LAVINIA ZAINEA

Social Encounters

       Last week, I went to a distant acquaintance’s birthday party. It was celebrated in her house, in a rather glamorous fashion; we drank champagne before the main course and the host generously offered to fix us a variety of cocktails. In a corner of the room, somebody had installed a complicated music system that allowed people to listen to the newest techno songs all the way to the back of the garden. As it turned out, nobody danced, but preferred to sit at the table in the garden, sipping gin and tonic and discussing current or not so current affairs with their closest neighbors. As it happens, I was positioned somewhere at the centre of the table, surrounded by people I had just met or had previously encountered on one or two occasions. I quickly finished my side of polite conversation with the person on my right, a friendly, vivacious girl, who had just returned from a trip to Hong Kong, so the talk went smoothly with me asking questions and nodding at her answers rather absent-mindedly, grateful for not having to be engaged in the conversation about cars and labels that was going on on my left, subject which I was totally ignorant of. After half an hour however, it was clear that beside my slight interest in Asian mentality, which she seemed to share, and our mutual interest in trips of any kind, we really didn’t manage to make our conversation go beyond the level of politeness, and actually enjoy it. She gave up first, went to pour herself some more gin, and joined a debate about economy at the other end of the table.
       I turned then to the girl on my left, who had finished with the car debate and was now silently contemplating the wall in front. I smiled politely and tried to force a conversation about travelling plans, so we ended up talking about a trip that she had taken to Berlin the previous month, when all of a sudden she asked me if I had ever read Cella Serghi. I answered that indeed I had, years before, and she went on to say that before Berlin she had been in Balcic, and all she could do, while being there, was imagine Alex and Diana, the main characters, walking around. She had also read the novel when she was 13, during late summer afternoons, dreaming of sandy beaches and strange names. And there we were, the two of us sharing the same estranged memories that were once so dear to us, encountering them in a stranger, after so many years. And, for an instant, we were the closest of friends, bound by a book we had read ten years before.