Millions of dust particles float in the beam of sunlight, landing on a worn Persian rug. Seated on the floor, I watch their delicate dance. Through the closed bathroom door, I can hear silverware clinking and the muffled gurgling of water pouring into the bathtub – Grandma is doing the dishes. She must be uncomfortably bent over the edge of the bathtub, as I have seen her so many times. The strained leaning forward of her body makes the hem of her dress rise in the back, exposing her flabby thighs just above the stockings’ garter line. 

Without a kitchen, food is prepared in the bathroom. I have spent countless delightful hours watching our help, Lucreția, wrapping rice and ground pork in pickled cabbage leaves to make sarmale. She would separate a wet, salty leaf from the cabbage head and flatten it with her palm on the cutting board. After placing a spoonful of rice and ground pork on the lower edge of the leaf’s wider side, she would roll it until completely enclosed. Finally, she would tuck the loose ends inside and place the sarma in a huge pot, meticulously building a spiral of small bundles. The pot would simmer on a portable gas stove for hours, filling the whole house with the smell of cooked cabbage.

Lucreția is a hoștezeancă – a descendant of ethnic Germans who moved in clusters of small farming communities surrounding the city of Cluj sometime during the 16th century. They supplied the townspeople with fresh fruits and vegetables until the communist urban expansion of the 1960s destroyed almost all of their gardens. Lucreția is among the few left. She wears a stiff, colorful skirt and covers her waist-long braids with a white kerchief folded over the ears and tied under the chin. 

We live on the upper floor of the house – three generations, four adults, and two children crammed in two rooms. At least we don’t share our space with other families, as my grandparents had to do when they first rented this place. Exiled by war to Bucharest for several years, my grandfather returned to Cluj in 1950 with a young wife and a baby girl – my mother. The communist authorities had expropriated the house from its owners, a Hungarian couple thereafter forced to occupy only the damp ground-floor quarters. My grandparents and another family with a newborn were granted tenant status for the upper floor, paying a low rent to the state. The two families shared the space for several years. During the temporary relaxation of the communist rule that followed Stalin’s death, the owners reclaimed their property. One family left, but my mother – by then a middle schooler – and her parents stayed as tenants of the original landlords. This lodging arrangement spanned decades, during which my mother graduated high school, went to college, got married, and had children.

Of course, I don’t know any of these family stories yet. For the moment, I am busy contemplating other things, like the dust playing in the morning sun of November. Kneeling on the Persian rug, I uncurl its tassels with a broken plastic comb. 

My father is preparing to go get in line at the grocery store. Earlier, a neighbor stopped by in a hurry with exciting news: “They are bringing sunflower oil!” I know the store well. Opened by a Jewish family after WWI, the grocery quickly went through several Romanian and Hungarian owners only to end up as communist property. Yet, it has changed little in half a century. The wooden floor painted with gasoline to keep off bugs and rats, the shelves extending from the floor to the tall ceiling, the sweet but rancid smell, and the dim lights seem timeless. The only sign of the times – a chubby clerk in a lavender uniform talking in a northern Transylvanian dialect and wearing massive hoop earrings made of gold so cheap that they have a copper hue. Every Saturday afternoon, my brother and I take a stroll to the corner store to buy eugenia – diluted cocoa cream sandwiched between two biscuits – the epitome of rudimentary communist sweets. We open the sandwich and lick the cocoa cream, which leaves an unsavory, greasy film on the palate. The biscuits are rock hard, so we just nibble on them until they dissolve in our mouths. 

About a year ago, empty pockets started to form here and there in the rows of merchandise. Every day, the shelves look more and more like a mouth with missing teeth. With the government determined to pay Romania’s international debt, basic goods have been redirected to massive exports. Domestic consumption relies on rationed, intermittent supply. At the beginning of each month, we receive food ration tickets. The yellow ones grant each one of us seven eggs, half a pack of butter, half a liter of sunflower oil, and one kilo of baking flour. Then, there are the white cards with numbered small squares that the cashier punches daily as proof that we each bought half a loaf of bread. Milk is not rationed but can only be found every other day. Sugar is almost as rare as chocolate and exotic fruits. Decades from now, when I will get married, my mom will pass me a handwritten notebook she inherited from her mother. Each generation adds new recipes in alphabetical order. My mom’s most original dish is recorded under F: “Flourless cake without eggs, butter, or sugar.”

