It was impassioned and exhausting.

The general meeting of technicians was indignant that an architect, a layman, had the nerve to stick his nose in business he did not understand.

‘Your job is to take care of the construction side of the business. To build a refinery, an office block and a number of homes. That’s all. What’s the hurry with oil, drilling mud and wells?’

‘I don’t care about your wells. Whether you’re extracting petrol, vegetable oil or whey, it’s all the same to me. However, I can’t build using scraps. I need a site and I need space. And furthermore, I can’t build an industrial complex in a village of viticulturists. And I can’t build to the right of the village, because I’m not so mad as to leave a belt of peasants between the complex and the wells whom you’ll fumigate or poison a year or ten from now, or else their plum trees, and who will one day get fed up with the smoke and set fire to you too, along with the wells and the whole petrol game.’

… The argument would go on until dawn without a conclusion, and with both combatants exhausted.

Every point of the plan was buried and resurrected ten times. Everything old Ralph acquiesced to would be retracted the next day, when he’d got his strength back. One day, when the matter seemed further from resolution than ever, he went along with everything, signed everything, surrendered completely. At the beginning of May, I turned the first sod. That was five years ago …

How hard it was and yet how simple! What I love most about architecture is its progressive simplification of an idea, how the dream takes shape. For all the precision of the original plans, there’s something nebulous about the beginning of any construction project, as the precision is technical and abstract, and the concrete feeling of realizing it comes only later, after life has begun cooperating with your work. In these five years of work all I can recognize is the outline of the master’s plans. The rest has come through surprises, through encountering opposition, through accidents.

‘The village of Uioara will be moved several kilometres to the right, to the valley of the river Ursu.’ It was easy to say. And to do, up to a certain point. But we had to contend with unforeseen opposition, and were obliged to take account of superstitions and hidden forces which never figured in any plan. Nor is New Uioara exactly the village the master designed, a transplantation of the old community of viticulturists, held at arm’s length from Rice’s enterprises. And nor has Old Uioara been completely replaced by industrial buildings. There were some old maniacs who wouldn’t give up their old homes for anything and stupidly stayed on with their plum trees, battling waves of crude oil and drilling mud, and beyond in New Uioara some of the disoriented young men decided they’d had enough of tending vines and headed down into the valley, towards the wells, to become oil workers. This two-way traffic has changed the whole region, sweeping through old communities and precipitating changes in the structure of society. All this was too complex to have foreseen.

There is less litigation than before, but there is still enough. Rice keeps paying and they keep suing. There are some local adversaries who won’t give up while they’re still breathing.

From time to time a window or two gets smashed at the refinery or the offices. Where do these stones fall from? Who throws them? Why? As usual, the investigation makes little progress. It’s more prudent that way. Twenty years from now, everything will be forgotten completely.

Meanwhile, we build. The refinery was finished nearly two years ago. I’m astounded today to think that I participated in its construction. The offices have gone well enough, the houses incomparably better. I think by next summer we’ll have finished everything. We’ve kept moving our cabin and building site outwards, always towards the edge of this little town, which has gone up before us. Five years! I can’t believe how it’s flown.

*

There’s been a switch of night-shifts at the oil wells. From here, on the porch of the cabin, the lamps of those returning to the village are clearly visible. It hasn’t rained for about two weeks and the night is perfectly clear.