For Two Thousand Years

by Mihail Sebastian

  He left with a few coins in his pocket and a head full of crazy ideas. ‘A socialist,’ whispered the gossips. A ‘crazy kid’ who wouldn’t listen, growled Grandfather, who locked the boy out of the house at night when he loitered too late in town.

  It seems that during those years many small groups of people set out from all around the country for Alaska and California, some looking for gold, others chasing mirages. Shortly before the war, the American legation sent a document with the news that he had died in a small town in Texas where he had somehow become a plantation worker.

  *

  I gave Grandma the illustrated Bible bought on the train from Abraham Sulitzer, and now she’s reading aloud to me and to Grandmother, who didn’t get a school education.

  It’s a fairly ordinary Yiddish translation, I think; a popular edition, from its appearance, on poor paper, with cheap woodcuts. Grandma reads with a certain air of superiority. For her, Grandmother and I are both illiterate, since all my French and German books don’t compensate for my ignorance of her Bible.

  We began properly, in the beginning, with ‘Let there be light’. I listen to Grandma and the story becomes new to me, its appeal diaristic rather than biblical. Grandma reads avidly, visibly curious, turning the pages nervously and immersed in the delivery, as if it were about people she knew, neighbours or close relatives.

  Sometimes, at decisive passages, she stops briefly, shakes her head and makes a sound of amazement, regret or tribulation with her tongue against the roof of her mouth (tsk, tsk) as if wanting to tell Abraham, Esther, Sarah or Jacob that they’re being foolish or imprudent.

  There’s nothing ceremonious in the way Grandma reads. The Patriarchs don’t intimidate her. They, too, are hard-working men with wives and children, with troubles and sorrows. And if she, my grandmother, can place her experience at their disposal, as an elderly woman who has seen and lived through so much, why shouldn’t she?

  Who knows? – perhaps such-and-such a patriarch has a sick child who needs to be rubbed with aromatic vinegar, or somebody has hurt a finger and needs some healing herbs, or whatever else. Or some biblical wife may need some lemon salt to put in the dinner, she’s out of it and the shop is far away … It happens – it happens in life – why not in the Bible? …

  *

  A vast, white, crystalline morning. The north wind raged through the night, through the streets, against the windows, against the rooftops.

  Now, everything is shocked-still and transparent, as though under an immense glass sphere. If you shout, you can be heard from one end of the street to another, or perhaps further, as far as the Danube.

  I finally made it to the docks. The mountains of snow that yesterday were surging up at us now lie defeated, like wild beasts, their muzzles laid upon their paws. Giant shaggy white lions, soft-maned, reclining.

  There is only light, as if in the heart of a frozen sun. Something abstract in this steady, shining silence.

  Only the Danube is rough and disturbed. Choppy, ashen – there is something agonized about it, arrested in its onward tumble. You would say it had frozen wave by wave, each wave struggling and suffering in defeat.

  There is nothing of my lively, hurried Danube of March in it, my leisurely, regal Danube of autumn. It’s different, utterly different, deeper, more tumultuous, more silent.

  5

  We spend the afternoons in the workshop, drawing and modelling. It’s difficult, I have to admit. But it is work I could learn to love, unlike the standard morning classes, which are all as mediocre here as at the law and philosophy faculties. This is why I always return with pleasure to modelling clay in the workshop. Of course, what I’m making is absolutely worthless, and I wonder if I will ever manage to achieve anything in this world of earth, stone and cement.

  As a mental exercise, though, I’ve never found anything more calming than this game of modelling clay. It’s a docile, malleable material with its own odd character and sometimes between my fingers I find a shape I hadn’t sought; a gracefully leaning oval, a rough face with terse broken lines or some other wonder drawn from the reluctant, indifferent material, which hides so many facets within itself.

  And meanwhile, with my hands busy, my mind absorbed by the small phenomenon happening before my eyes, I have a feeling of freedom such as I doubt I’ve ever had before, even in the best days of the holidays.

  It’s a form of detachment from myself, as distinct as a physical sensation.

  In the evening, when I hang my overalls on the hook and wash my hands, everything seems to me clear and orderly, as it is in a simple, well-managed household.

  Were I of a slightly more lyrical temperament, I’d write a hymn to tools, a song of praise for work. Fortunately, though, I’m sensitive enough to the ridiculousness of my inner enthusiasm to be aware how immature and amateurish it is. I have something of the naivety of a first-year medical student, ready to discover a cure for cancer. A real architect would probably laugh heartily, were he to read what I write here.

  *

  It seems Blidaru’s last few lectures, from Christmas until today, have been impressive. ‘This is no longer political economy,’ I’ve heard the specialists cry in the chancellery of the faculty. They may be right. From what I’ve managed to find out from the professor himself, and from what others have told me, it seems that, strictly speaking, his course about currency is no longer an economics course, but rather one about the philosophy of culture.

