Forest of the Hanged

by Liviu Rebreanu

  His father’s return effected a great change, a kind of revolution, in Apostol’s life. The station platform was crowded with people, gentlefolk and peasants from the whole district. The child clung frantically to his mother’s skirts, as if he were expecting some terrifying experience. Then the train came in and drew up with an ugly grinding noise. Bologa, dressed in black, bare-headed and with a long brown beard which he had grown in prison, descended from one of the carriages. For a moment or two he stared at the crowd on the platform, and then quickly made his way towards little Apostol. He picked the child up in his arms and kissed him noisily on both cheeks, while the people cheered. Terrified, the small boy began to cry and to struggle in the arms of the stranger, who was now listening to the speech of the Protopop and was trying to pacify his son by rocking him gently in his arms. Finally, as the little one’s frightened sobs almost drowned the words of the speech of welcome, Bologa, enervated, felt obliged to hand him over to his mother, whose face had turned crimson from shame and emotion. In her arms Apostol became quiet, but he continued to stare fearfully at the gentleman with the brown beard.

  That very evening Bologa had a solemn talk with his wife regarding the child’s education. He enunciated in pompous phrases certain principles, quoted the names of several well-known educators, advising her to read their works, which he himself had read in prison with Apostol in mind, and, above all, begged her to bring energy, concentration, and firmness to her task.

  “The child must understand right from the beginning that man’s life is only of value if he follows an ideal!” added Bologa, rather touchingly. “Our parental responsibility is only just beginning. We must do our utmost to make a man of our boy.”

  Doamna Bologa wept and wrung her hands.… From her husband’s speech she gathered that she was being asked to moderate her mother-love, to give up her petting and spoiling. Nevertheless, she gave in without a murmur. Bologa, fêted by everybody, a martyr with the halo of imprisonment and that impressive beard, seemed to her an unspeakably wise master, whose right it was to exact obedience and submission. So she resigned herself to loving her babe in secret and to keeping her caresses hidden from Bologa’s eyes. On the other hand, she increased her religious instruction, and kept alight the faith in Apostol’s heart. In this matter her husband left her a perfectly free hand; although he himself was not a believer, he included religion in education as a means for developing the imagination.

  Apostol, subdued and timid, without playmates, felt deeply the stern atmosphere which his father imposed on the household. The fright of that first meeting remained imprinted on his heart, and he looked upon him as a stranger who had come to terrorize them. His only happy hours were those spent with his mother, when they were alone in the house or with Protopop Groza, who, being a childless widower, found pleasure in the company of the gentle and intelligent child. But over all the little boy’s thoughts and fancies there hovered a mystic kind of love in which God was paramount.

  When he was six years old another strange event made a deep impression on him. Doamna Bologa, thinking that the child would have to start school soon, talked the matter over at great length with the Protopop Groza, wondering what she could do to make this change less difficult for him. They both agreed that help from the Almighty would have to be asked. Finally, they decided to make Apostol say an “Our Father” on a certain day during Holy Mass. They made their preparations in great secrecy, in order that Bologa should not get wind of it and spoil their plan. At last, on the chosen day, the Bologas took their places as usual in the right-hand-side pew, and in front of them sat Apostol, dressed in new clothes, his eyes shining with excitement. Doamna Bologa, tearful and trembling, kept on crossing herself, and nervously fluttered the leaves of her prayer-book. Then, when the time for prayer had arrived, she bent over fearfully and whispered: “Now, my pet!” With head held high and firm tread, Apostol walked up to the altar, fell on his knees, and folded his hands. A moment later his thin voice floated like a white silken thread through the tense silence, rose upwards towards the star-sprinkled ceiling, and fell back among the hundreds assembled there. At first his eyes saw only Protopop Groza, who, from the altar, smiled at him kindly and encouragingly; afterwards he only saw the golden cross, which seemed to him to be floating in the air. Then, just as he was crossing himself at the end of the prayer, the sky seemed to open all of a sudden, and in the far distance, and yet so near that it seemed to be in his very soul, there appeared a curtain of white clouds in the midst of which shone the face of God like a golden light, dazzling, awe-inspiring and withal as full of tenderness as the face of a loving mother. And then from the midst of this divine radiance there emerged a living eye, infinitely kindly and magnanimous, which seemed to pierce all deep and hidden places. The vision lasted only a moment, but was so unutterably sweet that Apostol’s heart stopped beating and his eyes filled with a strange, ecstatic light. He was so filled with happiness that he would have been glad to die there and then in the presence of the divine miracle. When he went back to his seat his face seemed changed and the blue eyes framed in the pale face were like two pools of light.

