by On the way back to Timișoara we stopped at the rhyming towns of Oravița and Moravița, the latter of which was a stone’s throw from the border with Serbia. Mum was surprisingly enthusiastic about crossing the border, which was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I think she was keen simply because she’s a fan of Novak Djokovic who hails from Serbia. Dad was a lot less keen, and said he would have put his foot down had he known that Serbia was outside the EU. We got through the customs grilling and made our way to Vršac, pronounced (I think) vr-shats; just like in Srbija, the Serbian word for the country, there’s no vowel sound in the first syllable. Another interesting point: the Serbian language uses both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. We sat in a café and had ice coffees. These were delicious; the best coffee my parents had during their Romanian trip wasn’t even in Romania. It was also the cheapest coffee they had. We had no local currency, no euros either, just Romanian lei, and they didn’t accept plastic. They decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of making us change money, so they gave us the coffees on the house. I might visit Vršac at some point in the future; I’ll need to change there if I ever go to Belgrade by train. We had a job returning the car at the airport; we hit Timișoara at peak time and the office was empty when we eventually got there.
Seeing such beautiful scenery and a completely different way of life was quite something, but with Mum the whole experience was extremely fraught. Even simple decisions such as what food to buy at a supermarket or a restaurant became almost politically charged. If Dad or I ever disagreed with anything, she took it as a personal affront and wouldn’t speak to us or would say that she wanted to go home (I never knew which home she meant). She accused us of ganging up on her and even, at one point, abusing her.
On Friday night, my parents’ last night in Romania, we had a meal out. Or tried to. At the third place (the others were expensive) we sat outside, but then a torrential storm literally ripped through, tearing shades from their poles and knocking over tables. At that point Mum just wanted to get a few slices of pizza from the kiosk downstairs, but when I suggested that I could do better than that by buying whole pizzas from a pizza parlour, again she didn’t want to speak to me. Shit, I live here, I know what’s available. Why do you have to make all the decisions? She didn’t even trust me to drive the rental car apart from on a couple of occasions when Dad basically handed me the wheel.
Money has changed Mum almost beyond recognition. She has worked hard, I’ll certainly give her that, but like many of her generation, she thinks her financial success is solely due to her own efforts, making morally right decisions at the right times, living the right way, being a good person. Her value as a person can be measured purely by her net worth. As a friend said to me last year, life has become a game that you win by having the most shit when you die.
I felt a deep sadness yesterday when my parents left. Mum and I love each other dearly. I saw the last two weeks as a big opportunity to get on with her, to enjoy spending time wth her, and even though we didn’t completely fall out, I felt I failed miserably. I’m at a loss as to what I could have done differently, apart from simply agreeing with everything she said and did, which is Dad’s solution far too often. I suggested that they come here earlier next year when it will be considerably cooler, and perhaps just stay in Timișoara which Mum seems to like. Perhaps they could go on a Baltic cruise – Mum has become a fan of cruises, which remove a lot of the stressful decision-making from the equation. (With so many damn people, they’re my idea of hell.)
For the last two weeks I’ve been full of cold. It’ll take ages for me to come right, not that I ever really come right. My parents said they’d pay for me to have an operation on my sinuses and I’m very grateful for that. This week I’ll find out what the procedure would entail and what it would cost.
Yes it’s hot. Right now it’s 31 with a cloudless sky and hardly a breath of wind. Later it should reach 35. I’m relieved to see that they’re forecasting only 35 for this Thursday, rather than the 39 they were predicting yesterday.
Next post: photos.
