KUNDVAGNEN R TOM
“The laws of the office change with every election,” he interrupted gently. “But the law of the well is older. It says: Here, someone once bent down to drink. Here, a mother washed her child’s face. Here, two lovers dropped a coin and made a wish. You cannot fill that in with gravel and cement.”
“Matcovschi wrote,” he said slowly, “that a man without a village is a man without a shadow. And a village without its wells is just a map.” He closed the book. “Tell them the well stays.”
It was the third well from the house—the old one, with the moss-eaten beam and the bucket that had worn a groove into the limestone rim over a hundred years. That was where her grandfather, Nicolae, went when the weight of the new world became too heavy. Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii
Nicolae did not look up. He turned a page, though his eyes were closed.
She looked at the book in his hands. The cover was faded, the spine cracked. Dumitru Matcovschi’s face, stern and kind, stared out from the back. Her grandfather had carried this book through the last years of the Soviet Union, through the reawakening of the language, through the dusty days of independence and the hungry winter that followed. “The laws of the office change with every
She drank. The water was cold and tasted of iron and stone and centuries.
He handed her the book, opened to a different poem. She read the lines aloud: Here, a mother washed her child’s face
“Bunicule,” she said softly, sitting beside him. “The delegation from Chișinău is here. They want to talk about the land registry. About the EU grant.”
When she walked back to the house, she did not carry a message for the delegation. She carried the book. She would read them the poems herself. And if they did not understand, that was all right.
“The silence between the drops,” he said. Then he began to recite, not from the book, but from a place deeper inside him:
“Fântâna nu se dă… Fântâna rămâne… Că fără de fântână Ne rătăcim prin lume…”
