The Encyclopedia We Never Finished
By Ovidiu and Adi Catanescu
Two Brothers and a Basement Full of Life
When my brother Adi and I were growing up in Brăila, Romania, our parents' home was shared by considerably more creatures than the four of us.
Our father loved animals. At various times, we had chickens, ducklings, goslings and rabbits. Perhaps it was inevitable that his two sons would develop the same fascination with living creatures.
Adi, who was two years older than I was, was particularly interested in birds. In the basement of our apartment building, he built a large aviary that he could actually walk into. At one point, he kept approximately sixty budgerigars there.
I preferred fish.
I started with a secondhand aquarium acquired from a neighbor for practically nothing. I no longer remember exactly where my first tropical fish came from, but I certainly remember what happened afterward.
My collection gradually expanded until I had approximately twenty aquariums containing hundreds of tropical fish.
Our basement had become a miniature zoo. Adi spent countless hours caring for his birds, while I devoted myself to observing, feeding and breeding my fish.
We were still very young, but caring for all those animals taught us more than we understood at the time. We learned to recognize changes in their behavior, understand their needs and create the conditions necessary for them to survive and reproduce.
Keeping fish was one thing. Understanding them was something else entirely.
I wanted to know where they came from, what their natural habitats looked like, how they reproduced and what conditions they needed to survive.
Some species were relatively easy to breed. Others required considerable patience, careful observation and special conditions.
I experimented with different aquariums, aquatic plants and breeding arrangements. Even small differences in water conditions could determine whether a breeding attempt succeeded or failed.
And wherever I went, if there was an aquarium in the room, I noticed it.
That fascination eventually led me to a pharmacy in Brăila.
The Goldfish in the Pharmacy
One day, I went to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription.
I don't remember much about the prescription, but I certainly remember what I discovered inside the pharmacy.
The pharmacist had several aquariums filled with beautiful fish. One of them contained a number of mature goldfish, including what I thought was the largest and most beautiful goldfish I had ever seen.
Naturally, I asked about it.
I learned that most of the pharmacist's fish came from Bucharest. I also asked him how much he wanted for that magnificent goldfish.
"It isn't for sale," he told me.
He was keeping it for breeding.
That didn't stop me from wanting it.
Over the years, I continued visiting the pharmacy. The pharmacist and I became friends, and we talked about fish—where he obtained them, how he cared for them and how he bred them.
Every time I went there, that beautiful goldfish was still there.
I began saving money, thinking that perhaps one day I might be able to buy it.
Years passed.
Then came the time for our family to leave Brăila and move to Bucharest.
Perhaps the pharmacist realized that this really was my last opportunity. Finally, after all those years of visits, he agreed to sell me the fish.
His price was 75 lei.
I had saved 60.
For a boy my age, that was already a considerable amount of money. I offered him everything I had, but the pharmacist wouldn't sell the fish for less than 75 lei.
So I went to my mother.
As she so often did when something truly mattered to me, she gave me the difference.
At last, the goldfish was mine.
The Journey to Bucharest
Only a few weeks later, our family prepared to leave Brăila.
We couldn't take the entire animal world that Adi and I had created in the basement with us. His birds and most of my fish had to be given away.
But there were a few fish I was determined to take to Bucharest.
I still remember sitting in the cab of the truck carrying our furniture and belongings, holding a large jar containing my fish.
Among everything our family was taking from one city to another, that jar was one of the things that mattered most to me.
Before we left, the mother of some children from our building saw my beautiful goldfish and offered to buy it.
Her reasoning made perfect sense.
I was going to Bucharest. Surely, in such a large city, I would find other fish—perhaps even more beautiful ones.
Of course, I said no.
I remembered something my grandfather had taught me, a piece of wisdom I had understood even as a boy:
"Don't give up the bird you already hold in your hand for the one sitting free on the fence."
I had admired that goldfish for years. I had saved my money for it. My mother had helped me with the last 15 lei.
And now it was mine.
I wasn't about to exchange something I already loved for the possibility that something better might be waiting somewhere else.
So the fish came with me to Bucharest.
The Goldfish of Balta Albă
After we settled into our new life in Bucharest, my fascination with fish continued.
Some of the goldfish I had brought with me eventually ended up in an entirely different kind of aquarium—the lake at Balta Albă.
I released them there.
At the time, I had no idea whether they would survive. I simply watched them disappear into the water and wondered what would become of them.
About a year later, I saw children fishing at the lake.
Among the fish they were catching were goldfish.
I had no way of knowing whether those fish were descendants of the ones I had released. But naturally, I liked to believe they were.
Perhaps a tiny part of the aquatic world I had created in that basement in Brăila had survived the journey to Bucharest and established a new life in the waters of Balta Albă.
Naturally, We Decided to Write an Encyclopedia
By the time Adi and I were in high school, our interests had grown far beyond simply keeping fish and birds.
We had noticed that Romania didn't have a good, accessible book in Romanian about freshwater tropical fish.
Naturally, we decided that we should write one.
Not just any book, but an encyclopedia of tropical freshwater fish.
Our ambition, as Adi recently reminded me, was much greater than simply producing a guide to aquariums or describing a few popular species.
We wanted to create an encyclopedic work about freshwater tropical fish from nearly every important ecosystem in the world.
