For Two Thousand Years

by Mihail Sebastian

  ‘Come on, you can sleep here.’I went on, cursing him in my thoughts with utter fury and cursing myself for this bit of unforeseen bad luck. We undressed in silence, me furious, he unperturbed.

  What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him.

  I won’t be able to sleep. There’s no point shutting my eyes, I won’t sleep. It’s better if I accept insomnia and resign myself to wakefulness. He’s worn out. What has happened this evening probably happens to him every evening. Nothing that need bother him.

  A stranger sleeps next to me, like a stone beside another stone.

  He’s the first person ever to enter my life without knocking. Everyone I know, I know on the basis of an implicit pact of solitude. ‘Look, this is me, that’s you, I can give this much, you that much; we’ve shaken hands and have thereby sworn comradeship as regards certain things, ideas, memories – the rest is off limits, remains within ourselves, we’re well brought up and will never overstep the boundaries or open the doors which we have closed.’ The pact is clear, the parties well defined: me, you.

  A single stranger sleeps next to me and I feel like a whole crowd has come in with him. He hasn’t said anything to me, I haven’t said anything to him, but I feel I have nothing else to say to him, nor to hide from him.

  *

  ‘Revolution … Could be. Within a month, two, three,’ say the boys at the Central. Ştefan Pârlea is more specific:

  ‘By George’s day the gallows will be busy.’

  Perhaps they’ve got the dates and modalities wrong. But they’re not wrong about the atmosphere, which is suffocating.

  Where do they come from, these crazy, homeless, superfluous, empty-headed, empty-handed boys, with their undefined roles and blind expectations?

  They sleep here tonight, there tomorrow, the night after that they don’t sleep at all. They spend their lives passing from one table to another, looking for a penny, a cigarette, or a bed for the night. From time to time one of them finds a rallying call, a message for everybody, an absolute truth, and he elbows his way to the front. After a day or two, after a weekend or two, they lose their way out of boredom or the boredom of those around them.

  ‘We’re going to put them up against the wall.’ I’ve heard that expression a thousand times. I bump into an avenger at every street corner.

  Who is it they’re going to put up against the wall? That hasn’t been clearly established yet. The bourgeoisie, the old, those with paunches, the complacent? It’s all confused, blind, chaotic. They’re all discouraged and strung out. They’re worn out with waiting. This endless wait that consumes hours, days and years and still has room in its belly. This goalless, limitless, aimless waiting, a pure state of expectation, composed of nerves and tension.

  ‘It has to collapse, it absolutely has to collapse …’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Everything.’

  2

  I accompanied the master and Professor Ghiţă to Snagov to take a look at the professor’s plot. It’s a small site belonging to the association of teaching staff, in which Blidaru has reserved 200 square metres with the idea of one day building himself a house. He doesn’t seem at all inclined to build now. The site is well positioned, on the side furthest from Bucharest, with a vantage above the lake that would allow us to create a superb terrace. I’d like to build the house just for the pleasure of such a terrace. The master and I both tried to convince him, but the professor appears determined not to begin anything.

  ‘Please, don’t insist. I feel there’s nothing more ridiculous these days than beginning something – whatever it might be. I’m certain the earth will quake tomorrow, so I’m not going to start building a house today. You’re well aware how ridiculous it would be. It’s out of the question. This is a time for demolition, not construction.’

  *

  He’s lived in the same house since 1923. Everything is as it was when I met him first, the long rectangular curtainless window, the camp bed, the books, the small Brueghel on the wall … And he himself, in a long house coat, under the light of his desk lamp, seems unchanged. He speaks slowly, defining as he goes, checking each hypothesis, responding to his own questions, overturning his own objections.

  As he is calm and self-controlled, who can judge how pressing the problems preoccupying him are? Listening to him, I often have a sense of being with a chemist who, with a vial of ecrasite in his hand, declaims on the explosive qualities of the human body. And that this cold person is the most passionate and tumultuous of men.

  I reminded him of our first conversations here, of the 1923 course on ‘the development of the idea of value’, the indignation of the specialists, and how amazed we students were … I pulled an atlas from the shelf and opened on the map of Europe to mark with a pencil the very centres of crisis, which now validate the predictions he made back then.

  He took the pencil from my hand and pointed to the centre of the map: Vienna.

  ‘This is the pressure point. From here everything will fracture. Observe how from a clearly trivial matter, like the Anschluss, a totally disproportionate point of tension is created. Everybody takes a side in the game, everybody joins in, and the more deadly the stakes, the more desperate the pressure. When things collapse, they will collapse completely.’

  Leaning over the map, he looked like a general reviewing the course of a battle that is imminent.

