There is no reticence, no coolness. This leads inevitably towards a sense of obligation. I envy the cool and dignified reserve of the peasant: a formal farewell and off they go into the world. And when death comes, it comes like a relative.

The only person at home not shaken by Grandma’s death is Grandmother. At ninety years of age, there she is outliving the other grandparents, who were so much younger and more passionate to live than she. ‘God doesn’t choose. Today it was her, tomorrow it will be my turn.’ I think living and dying is all the one to her. Grandmother is of father’s tribe, a people that dies late, in old age, at a hundred years old, placidly, without regrets. Their deaths are simple and good. But my mother’s branch of the family has a completely different way of dying, and this was how Grandma passed away. They die by burning up swiftly, with short agonies, in which you feel the last shudder of pointless struggle. Their health is tenuous, nervous, maintained through unflagging effort and hard-won daily victories over a weary body. It’s more than an intellectual resistance, a continual act of will. One day, the inner arch that holds them suspended in tension suddenly collapses. It’s a Jewish death.

Father’s side of the family haven’t known it, and I think this is something of a family rule, as there are no examples there of any grandparent or great-grandparent who has passed away before they were in their nineties. Their blood is strong, not thinned by Talmudism or poisoned by the lights of lamps and late evenings in synagogues. They lived by a river, among boats, among grain. Grandma looked down on them, when in their company. Their excess of good health probably struck her as a sign of vulgarity.

*

Several times this morning I went down to the port, to see the new tugs that have started to arrive. The light is cold and lively, washed by wind and rain. It smells of wet willow bark, the young shoots emerging from under the freshly melted snow. In the distance, the blue Măcin Mountains, their peaks still white.

From time to time, the call of a boat’s siren, its adolescent pitch like the whinnying of a foal.

Let us forget, old man. Let us forget what needs be forgotten: look, the season is turning.

10

Labouring in the workshop gets harder every day. This spring is unbearably beautiful. It bursts forth violently, as if in revenge for the five months of winter and the eighty days of snow it has tolerated. I continue to endure the morning classes, awaiting the reward of the noon bell of freedom. The streets seem wider, the houses white, the women glowing. There’s a sense of nakedness everywhere.

But on returning to the workshop everything goes dark, the season is blotted out. The modelling clay is sticky and strong-smelling, the air has the chill of a damp cellar. We work sullenly, irritably, unproductively. For four hours I worried away at a ball of clay and got absolutely nowhere. Towards evening Marga came by and took me out for a stroll, which made up for everything, and we walked long and far, towards Băneasa.