My way might be more elegant, but is it fair?

And don’t forget Liebovici Isodor, still out there on the front line, patient and silent, inexpressive, without illusions or vanity.

A visit to the dorms. Black, black misery. Nothing has changed here. The same stoves, either cold or smoking, the same long rooms with their cracked cement, the same people. A few new faces – first-year boys.

Liova is gone. He died over the summer. He was somehow made for death, that boy, and seems to me to have fulfilled his destiny through tuberculosis in the same way others fulfil theirs by writing a book, building a house or completing their work. I talked to our old dorm-mates from last year about him. Nobody had much to say.

‘He had these yellow boots, nearly new, that he left here when he went away,’ said Ianchelevici Şapsă. ‘But they’re no good: too small.’

Liova, poor boy, your death did not even do that small good.

This building, despite being warmly called a ‘shelter’, is strangely apathetic, horribly icy … And yet several hundred young people live here. And only one room is alive, bustling, and breathing passion: ‘the social issues room’. That’s what they call it, with irony, because Winkler, the old medical student, has his bed here. Winkler has been kept from his exams by Zionism and by S.T. Haim, a mathematics student at the polytechnic and a fiercely argumentative Marxist.

The pair of them quarrel endlessly.

‘I’m going to report you both,’ shouts Ionel Bercovici, despairing of ever getting to the end of a page on constitutional law.

‘Idiot,’ replies S.T.H. (who is referred to by his initials, for some reason), ‘you want us to hold back the march of history until you’ve passed your exam?’

Neither Winkler nor S.T.H. can have a very good opinion of me. They regard me as an outsider. At any event, they felt I was a fence-sitter, someone who observed in passing, neutrally. I listened quietly in a corner to their confused disagreement without intervening, enduring stubbornly the hard, flashing glances they shot at me over their shoulders.

‘Dilettantes, that’s what you are,’ shouts S.T.H., ‘dilettantes in all you do, in all you feel or think you feel. Dilettantes in love, when you think you’re making love, dilettantes in science when you dabble in science, dilettantes in poverty, when you live in poverty. Nothing is seen through to its conclusion. Nothing heroic. Nothing unto the death. Everything for a cautious, compromised life. And you call yourself a Zionist, but you haven’t a clue if there really is a land called Zion. I don’t believe in it, you do. So why don’t you actually go there, set foot on that land? You sit here agitating, which consists in cutting out receipts for membership fees for ten thousand people as smart as you are, and they too reduce a drama to a membership card.’

‘And you?’ asks Winkler, ever calm.

‘Me? I’m here, where I should be. Wherever I am, that’s where I should be, because I’m serving the revolution. By the simple fact that I exist, the simple fact that I think. My every word is a protest, my every silence is a shout rising above your receipt-books and your smile …’

And he suddenly turns to me, pointing an accusatory finger, putting an end to my quiet corner, because my reserve clearly irritates him and because, in the end, he can’t stand the presence of an additional person who is neither friend nor foe – who is simply paying attention. S.T.H. needs an audience, an adversary, to feel he’s up against something.

Now, having issued the challenge, he waits for me to take it up, his eyes flashing cold fire. Fire ‘from the head’, I’m sure, and not from the heart. He’s tense as a folded razor, trembling in anticipation of being unsheathed.