In two years of war, that meeting was the finest thing that happened.’

*

I can see the master living just as easily in accordance with such principles, such simple laws. What I find hard to understand is not Ghiţă Blidaru’s thinking and his life, but how the two mesh. They seem so contradictory to me!

This man, who has passed through libraries, through universities, through metropolises, strives to remain a ploughman in his thinking. ‘That’s all I am,’ he tells me. Perhaps that’s true. But in the same evening I listened to Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto on his gramophone and, for the treason to be complete, good old Couperin’s Les Folies françoises. He has a fine understanding of art, down to the slightest nuances and the finest shades. And then there’s that Brueghel, the only painting in his study. What is it doing in the house of a ploughman from Vâlcea, who never tires of reminding me what he is?

So Ghiţă Blidaru inhabits an environment his thinking rejects, lives by values he denies, enjoys victories that he disputes.

‘Europe is a fiction,’ he’s been saying in his university course for six years, while never ceasing for a moment to love the spirit of this fiction. Brueghel belongs to this fiction, and Bach, and certainly Couperin.

Nevertheless, having passed through and loved them all, Ghiţă Blidaru inevitably returns to his grapevine, in the name of which he was lecturing the other day at the university.

The miracle by which this man manages to think, effortlessly, unaffectedly, like a peasant, is not something I can comprehend. His vision of life seems to open towards as much sky and earth as is visible between the handles of the plough. He requires no more than that. He believes in natural laws which are made and unmade from on high, he believes in hierarchies which no one has the right to challenge, and in the limitless dominion of the land over man. ‘You are what your land makes you, no more.’

For me – tired of having believed excessively in my right to assert myself against life, as though shouting ‘Stay still!’ – this notion of ease, of submission, of renunciation, was a lesson in modesty and the beginning of peace.

But I wonder why his own pride, which I reckon to be immense, does not revolt. Or how his desire for adventure doesn’t protest, or how his instinct for vehemence, struggle and wandering does not assert itself, and how these passions are tamed. Is it because his intelligence has set the example by sacrificing itself?

Because this intelligence, which is fiery enough to start a revolution, seems determined to bury the passions in ashes, to die one day with the simplicity of mind of a peasant who has never left behind the sickle blade with which he has cut grass for seventy years out of eighty.

4

I came across Phillip Dunton at the company offices in Piaţa Rosetti. He’d delivered some reports for Rice and was hurrying to catch the two o’clock train back. We stopped on the stairs to shake hands.

‘And how’s Marjorie doing?’

‘She reads and sits by the stove. It’s terribly cold in Uioara. It was freezing, like in mid-winter. But didn’t you see Marjorie here last week? She was at Ghiţă Blidaru’s opening lecture too. She came specially: said she couldn’t miss it. It was about Uioara, wasn’t it?’

I didn’t manage to answer. He had only five minutes to catch the train. He shouted from the bottom of the stairs:

‘Come to Uioara some Sunday. It would make Marjorie happy.’

So, she was here last week. At another time she would have burst into the workshop in the morning and shouted from the doorway: ‘I’m kidnapping you. You’re mine until 22.17.’

… And that stupid lie about the opening lecture, which she didn’t even attend. It’s not your style, Marjorie, to lie.

And I would have bet that in adultery you would have remained straightforward and without cowardice.

Now I understand Dronţu’s sensitivity, his inability to bear Professor Ghiţă’s lecture for fear of it being too rough on the master.

Today, in the office, I said to Marin in passing:

‘Phillip Dunton was here yesterday. We met at the office.’

For a good few seconds dear old Marin kept his thoughts to himself: to hear or not to hear what I was saying? He opted for deafness.

‘Who took my set square?’ he suddenly bellowed. ‘Yesterday I left it here, and now it’s gone. Maybe we’re haunted. It’s unbelievable.