furiously across the channel—their speed suggested that they also knew the water is unsafe. Once they saw our kayaks, they jumped on board and padded over our outstretched legs in search of water.

After hours sheltered in the dusky tunnels of the mangrove, the sky and sea overwhelmed. I thought, or remembered, that the ocean is captivating, at least in part, because it is so endless. Terrifying even. In a place like Thailand, it's easy to forget this about the sea, where the waters are so warm and welcoming. But the fact remains.

My expectations of Bangkok were, well, more seedy than chic. In the movies, this city is always depicted as a character of the night, neon-lit, with frenetic shots snaking through back alleyways, opening up onto clandestine establishments where anything can be procured for the right price.

About halfway to the hotel, though, we hit a complete standstill of well over half an hour. We had no idea what was going on, but the vibe was calm. People stepped out of their cars to look, but quickly retreated back into the air conditioning. From where we were, only a police blockade could be seen. After some time, an entourage of expensive black European automobiles waving flags sped past, and the blockade was lifted immediately. The taxi driver gestured and said, “King or Royal Family. Do you have traffic stop for king in Germany?” Dominik said, “No, in Germany we have a Chancellor, but she not important enough to stop traffic for.” The taxi driver replied, a bit puzzled: “Oh. Every Thai people love king!”

Feeling jet-lagged but electrified to finally be in Bangkok, we started walking along Ratchadamnoen Klang Road, a wide boulevard illuminated with white lights, marigolds, and displays prominently featuring the King’s noble visage. Together with the grainy images of the King in a range of benevolent poses, the soft white light endowed the city with a kind of peace that was at odds with any depiction I have ever seen of Bangkok.

The ferry was packed, mostly with Thais. The Thai men gave up their seats to the women and children, and gestured at any Western men sitting down to do the same. The Thai men held onto the railings in cool, nonchalant poses, staring out into the distance through their knock-off Ray-Bans.

Some of the people on the beach were covered with bandages wrapped around their legs, or arms. What'd happened? A scooter spill? Surfing mishap? Sea urchin accident? But no—the bandages were just covering fresh tattoos. That explained the odd bandage wrapped around the neck.

As we strolled back to the hotel, I spotted a trio of Thai masseuses eating noodles and salads out of Styrofoam containers. I asked them where they'd gotten their dinner and they pointed at a food truck across the street. Salvation! We ordered Larb Na (spicy minced chicken with basil leaves), Pad See-Ew noodles, spring rolls, and Tom Yum soup, with fresh coconut juice. These women cooked with joy and made some of the best food we had in Thailand in about 3 square feet of space with little more than one frying pan.

The middle-aged but very fit man sitting next to us on the bench, who had been undressing into his red speedo (must be a European), heard me say something to Dominik in German, and his head whipped around, homing in on his native language.

The ride back into port was much more fun for everyone, with Holger, as he finally introduced himself, taking center stage, bouncing around on deck in his red speedo and Santa Claus hat (it was, after all, Christmas Eve). With him on stage, a new vibe flooded in, like high tide, sweeping everyone on board along with it.

Part of what I love about traveling is getting to know some essential side of a person in a brief period, making these kinds of intense connections that you have to just as quickly drop when you go your separate ways. And while English is a poor tool for this, it's the only one most of us have.

When we got back to port at Ao Nang, Holger, for his part, saluted us. Still wearing his Santa hat and speedo, he hopped on his cherry-red motorcycle (no scooter for him here) and rode off into the sunset. The rest of us waved goodbye as we walked toward town, each group lapsing back into their native language, heading home.

# A Sunset over the Andaman Sea

I'd never seen a sunset like this.




December 25, 2015.

Buddhist temples are living communities. They are not just sacred places where you take your shoes off and tiptoe around the solemn chorus of chanting monks. There's that too, but there are also monks vacuuming out temples and sweeping the grounds. Visitors posing for pictures, worshippers meditating and talking over tea. On the perimeter, vendors set up shops to sell sundry religious objects—incense and relics and candles—but also secular goods to leave as offerings at the altar for the monks: cookies, instant noodles, bottles of Coca-Cola, and new vacuum cleaners. Here the secular mingles with the divine.

