I grew up with Endre Ady. I’m sticking with him. I’d feel stifled if I stayed here, in this atmosphere, with these people. And if it weren’t for my parents, who I have to see in the holidays, and especially if there wasn’t something else –’ he fell quiet, hesitating – ‘I think I’d stay there for good. You have to understand: it’s my memories, my language, my culture.’

‘A culture that, from what I’ve heard, doesn’t embrace you with the same enthusiasm with which you embrace it.’

‘I foresaw that objection. And I’m surprised you haven’t reminded me that Budapest University has a numerus clausus. Of course it’s not pleasant. It’s humiliating at times. But when you really love something, you love the good and the bad together. This will pass too, some day. You’d do the same in my place.’

We headed home, on the Ursu road. There was still a light on at the Duntons’, and Dogany suddenly fell quiet. He took his leave brusquely, with a quick goodbye. For a moment, I wanted to call after him. I’m not sure what I wanted to say to him. Something to make him feel less alone.

*

Marjorie came by the oilfield today. She was wearing a green knitted dress and a white scarf.

I was terribly busy, but took care to talk with her for a long time so that she wouldn’t think I was annoyed. She had leaned back against some support beams, arms hanging loosely at her sides, legs slightly bent, the soft shape of her knees protruding against her dress. She has fine, long bones. She spoke with great animation and seriousness, but I couldn’t understand what it was about. I tried to follow her or at least to seem focused, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Marin Dronţu approached us, but she continued speaking to me, completely unchanged, completely unsurprised, showing no awkwardness. He coughed a couple of times, shifted his weight from foot to foot, then went away, shrugging his shoulders in boredom.

‘She’s just showing off,’ he said to me later.

*

I wasn’t expecting the professor’s visit, and the telegram he sent me to announce his arrival was a real surprise.

‘At last, he’s given in,’ I said to myself. I’d asked him so often to come to Uioara, and he refused vehemently each time.

‘What you’re doing there is barbarous, criminal. It’s the most artificial thing that’s been done in Romania since 1848.’

Since I began work at the Rice concession, much opposition has subsided. Ghiţă Blidaru’s opposition alone has remained firm. Vieru doesn’t say anything, but I think that deep down this disapproval hurts him, and is all the harder for him to deal with as it’s purely intellectual in nature. If ‘Professor Ghiţă’ – as he calls him – were an engineer, I don’t think Vieru would care less about his objections. One set of figures can always be countered by others. But the professor’s hostility to the Uioara project does not concern technical or economic issues. He’s thinking of ‘the problem of the plum trees’, a perspective he would readily recognize as being at the very core of his thinking. ‘Whenever the struggle is waged between life and an abstraction, I will be on the side of life, and against abstraction.’

The master despairs utterly before this unassailable position, as it transcribes the issue to a level and a scale of values with which he has no connection.

‘What drives me mad about Professor Ghiţă is metaphysics. In a matter involving so many facts and practicalities – money, stones, oil, drainage work and water supply – he comes along with moral problems. I’m thinking in terms of practicalities, he in terms of metaphysics.’

‘Practicalities, practicalities!’ replies the professor contemptuously. ‘There’s only one thing it makes any practical sense to talk about: man.’

The argument has been going on for over five years, ever since Rice started work.