For Two Thousand Years

by Mihail Sebastian

  I’ve imagined every gesture dozens of times, and each time it strikes me as either excessive or inadequate. I’m even uneasy about the tin of cigarettes I’m bringing him: I don’t know how to give it to him. I’d like to manage the casual gesture with which you ask someone to help themselves by proffering a cigarette. I’d like to shake his hand simply, as I would in the street, to make it seem nothing has changed, that our meeting here is nothing out of the ordinary, that his presence here in jail isn’t a catastrophe …

  ‘Stop!’

  The driver braked hard, jolting us yet again.

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ he tells me and points to an imaginary line ahead, past which you could only see the points of three bayonets.

  ‘Jilava Prison?’

  ‘Yes. It’s underground.’

  The ringing of the bell, the repeated shouts of the sentries (‘Changing of the guard!’ … ‘Changing of the guard!’ …), the document checks, the suspicious looks from the officer on duty, are all simple, bearable. The only dark and oppressive thing, my old friend S.T. Haim, is this small wooden door at the end of a stone alley, this threshold I will, within minutes – seconds – cross. From here on I am powerless to avert my gaze. From beyond, strange, distant footsteps can be heard, as if from another world. There, the door is opening. I have to come up with a smile. At all costs, I must find it in me to smile.

  Blessed S.T.H.! He appeared in the doorway as stormily as ever, blond, agitated, impatient, his whole face illuminated. He stopped there for a moment to seek me out from twenty metres, from the other side of the bars. How many steps does he take to reach me? One, I think.

  He talks quickly, hastily, with animation, with eyes and hands, with the lock of hair that always flops over his forehead, with his whole being, as though under fierce internal pressure, exulting now with the joy of release.

  ‘If you could know how great it is here! People, the first people I’ve met. Centuries of prison are behind the door, no? Thousands of years. And it’s still not enough, because these people can take it without complaint. I would’ve been ashamed to feel sorry for myself, for my twelve-year sentence. If it weren’t for the lawyers and Mother, I wouldn’t even have appealed. Because this is where I’ll end up in any case. For us in here, there’s no review board, no appeal. I don’t delude myself with that nonsense. But the biggest appeal of all is coming – and coming soon, you might as well know. I don’t know what it’ll be like on Calea Victoriei, but here in the cells there’s a great smell of revolution. Don’t laugh. I can feel it. It’s a definite, physical feeling. There’s not a night I don’t fall asleep thinking that in the morning we could find the doors swinging open. We could be out before the first snowfall.’

  His absurd confidence astounds me. No, I’m not going to grab his shoulder and shake him awake. What good would that do? It’s better if he believes and waits, even if he’s only waiting for a pathetic shadow, a chimera he has taken with him on his journey into a land guarded by machine-guns and rifles.

  Farewell, S.T.H. Ten minutes have passed, and Jilava’s clock is more exact than the clock of history. Jilava measures minutes and seconds, you count out decades and centuries.

  *

  I dropped into the Central, where I was sure to find Ştefan Pârlea. He doesn’t move from here from dawn until after midnight. He has a table at the back, on the right, beside the bar, which everyone recognizes as his domain. It’s been a long time since he’s been at the ministry. He resigned in order to be free. Free to do what? I don’t know. Free for ‘the new dawn’. I’d have liked to tell him that his new nihilist hangout – unkempt and tatty – is ridiculous. But I was afraid he might explode with his old cry: ‘Shut up! You’re an aesthete!’

  I’d gladly avoid him, but he’s the only person who can really tell me what’s going on with S.T.H., why he was arrested, why he was convicted and what his prospects are. His file contains a German police report, which identified him in Berlin three months before his arrest, speaking at a neighbourhood communist meeting. There’s also the evidence of a senior functionary, who heard him speaking loudly on the Orient Express about ‘important secrets about arms’. In addition, depositions, allusions, presuppositions. The whole thing is flimsy and insubstantial. What’s true, though, is that it concerns S.T. Haim, an eager revolutionary any day of the week. It would have been no surprise had he been caught with nitro-glycerine in the pocket of his waistcoat. The man is as capable of carrying a bomb as an umbrella and of calmly depositing it at a cloakroom: ‘Please, put this bomb under my number; though mind it doesn’t go off.’

  Pârlea finds my questions irritating.

  ‘Why did they arrest him? Why did they convict him? Blather and nonsense. They arrested him because they had to. Him yesterday, me today, tomorrow everybody. That’s the only way you can have a revolution: with everyone sent to jail. Is he guilty? Innocent? He gets five years? Fifty-five years? His problem. For us, there’s only one question: is the state at the point of collapse or is it not?’

  ‘I hadn’t taken you for a communist.’

  ‘And I’m not one. What does that mean? Communist, reactionary, left, right … Superstitions, man, half-baked ideas. There’s only an old world and a new one. That’s all. A world that’s at breaking point and one that’s being born. Am I supposed to sit here lamenting S.T. Haim? I’ve no time. Full stop. We’re all stumbling through the night, pell-mell, some falling, others not, each to his fate. When morning comes, we’ll see who’s still standing.’