  *

  There’s not much to do in the workshop, so I almost always attend Ghiţă Blidaru’s course. The slide in the British pound has for the last three weeks fuelled his lectures and given them the vivacity of a serialized novel. From one lecture to the next, a new set of monetary certainties falls apart. The professor receives the latest reports on the disasters with professional detachment, but I find it hard to credit that the general collapse provides him with any satisfaction. However, I don’t think the monetary phenomenon interests him except insofar as it is a symptom and an element of disintegration. A strong currency means, in any case, a focus of value, which automatically guarantees the stability of all values, at whatever level you care to look, whether in economics or culture. A provisional stability, obviously, but real nonetheless. Conversely, monetary inflation provokes instability in every aspect of life, and first of all in the collective mind. (Isn’t revolutionary Germany a result in large measure of the years of inflation? – this is a question for Blidaru.)

  Sometimes at the professor’s course I feel like we’re gathered together in a kind of ideological headquarters of an immense world war, waiting from hour to hour for telegrams about the catastrophe, dreaming of the new world that will be born from its ashes.

  For the moment, beneath the surface, the old strata silently shift. Ghiţă Blidaru has a fine sense of hearing.

  3

  The first telegram from Uioara didn’t look too serious. ‘Men at Well A 19 refusing to work.’ It’s not the first time. The only thing that strikes me as odd is the sending of a telegram when so many telephone lines are free. At the offices in Piaţa Rosetti, however, everybody was calm.

  An attempt was made in the afternoon to make contact with Uioara, but it proved impossible. The operator in Câmpina gave the same response for an hour: ‘Uioara is not replying. Probably there’s a fault with the line.’ It was quite plausible, but I found it suspicious. ‘Perhaps you should warn old Ralph,’ I suggested half seriously. They laug
hed. ‘Where will we look for him? We’d have to search all Europe. Anyway, we can’t trouble him for every trifle.’

  At seven that evening Hacker, from accounting, burst into the office. He’d come straight from Uioara, with two punctured tyres, an overheated engine about to ignite, a shattered windscreen and the half the hood torn away. I was at the workshop and was immediately called to Piaţa Rosetti. En route, the master was silent and pale.

  Truth told, Hacker’s news was less alarming than the figure he cut. He had been imprudent enough to pass through New Uioara, where people protested with a bit of stone-throwing, which is really nothing serious. The real danger, should it arise, is Old Uioara, where the wells and refinery are. But at that point there were just the beginnings of a more than usually contentious strike.

  ‘I fear for the refinery,’ said Hacker. ‘They’d all gathered there in big groups, talking. The ones from the refinery were still working when I left, but who knows what’s happened since then? Or even if anyone’s left at the factory, so that we have electricity. Lord preserve us from darkness! I think it’s just what the plum brandy drinkers of New Uioara are waiting for. It was them who cut the phone lines.’

  I waited all night for news. Not from Uioara, which we were definitively out of contact with, but from the Interior Ministry and Prahova Prefecture. There was a terrible commotion at the office. Marjorie had come too, with Marin. She was very concerned, yet self-controlled. She was absolutely determined to leave immediately for Uioara, with Hacker’s car, which she said she’d drive on her own.

  The master had a faraway look. Just once he said to me: ‘I’d be sad if they went and destroyed Uioara on us.’

  *

  The morning papers are alarmist and confused. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. Two directors from the office have gone to negotiate, accompanied by a Ministry of Labour representative and preceded by platoons of police. Certainly, things could settle down if it were just a labour dispute. Is that all it is? I doubt it.

  However vague the information we’ve received is so far, it seems there are two distinct movements in Uioara, though they’re both caught up in the same storm. The first group is made up of refinery, factory and oil workers, all from Old Uioara. Then there are the viticulturists in New Uioara. The first group have wage demands, while the second group ask for nothing. They just want to go down to Old Uioara and destroy it. The oil revolt and the plum-tree revolt.

  There’s unanimous enthusiasm at the Central. On Calea Victoriei, a rumble of war. It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming! What is? Revolution, obviously.

  This morning, speaking to me, Ştefan Pârlea looked transfigured.

  ‘You know, I feel our moment has come. I feel we’re about to leave mediocrity behind. Leave it behind, even though we pass through blood, through flames. There’s no other way. We’ll be stifled otherwise. When you’re suffocating in a house filled with gas fumes you don’t waste time opening the windows: you smash them.’

  *

  The master, Dronţu and I tried to slip off to Uioara in Hacker’s Ford, which has nothing to lose anyway. But it was impossible. At Câmpina we were turned back by the police.

  What has happened beyond there? Nobody knows. The most sinister rumours are going around. That the peasants from New Uioara have burned down the refinery, that they’ve emptied the fuel tanks, flooding the whole internal line with crude, that they’ve barricaded the Americans in the offices, that they’ve attacked the police with rocks, that the police opened fire, that sixty people are dead …

  A moment of crisis! A moment of crisis! It’s as though I hear S.T.H.’s voice.

