Romanian reality was a clone of Soviet reality for four decades. We lived in the same apartment building, spoke the same artificial pseudolanguages, and were seized by the same profound sense of the absurd. We all lived in Mamin's building, and are all going down in it and with it. In that sense, Mamin's metaphor of a communal apartment house in Moscow is big enough to accommodate all of us now grubbing in the ruins of the “Grand Experiment.” Fountain is a communal metaphor about community in several of its guises: precommunity (the nomad tribe), faux community (several of these, corresponding to Soviet leaders), and finally, postcommunity (which resembles Marx's “primitive Communism,” from whence a supposedly rational Communism was going to arise — and did: into faux community.) Of all of these, only the nomad community makes any sense because its life is based on ecological necessity, that is, water.

There was a pure spring tended by an Orthodox monk at a hermitage in the mountain woods of Transylvania when I went there in July 1990. The monk looked a thousand years old, and he'd written in old-fashioned script on a yellowing piece of cardboard tacked over the spring: God's water. Drink and Be Blessed.