For Two Thousand Years

by Mihail Sebastian

  Old Ralph turned up, too, around four o’clock with a long-faced look of consternation. He hovered around Vieru, not knowing how to begin speaking again, but Vieru was determined not to lighten his penance. In the end, the old fellow had to bite the bullet: he took it all back, apologized in a roundabout way and vowed not to meddle any more.

  That night the master slept here with us, in the cabin. We stayed up late talking, drinking wine and smoking, all three of us. You could hear brief rumblings from afar, which then echoed down the whole valley, as if every sound were broken into thousands of tiny splinters. It’s a well that’s been gushing for about two days at Romanian Star. Like the breathing of a caged animal, somewhere in the night.

  *

  Pierre Dogany came by the cabin yesterday evening to see me. I was surprised, as he’d never done this before.

  Poor boy! He senses something has happened but doesn’t know exactly what, and doesn’t have the courage to imagine.

  If I could be sure his suffering contained enough freedom of spirit, I’d tell him and, with a little intelligence, he would be consoled.

  We went together to the Star well to see how it was working. There were a lot of flares, like some strange torchlight procession. Human shadows grew immense around us, into the distance, upon the hillsides.

  He spoke of his approaching departure, and tried to seem indifferent.

  ‘Why are you really going? Do you think the university in Budapest is better than the one in Bucharest?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s better. But it’s my university.’

  ‘I thought you were a Jew.’

  ‘I’m Hungarian. A Jew, of course, but also a Hungarian. My father opted for Romania. His business. He was born in Satu Mare, he wants to die in Satu Mare. He votes, pays his dues, reads the Bucharest newspapers. None of that interests me. It’s not part of me, I don’t understand it. I grew up with Endre Ady. I’m sticking with him. I’d feel stifled if I stayed here, in this atmosphere, with these people. And if it weren’t for my parents, who I have to see in the holidays, and especially if there wasn’t something else –’ he fell quiet, hesitating – ‘I think I’d stay there for good. You have to understand: it’s my memories, my language, my culture.’

  ‘A culture that, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t embrace you with the same enthusiasm with which you embrace it.’

  ‘I foresaw that objection. And I’m surprised you haven’t reminded me that Budapest University has a numerus clausus. Of course it’s not pleasant. It’s humiliating at times. But when you really love something, you love the good and the bad together. This will pass too, some day. You’d do the same in my place.’

  We headed home, on the Ursu road. There was still a light on at the Duntons’, and Dogany suddenly fell quiet. He took his leave brusquely, with a quick goodbye. For a moment, I wanted to call after him. I’m not sure what I wanted to say to him. Something to make him feel less alone.

  *

  Marjorie came by the oilfield today. She was wearing a green knitted dress and a white scarf.

  I was terribly busy, but took care to talk with her for a long time so that she wouldn’t think I was annoyed. She had leaned back against some support beams, arms hanging loosely at her sides, legs slightly bent, the soft shape of her knees protruding against her dress. She has fine, long bones. She spoke with great animation and seriousness, but I couldn’t understand what it was about. I tried to follow her or at least to seem focused, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Marin Dronţu approached us, but she continued speaking to me, completely unchanged, completely unsurprised, showing no awkwardness. He coughed a couple of times, shifted his weight from foot to foot, then went away, shrugging his shoulders in boredom.

  ‘She’s just showing off,’ he said to me later.

  *

  I wasn’t expecting the professor’s visit, and the telegram he sent me to announce his arrival was a real surprise.

  ‘At last, he’s given in,’ I said to myself. I’d asked him so often to come to Uioara, and he refused vehemently each time.

  ‘What you’re doing there is barbarous, criminal. It’s the most artificial thing that’s been done in Romania since 1848.’

  Since I began work at the Rice concession, much opposition has subsided. Ghiţă Blidaru’s opposition alone has remained firm. Vieru doesn’t say anything, but I think that deep down this disapproval hurts him, and is all the harder for him to deal with as it’s purely intellectual in nature. If ‘Professor Ghiţă’ – as he calls him – were an engineer, I don’t think Vieru would care less about his objections. One set of figures can always be countered by others. But the professor’s hostility to the Uioara project does not concern technical or economic issues. He’s thinking of ‘the problem of the plum trees’, a perspective he would readily recognize as being at the very core of his thinking. ‘Whenever the struggle is waged between life and an abstraction, I will be on the side of life, and against abstraction.’

  The master despairs utterly before this unassailable position, as it transcribes the issue to a level and a scale of values with which he has no connection.

  ‘What drives me mad about Professor Ghiţă is metaphysics. In a matter involving so many facts and practicalities – money, stones, oil, drainage work and water supply – he comes along with moral problems. I’m thinking in terms of practicalities, he in terms of metaphysics.’

  ‘Practicalities, practicalities!’ replies the professor contemptuously. ‘There’s only one thing it makes any practical sense to talk about: man.’

  The argument has been going on for over five years, ever since Rice started work. Ghiţă Blidaru has pointedly refused to visit us in Uioara, and thus refused to set eyes on what he considers always to be a ‘deliberate crime’.

