In March, an ambulance arrived at the building. Doña Ileana had died alone in her apartment; the postman found her while delivering her pension. A distant niece came from Iași, checked the place, and left without much interest.
Almost a month later, two police officers knocked on Radu’s door . They asked him to accompany them to the eighth floor because they had found documents that mentioned him. Upon entering apartment 34, everything was impeccably clean, with meticulously polished 1970s furniture. But what took Radu’s breath away was the living room wall.
A wall full of memories
It was covered with nearly a hundred photographs . All of them were of him. Him at three years old on a bicycle. Him on his first day of school. Him at 15 in his high school uniform. Him on his wedding day. Him accompanying his mother to the market. Him returning from shopping last summer. All taken from above, from the window of that eighth floor. For decades, without him knowing.
The police handed him an envelope found on the nightstand, along with a will authenticated in 2019. The apartment had been bequeathed to him.
The letter that explained everything
In the letter, Doña Ileana revealed the truth: she was Mihai’s mother, Radu’s father. In other words, she was his paternal grandmother . She had Mihai at 19, abandoned by the man she had hoped to marry, and kicked out by her own parents. She raised him alone, working two jobs, until at 17, her son left home after a heated argument and cut off all contact.
In 1974, the factory where she worked assigned her an apartment in that same building through a lottery, unaware that her son also lived there with his wife. When she went to look for him, Mihai opened the door and rudely told her to leave: “Ma’am, if you see me on the stairs, you don’t know me .” Ileana, 40 years old and with nowhere else to go, vowed to respect his decision. But she stayed in the building.
When Radu was born in 1989, she was 55 years old and watched from the window as his mother brought him home from the maternity ward. From that moment, she decided that this child was hers, though she kept it to herself. She watched her son’s funeral from afar in 2011, not daring to go downstairs. She photographed every stage of her grandson’s life for 37 years.
