Isn’t it strange that I find myself good friends today with the unhappy heroes from the notebook of 1923?
I couldn’t say exactly how the successive truces which have brought us together were made. In any case, in our first year of university we were thrown into opposite corners, while today we find ourselves together in the same place. It’s no small matter.
A new page has been turned, and new questions arise. The uproar at the university was fine and well, but insufficient. You can’t build a life out of that kind of thing. Not even for those engaged in ‘a struggle to claim their rights’. Nor for us, whose struggle concerned ‘internal problems’.
I realize, as though in the wake of a storm, that the same winds buffeted us both and that we were being wrecked in the same sinking vessel. It’s easy to cry ‘Hooligans’, and very convenient. It’s almost as simple as ‘Down with the Yids’. Is that all there was to our little drama?
Back then I guessed there was something else to it. Now I’m sure of it. But it’s got nothing to do with a natural bandit like Marin Dronţu. It concerns Pârlea. Marin Dronţu flailing about with his cudgel is irrelevant. He’s just a demonstrator. Pârlea is a more serious case and, with him in mind, I wonder if it is always easier to be a hooligan than a victim. I have no doubt that Pârlea has suffered greatly through the path he has taken. His political nihilism, his innocent revolts and his formidable imprecations perhaps show puerility of thought, but what is interesting is not their quality, but his sincerity in living them, the passion he submits them to. It goes without saying, when someone is beating your head with a stick, it’s all the same to you whether he’s a bandit or a hero, and I won’t get so precious about it as to declare I’d prefer to be killed by an ideological revolver than by an illiterate one.
Though I can see my personal situation as being just as bad either way, I can still allow myself to reflect a little on my aggressor. Well, in the case of Ştefan Pârlea, I don’t envy him at all. Student unrest was for me perhaps a tragedy, but it was for him too. I provoked him one evening into speaking about his role in the movement. He replied with deliberate harshness.
‘I’m not sorry about what happened. I’m sorry about how it ended: in indifference, in forgetting … Smashing windows is fine. Any act of violence is good. “Down with the Yids” is idiotic, agreed! But what does it matter? The point is to shake the country up a bit. Begin with the Jews – if there’s no other way. But finish higher up, with a general conflagration, with an all-consuming earthquake. That was our ambition back then, our real aspiration. But I for one have not finished. I’ll suffocate if nothing new happens.’
Perhaps Ştefan Pârlea is being poetic, with his symbols and myths, but in fact this tumult is for him a form of political thought. Who can guarantee that S.T. Haim’s ideas and calculations are closer to the truth than Ştefan Pârlea’s visions? What I find refreshing in this fellow is his total incapacity for schematic thought. His thinking is a flash-flood that demolishes, overturns and embraces, without method or criteria, according to the rhythms of his frenetic outbursts. I can trace in his habitual vocabulary a number of terms that he has never properly clarified, either in writing or speech, but which have some magical significance for him. He’d probably find it difficult to say exactly what is meant by the ‘barbarian invasion’ he calls for, or by ‘the seeds of fire’ he says lie latent in each of us, and which we need to blow into mighty blazes. It’s all so vague and inconsistent as to sometimes seem ridiculous … Yet Ştefan Pârlea passes from words to action with utter commitment. His departure from the university, for example, which came as an immense relief to everyone as, with a little patience, he would have been a lecturer within a few years, was not permitted to be a mere departure.
‘The only thing I can do for the university is burn it down,’ is what he is said to have written to the dean in an explanatory letter.
Even if this was what he really wrote, I still don’t see what the fuss was about. The recklessness of youth. A poor person has to compensate internally for poverty by slamming a few doors. Otherwise he’ll never learn to open life’s big doors. Pârlea’s abandonment of university was certainly a piece of nonsense, but I tell myself it was a healthy one. Or could have been.
But it turned out otherwise. And other pieces of foolishness followed, some were harder to explain than others. I confess that his escapade at Records is beyond me. Sub-archivist at the Ministry of Records? Perhaps. Perhaps, though, it’s stupid to accept such a low-ranking, badly paid and menial job when you could have been a professor or the editor of a big magazine. And, once finding yourself there, to continue experimenting with self-mutilation seems like childish play-acting.
In September he was listed for promotion; he would have received a higher salary and have been moved to the central office. He turned it down. He just returned the difference in money to the cashier, saying he wouldn’t accept a penny over 3,300 lei. ‘He’s crazy,’ they said at the ministry three days later, where the news passed from office to office, from person to person. The General Secretary called him to his office, in order to take a look at ‘the man who turns down money’.
‘Are you in your right mind, good man?’
‘I believe so,’ replied Pârlea, without further explanation.
But he erupted that evening, among us, when I reproached him for performing experiments ‘pour épater les bourgeois’.
‘You turned down 1,200 lei in exchange for the chance to astound a ministry of 600 people. That’s 2 lei per person. Never has a reputation been bought so cheaply.’
