Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Last night I dreamed of Nadia, and then, without any connection, of Maurice Turbé—in two separate dreams without any digressions, both neatly wrapped up and with a perfect sequence of events. Clear, symmetrical dreams, almost uninteresting precisely because of their clarity.

  I keep thinking of my conversation with Dupront. I understand very well that, instead of remaining here or going to take up a university chair in Algiers, he is eager to be in France.

  In the end, it is possible that France—though so quickly and disastrously defeated and taken out of the war—will be a determining factor in the new Europe, not politically of course, but morally and, above all, socially. (Ah! how badly I write.) More than any other country, France will tomorrow have human material ready for any revolution. There are two million prisoners in German camps, and it is possible that these two million will one day decide the shape of everything.

  Tuesday, 18 February

  I forgot to note in time the dream I had on Sunday night, and now it is beginning to break up. I am in a provincial town with Şerban Cioculescu, Ionel Teodoreanu, and Pastorel. Vladimir Streinu is also there, though we come only to four if we count ourselves up. We go into a hotel. There is a clean provincial room. Şerban Cioculescu writes an epigram (one of the verses ends with the rhyme “Gyr”). Pastorel writes another epigram in reply. Meanwhile the hotel proprietor comes and says that the room costs five hundred lei a night, which strikes us as rather a lot. I realize that there are only three beds in the room and go into the corridor to see if there is another room. The hotel corridors are filled with whores bustling around half naked. When I return to the room, I find the Teodoreanu brothers, §erban and Streinu, dressed as cossacks and dancing a fiery kazachok in front of the proprietor. He seems well pleased and wants to hire them for his cabaret.

  I am ill again. The “anaphylactic shock,” which goes back to last September and originally seemed little more than a joke, has started to become intolerable. I have seen four doctors and find their limitations quite distressing. The same remedies, the same diet, the same language—and, in the end, the same profound ignorance.

  All the Malaxa enterprises have passed by royal decree into the hands of the state: some ceded “of his own accord,” others expropriated. The list of reasons given is crushing for Malaxa.

  As a spectator—a very distant one at that—I cannot help feeling a certain satisfaction, as at the end of a well-acted play, especially one that concludes with a brilliant coup de théâtre. Malaxa’s mask (a pale effigy, mysterious and unsmiling) served no purpose. Everything is sinking into one great morass. What an extraordinary novel could be written by someone with intimate knowledge of the events!

  It is not yet clear what and who lies behind the Bulgarian-Turkish agreement, signed yesterday in Ankara. Cui prodest?2 Is Turkey going back on its commitments to Britain? Is Bulgaria trying to stop the German action in Bulgaria? Is there a Russian hand somewhere behind the scenes? In any event, a German attack no longer appears imminent.

  Wednesday, 19 February

  In today’s Universul there are two letters (one to a girl, the other to his parents) from a reserve officer and Legionary named Scîntie Ion, who committed suicide yesterday. It is worth copying down both letters.

  “You know, Mioarâ, I took part in the so-called ‘revolt.’ I can give you an honest account of things. I think that I was the cause of at least half the deaths suffered by the army. So I deserve to die, and now I have done it. It’s not that I wanted a Legionary regime to be established (I didn’t think one would be capable of giving real leadership), but I never had any confidence in this army, whose only heroes have been created by others. I happily fired with the aim of destroying it. I wanted it to happen because I am constantly pursued by it.”

  The second letter:

  “I have never loved you. You have been so much like strangers to me. I never thought of you as my parents, only as a world in which I woke up and to which I felt attached as to something that might offer me shelter. That’s all—nothing else. Don’t give anyone alms on my account. If you hear I have died, don’t come and collect me. I don’t want to be taken to church or buried in a cemetery, because I have never believed in those things. Let them burn me and scatter my ashes to the wind.”

  That is how Scîntie Ion, the son of farm laborers from Copâceni-Ilfov, writes and pays with his life. It could have come from any page in Dostoevsky.

