Hen Or Rooster By Radu Florin Pintea

HEN, OR ROOSTER? by Radu Pintea By all means it was a memorable day. The railroad travel fare had doubled that very day at noon taking everybody by surprise. Prices skyrocketing had become in Romania something like a bore on the free market in the last half decade especially; as for the government controlled section of the market, a certain rule was observed, staging the prices up-rise according to a more or less scheduled pattern; in force from, say, the 1st of the month on, after long, tedious tv hassles and floods of ink and printed material debating the curse. This time the bad news hit like a bolt out of the blue and caught many of the would-be travelers financially not prepared to do the travel, and many of them made about-face while the rest who scraped their pockets clean eventually boarded their trains growling and mumbling and muttering and laying themselves ready to ambush upon the merest of scratch in the way of an excuse to vent their sizzling white hot rage. It was an oven hot Tuesday, and in the compartment, due the greenhouse effect it was even more so, a sensation further enhanced by the electric red rayon curtains with which the Romanian Railroad Company endowed each of the trains’ compartments, clever move designed to justify in the way of upgrading of sorts that drastic escalation of the travel fare. Unfortunately, the hysterical hue of the brand new curtains, and perhaps the fabric too had proved to be rather climactic choices, and the bellicosity and harshness of the talking done in that end-of-May day had a rockbound psychological foundation to sound the way it did after all. There have been, I remember lots of leery remarks, ominous half-assents, bitter wisecracks about all of it, and the conversations droned on and on in that fiery vein and drifted toward that general direction, but the oppressive heat smothered the fuming rage and dampened in abundant sweat the biting orations and lower keyed everything everybody had to say. Maybe it was just the heat itself that in the end displaced the conversational topics in the relatively narrower range of “hot” items that funneled through the drowsy amblings to finally focus the discussion on egg-hatchers, which of course, had a lot to do with the heat and what came thereof. Or maybe in a subterranean way the hot issue was the juicy and spicy figurative sense of the word “chick” meaning “young girl”, not necessarily fast, but necessarily naked as they were sprinkled in both color and black-and-white print in the papers the commuters used to kill to kill time with while making the journey.

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Anyway, in this misty warm habitat in the railroad car compartment, much similar to the explosive mixture in a four-stroke engine cylinder, there came the spark, only it was a personal combustion, not a public one. What made it happen was some particular reference to economics, another red hot topic on a hot day. Memory is blurred on the train of thought which let to it at the time, but I’m positive it was related to the making of more money , yet another evergreen popular and incentive topic then and now and ever. And then someone mentioned the impossibility to tell boys from galls lately, and he had in mind the vagaries in fashion of a whole generation turned loose and in a wild motion which by design had taken the notion to outrage every at least five year older their senior, voluntarily, assuming as a matter of choice habit ways and paraphernalia of the opposite sex: boys used to grow their hair long, pierce their earlobes and stick earrings in them, wear rings on their fingers and trinkets about their necks; girls shaved bald their skull (or almost), took to cud enormous wads of chewing gum and pop big white bubbles out of their mouths, chain smoked and educated their voice husky. Whereupon somebody else mentioned that this vanishing of neat lines, this lack of specificity where the living things were concerned afflicted life itself and turned it into a hodge – podge of a life where nothing and nobody was what looked like anymore, and, they advised, that something should have to be done about it before being too late. Whereupon some other drowsy with heat character in the compartment did something like a general remark which shifted the focus to the animal realm. Suddenly, the molten dumb with so much heat phrases were revolving around chicken, literal, figurative, or both, whatever. And then, somebody else, me I suppose, although I can’t be sure enough since I was heat dumb struck myself, mentioned casually, of course, that little prize oddity about nobody except Japanese being able to tell hens from roosters in the bantam world barely hatched and fresh out to daylight from the egg shell. I was, am, and chances are will be ignorant about why some tiny bits of peculiar news seem to stick to human mind like cockleshell to a liner’s hull and stay there embedded for years, firmly defying oblivion. Could be I’ve read that piece of news over the shoulder in some paper of someone’s since I don’t use to buy papers myself, or maybe I’ve heard (or overheard ) it at some point. Or maybe just heard it over the radio. Or maybe I’ve learned it just then in the very compartment and it’s nobody than me who messed up things. Anyway, one thing is clear: the source is blurred. And the gist goes like this: A poultry farm invited Japanese specialists able to tell male from female among the young fowl in order to upgrade efficiency in an all-out action at the national scale, say, called something like “keep the chick and root the rooster”, about so.

