Fragrance (novel) [14]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
We must always look with humor at the demons’ attempts to make our situation more difficult. To increase the difficulties of our journey. What should they do, in their wickedness?! They are like children who stomp their feet in the toy aisle, even though they don’t need any toys, but peace. But by seeking peace in wickedness, the demons make you end up in Cluj-Napoca against your will, even though you should have returned to the Hotel, in Târgu Mureș. And because at Casa Petrină[1] you ate almost in the same exceptional format as at Kombinat[2], you return to them and are served by the young lady in black, who behaves naturally and whom you enjoy for her naturalness.
All as all, when you travel a lot, you need water and good, welcoming, restful toilets. If you have your water, you have an immediate answer to the dry cough, caused by dust. Or which is triggered by a lot of essential talking. And if you have a toilet at the right time, you have rest, you don’t stand on thorns, and you get on the bus in peace. The driver is the grand inquisitor if he is healthy, if he does not know helplessness. One of them, the youngest, needed the toilet like me, so we were competing to fit in the 10 minutes. With the train, the toilet is your choice. But riding the bus is a school of ascesis, because you must control your body until the finish line. A line that they decide, not you! And when you arrive and find a good smell in the toilet, a fresh, clean smell, and the urinal beckons you to use it, then you experience a great liberation from the pressure of the scrotum, you receive the release you need, after which you fill your palms with water, washing the liquid soap off them. And you leave praying for them, for your benefactors, for those who made and maintain the toilet, thanking God for working through all of them for your peace. This is what gratitude looks like, living gratitude! It is immediately. You give thanks immediately for what you receive. You rejoice for what you receive, because you need punctual things. And when you need it, your benefactors are those sent by God on your path, they are those through whom He works, so that you can leave and return safely to your home.
And, oh, your home, when you return from the road, is the greatest rest! The greatest benefaction of God. Your home is what you don’t want to give for not a penny. Because here, in your home, in your bed, at your writing table, with your wife and children, with your family, you are at peace, you are well, and you don’t need anything. And since morning, from the first hour, but also now, at 19.22, an effeminate, motherly young man has come to apartamente.ro, talking on the phone on the balcony. He speaks loudly, so that everyone can hear. And when his mother called him, she asked him, gave him advice, he explained to her. Then another young man called him, they sang an old refrain on the phone, which I knew too, and which I still sing out of nerves, out of fatigue, out of a whim. And now he’s talking to a woman, it’s a woman’s voice, and since I have the window open, I put him in a novel of nerves. Of the nerves of creation. That writing also has its positive nerves, which extract from reality, with the tweezers, what is needed and put it in the novel. The gestural automatisms, the verbal repetitions, the futile gestures are what disturb my creation. I need myself and my peace. Of descending into myself. And when the phone rings, it fires with the machine gun into my silence. When I hear a car alarm, a repetitive sound, it makes me not have the peace of writing, not have myself, because I must fight internally with the intruder, with the belligerent.
And if the heroism in my fairy tales made me look at the brave man with positive emotion, because I knew that good would win, the televised wars have nothing to do with anything other than the continuous prolongation of insecurity, fear, and loneliness. I meet more and more people who tell me that they no longer watch the news, so as not to go crazy. Protecting the nerves, from a certain age, is called health, being the correlative of mud wraps from Techirghiol[3]. The alert rang on the phone after I saw the whirlwind in motion. The cars collided into your living room, because you see them on the screen. You are told fragments of understandings, some summary data, delivered at chronometer, you have the illusion that you know some things, but you don’t actually know anything. Because you need TV novels, endless explanations for a certain event, in order to understand it. It’s not enough to introduce into the situation, but you have to debate it. To talk about the antecedents and the consequences, to talk at length about the perpetrators and the witnesses. That Bold’s Lina must know in extensive detail what happened on the road. Who said what, what did, what didn’t. But the adventist Geta contextualizes the things there, in her sect, presenting them „from a biblical perspective”. As their pastor taught her. What matters to Lina is that Geabou said he would pick the vines later, around october, so that the grapes would ripen well, even though Minel’s bees and the magpies have been eating them since august. But Geta, no and no! She sells honey and doesn’t skimp on the price, even though adventists are waiting for the end of the world and, if it’s coming so soon, you don’t need any money in the bank, right?! The tall pastor, with the face of a living dead man, preached with stony gravity after the carol concert. Those brought, among whom was myself, did not rejoice, because they were brought to be indoctrinated. But his talk did not catch on! Because there, in their midst, while they were praying, I felt the glory of God received at Baptism and I understood that the Church of God is the one in which I was already. And then I was overcome by an insatiable longing for my home, for my Church, where I went on the day of the Transfiguration of the Lord and where I was filled with divine fulfillment. For you cannot mimic the joy, the inner settlement, the divine boldness, the holiness. These are within you, not outside you! The godly gestures, when they are mimicked, when they are learned theatrically, are a theater of bad taste. For the holiness is the nature of man, when man is Holy. And the holy man behaves naturally with piety, with delicacy, with humanity, because they are within him, they spring from him like water from a spring.
After the suffocating heat of summer, the first day of autumn, at the end of august, was a good comfort. I included those written on the road, before and after the sermon, written with peace and fulfillment. And my great fulfillment is that all my writings, so diverse, meet, are friends, because my heart knows them all. And I wrote them from the inside out, carefully, with my care for them, which is my care for my soul. For the truth and its love.
[1] To be seen: https://www.casapetrina.ro/.
[2] Idem: https://kombinat.ro/.
[3] Details: https://sbtghiol.ro/features/namol-sapropelic/.