I wonder why it is so easy to call for ‘death’ in a Romanian street, without anyone batting an eyelid. I think, though, that death is a pretty serious matter. A dog crushed beneath the wheels of a motor car – that’s already enough for a moment of silence. If somebody set themselves up in the middle of the street to demand, let’s say, ‘Death to badgers’, I think that would suffice to arouse some surprise among those passing by.
Now that I think about it, the problem isn’t that three boys can stand at a street corner and cry “Death to the Yids’, but that the cry goes unobserved and unopposed, like the tinkling of a bell on a tram.
Sometimes, sitting alone at home, I realize I can suddenly hear the ticking of the clock. It has been beside me all along but, either because I wasn’t paying attention or because I’m accustomed to it, I don’t notice it. It has got lost, along with many other familiar little noises, in a kind of silence that swallows the sound of things around you. Out of this stillness, you get suddenly caught off-guard by the clock ticking with unsuspected violence and energy. The ticks strike in short, clipped beats, like the blows of tiny metal fists. It’s not a clock any more, it’s a machine gun. The sound covers everything, fills the room, grates on your nerves. I hide it in the wardrobe – it resounds even from there. I smother it beneath a pillow – the sound continues, distant and vehement. There’s no cure but to resign yourself. You have to wait. After a while, by some miracle, the attack is over, the cogs settle down, the second hand relaxes. You can no longer hear it: the ticking has blended back into the general silence of the house, merged with the general hum of all the other objects.
Exactly the same thing happens with that age-old call for death, which is always present somewhere on Romanian streets, but audible only at certain moments. Year after year it resounds in the ear of the common man, who is indifferent, in a hurry, with other things on his mind. Year after year it rumbles and echoes in street and byway, and nobody hears it. And one day, out of nowhere, behold how it suddenly pierces the wall of deafness around it, and issues from every crack and from under every stone.
Out of nowhere? Well, not really. What is required is a period of exhaustion, of stress, of tense expectancy, a period of disillusionment. And then the unheeded voices are audible again.
*
In Snagov, on the site, on scaffolding, among workmen, amid stones and cement and girders, there are no problems. The problems begin once I return to the city.
Something has happened in recent months. Some invisible mechanism which allows people to keep going has broken down. I see only exhausted people, I meet only those who have given up. The revolution was on its way, but did not arrive. The episode at the two Uioaras was a brief outburst, a lick of flame.
They had been saying: ‘This is the end of everything – here’s where it all begins.’ But here we are, nothing has ended, nothing has begun.
St George’s day is long past. The hangings Pârlea envisaged for the holy day have not materialized. All the appointed days have come and gone, all the deadlines have expired.
Something must be done for those at the end of their tether, fresh prospects are needed for those frustrated expectations.
A few boys on a street corner cry out ‘Death to the Yids’. It’ll do, for now.
*
It is extremely difficult to follow the progressive hardening of enmity from one day to the next. Suddenly you find yourself surrounded on all sides, and have no idea how or when it happened. Scattered minor occurrences, gestures of no great account, the making of casual little threats. An argument in a tram today, a newspaper article tomorrow, a broken window after that. These things seem random, unconnected, frivolous. Then, one fine morning, you feel unable to breathe.
What is even harder to comprehend is that nobody involved in any of this, absolutely nobody, bears any blame.
*
A terrible moment at the workshop. A quarrel with Dronţu.
We had been squabbling. Not for the first time, he not being the kind to mince his words and me not being slow off the mark either. It’s usually over quickly; he swears, I swear back – and then we shake and make up.
I don’t know how it started this time. I think it was over a bottle of ink I’d hidden away somewhere that Marin needed urgently. We scuffled, in jest of course, spoke rather roughly, then somehow found ourselves face to face and genuinely furious. There was a look in Marin’s eyes I’d never seen before. For a moment, a single moment, I thought he was joking and about to burst out laughing. I was going to extend my hand but, fortunately, I hadn’t a moment in which to make the slightest gesture, because he blew up:
‘Don’t act the Jew. I’m from Oltenia. Don’t speak that Jew-talk with me.’
I went pale. There was nothing I could do; everything between the two of us – memories, friendship, our professional relationship – turned to nothing. I had a powerful sense that the man standing before me had become a total stranger. He had become so distant, so foreign and inaccessible, that responding to him would have seemed as mad to me as conversing with a block of stone.
I should be sad. I’m surprised that I’m not. It’s as though I’ve been hit in the shoulder by a bullet, and now I’m waiting for the pain. But it doesn’t come.
I have a strange feeling that the name Marin Dronţu belongs to a stranger. It’s like a name from a book. I never imagined that I could forget a person, so deeply, so suddenly, so entirely.
I slept well, dreamlessly. I worked all day.
*
Marjorie came to Snagov. I was on the scaffolding and when I saw her in the distance, in white, it gave me a jolt, as though I were seeing her from years before, in Uioara; the likeness of Marjorie Dunton. I invited her to my room, a hundred paces from the building work, by the lake. Only now have I realized how much this room resembles our cabin from the old days.