  My study schedule doesn’t allow me even an hour on Thursday and Saturday, when Ghiţă Blidaru has his lectures. Anyway, he has vowed, if he catches me there, to just throw me out: ‘You’ve no business being at my course. Stay here where you are, and work. Full stop.’

  *

  I see him only occasionally, evenings, at his house, but when I do see him we stay up late, talking. I haven’t yet discovered a good technique for conversing with him. There’s so much I’d like to say and it is only with difficulty I manage to speak. Sometimes, at home or on the way to his place, I make a plan, studiously, of the things I should say to him, but, once I’m there with him, it all falls apart, as though he’s one of those people who makes the rules for everybody else, obliging you to submit to their temper and style as well as to their arguments. There is so much passion in this subtly constructed man, he hides so many storms with self-control and his rigorous thinking. He is the only man to whom I have ever felt it necessary to submit myself, but I do it with a sense of fulfilment and reintegration rather than of surrender.

  *

  I asked him a few days ago if he thought architecture condemned me to overly specific concerns and limited me to a field of entirely professional problems. And if I wouldn’t be distracted, whatever my job, by what seems to me paramount and essential; to be connected with the ferment of my times, sensitive to it, to its preoccupations and its general thrust.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘you can’t talk in terms of limitations. Architecture, medicine, music and economics are all planets in the same solar system. Whatever we’re involved in or working at individually, we reach our conclusions using guiding principles which are common to us all. The various truths and ideas about life in any period compose an organic unity, like members of a family.

  ‘It’s naive to think that a revolution which starts in one place, in one discipline, stops there. History is made from within rather than without, from the centre rather than the periphery. Crudely, we only pick up on the immediate, visible changes that impinge upon our lives. As a result we imagine that a revolution is first and foremost a political or economic upheaval. This is blis
sful naivety. A revolution can begin in physics, economics, astronomy, mathematics or anywhere else. It’s enough for something to be changed in the structure of a single thought or human life, because from that moment virtually everything is going to be changed. Everything in this world is connected; there are no isolated facts or preoccupations. Everything participates in a cycle. Why would you wish architecture to be absent from this chain? Relax and do your work there: whether you wish it or not, we’ll meet up eventually, you practising architecture, me in political economy, someone else doing anthropology, someone else again doing algebra. The vehicles vary: the road is the same.’

  *

  One evening recently, returning from Ghiţă Blidaru’s, I recalled how brutal my first conversation with him had been. Conversation! If you could call it that. I’d stopped him to complain about being thrown out of his course. How smartly he brushed me off! He didn’t even want to look straight at me. And today, remembering, I shudder with shame. How I suffered then. I spoke to him about that day and, though I feared he would see this as some kind of impudent reproach, I couldn’t refrain from asking:

  ‘Don’t you want to tell me what happened then, why you were so abrupt, so cutting?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember. Maybe I was bored, or upset. I don’t recall. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not sorry. I’ve never liked being too amiable with people, even with those I’m fond of. Particularly not with them. I tell myself, out of a hundred times you prod a person, perhaps twice you’ll get their attention usefully. When I walk through the grass, I don’t watch out for the blades of grass or beetles getting walked on. The earth doesn’t care for such delicate attentions. Stamp on and flatten all you want – after you’ve passed by the roots will continue growing, if they’re roots. When you walk on the soil, walk on the soil. When you walk among people, walk among people. A little blindly. It doesn’t matter. You’ll knock over a few things – the weak ones. But you’ll stimulate the others. Leaping before you look is an essential exercise. I haven’t spared myself and I’m not going to spare anyone else, particularly not if I’m fond of them.’

  It’s a tonic. Grit your teeth and carry on.

  6

  I realize, leafing through this notebook (it never occurred to me before to re-read it until yesterday, when, looking for Les Liaisons dangereuses to give to Marga, I came across it and opened it with a certain curiosity, as though it were an unfamiliar book) – that I’ve written nothing about her, about Marga Stern, for so long. This is rather strange because, of all the things that have happened to me recently, there is nothing I value more than having come to know her. (I don’t know why I avoid saying ‘love’, which would be simpler and more exact, a hesitation which she herself has observed on a number of occasions, without reproaching me, but with a tinge of bitterness.)

  I don’t regard this omission as pure chance. With a little effort at recollection, I’ve discovered, re-reading my notebook, something even more curious. What I note is that most of the long gaps in the diary coincide with intense (‘intense’ is putting it too strongly) moments in our love. Whenever a break of several weeks occurs in my notes, I search for and find beneath the silence something concerning Marga.

  I’m a ‘difficult love’ – according to her – and, fortunately, she manages to accept this difficulty.

  I ask Marga to come, I ask her to leave, I call her several days in a row in order to avoid her for weeks later on. The game would be outrageous were there not between us a tacit pact of freedom and forgiveness. I’m grateful she can respect the rules of the game so lucidly. Then, there is a certain weariness in her, which prevents emotionalism. And something else. A slight smile of discouragement, which must be her revenge on me.