‘You’re fools. What did you want me to do? To receive an extra 1,000 lei today, another 1,000 next year? To be sub-archivist today, next year head archivist, main archivist, general archivist? Is that why I escaped from where I escaped from? Don’t you see that any job you accept from this state implies complicity? That every success in this culture is a betrayal? I want to demolish. I want to burn down. And to do this I have to keep my hands free. I don’t want to have anything to cling to, anything to lose, anything to protect. Nothing to hold me back on the day everything gets fed to the grinder. You accept a lectureship with the idea of working, and one day find that the 15,000 lei they give you are indispensable, that along with them you’ve created needs, imposed obligations on yourself. The habits you acquire end up choking you, paralysing you. You become prudent, cowardly, grow old. The great perfidy of the order we live in is that it makes us its unconscious servants. And it buys us cheaply, by stealth. You know, I look at you and it scares me. Scares me. You’ve all got your own little affairs, your own little things going on, your own little arrangements. Your wasted years disgust me. I wish you’d get pot bellies faster, that your hair would hurry up and fall out, once and for all. The great conflagration is coming without you, it doesn’t need you, it doesn’t burn in your hearts …’
What I find interesting about Pârlea’s problem is that its origin lies in the movement of 1923. What remains from those years is not only the bloodied heads, the careers that were made and a steady engagement with anti-Semitism, but also a revolutionary spirit, a seed of a sincere rebellion against the world in which we live. This seed of revolution couldn’t be seen from our unfortunate dormitory in Văcăreşti, but my unhappy memories are perhaps not the only testimony capable of shedding light on those years. Certainly no one is going to blame me for this, as you can’t expect exercises in moral objectivity or a dissertation on higher reasoning from someone who gets beaten perhaps twice a week, on average. Being persecuted is not just a physical trial. It is one that affects you intellectually. The reality
of it slowly deforms you and attacks, above all, your sense of proportion. Now is not the moment to reproach myself for being slow to understand my assailants. That would be a belated and grotesque excess of objectivity. But I’m glad that times have changed in such a way that I can meditate in peace on the justifications for the beatings. The role of martyr has never sat entirely well with me, though I recognize in myself enough of a tendency towards this peculiarly Jewish occupation.
Pârlea represents the opposing side. For a long time I could see and understand nothing of it, owing to the endless coils of barbed wire strewn between us. It’s so comfortable and consoling to regard your adversaries as bad and stupid, to the point that, in my lamentable desperation back then, it was the sole crutch available, the last remaining bit of pride. That was a long time ago. More than the relatively few years that have passed. The clouded waters have cleared where the trouble was superficial and become yet more stirred up where the trouble ran deep. People have made their choices, opinions have hardened, foolishness has found the company of foolishness, truths have become more marked. Everything is more ordered. Perhaps the time has come to write the history of the anti-Semitic movement. By which I mean ‘the human comedy’ of people and what they thought rather than the dry facts of actual history, which I am familiar with and which have nothing new to tell. I’m convinced that once I excluded the imbeciles, the professional troublemakers, the agitators, the scattering of layabouts and dimwits, and after identifying in turn brutality, stupidity and scheming, there would still be something that would be a real drama. And that’s when Ştefan D. Pârlea would appear.
6
Ghiţă Blidaru’s course has become something of an ‘official matter’. Last Saturday a deputy from the biggest party asked the government at question time if it was going to tolerate the university becoming a centre of political unrest.
‘The authority of the state must not be disturbed, Minister, from behind the mask of general theories.’ (The evening papers reproduced this phrase as a headline.)
In fact, nothing serious happened. There were just some lectures about the liberal economic legislation of 1924. Very calm lectures in style, very violent in their stances and conclusions. Starting with the mining law of Vintilă Brătianu, Blidaru has analysed Romanian liberalism. The party is alarmed, the government bored. Vintilă Brătianu must have made a fuss at the last council. ‘He must desist, gentlemen. He must desist.’
Blidaru did not desist at all. For next week he has announced an inquiry into the stabilization plan and credit mechanism that’s being prepared. What’s peculiar about this whole struggle is that while the newspapers are censored and all opposition excluded, an economics professor can openly attack anything he wants and there’s no way to stop him.
Professor Ghiţă’s situation is excellent. He teaches his course, follows his schedule, and nothing else. However, his lectures have become the last refuge for anti-liberalism. The whole public crowds in. Blidaru, unaffected, converses with his students. He has been discreetly offered several foreign posts: the presidency of an economic delegation in Paris or, should he wish, a small delegation in a neighbouring state. He’s refused them all. ‘We’ll see, later, in the summer break. For now, I have my lectures to finish.’
I have trouble understanding his passion for politics. He has no personal ambition to satisfy, no fights to win. He’s certainly no warrior. He is an idler of genius. Rather than marching forward to meet life, he sits still and lets it come to him.
