Seven Years to Understand How the World Works

I'm 17 years old and it's the beginning of spring. I play basketball for a year and I start dating. I gave up football. First of all, because of my mother, who decided to become an intellectual rather than a football player. And then they helped me with the heels that my <x0handra” under my knees, and they stopped me for several months.

I find a school, not far from home, where basketball is played. For some nights I remain motionless in the field as an idiot, as no one wants to have on the team “a” animal one meter and 73kg. Then, one Saturday, there are only five boys, so I can enter the field: three-by-three. There's a girl on every team. And they're both beautiful, which gives me a special motivation to play well.

My team's small, but it moves very well and has the best shot of all. I never get past the ball until at some point I can stop a pass and mark the basket. We win all the matches, which is definitely positive. I'm the one with the darkest skin, but we're in Ceausescu's era, so there's no unpleasant comments. Everyone certainly has their own thoughts, but nobody talks.

Dusty, on another planet

I return to play in that field practically every night, and become friends with some guys. I'm slowly imposed as one of the best players and sometimes I can dominate the game. There's always five or six girls in the field, and they're all very good to me, except for <x0 secretion”, a little girl, with a haircut and blue-lighted eyes, which seems to come from another planet.

Once in May, I am invited to a party and decide to go. There I meet again “acre”. We talk all night. In the morning I fell in love, as I never imagined would happen to me. Making my own “acre” becomes my absolute priority, and in the last month of school, I completely neglect lessons. I train like crazy at basketball and make rapid progress. I go to the point of touching the basket ring and start making 1,500 bends a day. I have an incredible destiny, and I can eventually go to the colony with him, to Costinesti, the Black Sea. We're in love and we seem to be on another planet.

That's the happiest year I remember. The secretion” is the most beautiful of the kingdom and everything is exactly like the dream. I can somehow dive into the basket, and I dream of becoming king of basketball.

It's the early 1990s, we're together and I'm super happy. I earn some money by doing every kind of seasonal work (including excavations), and by shopping with Serbs and Bulgarians. I'm having a great vacation in Costinish, practically without a headache. I'm not very interested in engineering and university, my grades are a little mediocre, but I just learn what I need to pass on exams.

I read a lot, I keep reading “barking my head” with computers and playing basketball with persistence. We take long walks and drink Pepsi on the sidewalk. “The Scorpion” is the most beautiful girl I know: I'm madly in love with her. At one point, however, I think things are not as simple as they seem. Her family is white and my mother suddenly becomes a problem. The fact is, I'm a Gypsy. It's clear and cut. We shouldn't meet.

I don't understand. Together we are very happy, and suddenly this nonsense comes. Scorpion is always under pressure. Her colleagues at the university, where they study law, at best look down on me when they don't show outright disgust. It all sounds ridiculous. I'm definitely better than any one of them in all angles except for skin color. I think the case will be settled and I will continue to do everything I can to be with him. I clearly deal with a child's mind, not an adult.

Between the dragon and the hammer

Things gradually get worse. My fairy turns into a real scorpion, turning to my mother, but she's got decades of experience: when she says she's raised me bad, she gets on my mother's blacklist. I feel between a whore and a hammer, and I continue to act like a foolish child, convinced that the universe in my head fits into the real world.

The first serious debates begin, and, at one point, she tells me she will no longer stay with me. She'll never marry me. Actually, I never thought about marriage, but something breaks up inside me. Suddenly I realize I'm a Gypsy. That I'll always be a Gypsy. I realize that this is true of friends around me. Good people who hate to death the Gypsies: We are in 1993, and violence has recently occurred in Hãodão, where some Romanians and Hungarians killed three Gypsies. Roma hate is in fashion.

Many people try to forget about me being a Gypsy, but they don't mind insulting other Roma.

My mother works as a servant to a German woman. My father is an alcoholic, he hates us and repeatedly threatens to kill us. Romania is in control of senior Securitate agents, and money traffickers. I think seriously about suicide and one day I find myself walking along the train tracks.

It's early 1994 and I'm surrounded by a terrible reality. I'm poor, at college I study a topic that I don't like and that prepares me for unemployment, and I'm in a relationship with a girl who considers me a problem for her future. All this, in a collapsed place.

I decide to survive and start building walls around me. I slowly become a fox trying to throw away, and I start ignoring the good people who stand by me, telling myself I have to get out at all costs. From time to time, I give a hand to the children in need, which makes me feel good, but it will take me seven years to realize that, accepting reality doesn't mean doing what I've been told to do.

This article was published for the first time in the Romanian weekly “Veche”. Bring in Albanian from The world..