  But here I am psychologizing – that’s not what I intended.

  *

  The strange fact remains that, without exception, every good moment of our love has been marked here, in my diary, by a blank page.

  There are days I love that girl with simplicity and an open heart and I feel how she makes me happy. I await her calmly and unhurriedly – a little indifferently perhaps, with the right amount of indifference this calm love requires – and when she comes, when I feel her nearby, leaning back against the terracotta stove, or tucked into the right corner of the divan, or leaning attentively over my shoulder, over the table I work at, all these details are all such great, natural joys.

  Clearly Marga and my diary don’t get along. There are far too many general ideas, too many ‘problems’ here.

  I note I’ve picked up the detestable habit of stating categorical truths. Too often I use that plural formulation (‘we’ are this, ‘we’ are that, ‘our’ destiny, ‘our’ duty) and generalize a collective, confused experience in this ‘we’ that at other times I wouldn’t allow myself to use without verifying it in the light of personal experience.

  Marga, who takes pride in having no aptitude for abstractions, is for me – to use a pedantic term – ‘reasserting her individuality’. (If she could read this, she’d be horrified. Forgiving as she is, I wouldn’t be forgiven this.) I don’t know, perhaps our love has its concrete, immediate ‘problems’, which simply derive from the meeting of our two individual selves. Nothing destroys general ideas and conclusions more radically than being in love, since love reduces everything down to your own sensibility, reinventing superstitions, certainties, and doubts and values, obliging you to live them, to test them, to re-create them. There is something profoundly original in every love, a principle of birth, of creating all things from the beginning.

  No, I don’t love Marga passionately, I’m well aware of that, as is she, but all it takes is for her to happen along for the ‘big questions’ to disappear and be replaced by the whole world of living, personal meanings. Small change, of course, yet so vital.

  What I particularly love in her is her terrible fear of abstraction. If I happen inadvertently to mention one of my famous intellectual crises, this girl, usually so understanding, suddenly withdraws, discreetly but firmly, refusing not only to answer, but even to comprehend. She has a particular inclination for things, objects, particular facts and individual people.

  Me, you, this book, this chair, that window. She alone in all my world – family, friends, acquaintances – did not consider my move from law to architecture an extravagance. When I told her, she responded, almost without surprise, ‘Good for you.’ Her awareness and interest in my new duties surprised me at first. She asks me to explain things exactly, wants details, looks and inquires. Once she made me take her to the workshop and she stayed there all afternoon, wandering freely between the tables, mingling with my classmates. Usually so uncommunicative, she asked questions, demanded technical details, picked up the modelling clay familiarly and tried to work it. If I’m busy at my drawing board when she calls to visit, she won’t let me interrupt the work; she pulls up a chair, kneels on it, elbows on table, and watches with a seriousness that seems to me utterly childish. A true vocation.

  There is certainly something lucid in her intelligence – and perhaps limited at the same time – something practical, and with a sense of proportion. I understand now why I was amazed by her reputation as a good pianist when I heard her playing for the first time, some time ago. Technically accomplished perhaps – I’ve no idea – but her musical style is odd, to say the least. Unfortunately, she was playing Chopin then, a nocturne, which she made unrecognizably straightforward, precise, well defined. Marga doesn’t play, she follows the rules. Just by listening to her, I managed to understand for the first time what was meant by the ‘construction
of a piece of music’. I saw it drawn up, logically, phrase by phrase, movement by movement. (Maybe this is where her curiosity about architecture comes from.) This style probably involves numerous musical risks, and has certain advantages. It’s a great pleasure to hear her playing Mozart; it’s a tight, painstaking Mozart, like the cutting of an incredibly fine surgical saw.

  *

  How is Marga Stern able to relate naturally and calmly to things, and what is the source of her happy ability to shield herself from dreams and illusions? I envy her for her happy, sane and easy-going practical spirit. I’m envious of her lack of imagination and her resistance to abstraction. I have the same kind of admiration for this sensible spirit as I would for a healthy body, secure in its strength and physical integrity.

  Can it be that there is nothing Jewish in this beloved girl, not a single feature, not a shade, not a single turning inwards towards the broken layers of memory deposited there?

  I foolishly asked her this, just like I’d ask her if by any chance she had a headache. She answered with a shrug.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I have my moments of melancholy, of course. When you’re irritable, or when I love you too much or, well, when something bad happens to me, whatever that may be.’

  The fact is, Marga is a woman before she is a Jew. And if the destiny of the race compels her towards insecurity and uncertain dreams, her destiny as a woman – which is more powerful – returns her to the earth and binds her to it, returns her to the laws of life, which are silent in her, in expectation of moving onwards, through childbearing. It’s a physical calm, and it expresses itself daily through a powerful sense of practicality, a sense of preparedness and expectation.