  Not even here in the café, between two drained glasses of beer, dominating all the tables around with his baritone voice and scaring his timid young listeners, is Mr Ştefan D. Pârlea ridiculous. He has an inspired visage and a firm fist. When he speaks, his gaze moves about the surrounding faces, as though seeking a target. A group of adolescents flanks him like a permanent guard, all awkward in their civilian clothing, their first since leaving school. They smoke a lot and badly, sometimes with too great a show of bravura, sometimes with a nervous twitch that betrays the recent memory of furtively lighting up in water closets. Various pamphlets circulate among them, and they read them avidly, commenting aloud, reciting verses, proclamations, manifestos. They all speak with exaggerated familiarity although they’ve never shaken hands, and never met each other before. Between one and two o’clock, the hubbub suddenly ceases. Everybody is looking for the 26 lei needed for the lunchtime special. Coins pass from table to table, coughed up either amicably or with a bit of swearing. The girls are fewer in number, the occasional one lost amidst a group of boys, jaded waifs in trenchcoats, bareheaded, stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes. It’s hard to know what they are: perhaps students, perhaps cabaret dancers, perhaps just streetwalkers.

  Then there’s one who looks surprisingly like Louise Brooks, in Lulu. All the boys address her by name – Vally – and she responds to them all with the same sweet, bored smile. She wears a green sweater pulled in boyishly at the waist by a belt and on her head a scrap of a beret – also green – that leaves her three-quarters bare head rounded off with a fringe. She visited our table and greeted Pârlea with a vague gesture, raising her index finger to tip the brim of an imaginary hat.

  ‘Got a smoke?’ she asked me in passing, and I proffered my pack of Regalas. She took one, frowning for some reason.

  ‘You look like the heroine in Wedekind.’

  ‘I know. Lulu.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s what they tell me.’

  She went away, her gait more casual and indifferent than lazy.

  I’ve discovered why Vall
y turned up her nose while accepting my cigarette. At the Central they only smoke ‘workingman’s’ cigarettes, cheap cigarettes made with black tobacco. Mine was a bourgeois cigarette. Poets, revolutionaries, free people, those with imagination, visionaries, only smoke proletarian tobacco. My poor 30 lei pack was bad manners, an affront. The frown of the girl who looks like Lulu in Wedekind meant: ‘So that’s the kind you are.’

  There are other rules of conduct at the Central. Don’t do more than raise a finger to greet someone. Under no circumstances, if you wear a hat, must you take it off. Everybody on first-name terms. But don’t formally introduce yourself to anybody. As a rule, everybody here knows everybody. There’s no time for politeness, lies, frivolity. We’re tired – right? – we’re fed up. Rich people, important people, people with pot bellies can fool about all they like. They’ve the time and inclination for joking around. Not us.

  There’s a heavy air of boredom and futility at the Central, despite the constant hubbub. If these fellows aren’t busy being passionate, then they’re pretending to be, if they’re not discouraged, then they play at it. Some of them are very young, aggressive and loud, with pubescent rashes on their faces, young agitators who still haven’t found a job to do. Scattered among them is the occasional attractive adolescent face. There are also a few recent beards and moustaches that are deliberately unkempt, sombre and prophetic. (The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It’s the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.)

  Once inside, it’s hard to leave the Central. Indolence grips you, the dishonest notion that you’re waiting for someone when in fact you’re expecting nobody, you’re just fed up with walking the streets aimlessly. The revolving door spins endlessly, bringing in the same characters. They come and go, then five minutes later they’re back at the same table they left. There’s an air of somnolence, stuffiness, dissipation, a taste of ash, a memory of cigarette-ends.

  Occasionally there’s a heated exchange of ideas or fists at one or other of the tables, and everyone is briefly shaken from their torpor. Then the passing fuss subsides again in the constant dull din of voices.

  There’s a bearded twenty-year-old from Bessarabia who’s supposedly a blacksmith’s son and a genius. He’s translated Alexander Blok and from time to time he comes to life by trumpeting a verse from ‘The Scythians’.

  *

  I came across Vally on her own, leaning back against the bar and watching nothing in particular through half-closed eyes, as though through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. She’s a beautiful girl and her sleek fringe gives her an amiable air which the cigarette doesn’t entirely dispel. I went up to her and made a proposal that caught her off-guard.

  ‘How about taking a walk?’

  For a moment she seemed not to comprehend. (‘A walk? Why?’) She stopped before the doorway, hesitating once more. Rain.

  ‘I hope you’re not put off by a drop of water?’

  She slowly turned up the collar of her trenchcoat, stuck her hands in her pockets and set off with a slightly heroic attitude, as if confronting a storm.

  The old pleasure of strolling in the rain. The shining wet asphalt, the twinkling of distant neon signs, people rushing by, taxi horns blaring and the steady, general, generous rain falling on the rooftops …

  We walked for a good while without speaking. I listened to her footsteps on the asphalt, sounding a little too forced and energetic for her, as though ready for a race of several kilometres. She wore a lightweight raincoat and the rain struck it noisily, making what was little more than a drizzle sound like a storm.

