They knocked me to the wall with a single blow. I watch them from the corner into which they have pushed me. The door was ajar. Laughter, voices, shouts from one bench to another could be heard. Five minutes to six. Ghiţă will enter now. If I could get in too … If I go to those idiots at the door and talk to them, perhaps they’ll understand. Good God, a seat in the back row … It’s hardly too much to ask … No, that’s an idiotic idea … Silence. Then applause. He’s entered, surely. The door closes. One of them, the only one who has remained to guard the lecture hall, stares at me.

‘What’s up, pal?’

‘What’s up? I’m terribly ashamed of you and the others, I feel a head taller than you, because you’ll never know the sad pride of defeat, alone against ten thousand. And I’m going to see Ghiţă Blidaru and I’m going to talk to him.’

*

I can’t re-create the scene. I’m powerless to remember it all now. It was brusque. Just two or three words and a puzzled glance.

Ghiţă was leaving the secretariat. I went up and spoke to him. I don’t know what I said. I swear I don’t, and that this isn’t a ruse to spare myself one more moment of self-disgust.

He interrupted me.

‘Young man, what do you want?’

‘Professor, they threw me out and …’

‘Well, and what do you want me to do about it?’

He walked off without waiting for a reply.

I should run for hours through the streets, or chop up a wagonload of barrels with a hatchet, to collapse in my bed in the evening and sleep and forget.

*

Third night playing poker. We played in the library, around a candle, until three or four in the morning.

Yesterday I won 216 lei and then treated everyone to some girls, where we went in two at a time.

Ionel Bercovici kissed me. ‘Hey, and we all thought you were stuck up.’

A disgusting dive. That vinegary white wine is really pretty awful. The first few glasses make you wince. Then in the end it works.

It goes on until late in the night. At The Cross, at Mizzi’s, that whore from Cernăuţi, who for an extra 10 lei will do anything.

We walked between bayonets all day. There was a small group of us downstairs, at the secretary’s office, when compact bands arrived from the faculty of medicine. We were surrounded on all sides and only got out between a line of police two-deep. They escorted us through the streets like that, closely followed. We changed direction several times, hurried on, ducking into courtyards in the hope of shaking them off. Until nightfall. Until now.

If it weren’t for the consolation of the bitter-tasting nights of gambling, the dizzy pleasure of poker, what would life be?

Then there’s another matter.