The airport at Con Dao must be one of the smallest in the world. The plane touched down and taxied over across a tiny tarmac to a two-story building smaller than a grocery store in the West. Nevertheless, there was, oddly enough, a bus to shuttle the 30-odd passengers the 30 feet across the tarmac from the plane to the airport.

During our honeymoon in Panama, one of the stormiest places on earth, we weathered a bad storm in a thatched-roof hut on an island smaller than a football field. We were in the Caribbean archipelago of the San Blas Islands, an autonomous indigenous region. That morning, when ominous storm clouds were gathering over the mainland, I asked an indigenous man about when the storm would arrive. He just shook his head and replied, "Only the gods know."

The people of Con Dao were just going about their business, diligently getting their homes ready for the storm that was going to come. Groups of village men were huddled around the task at hand, each pointing out to the other what should be done. Their wives chatting nearby, babies on hip. Their older children playing, waving at us on the scooter and calling out "hello" at us foreigners as we passed by. People buying enough groceries and water to get through the next day.

The typhoon arrived in full force early on Christmas Day. That morning was dark as dusk. The staff at the hotel told us that the military had instituted a curfew, so no one could leave their homes, though we saw from our window a few soaked scooter drivers ferrying provisions. Rain fell in jagged sheets, cutting down palms, screeching into corrugated roofs. The wind blew in haphazard gusts.

There's hardly any traffic on the streets of Con Dao, and the only town on the tiny island is small enough that everyone seems to know each other. The day begins early, at 6am, when loudspeakers awaken the locals with tinny announcements and revolutionary music. Everyone on the island seems to meet at the local morning market to grab breakfast and by mid-morning, everything settles down as the heat of the day rolls in. Things pick back up again as the heat dissipates at sunset, as fishermen lay anchor for the night and haul their catch to the evening market. After dark, families stroll the town's beachside promenade, snacking on barbecued seafood.

As we paid the entrance fee, the museum staff member warned us that we would be locked in if we didn't make sure to leave by the posted closing times. His warning seemed to elongate the shadows falling from the high brick walls of the prison.

We walked along the shadowy pathway, gravel crunching noisily at our feet, not quite sure what we were looking at yet. Then we came upon the first building and went inside, climbing up an inconspicuous set of stairs.

I actually found these huge rooms of the Con Dao prison even more terrifying than the tiger cages. The scale of the suffering there was hard for me to imagine. Their collective suffering must have hung in the air like an oppressive humidity, weighing down on every breath. Every twitch, gasp, move, cough, hunger pang, or call of nature rippled through the room. They couldn't suffer without increasing the suffering of those around them. Their suffering wasn't even their own.

Underneath an open sky, perhaps under the scorching sun in the dry season or the piercing rain of the monsoon, the prisoners were beaten or simply left for days, with no protection against the elements. After having spent months or even years in the claustrophobic containment of the tiger cages, being exposed to the vastness of the sky must have been yet another terror.

On the street between Ho Chi Minh’s tomb and the presidential palace, I walked by a man meditating. I’d never seen someone meditating in a public space. His eyes were closed, back straight, hands resting on his knees. Face fully empty of expression. A blank peace.

I snapped this picture, guiltily. I almost never take pictures of people. It’s too fraught—first it was the soldier with the gun, now it’s tourists armed with cameras. His eyes didn’t flinch at the click. He was not looking back.

He must have chosen that spot for a reason. Just down the road, a group of protestors were gathered in front of the presidential palace, and soldiers were negotiating with them to leave, stopping bystanders and making them delete the iPhone pictures they captured of the confrontation.

But he was off somewhere else.

