I didn’t manage to answer. He had only five minutes to catch the train. He shouted from the bottom of the stairs:
‘Come to Uioara some Sunday. It would make Marjorie happy.’
So, she was here last week. At another time she would have burst into the workshop in the morning and shouted from the doorway: ‘I’m kidnapping you. You’re mine until 22.17.’
… And that stupid lie about the opening lecture, which she didn’t even attend. It’s not your style, Marjorie, to lie.
And I would have bet that in adultery you would have remained straightforward and without cowardice.
Now I understand Dronţu’s sensitivity, his inability to bear Professor Ghiţă’s lecture for fear of it being too rough on the master.
Today, in the office, I said to Marin in passing:
‘Phillip Dunton was here yesterday. We met at the office.’
For a good few seconds dear old Marin kept his thoughts to himself: to hear or not to hear what I was saying? He opted for deafness.
‘Who took my set square?’ he suddenly bellowed. ‘Yesterday I left it here, and now it’s gone. Maybe we’re haunted. It’s unbelievable. You can’t work in this place.’
The louder he bellowed, the falser the outburst sounded to him. Not knowing how to end it, he shouted even louder.
Then he suddenly went quiet, frowning and sombre. He muttered from time to time, shrugged his shoulders, swore by all the saints.
He caught up with me in the street after work.
‘Why don’t we go get a brandy?’
‘Sure.’
‘Come on, then.’
And, later, on the way, apropos of nothing. ‘To hell with women. I’m telling you, there’s no end to the trouble they bring.’
*
A long, despairing letter from young Dogany. Things are not going at all well in Budapest. The university has been closed again, there have been major disturbances, street battles, arrests. He himself received a pretty bad blow to the head.
‘Everything would be fine and I’d put up with it all, if at least I could manage to stay. On Thursday I have to present my papers at the secretariat of the faculty for another review. Will I be allowed to stay? Will I be expelled? My father threatens to cut off my allowance if I don’t return to Satu Mare. But I can’t, I simply can’t. What can I do there, in a country that’s not mine? But is Hungary my country? Yes, absolutely, whatever my father says and however much you might laugh. Only one man could understand me, if he were alive today: Endre Ady. I’d write to him and I’m sure he’d understand me.’
I wrote back:
Dear Pierre Dogany, stay where you are. It’ll pass, you’ll see. Six years ago I went through what you’re going through now. It has passed, and one day I’ll forget. They beat you up? It’s nothing. They’ll beat you up ten times, then they’ll get tired of it. Do I laugh at you? Yes, I admit I laugh and your Hungarian fervour strikes me as comic. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. In your place, I’d do the same thing. In your place I did do the same thing.
Today, everything has settled down calmly and nicely. Sometimes I recall my past despairs and I don’t understand them. They seem embarrassingly childish.
Force yourself not to suffer. Don’t allow yourself to indulge your suffering. There’s a great voluptuousness in persecution and feeling yourself wronged is probably one of the proudest of private pleasures. Be vigilant and don’t indulge such pride. Try to take whatever comes with a certain good humour. Think how ridiculous we would be if we were alarmed at every shower of rain that soaked us. Believe me, what’s happening to you now, however sad it may be, is no more than a shower.
*
I’ve tried to remember where I know Arnold Max from but it just won’t come to me. I no longer have any idea of the place or the circumstances of our first meeting.
I’ve so often promised myself to limit my relations with people, but I’m incapable of controlling myself. The ease with which various acquaintances manage to crowd around me is intolerable. At first they’re neither hot nor cold nor black nor white, but eventually, without me realizing it, I become subject to suffocating demands.
One evening I sat and thought of my connections with various people, and was alarmed to realize how many of my friends are superfluous and uninteresting. You just find yourself surrounded by the dramas and farces that pop up in the wake of your indifference and one day make their demands on you. Why? How? When? It’s too late to figure it out and, in any case, too late to put it right.
You’d need to be cruelly vigilant at every moment, to pinch the shoots of all those attempts at cordiality that will eventually make you their victim. I dream of a life reduced to a few carefully chosen relationships, perhaps three or four, and only those I find strictly necessary and which serve my personal needs. The rest held at a distance, in the well-guarded zone of brief greetings in the street, from where no effusions, confessions and emotionalism can reach you. The first concession, the first weakness, is fatal.
Take Arnold Max, for example. Yesterday he spoiled my whole afternoon, dragging me up and down streets, in order to tell me of his endless problems in art and life.
‘Interesting fellow.’ But I, for one, am not a novelist and to hell with all these ‘interesting’ fellows, I’ve no use for them.
Another of those fevered types. He’s thirty-three but looks twenty-two, small, slight, with a face like that of a frightened badger, his raincoat flapping in the wind, pockets stuffed with pieces of paper (laundry receipts, verses, beginnings of poems, love letters, modernist manifestos). I’m curious what logic underlies the association of the ideas he articulates in conversation.
