He must have sensed how worked up I was there, to his right, tongue-tied yet bursting to speak, because he suddenly halted in the light of a shop window and looked straight at me, in surprise.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Professor, what I want to say is …’
But I did not continue.
‘I know what you want to say. You want to say it all. Which is the simplest and the most complicated thing in the world. Forget it. What’s the hurry? There’s none, believe me. We wanted to take a walk: so let’s walk. We’ll talk another time, when it occurs. Only those things that “happen” are worthwhile.’
He gave me a cigarette, took my arm and led me onwards, changing the subject.
2
The university was closed the day before yesterday, 9 December, in anticipation of the 10th. Quiet days, however: the occasional scuffle and an unremarkable street demonstration.
In any case, things have settled down. I’ve re-read, from the green notebook, the page from this day last year.
How young I was! Someday I’ll manage to accept hurt without it affecting my personal calm in the slightest. Perhaps this is the only way to be strong. Anyhow, probably many blows lie in store for me.
I ask myself if fleeing from the dorms and my fellow students, even for this rough sort of life I lead, was in fact an act of courage or one of cowardice.
I ask myself if I have the right, for the sake of my solitude, to laugh at the cheap heroism of Marcel Winder, who still today luxuriates in enumerating the beatings he gets. Though he goes off at the mouth and I restrain myself, the fact remains that he’s the one facing adversity while I turn my back on it. My way might be more elegant, but is it fair?
And don’t forget Liebovici Isodor, still out there on the front line, patient and silent, inexpressive, without illusions or vanity.
A visit to the dorms. Black, black misery. Nothing has changed here. The same stoves, either cold or smoking, the same long rooms with their cracked cement, the same people. A few new faces – first-year boys.
Liova is gone. He died over the summer. He was somehow made for death, that boy, and seems to me to have fulfilled his destiny through tuberculosis in the same way others fulfil theirs by writing a book, building a house or completing their work. I talked to our old dorm-mates from last year about him. Nobody had much to say.
‘He had these yellow boots, nearly new, that he left here when he went away,’ said Ianchelevici Şapsă. ‘But they’re no good: too small.’
Liova, poor boy, your death did not even do that small good.
This building, despite being warmly called a ‘shelter’, is strangely apathetic, horribly icy … And yet several hundred young people live here. And only one room is alive, bustling, and breathing passion: ‘the social issues room’. That’s what they call it, with irony, because Winkler, the old medical student, has his bed here. Winkler has been kept from his exams by Zionism and by S.T. Haim, a mathematics student at the polytechnic and a fiercely argumentative Marxist.
The pair of them quarrel endlessly.
‘I’m going to report you both,’ shouts Ionel Bercovici, despairing of ever getting to the end of a page on constitutional law.
‘Idiot,’ replies S.T.H. (who is referred to by his initials, for some reason), ‘you want us to hold back the march of history until you’ve passed your exam?’
Neither Winkler nor S.T.H. can have a very good opinion of me. They regard me as an outsider. At any event, they felt I was a fence-sitter, someone who observed in passing, neutrally. I listened quietly in a corner to their confused disagreement without intervening, enduring stubbornly the hard, flashing glances they shot at me over their shoulders.
‘Dilettantes, that’s what you are,’ shouts S.T.H., ‘dilettantes in all you do, in all you feel or think you feel. Dilettantes in love, when you think you’re making love, dilettantes in science when you dabble in science, dilettantes in poverty, when you live in poverty. Nothing is seen through to its conclusion. Nothing heroic. Nothing unto the death. Everything for a cautious, compromised life. And you call yourself a Zionist, but you haven’t a clue if there really is a land called Zion. I don’t believe in it, you do. So why don’t you actually go there, set foot on that land? You sit here agitating, which consists in cutting out receipts for membership fees for ten thousand people as smart as you are, and they too reduce a drama to a membership card.’
‘And you?’ asks Winkler, ever calm.
‘Me? I’m here, where I should be. Wherever I am, that’s where I should be, because I’m serving the revolution. By the simple fact that I exist, the simple fact that I think. My every word is a protest, my every silence is a shout rising above your receipt-books and your smile …’
And he suddenly turns to me, pointing an accusatory finger, putting an end to my quiet corner, because my reserve clearly irritates him and because, in the end, he can’t stand the presence of an additional person who is neither friend nor foe – who is simply paying attention. S.T.H. needs an audience, an adversary, to feel he’s up against something.
Now, having issued the challenge, he waits for me to take it up, his eyes flashing cold fire. Fire ‘from the head’, I’m sure, and not from the heart. He’s tense as a folded razor, trembling in anticipation of being unsheathed. But I meet his gaze, and return it, though I feel it burning, and keep quiet. I let the silence grow, until it must shatter under its own weight.
He awaits a gesture, a sign, the start of a reply, something that will let him explode without being silly, but I’m determined not to help him out in any way, and all his violence, all his fury, is vain, useless.