If I’ve learned anything from Ghiţă Blidaru, it is exactly this lack of aggression in dealing with life. His laziness is that of a plant, of a tree. Life grows and decays, storms come and go, death waits somewhere, in the shadows – all harmonious. I believe nothing will ever surprise Blidaru or shake his composure. Not because he is sure of himself, but because he is sure of the earth he walks upon and the sky he finds himself beneath.
‘Worries? Where do you find worries in this world full of certainties? Shouldn’t the simple fact that the sun rises and sets be enough to reassure us?’
If he had been a carpenter, a stonemason, a boatman on the Danube, a ploughman in Vâlcea, his thinking would be no different to what it is today. He is the only man I know whom I feel that fate can do nothing to harm, because he accepts fate, submitting happily to whatever it brings.
With his formidable laziness, his deliberate lack of initiative (‘I have nothing to do with life, life has everything to do with me’), Blidaru is ready to waste every big opportunity, to miss every decisive rendezvous which good or bad fortune arranges. He will always find a book to open in the final hour, a woman to love. For him, nothing is urgent. He has told me so countless times. Every joy has its season, and every pain. Let’s await the passing of the seasons. It’s useless to hurry, because you can’t arrive too soon for winter, which comes to meet you. There is an autumn for every hope, a springtime for each despair. In this race you can never come too early or late: you always come on time, whether you wish to or not.
*
I don’t know how many persistent pains, hidden deaths or unanswered questions Ghiţă Blidaru faces with equanimity. But I can guess. He has made countless renunciations in the fields of intelligence, pride, victory and excitement. Each one of us is barricaded within himself, and most of us seek to strengthen our barricades, to make our inner defences impermeable, while he cooperates with life to knock them down, surrendering before the fight, already beaten. Beaten? No. At most, he has conquered his own self.
7
I’ve been to Uioara to see how things are going. Rice bores us time and again about every accident with a heater, a lift or lighting. The master wanted a first-hand report.
I’d have liked to have stayed in the cabin where it’s not cold at all once a good fire gets going. But the Duntons wouldn’t hear of it. Marjorie was waiting for me at the station with Eva Nicholson.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. Then, in the sleigh, she was quiet the whole time. Eva was asking me about everything and though I answered in a lively enough fashion, I had the impression that Marjorie was paying no attention. She was extraordinarily serious, in her blue ski-suit that gives her that impossibly adolescent air. At the corner of Ursu, she asked the sleigh-driver to stop, and nodded her head to indicate the snow-laden oil wells in the distance.
‘Look how desolate it is.’
To me, the landscape looked peaceful rather than desolate.
In the afternoon I worked at the refinery and took a walk to the oil wells, to see what could be done to put old Ralph’s mind at rest. His alarm was unnecessary. The inevitable trivialities.
In the evening, I spent a long time talking with Marjorie.
Her serious smile, her temples illuminated with blonde hair, her lively young hands were the same as ever, but she was listening as if someone had told her to behave herself. What I still like most about this girl is how she moves, her bearing, the way she leans against a wall, the rather lazy way she sits in an armchair, the sudden way she rises as if frightened. There’s an odd mix of awkwardness and sureness in all her movements, in the way she speaks, in her attention as she listens to you, in her loyal laughter.
She talked about the books she’s been reading, played several pieces for me on the piano, gave me a short theoretical lesson on skiing and put me in the role of judge between her and Phillip, to decide who can get down from Uioara to the Ursu Corner fastest.
‘Tomorrow morning we’ll have a race,’ I proposed.
‘No, tomorrow morning we have other plans for you. It’s a surprise.’
The surprise was a walk to the cabin. I found it all tidy and clean, as if I’d never left. On the brick chimney, two framed pictures: Marin Dronţu and myself. Between them, a small photograph in which I could just make out Marjorie from last summer, in sandals and a tennis dress.
‘Who put these pictures here?’
‘I did. Sometimes I come to the cabin to read. I don’t know, I find it more beautiful here. As if I weren’t alone. I have someone from the refinery to get a fire going in the stove and then I come and spend an hour or two. Look there, in the cupboard, there’s tea, rum and sugar. You can’t imagine how I like doing the housekeeping here, where you two stayed. And look what lovely expressions you have, you and Dronţu, in the photos.’
She laughs. She goes up to the chimney and curls an arm around the post on the right, as though around a man’s neck.
It’s hot, the water for the tea snoozing in the teapot, a dry oak log crackling in the fire. The windows are white with snow and it gives me the feeling that we are far away, in a mountain refuge, overtaken by an avalanche that has cut off our route of return. For a moment, I wonder if I’m going to get up and walk over to Marjorie and take her in my arms and kiss her. We look at each other for a long time, like in a children’s game where you have to try not to be the one to blink first. I close my eyes and my questions receive no answer: yes? no? yes? no?
PART FOUR
* * *
1
A long night with Maurice Buret at the Coupole. All humanity parading before our 1.25-franc glasses of beer. Smiles, shouts of surprise, short familiar scenes, loves, betrayals, dramas … The spectacle became slowly more drunken, with the imperceptible passage of time.
For Two Thousand Years Page 15