I thought of that image we all have of Vietnam—the meditating monk’s self-immolation. I’ve always read that act—or learned to see it—as a symbol of man’s undying will to be free from political oppression. The triumph of liberty over totalitarianism.

But there’s more. The thing that becomes more interesting for me as I get older is not the depth of that monk’s political conviction. The image contains a mystery clouded by the low-lying weather of political conflicts. The astonishing thing was not (just) his self-sacrifice for a greater cause. It was the freedom he had already achieved. It was the state of mind he had been able to cultivate. The state of mind that allowed him to set himself on fire without even flinching, dissolving into a stream of smoke floating up into the sky.

December 2017.

“It must not have been so bad,” she said, loudly, in that obtrusive and unaware tone you hear from some Americans who find themselves far, far away from home. “They called it the Hilton, after all.”

December 2017.

For every Armenian in Armenia, there are nearly four living outside of the country, in the Diaspora. There are only a few peoples and places in the world like this, and all of them share similarly sorrowful histories: the Armenians and the Jews, the Albanians and the Greeks, now too the Eritreans and the Syrians.

When I was growing up, my father, a third-generation Armenian, worked for a building materials corporation founded by an Armenian immigrant. The founder’s was an exemplary American story: he survived the Genocide and sought refuge in the United States. In that safe and bountiful land, he invented the single-handle faucet, which turned into a Fortune 500 company and him and his heirs into millionaires more times over than they could count.

In the mid-1980s, his company was planning to build factories in Armenia to bring jobs to the desperately poor Soviet country. They wanted my father, an engineer who spoke fluent Armenian, to move to Yerevan and carry out their plans. I was a little girl, my sister just a baby. My mother, who thought my father was maybe Greek or Italian and confused Armenia with Romania when he explained, was open to the adventure, ready to see a place she had never known existed.

It never came to be. The plates shifted below our feet, closing the opening, when on December 7, 1988, an earthquake shattered northern Armenia, killing 25,000 people. The company decided to take the funds allocated for the new factories and allocate them to earthquake relief, mostly to buy heating oil so city dwellers could get through the winter. More sorrow for the Armenian people, more lost opportunities.

The project was canceled and we stayed in metro Detroit. This would have been my chance, too. By the third generation, most descendants are set far adrift from their Diaspora. Another kind of disaster, smaller but devastating still.

Now being Armenian is an identity I carry mostly only in name.

At the Frankfurt airport, I hand over my passport and German ID card at the immigration booth. A German immigration officer asks me, “How’s Connecticut?” I’m confused: I’m on my way to Ireland, not Connecticut. I say, “I don’t know, I’ve never been there.” He looks at me, even more confused. “But it says you were born there.” He presses my passport against the glass.

How embarrassing. Of course. I understand his question now. I tell him I was born there but we moved before I could walk, so I don’t remember anything about it. I might as well have never been there. The explanation feels long and convoluted. He shrugs his shoulders and hands my passport back to me.

We Americans have to have shallow roots so we can put them down quickly.

In Athens, the presence of the economic crisis is more subtle, but you don’t have to look far to find traces of it. Like an invasive species, it has made itself at home by pushing others out, displacing businesses and shops from their neighborhoods, people from their homes. It’s present in absence: storefronts shuttered, empty parking lots, new hotels never to be finished, concrete swimming pools fissured by the sun. And coming through the cracks, saplings turning into trees.

The crisis is there in conversations started and abandoned. A middle-aged male waiter at the restaurant: “Where are you from? America, oh Germany? I used to go to Frankfurt every year, for trade fairs. I know the city well. I was in the textile business, before ...” (eyes cast down, a direction that suggests shame. How could I have known that my answer would hurt?) “…yes, what would you like to order?”

Yet the precariousness—and injustice—is out in the open if you look for it. In Athens, refugees are squatting at the old airport without even the most basic of services, while just up the road, dozens of interior design studios sell Scandinavian-inspired furnishings and 10,000€ couches. At the entrance to the Athens Metro, the homeless are sprawled out on sleeping bags, dazed from the heat, and in a downtown park near Omonia Square, just off the tourist drag, heroin addicts tremble deliriously on public benches.

