The US presidential elections are just a few days away, which makes me think of this story from my childhood in 1980s’ Romania when I joined a little cult…
***
“A homegrown elf?” I asked, not believing my ears.
Yes, a homegrown real-life elf with a tiny hat and a beard, an elf who talked and ate and, I assumed, pooped too.
This story happened a long time ago in my native Romania, when I was no older than fourth grade. It happened soon after a dusty patch in our schoolyard got covered in gravel. Rocks of all shapes, all colors, all textures, all sizes.
One morning, a girl in my class had exciting news for the rest of us. (I don’t remember who, so I’ll use the name Dana.) That morning, Dana revealed to us that our school’s gravel patch was not full of rocks but of elf-eggs.
“I hatched my own real elf from one of those rocks,” she said.
We listened in awe as she explained her secret recipe. For a good-sized elf, we needed a clean, fist-sized rock. We had to boil the rock for longer than we would an egg—so maybe half an hour. Then we had to squeeze a precise number of lemon drops over the hot rock and—just like that—the rock would crack open to reveal the elf inside.
That day, all of us girls stopped by the new gravel patch and stuffed the pockets of our school uniforms with fist-sized rocks. At home, when my parents weren’t around, I scrubbed my elf-eggs with a nailbrush and a lot of soap, set a small pot on the stovetop, and added the water. Now, was I supposed to add the elf-eggs in the cold or in the boiling water? After much deliberation, I plopped them into lukewarm water.
I had no lemon juice in the house. Lemons were imported goods, not something the average Romanian would see in a grocery store in a socialist economy. But I found a plastic yellow bottle in the fridge, and there was some sour juice inside that tasted like lemon. I set my rocks on a wooden cutting board and counted the lemon drops. To my surprise, the elf-eggs didn’t crack open, not one of them.
First thing in the morning, I found Dana.
“It has to be a real lemon,” she said.
Another girl cut in to gush about the brand-new girl elf she had at home.
“A girl elf?” I said, feeling jealous.
“Yes.” And she described the creature to me, though I can’t pretend to remember the description. (As I said, this story happened a long time ago. Parts of it faded and disappeared, so I’m filling in the blanks with made up details.)
“Do you happen to have an extra lemon?” I said.
No such luck. I trudged back to my wooden desk. How was I supposed to sit still and pay attention during classes now, with a lemon quest waiting for me? As luck had it, my grandmother was the manager of a workers’ cafeteria at the steel plant in our industrial city of Galaţi, and, after a few, long days, she was able to bring me the lemon of my elf-dreams. Meanwhile, one of my closest friends (I’ll call her Stela) had grown not one, but two elves at home. A boy and a girl.
“Can I come see them?”
“No.” Her father, who occasionally whipped Stela with a rubber hose when she misbehaved, was on leave from work, and he didn’t like kids hanging around his apartment. Otherwise, Stela would’ve taken me to see her elves. I understood—I didn’t want to be around that horrible man either.
“Can you bring them to school maybe?”
What a silly idea. Did I want them to suffocate in Stela’s backpack? Besides, they were just getting used to their new home, a large flowerpot made to look like Thumbelina’s place.
I had no choice but to continue working on my lonely elf-making. I collected more rocks and went back to boiling them. By now, it mattered if the rock was smooth or sharp, if it had stripes or mica spots, if it was flat or bulgy, per Dana’s instructions. I asked my grandmother for more lemons—I told her I had taken a liking to lemon-flavored tea. As a loving grandmother, she brought me more lemons, no matter how hard her own quest was.
At home, I kept my failed experiments secret. I only boiled rocks when my mother (a high school teacher), my father (an engineer at the steel plant), and my brother (three years younger) were not around. At school, the elf chatter had grown louder. Stela’s elves improved her father’s mood, so he had stopped hurting her. Everywhere else, elves made great bedtime pals, especially if you were afraid of the dark. They helped with homework. They had magical talents. For all those reasons, I was dying to get my hands on one. I had high grades in school, but I was failing at elf-making every single day.
“Maybe they don’t like you enough to come out of their rocks for you,” a girl told me one day.
So that was the reason I was failing: not because I wasn’t trying hard enough or following the instructions to the letter, but because there was something wrong with me, which the elves sensed from inside their rocks. That was heartbreaking and shameful. Nevertheless, I persevered. I think my mother had to mend my uniform’s pockets once or twice, and she wasn’t pleased with my carelessness.
One day, our teacher asked a girl up to the blackboard, and on her way there, a rock fell through a hole in her uniform’s pocket.
“What’s that?” the teacher said.
The girl’s pockets were bulging with rocks. A boy probably yelled out something about elves, and the other boys joined in.
The teacher had the girl empty her pockets on the classroom floor. “Anybody else making…elves?”
“All the girls,” the boys said, laughing.
And so, all of us girls had to stand in front of the classroom and empty our pockets. The floor looked like the gravel patch in the schoolyard. The boys jeered at us, and the teacher didn’t tell them to be quiet. I felt embarrassed, but some of the lined-up girls threw meaningful glances at one another.
“Elves don’t exist,” the teacher said.
What? So there was nothing wrong with me after all? But then why had all my friends been claiming that they hatched elves from rocks? I trusted them, but I also trusted our teacher.
I needed answers, but nobody wanted to talk about the elves that day, as though they had been murdered. By the teacher. And by the boys.
I asked Stela on our way from school if her elves had been real.
“Of course they’re real. They live with me at home in their flowerpot.”
“Can I see them?”
“Come by tomorrow, when my father’s at work, and I’ll show them to you.”
I don’t know if I even slept that night, so excited I was to see those elves at long last. Yes, our teacher had been wrong, and yes, there was still something wrong with me, but to hold a real elf in the palm of my hand…
The next day Stela looked crushed, maybe even cried. “My elves died last night, and I buried them in the flowerpot they liked so much.”
I was crushed too. “Are you going to make new ones? There’s still plenty of rocks in the gravel patch.”
“No, elves don’t live long, and it’s so hard for me when they die…”
Now there was no one to keep Stela’s father from hitting her when he was angry. But I didn’t press her with any more questions because she was heartbroken.
The other girls stopped talking about their elves at school, or at least were careful to never mention them in the presence of someone who couldn’t hatch her own. Life soon returned to normal, and I went back to studying and earning high grades. Though the suspicion that something was wrong with me had hatched and was growing.
***
I told you this story because it might explain how some people have been pulled into Trump’s MAGA cult over the years. Peer pressure makes us accept things we wouldn’t otherwise. Once we do, human nature does the rest, as we hate to accept that we were intimidated, duped, or taken advantage of.
In the US, millions have accepted that democracy is obsolete, and we need a strongman to lead the flock. But I already lived under a dictator in Romania—and it sucked. That’s why I appreciate democracy, as messy as it is, more than I can explain here. (I wrote lots more about this in my legal thriller, which I think of as the little pebble I tried to throw at Trump—and missed.) That’s why it breaks my heart to see people willing to throw away rights others have fought for and even died for, so we can have them today.
So, if you’re in the US, I hope you already voted or will vote for democracy, sanity, humanity, and decency. And if you’re in a different country, wish us luck.
