Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

Friday, 21 March

  An evening of music such as I have not had for a long time. From Munich, played by the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg, the C major piano concerto by Mozart, and at the end an andantino from the “Paris” symphony in G major. Then I switched straight to London (the Home Service) for another Mozart concert: first a piano concerto, then the minuet from the Kleine nachtmusik (in English: the Little Evening Serenade). Also from London, as I am writing this note, a concert of Spanish music: small orchestral pieces by Granados, Albeniz, Falla.

  Sunday, 23 March

  I’ll probably be forced to leave my flat. My landlords’ demands frighten me, and I dare not take on such major obligations when my whole situation (is it a “situation”?—the word seems a mockery) is up in the air.

  I am well aware that to move from here would mean a terrible upheaval in my whole way of life, but I shall just have to resign myself to it. I shouldn’t forget that we are at war.

  “I shouldn’t forget”—that’s a manner of speaking. Could I possibly forget? I feel it in all my thoughts, in every step I take, in every minute of the day. Sometimes it is a sharp, physical pain, a kind of nervous choking. And so the days pass, one after another, slowly, heavily. . .

  I saw Titu Devechi yesterday morning. He looks thinner and more tired, with more grey hairs. He has been ill. Political events don’t seem to have affected him too badly: he is always skeptical, humorous, pleasant. I think the war has aged me much more. As I listened to him speak, explaining and offering solutions, I felt like laughing at the naiveté of what he said— as if he were a young boy whom you can’t be bothered to contradict. All you want to say to him is: “You’ll grow up, then you’ll see. . . .”

  But it was nice being with Devechi. Last autumn he thought a German victory absolutely certain; now he is beginning to have doubts. “If they don’t win by November, they never will.”

  Yesterday Yugoslavia appeared to have been defeated—offered some formal concessions and marks of respect, but defeated nevertheless. They were due to sign the Tripartite Pact yesterday, or at the latest today. But now things seem to have been put off again, no more than “put off,” I think. There is an attempt at last-minute resistance. Government resignations, protest meetings, memoranda, telegrams, demonstrations.

  But they’ll sign all the same.

  It’s a strange feeling to go into a large, brightly lit restaurant with lots of people and music. It seems like an unreal world, a theatre setting, lying altogether outside our lives. I went to the Cina with the Zissus. (I swear it’s the last time I’ll go out with them. From now on I’ll avoid them as much as possible. She is the perfect example of a Jewish parvenue. How dear to me, by contrast, are becoming the careworn mothers of Văcăreşti and Dudeşti; how beloved yet again is Mama, my mother, so simple and so good.)

  I left the Cina feeling dazed, having eaten all the while with pangs of conscience. I was ashamed. I felt guilty.

  That Zissu is impossible to understand: a theorist of full-blown Jewish nationalism who goes out every evening to a cinema or restaurant, two months after a pogrom.

  Wednesday, 26 March

  Yesterday Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact in Vienna. The hesitations served no purpose, and regrets will not make up for anything. The game is always played in the same way Yesterday afternoon I listened on the radio to the ceremony at which the pact was signed. Tvetkovič gave a speech in Serbian, the only note (sentimental though it was) of “independence.” It will be Turkey’s turn next. But first Greece will have to be occupied by German troops (which is very likely to happen). The Turks, who now seem disposed to resist (and who, to this end, have safeguarded their rear through the nonaggression declaration with the Russians that was published yesterday), may nevertheless surrender when German troops are available to be released from the Greek front. It is the same comedy, in an endless number of identical acts.

  Later, much later, a study may be written about a strange phenomenon of these times: namely, the fact that words are losing their meaning, becoming weightless and devoid of content. Their speakers do not believe them, while their hearers do not understand them. If you analyzed word by word, grammatically, syntactically, and semantically, the declarations to be found almost daily in the newspapers, and if you opposed these with the facts to which they refer, you would see that there is an absolute split between word and reality. It is not the first time that such thoughts (written here badly) have occurred to me, but the occasion today was a sentence in a speech that the General made yesterday. “Those who, in their relations with defenseless people, have revived in today’s world the terror and barbaric savagery of the past will themselves be branded by contemporaries and punished by history as they deserve.”