  ‘Why do you come to the Central?’

  She didn’t reply for a moment. She continued walking, bent forward slightly to spare her cheeks from the falling rain. Finally she spoke.

  ‘It’s cheap. Lunch costs 26 lei.’

  ‘So you stay all day? I took you for a student.’

  ‘I am. Kind of. I’m in my third year but I still have exams to repeat from the first year. But I get bored, bored to death … I find it hard to sit at home. Nothing I do works out, I’m sick of it.’

  ‘And you find the Central amusing?’

  ‘Amusing! … No … Well, I don’t know. I can’t seem to avoid it, that’s all. Wherever I’m coming from, wherever I’m going, I drop in. I step in to see what’s new and get talking with someone or other. Next thing you know, time has passed.’

  She talks in a jaded, indifferent tone, either from great boredom or great tiredness.

  ‘But have you never tried to get away from there?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, but I’ve never managed it. In the end, I’m happy the way I am. You think it’s a big deal if you manage to stay away from the Central?’

  ‘Why are you speaking as if we know each other? You met me three days ago. You don’t know who I am or what I want.’

  ‘So what? That’s how I talk with everyone. I think you’re smart enough not to let it bother you.’

  ‘Thanks for your faith in me. But it’s about you, not about me. Doesn’t being over-familiar put you at a disadvantage? A more formal way of speaking doesn’t just mean you’re being polite, it’s also a way of protecting yourself.’

  ‘How subtle. But I don’t get it. “Protecting yourself.” You’re funny, you really are. What should I be protecting?’

  We walked on in silence. Later, I hailed a cab.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wherever you want.’

  I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette. I thought of taking her back to my place, but the driver was heading in the direction of Calea Victoriei and I couldn’t be bothered telling him to turn around. I dropped her off at the Central. She gave me a soldierly salute from the doorway, her finger to the usual imaginary cap. A smile that communicated nothing flickered on her lips.

  I went back to the Central yesterday out of curiosity and stayed the whole evening. I had nothing else to do. It was too early to go home and the weather was too bad for walking around. Five minutes, another five, another five. Someone came and asked me for 26 lei, someone else for a cigarette, someone else for 3 lei for a newspaper. I had the feeling I knew everybody and perhaps I did in fact know them, from the street, the tram or somewhere else.

  ‘I should go,’ I said to myself several times, but felt too lazy to stand up. Vally, going from table to table, acknowledged me with a few words in passing.

  ‘Still here?’ she asked casually, not pausing for a reply.

  In Ştefan Pârlea’s group they were discussing ‘disintegration’. The boys followed the conversation with great concentration, as though each had personally borne witness to the stages of this breakdown. Watching them falling under the narcotic spell of the discussion – some of them pale, others earnest and tense – made me want to bang my fist on the table to snap them out of it. ‘They need to be stampeded,’ I thought. ‘They need to be cleared out of here urgently; they’ll never get out of their own volition.’ As if putting up a weary struggle against sleep, I was myself unable to arise from my seat. ‘Oblomov,’ I reflected, recalling that lazy Slavic hero. ‘A café full of Oblomovs. And me, among them, on the way to becoming one.’

  We left late, all together. Outside, they bid each other farewell at various street corners, taking the unfinished debate on to their neighbourhoods in smaller groups. After Lipscani Street a fellow happened to be walking alongside me.

&nb
sp; ‘You live around Carol Park.’

  ‘Yes … more or less …’

  I felt awkward walking alongside someone I didn’t know and to whom I had nothing to say. I tried to make conversation, as the silence was intolerable, but it was no good. I couldn’t find much to say and he didn’t feel much like replying.

  I turned right at the Church of the Holy Apostles, thinking he would carry on ahead towards Antim Street. But he turned the corner with me. I made one last attempt on Emigratului Street, too insignificant a street for his route to coincide with mine. He followed me. I was furious with him and would have liked to stop there and then and demand to know where he was going. But I restrained myself, as there weren’t more than a hundred paces left to my door, and once there I quickly extended my hand, taking him by surprise, thereby leaving my farewell half-accomplished.

  ‘What? … You’re going?’

  ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

  He stood there on the footpath, in front of my gate, leaning against a lamppost with his hands in his pockets, suddenly disoriented, as though he’d just missed a train. I took several steps into the yard, unsure whether I should turn around. I had an intense feeling of relief, which an inner voice summed up nicely as: ‘He can go to hell.’ But I also felt I was doing something ‘one ought not to do’. I felt a vague sense of shame, and I foresaw that it would not let me be. I know how I am. I’m not incapable of committing certain minor infamies to protect my personal peace. But once committed, the memory of them nags at me like a speck of dirt in my eye.

  I turned back to him, fed up, and snapped:

  ‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you go and sleep?’

  He shrugged and smiled (probably at the naivety of the question).

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Hmm! Wherever.’

  My first thought was this: ‘How good it would be to be upstairs already, in my room, alone in bed, making myself at home, turning on the bedside lamp to read.’ To be alone at that moment seemed the greatest happiness possible.