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From the poultry farm’s point of view, and any other similar outfit one’s for that matter, really it was a must to tell girls from boys as quickly as possible, at the earliest stage as possible since freshly hatched chicken are fast, gluttonous eaters, but the only sex of economic interest was female, so there could be absolutely no delay with implementation of the overall “keep the chick and root the rooster” branch policy. The method Mr. Juki and Mr Ozawa used in order to tell boys from girls right out of eggshell with all the economic advantages this piece of knowledge incurred was equally and classically and wonderfully simple too. They picked up the fluffy, golden, chirping young fowl and with just one swift move parted their little, orange, skinny legs and peeped in between. They set up a very sketchy lean-to next to the hatcher building. The rig consisted of two 1,000 Watt mirror-backed photographic bulbs installed face down on top of the two tripods, one apiece for both Japanese specialists flown in from the Rising Sun country itself, two tables, two swivel chairs, two starched and crisply ironed coveralls and two pairs of collapsible sort of goggles provided with the special feature of revolving on its hinges sp they could be either swung up and worn like some cap-peak, or else, swung down and look through in order to offer the protection they were supposed to provide; they were made of intense yellow cellophane as everybody right away noticed. Apparently Mr Juki and Mr Ozawa belonged to some elite in their own country, word had spread, who could guess the baby fowl’s sex at a time when not even the biology itself made its mind yet as to what particular attribute should endow the poor critter. And with their collapsible yellow goggles and their slanted eyes that saw deeper than any other mortal into the depth of creation itself, Mr Juki and Mr Ozawa were rated as the fastest chick sorters in the world. But the divine Book of the Making any new generation of chicken produced a nigh fifty-fifty yield of male and female whereof the masculine half had to go since they were not egg layers but with an appetite when young that outrun the hens’ one by three to one. Therefore they were usually sacrificed, minced, mixed up with fodder, vitamins and other vitality boosters and fed to the lucky surviving generations of poultry. The Japanese experts’ job in the County Poultry Farm, Romania, was to train the Romanian chicken farmers in the professional skill of telling womb from prick at lightspeed with the domestic fowl at an industrial scale and it had to pass by one full year of 8 hours a day 5 days a week at $2,000 per month per expert until it was clear that not a single bloodshot eye-strained neck-sprained trainee of the whole lot could or would ever break on, let alone graduate, at the mastership of telling what’s “she” from what’s “he” by a mere one second long peep right into the desperately alike yolky fluff at the backsides of the chicken. By that time it became clear for all the would-not-be-experts that that particular ability was something rare, awe inspiring and forbidden to commoners no matter how

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eager that it qualified rather as a Godsend gift to a chosen few than a trade to be apprehended and mastered through diligent study. Besides headaches and constant, newly acquired tic of rapid blinking, there was no other apparent headway with Mr Juki’s and Mr Ozawa’s students. Nevertheless, the results of the County Poultry Farm were spectacular throughout the whole stay of the Japanese, the source reported. Bereft of the sterile greed of the baby roosters the female population gained in number and that number kept going up at al livelier pace. The rhythm of laying eggs quickened too, and the fraction designed to be marketed as fresh eggs returned a hulkier amount of cash. There were side effects also. One of them, for example, was the sudden trend to cannibalism. Bereft of the male control element where the natural balance of sexes was observed by default, females turned wild and bloodthirsty, especially because of the diet presented them daily with the nonturndownable alternative of feeding on their own kin or starve to death, so it was in the way of fowl to rather chose the former. Now, what must have triggered my five years or so old deeply settled memory, what made it shudder awake from its dormant bottom layer and surface again into the ever troubled, full blasted actuality of the ever awaken conscience was a jumbled conversation heard on Tuesday, May 30 in a railroad car compartment of a train bound to Constanza. Then some perspiration reeking guy, fazed out and sitting at the most exposed seat right by the window, waved a hand half to fan himself, half to dismiss the whole idea, and said: ‘Hell, no, mister. Japanese my foot!’ And he told us about an old veterinary doctor, good friend of the bottle , who, the guy in the oven hot compartment claimed had a simpler and a cheaper method of telling which was which. ‘He used to pick them up and hold them by the beak and just look at their legs carefully,…and I say at their legs, not between, mind me’, the guy in the corner by the window said. ‘And if the fowl is a rooster, he kicks, while when she’s a baby-hen, she just dangles the talons limp.’ ‘Is that so?’ ‘No exception, or so he says, the vet, I mean. Male kicks, female stretches her legs limp. Always. ’ ‘Why?’ ‘Nobody knows.’ ‘Knowledgeable man this vet of yours, ’ says I, loose with wordage if not outright careless, but our minds almost literally molten with extreme heat in the compartment, the blunder went unacknowledged as the guy fanned himself some more, a futile waste of energy at the time, and said: ‘Who? The son of a bitches of a guzzler?!’ And he even volunteered over the angry clang of the ironworks our compartment chanced to be, sitting smack on top of one of the two twin-axle carriages of the car, and

