“Fântâna nu se dă… Fântâna rămâne… Că fără de fântână Ne rătăcim prin lume…”
“What do I tell them?” she asked.
“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.”
Longing is not an illness. Longing is a root… The more you cut from the branch, the more the heart grows… Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii
She drank. The water was cold and tasted of iron and stone and centuries.
The well would remain. The root would hold. The heart would grow.
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. “Fântâna nu se dă… Fântâna rămâne… Că fără
“They want to pave the path to the new well,” Ana said. “And fill this one in. It’s a safety hazard, they say.”
Ana knew the poem. The well is not given away… The well remains… For without the well, we wander lost through the world…
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. It says: Here, someone once bent down to drink
She found him sitting on the low stone wall, a worn volume of Dumitru Matcovschi open in his hands. He wasn’t reading. He was listening.
“Bunicule, the laws—”
“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.”
“Dorul nu e o boală, Dorul e o rădăcină… Cu cât tai din creangă, Cu cât crește inima…”