The Tile-Laying Florist

It was midday, and hot. Shimmering grey, with the candy-coloured specks of houses along its edges, Strada Libertății lay deserted before me. I followed it the short distance to the river. It was little more than a trickle. Nothing to justify the name „Great Kokel“, as the Saxons called it in German. The Romanians called it „Târnava Mare“, the Hungarians „Küküllő“. That suited it best: a name like a brook full of ducklings.

My mother had loved playing by the Kokel as a child, but I could not picture this childhood playground of hers. The concrete embankments lining the river were too flat, too grey, too utterly devoid of imagination, with the housing blocks of the socialist decades looming above them.

Ahead of me, the asphalt glittered in the sunlight. A little further on, parasols glowed a deep red. There seemed to be a market there, which was just what I needed.

In the half-light beneath the parasols, heads of cabbage, heads of lettuce and the heads of stallholders gradually became distinguishable. Fruit and smaller vegetables were piled up between them. Peppers in pods, garlic in plaits, herbs in bunches. There were no flowers.

But there were wasps. Enormous swarms filled the warm market air so densely that I held a hand over my mouth to breathe. Those that were not flying were grazing on the fruit. Watermelons were particular favourites, displayed here cut open. The ripest melons were not red but striped black and yellow. The wasps did not seem to fly towards the fruit so much as simply drop onto it. Gorged with juice, they took off again on sticky wings, staggering about in a fruit-sugar stupor, and buzzed — as aimlessly as I did — between the market stalls, settling on berries, bananas and pears, on hands and noses, tolerated by their owners with the utmost composure, sometimes ignored with admirable indifference. A hundredth of this insect population would have made the television news in Germany.

Harassed by the buzzing and humming, I left the market with my purpose unfulfilled, and only realised, when I found myself back at the river, that I was heading in the wrong direction.

Never mind. This way, then.

Two bridges further on, Schässburg seemed to come to an end. The road widened and followed the Kokel off into somewhere or other. But here, immediately to my right, was a corner. I turned it — and that was exactly the right place. One of the main streets of the lower town began here, with shops lining it one after another. Just beyond a liquor shop stood what might be my destination: a narrow white building whose entrance was completely entwined with plastic flowers glued to the façade.

Four steps led up to a glass double door through which no light escaped. I pressed my nose against the pane and could make out the shadowy shapes of buckets and vases, with all sorts of colourful things inside them.

I was back at the foot of the steps in an instant.

What if all the flowers were plastic?

Undecided, I walked a little way, turned back, repeated the exercise like a man who needs a piss but refuses to go. Peered through the glass once more — and finally ventured inside, into cool, damp darkness.

The Lord of Darkness appeared at once: a man in a green apron, round-headed and sparsely haired, delighted beyond measure by my visit.

„Bună ziua!“ he greeted me. I nodded back without a word. Adept at turning little or nothing into a business opportunity, like every Romanian I had encountered so far, he immediately began fishing floral horrors out of the depths of his cave and proudly presenting them to me. Most of these bouquets, in their arrangement, resembled a Balkan mixed grill, except that the meat had been replaced by flowers and the serving platter by several layers of plastic wrapping.

Behind the merchant’s almost bald head, a garishly orange artificial wreath glowed vulgarly from a chair. I pointed towards it, merely to indicate the general direction in which our search should proceed.

„Sepolcro!“ I explained my gesture in my trusty Italian.

The merchant did not react.

„Una decorazione per una tomba,“ I continued.

„Doam?“ The florist looked at me questioningly. Something seemed to be dawning on him.

„Cimitero!“ I persisted, and struck — hurrah! — upon the common root of the two Romance languages.

„Cimitir, așa e! Foarte bine, foarte bine!“ The flower merchant was positively beaming now. In no time, he produced an arrangement of pink plastic blossoms on turquoise-blue stems, appropriately veiled in black tulle like a Sicilian widow. Enthusiastic explanations in Romanian accompanied the ghastly creation.

„Stop,“ I intervened. „Fiori veri, per favore!“ Real flowers, please! And, in frustration, I added a German swear word.

That one the merchant knew.

In surprisingly decent German, and with his face contorted into a peculiar expression of regret, he explained that at present he had only roses „for real“, long-stemmed and magnificent, red as blood into the bargain. Would those be acceptable?

They would. Did I have a choice?

Soon the worktable was heaped with glorious blood-red roses, and the grotesque undertaking began. With the dexterity of a practised hand, the rose-tamer twisted the flowers together in a manner I had never seen before, miraculously without pricking himself on the thorns. No sooner had a basic spiral taken shape than he began threading more roses into the vortex from above, squeezing a thin sheet of coloured plastic halfway between the blossoms after approximately every third flower (we had rashly neglected to agree on the total quantity of material to be used), leaving the other half fluttering in the breeze.

I watched, as mesmerised as I was helpless, while he took enormous pleasure in being able to distract me from his work by talking to me in German.

He was, he freely admitted, a trained tiler by profession. He had found his way into the flower business by various roundabout routes that were of no importance. He had nothing but the fondest memories of Germany. Of Gelsenkirchen, to be precise, where many years ago he had learnt the language of Goethe and Schiller, perhaps not quite impeccably, but still. Marvellous it had been there, no comparison with Schässburg, for in Germany money had been lying about on the ground, and in his case not merely by virtue of his profession. He still regretted no longer being able to work there. Why, he did not reveal.

To someone already tired and mentally somewhat drained, his talk was soporific; to someone whom guilt had by the collar, positively anaesthetic. And so I let him have his way, merely nodding whenever he asked permission to add yet more decorative plastic, ornamental ribbons and layers of glossy finishing spray, until the bouquet finally radiated that cheap indecency which here was regarded as the very pinnacle of refinement.

Without even waiting for my praise, the flower strangler, now that it came to payment, no longer relied on his linguistic abilities alone. As in other countries further south, inconvenient facts were entered directly into the till, so that one need not waste time explaining them but could simply hold them up for inspection. In this case, the till was an ancient calculator, as big as a writing pad and, naturally, made by Casio.

Its display had room for very large numbers. By now, at the very latest, I ought to have synchronised a few of my observations with those brain cells of mine that were still functioning and asked them for an assessment of the situation. Instead, I merely stared in overwhelmed acquiescence at the number „90“, which glared back at me with unmistakable clarity. Without a word of protest, and much to the delight of the tile-laying florist, I fumbled out the required sum and handed it over.

It took until I was halfway across the Kokel bridge for my daze to lift. I had spent around twenty euros on flowers — in a country where that amount could buy your three best friends a two-day party.

By the time I reached the cemetery, however, I had more or less made my peace with the matter. As I walked, I had peeled away most of the plastic sheets, untangled the ribbons, discarded almost everything made of plastic and calculated that in Germany the same money would have bought me only a fraction of the number of roses, albeit more elegantly arranged. I kept some of the glittering tat to brighten up the plastic bottle that was to serve as a vase. I could find no better container for the water.

Only now did I finally pay my respects, even allowing myself to sit down on the grave slab. When, after a long conversation with my ancestors, I slowly set off to check in at my guesthouse, where they had been waiting for me for hours, I had regained something of my inner equilibrium. To have found the graves of my ancestors, and quite by chance, was far more than I could have expected.

Quietly, I hoped that I might not go unnoticed by the living, either. Even if I was neither dragging a coffin behind me nor playing the harmonica, like the great strangers of the silver screen, I hoped that the flowers on my great-grandparents‘ grave would not prove entirely without consequence in talkative Transylvania.