  “Mummy, I have seen God!” murmured the child fervently, while Doamna Bologa vainly tried to stay her tears with her sopping handkerchief.

  Apostol’s vision gave rise to countless discussions in the Bologa household. The Protopop and Doamna Bologa were firmly convinced that God, as a special act of grace, had shown them by this means what path of life the boy was to follow. The lawyer, on the other hand, tried to prove to them that the whole “miracle” was merely the result of the child’s religious exaltation. Finally, unable to convince them, Bologa lost his temper and accused them of endangering the well-being of his son by filling his impressionable mind with popish fantasies, and as he, the father, was responsible for Apostol’s spiritual welfare, he forbade, once for all, such exhibitions in future.

  Apostol did his elementary school work at home with his mother for teacher. Bologa cross-examined them both every Saturday with a severity that grew more and more rigorous, treating them as if they had been accomplices bent on deceiving him. Although Apostol was industrious, his father decreed that he was to go to the College at Nasaud, explaining that it was necessary for the child to come into contact with people and with the outside world. The truth was, however, that Bologa, displeased with the ultra-religious education which the child was receiving at home in spite of his instructions, wished to curb the evil while there was yet time.

  They boarded him with the professor of mathematics, a good friend of Bologa’s, in order that he might be well cared for and supervised as at home. After his parents had gone and he remained alone, Apostol was filled with a painful dread. He felt abandoned and exiled, strange and helpless. And he couldn’t even weep for fear the children of the house should make fun of him. But at the very moment when he felt almost hopeless, he caught sight of a picture of Jesus Christ crucified, which hung on the wall, and his loneliness disappeared as if by magic. He was no longer alone. God had soothed his pain.

  As Parva was not far from Nasaud, Doamna Bologa used to come over every month to see him and pet him. But now Apostol seemed cheerful and contented. He loved learning. At the end of the school year, when he came home for his holidays, he gleefully presented to his father a brilliant report.

  “I congratulate you!” Bologa said to him after reading it carefully, shaking hands with him as with a friend of his own age.

  That handshake made a curious impression on the boy. For the first time he felt that his father loved him. Until then he had thought that affection must needs be associated with tears and petting. Now he began to understand that affection could also be restrained and manly. So he also became more discreet in displaying his feelings. He liked to be considered a man. His best friends, Alexandru Palagiesu and Constantin Boteanu, were three or four years older than he.

  When he had got through his fourth form and again brought his report home, his father thought it a f
it opportunity to say a few serious words to him in the presence of his mother. After an introduction, peppered with Latin quotations, he reminded him of their heroic ancestor of Alba-Julia, and then went on speaking impressively :

  “Henceforth, my son, you are a man. If it were necessary you are now in a position to earn your own living. In the upper school your outlook will become wider. You will learn to understand many things as yet unknown to you, for life and the world are full of strange enigmas. You must ever try to win the respect of men, and more especially your own self-respect. Therefore spirit, thought, word, and deed in you should always be at one, for by this means only will you be able to obtain a stable equilibrium between your world and the outside world. Always do your duty like a man, whatever the cost, and never forget that you are a Rumanian!”

