Deep in a valley in the Carpathians, in Romania, far from the world, out of time, old Iochka lives by picking up the branches left in the forest by forest workers. He makes charcoal out of it—the best—which he sells around.
Installed on the bench in front of his small house, this almost century-old man is more and more alone, more and more silent. The days seem to be the same, lengthened and lightened by the effects of the palinca, local brandy. “He drank in a peaceful, quiet, unimportant and aimless way. »
Molnar Jozsef, known as Iochka, is an integral part of this valley, which he crisscrosses at the wheel of his old Trabant or the tireless tractor that he himself built, “just like the trees, the river and the path on which he had grown old.
Seated, looking beyond the mountain, he sees the years passing by, circular, like the growth rings of a tree where periods of drought, heavy rains, insect epidemics, fires, illnesses or wounds can be read. And the old man remembers. He remembers and he smiles since “the happy times of old kept him alive”.
He also remembers that all was not rosy and that in 1942, he had been picked up from his home to be sent as a child in the Romanian Fourth Army on the Don – one of the main rivers in Russia. There, he had been made in spite of himself as a blacksmith in a large village of Kazakhs. Nor did he forget the ten years he spent after the war in a prison camp in the Soviet Union. If he has indeed returned, his relationship to the world and to time seems to have been forever changed.
The Ceaușescu years (who is never named) will also pass by, distant for him even when they were in progress, of his work in a construction site, of his friendship with the foreman, the doctor and the Orthodox priest, characters of alcoholics in both colorful and silent.
He especially remembers the dazzling meeting with the one who will become his wife, Ilona, who came one day to find him in this lost valley. A beautiful story of love and sexual fury. Ilona, who died too soon of cancer. “He had been absolutely free until the day when a ruthless and perhaps indifferent god took Ilona from him. »
The hero of Yoshka, the first novel translated into French by Romanian Cristian Fulaş, publisher and translator born in 1978 who lives near Bucharest, evolves in this kind of vague and timeless setting. “It was the simplicity of primordial things that distinguished old Yoshka from other men and at the same time brought him closer to them, as naturally as possible. »
A novel that may be a little long, which makes us itself, it is true, experience time, with its beaches and its folds, bathed in the love of nature. A way of feeling like Iochka that “nothing measured time which was, in any case, only an impression”. In this regard, it is not without interest to know that Cristian Fulaş has undertaken since 2019 to translate In Search of Lost Time.