By VALER POPA
An excerpt from Moon Over Bucharest, a finalist for the 2026 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
He was led by the apostle into a valley shut in between two hills, where everything that is lost on earth (be the fault of ours or that of time or fate) fetches up miraculously
— Ludovico Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, Canto 34)
Of course, the Favorit Cinema was closed. It had kept mute vigil behind our building for nearly thirty years—ever since some overzealous tycoon bought it shortly after the revolution, hoping to turn the place into a nightclub; ever since he went bankrupt, fired the staff, and locked the doors with a chain so massive and medieval that even now, people often wonder how such a bulky thing could still be manufactured.
The interior has deteriorated greatly since then—the plush seats have been eaten away by moths, and rats now use the foam for nests to keep their pink little ones warm during the winter. Residents in our building often shiver when they think about what’s in there, when they imagine the filth, the dust, the mold, the expansive cockroach colonies, the earwigs and mole-crickets that scurry about in the dark, quietly ripping apart old posters and mud-stained catalogues with their shoveled forceps and pincers and later hoisting these scraps on their small, muscular backs to pamper their queen: a two-inch, egg-laying sausage with little wings that will never allow flight. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I too liked to envision its awful tenants: monsters crouching in desolate hallways and projection rooms, sniffing at the spongy bones of mice, dogs, or other things that crawled inside to die in solitude.
But it wasn’t always like this. At one time, the Favorit had formed the center of those long, falconing walks I often took with my grandfather, back when he taught me the first rules of being a gentleman. At that time, Bucharest was a different city. It was poor and mean and I was ungracious. I really could have cared less about my lessons. Most times, I wanted nothing more than to go inside the cinema and see a movie, but Grandfather wouldn’t hear of it, maintaining that my education was more immediate.
These lessons always began with the walk. “This is how gentlemen do it,” he’d say, before proceeding to demonstrate, keeping his knees nice and straight, his polished shoes angled elegantly to the side as they took long strides. It was no doubt an antiquated conception of gentlemanliness, perhaps one better suited to the nineteenth century, but he defended its tenets as if they were scripture. “The angle of the foot makes all the difference,” he explained. I gave it a few tries myself, but I stepped too “obtusely,” so that my gentleman’s gait was more like the waddle of a prehistoric bird disgraced by evolution. Discouraged, Grandfather would skip to the next lesson. We’d both sit down on a green bench near the cinema entrance, he’d pull out a fresh apple that he’d bought earlier that morning, and then he’d hand me a book to read out loud.
Even though he never learned to read, Grandfather felt it was necessary to fill our house with books. “Only peasants live in homes without knowledge,” he used to say, perhaps wishing to distinguish his present self from some previous and far more impoverished persona. Thanks to him, we now own hundreds of volumes, all bound in the same red or blue faux-leather jackets dating back forty to fifty years. With his electrician’s mulishness, Grandfather amassed whatever reading material he could find, whatever was cheaper, older, with yellow pages half-decomposed, hanging from their scruffy spines by a splinter and a prayer. And because he could never read the covers, because he could never discriminate one paperback from another, a torrent of eclectic old tomes slowly overtook our home, including canon masterpieces, cookbooks, history books, a forest’s worth of encyclopedias, and discourses on mysticism, Yoga, and acupuncture. When my grandmother asked him what all this nonsense was for, he insisted that he would teach himself. But he never did. He never could. Indeed, one day I found him sitting alone on the bed in Mother’s room. He was facing the window, his shirt tucked deep inside his pants while two kidney beans of moisture prudishly kissed across his back. Quietly, so as not to disturb him, I watched his hands slowly page through a book he held upside down, and I heard him sigh in shame because those tiny snakes below his nose refused to unleash their meaning.
And so, on the days he made me read in front of the Favorit Cinema, it was more for his benefit than mine; for years he’d been dying to know what those pages had concealed from him and now he’d finally found someone who could tell him. I tried my best, though I made plenty of mistakes. Nonetheless, he’d listen closely and correct my pronunciation. Then, when I finished, he’d explain what he thought the passage or book I’d read was really about. He’d sit and slice it apart, dissecting the prose as though it were a corpse. He worked hard to extract hidden messages, untangling Byzantine conspiracies that were never there to begin with. Sometimes he would think about a book for days or weeks, and his ideas would slowly rise into shabby towers of sophistry that toppled over with the slightest breeze. Of course, I never understood what he’d meant to say then, but he talked to me as though I could, as though I was fully grown, and that made listening somewhat compelling. “You’ll be a gentleman one day,” he’d say then, swelling with pride, more reassured by the way I read than by the way I walked.
