Vivid POSTCARDS
Postcard from Calea Victoriei

by Leslie Hawke

Coming home from the World Class Downtown gym (I had just taken my first ever yoga class) I got mugged earlier tonight, a little before 10 pm. Right by the Humanitas bookstore across from the Senate Building.

It was a kid, 13 or 14 years old, whom I recognised because he often gives me a hard time when I walk home alone at night and refuse to give him money. Unlike many other nights, tonight there were lots of people milling around the newly unveiled and well-lit Revolution Memorial and the street was full of cars. As the kid stopped ‘begging’ – and started grabbing at me – and I realised what was happening, I maneuvered into the middle of Calea Victoriei (we were conveniently positioned at a newly painted cross walk) and started yelling ‘Hey, Stop, HELP!’ in that high-pitched, escalating, undignified way that people do in real life.

The weird thing was that the people on the street and in the cars all politely stopped and watched while a swarm of at least a dozen street kids appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly my scrawny assailant turned to run and I realised he had succeeded in extracting my wallet from my shoulder bag – so I took off after him. At that point two tough-looking young men (of Roma descent I think) jumped out of a white van and started yelling and chasing the kids who dispersed in all directions like so many mice. The kid dropped my wallet, sans 50 or 60 RON, the two young men asked me if I was OK, and the traffic resumed.

I was shaken, partly by the fact that so many observers, both pedestrians and those in cars, just stopped and watched passively, partly by the fear that the two guys who had chased the kids off were actually part of some bigger scam – and partly by a sense that the universe just might be thumbing its nose at me. It also seemed more than a little ironic that my first yoga class coincided with my first mugging.

There’s a police station right across the street from my apartment so I rang up Maria and she met me at the station. The officer on duty ordered a pair of young cops to make an investigation (an effort that Maria said they would never have made if I hadn’t been a foreigner). They took no written notes but made the usual inquiry, ‘Were they gypsies?’ and drove us in a Politia van to the scene of the crime. They searched the adjacent overgrown lawn around the old Orthodox church. The area was ominously empty but they managed to round up two prepubescent boys, who, when they were assured they themselves were not considered suspects, were only too pleased to recount the whole earlier episode with lots of animated gestures. I asked the boys, Ion and Mirel, if they were in school and the one with bright, sweet, alert eyes said proudly, ‘Yes, 6th grade!’ I tried to find out why he was on the street; he said his mother was ‘crazy’, as if that were sufficient explanation. My instinct was to scoop him up and bring him home, and I think Maria’s was too. Mirel on the other hand, smaller, less intelligent looking, and probably younger, had that scary look of the irretrievably lost.

To make an official report I would have had to go to another police station across town. It was late, and what was the point really? I didn’t want to ‘file a complaint’. I just wanted it to be on record that such things happen right there in Piata Revolutei. Children attack middle-aged women for money. I don’t think I, or anyone else is likely to turn the tide of Ion’s, or Mirel’s, or my 40-kilo assailant’s life. But I do believe with concerted, intelligent, long-term effort we can prevent other children from reaching this point of no return.
For me, the episode was, well, humbling. Yes, that’s the word for it. And it reminded me in very concrete terms that what Maria and I and our staff and frankly a lot of other people in Romania, are trying to do – that is, to stem the tide of multi-generational poverty, and thereby lessen its damning effects – is of monumental importance; that it is in fact, a moral imperative.