As if tugged by an invisible thread, I stroll the same old streets—under linden and chestnut trees, past potholes where water or fallen autumn leaves used to gather and kids used to splash and stomp around—breathing more deeply as I walk by the walls enclosing certain yards. Behind one I detect an elderberry bush, or maybe it’s jasmine, or even the more fragrant Japanese honeysuckle. I know there must be rusty garage door in the near courtyard, which will echo the sound of my heels and wake up the neighbour’s dog. And the small starlings lining the now-obsolete rooftop TV antennae will promptly chime in, too, right on cue.
After many years in Zurich, Victoria, the protagonist of Swiss-Romanian writer Dana Grigorcea’s novel An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, has returned to her native Bucharest, a city now transformed from the Communist-era world in which she grew up into a place reshaped by post-revolutionary currents. It is a place she experienced in flux, as a member of the “so-called transitional generation,” but it has changed even more in her absence. She doesn’t tell us exactly why she has come back, but she is living in her family’s apartment and working at a bank. That is, until the bank is robbed by an old man with whom she will again cross paths as his geriatric crime spree continues. This unlikely occurrence not only knocks her off-kilter, but when her employer insists she take leave to “process the trauma,” it opens up time and space for her to reconnect with the people and places of her past.
And so, in the stifling summer heat, trailed by the sticky scent of linden blossoms, Victoria fills her newly freed days wandering the city. Bucharest becomes a kind of post traumatic memory theatre with a personal grid superimposed on its layered historical structure. Street names are critical to her ability to orient herself, especially on those arteries that have been renamed, sometimes a number of times, as political currents have shifted. She regularly encounters people from her childhood and adolescence—school friends, former boyfriends, characters from her neighbourhood. Not exactly stream of consciousness, Victoria’s line of thought takes regular digressions as she sees or thinks of something or someone she once knew. Her new boyfriend Flavian will frequently try to navigate this altered landscape with her, offering a frame of reference wherever he can to the many changes that have occurred during her many years in Zurich. And her parents, who have also been living abroad, arrive to visit, further disturbing the unsettled dust of memory. She has an awkward lunch with her mother:
She picks up her knife and fork and continues eating, and I wonder if it would be better for us to talk about her life in the south of France but we tied that last time and it only made her sad. ‘We moved there too late, just too late.’ Or should I tell her about what’s going on here in Bucharest—about her dental practice which is going well? But she already knows. Once again, I refrain from asking her where she parked the car whose keys she’s left with me, and what it looks like. I’d bet it’s a cream-coloured Peugeot, upholstered in cream-coloured leather. Some day I’ll come across it by accident while strolling about the neighbourhood. The door will pop right open for me, just like in Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales of eternal youth and everlasting life, stories where the hero returns to his homeland after a long absence and finds that everything has changed, he doesn’t recognize a thing, and even starts to doubt whether he ever had any homeland at all.
As she traverses the city, Victoria notes the heavily weighted history of buildings, landmarks, public squares, and roadways. Her senses are on high alert, yet she is distracted by the smallest details, like the colour of nail polish she has chosen. And there is a constant, uneasy misfit between past and present that unnerves the narrative flow. Sometimes Victoria repeats herself, other times she falls into a side story about someone from her past that may or may not be fleshed out later, or seems to lose track of the thread of events that are—or appear to be—happening in the present. Sometimes the line between truth and illusion breaks down altogether like when a ride on the bus on the same route she used to take every day with her grandmother becomes a surreal, dystopian detour through a decaying urban landscape where cellphone service suddenly disappears and other passengers seem to morph into people Victoria thinks she recognizes.
Of course, she is a less than reliable narrator; her interpretation of reality and her emotional engagement is uncertain. Past lovers continually reappear, leading Flavian to ask “Are you waiting for a lover?” He eyes her with suspicion. “If so, I’ll stay by the door to catch him.” But through it all, Victoria remains an infectiously engaging story teller drawing on a wide range of characters and experiences. From the tale of a philandering neighbour murdered by his wife, to memories of her wildly eccentric grandmother, to details of unconventional tendencies of her parents and their friends, to an account of joining a crowd of thousands to catch a glimpse of Michael Jackson during his Dangerous tour in 1992, the Bucharest that she brings to life is the Ceausescu-era city she grew up in overlayed by a changed, modern metropolis that doesn’t exactly match at the seams. In these cracks she encounters people from her past, both in memory and in real time. But then, what is real time when life has been disrupted by an unexpected event in a city that has itself been disrupted by more than one political upheaval?
An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence by Dana Grigorcea is translated from the German by Alta L. Price and published by Seagull Books.
roughghosts 
Sounds very interesting.
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It is interesting, a rather different approach to the “wandering down memory lane” type novel.
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