Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  3. “Our Father, Our King”—the first words of the Hebrew litany for the days of repentance.

  4. Hitler took power on 31 January 1933, and Antonescu on 6, not 8, September 1940.

  5. "Puts on a brave face in adversity."

  6. "You know, I have always been for the British."

  7. In English in the original.

  8. "I was hungry, terribly hungry."

  9. The reference is to the roundup of Jews in France.

  1. The premiere of Ursa Mare, renamed Steaua fără nume, took place on 1 March 1944.

  2. shit

  1944

  Saturday, 8 April 1944

  Four days after the bombing, the city is still in the grip of madness. The alarm of the first moments (no one quite knew what was happening, no one could believe it. . .) has turned into panic. Everyone is fleeing, or wants to flee. The streets are full of trucks and carts carrying all kinds of jumble, as if everyone were moving house in one vast tragicomedy.

  Today a few streetcars started to run here and there, but most of the lines are still blocked. Half the city is without electricity. There is no water supply. The radiators do not work. Flocks of women and children come with buckets from various wells and fountains, where long queues have formed.

  In an hour (and I don’t think the actual bombing lasted more than an hour), a city with a million inhabitants was paralyzed in its most vital functions.

  The number of dead is not known. The most contradictory figures are bandied about. A few hundred? A few thousand? The day before yesterday Rosetti said 4,200—but that isn’t certain either.

  Yesterday afternoon I went to the Grivita district. From the railway station to Bulevardul Basarab, not a single house was untouched. It is a harrowing sight. Dead bodies were still being dug up, and groans could still be heard beneath the ruins. On one street corner a group of three women, pulling their hair and tearing their clothes, let out piercing wails over a carbonized corpse that had just been taken from the debris. It had rained a little in the morning, and a smell of mud, soot, and burnt wood floated over the whole neighborhood.

  It was an appalling, nightmarish vision. Being unable to pass beyond Basarab, I returned home with a feeling of revulsion, horror, and impotence.

  Five years ago, when I was doing military service at Mogoşoaia, I passed every morning and evening through that station district. I avidly read the morning paper on the way out, and the evening paper on the way back, anxiously following the press dispatches. I knew that war was pressing down upon us. I knew that our fate was at stake in those dispatches, as we set off for the training fields, and the fate too of the shopkeepers noisily opening their shutters, and of all the people hurrying on foot to the market, the station, or the railway yards. But no one imagined the grim scene that would appear on a chilly spring day five years later, when the smoke of fire and massacre would hang over ruined houses.

  And none of us could do anything about it, either then or now.

  It is strange that while the bombing was going on, I did not at all feel that it was serious. At first I thought it was an exercise (there had been one three hours earlier). And when the thundering sounds began, I thought it was the ack-ack. There were a couple of more powerful convulsions, but they did not seem to come from bombs.

  When I went into the yard, I saw many sheets of colored paper floating about (propaganda material, probably), and I thought that that was all the aircraft had dropped. The first rumors from town (a bomb on Brezoianu, another on Strada Carol) sounded like concoctions.

  When I went toward the center, a strange nervous agitation animated the streets—more like curiosity than terror. Only later did we realize the scale of the destruction.

  Leni’s house is completely wrecked. I went there the day before yesterday to help her rummage for anything that could be saved from the rubble.1

  Mary, the young manicurist who used to come every Friday morning, was killed. She was so young, so sweet, so honest—a shopgirl, but as graceful as a child, as sensible as a young lady at a boarding school.

  When, among the thousands of anonymous dead, you come across a face you know, a smile you have seen before, death becomes terribly concrete.

  Aristide, Rosetti, Camil, and Vi§oianu have fled the city, each to where he was able. No one is left except us, for whom any thought of leaving is ruled out.

  The consternation caused by Tuesday’s bombing will gradually pass, but anxiety about a future one will remain. When will it come? What will it be like? In which district? Will we escape? Who will escape?

  Nor is it just a question of physical survival. There is also the misery that follows, and all the dangers involved in a general atmosphere of despair, fury, and hatred.

  For the moment there are no signs of an anti-Semitic crisis. But one is possible at any time.

  Sunday, 16 April

  The second bombing came yesterday morning, between twelve and one. It struck me as much worse than the previous one. Fortunately I was at home and could calm Mama a little; she had a fit of weeping. At least once, the noise of the explosion was so loud that I felt everything was happening in our neighborhood. The aircraft always seemed to be passing over our heads. We waited tensely: now . . . now . . . now

  The city center looks appalling. Bulevardul Elisabeta from Brezoianu to Rosetti, and Calea Victoriei from the post office to Regală, are blocked. Most of the bombs fell here and in nearby streets. What were they aiming at? I don’t know. Maybe the telephone exchange. But in that case the bombing was very inaccurate. The block containing Cartea românească was destroyed; the University and the School of Architecture set on fire; many other buildings hit. Yesterday evening the flames could be seen from a long way off. I don’t know if there were casualties and, if so, how many.

  I keep thinking of Poldy. When we hear from him, everything will be easier to bear. But until then, all kinds of thoughts will beset me.

  Spring! Full of anxieties, full of uncertainties. Somewhere, far away, muted hopes.