But S.T.H. does not lose the match. Anybody else in his situation would have, but not him. He shakes off a lingering frown, passes his hand over his head, steps towards me and, in a tone that is surprisingly melodious and friendly after his previous vehemence, says:
‘Won’t you join me at the pictures this evening?’
S.T. Haim, my good friend, how well we play our roles, and how sadly.
*
I took my leave of S.T.H. last night and at seven-thirty this morning he was knocking on my door (when did he sleep? when did he get up?) so that I’d see the message he’d slipped under it … Then I heard him stomping down the stairs.
I wish to disturb you. Your complacency horrifies me. Montaigne, of whom you spoke last night, is heresy. Stendhal, a frivolity. If that’s all it takes for you to sleep peacefully, all the worse for you. I wish you long, dark periods of insomnia.
‘I wish to disturb you.’ If he’s taken that from Gide, he’s ridiculous. If he came up with it himself, he’s doubly so.
S.T. Haim, charged by destiny to summon me to my duty! S.T. Haim, called to shake me up and to remind me of the tragedies I’ve run from, Montaigne under my arm!
The messianic impulse and psychological insight are incompatible. S.T.H. is a missionary with no notion of what is going on in the people around him.
He wishes to disturb me. And I’d like to find a stone on which to lay my head.
Had I a sense of mission like his, I would do my best to bring calm to the situations and consciences around me. And most of all to that of S.T.H., who is a weary lunatic, a child under the spell of illusions.
‘S.T. Haim,’ I would say to him, ‘you’re worn out. Stop, sit still for an hour. Look around. Touch this and observe that it’s a bit of stone. Hold this in your hand and know it’s a piece of wood. Look, a horse, a table, a hat.
‘Believe in these things, live with them, get used t
o regarding them normally, without looking for shimmering phantoms in them. Return to these sure, simple things, resign yourself to living with them, with their low horizons, in their modest families. And look around, entrust yourself to the seasons, to hunger, to thirst: life will get along fine with you, as it calmly does with a tree, or an animal.’
But who will say these same things to me? And who will teach me how to teach the others?
*
Let’s presume that the hostility of anti-Semites is, in the end, endurable. But how do we proceed with our own, internal, conflict?
One day – who knows – we may make peace with the anti-Semites. But when will we make peace with ourselves?
*
It’s not easy to spend days or weeks running from yourself, but it can be done. You get into mathematics and Marxism like S.T.H., become a Zionist like Winkler, read books as I do, chase women. Or play chess, or else beat your head against a wall. But one day, in a careless moment, your own heart will be revealed to itself, as though you had turned a corner and collided with a creditor you had sought to avoid. You behold yourself and perceive your vain evasions in this prison without walls, doors or bars – this prison that is your life.
You can never be vigilant enough. Some are better at pretending than others. Some keep it up for years, others for just a few hours! It ends for all in an inevitable reversion to sadness, like returning to the earth.
For some reason, after so many years, last night I was remembering my grandfather on my mother’s side. I see him at his work-table, among thousands of springs, screws, cogs, and the faces and hands of watches. I see him leaning over them, a watchmaker’s monocle clamped as always in the socket of his right eye, an exacting master casting spells with his long-fingered hands over the world of mechanical wonders he ruled, putting it in motion.
On that monstrous table, which as a child I was forbidden to go near (a missing cog meant the onset of chaos), he organized tiny autonomous worlds, tiny abstract entities from those minuscule dots of metal, which came together as a precise, strict, ordered harmony of hundreds of rhythmic voices in fine, ticking music. Under the glass of every watch-face lay a planet with its own discrete life, indifferent to what went on beyond it, and the glass seemed specially made to separate it from that ‘beyond’.
Though I sensed he was restless, the old man was truly enviable for the peace he enjoyed among the metal beings his hand created. He lived under their spell for hours, days, years. Yet his craft was surely also an escape, a refuge. And perhaps he ran from himself, and was in terror that he would never encounter his true self.
And so, in the evening, when darkness fell and he had risen suddenly from the workbench over which he had sat silently all day, there was no pause, no restful smile on the face that gentle man. He was always hurrying. Why was he hurrying? Where was he hurrying to?
He would get his hat and coat and walking stick, say something in passing and hurry into the street, leaving the door open, and to the synagogue across the road. There he would rush about with the same harried air, shaking hands here and there, and finally come to a stop before his prayer stand. There he would recover his composure, leaning over an open book, as tensed and silent as he was before the tiny wheels of a clock. Many times I watched him there, reading. He seemed immersed in confecting more tiny mechanisms, and the letters in the book – terribly small – looked like more tiny parts to be organized by his eye, to be called forth from nothingness, from stillness. At home were clocks, here were ideas, and both were abstract, cold and exact, subject to the will of a man trying to forget himself. Did he succeed? I don’t know. His face was at times illuminated from beyond, in expectation of what – or despairing of what – I am unable to say.