  *

  Vieru is depressed. He believed the project at Uioara was something enduring, and now this unexpected brush with disaster disorients him. So many years of work wiped out in a night, in a moment. If the reports of a fire are confirmed, then what will be left for those who built it? A few plans, a few photographs …

  Ghiţă Blidaru is triumphing. But he is not acting proud and I don’t believe he’s pleased. He came to the workshop to see the master and I was surprised by his anxious expression.

  ‘Have you won?’ Vieru asked him, trying to laugh.

  ‘Not yet, unfortunately. It takes more than a fire to make a revolution. What’s happening now in Uioara is certainly in the natural order of things. For ten years the wells have spoken, and now it’s the turn of the plum trees. Their voices are older, and so they had to make themselves heard. But let’s not fool ourselves. It’s still not enough. We need to burn down a whole history, not just three oil wells. There are so many things left to destroy that Uioara resolves nothing. We’re only at the beginning.’

  *

  Eva Nicholson turned up at the offices in spectacular fashion. She came on her own in a two-seater car and in two hours will head back. She’s wearing a sports suit over which she’s thrown a mackintosh. She’s pale, calm and very tired, but completely unemotional.

  ‘I’ve come to buy cotton wool, iodine lotion and bandages. There’s a need for them there. I couldn’t buy them in Ploieşti, where I would have caused suspicion.’

  ‘My dear lady, are you siding with the insurgents?’ asked somebody from management.

  ‘They’re not insurgents; they’re the injured.’

  In any case, things at Uioara aren’t so bad after all. Eva Nicholson has reassured us. First of all, nothing has been destroyed, or almost nothing. Things have been stolen here and there, and there’s been a disturbance. The police opened fire. The workers locked themselves into the factory and refinery. If they don’t leave within twenty-four hours, the police will open fire again. Within three days, it’ll all be sorted out.

  *

  Peace. Old Ralph T. Rice arrived yesterday. The latest bulletin from Uioara announces the evacuation of all the buildings. For now, the ‘instigators’ are being weeded out and made an example of. Work could restart next week at the wells and the refinery. Work has begun already at the power plant with a reduced staff. An Interior Ministry statement mentions four fatalities and several injured. But terrible things are whispered of.

  4

  Several times I’ve attempted to work, but it all feels irrelevant. You’re on a sinking boat. What’s the point of keeping to your post? Disasters aren’t organized events – you just have to manage.

  Never have my room, my books and my maps seemed more intolerable to me. I’ve always believed that the only defeats and victories that matter in life are those you lose or win alone, against yourself. I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.

  The dignity that solitude affords is gone. The vice has been cured, perhaps. We’re going to remember our natural obligations and will live thrown together with our fellows. Some will be crushed, others saved, as we are pell-mell ploughed back into the savage order from which we once fled as individuals. Who knows? Perhaps a field that for decades has yielded only special plants – chrysanthemums or tubers – needs a furious outbreak of weeds, nettles, henbane and wild laurel for it to regain its fertility. The season of bitter plants has come.

  For too long I have played on the stage of lucidity, and I have lost. Now I need to accustom my eyes to the falling darkness. I need to contemplate the natural slumber of all things, which the light calls forth, yet also causes to tire. Life must begin in darkness. Its powers of germination lie hidden. Every day has its night, every light has its shadow.

  I cannot be
asked to accept these shadows gladly. It is enough that I accept them.

  *

  To surrender to the wind and the rain, to submit to the coming night, to lose yourself in the passing crowd – there is nothing more restful. I will no longer seek the path that leads me to myself. But nor can I expect horizons now hidden to arise out of nothingness. Despair is a sentiment I have long suppressed, knowing how oppressive it is in a Jewish sensibility. I will not go back to the ghosts I have left behind. Is a ‘new dawn’ on the way? It surely is. But until then, the dusk will be slowly gathering over all I have loved and love still.

  I will build the house at Snagov. I have to. If necessary, even if Blidaru does not wish me to. I have to build a house of gracious, simple lines, with great windows and an open terrace – a house for sunlight.

  I have spoken at length with the professor and, though he is unconvinced, he will consent. I have asked him for full freedom to decide and to work. He has sworn he will not set foot there until I give the word.

  Ştefan Pârlea always talks of the great historical conflagration that is drawing ever closer. Very well, then. I will have something to offer up to this conflagration.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  1

  I was on my way to the workshop, to meet the master. We seldom see each other now I’ve begun work at Snagov. I decided to go to town no more than once a week, on Saturdays. I’d have trouble finishing by September otherwise.

  At the corner, towards Boulevard Elisabeta, was a group of boys selling newspapers. ‘Mysteries of Cahul! Death to the Yids!’

  I have no idea why I stopped. I usually walk calmly by, because it’s an old, almost familiar cry. This time I stopped in surprise, as if I had for the first time understood what these words actually meant. It’s strange. These people are talking about death, and about mine specifically. And I walk casually by them, thinking of other things, only half-hearing.