Marjorie came on her own initiative.
‘What happened yesterday was awful. Marin told me all about it. It’s ridiculous. Two serious people like you … You must understand. A moment of irritation, of distraction. One doesn’t break off an old friendship over something like that. You understand, don’t you? Tell me you do!’
‘Dear Marjorie, I understand. I understood from the first moment.’
‘So the two of you will make up?’
I shrugged.
‘Obviously! You said it yourself, for God’s sake: we aren’t kids.’
*
Evening boating on the lake, with Marjorie and Marin. We were awkward with each other for a time. We shook hands and skipped the explanations. It’s easier that way.
There was a fine view of Blidaru’s house from out on the water, with only the straight lines of the walls discernible in the dark. The scaffolding, carts loaded with lime and the heaps of stone were immersed in shadow. It soothes me just to look at this house. I only wish I could postpone the day I will complete it.
We’d been silent too long, and Marjorie sensed this. She asked Marin to row back towards the shore.
‘I’m tired, fellows. Come on, carry me. Do you remember? When we were in Uioara?’
Do we remember … I lifted her to ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, and Marjorie, recalling a moment from that September day long past, took her hat from her head and, waving it like a flag, began to sing as she did then:
It’s a long way to Tipperary
It’s a long way to go.
I was well aware that this was nothing but an effort to invoke among us the shadows of the past, but it didn’t prevent a familiar emotion from taking hold of me.
As I accompanied them to the bus, Dronţu said to me, with a certain languor, a certain heart-weariness, which made up for a lot:
‘You know, life is rotten. We manage to do a heap of rotten things and don’t even wonder at it. It really is rotten. Nobody’s to blame.’
Indeed, nobody is to blame. This is the point we find ourselves at, sooner or later. I know this so well, from the past, from the profound sense that there is nothing that can be done about it. I know that things can’t happen in any other way …
2
Sami Winkler has departed. In a workman’s shirt, bareheaded, a little knapsack on his back, looking out of the window of a third-class compartment like someone going to the mountains for a couple of days.
I asked him, jokingly:
‘Aren’t you travelling light for a man who’s making history?’
‘No. It’s all I need. I’m leaving the rest behind.’
‘Isn’t that tough?’
‘Pretty tough. So it’s better to make a clean break. To say goodbye to the lot rather than to one thing at a time.’
He was on his own. He’d forbidden his relatives from coming and his travelling companions had gone ahead to Constanţa, to await him on the ship. Next Thursday they’ll be in Haifa.
‘And then?’
He replied by spreading his arms, probably meaning that the answer was too great for a single word: ‘everything’, ‘life’, ‘victory’, ‘peace’ … He was very calm, unexcited, unhurried.
Two boys selling a right-wing newspaper happened along. ‘Take one, gentlemen, it’s against the Yids.’ Their timing made us smile. Sometimes symbolism is too obvious.
Winkler called them over and bought a paper.
‘I brought nothing to read on the trip.’
Indeed, he had brought no books. Not a single one. Then again, books were never really his thing.
We shook hands. I would have liked to embrace him, but I was afraid of the disruption such a show of feeling would have injected in our self-controlled parting. We shook hands.
*
I would like him to prevail, but I find it hard to believe in his victory. I hope he finds peace among his Palestinian orange groves, the peace we have sought in our own ways; S.T. Haim in Jilava Prison, Abraham Sulitzer through journeys and books, Arnold Max through poetry, me on the site, building. The boat cutting through the waves to Haifa will perhaps mark the direction towards a new Jewish history. Will it take him towards a Jewish peace? I don’t know. I don’t believe so. I don’t dare to.
Two thousand years can’t be overcome by leaving for somewhere. They would have to be forgotten, the wound cauterized, their melancholy cut to the ground with a scythe. But the truth is that there are too many years for us to be able to forget them. We live always in the troubled memory of them. The memory reaches far back and hangs like a haze over the horizon of our future. Only rarely, through this history of warfare, victories and kingdoms, does any light pierce the mist. Is it possible to build a new history from such material?
*
Winkler has many fights ahead – and he will win them all. But there is something he must let go of also, and I don’t know if he will succeed. He must let go of his habit of suffering, he must let go of his vocation for pain. This aptitude is too well developed and the instinct too entrenched to yield even before such a simple life. This bitter root can withstand every season and will always be ready to bear its sad fruit, even in the gentlest summer, with the soul lulled by dreams of eternal peace. You will face yourself again in a moment of terror and will learn once again that old lesson you keep forgetting: that you can escape from anywhere, but you cannot flee your own self.
3
I wish I could reproduce word for word, like a stenographer, the discussion I had yesterday evening with Mircea Vieru.