The pastel-colored tickets are reserved for meat. The light blue may secure up to one kilogram of poultry. Plucked and frozen, whole chickens are stacked in freezers that have the solemnity of a morgue. The amount of meat on their bones is meager, but my mother is nevertheless content. “You can make a really good soup,” she teaches me, “from chicken claws and heads.” If you can find it, one kilogram of pork comes with pale pink tickets. Rumor spreads like oil leaking from a cargo ship onto the ocean’s surface: “They are bringing pork feet!” When they hear it, my parents drop whatever they are doing and run to get in line at the grocery. If our help, Lucreția, or my grandmother are not around, the children join the food-seeking expedition. In fact, I enjoy lining up so much that my favorite game these days is to stand still by the living room wall, hunched and bored, with an empty bag in my hand. The first time I did this, my mom noticed me after a while: 

- “What are you doing there?” 

- “I am waiting in line for eggs!” I responded proudly. 

Mom laughed and cried and then laughed and cried again.

- “Take me with you!” I beg my father, who is now ready to leave for the grocery store. 

But he refuses: 

- “It’s too cold, and there will be a long line outside the store.” 

- “What do you mean cold? Look, it’s nice and sunny,” I insist, pointing to the bright sunbeam. 

- “That is the sun with fangs,” he quips. 

Seeing the disbelief on my face, Dad takes a piece of paper and a pencil. First, he draws a big circle and a multitude of lines extending outward from its edge. These are the rays, I figure, but it’s still a faceless sun. So my father sketches a pair of eyes inside the circle and then the huge horizontal oval of an open mouth. To my horror, he quickly fills the sun’s mouth with saw-like teeth. 

The fangs are perfectly aligned. This is one of my father’s talents. He practiced it while training as an engineer in college, and even now, he can draw perfectly straight lines without a ruler. His older sister likes to recall him as a preschooler prodigy – writing the alphabet with his finger in the air while herding cows, bare feet on a dusty road of his native village devastated by war and drought. His thirst for learning did not go unnoticed. Incentivized by the prospects of communist-enabled social mobility, his parents sent my father to boarding school when he turned 10. He finished high school at 17, served for one year in the army, and graduated college as class valedictorian at 22. After a few years as chief engineer in Cluj, he completed a second university degree in economics, then defended his doctorate in engineering, and became a university professor.

Still holding my father’s drawing of the sun with fangs in my hand, I cling to his jacket: 

-“Please take me with you!”  

And so, he does. 

At the store, about 40 people are waiting in line on the sidewalk. Some brought folding chairs. Here and there, empty bags lie on the ground by the store’s wall. Eager to reserve a place, those who cannot make it to the line early enough send an empty bag with a neighbor or a friend, just like the folktale ogre who throws his axe from miles away to announce his imminent arrival. As we wait, more and more people arrive, braving the cold, bundled in sheepskin coats, congregating in small groups. Here, several women gossip about the amount of money someone received in wedding gifts. There, some elderly whisper political jokes in the Radio Yerevan genre – a parodic Q&A between listeners and a radio host. “Question: Is it true that the communist party will give to every citizen a brand-new car? Answer: Yes, this is absolutely true, but with a few minor corrections: it is not a car, it’s a bicycle, and the party will not give, it will take it away.” Someone in the crowd has brought a bottle of home-made plum brandy that is passed among friends, acquaintances, and strangers. 

After two hours, my feet and hands are getting cold, but I won’t admit it. Suddenly, someone pushes me playfully and I turn around: it’s Irina, my preschool classmate. We chase each other in the crowd, laughing. Her mom chats with my father and marvels about me getting taller since she last saw me. She hands me a hard candy covered in cocoa powder. I choke a little as it melts in my mouth.

The store opens and everybody pushes toward the door at once. My father wants to take my hand, but the tide of moving bodies propels me away from him. Frightened, I reach out, and he manages to grab my wrist. The open mouth of the store swallows the crowd, which pulsates in oscillating waves. I am surrounded by poking elbows, hips, and knees, my face pressed against the pungent sheepskin coats. Somehow, we make it to the counter. Dad is about to place the sunflower oil in his bag when I notice on the bottle’s greasy label a sun with a corona of curly petals. I watch as the sun grows shiny human arms and waves at me. But then the sun opens a mouth full of fangs and calls my name in a slow, chilling voice. 

I pass out. The crowd almost tramples over me. My father lifts me in his arms. The bag’s raffia handles cutting into his wrist, he struggles to get me out. The crowd crushes him, the elderly curse, the gossipy women shriek. Irina’s mom scolds him: 

- “You should have known that your daughter is too weak to stay in line!”

We make it back home. I find my father’s sketch dropped on the Persian rug. In our absence, someone has added a cartoon speech bubble by the sun with fangs’ mouth: “I’M HUNGRY.”