  ‘At last, he’s giving in,’ I said to myself, hastily, receiving the telegram. It was premature of me. Far from giving in, he has decided to criticize our work publicly.

  His course this year will deal with the Romanian economy and its European deformations. The opening lecture will focus specifically on the two Uioaras, Old and New, as the starting point for the entire course. That’s why he’s here: to get some first-hand information.

  He wouldn’t let me accompany him on his walk through the village. He assumes I’m in league with Vieru.

  ‘Stay at the oilfield and do your job. I’ll wander around on my own.’

  In the evening he came to my workplace to get me. I was in boots, overalls and a short-sleeved collarless shirt. It seems I’ve turned terribly dark in the sun over the last few weeks.

  ‘You resemble a stonemason,’ he said to me. ‘It makes me happy to look at you.’

  Like a stonemason … I don’t know about that. But I do feel free, at peace, ready to take things as they come, to await their unfolding with acceptance, to behold them without fear, to lose them without despair. I think of the big personal problems I used to have and I don’t understand them. I don’t understand them, and good riddance.

  Life is easy. Life is terribly easy.

  *

  It rained two days in a row and the road from the cabin to Old Uioara is full of mud. I made a mighty fire in the stove and spent both evenings reading until past midnight. It smells of autumn – and we’re only in September. It brightened a little this morning and I thought the weather was picking up, but then it began pouring again, even more heavily.

  At five, I received a visit that took me aback. Marjorie Dunton, in a raincoat, bareheaded, wet and trembling and noisy. (I hadn’t seen her in recent days. Except for once, last
Wednesday I think, on the way to Prahova. She was with Dronţu, whom I just greeted in passing as he seemed terribly embarrassed.)

  ‘I’ve come to get you out of your lair.’

  I found for her a dry blanket, slippers, a dressing gown and settled her by the fire so she could dry her hair, which, being so wet, was no longer blonde.

  I made tea and had her drink it with lots of cognac.

  So, we talked about this and that … I told her that in three or four days I would be leaving for Bucharest.

  ‘I know. You left around this time last year too.’

  I like the direct way she speaks, without pauses, without pushiness, rather boyishly.

  Later, Marin came in from the oilfield, not at all surprised at finding her with me. We walked her home together and, several times, where there was too much mud, I carried her over, swinging her and singing ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’.

  She sang, triumphantly twirling the beret I’d given her to cover her head.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary

  It’s a long way to go …

  2

  The November issue of Der Querschnitt features a long essay on Mircea Vieru’s work, with photographs, scale models and reproductions. A special section on the Uioara project.

  So, success. Definitive, incontrovertible success, from beyond the horizons of Bucharest. Who would have said, years ago, that it would come so soon?

  When the professor took me the first time to Vieru’s house, I found him at the lowest point of his career. He was close to giving up the fight. If Ralph T. Rice hadn’t appeared from nowhere, Vieru would have been a broken man. I still don’t know today how he managed to put up with so much.

  I couldn’t open a newspaper without finding a piece of news, an act of treachery, a farce. Everywhere, in the gossip columns, the society pages, in humorous magazines, in caricatures, the ‘affair of the day’, everywhere Mircea Vieru, only Mircea Vieru, every day Mircea Vieru. Every gaffe was attributed to him, every piece of nonsense was spoken by him, every joke was on him. In the summer, in the Cărăbuş review theatre, Tănase, with a trowel in one hand and a brick in the other, recited a couplet explaining the whole ‘affair’. Everybody laughed terribly, and I remember I found it amusing myself at the time. I later learned that Vieru had made a point of not leaving Bucharest that summer, so that it couldn’t be said of him that he was trying not to be seen. What cruel moments he must have lived through, he who is so proud, so sensitive to the smallest detail, such a child when it comes to slights and revenge.

  It was mostly out of curiosity that I accepted when the professor offered to recommend me to Vieru for a place in his workshop. A second-year student, I didn’t have high hopes of any great personal success with an architectural firm; I lacked even a basic grasp of what was going on with which to orient myself. But the man interested me; he had initiated so many attacks, got involved in so many struggles, and aroused such opposition. Everyone was against him: the press, his peers, the school, officialdom, ministries, all Bucharest, all Romania, the whole world.

  ‘You’re going to meet the most detested person on the face of the planet,’ said the professor, climbing the stairs ahead of me, to the office.

  The most detested person on the face of the planet! Blond, blue-green eyes, a bright, open smile, a modest bearing, with unexpected flashes of pride, nervous hands, a deep, even voice, never raised, though often giving an impression of vehemence, by emphasis, phrasing, pauses … The abominable Mircea Vieru looked something between a schoolboy and an amateur botanist. Only later, getting to know him, did I realize that his forcefulness, of which they make so much, is not imaginary. On the contrary, it is very sharp and penetrating. It is an intellectual force, an objective force in the world of values and ideas, which has nothing to do with his personal goodness and limitless generosity. Vieru is forceful as only the good can be, disinterestedly, passionately, freely. I now understand well that poison vortex in 1923, which he had to rise above at all costs.

