This happened a long time ago in London on Christmas night. We have been planning to go to Europe for a while and, even though, we did not really discuss the first country we would go to, somehow in our conversations it never turned out to be England. Those were pre-Harry Potter days, of course. Nevertheless, a bunch of our friends decided to spend New Year’s in London and invited us to come along.

I do pick up a book by Chekhov or Ionesku every once in a while to fill the theatrical void inside my head. Sometimes I even dream about acting. One evening I was browsing Ionesku’s annotation to the play “The Killer”. Ionesku was explaining that his play was intended to condemn conformism and totalitarianism. The analogy that he brought up was about a writer that took part in a demonstration in Bavaria in 1936. The pro-fascist crowd was meeting Hitler. It boiled in admiration. There was so much electricity in the air that it was hard to resist. The writer tried to fight back. He felt how his mind protested and fought against following the crowd. He almost felt mad, torn by contradiction in his head. As I was reading those lines an old story popped in my mind.