  Dinner yesterday with Vişoianu, Gina Strunga, and Ghitâ Ionescu (who vanished in the Legionary period, when I think he tried to “adapt,” and who has now calmly reappeared comme si de rien n'était). Vivi said some astounding things about Gheorghe and Maryse Nenişor, who appear to have been left as Titulescu’s sole inheritors after some devilish scheming on Gheorghe’s part. Poor devilish Gheorghe!

  Leni was moving on Sunday evening when she celebrated at home a year since her last premiere. “I’ll die if I don’t get a part this autumn. I can’t take it any more.” She has learned to play the accordion, and when she wanted to show us what she knows, she had anxious tears as at a real premiere.

  More moving, however, was Eugen Ionescu, who again came to see me yesterday morning. He was desperate, hunted, obsessed, unable to bear the thought that he may be barred from working in education. A healthy man can go mad if he suddenly learns that he has leprosy. Eugen Ionescu is learning that not even the name “Ionescu,” nor an indisputably Romanian father, nor the fact that he was born a Christian—nothing at all can hide the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. The rest of us have long since grown used to this dear old leprosy, so much so that we feel resignation and sometimes a kind of sad, disconsolate pride.

  I have been reading Shelley the last few days. It is a great pleasure.

  Thursday, 27 March

  A bewildering coup d’état in Yugoslavia. King Peter takes power at seventeen years of age. The regent resigns his office. Prince Paul flees abroad. The head of the general staff forms a new government, which includes Macek and the three Serb ministers who did not resign in protest at the Tripartite Pact. Tvetcovič and Činčar Marcovič are under arrest. Stupor and then frenzy! Here in Bucharest you could feel in the streets a nervous excitement, as on decisive, momentous days. What must it be like in Belgrade! Overnight, in less than twelve hours, the whole situation in the Balkans has been turned upside down—perhaps not only in the Balkans. I spent the day fretting with impatience, curiosity, hope, and expectation. I am tired of excessive surprises!

  Keren was occupied today by the British, after a three-week siege. No doubt the rest of Eritrea will now fall much more easily, almost automatically.

  Harar, in Abyssinia, also fell today. The news arrived late, in the evening, as if to crown a day so rich in events.

  Nor was that the last news of the day. At 11:30, just now, Radio Bucharest announced that Jewish real estate has been expropriated. Houses taken from Jews will be given to teachers, officers, magistrates, and so on. What worries me is not the measure in itself (because it is unimportant in the only perspective that counts: the war), but the fact that the government, in adopting such a serious anti-Semitic measure, has jumped over a whole series of anti-Semitic blows that it might have dealt out as graduated diversions. What can follow after such an expropriation? Maybe the establishment of a ghetto. And then? All that will be left is a pogrom.

  As before, only more so than ever, I keep telling myself that the only thing to do is to be patient, to wait and endure. It’s a question of time. If you are alive, if you stay alive, all the rest will pass.

  Friday, 28 March

  I am distraught by what happened last night, and anxious about what will happen now
. Previously—even under the Legionaries—anti-Semitism was bestial but outside the law. That, in a way, was how it was excused. And at any moment, however formally, you could appeal to the authority of the state; a minimum of legality was preserved in official actions. Now, however, even that precarious sense of official justice has gone. All the morning papers give banner headlines to the expropriation of the Jews. The rest of the news (the war, the victories in Africa, the coup in Belgrade) is pushed to the back. What is important in Romania today, on Friday, 28 March 1941, is that the Jews have had their homes taken away from them. The rest has no significance!

  This morning once again, though more acutely and painfully than ever, I felt as I spoke to my school pupils about “literature,”9 even Romanian literature, that we are clinging pointlessly and absurdly to things which no longer have any meaning or reality for us. In the seventh grade the boys were doing test papers, and I got them to write about sàmanâtorism.1 But as I watched them, bent (so seriously!) over their exercise books, I had a feeling of fraternal pity for their labors, for their wasted time, for the daily trials of their youth. So many of these boys’ parents had been ruined overnight, thrown into the street by a mere decree—and now they were here writing about “problems of Romanian literature.” How grotesque!

