The Party After The Book Presentation

Motto:
"We live in Romania, and that keeps us busy" -
Mircea Badea, TV commentator

The launch of the book honoring the life-time achievement takes place in the school’s chemistry lab. On the back benches - literally long, wooden benches - sit the second-rank guests: some researchers with the Institute for the History of Literature; the writer’s illegitimate daughter; the village mayor, who is also heading the local subsidiary of the ruling party; and the County head of the Culture Department.

With all the equipment for testing the properties of the sulfuric acid on the desks in front of them, one may rest assured none of these people will try it on the desk wood to see if the acid really works through it.

These are reasonable people, not naughty schoolchildren.

The panel sits behind a table adorned with a red cloth, the same red cloth of which the former Romanian Communist Party flag was made of, and which someone found cast in an old closet. On the panel sit the honor guests: the County prefect; some now famous villagers, among whom the horseshoe maker Tache. He bought the local factory for transmission chains and turned it into a cluster of Turkish baths. Also on the panel sits a former famous TV star, which now is out of contract.

On the right-hand wall hangs the Mendeleyev Table. The Zinc is missing, as the night watchman stole it to drink it.

From the third row of desks to the back of the room, one can see no chemical lab paraphernalia, only the clean wooden desks, behind which sit the school’s teachers.

They are middle aged women, with worn out sweaters and apparently melancholic gazes, which in fact are void of any thoughts. The retired teachers are there too, wearing Siberian-style hats under which one could imagine the untended hair.

The program of the meeting was set up by the writer’s daughter and the head of the radio transmission station in the village. Three of the researchers arriving from Bucharest read their long and boring speeches. Faint applause follows each of them.

The head of the local cultural center stands up and sings an aria of the Rigoletto opera, seasoned with terrible cries where high notes should have been. The TV star takes the floor too, telling his old jokes which nonetheless liven up the audience, and makes it crack up with laughter.

After the symposium in the chemistry lab, all guests are invited to lunch in the physics lab, where tables are set.

The school readied itself for a week for this event. The lab equipment was temporarily moved into the cleaning-lady’s locker room.

Only the Foucault’s pendulum stayed since the physics professor said he would file his resignation if it was moved out from the lab. The female teachers worked for a week to cook the cabbage rolls with sour cream and to thinly cut the bacon and pluck a toothpick in each and every piece.

The male teachers boiled the brandy in one of the pots used in the physics lab to demonstrate the Archimedes principle.

Before eating the appetizers, there is the prayer moment.

The school principal sits next to the TV star and tells him that she writes poems. She wears a starched blouse and high-heels. Also, for the first time in her life she dyed her hair for the event. Maybe this is why she is so unsure of herself and looks as if stepping on the deck of a ship in full storm.

She pulls out of her purse a red booklet, tied up with a ribbon, and reads one of the poems to the TV star. The man listens with a distant look, as his image councilor told him to.

The pinnacle of the whole meeting arrived: presenting the boiled brandy. The school director claps her hands to ask for silence in the room.

Taps at the door are heard, as if well-wishers at Christmas time would have come. "Come on in," say the people inside, as the script required them to. The door opens and in come a long line of men, each solemnly carrying pots of boiling brandy, as if they were Olympic trophies.

In a like ceremony is welcomed the wine too.

At the very end, the principal’s secretary comes to the table where the panel sits with a tray full of coffee cups. The panel had a table set apart for them in the physics lab too: it carried flower bouquets in jars, which until held before the frogs used for dissections.