Among all the books we consulted, his favorite was Orlando Furioso, the great Italian epic of the cinquecento, set during the mythical wars between Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid. I must have poured over it a thousand times, struggling through its dense, lyric wilderness with nothing but the blunt machete of my fledgling literacy. He especially loved the thirty-fourth canto, which recounts a miraculous voyage to the moon, to a special valley where everything that is forgotten on our Earth resurfaces. He told me that when the world forgot about him, he too would end up on the moon, so that one day, when science and engineering had made sufficient strides, I might visit him in a spaceship.
Shortly before he died, when I was six or seven years old, during one of those long peregrinations around the cinema, grandfather finally acquiesced and took me inside to see Jurassic Park. It was during the most exhilarating scene, in which the velociraptors are hunting the children through a large kitchen, that a little girl behind me began to cry and I was instantly severed from the thrill and terror of the film. I got a quick glimpse of her as I turned around. She was a blonde, pudgy thing, and she wailed so hard that her mother, red with embarrassment, was forced to pick her up and carry her outside. After the film ended and I was on my way out with Grandfather, I saw the little girl sitting on the green bench where I’d endured my lessons, her feet dangling, sometimes kicking back and forth, while her mother wiped tears from her round fleshy cheeks. When she glanced my way, I gave it to her straight: a grave, reproachful look that made it clear she’d behaved like a baby and—worst of all—that she’d ruined the best part of what had just become my favorite movie.
I remember the weeks that followed as a frenzy of imaginative excess. I was so enchanted by the idea of resurrected dinosaurs that for a whole month, I chose to walk around the house only by lumbering about the way a tyrannosaur would: my middle and index fingers rigidly extended like a pair of pitchforks, roaring occasionally while slowly panning my body from left to right and back again. After a month, I stopped walking like this. I’m not sure why, but I began to believe that one of my classmates was secretly spying on me while I was at home. I was convinced of it in fact. Somehow, I knew he had been born with special hands, with powerful suction cups for finger pads like some colorful tree frog, and he could easily scale the outer walls of our building, up to my window on the second floor, where he could scrutinize me while I was alone. It was a truly awful epiphany. I could imagine the ensuing scenarios in my mind: Grandfather walking with me to school, me running up the stairs to class, trying to sneak inside unnoticed the way I usually did, and then tumbling into an uproar of laughter from the others, informed now of all my activities at home, of those things I did alone. Nothing could escape them. They’d know about the special exercises I did each day to straighten my crooked back, about my flat feet (the spy would clearly see them whenever I removed my socks to go to bed or take a bath), they’d discover the crusty drool spots on the backside of my pillow, and they’d know that I preferred to pee sitting down. Not only that, but they’d have a perfect knowledge of my family and its hidden workings: the way my mother always came home from work at the hospital and sunk into her habitual well of melancholy; the way Grandfather painstakingly tried to teach himself how to read without a sliver of progress; the absence of my father, who only came home occasionally, stumbling in with the stiff steps of a sleepwalker and flaunting the smell of other women on his clothes; and Grandmother, who wandered spectrally from room to room each night because she could only sleep three hours at a time. And so, I stayed put and kept very still. I didn’t go out to play. I was a good boy, concealed in his room, spending those days fearful of the outside world, with all its spies and intruders.
