For Two Thousand Years

by Mihail Sebastian

  ‘What’s up, pal?’

  ‘What’s up? I’m terribly ashamed of you and the others, I feel a head taller than you, because you’ll never know the sad pride of defeat, alone against ten thousand. And I’m going to see Ghiţă Blidaru and I’m going to talk to him.’

  *

  I can’t re-create the scene. I’m powerless to remember it all now. It was brusque. Just two or three words and a puzzled glance.

  Ghiţă was leaving the secretariat. I went up and spoke to him. I don’t know what I said. I swear I don’t, and that this isn’t a ruse to spare myself one more moment of self-disgust.

  He interrupted me.

  ‘Young man, what do you want?’

  ‘Professor, they threw me out and …’

  ‘Well, and what do you want me to do about it?’

  He walked off without waiting for a reply.

  I should run for hours through the streets, or chop up a wagonload of barrels with a hatchet, to collapse in my bed in the evening and sleep and forget.

  *

  Third night playing poker. We played in the library, around a candle, until three or four in the morning.

  Yesterday I won 216 lei and then treated everyone to some girls, where we went in two at a time.

  Ionel Bercovici kissed me. ‘Hey, and we all thought you were stuck up.’

  A disgusting dive. That vinegary white wine is really pretty awful. The first few glasses make you wince. Then in the end it works.

  It goes on until late in the night. At The Cross, at Mizzi’s, that whore from Cernăuţi, who for an extra 10 lei will do anything.

  We walked between bayonets all day. There was a small group of us downstairs, at the secretary’s office, when compact bands arrived from the faculty of medicine. We were surrounded on all sides and only got out between a line of police two-deep. They escorted us through the streets like that, closely followed. We changed direction several times, hurried on, ducking into courtyards in the hope of shaking them off. Until nightfall. Until now.

  If it weren’t for the consolation of the bitter-tasting nights of gambling, the dizzy pleasure of poker, what would life be?

  Then there’s another matter. The voluptuousness of being dirty, your secret pride in letting yourself go. Today you give up brushing off your hat, tomorrow you don’t change your shirt, the day after you don’t repair your worn-out heels. To sink down deeply, irrevocably in filth and to love it for its dirtiness, for its familiar smell, for its dry crusts of bread, for the intimate warmth of humiliation. And to know that you are once and for all rudderless, that control slipped from your hands one morning when you didn’t change your collar, because you couldn’t be bothered.

  Haven’t they always told us we’re a dirty people? Maybe it’s true. Perhaps our mysticism, our asceticism, our piety is just that – dirtiness. A way of getting down on your knees, a form of slow, voluptuous self-mutilation, ever further from the white star of purity.

  *

  This morning, in the yard of the dormitory blocks, Marga Stern said to me, awkwardly, as if the news had nothing to do with me:

  ‘Look, spring is on its way.’

  4

  I fled. Two weeks ago, on a day when I told myself I had to choose between being the fourth hand at poker or living. I fled, and I’m glad, because it was hard.

  It’s a small room. A garret. But it’s mine. A chair, a table, a bed. Four white walls and a high window, through which the tops of the trees in Cişmigiu Park can be seen.

  The formula is simple and I wonder why I didn’t discover it earlier.

  Two thousand lei per month: 1,000 for the room, 300 lei for thirty loaves of bread, 300 lei for thirty litres of milk, 400 lei remainder.

  I’m going to write to Mama asking her to embroider a handkerchief with the motto I’ve discovered: LIFE IS SIMPLE!

  Fourteen days on my own. I’d like to know exactly how many people in this city, in the wide world, are freer than me.

  I found a superb Montaigne for 60 lei in a second-hand bookshop, from 1760, with fine matt paper and amazing footnotes. Impassioned. The more impassioned he is, the more of a libertine, sceptic and artist he is. Me? I’m just tortured.

  What a break. And I never, ever guessed, fool that I am, that such a holiday were possible.

  I’ve put up a big map of Europe on the wall facing the bed. I need a globe but I haven’t enough money.

  Maybe it’s childish, but I need to draw upon the symbolism of this map and to read off the cities and countries on it. It’s a daily reminder of the world’s existence. And that every kind of escape is possible.

  *

  It was beautiful just now in Cişmigiu, with that white metallic sun, the water green with vegetation, the still leafless trees, naked like a herd of adolescents drafted into the army.

  People are so ugly in their out-of-season coats, their hats worn out from winter, with their sun-scared smiles and heavy, trudging steps. I watched how they passed and pitied them their graceless lack of awareness.

  *

  A young, smartly dressed girl stopped on the boulevard in front of the window of a fruit shop. I said the first nonsense that entered my head. She laughed and agreed to walk with me.

  She didn’t ask where I was taking her. She ascended the stairs, and undressed readily once the door was closed. A small body, pleasant rather than beautiful, very young. We made love in the middle of the day, the window open, both of us naked. The girl cried from pleasure and afterwards walked through my bedroom with my clothes over her shoulders, curious, looking through the papers on the desk, opening books, closing them loudly.