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told the numb, soaked wet audience three of foursome funny stories about the bottle lover doctor, an amazing display of vitality given the circumstances. A small fraction of it induced in me a vague wish to emulate, and I remember I did so reminding the success Mr Juki and Mr Ozawa enjoyed some ten years back and telling the same bored to death audience about their way, the Japanese way, to sort out at US$ 2,000 times two per month what the paunchy guzzler would have spilt to anyone for keeps for a beer maybe two and in a simpler way. Whereupon another guy, more elderly, sitting just across the aisle snickered and said: ‘Why the hell didn’t they seek advice in this here country prior to asking overseas in the first place?’ ‘That surely beats me,’ some passenger mused. ‘Huh! That surely beats me not,’ somebody else replied tartly. ‘No one can pretend in good faith that one knows all the professional tricks and secrets pertaining to a certain occupation. Hell, there are good professors and bad professors, good doctors and bad doctors, good engineers and bad engineers. Therefore there must be also good veterinarians and bad veterinarians, if you don’t mind me saying.’ ‘This here mister is right,’ a plump, buxom woman by the window said. ‘Many a time specialists in some field reach the expertise the hard way, damaging a lot while learning to avoid doing so, and they would not willingly share their own professional secrets with other people, especially if they happen to work in the same guild. All seem to be childishly jealous about them secrets, you know. ’ ‘I’ve always said Romanians are ingenious, brilliant people when pressed with the back to the wall, drunk or not drunk. ’ ‘Amen.’ ‘Amen to what?’ some other new character snorted scornfully, eyes squinting. ‘Intelligence, or laziness?’ ‘Why, amen to laziness!’ ‘And also we’re begrudging people too, don’t tell me no. Nobody seems not to mind his or her neighbor’s goat.’ ‘That’s true, I’m afraid.’ ‘So what? Nothing new here. From a more general point of view everybody is coveting everything everybody else has; to some degree, at least.’ ‘What? Goat’s worst, you said? Hell, no! Those times are long gone and past, mister. He wishes now the goat’s owner death instead!’ That was not true, however. There must have been some misunderstanding somewhere, and I pointed to my fellow passengers that it was only for the special feature of the intelligence to shortcut we were considered “lazy” people. I, for one, saw nothing wrong with shortcuts at all, I was struggling hard to be one of its practitioners in life. As to ingeniousness one example sprang right up in mind. It deals with a driver on a state own milk truck bound to make its runs daily from the tightwad countryside located suppliers to the even more tight purses town located users who in order to cut pilferage to 00.00 had put wire and seal on all the ports, inlets and outlets of the tank after filling it up on departure; and the butter makers in town tore the lead seal off prior to unload on milk run cistern arrival.