At least sixty years of life and twenty of death separate us. Even more – many more. He lived in the Middle Ages and I live today. We are separated by centuries. I don’t read the books he read or believe the things he believed in, I am surrounded by different people and have other preoccupations. And yet today I feel I am his grandson, his direct descendant, heir to his incurable melancholy.
*
Why do we, who rebel against ourselves so often, for so many reasons, never revolt against our taste for catastrophe, against our kinship with pain?
There is an eternal amity between us and the fact of suffering, and more than once, in my most lamentable moments, I have been surprised to recognize the mark of pride in this suffering, the indulging of a vague vanity. There is perhaps something tragic in this, but to the same degree it also shows an inclination for theatricality. Indeed, in the very hour when I am deeply sad I sense, subconsciously, the metaphysical tenor of my soul taking the stage.
Perhaps I’m bad to think this way, but I will never be sufficiently tough with myself, will never strike myself hard enough.
*
I would criticize anti-Semitism above all, were it to permit me to judge it, for its lack of imagination: ‘freemasonry, usury, ritual killing’.
Is that all? How paltry!
The most basic Jewish conscience, the most commonplace Jewish intelligence, will find within itself much graver sins, an immeasurably deeper darkness, incomparably more shattering catastrophes.
All they have to use against us are stones, and sometimes guns. In our eternal struggle with ourselves, we have a subtle, slow-working but irremediable vitriol in our own hearts.
I can well understand why a renegade Jew is more ferocious than any other kind of renegade. The harder he tries to shake his shadow, the tighter it sticks. Even in disowning his race, the very fact of his apostasy is a Judaic act, as we all, inwardly, renounce ourselves a thousand times, yet always go back home, with the wilfulness of one who desires to be God himself.
*
I’m certainly not a believer and the matter doesn’t concern me, doesn’t really trouble me.
I don’t attempt to be rigorous in this regard and acknowledge quite frankly the inconsistencies. I can know, or say, that God does not exist, and recall with pleasure the physics and chemistry textbooks from school that gave him no place in the Universe. That doesn’t prevent me from praying when I receive bad news or wish to avert it. It’s a familiar God, to whom I offer up sacrifices from time to time, under a cult of rules established by me and – I believe – corroborated by him. I suggest typhus for myself, instead of a flu He was thinking of sending to somebody dear to me. I indicate certain ways in which I would prefer him to smite me or show me mercy. Anyway, I cede to him much more than I retain, as what I give him comes from myself, but what I retain belongs to the others, the very few others, that I love.
And I doubt our conversation troubles him, as He doesn’t quite see it as a transaction and is aware of the good intentions with which I approach him.
All the same … Sometimes I feel there is something more, beyond that: the God with whom I have seen old men in synagogues struggling, the God for whom I beat my breast, long ago, as a child, that God whose singularity I proclaimed every morning, reciting my prayers.
‘God is one, and there is only one God.’
Does not ‘God is one’ mean that God is alone? Alone like us, perhaps, who receive our loneliness from him and for him bear it.
This clarifies so many things and obscures so many more …
3
A long conversation with Ghiţă Blidaru. In the end I told him ‘everything’, that same everything I feared and which he had intuited at a glance. All I’ve been thinking about lately, everything written in the notebook, all I haven’t written …
I spoke impulsively, quickly, and a
great deal, in fits and starts, jumping from one subject to another, doubling back. I expressed myself badly, in my nervous disorder. But he has a way of listening that seems to simplify your own thoughts, however poorly you express them. His mere presence creates order around him.
‘You should do something that connects you to the soil. I still don’t really know what. Not law anyway, or philosophy, or economics. Something to give you back your feel for matter, if you’ve ever had one, or that’ll start to teach you, if you never have. A craft based on certitudes.’
I shrugged, despairing of such a vague solution. And, anyway, had I really been seeking a solution?
But he continued:
‘Can you draw?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you draw well?’
‘I’m pretty bad at what they call “artistic drawing” at school. Quite good at technical drawing.’
‘How are you at maths?’
‘I don’t love it. I was good at it at school, though unenthusiastic.’
I had no idea what he was getting at and replied more in puzzlement than from curiosity. What happened next was astonishing.
‘Why don’t you become an architect?’
I said nothing. Is he joking? Performing some kind of experiment? Attempting to demonstrate to me how vain my ‘problems’ are? Setting me up somehow?
Perplexed, I keep quiet – and he doesn’t press it, and immediately changes the subject, leaving open the possibility that we will return to it.
‘Anyway, think it over seriously. It’s worth it.’
*
I’m very well aware that the professor’s proposal is full of risks. I’ve never been overly concerned about my ‘career’ as I’m convinced that I will always be poor and accept that with good grace – and yet, though what he proposes I do is not exactly an adventure, it certainly is imprudent … Are the psychological motives impelling me to take such a leap really strong enough for me to carry it through?
For Two Thousand Years Page 4