May 23, Frankfurt Airport

Frankfurt built a cathedral to the bus and called it an airport. While descending from one of its wheeled vessels, I hear my name—“Alina!”—and recognize the voice as Andrei’s. It’s been decades since I last spoke to this friend, but little has changed, which is to say, he has the same glasses, same haircut, his grin like a favorite park whose paths I’d forgotten. We catch up in Customs. He’s spending a weekend in Bucharest for a university reunion. Rumor has it that the Romanian diaspora in Germany voted heavily for Trump’s pet, George Simion, in the recent election; whereas Putin’s pet, Călin Georgescu, did well with the rural reactionaries and wellness-Influencers.

Both of us are relieved that Simion lost, and wary of the future. The newly-elected government emphasizes austerity policies. Public service jobs are at risk. Cabinet members offer the word “sacrifice” to the press. As Andrei and I marvel at the coincidence of our meeting, a different word flutters like ghost-breaths between us. Home?

Bucharest

Strada C. A. Rosetti. Wired by memory and curiosity, I bury my jet-lag in dusk and set out to find my favorite haunts. A brisk walk through the rain, honeysuckle vines dripping over gates and garden walls as if to seduce the sidewalk. The signage and graffiti collude through juxtaposition. I read the streets in passing. A plaque marking Cezar Petrescu’s house proffers graffiti of the Romanian flag. Beneath another plaque that marks Virgil Gheorghiu’s home, a bumper sticker reads, in awkward English, “Support Not Punish.”

May 24, Bucharest

Bulevardul Lascăr Catargiu. A sour cherry tree growing between flower beds outside a vaguely-Brutalist apartment building. Ecstasy: to be swathed in the mutations and staccato intonations of my first language while walking down the street. The patch-words borrowed from Turkish and Russian sound nervier, less stable, when ornamented with diacritics and edged by the energy of Bucharest. As officially developed and re-Latinized by 18th century intellectuals and writers, my mother tongue emerged from an effort to expel its Slavic elements from the vulgar Latin at its base.

Reflecting an elected affinity for the ancient Roman colonizer in the hopes of escaping the Ottoman and Russian empires of modernity, Romanian evolved in relation to its geographic status as a borderland between great powers. Precarity and vulnerability are bricked into the national concept; academics and literati have been tasked with gatekeeping linguistic purity since the 1940s. But neologisms and impure hybrids flourish on the sidewalks and in the tapestry of gorgeous idioms that pepper everyday conversations.

The stain of being “eastern” is a political stain, and Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory only amplified the bias that undergirds the neoliberal Clinton years, and enriched countless Ivy-League graduates who profited from their embrace of neocolonial development economics. Romania, to Huntington, was a freakshow, an anomaly, a mutt that carried the clash within its flesh, blending the Eastern Orthodox inclination towards mysticism and mystery cults with a Latinate culture.