  I recently read Jocul de-a vacanţa again. The first two acts are excellent in terms of plot. Act Three is rather "cooked up," literary, "languissant," too low-key, almost lame. But it still reads nicely, even if the action of the play falls off after Act Two. I hesitate to write for the theatre. I’d have to have more of a will—and especially better health—to get down to work.

  Monday, 24 February

  Fabi has died.

  Thursday, 27 February

  I mourned a lot for him and still am mourning, but I’ll forget him—am already forgetting him. For a day or two I couldn’t think of anything else. I had him constantly before my eyes, heard him talking, saw him. Now other thoughts are returning to preoccupy me: the war, communiqués from the front, daily events both big and small. And among them, as through a cloth that suddenly tears, or through a fog that lifts, his dear face reappears.

  He was so handsome. I couldn’t help marveling each time I saw him. “How come you’re so handsome, Fabi? It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s a scandal.” He laughed in a childlike way, a little embarrassed, a little ironic. He had a strangely timid gesture of confused disbelief, as if to say: “Drop it. Let’s talk about something else.”

  The last time I saw him in good health, up and about, was at my place a couple of weeks ago. It tears me up to think that I let him go away so quickly. He had come for me to give him some books to read. Why didn’t I make him stay? Why didn’t we have a chat? Why did I get to know him so little? Why didn’t I draw him closer to me?

  The poor dear boy! It’s so hard for me to understand that I have lost him forever; so hard for me to see, instead of his bright sixteen-year-old image, with silky fair hair, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows blocking his forehead—to see instead of this a grave.

  I’ll wait for a fine morning to take him flowers.

  Wednesday, 5 March

  This morning, from Zeesen, a Schubert cello sonata (a melancholic, meditative Schubert). From London, a delightful little oboe quartet in F by Mozart. And yesterday evening, also from London, an unremarkable clarinet quintet by Brahms—dull, flat, uninspired. The other evening I chanced upon a harpsichord concerto from Vienna. As I listened, I wondered what it could be. The first phrase told me it was definitely eighteenth century. But by whom? I started a process of elimination: not Bach (too light), not Mozart (not light enough), not Handel, not Haydn. Maybe an Italian? Maybe one of the two or three lesser Bachs? This last assumption seemed the most plausible. So, Carl Philipp Emanuel or Johann Christian. And it was indeed Johann Christian Bach. Great personal satisfaction. Flattered by my skill in working it out.

  German troops have been in Bulgaria for three days. Filov3 signed the Tripartite Pact, and that same morning—a few hours before it was signed, in fact—the Germans crossed the Danube.

  On Monday evening there was a surprising Russian note of protest. But whether the Soviets are opposed to it or not, Europe is closing all its gates and windows. Greece will not be able to resist much longer, with German tanks already on its coast. As for Turkey, which has done nothing up to now, I think it is too late for it to defend its positions in the Balkans. The German game is always the same and always victorious: to break up possible alliances and associations, to paralyze one zone of operations after another, and then to occupy them as those still on their feet wait their turn in a resigned stupor. Yugoslavia will fall soon. Turkey will give up a little later. It is stupid and simplistic—yet inexorable.

  Thursday, 6 March

  I have been to see Mircea Eliade’s Iphigenia. (A Thursday matinee
, with prices pitched at ordinary people: forty lei the most expensive seat. It has been one of the National’s worst flops.) The play is much more interesting than I remember from when I read it. The performance is crude, however, and lacks style or dignity. Acting is terrible in Romania—and you never feel this more acutely than after a long time away. Hoarse voices, which scream and shout. False, declamatory gestures. I tried just keeping my mind on the text, and it did seem really beautiful. Only here and there were there annoying Legionary allusions.

  This evening, from Zeesen, Beethoven’s Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello in D, Op. 70/1. Combarieu says of it: “claire idylle qu'on a comparée à la modeste et jolie sonate en mi bémol. ”4

  Finished Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh’s whimsical novel. I read it without a dictionary, but ruthlessly skipping hundreds of unknown words. If I had more patience, and more scruples, I would make more progress in English.