  ‘Will you come here again?’

  ‘I will.’

  She didn’t ask me for anything. I forgot to ask her name.

  The pleasure of being naked. Feeling yourself recovering your animal poise, to feel it concretely and bodily, hearing the sure surge of your blood, knowing the voluptuousness of lifting an arm and letting it fall, having a sure sense of your solitary physical life.

  This should be inscribed in the eulogy of love.

  *

  A curious meeting with Ştefan D. Pârlea. It was he who stopped me. I wouldn’t have dared, though I retain a dram of affection for him since high school, without really knowing why.

  A bony, hard, scowling fellow, with a mighty handshake, the eyes of a vulture, a virile ugliness that is almost a form of beauty.

  ‘Hey, look, the sun is shining …’

  We wandered about together, through various neighbourhoods, finding it odd not to come across our old familiar Danube. He told me what was going on at Blidaru’s course, which he too discovered some time ago.

  We talked a lot, about a thousand things, about books, memories, women. We stopped at a bakery, past the end of the bridge, to buy sesame pretzels. We ate in the street though people looked at us.

  ‘You know, Pârlea, we could be friends, if we weren’t divided by so much nonsense.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. The pair of us can’t be friends. Not now or ever. Don’t you get the smell of the land off me?’

  There was something absurd and terrible in his eyes.

  Don’t you get the smell of the land off me? Yes, indeed I get it. And I envy you for it.

  I have an immense longing for simplicity and unawareness. If I could rediscover some strong, simple feelings from somewhere centuries back – hunger, thirst, cold – if I could overcome two thousand years of Talmudism and melancholy, and recover – supposing one of my race has ever had it – the clear joy of life …<
br />
  But happiness, for me, is a strange, tumultuous feeling, composed of endless evasions, always in danger of collapse.

  I was happy three days ago. Today I’m depressed. What happened? Nothing. An inner crutch slipped. Some poorly suppressed memory rose to the surface.

  At twenty years of age, healthy and without any personal handicaps, I feel that I have been destined to be divided in ten parts and negated in each of them.

  No, we’re not an easy-going people. I am so ill at ease in my own company: how badly another person must feel being with me. We’re impulsive. We’re more than we can deal with. And on top of that, we’re impure.

  We: meaning me. Ianchelevici Şapsă. Marcel Winder.

  He smells of the land, lucky man.

  I regret that, in this internal conflict, I retain some sympathy for myself. I’m sorry I catch myself loving my destiny. I’d like to hate myself, without excuses or forgiveness. I’d like to be an anti-Semite for five minutes. To feel an enemy in myself who must be vanquished.

  *

  The girl from a week ago came. I didn’t invite her in.

  ‘Didn’t you ask me to come?’

  ‘Yes. And now I’m asking you to leave.’

  Something tells me that we are unable to live any of life’s moments fully. Not one of them. That we eternally stand at a remove from what is happening. A little above or a little below things, but never at their heart. That we don’t experience feelings or events fully, and then we drag these unresolved matters after ourselves. That we have never been complete villains or complete angels. That the fires we lit to offer up our hearts smouldered out too soon. That we have lived through an eternal compromise between fortune and misfortune.

  *

  It’s better this way, working fourteen hours a day. The exam is just an excuse. But I feel good in this prison of books, into which nothing penetrates from without or within.

  I could have done with a dose of typhoid just now. Maybe this exam will be a substitute. The important thing is to forget myself, to have an exhausting, mechanical activity that absorbs me completely, and to hell with the world’s problems.

  Marga Stern has paid a friendly visit to my garret. She was wearing a red dress, and her hand was warm and calm and she playfully placed it on my brow.

  Not quite a seduction, dear girl.

  *

  Marcu Klein, you’re an ass, and if I had you in front of me I’d embrace you and then box your ears mightily four times so you wouldn’t forget.

  You weren’t on your own. There were between forty to sixty of us with you, awaiting the civil law exam. From eight in the morning, from when we were called, until eleven in the evening, when Mormorocea, the professor, finally entered. He was clearly drunk and half asleep. We all saw it, just as you did, you smart-ass. We were all tired from that long, wasted day. But we took our places submissively, and perhaps a little disgusted. And you clenched your fists and continued frowning.

  The professor mumbled a question and nodded off. The boy beside you answered clearly and very precisely. When he finished, there was a moment of silence. Mormorocea grunted, annoyed that the silence had disturbed his sleep.

  ‘You haven’t learned anything. Next one!’

  You were ‘the next one’. You stood up. I closed my eyes, because I knew – do you hear? – I knew what was going to happen.

  ‘Professor, this is disgraceful.’

