There are stories that seem like they were invented by a screenwriter, but they happen in ordinary buildings, in ordinary cities, among people who cross paths daily without suspecting the weight of what they keep silent. This is one of them, and it happened in a ten-story building on Mărășești Street, in the Romanian city of Focșani.
A whole life in the same building
Radu is 37 years old, works in an auto parts warehouse, and has never left the apartment where he was born, on the third floor of the building constructed in 1974. There he grew up, studied, got married, divorced, and returned. His parents had already passed away—his father in 2011 and his mother four years earlier—and since then he has lived alone.
In the same building, five floors higher, lived a woman known to everyone as Doña Ileana , a woman who had lived there since 1974. For 50 years, she didn’t speak to anyone. She greeted people with a slight nod, paid her maintenance fees in a sealed envelope, didn’t participate in meetings, and never smiled, not even at children. She left on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00 a.m. and returned an hour later with a light bag. The neighbors speculated about some old tragedy, but no one knew the truth.