It was two months later, in the full swing of autumn, that Alexandra first spoke to me. It happened at school. One day, the teacher picked me out the way she always did when she wanted an easy fool to humiliate, and asked me, before the whole class, to identify the season when grapes were harvested. Not knowing the answer, I said what first came to mind: summer. It seemed right. Summer, after all, is the warmest season and that’s when all fruit should ripen. But when the teacher grinned, her silver incisor gleaming like a star, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. “Fall,” she squealed, and attached a devastating “idiot” to the end of her correction, which encouraged all the other children to laugh as if the answer had been utterly obvious. Some hours later, during recess, while the other boys rushed off to play soccer in the courtyard and the girls played jump rope or hopscotch, I crawled inside an old concrete play tube, smashed my pen case against the wall, and buried my face deep between my palms, wholly convinced that this kind of humiliation would always be my lot in life. I was about to burst into tears when I felt something strange, a slippery thing. It was like a mollusk that had suddenly flattened up against my cheek, expelling its warm entrails down my face. I turned around, livid with rage and fully equipped to punch the face of yet another callous trickster, and I was surprised to find the big sloppy lips of that pudgy girl from the Favorit. “It’s okay,” she said to me softly, stroking my hair the way her mother must have stroked hers. “I would have said summer too.” Then she picked up all the pens and pencils I’d scattered about, placed them neatly back in their case (featuring a bright red rocket blasting through the stars), and gave me another kiss. That’s when I decided to forgive her transgression at the theater.
Alexandra was my first friend. And ever since we’d seen Jurassic Park at the Favorit, both of our brains became stuffed with the obsolete mementos of prehistory. In Grandfather’s collection, I’d managed to find an illustrated dinosaur encyclopedia, published long ago, which I brought to school one day to read with Alexandra. Together, we’d sit hunched inside the concrete play tube, conspiratorially, as if plotting some secret debauchery, and with reverential silence for the hellish ghouls inside the book, we’d examine the vast variety of prehistoric fauna all throughout recess. We always looked at the pictures first. Each illustration, showing the giants as they thundered through primeval swamps and jungles, was drawn in an antiquated, exaggerated style: bloated bellies, emaciated limbs, hard shield-like scales interlinked across their hide, and long Turkish daggers for teeth. Alexandra loved most of all to read out the names from the book. She took great pleasure in their pronunciation, and I would listen carefully, thoughtfully, watching her chapped lips form fantastic names that pulled us into a past far beyond anyone’s reach or imagination. Sometimes she would hand the book over and I would read, albeit slower, but with her help I didn’t feel so ineffectual. Naturally, she always read with better fluency. And once in a while, she’d pronounce things with such intensity, her little brow furrowing from concentration, that for a brief second I’d become frightened; I felt I was no longer in the company of a little girl but of someone else entirely, someone older, perhaps the woman she’d one day become.
I liked it best when she huddled close, helping me say the words that were so difficult: “tri-ce-r-a-tops,” I’d read clumsily, syllable by syllable, “steg-o-sau-rus,” “pter-o-dact-yl,” and she held my hand, so that I could smell her clothes, her body, her hair impregnated with the thin scent of onions.
Several times, I was fortunate enough to play in her apartment. Alexandra and her mother lived in the same neighborhood, only two trolley stops away, on Strada Romancierilor. Their apartment was on the top floor of a communist high-rise overlooking a large playground with concrete chess tables in front, where the elderly—players and kibitzers alike—always gathered for long, heated tournaments.
Her place was nothing like ours. Ours was sparsely furnished, with yellow spires of unread books stacked about the living room, like the skyline to some lonely paper city. Our closets were filled with all manner of electrical knickknacks, items Grandfather had invented or conceived of (which Grandmother later threw away after he died), or tools he’d brought back from work at the Electrotehnica and forgot to return by the time he’d retired. Many things were improvised. Our old black-and-white TV, for instance, acquired its color through a gradated plastic tarp that he’d stretched over the screen. It had three sections: green on the bottom, to approximate grassy earth, yellow in the middle for a human flesh tone, and the top was a light blue to match the color of the sky. Once in a while, they even seemed to fit quite well. Our kitchen was no less messy. This was Grandmother’s realm. At that time, it was the main conduit for all the sick, flu-ridden children of the Drumul Taberei neighborhood. There, she administered shots on the side (even though she’d retired as a nurse, she still happily terrorized the little ones for a few extra lei). This way, she built up a collection of her own—though not as impressive as Grandfather’s—of small articles and clothes that children forgot and left behind: tiny mittens, gloves, hats, and scarves. These she held captive, for ransom, until her injections were paid in full.
