She alone in all my world – family, friends, acquaintances – did not consider my move from law to architecture an extravagance. When I told her, she responded, almost without surprise, ‘Good for you.’ Her awareness and interest in my new duties surprised me at first. She asks me to explain things exactly, wants details, looks and inquires. Once she made me take her to the workshop and she stayed there all afternoon, wandering freely between the tables, mingling with my classmates. Usually so uncommunicative, she asked questions, demanded technical details, picked up the modelling clay familiarly and tried to work it. If I’m busy at my drawing board when she calls to visit, she won’t let me interrupt the work; she pulls up a chair, kneels on it, elbows on table, and watches with a seriousness that seems to me utterly childish. A true vocation.

There is certainly something lucid in her intelligence – and perhaps limited at the same time – something practical, and with a sense of proportion. I understand now why I was amazed by her reputation as a good pianist when I heard her playing for the first time, some time ago. Technically accomplished perhaps – I’ve no idea – but her musical style is odd, to say the least. Unfortunately, she was playing Chopin then, a nocturne, which she made unrecognizably straightforward, precise, well defined. Marga doesn’t play, she follows the rules. Just by listening to her, I managed to understand for the first time what was meant by the ‘construction of a piece of music’. I saw it drawn up, logically, phrase by phrase, movement by movement. (Maybe this is where her curiosity about architecture comes from.) This style probably involves numerous musical risks, and has certain advantages. It’s a great pleasure to hear her playing Mozart; it’s a tight, painstaking Mozart, like the cutting of an incredibly fine surgical saw.

*

How is Marga Stern able to relate naturally and calmly to things, and what is the source of her happy ability to shield herself from dreams and illusions? I envy her for her happy, sane and easy-going practical spirit. I’m envious of her lack of imagination and her resistance to abstraction. I have the same kind of admiration for this sensible spirit as I would for a healthy body, secure in its strength and physical integrity.

Can it be that there is nothing Jewish in this beloved girl, not a single feature, not a shade, not a single turning inwards towards the broken layers of memory deposited there?

I foolishly asked her this, just like I’d ask her if by any chance she had a headache. She answered with a shrug.

‘I don’t know what you mean. I have my moments of melancholy, of course. When you’re irritable, or when I love you too much or, well, when something bad happens to me, whatever that may be.’

The fact is, Marga is a woman before she is a Jew. And if the destiny of the race compels her towards insecurity and uncertain dreams, her destiny as a woman – which is more powerful – returns her to the earth and binds her to it, returns her to the laws of life, which are silent in her, in expectation of moving onwards, through childbearing. It’s a physical calm, and it expresses itself daily through a powerful sense of practicality, a sense of preparedness and expectation.

I re-read what I wrote above and laugh. Dear girl! What is left of you, of your warm laughter, of your good unhurried kisses, of the arms you lazily wrap around my neck, what is left of you in this writing that complicates you, comments on you, changes you?

She has a receptive sensibility, is obedient and well behaved, and she struggles to suppress her tremors beneath the virginity she defends against both herself and me. I know her body, suffering in expectation, I know the line of her hips curving so lazily, with such melancholy, beneath her dress.

No, there are no big questions. It is the small certainties that concern her and are illuminated in her presence.

7

The lines written in recent days about Marga concerning what I ironically call ‘big questions’ are unutterably mediocre. If I had not once and for all decided to stop being foolish, I’d rip up the page. But keeping a diary would be too easy a job if you could modify it afterwards, correcting what was misconceived in the first instance. You can’t correct without dissimulating. And that’s not what I want.

But I was humiliated with the shame of it, cringing at the limitations of those thoughts, at their triteness and complacency, I was ashamed yesterday evening in the street when, turning a corner, I found myself in the middle of a revolution. I don’t know exactly what had happened. There had been a local meeting of workers and in the end the police intervened.