  Sunday, 9 March

  A long, strange, complex dream, with numerous incidents and all kinds of forgotten people (I wonder where Uncle Hainerich came from, for example)—impossible to reconstruct it now. I still recall the basic schema, but terribly pared down. Prince Niculae is visiting my studio flat on Calea Victoriei. Poldy and Benu are up there with him (but they are not alone, because there is a kind of reception). I am downstairs in the street, coming from Piata Amzei. I see, or rather guess, that it is Niculae and Poldy at my window; they are probably waiting for me. I bump against a little contraption, a kind of child’s scooter, that a general has left by the side of the pavement. I go into a grocer’s shop (on the left pavement, near Dr. Ambrosi’s) and buy some cigarettes and matches, also having a little argument with the boy who sells them to me. I come away loaded with packets and with a bottle of cooking oil. I feel embarrassed that the people up there at the window will see me in this predicament. I pass Tata and Uncle Hainerich without stopping, and finally go into my building. Collected around a table in the downstairs lobby, a group of men seem to be commenting on my entrance. I go into the elevator, where I am not alone but with Celia. The elevator travels up for an unusually long time. I am surprised we are not there yet. I tell Celia something is probably wrong with the elevator. We look through the windows and observe that, in fact, we are flying among tall, unfamiliar houses. Then we suddenly fall to the ground and die. But our death does not end the dream. We continue to take part in all that happens, even though we know we are dead. I cannot remember any more.

  Marietta Rares stopped me in the street, though I was about to pass her with a simple greeting. I listened to her complaint: Haig is still under arrest, charged with all kinds of things; the statements made by actors at the National are crushing; he is accused of communism and of revolt. Marietta Sadova has been expelled from the Conservatory, Giza has disappeared, her house is constantly searched, etc., etc. I let her speak, without interrupting and without making any reply. What more can I do than shrug my shoulders? If they had won, I know they would have been ten times fiercer. And other people’s suffering would have been a matter of terrible indifference to them.

  I read by chance Jules Romains’s Le Dictateur. What childishness! What naiveté! Maybe in 1926 such things were not necessarily ridiculous. But today, after all the things we have seen . . .

  Friday, 14 March

  Yesterday, after several months of intermittent reading, I finished the first volume of the Pléiade edition of Balzac: La maison du Chat-qui-pelote, Le bal de Sceaux, Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, La bonne modeste mignon, Un début dans la vie, Albert Savarus, La vendetta, Une double famille, La paix du ménage, Madame Firmiani, Etude de femme. It will be hard for me to keep reading everything in chronological order. I don’t know when I’ll be able to read Balzac again systematically. (I’d need a year or so!) But so as not to stop just like that, I have decided to read his most characteristic novels (Eugenie Grandet, Père Goriot, Le lys dans la vallée, etc.) and to leave the rest for another time.

  According to Rosetti, Mircea has been appointed to the legation in Madrid. He won’t even be coming back to Romania; he’ll go straight from Lisbon to his new post.5 This way he’ll be spared having to take a stance. And later he may feel just as well in one camp as in the other.

  The spring war seems to have begun. Major bombing of London and Berlin on the same night.

  Roosevelt’s pro-British legislation has been in force for three days. There is muted annoyance in Berlin. “The Jews are to blame,” says the German correspondent of Universul. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a new anti-Semitic wave, as a riposte and a diversion.

  Always long, complex, uncanny dreams, almost every night. But I forget them before I can write them down.

  Sunday, 16 March

  Yesterday was a year since Nae Ionescu’s death. The requiem at Visarion Church was interesting for the people it brought together, but with sad memories of all the things it forced you to think about. Two months ago, before the “revolt,” Nae Ionescu’s political error, his pointless adventure, did not appear the great failure it does today. Old people from Cuvântul: Onicescu, Devechi, Voglberg, Alexandra Devechi, Pretorian. All have grown old. It felt more like their requiem.