  When Apostol was in the fifth form, about Christmas time, during a mathematics lesson, he was fetched out of class. In the passage he found their own coachman waiting for him, cap and whip in hand.

  “What is it? What has happened?” asked Apostol agitatedly.

  “It’s all right, young master, everything is all right—but during the night the master died from heart failure, and the mistress has sent me along to fetch you home for the funeral.…”

  Apostol wept unconsciously all the way to Parva. The funeral was imposing. Thousands of people followed the coffin to the grave, and many sorrowful speeches were made. Afterwards, for a few days, Apostol remained at his home. He no longer wept, but he would sit for hours staring at a photograph of his father in a stiff, truculent pose. (It had been taken at Cluj, just after the lawyer had been released from prison.) Up till now this photograph had always intimidated him. Now it filled him with remorse. All round him black-winged questions seemed to hover, and he did not dare to face them. He kept on telling himself that he had failed to appreciate his father, he recalled his severe admonishments, and he was haunted by a fear that something—he didn’t know what or where—should crumble away. On the third day Doamna Bologa, worried by his deep dejection, said to him gently and tenderly:

  “You must not grieve so, darling.… It can’t be helped. It was God’s will.”

  “Why?” asked Apostol abruptly, staring at her vacantly.

  His mother made some answer, but he gave no heed to her words, for even as he uttered that “Why?” something within his soul, some agelong structure with foundations strong as the roots of an oak, collapsed with a terrifying crash.

  “I have lost God!” flashed through his mind. He closed his eyes as if by this means he would ward off the catastrophe. He felt clearly that he was slipping down into a bottomless pit and that he could not stop himself; there was nothing to which he could cling. All this took about a moment or even less and left him filled with a paralysing fear such as he might have experienced if he had found himself stranded alone at dead of night in an immense graveyard, without notion of direction.

  He returned to Nasaud in a bewildered state of mind. His soul was tom by doubts, and he felt convinced that he had become an outcast. At first he had tried to build up a new house with the wreckage of the old, but he found that from under every stone a painful question would leap forth, a question for which he could find no answer. He soon wearied of these hopeless efforts with their continual torture. But presently there arose above everything else, like a victorious banner, the desire to find true answers to these perturbing questions.

  As an undergraduate he spent his holidays arguing and disagreeing with his mother and Protopop Groza, who, remembering the vision he had had, wished to make him enter the Church. But Apostol turned a deaf ear at the bare mention of theology. He was nearly twenty now, tall, very slim, with a white, puckered brow, rather long chestnut-coloured hair brushed back from the face, and there was that in his appearance which brought to one’s mind the young men of the beginning of the last century who had been ready to die for a dream. The more wildly his heart throbbed with eager desire to live, the more his mind tortured itself with unsolvable questions, and he actually suffered physically each time his search for a solution was arrested by the boundaries beyond which human knowledge has not yet penetrated. He became introspective, a dreamer with obstinate determinations. Doamna Bologa was wont to say, with a shade of regret, that he resembled his dead father, at which Apostol felt flattered, for the older he grew the more he admired his father’s wisdom and tried with all his might to emulate him. When he saw that resistance without arguments would not convince his mother, and more especially Groza, he told them bluntly that he had ceased long ago to believe in God, and that consequently he could not possibly choose a profession which would be based on a lie.

  The Protopop became very indignant and left the house without shaking hands with him. As for Doamna Bologa, she wept for a whole week, and prayed to the Almighty to turn her boy back again into the right path.

  Apostol had determined long ago to take up philosophy. When the Protopop heard this his indignation increased, and in order to overcome the obstinacy of her erring son he advised Doamna Bologa to refuse him the financial means. The young undergraduate fumed. For several days running he had long consultations with his only friend in Parva, Alexandru Palagiesu, who had studied law and was now a full-blown lawyer waiting for the retirement of the old lawyer so that he should take his place. As a direct consequence of these confabulations, Apostol ran over to Nasaud, consulted his quondam host and the head master of his college, with the result that he petitioned the Ministry of Education for a bursary from the State. Three weeks later the answer came; he had been granted a place in an endowed college in Budapest, which meant full board and lodging, and even a few crowns a month pocket-money.

