He has that rather childlike and distracted air that people with an interior life retain in wealth; a sign that wealth, even if they aren’t indifferent to it, is certainly not indispensable to their identity. Off-handedness is the humour of elegance, and I don’t know a true intellectual whose elegance does not involve this kind of humour. S.T.H. certainly has it. His silk shirts, his flannel suits from London, his fine bulky shoes, the delicately patterned tie – not only is he not intimidated by any of this, but he treats it all with bonhomie, as if they’re amusing trifles.

We strolled through the gaming rooms and through the park, very happy to be seeing one another again. S.T.H. knows about the work going on at Uioara and seems well informed.

‘Very interesting, everything Vieru’s attempted there. You’re working for us. You’re making this entire region proletarian. In fact, you’re doing something even more serious: you’re dissolving the antagonism between the peasants and the proletariat. Another superstition that’s disappearing. No sir, you can’t have rural reaction in the middle of fighting for the revolution. I don’t recognize the peasantry. I recognize workers and property owners. What work they do and what they own makes no difference. In the factory or in the field, the problem of class remains the same.’

I didn’t attempt a reply, but smiled at finding him, despite the years, just as attached to his Marxist rhetoric. I commented, lightly, that things weren’t that simple, that if he were in Uioara he’d see that the process was deeper and more complex, that I didn’t believe the antagonism between workers and peasants was a superstition and that in any case, we were a long way from having dissolved it, so he had nothing to congratulate us for. I would like to have talked to him about ‘the plum-tree issue’, which I had so often been forced to reflect on since settling in Uioara, but that certainly would have infuriated him and I wasn’t in the mood for an argument. I was very much enjoying strolling with him and I didn’t want to spoil my enjoyment. We moved on to other subjects – books, women – and I was happy to see how sensitive and open the fellow was when you get him off Marxism and dialectics. I asked him to visit me some day at the oilfield, and he said he wasn’t sure he could, as he wasn’t alone in Sinaia. This probably meant a woman, but I didn’t ask for details. Judging from his reluctance to speak, it was probably an affair of the heart. But he clearly felt the need to explain himself, as he burst out, with a certain weariness in his voice:

‘Books, love affairs, money, they’re all substitutes. I’d be bored without them. I’m waiting for something else entirely … But the right moment is yet to come. We’re in a stupid year, a year of prosperity. I’m waiting for the crisis. That’s when everything will fall, be overturned. There’s too much money around now, too much excess, too much optimism. We’ll see what happens in 1930, in 1931. Things will come to a head one way or another. Until then, I’m going to rest.