As the crisis enters its ninth year, things keep quietly slipping away. Like watching the sunset in this part of the world: even as the sun's going down, it moves so slowly that if you didn’t know any better, it might just stay suspended in the sky forever. And then you look away for a moment, and it’s gone.

When we first arrived, our host, a wiry journalist who rented out his place to keep afloat during the economic crisis, politely put us in the elevator and ran up the four flights of stairs to meet us at the top. I didn’t like it from the moment I saw it. It was little more than a wood-paneled, American-sized refrigerator, with mechanical press-buttons last manufactured in the 1970s. It was one of those elevators where the front of the cabin was actually open, so you can see the inside of the shaft passing as you ride up and down. It rode up ploddingly, like a grumbling beast of burden.

I’ve never much liked elevators, especially small ones, and I generally force myself to take the stairs to incorporate more ambient exercise into my life. But the real reason is that elevators make me nervous. Being locked in a box is terrifying, and that’s exactly what an elevator is once you strip away the habit of it. There’s this moment I always find myself holding my breath between when the elevator lines up with the floor and when the bell rings to announce our arrival. It’s the silence in that moment before the bell goes off and the doors open that they still might not.

We look through our pockets. Nothing suitable. The euro coins are too thick. I look down at my hands. My engagement ring. It’s thin, and platinum is a strong metal. I take it off and give it to Dominik. He puts it into the groove and tries to turn the ancient screw, but doesn’t manage to get it more than half a rotation.

The word quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta, for 40. That was the length of the period of isolation imposed by fourteenth-century Venetian officials on ships suspected of carrying pestilence from the East. These ships, laden with the marble, jewels, and spices that made Venice one of the richest places in the world, bobbed in the harbor, waiting for time to pass. Only time would bring an end, an absolution.

The temptation here is to stray outside of quarantine. As I write this morning, it is a beautiful sunny day. One of those first days of spring, when, under normal circumstances, the parks would be full, and the cities would teem with families and friends meeting over coffee or just taking a walk together. These are now potentially fatal temptations. If not for you, then for someone else you might not even know. Just because you can’t see or feel the threat doesn’t mean it’s not real. Even medieval man understood that.

One thing, if nothing else, is sure: for now, we will be at home. In our own four walls. Deeper still in the word quarantine, at the base of 40, is the word quattuor, for 4. The irony of our essential, unmitigated interconnectedness is that in order to survive, we have to put up walls against each other on all sides, and keep them there. Until this passes.

One afternoon in the Piazza della Signoria, our group was standing around waiting for something, the way large groups idle without knowing quite why, and I found myself getting more and more annoyed with the inertia—of this group, of my life. I just wanted one moment to myself in this beautiful place. Something of my own.

Admittedly, it was a lame gesture of independence, but I tiptoed away from the group, keeping an eye out for an adult to notice and come squawking at me to rejoin the flock. I ended up at a gelato shop across the square. As I walked in, I smiled shyly at the handsome young Italian man behind the counter. He smiled back. Because he couldn’t speak much English and my Italian was nonexistent (another reminder of my unworldliness), I pointed at the flavors I wanted and he rang up the amount on the register. I counted out the lira self-consciously, taking way too long to close this transaction. I didn’t know which bills were what, and I could see that he could see my clumsiness, but he kept smiling. I made a mental note to memorize the currency later at the hotel.

It was a completely pedestrian transaction but as I was leaving ice-cream-in-hand, the young Italian blew me an exuberant kiss and shot me a big Hollywood grin. Baffled, I blushed and waved, turning on my heel and scurrying away.

I rejoined the group (no one had noticed my absence) and ate my gelato furtively, my cheeks still awash with the warmth of the encounter. And then I started to smile. Yes, I had fumbled that encounter, and didn't know how to take the opening. But I didn’t know that I could get men to do that for me. It must have been the first time someone saw me as a woman.