  At the University he met with expected and unexpected difficulties. He overcame them with enthusiastic courage. He learnt Hungarian and German in a few months, and so well that after his first examination he received congratulations and an invitation to dinner from his Professor of Philosophy, who was old, poor, and the scion of a noble family. The relations between master and pupil then became those of a father-confessor and a believer. A good judge of character, the professor soon understood Apostol’s restlessness and took him to his heart. To him it seemed that this young man was typical of a generation which, losing its faith in God, strives to find something outside the human soul, a scientific God, free from mystery, an absolute truth beyond which there should be nothing and which should contain and explain all things.

  The serenity and sympathy of the professor gradually calmed the exaltation of the student, and when he came home for his first vacation he brought with him a “conception of life” which he explained all the summer to Alexandru Palagiesu, who had now a lawyer’s practice in Parva.

  “Man alone is nothing but a worm,” the student would assert with as much confidence as if he had discovered the philosopher’s stone, “a mere spark of fleeting consciousness. Only organized collectivity becomes a constructive force, old man! As a single unit man is useless, whereas in a collectivity every effort finds its place and altogether contributes to the advancement of the individual, while the concerted activity of all collectivities brings humanity nearer to God. To-day, through lack of organization, at least 90 per cent. of the work done by the human brain is wasted.… Just imagine what would be the result if, by means of a perfect system of organization, the mental efforts of all human beings were directed to the same aim! How many men are there on the earth to-day? Let us say two thousand million. Very well, would the unknown still exist if two thousand kilograms of grey matter would in one common impulse storm the closed gates?”

  “Which means in plain Rumanian that we are to do things in common,” said the lawyer, “that we are to do our duty to the State—that’s it, isn’t it? Well, our laws enjoin us to do the same thing.”

  “No, not the laws.… Conscience must dictate your duty, not the laws. There’s a great difference.…” Apostol would flare up and vehemently he would begin his explanations anew.

  For two
years in Budapest he tested his “conception of life” in all circumstances, and after each test he found it better and more satisfactory. But he hated living in the capital. The noise of the streets, the self-centredness of the people, the mechanizing of life, irritated him. He desired ardently the enlightenment of the soul, and that he believed was impossible to attain amongst large congregations of men. In the midst of nature he felt free and nearer the heart of the world. Whenever he had time he ran away from the town. He was as familiar with the hills round about Buda as he was with the country surrounding Parva. It was only when he came home that he noticed that he had shaped his life on a last which was not appreciated at all there. In Parva his “conception” rocked and efforts were needed to prevent it from collapsing. Here the State was looked upon as an enemy. It was during his third vacation, whilst arguing with the lawyer Domsa, who, after the death of old Bologa, had made a fortune in Parva, that he succeeded in finding a satisfactory reasoning.

  “I don’t affirm that our State is a good one,” exclaimed Apostol with sudden inspiration. “I don’t affirm that at all. Give me a better State and I’ll take my hat off to it. But so long as this one exists we must do our duty by it. Otherwise we should fall into anarchy, sir. In life we must reckon with realities, not with longings.”

  The lawyer Domsa was very fond of him, and foresaw a brilliant future for him, an opinion shared as a matter of fact by all the gentlemen of Parva, and even those of Nasaud. It was common talk that Apostol was the darling of the Faculty and that he would most certainly become a professor at the University. For that reason Domsa paid court to him to a slight extent in the hope of attracting his attention to his daughter Marta, a little girl of about seventeen, sweeter and more ingenuous than any lass on the shores of the Someş, and who, in addition, had a substantial dowry, being Domsa’s only child.