I belong to a generation common talk found a crueller name for: decreței, the decree children — subject of Florin Iepan’s documentary Children of the Decree. A cohort inflated by Ceaușescu’s demographic policy, abortion and contraception outlawed in 1966 to manufacture Romanians, so that the glorious regime could then walk us down, step by step, hand in hand with the rest of society, into the catacombs of Maslow’s pyramid.

Life offered us unforgettable experiences: cold, hunger, fear, unbroken applause. All of it, up to that astral moment in December 1989 when we put Ceaușescu on a helicopter.

Then came the transition, long as a winter — the way out of the tunnel. I wouldn’t say the light at the end of it is blinding, or that our paths run through meadows of four-leaf clover. But I wouldn’t say we are a sacrificed generation either.

It is the summer of 2021. More than a year ago, when we first heard of the epidemic in China, the virus had not yet reached Europe or the United States. We knew, though, that it needed no visa, and that it would come our way without fail.

In those days, when the spectre of the pandemic was only beginning to take shape, a good friend, my age, confessed that existential sadness had struck him: “Yes, we are a generation that missed the war, but caught communism, caught the transition, and now a pandemic is stalking us.” And a pandemic there was.

The words of another man my age, from Yerevan, took some of the edge off the negative energies — the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh had already reignited: “Listen to me: war is infinitely uglier than a pandemic. I have been there.” He gave me a few telling examples. I agreed with him.

So then: what was to be done, how do you face (yet another) period whose end you might not live to see? Or whose end those dear to you might not live to see? Trained in a full-blooded dictatorship, we are not easily surprised: “What could possibly be worse than communism?” And yet…

At first, when I heard the word pandemic, it took me a few seconds to process the weight it carries. I had read Camus's The Plague, Sartre's The Flies, and Slavici’s Pădureanca, and the other titles one reads on the subject, but I had never given epidemics more importance than they seemed to deserve: pretexts with a metaphorical and political flavour.

Scenes of various epidemics were passing through my mind when, through some connection of the synapses, I landed on a flash from adolescence — a film poster: Five for Hell, an Italian film, though at the time I took it for American. Maybe you have seen it, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is where the idea for the book in front of you was born.

I said to myself: what if I gathered a handful of people to keep a diary of how they are living the pandemic, wherever they are? I thought that if I managed to bring together five, I would be more than pleased. I had no hopes beyond that.

By the snowball method, five times that number came together, minus one. Twenty-four souls scattered by fate to the four corners of the earth: from Hong Kong to Finland, from the Canaries to Canada, from Mexico to New Zealand, from New York to the branded European capitals of fashion and perfume. An eclectic network of anthropologists, actors, writers, software engineers, activists, lawyers, journalists, diplomats, film directors, poets, architects and more.

I expected chronicles of isolation and solitude. What I often got was something else: grandparents, famine, wars, jars of pickles — as if, asked to write about the present, people had instinctively fled into memory. The rest, I invite you to discover from their own writing.

The text above is the foreword to “Jurnal de pandemie. Proză de grup” (Pandemic Diary. Group Prose), published in Romania by Brumar. We are publishing the whole series here, one text at a time — in Romanian and, for the first time anywhere, in English.