That the fires we lit
to offer up our hearts smouldered out too soon. That we have lived through an eternal compromise
between fortune and misfortune.
*
It’s better this way, working fourteen
hours a day. The exam is just an excuse. But I feel good in this prison of books, into which
nothing penetrates from without or within.
I could have done with a dose of typhoid just
now. Maybe this exam will be a substitute. The important thing is to forget myself, to have an
exhausting, mechanical activity that absorbs me completely, and to hell with the world’s
problems.
Marga Stern has paid a friendly visit to my
garret. She was wearing a red dress, and her hand was warm and calm and she playfully placed it
on my brow.
Not quite a seduction, dear girl.
*
Marcu Klein, you’re an ass, and if I had
you in front of me I’d embrace you and then box your ears mightily four times so you
wouldn’t forget.
You weren’t on your own. There were between
forty to sixty of us with you, awaiting the civil law exam. From eight in the morning, from when
we were called, until eleven in the evening, when Mormorocea, the professor, finally entered. He
was clearly drunk and half asleep. We all saw it, just as you did, you smart-ass. We were all
tired from that long, wasted day. But we took our places submissively, and perhaps a little
disgusted. And you clenched your fists and continued frowning.
The professor mumbled a question and nodded off.
The boy beside you answered clearly and very precisely. When he finished, there was a moment of
silence. Mormorocea grunted, annoyed that the silence had disturbed his sleep.
‘You haven’t learned anything. Next
one!’
You were ‘the next one’. You stood
up. I closed my eyes, because I knew – do you hear? – I knew what was going to
happen.
‘Professor, this is disgraceful.’
Why, Marcu Klein, could you not have kept quiet?
Who pushed you, you lunatic, alone among forty, to speak for everybody, to condemn and avenge?
What absurd need to denounce injustice inspires you to cry out? From what ancestral education in
humiliation and revolt? What perverted instinct requires you to stop and investigate
unpleasantness, instead of passing by? Do you not know how little it takes for people to turn
against you? I’m furious with you because I can’t hate you enough and because I,
along with you, belong to a race that can’t accept things and shut up.
*
Telegram to Mama: ‘Passed exams.
Happy.’ Happy? I don’t know. All I know is that at home, on the right bank of the
Danube, there are twenty metres of warm sand and, before me, an entire river to swim in.
PART TWO
1
November, the most beautiful month! Walking the
streets, enveloped in a general lazy drizzle, shut off from the details around you, rendered
impermeable, alone … You leave home with a pipe and your thoughts and walk the streets for
hours, seeing nobody, stumbling into people, trees and shop windows, arriving home late, like a
ship to port.
My time of the year, November. The month when I
re-read books, leaf through papers, gather notes. It’s a kind of hunger for work, for
activity, for taking up all the old tasks once again.
And that damp organic smell in the morning when I
go out – and the warm halos of lamplight in the evening when I return …
*
In a bookshop, where I’d entered to browse
the magazines.
Somebody slaps my back. I turn around.
Ghiţă Blidaru.
‘You missed the opening lecture
…’
I’m surprised, or very happy, or afraid of
saying something impertinent. In any case, I say nothing.
‘Why don’t you pay me a visit? Look,
Thursday evening, half past four, my place. What do you say?’
He bids me farewell with a comradely tip of the
hat and leaves.
*
He has three rooms full of books and an empty
fourth one where he sleeps: a simple bed, almost a camp-bed – and nothing else. On the
wall by the door, a neat reproduction of a winter scene by Brueghel.
Almost half the front wall is taken up by an
immense rectangular window made of a thick pane, more crystal than glass.
It’s a bare, stark, frugal interior, yet it
has an inexplicable air of intimacy, even warmth.
I’m so intimidated I can hardly move.
Behold this man, whom I loved and envied. He has become enveloped in so many layers of legend in
the past year, since that first evening I heard him, above in the university.
Here he is, his assured lordly demeanour, his
rough joined eyebrows, his languid but commanding hand, here in this house that is just like him
in its clean lines, its total precision, the starkness of its every detail. In a dressing gown,
a wool scarf around his neck, his head inclined slightly towards the lamplight shining from the
right, there is something monastic in his bearing, and in his frown, now softened a little by a
smile smouldering in shadow.
I listen to him with a certain panic. Panic that
he might fall silent at any moment and that I will be required to speak. And about what? Good
God, what could I possibly say in response? And how would I say it? The pressure of his presence
unnerves me more than it gladdens me, though I know it makes me very happy indeed.
Has he perceived something of my panic? He rises
and fetches his pipe-tobacco, lights up, then goes to the window and stares out, as if watching
for something in the fading evening.
*
I’d rather not see him again.
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