‘Greetings … Lucky I met you, come on Thursday evening to Costaridi’s, everyone will be there … You know, I’ve discovered a great novelist; the greatest of them all, he’s fabulous … Leon Trotsky. The episode of the dead person in Finland from Mein Leben is Dostoyevsky, pure Dostoyevsky … That imbecile Costaridi was telling me about that Moréas of his again … I can no longer breathe with the number of windbags that have sprung up in this generation. Listen, about Moréas … I’ll say it loud and clear: Tardieu’s dead. There’s a scheme involving Herriot and then there’ll be a social revolution … Stănescu told me once that his socks cost 600 lei a pair.’
He talks a tremendous amount, with a strange, nervous volubility, in which you hear a dozen thoughts, ideas and memories muttering at once. Each thought remains uncompleted. He trails them behind him like so much torn paper, snagged on random words or images.
I have the impression that he speaks from a fear of silence, from a fear of finding himself alone.
‘What do you think about when you’re alone?’
‘What do you mean, alone?’
‘Just now, for example, before you bumped into me. You were walking along the street, no? And there was no one with you. Therefore, you were alone. So, what were you thinking about?’
He stops dead for a moment, trying to remember.
‘Wait a minute … What was I thinking about … I don’t know …’
Arnold Max, the-man-whom-nothing-happens-to. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t go to the theatre, doesn’t go out, isn’t interested in people or books. There’s no woman in his life, no friends. Nothing. A desert haunted by moods, by problems.
He’s always writing, adding things, erasing. I wonder if he’s ever calmly and patiently listened to his own verses. He doesn’t have the time. He has to be writing them. His life is plunged in them, immersed
in them, besieged by them. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he pulls a piece of paper or a visiting card from some pocket, from which he reads for half an hour, with a kind of fury or enthusiasm to devour it all, poem and paper. It’s all the same to him whether you listen or not. He reads on with a certain cold illumination, ready to brave an ocean of indifference. Most of all his own indifference, which is greater than his passion for poetry, half-simulated in order to give some sense to the terrible void in which he lives and from which he flees.
It’s the poetry of a man who’s lonely, troubled, drunk on unexpected bursts of pure melody, and it is painfully simple for such a complicated man. Out of all his writings, I like the ‘Five Tales for a Small Voice’. The rest is tiresome and obscure. He has talent, I know. Everybody agrees. But I want a life without poisonings, fireworks and problems. A life of ‘good day’, ‘good evening’, ‘the bread is white’, ‘stone is hard’, ‘the poplar is tall’.
*
I glimpsed Majorie Dunton in a tram. I don’t think she saw me. And she was also here last Thursday. (Hacker from accounting brought her by motor car and I heard it from his mouth.) ‘Give her my regards, if you’re heading back together this evening.’ ‘No,’ Hacker replied, ‘I’m going back alone. Mrs Dunton is spending the night in Bucharest.’
On Friday, in the workshop, I dropped it on Dronţu. ‘Did you sleep well last night, Marin?’
Stupid question.
*
Sami Winkler called by to see me at the workshop, to ask me for a letter of recommendation for Ralph T. Rice.
‘Are you looking to be a miner?’
‘It’s not for me. It’s for some boys we’re training for going to Palestine. And they need a couple of months’ experience in a refinery. I thought you might be able to smooth the way in the head office. Unpaid work, you understand.’
I brought Winkler round to Piaţa Rosetti and introduced him to old Ralph. I think he’s going to do it.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Winkler, and excuse me for asking. Did you complete your thesis?’
‘I abandoned it a long time ago. It no longer interests me. I’ll stay another two or three years, then I’m leaving. I’ll be a farmer in some colony.’
‘Why a farmer? Don’t they need doctors over there?’
‘Doctors perhaps, but not diplomas. I’ll be working the land somewhere, in a colony, and when a doctor’s needed I’ll act as a doctor. I still know how to do a bandage.’
Winkler means what he says. For the last four years he’s worked from spring to autumn on a farm in Bessarabia organized by Zionists to train pioneers.
‘I’m not boasting, but I can plough very well.’
He says this simply, without giving himself airs, almost with indifference, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Explain to me, please, why you’re leaving. In 1923 it would have been understandable. But today, now that things have settled down? I’ve the impression that everything has changed over the last five years. It’s safer, there’s more goodwill, more understanding. You can breathe, you can talk with people.’
‘Perhaps. But I’m leaving, not running away. I’m not leaving because it’s bad here and there it’s good, but simply because I can’t live anywhere in the world but there. I’m a Zionist, not a deserter. Listen, in 1923, in the middle of anti-Semitic unrest, Zionism was at its apogee, while today, when everything is calm and prosperous, Zionism finds itself in crisis. But I prefer this Zionism in crisis, because it’s made up of determined people, while the Zionism of 1923 was made up of frightened people.’
*
Evening at Costaridi’s. Long arguments about angst, contemporary neurosis, Gide, the war generation, Berdyaev … I’m amazed at the verve with which people can discuss angst while drinking a coffee. In 1923, in my green notebook period, I would probably have argued passionately. These days I experience a very specific discomfort in dealing with any broad problem, whether it’s angst or destiny or crisis … It’s the abuse of language that puts me off.