  I am too alone. Old, sad, and alone.

  But I forbid myself to sink into a crisis of personal despair. I have no right. Il faut tenir le coup.2

  I am reading Balzac, the only thing of which I feel capable at present. I couldn’t work. I have reread with disgust one of my plays (“Alexander the Great”). I didn’t realize it was quite that bad. Inexorable.

  I have reread with great interest Illusions perdues (Les deux poètes, Un grand homme de province à Paris, Les Souffrances de Vinventeur). Yesterday and today, Ferragus. I have now begun La Duchesse de Langeais.

  Tuesday, 18 April

  This morning’s air-raid warning caught me at the liceu. As soon as the “pre-alarm” sounded, I went into the street and started running home. The main square had a cinematic aspect: a scene of crowd panic, with hundreds of people running aimlessly like drunken ants.

  I stopped for a moment at the corner of Strada 11 Junie, just as the siren was sounding. I went into a trench but soon came out again. What was the point? I kept heading for home, to be with Mama as quickly as possible. The streets had emptied, but there were still a few people passing by. No one forced us to move on. The terrible silence of a deserted city.

  On Sunday morning they were over Brasov and Turnu Severin. And today?

  No news from Poldy. I wait anxiously.

  Still reading Balzac. Yesterday I finished La Duchesse de Langeais. (It’s not the masterpiece that Antoine Bibescu suggested.) I know immeasurably better things in Balzac, even among the minor works. La vieille fille, for instance—not to speak of Pierrette.)

  I read today La fille aux yeux d’or.

  Yesterday I happened to open a volume of Baudelaire. I was struck by the affinity between his Paris and a certain image of Paris in Balzac: a dirty, fetid, gloomy city, a (scarcely theatrical) mixture of splendor and misery, a Paris I used to consider distinctively Baudelairean and that I am now getting to know better and better in Balzac.

  As soo
n as I hear good news from Poldy, I’ll try to work. A play (“Freedom”) or even the novel.

  Saturday, 22 April

  Yesterday morning, at the fateful hour of twelve, there was another air raid—the third. I still don’t know which part of town was hit. There’s nothing in the center. It must have been in the outskirts—Pipera, Ford, Malaxa. Anyway, this time we don’t hear any echoes of a great disaster.

  This morning at eleven a rumor started, from somewhere, that there was an alert. The shops closed and people rushed home.

  In the evening there has been the growing impression of a deserted city. A vague anxiety is floating in the air. You feel as if you are suffocating.

  Balzac, still Balzac. I have read Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen, and begun Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, where the rediscovery of Vautrin heightens the curious interest.

  Tuesday, 25 April

  The bombing yesterday morning was the longest and probably the worst up to now. There was no trace of it in the center, at least, where everything—water, electricity, streetcars—seemed to be working normally. But they say the railway line was blown up at the Chitila marshaling yard, and that the Filantropa district was badly hit. Several young Jews from a civil defense detachment died in a trench shelter. Things also seem to have been very serious at Ploiesti.

  I had lunch with Ginel Bălan,3 who told me of a “historic” conversation he had a year ago with Mircea Vulcănescu. The finance minister suggested to Bălan that he should assume the financial management of Transnistria, a kind of vice governorship. When Bâlan rejected the offer, Vulcănescu took him aside and tried to change his mind: “This is a unique opportunity for our imperial ambitions. Transnistria means the first experience of colonization in Romanian history. By planting forests in the whole of Transnistria, we’ll be able to stop the icy north wind ever blowing on us again.”

  Sunday, 30 April

  It has been raining for three days or so. It’s a kind of anti-aircraft defense: we feel more sheltered beneath it. Anyway, there haven’t been any more alerts.

  No recent news from Poldy. A letter reached us today—but dated the 8th of March.

  Finished volume five of the Pléiade Balzac. Begun volume six.

  Nothing new at the fronts.

  Thursday, 4 May

  Last night there was bombing between one and two—the first night raid.

  I didn’t go into town at all today, and I don’t know what happened. The bombing seems to have been more or less random, without precise targets. (Strada Izvor, Bulevardul Mărăşeşti, Strada Mecet—why those?) Renée Presianu was killed along with her entire family. The poor girl!

  I suddenly feel in greater danger than ever. Organized bombing with reasonably precise targets is something against which you feel you can protect yourself. But no precautions are of any use against blind chance.

  Sunday, 7 May

  The whole city smells of lilies and smoke. Spring burst out magnificently after a week of rain, but thick clouds of smoke hang above the city from the bombing of last night and this morning. In sixty hours there have been five alerts and two bombing raids. We are having one disaster after another. On Friday, one alert in the morning and another in the evening. The same on Saturday. This evening we are waiting to see what will happen.

  Last night, stray bombs also fell on our part of town—Sfîntii Apostoli, Bateriilor—but the real destruction was a long way off, around the station, around Buzeşti, around Bonaparte and $tefan cel Mare. Apparently, whole streets are ablaze there.

  Water, electricity, and telephones are out of order in at least half the city. (We still have water and electricity.) The streetcar service has again been suspended. I went into town for a while, but the main streets were deserted.