We imagined chapters about the fish of the Amazon jungle, the great lakes of Africa, and the rivers, swamps and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.
From one ecosystem to another, we wanted to explain not only the fish but also the environments in which they lived.
We had managed to obtain three foreign-language books about tropical fish: one in English, one in French and one in Italian.
These books were our guides and reference materials—starting points for a much larger project of our own.
We intended to combine the information, translate it into Romanian, organize it and add our own illustrations.
Adi recently reminded me of the philosophy behind our ambitious undertaking:
"If you copy from one book, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two books, perhaps it's a little less obvious. But if you combine three books into one, that's a masterpiece!"
I can't remember whether we actually said those exact words at the time, but they perfectly capture the spirit of our project.
We certainly weren't lacking ambition!
The joke was memorable, but the work we planned was much more ambitious than simply copying information.
We wanted to understand, organize, illustrate and explain an entire world.
Inspiration from the Antipa Museum
One of the things Adi remembers particularly well is our fascination with the dioramas at the Grigore Antipa National Museum of Natural History in Bucharest.
The museum's displays recreated natural habitats, placing animals in carefully constructed landscapes that helped visitors imagine the environments in which they lived.
We were fascinated by the idea of reproducing nature on a smaller scale.
We studied the dioramas, made sketches and collected illustrations connected with the ecosystems that interested us.
Inspired by what we had seen at the museum, Adi and I even came up with the idea of creating backgrounds for our aquariums.
We painted underwater scenes on sheets of paper and placed them against the back glass, hoping to give the aquariums more depth and make them look like real underwater worlds.
Some of them actually turned out quite convincing.
For a while, we probably thought we had invented something new.
Only later did we discover that similar aquarium backgrounds already existed in Western Europe and the United States.
As Adi jokingly reminded me more than fifty years later, apparently someone in the West had already "stolen" our brilliant idea before we even knew they had it!
Those experiments also influenced our plans for the encyclopedia.
We imagined beautiful illustrations showing not only the fish themselves but also the environments they inhabited.
In our imagination, the finished book would bring together science, geography, natural history, practical knowledge and illustrations.
It would explain where the fish came from, how they lived in nature and how they could be cared for and bred in aquariums.
It was an ambitious undertaking for two young brothers with limited resources, but we had plenty of imagination and enthusiasm.
A Project Bigger Than Two Teenagers
Unfortunately, writing an encyclopedia turned out to be considerably more difficult than dreaming about one.
We were still high-school students. We had classes, homework, friends, parties and all the distractions of ordinary teenage life.
And, of course, we still had our animals to look after.
My aquariums required constant attention, while Adi had his own responsibilities with his enormous collection of birds.
Our proposed encyclopedia required research, translation, scientific accuracy, artistic skill, organization and countless uninterrupted hours.
We had enthusiasm and imagination.
What we didn't yet have were the time, resources and experience needed to complete such an enormous undertaking.
Little by little, the project was postponed.
The three reference books remained, along with our notes, drawings, sketches and ambitious plans.
But the encyclopedia was never completed.
Eventually, life took us in different directions, and the project became one of those wonderful childhood dreams that never quite materialized.
At the time, we may have considered that a failure.
More than fifty years later, I see it differently.
Perhaps It Wasn't a Failure After All
My fascination with tropical fish never disappeared.
Years later, after Maria and I were married, we bred rare varieties of tropical fish and sold them at the Sunday market in Bucharest.
But that's another story.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Adi and I had actually finished our encyclopedia.
Would anyone have published it? Would other young Romanian aquarium enthusiasts have learned from it?
We'll never know.
But perhaps the most valuable part of the project wasn't the book itself.
It was the experience of working together, sharing our curiosity and imagining that two brothers from Brăila could create something that didn't yet exist in their own language.
We learned about fish, geography, biology, foreign languages and the enormous diversity of life on our planet.
We also learned that starting a masterpiece is considerably easier than finishing one.
The book itself was never completed, but the curiosity and knowledge behind it never disappeared.
It survived in the basement in Brăila, in Adi's walk-in aviary filled with budgerigars and in my twenty aquariums containing hundreds of fish.
It survived in a boy who walked into a pharmacy for a prescription and came back again and again because he had discovered an aquarium.
It survived in the 60 lei I saved over the years and in the additional 15 lei my mother gave me so I could finally buy the most beautiful goldfish I had ever seen.
It survived in a jar of fish traveling in the cab of a furniture truck from Brăila to Bucharest.
It survived in the goldfish released into Balta Albă and in the children I saw fishing there a year later.
It survived in the three foreign books spread across a table and in the sketches we made while studying the dioramas at the Antipa Museum.
And it survived in two high-school brothers who believed they could describe the freshwater fish of the entire tropical world.
More than half a century later, Adi and I are still sharing memories, exchanging ideas and working together on stories.
Now, thanks to Owl Spit, our unfinished encyclopedia has finally inspired a publication.
Not quite the masterpiece we originally envisioned, but perhaps something even more meaningful: a little piece of our childhood, preserved for our children, grandchildren and anyone else who might enjoy the adventures of two brothers who once believed they could write an encyclopedia.
After all, we had three books.
How difficult could it possibly have been?
The encyclopedia was never finished. But now, at last, it has become a story.
Enjoyed this story?
Help us keep our memories alive.