  Camil Petrescu complains that he probably won’t get even one of the houses taken from Jews.

  “They never give me anything,” he said, disheartened.

  “Well, this time,” I replied, “even if they gave you something, I’m sure you wouldn’t take it!”

  “Not take it? Why shouldn’t I?”

  He spoke so calmly that I could not fail to understand what he was saying. Not only did he see no reason not to take possession of a house that was not his and had been taken from a Jew; he actually expected to be given such a house, and would be disappointed if this did not happen.

  Marietta Sadova has been interned at Tirgu-Jiu for several days. She seems to have been agitating recently as at the height of the revolt. I don’t know why, but there seems something comical in her political adventures.

  In Marseilles today, ten thousand French people demonstrated for Yugoslavia. The police had a hard time dispersing them. Secretly, silently, the whole of Europe is celebrating. In Rome and Berlin there is a confused silence. The coup in Belgrade has upset the whole program of Matsuoka’s visit.2 I think the Germans will try to claim a bloody price for the unexpected blow they have received.

  From Geneva this evening, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. An hour of calm.

  Saturday, 29 March

  A brief conversation with A.B. as we drove home by car. He reminded me (most delicately) that our agreement had been valid for six months and had therefore now expired. From the first of April, everything will be up in the air. Suddenly, as in a fit of choking, I feel again all the fear of a poor and wretched life.

  Tuesday, 1 April

  There was a great sea battle in the Mediterranean, 150 miles south of Crete, during the night of Friday and Saturday. A great, very great victory for the British. The Italians have definitely lost three 10,000-ton cruisers and two destroyers, each between 15,000 and 18,000 tons [sic]. A large 35,000-ton battleship was so badly mauled that it is not known whether it managed to reach the safety of a port. Another cruiser and another destroyer are also thought to have been lost. A thousand Italian and German officers and sailors were fished out by the British and put ashore in Greece. Hundreds more Italians, perhaps thousands, remain battling the waves in the region of the action. The British lost no more than two airplanes, and all their ships have returned to Alexandria without a scratch. Admiral Cunningham issued the briefest possible order of the day: “Well done!” In Eritrea the British keep advancing toward Asmara and are already halfway from Keren. In Abyssinia they have occupied Dire Dawa and are now heading, from several directions at once, toward Addis Ababa.

  While the Italians are losing on all fronts, the Germans are probably preparing an offensive behind their great cloak of silence. The mystery is the same as last spring, with some stunning blow possible at any moment. But where? Very probably, in fact certainly, in Yugoslavia. The game there is starting to become clearer. Attempts are being made to provoke a Croat diversion, which might serve—in an eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia—the same role that the Slovaks played in the destruction of Czechoslovakia. But even if it does not take that form, the Germans are bound to strike in one way or another. It is the first of April. We turn the page of the calendar with mixed feelings: on the one hand, relief that a month of this spring has passed; on the other hand, anxiety that we are still in the middle of spring and that things cannot mark time much longer.

  Madeleine Andronescu paid me an unexpected visit yesterday, accompanied by Titel. What a real pleasure to discover that some people still think of you, even when nothing—not even a past friendship—obliges them to do so.

  Wednesday, 2 April

  Asmara surrendered yesterday, and it is unlikely that Massawa will hold out. Resistance is no longer possible in Eritrea.

  Until yesterday, the Bucharest papers showed a quite undisciplined sympathy for the new regime in Yugoslavia. A photograph of King Peter was printed alongside commentaries full of praise, and the headlines announced “perfect order in Yugoslavia.” Today all the papers speak of “the atrocities in Belgrade,” “the inevitable disaster,” “Serbian provocations.” The Germans are preparing to attack in the familiar manner. First there will be a propaganda barrage about the martyred German population (as in the Sudetenland and in Poland), then—probably—a border incident, and finally an invasion. They can’t even be bothered to think up something new.

