Sanda Budis’ freedom at an old age

An interview with Romanian 88-year old architect and writer Sanda Budis about the freedom found in being old and the courage to confront a mad history. Not even movies or sensational novels would dare to tell a story where a woman gets married and in less than 36 hours after her wedding, her father is taken into custody and sent to prison by the secret police, and then her parents in law, which she didn’t yet meet, are sent to a labor camp, hundreds of km away. Such a story would seem excessive and hard to believe. But this is what actually happened to Sanda Budis, a now 88-year old Romanian architect, and it’s just a tiny part of the unbelievable experiences she went through during her life. And then at 85, Sanda sat down and started writing a book about her life called “The father’s girl and the daughter’s mother”- not exactly what you’d expect of an octogenarian. But Sanda has never been an ordinary person, even though she says the opposite about herself. “My story is that of an average person, who has lived through a convoluted History, lost everything many, many times and had to start everything from scratch three times, with a courage I wish you’d also have.” Sanda Budis now lives in Switzerland, where she moved when she was 47, in 1973, “with 10 dollars in her pockets”, but she regularly comes to Bucharest to visit her daughter, the author and political and civic activist Sandra Pralong. I meet her in a spacious, light-filled apartment, and I am simply taken by surprise about how funny and direct Sanda Budis is. She is a woman in her 80s, but there is no single detail that escapes her. She notices that the necklace I’m wearing is broken and she says, “let me fix it.” When I try to protest, we can leave it for later, she immediately reacts. “We need to take this load from our minds, dear, right now. Hello! This is what I taught Sanda, never load yourself with a bag of problems!” The freedom “Last year I turned 85 and I celebrated with some 50 friends: a few old ladies still alive, like me and a lot of young people, my daughter Sandra’s friends, but mine also. To everyone’s surprise, I arrived wearing some cabaret-like 10 cm high heels and I blew everyone’s mind: I was a vamp- a surprise not only for my daughter Sandra, but also for me. While looking for my flats I found the high heels and because all my life I’ve been doing crazy things, I thought- this is the time,” Sanda writes in her book. Being old gives you an extraordinary freedom, she tells me. “You don’t care about anything anymore. You don’t have to be beautiful, smart, elegant, you don’t have to be anything anymore.” Then she adds laughing. “I’m a walking corpse. That’s what I told a group of 30 young girls I met some days ago. The all looked at me a bit dazed and scared. I like to laugh, to play, to confuse, especially those who give themselves such importance. And I like to shock Romanians. They are so scared and I’m the opposite.” Old age creeps with helplessness, Sanda writes. You can’t open a jar anymore, you can’t run to catch the bus and you climb a hill only with difficulty. But she has developed two new weapons, surprise and scream, that are legitimate to use against absurd behaviours, she says. Take the car episode, for example. Sanda is 82 and she is peacefully driving her little Matiz on Coposu boulevard when a big car illegally crosses her way. Sanda uses the car horn but the big car, now in front of her, teases her with sudden stops. When the two cars stop at the traffic light, “I got off my car, and surprise! I got next to him and I slapped his fat arm resting on the car door and back to my car, where I barricaded myself and chased away.” God gave her a great deal of courage, she says. “I’ve been brave all my life, maybe a little bit unconscious, ever since I was a little kid. I was riding horses, cows, everything I could find. Scared of them? Not a single bit! Jumping fences, getting in everywhere. I was a cured boy.”