The girl behind the counter wasn’t Italian and she was totally bored, staging a slow-motion protest the way only teenagers can. I smiled at the girl, knowing her pain, and I told her that I came here 15 years ago, and I'm returning now. I suppose it was an overly American thing to do—sharing personal information with strangers working in service—and I didn't really know why I was saying it. This place doesn't mean the same thing to her as it does to me.

As I walked out this time, the gelato didn't taste nearly as good as last time, imbued as it was with that stranger’s sweetness. But I savored it all the same, knowing that the kiss swept me onto a fanciful path that led me to pursue an education, find love, and discover many more beautiful corners of this world. At 29-going-on-30, I left this time, gelato in hand, knowing that any adolescent preoccupations about my naiveté or inexperience were no longer justified.

Nagorno Karabagh does not exist on most maps. It is a disputed territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan. A little-known war was fought here in 1994, and while the Armenians established a de facto independent state, the international community sided with the Azeris, and the enclave remains officially inscribed in the borders of Azerbaijan.

In any case, you do not need a map to get there. There’s only one road in.

Nagorno Karabagh means mountainous black garden, and it is well named. As we drove along on that lonely road in southern Armenia, paved with funds from Diasporan Armenians, frequented by sheep and trucks clattering through from Iran, a plateau of heavy black mountains rose up in graceful, intimidating formation, like a front line.

That night, the sky was crammed, even cluttered with stars. The stars in the sky were no more or less than on any other night. We just usually cannot see the sky for what it really is.

There are few places left in the world where we see space as it really is.

We set off to explore, and with the hotel off limits to everyone but guests, we basically had it all to ourselves. There was hardly anyone there. Creaking doors bellowed into cavernous rooms, and we found ourselves treading lightly through the halls as we wandered into wings we weren’t sure if we were supposed to be in.

Sometime hours later, but hours still to go before dawn, I woke up to the drapes whipping into our room, like a flag in a storm. There was an unusual, slightly sour smell in the air, as if someone had left a cigarette burning somewhere outside.

I took a deep breath. It smelled like smoke, but I couldn’t be sure. It was somewhat astringent, more akin to pine than outright fire, with a trace of exhaust. I couldn’t decide. The sky also seemed brighter than it should have been at the darkest time of night, illuminated uniformly as if from behind, like a backdrop in a theater. I looked up for a sign in the starless sky. Could it be a fire?

After breakfast, we went back to the room and sat on the balcony. Even though it was around 10AM, the sky was still rather dark, making it feel more like early evening than mid-morning. Yesterday had been a perfectly cloudless day, and last night, low clouds and a cold(er) front had settled in. But they weren’t normal clouds. They hung low and dirty, the sun shining mustily behind. The sky was matte.

The notary presided over a wood-paneled office, his desk strewn with papers. He was dressed in a gray suit, cut a few sizes too large, wearing a red silk shirt, gold pinkie ring, and a green paisley tie.

Next to his desk, the news played on a big flat screen TV at a volume just loud enough to contribute to the white noise in the room, but not loud enough to actually watch. In front of where the notary sat stood a statue of the blindfolded Lady Justice balancing the golden scales, flanked by a small flag of Romania and the European Union, and next to this, the Bible.

I asked them what they thought the biggest change in Romania has been since independence. The man said, “Well, we used to be so excited when we got a bicycle. Now people are unsatisfied with their old car. Now there’s always something better to be had.”

There we were, sitting around a table in a house the family had built themselves and decorated in bright, optimistic colors, with modern furniture. The table was spread with a kind of bounty unimaginable before the Revolution: Coca-Cola, plates of cookies, Italian coffee, oranges—goods loaded on trucks that under Ceaușescu would have been diverted long before arriving at the market. Even if the goods had reached their intended destination, there wouldn’t have been money back then to buy them, anyway.