Nobody gets up to close it. Ionel Bercovici is playing poker on his bed with Marcel Winder and two others whom I don’t know.

You can hear Liova coughing from time to time. Somebody is beating his hands together, either because the coughing annoys him or because he’s cold.

Saturday evening

Every Jew is a king

And every corner of the house rings with laughter

And everyone’s happy

Ianchelevici Şapsă is singing. Leaning against the wall, overcoat draped over his shoulders, hands in pockets. He has a heavy, drawling voice that has trouble with the high notes and he stumbles a little at the end of each verse.

‘… A ieider i-id a melah … Every Jew is a king …’

It’s a melody I’ve heard before somewhere, long ago. At home, perhaps, in Grandfather’s time.

My eyes feel hot. It’s nothing, kid. Nobody can see you. And don’t you feel it does you good, infinitely more good, than proudly gritting your teeth and holding it in?

Sing, Ianchelevici Şapsă. You’re a big fellow, twenty-five years old, and haven’t read a book in your life, you’ve passed through life aware of everything around you and steady on your fine animal feet, you wash your own socks and eat a quarter of a loaf of bread and three walnuts for lunch, you talk dirty and laugh to yourself, you’ve never looked at a painting or loved a girl, you swear like a trooper and spit on the ground, but look at you now while we, the rest of us, watch you silently as though by the roadside, you alone Ianchelevici Şapsă, dispirited, sullen and starved though you are – you alone are singing.

*

I’d gone to the rector’s office to ask something. On returning, the vestibule – empty ten minutes before – had been invaded. I didn’t recognize anybody. But it had all the makings of a nasty fight.

So – I’m trapped. I’m noticed by somebody, or so it seems to me. I go up the stairs three steps at a time, slam behind me various doors, hit walls as I veer left and right. On to the second floor, then left, and I don’t feel I can keep going much longer: I stick to the walls and with a trembling hand seek a door. In trepidation, I push a handle. It’s open.

A small, uncomfortable classroom. Ten or twelve in attendance. A very young man is at the lectern: a student or assistant. He’s talking. Probably it’s a seminar.

My head is spinning and I don’t know if I’m afraid of those outside or embarrassed before those inside. I have to do something to occupy myself and compose my nerves. I take out my pencil and pad: I make notes. Mechanically, absently, simply to behave coherently and get a grip on myself. I don’t know what the man at the lectern is saying. I record like a stenographer, like a machine. Involved only in the motion of pencil on paper, indifferent to everything said, completely detached from what’s going on.

And now, this evening, I find this strange piece of paper in my hand:

There is something profoundly artificial in the entire value system underpinning our lives. Not solely in political economy, where the stresses are visible and the evil easy to locate. Financial instability is the most obvious, though not the most acute, crisis of the old world. There are breakdowns that are even more serious, and even sadder agonies. We will understand nothing about the economic crisis we are studying if we get bogged down in technical details.