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Apparently there was no way for the driver to get himself a couple of liters of milk daily for his personal use, tax-free and no deductible. And in a million years you wouldn’t guess what our wheel wrestler on the milk run did. There must be some international saying “can’t handle honey and not licking fingers”, which holds water for milk too, and our trucker knew it too, and felt entitled to put it to effect and pick himself his due profit of that due world widely warranted claim. The cistern had a man-lock on top. Through that large opening he introduced a large, clean, newly hewn pine board and left it there to float free into the milk. While driving away on the road, the wood board sloshed and banged and splashed this way and that way with the bumps in the road and the curves, and by doing so it managed to actually churn the milk exactly like a regular countryside churn only bigger, and at the end of the journey when the buyers the seals off and turned the outlet tap open, they were perfectly convinced they were getting their full money’s worth. However the shrewd cistern driver could then remove under the cover of night the man-lock lid and enter the tank ‘jes’ to mop it clean’ along with a bagful of empty jars a-shoulder, and all he had to do to fill them up to the rim with prime, first class milk cream and butter was to scrape clean not the oval tank walls on the inside, but the big chunk of rugged lumber which did the churning for him. Or the one with the crack-jack who used to seal brand new wheelbarrows from a mechanical confectionery shop by simply filling them up with sand, dirt or hay and pushing it up right through the main gate and under the benevolent stare of the guards who probably pitied the poor son-of-a-bitch who toiled so hard at toting so many wheelbarrowfuls of construction raw materials to the nearby building in erection; the poor guard failed to notice the guy pushed full barrows out only, never an empty one back, as he should. Of course these were but two classical samples of individual vs. system cases, or better yet, individual fooling the system, the aforementioned being the Romanian contribution to the specific treasure of tricks to do in the ever open contest between plural and singular interests, and when such deeds of daring and sparkle hit mass media and become items of public record, they were usually rather hailed than hooted and automatically won the status of authentic milestones of intelligence there only to be challenged and beaten. ‘Jesus, Christ. But why? I wonder why? We used to be Orthodox people, we, Romanians.’ ‘You mean we used to be once. Not anymore, though. We degenerated, I’m afraid. We are old and wasted as people, we’re spent, exhausted, tired of us, tired of being, tired of all.’ ‘And perverted, too. I saw the other day on television the parliamentary debates on homosexuality issue.’ ‘Yep. I saw it myself, and it made me puke.’ ‘The sons of bitches passed the damn bill. Goddamn them now and ever forever for that.’ ‘Amen,’ a quiet man reading a novel said, his first contribution to the opinion exchange. ‘They had to do it just to humor the European standards of so-to-speak freedom.’

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‘Freedom, my foot! Freedom to do it in the ass? Excuse me, ladies. But the Romanians used to be regular, as far as I know.’ ‘Umh. And over did it at times, too.’ ‘I’m sure you can say that. I don’t even recall to have met perchance a queer in my whole life. ’ ‘So much for the Europe. If they like the asshole, then why don’t they just help themselves and leaves us, regulars, alone?’ ‘I’m not sure, but I guess they raise a point of principle here, my friend. Doing such, I suppose, they feel like defending the fundamental right to freely take up a choice even it’s a bad one; or so the song goes.’ Everyone’s own personal, unhampered choice. Even if that choice is evil, and to be condemned.’ ‘What I don’t dig is why one must have to ram down our throat such bullshit.’ ‘Politics,’ the novel reader explained, closing the book with the quietly resolved air of someone who just decided what was being said by his fellow passengers in the compartment was more attractive than what the author said. ‘Politics, politics, politics. Everywhere you turn your head you hear this crappy word that should explain everything every time anyone or anything else fails. How I hate this word. It sounds so hollow to me, so freak. So devoid of any practical meaning.’ ‘To you, maybe, yes, but it certainly fills up nicely so not so few bigwheels’ pockets. Politics wields power. Real power. And in the end it is always the few who handle, who exercise the power.’ The talks heated up and gathered momentum as the subject matter shot here and there like a flipper ball until it hit again the recurrent topic “sex”. Now being the topic that always stirs, it stirred me too in the way of reminding me about the really bad things sex or rather the lack of it can lead to. Through the haze of the heat I remembered Jeff, the GE field man in Cernavoda, his New Jersey sexless cat and the trouble this particular pet led him into some more than eight months ago when upon leaving on Christmas holiday he had had his and his wife’s housekeeper report daily or at least every other day or so to their apartment in the campus to feed the cat. To discover some seven months later the $ 1,200 genuine pearl string, the wedding gift and a $ 500 gold bracelet the only valuables missing as his wife said prior to their leaving bound to Stuttgard in order for her to deliver the baby due any day now. Booboo was the cat’s name, after the jolly bear’s sidekick cartoon character , the one helping his resourceful pal to do in the tubby rancher. So Jeff’s wife left her husband handle the touchy thing alone the best way he saw fit, and some heavily rainy day he took a grab of me and shanghaied me to act like a double cut middle man and interpreter with their actual housekeeper who allegedly was reported by Jeffrey to me while he was driving us both at his place to have made some recurring pilfering every now and then, but nothing bigger than, say, a chicken leg (or two) - note the recurrence of term “chicken” and “legs”, but I don’t think here we have any connection with Mr Juki and Mr Ozawa’s skill, at least none I’m being aware of from the freezer, or a bottle (or two) of very expensive black, imported German beer from refrigerator while doing her job. So, here we were the four of us, Jeff, the housekeeper, her five years or so brat and I standing in the hallway of the big, empty house trying easygoing in some informal,

