I slaved away at my revision, listening to the city outside the window, overflowing into the autumnal plains. Once again I didn’t have the strength to laugh at myself for indulging in melancholia before such a major event. I would have liked to chase it all away somewhere, into the depths of my soul, into my native city, and to stride out heroically. And it occurred to me that I was a hero, for reading unbearable books during these first, gentle days of autumn.
In a room that was far too large and cold for us terror-stricken beings, we were allocated separate desks. Two masters we had never seen before hurriedly dictated the question to us. I calmed down as soon as I began to write. At the same time the following morning we had to translate a paragraph from the philosopher Seneca, and in the afternoon produce a French version. Then we had three days off. We went home full of joy, laughing in the streets, imagining we were already undergraduates. We treated Marcu to a chorus of anti-Semitic jokes. He replied sanctimoniously: ‘The Jew lives forever!’
We all got through to the oral exam.
Sheets of white, official paper were posted on the noticeboard, giving the dates for all the exams. We were promptly overcome by a fever of frantic reading, nervous page-flicking, memorizing, writing revision cards and underlining with red pencils. I didn’t recognize myself. I got up at dawn and pored over dry, daunting textbooks that I’d never opened in my whole time at the lycée. I worked with a mind and a spirit that were foreign to me, a determination that seemed to come instinctively. I could feel my strength fading, as if I was going to collapse and forget everything I had stored away.
And then all of a sudden I was calm, bored, filled with nausea. Devoid of emotion I waited for the oral exams.
...It’s now evening, it’s warm, and the air is filled with of the fragrance of rain. But this morning it was clear and cold. The leaves were falling, so were the ripe chestnuts, and the pavements were clean and violet-tinted. I left home without my cap or school bag. After Mama had kissed me, made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and lit a candle. I hadn’t finished my cup of black coffee. I hadn’t finished my croissant. Yet I wasn’t nervous. I strolled along, avoiding the boulevards with their trams and hurrying people.
I was one of the first to arrive in the main courtyard. A few of my fellow candidates, from other lycées, were flicking through books that they took from bulging satchels. I didn’t know anyone in my group. But Marcu and the others had promised to come and find out the result.
I wandered around, without thinking about anything, without wishing for anything. Every now and then I felt like shouting: ‘Let’s get on with it! Let’s get on with it!...’ But I calmed down and kept on pacing, without once looking at a book or revision card.
I remembered something that disconcerted me, a passing and seemingly mischievous remark made to me by a female medical student who was looking for my brother: ‘I wish I were still at the lycée...’
And I remembered, and was disconcerted by, other half-forgotten scenes and words. I paced up and down the courtyard, my mind far away from the exam and the group of examiners who were taking their time to assemble.
After an hour we were summoned into a dark corridor. I looked round at my fellow candidates: they were trembling, white-lipped, with dry throats and lined brows. I had turned pale and was fiddling with my glasses.
The classroom was far too brightly lit. I was both surprised and annoyed to see there were no chairs. The examiners had chairs, while we sat side by side on a long bench. I felt calm; too calm.
We started with Romanian language and literature.
‘What can you tell me about the evolution of suffixes?’
The boy stared blankly. His neighbour was trembling all over. I saw he was trying hard not to put up his hand. The first boy answered, but got confused. This delighted the third boy, who the examiner sadistically missed out, and moved on to me instead. I responded perhaps a little too quickly and sullenly.
‘Can you give any examples from the Byzantine lexicon?’
It was a stupid question, but I knew the answer. Myopic and irritated, sometimes wearing a presumptuous smile, the examiner naturally assumed I was a prize-winning peacock, and asked me some other questions, whose answers couldn’t be memorized. But he was hoist by his own petard, because I understood Eminescu, and interpreted the beginning of his ‘Letter I’ better than he had expected. He asked me about the Transylvanian historians, without suspecting that I had spent many a perfumed night reading Şincai, or knowing that I had recently found Şeineanu’s History of Romanian Philology in a second-hand bookshop.
‘Why did people persecute him so much?’ This is what the others were probably wondering. Perhaps he was a Jew.
‘What do you know about the origins of folk poetry?’
I told him what I knew. But he interrupted me.
‘Thank you. I’ve heard enough from you.’
This first success encouraged me. When it came to history, I answered whatever questions the examiner’s mistrustful curiosity required: such as Petru Muşat’s23 relationship with the Poles.
My neighbour wasn’t quite so lucky.
‘Where did Nicolae Mavrocordat enter Bucharest when he arrived from Moldova?’
‘?’
‘Which Romanian prince drowned in the Dâmboviţa?’
The last boy in the group knew the answer to this.
‘Vlad the Drowned.’
‘Do you know anything about him?’
‘He was Voivode of Muntenia24...’
‘Good.’
In geography I didn’t know the name of a flower that grows on the north-eastern slopes of the Apuseni Mountains. Nor did I know the tributaries of the Crişul Alb. I got a four. The boys either side of me knew the names of so many rivers and mountains...
In physics and chemistry, as well as French, I was able to answer everything. It annoyed me that the examiner – an uneducated man – was only interested in synonyms and homonyms, or a summary of El Cid.
‘Describe the evolution of the digestive system from echinoderms to man.’
I remembered my science lessons, the years spent in the physiology laboratories of the Casa Şcoalelor25, my collections of insects, and my volumes of Brehm, Perrier and Fabre. The answer came to me slowly, gradually.
The question fascinated me; I made concerted efforts of memory, logic and concentration. But the examiner wasn’t satisfied. He assumed that I just couldn’t remember.
‘If you start to learn something, you should finish it, like a proper know-all. As it is, I can only see evidence of average perseverance, for which you get a five.’