  There were also a few conspicuously Legionary figures: recently grown beards, mysterious looks, young desperados with their hair sticking up. Somewhere at the front was Codreanu’s widow, to whom various people pushed through and paid their respects. What is Nae Ionescu doing among such types? What did he have in common with them?

  An amicable supper yesterday at Cantacuzino’s. I had a strange feeling of being in a different city, with books, paintings, and friendly people, instead of war, Germans, and Hitler.

  Roosevelt’s speech tonight was violently anti-Nazi, full of confidence, expectant of certain victory. Glued to our radios, we lived in a world which, though so far away, we consider our own. Then we go into the street and wake up in a city with German troops—their prisoners.

  I keep thinking of my plays but cannot make up my mind to start work on them. It is true that the one with the journalists should be left to clarify itself, to acquire sharper contours. The material is rich enough, but I can’t yet see the structure. Sometimes I think it should be more serious and more substantial than a mere Bucharest comedy of manners. Is not the way Nae came to Cuvântul and ended up controlling it a theatrical adventure? But the “Grodeck” play is fairly well defined, and I could—or anyway should—get down to work on it.

  Tuesday, 18 March

  The dismal text of the Rent Act was published in today’s papers. I don’t know why, but “legal” anti-Semitic measures seem to me more depressing, more humiliating, than beatings and window-breaking. Maybe this law will serve as a warning, will remind us of all the threats that are ever-present. Jews forget so quickly, with such a childish lack of awareness, that someone has to remind them from time to time what their destiny is.

  I have been sad all day. My heart is heavy not simply because I shall have to pay a rent beyond my means, or perhaps to give up my flat and hunt high and low for somewhere else to live, but because all this stupid, senseless cruelty has no aim other than to harm and mock for the pure pleasure of harming and mocking.

  Titulescu has died in Cannes. I did not know him, never heard him speak, and had neither a personal liking nor political admiration for him. I was more inclined to think of him as a slightly hysterical meddler (some images from Cuvântul have stuck in my mind). Neither through Maryse and Gheorghe,6 nor through Sacha Roman,7 nor through Aristide (who could have familiarized me with him) did I get at all close to him. All I remember is that late-September morning in 1930 when I saw him in Geneva presiding over the General Assembly of the League of Nations, in the Batiment electoral. It was so sunny and I was so young, coming from Annecy and on my way back to Paris. Everything ahead seemed open and possible to me. Quantum mutatus ab illo . . ,8

  Absurd dreams every night. When I wake up, my head still cloudy, I promise to make a note of them. Then I forget. L
ast night I dreamed I was a soldier in some zone of operations. I was with Picu Mironescu and Major Raceanu, who at first seemed to have become a lieutenant colonel. Every dream in which I am a soldier is a nightmare. The day before yesterday I had one that ended in a funny way. I was with Poldy in a streetcar in Brăila, going to see a statue of Take Ionescu. When the streetcar stopped, we turned indignantly to the driver or conductor and asked him to explain why the statue had disappeared. The driver was Dr. Dumitrescu-Brăila. He said that the statue was in fact there and told us to get off. We found a very beautiful marble statue (black, I think) and looked at it for a long time.

  The other night I dreamed again that I was in Brăila, with Nina. We were walking along Bulevardul Cuza toward the Danube. Near the Lutheran church there was a military prison in which Mircea was being held; all kinds of detainees were walking around the yard. I went into an office and telephoned a civil servant (his name was Constantinescu, but he also had another, somewhat ridiculous one, such as Policarp). As I left, they hoisted some flags, including four black flags as a sign that four men had been executed. But all the dreams are much more complex than I ever manage to note. The very act of writing them down simplifies them.

  A Handel evening, quite by chance. First, from Geneva, a few choruses and a long, very beautiful concerto for string orchestra. Then immediately afterward from London, some soprano arias and a trio for two violins and piano. All very beautiful, grave, and soothing.