“The laws of the office change with every election,” he interrupted gently. “But the law of the well is older. It says: Here, someone once bent down to drink. Here, a mother washed her child’s face. Here, two lovers dropped a coin and made a wish. You cannot fill that in with gravel and cement.”
“Tell them,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “that Dumitru Matcovschi said: ‘The one who drinks from his own well is never a stranger in his own land.’ ”
“The silence between the drops,” he said. Then he began to recite, not from the book, but from a place deeper inside him:
“Matcovschi wrote,” he said slowly, “that a man without a village is a man without a shadow. And a village without its wells is just a map.” He closed the book. “Tell them the well stays.” Dumitru Matcovschi Poezii
“Bunicule,” she said softly, sitting beside him. “The delegation from Chișinău is here. They want to talk about the land registry. About the EU grant.”
Nicolae finally opened his eyes. They were the color of wet earth. He looked at the old bucket, at the initials carved into the wood— N.M., 1947 —the year he had dug this well with his own father, the year after the famine.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
“They want to pave the path to the new well,” Ana said. “And fill this one in. It’s a safety hazard, they say.”
She looked at the book in his hands. The cover was faded, the spine cracked. Dumitru Matcovschi’s face, stern and kind, stared out from the back. Her grandfather had carried this book through the last years of the Soviet Union, through the reawakening of the language, through the dusty days of independence and the hungry winter that followed.
“Fântâna nu se dă… Fântâna rămâne… Că fără de fântână Ne rătăcim prin lume…” “The laws of the office change with every
Ana looked up. The delegation from Chișinău was waiting in the yard, men in clean shirts and polished shoes, holding clipboards and pens. They knew the price of everything and the value of nothing that couldn’t be digitized.
“What do I tell them?” she asked.