I went bright red. I was humiliated, furious, and upset. I would have liked to say: ‘What?’ I would have liked to challenge him – this supercilious, uneducated examiner whose knowledge had been acquired from elementary textbooks – to a debate about the philosophy of biology. But there was nothing I could do.
Bitterly, I swallowed my pride. But it was over.
I left the building without any feelings of delight, without running down the street shouting like I had promised myself. I told my friends how furious I was with the natural sciences examiner. They said I was naïve. And that five was a good mark.
I jotted down some figures on a wall and worked out the average. Come what may I’ll get a six. I’m virtually certain to pass. But I don’t feel the least bit glad, and that hurts; it hurts so much. Which is why I’m writing in my notebook: so I won’t forget the pain I felt on the day of the exam.
In my novel, if I ever write it, I’ll include all the foolishness, all the absurdity of the Baccalaureate. Using many examples I’ll show that only the lucky ones pass, the favoured ones, the imbeciles. I’ve never seen the list of questions that everyone talks about. If they had asked me about insects in Natural Science, Romanticism in French, and the geological origins of mountains in Geogra
phy, I would have got the highest marks. If they had asked me anything else, I might have got an ‘Unsatisfactory’ in everything. So I’m lucky, but also unlucky. If I pass I’ll just be average, by pure chance. My shortcomings weren’t discovered and my qualities weren’t rewarded. How distressing...
And if I don’t pass?...
It has just started to rain: heavy, cold, monotonous.
Is it autumn outside, or is it autumn in my attic?
* * *
23Petru Muşat: Petru I, Voivode of Moldova from 1367-1368.
24Muntenia: a former Romanian feudal state, then a principality, and after that one of the united Romanian Principalities. It is now the Romanian province of Wallachia.
25Casa Şcoalelor: the National School and Public Libraries Board.
Finale
I did it! I did it!
I’m the only one from our lycée to pass. It upsets me that Marcu didn’t pass. We won’t be friends anymore. What connected us was our minds, not our souls. Once we’re apart, we might just forget about each other...
*
Anxiously, I found my name on the list. Then once again I walked through the large courtyard with its plane trees, as I had on the days of the exam. All of a sudden I was overcome by a powerful urge to see the lycée where I had spent eight years of my life. The masters and the pupils all asked me about the Baccalaureate. I gave brief answers. It made me sad to see classrooms where there would soon be no familiar faces. And it made me sad to see the school porter, and the little organ hidden under the stairs, and the shelves full of books that I’d read so many times...
My friends all kissed me...
It was now the time of gifts.
Who knows what life will bring during these days of autumn, when I feel so different, so strange, always on the point of crying, running, laughing?... I don’t want to think about university. This is still an adolescent’s notebook. I want to write a few more pages, and then finish it once and for all.
Who can really understand the devastating sadness I feel when I say finish it once and for all? a life is coming to an end. One day I’ll look through this notebook, or perhaps I won’t, and then – just like now – I’ll be alone.
I find it hard to write. I get distracted by new pleasures, new ideas: university... and yet I’m still attached to my adolescence, to the novel I haven’t written.
I haven’t written it because I couldn’t find a novel in myself or in other people. We were all just vague outlines, sentimental and mediocre. Sometimes ridiculous, sometimes heroic. How could I find a conflict in the world, one that would inspire a novel?
I haven’t written it, and life weighs heavily on me, the life of the adolescent that would be described in my novel.
I don’t understand anything that’s going on around me at the moment. This novel obsesses me, I’m tormented by all the things that have to be said. Yet I don’t know how to write it, I’m unable to write it.
*
The sun has come out again.
The sun has gone behind cloud.
Today I wandered through fields that smelt of autumn, just like I used to on childhood afternoons. I saw so many things that I haven’t seen for a long time. And, standing next to a tree, I cried like an adolescent when I noticed a patch of blue sky. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t wonder why.
Then I came home.
From now on I’ll have to work hard, without rest, never sparing myself or my youth. Yet I can’t work. I hit myself, I bite my lip, but I just can’t work...
*
Autumn, blood-red autumn, is coming to an end.
My attic is the same as ever: quiet, lonely, sad. I’m going to write The Novel of the Short-Sighted Adolescent. But I’ll write it as if I’m writing the author’s Diary. My book won’t be a novel, but a collection of comments, notes, sketches for a novel. It’s the only way of capturing reality, both natural and dramatic at once.
*
It’s raining, it’s still raining.
When you’re in an attic, you always love the rain. I want to finish the Diary today, on this autumn day. I want to finish it because I’m burning to begin my novel now. I’ve already drafted the first few chapters.
I shall write: ‘As I was all alone I decided to begin writing The Novel of the Short-Sighted Adolescent this very day...’
It’s raining in the garden, and that makes me happy.
The Author
Mircea Eliade was born in 1907 in Bucharest, the son of an army officer. He lived in India from 1928 till 1932, after which he obtained a doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on yoga, and taught at the University of Bucharest for seven years. During the war he was a cultural attaché in London and Lisbon, and from 1945 taught at the École des haut études in Paris and several other European universities. In 1957 he took up the chair of history of religion at the University of Chicago, a post that he held until his death in 1986. Fluent in eight languages, his extensive body of work includes studies of religion and the religious experience that remain influential, such as The Sacred and the Profane, and numerous works of literature, including The Forbidden Forest, Bengal Nights and Youth without Youth, both of which were adapted for the screen.
The Translator
Christopher Moncrieff translates widely from French, German and Romanian literature. After military service in Europe, the Near East and the USA during the Cold War he produced large-scale son et lumière shows in Germany, France and Los Angeles before beginning to write and translate. He read Theology at Oxford and has qualifications in design and on the military staff. A frequent traveller in Central and Eastern Europe, he speaks a number of the languages of the region. He also works for autism organisations and is a neurodiversity activist.
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