  Why, Marcu Klein, could you not have kept quiet? Who pushed you, you lunatic, alone among forty, to speak for everybody, to condemn and avenge? What absurd need to denounce injustice inspires you to cry out? From what ancestral education in humiliation and revolt? What perverted instinct requires you to stop and investigate unpleasantness, instead of passing by? Do you not know how little it takes for people to turn against you? I’m furious with you because I can’t hate you enough and because I, along with you, belong to a race that can’t accept things and shut up.

  *

  Telegram to Mama: ‘Passed exams. Happy.’ Happy? I don’t know. All I know is that at home, on the right bank of the Danube, there are twenty metres of warm sand and, before me, an entire river to swim in.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  1

  November, the most beautiful month! Walking the streets, enveloped in a general lazy drizzle, shut off from the details around you, rendered impermeable, alone … You leave home with a pipe and your thoughts and walk the streets for hours, seeing nobody, stumbling into people, trees and shop windows, arriving home late, like a ship to port.

  My time of the year, November. The month when I re-read books, leaf through papers, gather notes. It’s a kind of hunger for work, for activity, for taking up all the old tasks once again.

  And that damp organic smell in the morning when I go out – and the warm halos of lamplight in the evening when I return …

  *

  In a bookshop, where I’d entered to browse the magazines.

  Somebody slaps my back. I turn around. Ghiţă Blidaru.

  ‘You missed the opening lecture …’

  I’m surprised, or very happy, or afraid of saying something impertinent. In any case, I say nothing.

  ‘Why don’t you pay me a visit? Look, Thursday evening, half past four, my place. What do you say?’

  He bids me farewell with a comradely tip of the hat and leaves.

  *

  He has three rooms full of books and an empty fourth one where he sleeps: a simple bed, almost a camp-bed – and nothing else. On the wall by the door, a neat reproduction of a winter scene by Brueghel.

  Almost half the front wall is taken up by an immense rectangular window made of a thick pane, more crystal than glass.

  It’s a bare, stark, frugal interior, yet it has an inexplicable air of intimacy, even warmth.

  I’m so intimidated I can hardly move. Behold this man, whom I loved and envied. He has become enveloped in so many layers of legend in the past year, since that first evening I heard him, above in the university.

  Here he is, his assured lordly demeanour, his rough joined eyebrows, his languid but commanding hand, here in this house that is just like him in its clean lines, its total precision, the starkness of its every detail. In a dressing gown, a wool scarf around his neck, his head inclined slightly towards the lamplight shining from the right, there is something monastic in his bearing, and in his frown, now softened a little by a smile smouldering in shadow.

  I listen to him with a certain panic. Panic that he might fall silent at any moment and that I will be required to speak. And about what? Good God, what could I possibly say in response? And how would I say it? The pressure of his presence unnerves me more than it gladdens me, though I know it makes me very happy indeed.

  Has he perceived something of my panic? He rises and fetches his pipe-tobacco, lights up, then goes to the window and stares out, as if watching for something in the fading evening.

  *

  I’d rather not see him again. I feel ashamed. Seldom have I been so utterly stupid and dull. My intelligence! A certain youthful attitude of mind, that’s all it amounts to. And when you don’t even have that, nothing is left. How else can my total vacuity yesterday be excused? Two hours of conversation, two hours of me being silent. I participated with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in a conversation from which I had wanted everything. I don’t know what I mean by ‘everything’, but I must mean a lot by it, because I feel so acutely that I completely wasted my visit to Blidaru’s home.

  *

  On Monday he spoke at the Foundation, as part of
the Social Institute’s series of lectures. There was no risk of me being seen in that immense crowd, in my seat in the second balcony.

  What charm and simplicity the man has. His style is terse and angular, rough and digressive. He throws out a word, opens a secret door, kicks a stone he’s picked up along the way. Spontaneously, and somehow trusting all to hazard. And then, when the hour is up, and you look despairingly at the field of thought that has been devastated, suddenly – I couldn’t tell you how – matters begin to resolve themselves. The disconnected ideas strewn about over three-quarters of an hour return home in the final quarter, clear, quiet, necessary, utterly compelling, and completing a cycle of reasoning as though it were a symphonic arrangement.

  I will understand later, when I’m older, what kind of a thinker Blidaru is. But I already know he is a great artist.

  *

  He caught up with me in the lecture hall as I was leaving and took my arm in a simple, friendly fashion.

  ‘Let’s take a stroll.’

  I walked with him as far as his home, and several times along the way tried to talk to him. But it wouldn’t come. His fault this time rather than mine, though, as he wasn’t in a mood for chatting. He just wanted to walk, hands in the pockets of his long raincoat, hat over his eyes and his nose in the air, taking in the smell of rain and wet trees – the smell of the last days of November.

  I walked nervously beside him, eager to cut through his small-talk to interject the questions I wanted to ask, the things I didn’t clearly understand but which seemed so compelling. Several times I tried to start a sentence and gave up. Several times I formulated one in my mind but was unable to take it anywhere.