I.

1.

He sat in a shady corner of the garden, admiring the 'wilderness' he had created (his wife christened it with her usual ironic tenderness). He planted the fruit trees, but also the bright green, red and yellowish-leaved shrubs, the hyacinth, Japanese quince and rose bushes, the tulips, the sword flowers in bloom, the magnificent dahlias. His wife, a city girl, knew nothing about gardening, though she appreciated her husband's jungle with a gleeful and never-ending embrace. The feeling was mutual, for his wife, in turn, was making the house bloom with beautiful houseplants.

The sky in the summer afternoon was a radiant blue. But the cherry tree on the other side of the garden had dropped a few yellowing leaves, which were then blown away in butterflies by the wind.

Meanwhile, he was pondering a fragment of a memory he had almost forgotten. Perhaps it was the sight of autumn fading from somewhere in the cracks of oblivion.

In the early nineties, as a Romanian-Hungarian student, he was a committed supporter of the ideal of balanced Romanian-Hungarian coexistence. This was not then an indispensable state of consciousness of the Hungarian public in Romania.

Moments earlier, he had been arguing with his wife, who, since they moved here to be near Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) for their sons and grandsons, was finding it increasingly difficult to accept that the Kolozsvár they had known so intimately from their university days was nothing like what it used to be. Our hero saw this too, but having spent a large part of his university years among Romanians, he found it easier to bear. The empathy born of the situation (try to think with the other person's mind - such as it is - before forming an opinion) was no longer something he was able to shed. In fact, his wife was not repulsed by"others" either. In fact, he became friends with every living Romanian within minutes, but he thought that if he tried to think with a Romanian mind, his partners could make an effort. Besides, she might have had a more objective basis for empathy with Romanians than her husband, given that, according to family tradition, she had a Florica among her ancestors in Partum. But perhaps that is why she would have expected more from her relatives than she could have expected in her garden solitude. The strange Székely dialect word"fox's egg" (it means: relations) was sometimes used by her husband. According to family documents, he was a pure Szekler, going back at least to the 16th century. From both branches.

Moreover, as the years went by, the woman more and more often cried out,"They have taken everything from us, what more do they want?" The people of Kolozsvár had got used to the"change of the world", albeit with difficulty, but she - as a resident of Nagyvárad (Oradea), coming fr