  When, immediately following the war, Mircea Vieru came up with some rather insolent notions in his works on architecture and town planning, he seemed more amusing than anything. ‘That damned Vieru,’ would think his fellow architects, with a mixture of vague admiration and disbelief.

  ‘Architecture isn’t a private matter between a man with money and a man with a diploma. Architecture is a matter of communal life. Any liberties can be taken, but the liberty of bad taste may not. A badly conceived house is a disturbance of the peace.’

  ‘That damned Vieru!’

  But when Mircea Vieru went from general ideas and opinions to the nitty-gritty of individual cases, naming names and involving people and projects, things took another turn. Toes were stepped on – and that’s a serious matter.

  For some three years, this man did nothing but denounce. A building over a certain size couldn’t be built without him putting it on trial publicly and in writing. In detail, with photographs, figures, names, following the entire process step by step, checking, challenging, attacking. He no longer took any interest in his own projects. What excited him now about architecture were its fashions, errors, clichés and pointless attempts at innovation. He had stopped being an architect and had become a pamphleteer. How many competitions were disrupted by one of his inopportune interventions, how many contract-winners were endangered by him, how many artistic collaborations fell apart as a result of his lack of tact! They still laughed, here and there, at his audacity, at his extraordinary polemical verve, but it was nervous laughter. Because no one knew what was coming next from this blond, edgy, intolerant little man who spent the little money he had printing magazines of art and criticism, which he wrote, corrected and administered alone, exhausted by work but relentlessly passionate.

  His pamphlet Academic Bombast and Revolutionary Bombast caused complete bafflement. Everyone had known Vieru as a modernist. Now nobody knew what he was any more. Anything was possible and there was no way to protect yourself. Vieru disposed of your peace, your freedom, your private arrangements. For three straight years he was the artistic police, spreading panic, sowing enmities that would bide their time, awaiting their moment. The moment wasn’t long in coming. Vieru’s first misstep gave the signal. And it truly was imprudent of him to accept at that moment a project in the Engineers’ Park. They gave him sole responsibility for building an entire neighbourhood. Admittedly, the enterprise was dizzyingly attractive for a man who had dreamed of nothing his whole life but building something grand, extensive, new, from scratch, his alone to direct and plan. But had he been more prudent, he would have known the moment was not propitious. A man in the midst of such hostility would not be granted the peace needed to create. A prickly Vieru would be put up with as long as he was poor. How could you hurt him? By attacking his intelligence? His passion for dispute? Lucky enough to possess nothing, how could he be condemned for compromising, for being afraid, for being cautious? But a Vieru engaged in something big, a Vieru on the path to realizing a grand project, went from being dangerous to being vulnerable. Very vulnerable. The day the ex-pamphleteer stepped on the site, his fate was sealed: there were old scores to settle and slights to be avenged.

  And what a show it was! And not just the newspaper articles, the coffee-shop talk and the anonymous letters to the consortium that had hired Vieru. He could have defeated all that alone, he who knew about writing, arguing and declaiming. But there were neighbourhood meetings too, protesting against ‘the disfiguring of our Capital by irresponsibly ceding the construction of an entire neighbourhood to a pretentious bungler’.

 
And then there were questions raised in Parliament, telegrams to the Minister for the Arts, ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations in front of City Hall, mass walkouts of workers …

  I remember well those enormous placards hanging from a cart pulled down Calea Victoriei by a donkey who became popular very quickly.

  Citizens of Bucharest! Will you tolerate a newcomer’s risky experiments in your city, in the capital of a united Romania? Will you permit the sacrifice of the most picturesque corner of the citadel of Bucur?

  I didn’t know the master during that period, and I would have been indifferent to the whole story if I hadn’t had an instinctual glimmer of sympathy for the man who had drawn such unanimous enmity. I followed the affair in the papers and was very distressed to one day read that ‘good sense triumphs at last, architect Mircea Vieru’s contract has been revoked and work at the Engineers’ Park has halted, to general satisfaction’.

  I met him several months later, in autumn.

  It was an empty office. His friends had one by one deserted him, no clients appeared, the summer had passed without any work and winter was coming with no projects in store. Vieru was writing a pamphlet to ‘set the record straight’ about the sad affair of the revoked contract. He wrote at night to give us an overwrought read in the morning, complete with gestures and outbursts. He was at war with the universe: with the government, with Parliament, with City Hall, with the Liberal Party, with the Romanian people. When he found a strident phrase, he perked up: ‘I’ll show them.’ It was hard to say what he was going to demonstrate, or to whom.

  One man alone remained always by his side, sharing his fury and suffering his disappointments: Marin Dronţu. He carried a stick and had obtained a permit for a gun. What he really wanted was to shoot one of the ‘thugs’ who wrote in the papers against his master, and if he didn’t do it, it was only because it was hard to know where to start. But there were some suspicious fights at night, resulting in some bloodied heads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dronţu had a hand in them. And today, when I ask him, he smiles mysteriously. ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see anything.’