{"id":6757,"date":"2020-10-02T10:33:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T07:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/ma-omoara-pascu-paraschiva\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T14:19:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T11:19:24","slug":"ma-omoara-pascu-paraschiva","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/mental-health-art\/ma-omoara-pascu-paraschiva\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cPascu Paraschiva is killing me!\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(Winner of the Mental Health for Romania Art Contest<\/a>, prose category)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If her aunt was in a good mood, Aura would sometimes let her sit with her in her parents\u2019 bedroom and watch a film or TV series together. Her small child\u2019s body lay sprawled on the bed, propped up by a heap of big, firm pillows stuffed with goose feathers, eyes fixed on the television and the remote in her hand, while her aunt, Aunt Mari \u2013 as all the nephews called her \u2013 sat on the edge of the bed, with the child\u2019s legs stretched out across her lap. Her hair was somewhere between a shade of grey and greyish-white, cut short, kind of boyish. She didn\u2019t wear earrings, but Aura remembered seeing her a few times wearing large amber beads and oversized sunglasses with yellow frames and tinted lenses, under a large white cloth hat to shield the top of her head from the sun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her youth, her aunt had been a beautiful woman, with a slim waist and long, silky hair, always wearing elegant clothes, in keeping with the fashion of those years, as Aura had seen her in a photograph from the civil wedding party, in which her aunt\u2019s younger self was dancing, relaxed. Now, depending on her mood, she often wore either a long skirt pulled up to almost under her breasts and a baggy blouse, or \u2013 when she was in a belligerent mood \u2013 a washed-out army-green shirt she seemed unable to part with. She smelled of cigarette smoke all the time, because she smoked a great deal, even at night, and the fingers and nails of her right hand were yellowed from all that tar. Aura had noticed on several occasions that they were yellow, when the woman asked her to cut her nails outside, in the yard. She did it too, even if it wasn\u2019t an especially pleasant activity, but she got it over with quickly. And whenever she cut her nails, she also noticed that on one of her fingers her aunt wore a white plastic ring, snapped off a small tube that held the drops she took every day. Sometimes Aura\u2019s aunt also carried a black patent handbag on her arm, in which the child suspected she kept her lipstick \u2013 it had always been a mystery to her child\u2019s mind how a lipstick that was green when you took it out of the tube turned red on her aunt\u2019s lips. In this same handbag, Aunt Mari kept a toy pistol and lots of other little bits and bobs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only reason Aura let her sit and watch television was that she made her massage her feet \u2013 oh, and what a massage she gave her soles and calves! Vigorous, strong, soothing movements. It was a real godsend for the child, who delighted in this pampering she didn\u2019t get from the other members of the family. But shortly after they started watching television together, Aunt Mari would slide down a foggy slope of the mind and rattle off some nonsensical things that had become part of the landscape at home and to which Aura had become immune. In other words, after a while she barely paid attention to them: \u201cThat\u2019s me when I was younger\u201d, \u201cThat\u2019s Ionel when he was younger\u201d, she\u2019d say, referring to her brother, that is, Aura\u2019s father. Any actor or actress in films, any celebrity or TV presenter, any politician who appeared on the small screen was automatically accompanied by a remark from her aunt, spoken in a hoarse voice \u2013 the result of decades of smoking unfiltered cigarettes from the packets Aura\u2019s grandmother kept hidden in a huge pocket of her kitchen apron. She was the one who gave her aunt cigarettes and she never handed her a whole packet. It was also her grandmother who, as Aura had seen so many times, gave her aunt her medicines regularly: in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening. Words like \u201ctreatment\u201d, \u201cdrops\u201d, \u201cprescription\u201d, \u201cHaloperidol\u201d were spoken by the old woman and caught on the fly by the child, so that one day, when she was smaller and playing doctors at nursery, the teacher heard her prescribing the patient-doll a little \u201cHaloperidol\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\"Pencil\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 Yann Kebbi<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now it was summer, and the heat had made everyone in the house retreat to the cool of their rooms, behind drawn blinds. Flies buzzed incessantly in the kitchen, despite all the efforts Aura\u2019s mother made, using expensive sprays and yellowish strips with a sticky glue that the poor flies\u2019 little legs and wings got stuck to. The hallway that connected the kitchen to the front door opened into a room, and here, on two large cement steps covered with a runner, Aunt Mari spent most of her time, smoking, eating watermelon and talking nineteen to the dozen. Most of the time, the woman didn\u2019t sleep at night and stayed on those two steps until dawn broke, and through all those hours of the night her mouth never stopped, burbling words mixed up in the whirl of neurons, under the influence of the treatment and sleepless nights. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, during the day she didn\u2019t just stay in the house, as the child had noticed so many times when she played in the yard or the garden. Aura had seen her aunt in many guises over the years and all of it seemed normal to her. She believed everyone had an \u201cAunt Mari\u201d at home. On clear summer-sky days, the woman would point a toy pistol at the sky, either wooden or plastic, stolen from Aura\u2019s older brother, firing with all her might at enemy rockets which any sane person would see as the white trails made by aeroplane engines in flight. And she would keep firing at these contrails, reproducing the specific sounds too, until they disappeared from the sky, and only then could Aura\u2019s aunt breathe a sigh of relief, because she had saved them all from death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other situations, Aura would catch the woman lifting the receiver of the kitchen landline and, without dialling any number on the rotary, screaming in a loud, hoarse voice: \u201cHello! The Prosecutor\u2019s Office! Get the Prosecutor\u2019s Office here! Pascu Paraschiva is killing me!\u201d. Then she would hang up, slamming the receiver back into the cradle, and rush outside in a whirlwind, where she continued her stream of words, calling for help from prosecutors and passers-by, saying that \u201cPascu Paraschiva\u201d was trying to kill her, until she went hoarse from all the shouting. When she got older, Aura understood that Pascu Paraschiva was, in fact, her grandmother\u2019s maiden name, but nobody called her \u201cParaschiva\u201d. All the grandchildren called her \u201cGran Georgeta\u201d, after a pet name their grandfather had given her in his youth. Only Aura\u2019s aunt, during her crises and hallucinations, which became even more frequent in the summer months, called her by the name that had become synonymous with that of a dangerous killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\"A\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 Illustration Works\/Corbis<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aura grew up with scraps of information about her aunt, like the pieces of an extremely complicated puzzle that never stayed the same, that seemed to change from one day to the next, just as her aunt\u2019s mood seemed to change too: today she seemed to love them, tomorrow she cursed them at the top of her lungs, reviling them and shouting that they were \u201cBulgarian brats\u201d. The child had never asked herself questions about the woman\u2019s condition and nobody had ever explained what the illness Aunt Mari had suffered from since her youth meant, after a disappointment in love. She knew that summer was an unpleasant period for her aunt, because the \u201ccrises\u201d appeared, that she became a danger both to herself and to their grandmother, and that Aunt Mari had to be admitted to a hospital in Bucharest, from where she would return home after a few weeks, somewhat calmer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were also days when her aunt slept a lot, a great deal, and Aura barely saw her around the yard or the house. There were moments when the woman confessed that her biological parents were Nicolae and Elena Ceau\u0219escu, though for the child it was hard to understand how two figures she had heard talked about on television could, in fact, be her aunt\u2019s parents. On top of all that, she also remembered some funny moments she had witnessed. For example, when a close cousin of Aura\u2019s father came to visit one summer \u2013 an elegant, well-groomed woman in her fifties \u2013 her aunt approached her, put her hand on the woman\u2019s prominent belly, and declared in a serious, matter-of-fact tone: \u201cYou\u2019re pregnant, madam, you\u2019re pregnant!\u201d. More often, though, the nasty or angry remarks were directed at the one who over the years had become the main target of her aunt\u2019s verbal attacks, namely Pascu Paraschiva. The old woman \u2013 God rest her soul! \u2013 hadn\u2019t had many peaceful days in her daughter\u2019s company since she\u2019d fallen ill with her nerves, and the phrase that stuck in Aura\u2019s mind and was spoken most often in their house \u2013 second only to \u201cPascu Paraschiva is killing me!\u201d \u2013 was the eternal \u201cYou\u2019re mad, madam! Can\u2019t you see you\u2019re mad?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*A portrait of my aunt, whom I lived with in the same house. My aunt suffered from schizophrenia, as also emerges from the portrait \/ short prose, and when I was a child, all those things she did seemed normal to me.* <\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If her aunt was in a good mood, Aura would sometimes let her sit with her in her parents\u2019 bedroom and watch a film or TV series together. Her small child\u2019s body lay sprawled on the bed, propped up by a heap made of big, firm pillows stuffed with goose feathers <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5798,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_mhro_primary_tag":464,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1050],"tags":[40,49,64],"class_list":["post-6757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mental-health-art","tag-schizofrenie","tag-medicatie","tag-concursul-de-creatie-mhr"],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cPascu Paraschiva is killing me!\u201d - Mental Health for Romania<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Winner of the Mental Health for Romania Art Contest, inspired by the author\u2019s childhood experiences with her schizophrenic aunt.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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