He had visited me at work. Blidaru’s house is of interest to him too. Mostly he’s interested in it as my building – the first one I’ve done alone. He doesn’t want to make any criticisms. He very much wants to see me bring it all to a conclusion, on my own – which both delights and intimidates me. I’m not certain that I’m really getting it right. Sometimes it all seems inspired, clear and coherent. At other times, the contrary; it’s all lifeless, cold and schematic. I invited the professor, but he didn’t want to come.
‘No. Carry on, do what you want, work how you want. That’s what we agreed. When you’re finished, let me know. Until then, the house is yours.’
From the site, I went with Vieru to the Bucharest road to have dinner. It’s been a full five weeks since I’ve been out of Snagov.
‘I never see you in town any more. Why?’
‘Because I’m fed up with it. It’s the tense, poisonous mood. At every street corner, an apostle. And in every apostle, an exterminator of Jews. It wears me out, depresses me.’
He didn’t reply. He reflected for a moment, hesitating, a little embarrassed, as though he wished to change the subject. Then, probably after brief private deliberation, he addressed me in that determined manner people have when they want to get something off their chests.
‘You’re right. Yet there is a Jewish problem, and it needs to be solved. One million eight hundred thousand Jews is intolerable. If it was up to me, I’d try to eliminate several hundred thousand.’
I was startled. I think I failed to hide my surprise. The one person I had believed utterly incapable of anti-Semitism was he – Mircea Vieru. So, him too. He noticed my distress and hurried to explain.
‘Let’s be clear. I’m not anti-Semitic. I’ve told you that before and abide by that. But I’m Romanian. And, all that is opposed to me as a Romanian I regard as dangerous. There is a corrosive Jewish spirit. I must defend myself against it. In the press, in finance, in the army – I feel it exerting its influence everywhere. If the body of our state were strong, it would hardly bother me. But it’s not strong. It’s sinful, corruptible and weak. And this is why I must fight against the agents of corruption.’
I said nothing for a few seconds, which was not what he had expected. I could have responded, out of politeness, to keep the conversation going, but I failed to.
‘Do I surprise you?’
‘No, you depress me. You see, I know two kinds of anti-Semites. Ordinary anti-Semites – and anti-Semites with arguments. I manage to get along with the first kind, because everything between us is clear-cut. But with the other kind it’s hard.’
‘Because it’s hard to argue back?’
‘Because it’s futile to argue back. You see, dear master, your mistake begins where your arguments begin. To be anti-Semitic is a fact. To be anti-Semitic with arguments – that’s a waste of time, a dead end. Neither your anti-Semitism nor Romanian anti-Semitism has need of arguments. Let’s say I could answer those arguments. What then? Would that clarify anything? Taking into account that all the possible accusations against Romanian Jews are just local issues, while anti-Semitism is universal and eternal. You don’t find anti-Semites only in Romania. They’re also in Germany, Hungary, Greece, France and America – all, absolutely all, in the context of interests, with their own methods, with their own temperaments. And there haven’t only been anti-Semites now, after the war, there were anti-Semites before the war, and not just in this century, but in the last one and all the others. What’s happening today is a joke compared to what happened in 1300.
‘So, if anti-Semitism is indeed such a persistent general fact, isn’t it useless to seek specific Romanian causes? Political causes today, economic causes yesterday, religious causes before that – the causes are too numerous and
too specific to explain such a general historical fact.’
‘You’re very crafty,’ interrupted Vieru. ‘Aren’t you trying to make anti-Semitism inexplicable by making it eternal? And declaring Jews innocent?’
‘God forbid! Not only does anti-Semitism seem explicable to me, but I believe Jews alone are to blame. Yet I wish you could recognize at least that the essence of anti-Semitism is neither of a religious, political nor an economic nature. I believe it is purely metaphysical in nature. Don’t be alarmed. The Jew has a metaphysical obligation to be detested. That’s his role in the world. Why? I don’t know. His curse, his fate. His problem, if you like.
‘Please believe me. I don’t say this out of pride or defiance. On the contrary, I say it with sadness, weariness and bitterness. But I believe that it’s an implacable fact and know that neither you nor I nor anybody else can do anything about it. If we could be exterminated, that would be very good. It would be simple, in any case. But this isn’t possible either. Our obligation to always be in the world confirms it over so many thousands of years, which you know have not been merciful. And then you have to accept – look, I accept it – this alternation of massacres and peace, which is the pulse of Jewish life. Individually, each Jew can ask in panic what he has to do. To flee, to die, to kill himself, to receive baptism. Resolving one’s personal affairs involves endless pain which you, certainly, as a man of feeling, will not ignore – but this is nothing more, however, than “resolving one’s personal affairs”. Collectively, though, there is only one path: waiting, submission to fate. And I think this, rather than being an act of reneging on life, is one of reintegration with nature, with the awareness that life goes on after all these individual deaths, they too being part of life, just as the falling of leaves is a fact of life for the tree, or the death of the tree to the forest, or the death of the forest for the vegetation of the earth.’
For Two Thousand Years Page 21