But Alexandra’s home was a different world altogether. Everything was set neatly in its place, newly dusted, clean. The television was brand-new and genuinely colored (no tarps). Her mother wore different clothes than mine, and although she also seemed sad, it was a different sadness, a more dignified and removed one that somehow made her seem beautiful. Most fascinating was the room where we were allowed to play. I’m not sure who it belonged to, but I’m certain now that it could not have been Alexandra’s bedroom. It contained large and massive furniture, and I had the vague intuition that it must have harkened back to a very long time ago. Among the many items there, I now can now remember three: a finely carved cuckoo clock, with a wooden nightingale that nested somewhere between its gears and came out to warble every hour; a poster on the door of John Lee Hooker playing guitar (a gift from her cousin, who had left for Detroit after the revolution); and a cheap painting of a female nude lounging on a red divan, which hung up above the bed. It was something akin to an Olympia or Venus of Urbino, with dark, sleepy eyes that followed me from one corner to the next.
This was the room where we played house. House, of course, was Alexandra’s favorite game. The rules were simple: I was the husband, she the wife, and a pudgy blonde doll (made with Alexandra’s precise likeness in mind) was our daughter. I worked in an office and she took care of the doll. When I came home, she served us dinner, usually make-believe salad consisting of grass she’d ripped out from the playground below, and then we’d bed down for the night and pretend to sleep. “Bedding down” was a special part of the game that always required extra preparation. It was more like a ceremony, unquestioned and sacrosanct, anchoring our game with a mysterious gravity, some importance we couldn’t yet classify or understand. But I liked it. I liked the way Alexandra made her ritual fuss. I liked watching her pull out all the sheets, the blankets, and the lingerie from a dark wardrobe that always made me think of some gutted devil, its belly splayed open to reveal silk and linen innards. She spent an eternity picking out her favorite sheets, her favorite colors, the best and prettiest assortment, and even though she often asked for my opinion, she always dismissed it after a blunt and annihilating second of reflection. “That’s just silly,” she’d say. “You don’t know anything.” Then, when she’d made her choice, when she’d fixed the bed to her liking, she’d undress, shedding and tossing everything without an inkling of shame; she’d put on her mother’s enormous white nightgown, and like a large blonde jellyfish, she’d float up on the bed and make room for me to crawl beside her. “Won’t your mom be mad?” I’d ask. “No,” she said. “Mom always falls asleep in front of the television,” and then she put her arms around me. “Now go to sleep.”
That was the part I loved the most. She wrapped me up in her mother’s soft nightgown and I could feel her little chest move back and forth, her warm breath brushing up against my neck, and while she closed her eyes and pretended to snore, while the outside world slipped and sifted into ours—carried aloft by the somnolent calls of Romani junk-sellers as they hawked cheap cutlery in the street below, or older boys playing ball—I felt immensely privileged. I had a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of grown-ups. And while I mocked sleep, nestled between Alexandra’s small and supple arms, while quietly studying the mystifying landscape of the nude above me—the dramatic curvature of her hips, her bright pink nipples, and the dark, unsettling core of her pubis—I felt I could readily dispense with childhood, I could skip it altogether and arrive there, in that room, with the same furniture, painting, and cuckoo clock, only it was real sleep I’d be awaiting, real dinner we’d be having, and a real, grown woman’s arms locked around my waist.
The one flaw in this game was that our pretend nights were always too short. They lasted no more than three to four minutes and then Alexandra would rise abruptly, stretching her body before rigorously shaking me awake. “It’s time to get up,” she’d say, “time to go to work.” Once or twice, I tried to tell her that I didn’t have to work, so that I might linger in her arms a bit longer. I told her it was a holiday. “What holiday?” she demanded with great suspicion. “Pentecost,” I said, and instantly looked away. “But Pentecost isn’t till June,” she said. Pinned, helpless, I tried to wiggle my way out some other way and told her that it was useless to go to the office because the building had burned down; I’d have to wait until they built a new one. She didn’t like that either.