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offhand way to siphon some background information from the actual housekeeper about the former housekeeper while she calmly ironed away Jeff’s shirts and her kid was busy with the electric oven into the kitchen as we all realized later on when the international plot and intrigue debrief were at a peak and we the grownups thought at first it was the girl’s iron left unattended the source of the burn smell, and me paddling barefoot meanwhile on the wet, just washed tile floor and begging the master of the house to lend me for Chrissakes a pair of slippers or else I’ll catch cold and nose runs, maybe. He got me a king size pair of them all right from a locker, and feeling more secure about the near future of my good health I managed to do my best to swap back and forth questions and answers until she eventually began to cry saying he suspected her of being a thief and from fear he will go to file a report to the police. He says, hell, no, he and his wife like her very much and the way she does her job and want her to stay. She sobs and says she like her job and want to keep it since she has a child and has to have honestly earned money and she won’t do such a thing like stealing on her employers. A chicken leg from fridge every now and then, yes, but pearls and gold – no. Unfortunately it’s a damn too old thing to bring it up with the police as a formal complaint and Jeff knows and is very sad about it but there is nothing he can do except to regret and hope it will not happen again. The pearl string and the gold bracelet were a wedding gift and when I ask him when he remember he saw his wife wearing them last time he just shakes his head and waves a hand airy. ‘I don’t know, really. Since the wedding, I’d say,’ he says, and I say ‘Umm,’ because this was before the assignment to Korea and, of course, before coming to Romania. ‘Tell her I’ll be off soon, leaving for Germany to see my wife and I want her to come in here everyday and feed the cat,’ Jeff says. I do as he said and the housekeeper nods; she knows, she’s used to the chore, she’s done it before, she knows. I don’t. ‘Did I get it right?’ says I. ‘Is she to report in here every day just to feed the cat? That’s all?’ Jeff nods gravely. ‘But why you have to leave the son of the gun indoors to begin with?’ I said. ‘Why not turning it loose instead for the duration?’ I’m sure it will not starve. It’s just a cat, you know, and I bet it’ll even enjoy and maybe use a bit of freedom once in a while.’ ‘This is a special cat, Booboo is, you know.’ ‘Really? What’s so special with this cat?’ ‘It’s a New Jersey cat.’ ‘Big deal! Any alley cat is as special as the next one. New Jersey or no New Jersey. I’m sure it’ll appreciate a little tomcatting around just once in a while,’ says I and winked lewdly Jeff’s way. ‘Give the poor soul a break, eh?’ The GE field engineer seemed to ponder and I nudged him a bit further, in the hope to see him over the fence. ‘Give the housekeeper here a break, too. Now, look here, Jeff, I’d hate to sound like patronizing, but what the heck, it’s June, it’s hot, and it ought to have got some notions about getting out by itself anyway, since it’s impossible not to have heard some

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wild, sexy catcalls one of these nights. I for one hear them all night long. See what I mean?’ I drove away my point in a soft spoken, man of the world way much like a shrewd lawyer just about to crack a psyche. ‘Yessir, your cat won’t mind being out at night all by itself. And it can’t tell the difference between the New Jersey rooftops and the Cernavoda ones even if such a difference would exist. And, besides, they mew the same your cats and our cats. ’ Jeff had the mettle and when he spoke next, the feel is almost a palpable thing. ‘Booboo is a special cat,’ he says, and I love true nature lovers but his stand got my goat. ‘Animals have been able to take care of themselves long before green peacers have taken up to spoil the nature with their canned pet food and forcible confinement…’ and I cut myself short realizing I was just about to deliver the line ringing something like “…while people starve in Africa” and look like a sissy. ‘Booboo doesn’t need to get out,’ Jeff said. ‘But why? I don’t understand. Animals crave for outdoor life, or at least for being left alone once in a while for a tumble or a rough up with their buddies. I just don’t see why Booboo won’t welcome that. Is it sick or something? Or maybe too old?’ I insisted and suddenly felt stupid since the issue seemed to prove no point but just waste our time and nerves and maybe bring to untimely end a friendship I hoped both of us cherished. ‘Nope. Neither of them.’ ‘By the way, is it a “he” or a “she”?’ I asked. ‘Neither of them,’ he said, and he was dead serious. I stood dumbstruck for a while until he eventually volunteered an explanation that proved right the ugly hunch I had had feeling hard like a punch in the pit of the stomach, but afraid to spell it out aloud. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘It underwent a surgical intervention.’ ‘Umh.’ ‘’It has been ___er___nutted.’ ‘Umh. You mean it originally was a “he” and he had balls or nuts for that matter and they have been removed, scooped out by surgery, right? ’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Well, now I begin to see why,’ I said and presumably Jeff was led to believe I’ve meant why the cat has no business or eagerness to roam free outdoors, but actually it was something else. Something with a rather freakish hard core in it. But I managed to brave it and almost burst into laughter. ‘Jesus, so for the sweet sake of a cat which is neither a she-cat nor a he-cat you managed to get your wedding jewels stolen, eh? ’ Heat prevented me to remember whether he offer more than a shrug in a way of consent. There was a guy who seemed to can’t stand anymore and popped open a bottle of cheap bear and proceeded to guzzle straight off it after he generously offered to the compartment first, which equally gallant turned down the offer with one or two extra

