I caught sight of the director looking down from the orphanage balcony with the local mayor and priest, observing our bedraggled procession as though they were members of the polit-bureau attending a Red Army parade. I rounded the corner of the old pink and green nobleman's building where a group of blind musicians began to play, the children gesticulating their distorted bodies to the music with glee. As everyone seemed to be looking at me for the next cue, I pulled out the icon from my rucksack that I had been carrying from Mt. Athos, a gift from an American novice for the orphans of Romania. On the back were messages in Greek, English and Romanian. I made my presentation to the priest who gave me a great hug and kissed me on both cheeks.
Sublime moments seem to be characterised by their brevity.
But what stayed was an exquisite, and all too rare, sense of having reached my goal. M y welcome had been especially poignant because of the noticeable absence of my two younger brothers, without whom I would never have found myself in this remote part of the world. They had come to Romania in 1990, immediately after the revolution, with an Aid convoy from Scotland. The older of the two, Rupert, was covering the journey as a journalist, and Moona, a skate- board champ turned surfer, was taking a break from his quest for the perfect wave. The place was worse than anything they had seen so far.