The last day we spent together was also at the Favorit. It was in the small park beside the entrance (which no longer exists), where—despite her mother’s warning not to play inside the sandbox because she’d get sick—the two of us thoroughly excavated the place for dinosaur bones and footprints. Three years later, after Alexandra and her mother had left to live with their cousins in Detroit, as I began to feel those first pinpricks of nostalgia, the image of the little dig suddenly came to mind. My grandfather had passed away by then, my father had left us for another life in Italy, and I’d fallen sick with mumps. To remedy the situation, or at least push back some of our miseries for the time being, Grandmother suggested that we take a week-long trip to the Black Sea. Surely, as it had been in her day, or when Mother was a little girl, there was no better cure for a case of mumps than frequent gurgling of seawater. I gladly welcomed the change. Although I no longer had any fever, the day-to-day inertia the illness demanded (I was told not to make any sudden movements, otherwise my “little eggs” would fall off) was wearing me down, and I’d been inconsolable for weeks. Plus, I’d never seen the sea, and I wanted very much to confirm that it was black. So, we set off for Constanta by train. When we arrived, my mother rented a cheap room with two beds in an old run-down hotel not far from the mosque (I can still remember seeing the top of the minaret from our window), and each morning, before the sun rose, Grandmother took me down to the sandy beach littered with seaweed and vanquished jellyfish, waded with me into a water that was still soupy in places with flotsam treasures—gelatinous plastic bags or drifting nebulas of sunflower seeds—and there, with great reluctance, I’d begin my treatment. It was during one of these therapies, while gurgling the nauseating saltwater one morning and looking off into the distance, beyond the rusty freighters pulling into port, that I was reminded of Alexandra and the sandbox. It occurred to me then that if I weren’t so frail, if I weren’t so sick, I could simply swim all the way across, over the floating garbage and the dark blue edge of water, and arrive at another shore, a better shore, where Alexandra was presently scouring the sands for velociraptor eggs and thinking of me. I turned around and asked Grandmother what was on the other side so I could coordinate and prepare my voyage. “Is Detroit over there?” I asked, pointing to the deep blue line that capped the edge of the sea. But she only gave me a sobering look that all but confirmed I had been too whimsical. “No!” she said. “That’s Turkey.”
*
Memory is a funny thing. And you don’t quite realize how truly porous it is until you no longer have the power to conjure it up. I never imagined that I could forget Alexandra, or what she looked like. For the longest time, I was unwilling to accept that she too was susceptible to the sieges of amnesia. But one day, not long before this story begins, I discovered that the walls to this fortress had been breached. Of course, it didn’t happen all at once. I lost her face the same way most of us forget any given thing: a fading, steady corruption spread unperceptively over time until I realized that what I remembered had no relation to the thing remembered, until it was entirely other, an impostor usurping the most intimate parts of me. Gradually, Alexandra, like so many other cherished things, fluttered away toward the moon, to that valley mentioned in Orlando Furioso, where all that is lost on Earth fetches up again.
The day I realized she was lost—truly lost—I became inconsolable. At first, I wouldn’t accept it. I prayed that it was only temporary. I kept believing that she might come back to me, but weeks passed without my being able to do much of anything, not even read (which before had been my only consolation). In fact, no matter how hard I tried, I could not register a single printed letter. Soon, all my evenings became squandered time. I’d get antsy and restless. I felt aimless, adrift. I’d get up and stretch, look outside, prowl among the shelves and piles for books I could no longer read, or wander through the house at night, intersecting paths with Grandmother as we both groped our way to the bathroom.
For weeks there sat on my desk a book of poems I had been unable to finish. The first few pages had been ripped out so I had no way of knowing what the title might have been, or who had authored it. There was only a mention of the city where it had been published—Buenos Aires—and a photograph of what, I assume, must have been the poet. He was an old man, fierce and blind, with exceptionally beautiful teeth. His skin was pulled taut about his jaw and neck like the mask of a shaman. Every now and then, I’d look at him and understand that he was a man who did not waste time looking out of windows, and I felt guilty, fat with lethargy and thoughtlessness. I’d feel the need to move then, to walk, as if the motion might revive Alexandra’s features, revive the past. I’d put on my shoes, my Grandfather’s coat if it was raining, I’d grab a stick to ward off the feral dogs and walk into the desolate quiet of the night. I’d walk west down Drumul Taberei, along the edge of wounded earth and scaffolding where the new metro would be. I’d keep going until I reached the poplars on Strada Romancierilor, until I came across the playground and chess tables in front of Alexandra’s building. I’d sit down then. I’d look up toward her floor and her window and then spend a few minutes, maybe even half an hour if necessary, remembering her apartment as it was before she left, when we were both children.
Little did I know that, in a way, she too would come back to me—along with so many other things from the moon.
Valer Popa was born in Bucharest, Romania, and immigrated to the states through the Visa Lottery Program. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Cornell University’s MFA program in fiction, he now lives in Chicago with his family and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.