  I have the feeling that there are fewer German troops in Bucharest. Rapid troop movements seem to be taking place in the direction of the Yugoslav frontiers. It could be that the attack will come simultaneously from Bulgaria, Romania, and Germany.

  I met Lilly Popovici this morning on Calea VIctoriei. I think she was more embarrassed than pleased to see me. She claims that Marietta was arrested after being denounced by Marioara Voiculescu. I accompanied her as far as the Café Nestor. A German officer passed alongside us.

  “I can’t stand them,” Lilly said. “I hate them. I feel ashamed when I think of the Serbs and the Greeks—ashamed of ourselves.”

  I listened to her without agreeing or disagreeing. I have a vague sense that when the Legion was still going strong, she must have been less intransigent. The role of a Legionary Clytemnestra—which she acted in Mircea’s play—suits her very well.

  Today I thought of a three-act political comedy set in Bucharest during the revolution of 1848. A lot of topical things could be said like that, under an amusing period camouflage.

  Why does everyone I meet seem startled at how bad I look? “You’ve gotten thinner! You’ve aged!”—they keep telling me. And it doesn’t give me any pleasure at all.

  As the 23 rd of April draws near, the thought that I shall have to leave my flat becomes more unbearable. I’d have to find 100,000 lei to keep it until autumn. But how could I? From where?

  Thursday, 3 April

  The “political comedy” of which I was thinking yesterday has become less vague. As I walked in the street this evening, I enjoyed developing a clearer idea of things. The play might be called “Freedom.” It would have several acts, and would in any event be divided into a number of tableaux: one in Bucharest, in the editorial offices of a revolutionary paper; another in the French consulate; another—after the repression— on a country estate where the play’s hero takes refuge. In order to write the play I would have to study newspapers from the period, a history of the movement, various documents and proclamations, and so on. I don’t think of it as being too serious. A light comedy of politics and love.

  The Italians have retaken Benghazi! I didn’t think such a turnaround was possible. It will sober me up after the euphoria of recent events. So, the war will last a lot longer.

  Friday, 4 April
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br />   Act One of Freedom (if I ever write it) will not take place, as I thought yesterday, in the editorial offices of a newspaper. That would have two drawbacks: 1) the problem of having an “editorial office” in 1848 Bucharest (I don’t even know if there was such a thing); and 2) the weakening through repetition of the “press comedy” idea, which I have been considering for some time and do not want to abandon. It may be better to have the first act set in a public administration office; that would give me an opportunity to present the change of regime at the very moment of the seizure of power.

  I wrote the above note from a kind of copyist’s sense of obligation. This morning I would have written it with joy. I still liked the idea of the play, which was vividly present to me. But now it is evening and, after this long day (another and another day—all of them long), I feel tired, jaded, defeated by all that has happened, all that awaits us, all that I no longer have the nerves to endure, conceal, cover in silence. On such evenings the thought of my ever writing literature again seems absurd. I feel terribly old and worn out.

  Saturday, 5 April

  The British retreat from Benghazi gave me a sleepless night. I had thought that that front was sewn up. The blow seemed so serious not in itself, as a loss of territory, but for what it signified. It was possible for an offensive force to be re-created at Tripoli, for fresh troops and materiel to be brought in, for a counterattack to be prepared—and the British, with their notoriously bad intelligence, knew nothing about it. Absolutely nothing, so that they could even move all their troops to Eritrea or perhaps Greece, leaving Cyrenaica undefended. Now it is possible that the whole of Cyrenaica will again fall into the hands of the Italians, with the Germans doubling up for good measure. A fight to recapture it will have to be waged once more—who knows when?—after the complete occupation of Eritrea and Abyssinia, but it remains to be seen whether, in the meantime, the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia will leave the British with enough troops to send to Libya. I have done all this reasoning today. Yesterday, and even more the day before, I was incapable of any rational analysis. The news, coming so unexpectedly, had depressed me too much!