  I would like to know that there is some purpose behind all this, that it is leading somewhere, that the suffering is not completely pointless.

  Monday, 8 May

  Bombing last night for the third time in twenty-four hours—brief but powerful. For a few hours it seemed that the bomb we heard falling was for us: a long high-pitched whistling, as of a rocket at a fireworks display, heralded the strike. We closed our eyes—and waited.

  Today it seemed like Sunday in town: closed shops, empty streets, people waiting around the shelters.

  It is one in the morning. Maybe they won’t come tonight. I’d like to sleep. I’m beginning to feel exasperated, to think of leaving Bucharest. The shelter does not inspire any confidence; people died last night in almost every part of town.

  Wednesday, 10 May

  Thousands of people started leaving town at daybreak today. For two days the rumor had been spreading by word of mouth that, according to Radio London, Bucharest would be destroyed on the ioth of May It was an idiotic idea, which people believed with superstitious terror.

  But it has been peaceful—at least so far, as I write these lines after midnight.

  Thursday, 11 May

  Scarcely had I written the previous lines when the air-raid warning started. We heard no explosions from anywhere, but we were kept in the shelter until the “all clear” sounded at two. I cannot take this sinister game as calmly as I did at first. I have nervous shudders that I scarcely manage to control.

  Am I too about to fall into panic? I have no right. I must hold on— at least for Mama, if for no one else.

  Vague thoughts about leaving town (everyone is leaving. ..) have troubled me for the last couple of days.

  Today I saw Romulus Dianu4 (how naive I am!) and asked him to put in a word for me at the Ministry of the Interior. His refusal was cold, evasive, and formal. The guy is extremely reserved, with something lizardlike in his sleek gestures.

  But this has cured me of such attempts. We’ll stay where we are— and may God watch over us.

  Nora and Mircea have left. I rang them a few times today, but there was no answer. I feel more alone than ever—a poor bachelor who clings to his friends and tends to make a habit of them.

  This afternoon I walked through town feeling weighed down by loneliness. There is no one with whom I can talk, no cinema that I can enter. (Most of them are shut, and the rest show only the worst old leftovers, as in a provincial town.)

  I am still reading Balzac. He can be depressing at times, with his meticulous ferocity and a relentless sense of doom. Cousine Bette and Cousin Pons—gloomy masterpieces in which “the triumph of evil” is implacably organized. I read them in a childlike manner, with compassion and rebellion in my heart. There is also a desperate platitude about the milieu in which they are set; abject little furies (Bette, Mme. Matiffat, La Cibot, Fraisier); no one has the Mephistophelean grandeur of Vautrin.

  I still have some writer’s tics. The idea of one day writing a book about Balzac has remained from my previous existence. But what is the point of such a project amid today’s collapse? When, how, and with what shall I be able to rebuild a life for myself?

  Sebastopol has fallen—a couple of days ago. The war in the east will move on from the standstill of the last month or more. Apart from the bombing, everything has been frozen at the fronts.

  Monday, 15 May

  Five days without an air-raid alert, eight days without any bombing. We don’t know how long this will last, but it has given us a respite to do something about our shattered nerves.

  If it were not ridiculous to make any political judgment about the bombing, I would say that the pause is likely to continue for the time being— so long as the Anglo-American offensive in Italy (which began three days ago) is at its height. They have to concentrate their aircraft there at least until they break the German lines—and it would be illogical to shift them to other targets.

  It would be “illogical.” Yet nothing is logical in this war, at least for us who lack hard information and have to judge on the basis of fragmented signs and appearances.

  Did I not explain to Alice Theodorian, on the evening of 3 May, that the British and Americans wouldn’t start bombing Romania again
until the Russians launched a new offensive in Bessarabia and Moldavia? My reasoning was perfectly logical. Yet two hours later we were all in the cellars and the first British night bombs were pattering over most of the city.

  Tuesday, 23 May

  Some rather old but reassuring letters from Poldy (late March/early April).

  I had been growing desperate, tormented by the most terrible thoughts.

  How he has suffered in his loneliness!

  Still quiet. Ploieşti has been bombed (on Wednesday afternoon, I think), but nothing here in Bucharest.

  The hysteria of “heightened alert,” of warnings and pre-warnings, has calmed down. The city seems to be growing more lively again.

  But how long will the pause last?

  The offensive in Italy is continuing. All quiet on the other fronts. In fact the aerial pressure in the west seems to be slackening. The invasion fever has noticeably declined.

  Finished Volume VI of the Pléiade Balzac. Begun Volume VII.

  Wednesday, 31 May

  An alert this morning. Air raids on Ploiesti and Brasov.

  The fighting in Italy remains intense—but this does not stop the British and Americans from pummeling us too. Well, anyway, we have had three weeks’ grace.

  In my view, as soon as something new happens at the fronts (the fall of Rome, an invasion, a Russian offensive), we’ll see another round of bombings here, perhaps worse than the last. I am thinking of leaving then—but will it be possible?

  I am translating Vient de paraître for Sică. He has a season at the Studio and wants to open it in a few days’ time with Steaua fără nume. But I don’t think he’ll actually manage it by then.