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thirsty exceptions who helped themselves; it was such a puny thing for such a huge thirst turbine deal with! ‘We, Romanians, certainly are smart, only we’ve been bottled up sort of a bit for too long. Give us time enough and we’ll pull it out nicely, no problem. ’ He waved around the half empty bottle magnanimously confident. ‘I can even tell you, people, some buddies of mine …’ And he sampled some more of the Romanians’ saga abroad no-end happenstances apparently picked first hand involving a couple of Moldavia no-squeamish things while in an Istambul bazaar, or even more daring exploits of some other bunch of friends in an used cars lot in Hungary. The stories had two effects; at least two I’ve been aware of: they enhanced the thirst of the storyteller for once; and on the other hand they yanked me out of my wits as new and hideous thought hit me. Heat, parched palate, high prices and bright red curtains forgotten, I asked in a fit of sheer factual curiosity the guy who first brought up the hen vs. rooster issue: ‘Where did you say the Jap specialists came to?’ ‘Why, the place, you mean?’ ‘Yeah, that’s what I mean: the name of the place.’ ‘Why, it was Strechaia,’ the man said, and that did it. You see, Strechaia, by any Romanian linguistic standards no matter how loose is a pretty hard name to miss or mistake because of its strong, genuine, special resonance stretching (note the same root, see?) far way back perhaps into ancient times and the very name itself enjoys a, say, whacko ring sort of likely once heard one never forgets. Nor did I. Since the vet we’ve been talking about was also from Strechaia, or so my story had it. And even in that heat, that was quite a striking coincidence which struck me not at all since I am no believer in coincidences. And then it finally occurred to me that even if I had small evidence to back up my suppositions Mr Juki and Mr Ozawa knew the old vet system of telling hens from roosters but pretended to do it otherwise, blazing lamps involved just in order to give a more serious looking air to a mere peeping smack into the ass approach, and dazzling off the goofy and snoopers in the process while all they actually did was to surrepetitiously glance under the table and into the penumbra whereof they took their pick and see whether their catch either kicked or went limp legged and therefore learn whether the damn fowl was a rooster or a hen even before they prestidigitatorically and theatrically spreadeagled them under the high Wattage bulbs. And I also thought, based on the same skimpy evidence, of course, that the decision making people who hired the Japs for such a task knew what the vet knew, onley they went on fuelling the alternative either from being grafted, or maybe out of some international policy scheme such as you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours; or both of them, included a two-way tickets to Japan free, aspect the say-so people on the top peg of the poultry business on the national scale all their lives had been looking forward to. I had in mind some rather pointed set of questions to ask, the first and most crucial being whether the bottle loving vet got wise on the Japanese contract and all, and what his comments sounded like if any, but unfortunately the train’s breaks began their

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screeching work on the impending next stop which happened to be the Cernavoda Bridge Railroad Station “Eng. Anghel Saligny” which was my terminal point. I yanked my baggage from the overhead rack, wished company happy journey and ever after sunny days on their vacation trips and hopped out and down to the concrete slabs of the platform and I made it straight to the rickety, old fashioned ferry boat and the Nuclear Power Plant Site looming beyond the hills for some fourteen years or so in perpetual construction; basically, same like Strechaia Poultry Farm and its Japs, only larger in scale, this was also an international joint venture of Americans, Canadians, Italians, Argentinians, Pakistani, Bengali, Colombians and, or course, Romanians at it to make it produce nothing else but what one would expect any power plant to produce: power. I don’t know what else a power plant commissioned or not might yield if not power, and I’m dead sure that whatever it is and whatever it is called this alternative output, a power plant the Cernavoda NPP size is in for something real big. And whatever it is, I had the hunch that somehow, eventually when all told and all heads counted, the Romanians will manage to bag a fairly nice stunt as the guy who waved the bottle earlier in the compartment put it: ‘We, Romanians, are certainly smart if uncorked.’

***

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