You can’t work in this place.’

The louder he bellowed, the falser the outburst sounded to him. Not knowing how to end it, he shouted even louder.

Then he suddenly went quiet, frowning and sombre. He muttered from time to time, shrugged his shoulders, swore by all the saints.

He caught up with me in the street after work.

‘Why don’t we go get a brandy?’

‘Sure.’

‘Come on, then.’

And, later, on the way, apropos of nothing. ‘To hell with women. I’m telling you, there’s no end to the trouble they bring.’

*

A long, despairing letter from young Dogany. Things are not going at all well in Budapest. The university has been closed again, there have been major disturbances, street battles, arrests. He himself received a pretty bad blow to the head.

‘Everything would be fine and I’d put up with it all, if at least I could manage to stay. On Thursday I have to present my papers at the secretariat of the faculty for another review. Will I be allowed to stay? Will I be expelled? My father threatens to cut off my allowance if I don’t return to Satu Mare. But I can’t, I simply can’t. What can I do there, in a country that’s not mine? But is Hungary my country? Yes, absolutely, whatever my father says and however much you might laugh. Only one man could understand me, if he were alive today: Endre Ady. I’d write to him and I’m sure he’d understand me.’

I wrote back:

Dear Pierre Dogany, stay where you are. It’ll pass, you’ll see. Six years ago I went through what you’re going through now. It has passed, and one day I’ll forget. They beat you up? It’s nothing. They’ll beat you up ten times, then they’ll get tired of it. Do I laugh at you? Yes, I admit I laugh and your Hungarian fervour strikes me as comic. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. In your place, I’d do the same thing. In your place I did do the same thing.

Today, everything has settled down calmly and nicely. Sometimes I recall my past despairs and I don’t understand them. They seem embarrassingly childish.

Force yourself not to suffer. Don’t allow yourself to indulge your suffering. There’s a great voluptuousness in persecution and feeling yourself wronged is probably one of the proudest of private pleasures. Be vigilant and don’t indulge such pride. Try to take whatever comes with a certain good humour. Think how ridiculous we would be if we were alarmed at every shower of rain that soaked us. Believe me, what’s happening to you now, however sad it may be, is no more than a shower.

*

I’ve tried to remember where I know Arnold Max from but it just won’t come to me. I no longer have any idea of the place or the circumstances of our first meeting.

I’ve so often promised myself to limit my relations with people, but I’m incapable of controlling myself. The ease with which various acquaintances manage to crowd around me is intolerable. At first they’re neither hot nor cold nor black nor white, but eventually, without me realizing it, I become subject to suffocating demands.

One evening I sat and thought of my connections with various people, and was alarmed to realize how many of my friends are superfluous and uninteresting. You just find yourself surrounded by the dramas and farces that pop up in the wake of your indifference and one day make their demands on you. Why? How? When? It’s too late to figure it out and, in any case, too late to put it right.

You’d need to be cruelly vigilant at every moment, to pinch the shoots of all those attempts at cordiality that will eventually make you their victim.