Look at Radu Şiriu, broad-shouldered, fit, pink and plump, declaring, with no sense of the ridiculous, as if in a Russian novel:
‘I know nothing, I don’t understand anything: I’m experiencing a crisis.’
How does he manage not to choke on the poor taste of such a declaration? ‘It’s trivial,’ I remark to those around me.
‘Yes, trivial,’ says Ştefan D. Pârlea, picking up the remark from the other corner. ‘Yes, it’s in poor taste. So what? Is that what we need? To be delicate, spiritual, sceptical? A culture based on good manners – it disgusts me. Don’t feel any pain, because it’s in poor taste. Don’t scream, because of what the neighbours will say? Don’t live, it isn’t polite. Dear people, enough of this stupidity. We’ve had ten generations of sceptics who’ve checked themselves in the mirror all the time, with the excuse that they have a critical spirit. I want us to say, to hell with all these proprieties and let’s live. Stormily, without good taste, unrestrainedly and unfastidiously, but with a personal voice, with authentic feelings.’
Pârlea looks straight at me, with barely controlled violence. He polishes his glasses nervously, in order to see me better, his eyes shooting lightning that has been long gathering there to smite me. Beautiful forehead: proud, high, challenging, lit by his flashing eyes, which his short-sightedness makes that bit more intense. I’m attached to this adversity as to a friendship. I can’t explain it, I can’t understand it, but from the first day I sensed in this person an unshakable resolve. And, in a world of easy-going attachments, it’s no small thing to spontaneously earn serious enmity. A raw, healthy human enmity you can really count on.
And more, he’s the only person for whom these vague expressions – crisis, angst, authenticity – have vital meaning. His essay in The Thought – ‘An Invocation for the Barbarians to Invade as soon as Possible’ – showed for the first time the possibility of a spiritual position from which one could say with a measure of justification: ‘We, the young, who have come of age since the war.’ Pârlea’s cast of mind is too lyrical for my taste, while to him I must seem too sceptical. I would like only to make him understand that it’s not possible to be desperate and to hold debates at the Foundation on desperation, or to be anxious and to discuss angst. I’d like to tell him that these things, if they are real, are emotions, and that emotions are for living, not for chatting about. There is some demon of oratory in Pârlea’s nature which impels him towards speechifying, a thing I am altogether incapable of, since all my quarrels are with myself. To argue until two in the morning at Mişu Costaridi’s about ‘angst’ and then go home to bed is the height of comedy. Unfortunately Pârlea has no sense of humour.
S.T. Haim (a good friend of Pârlea’s – since when?) added his own Marxist spiel:
‘An “anxious generation” … How amusing you are, friends. The key to your problem lies elsewhere. You’re a generation of proletarians without class consciousness. There are fewer jobs, the scholarships are miserable, all the places are taken. You’ve been left out and so, for the sake of something to do, you engage in metaphysics. One day you’ll see that the bourgeois democratic state no longer accommodates you – and then you’ll join the revolution. That’ll blow your angst away, you’ll see.’
5
Only yesterday evening, leaving the office, I remembered it was 10 December. I was with Marin Dronţu, heading down towards Calea Victoriei. It was snowing sumptuously, with immense flakes, like a New Year’s Eve, and there was a real festive bustle in the street, the good-natured hum of a cheerful Sunday. At Cap
şa’s, on the corner, our way was blocked by a procession of students coming down from University Square.
‘What could this be?’ mused Dronţu. ‘Tenth of December,’ we remembered simultaneously, laughing. I have to admit there was a celebratory air to the whole demonstration, the light-hearted rambunctious mood of the start of the holidays. We stopped along with everyone else at the roadside to watch the march.
‘Down with the Yids! Down with the Yids!’
The shout passed from column to column, syllable by syllable, in a long, winding chain of sound. It was beautiful: I ask myself if that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but it really was beautiful. A crowd of young men – most of them certainly first-year students. Tremendous high spirits, an atmosphere of schoolyard fun. Nothing serious.
We remembered our first 10 December, Dronţu with enthusiasm, me with a trace of bitterness.
‘The blows I dealt that day,’ he testifies.
‘Perhaps you were the one who struck me.’
‘Perhaps. Where did it happen?’
‘In the main lecture hall in Law.’
‘No, I wasn’t there. Us architecture students went to the college of medicine, because we didn’t have enough Jews in with us.’
He is moved, almost. It would be unfair of me not to understand: these are his memories of his younger days. They’re mine too – though they’re less cheerful. In any case, it would be grotesque of me to want to get indignant about these dead and buried matters. It’s not serious or aggressive any more. These ‘Down with the Yids’ of today are almost innocent, almost likable.
We strolled until late, relating innumerable tales of those times. Marin boasted of his deeds.
‘Back then I had a cudgel you wouldn’t believe. The Jews scarpered at the sight of me. I’d become famous at the faculty of medicine. ‘Dronţu from architecture.’ Who hadn’t heard of me? I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of me … I was wild!’
For Two Thousand Years Page 14