Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years

*

Can that be it? This morning I went to the class on Roman law. No one said a word to me. I took notes feverishly, in order not to have to lift my eyes from my desk. Halfway through the lecture, a ball of paper falls on the bench, beside me. I don’t look at it, don’t open it. Someone shouts my name loudly from behind. I don’t turn my head. My neighbour to the left watches me carefully, without a word. I can’t endure his gaze and I look up.

‘Out!’

He barks the command. He stands up, making space for me to get by, and waits. I feel a tense silence around me. Nobody breathes. Any gesture from me and this silence will explode.

No. I slide out of the desk and slip towards the door between two rows of onlookers. It all happens decorously, ritually. Someone by the door lashes out with his fist, but it is a glancing blow. A late punch, my friend.

I’m out in the street. I see a beautiful woman. I see an empty carriage passing by. Everything is as it ought to be. A cold December morning.

*

Winder sought me out to congratulate me on yesterday’s events. I don’t know who told him about it. And he gave me a ticket to go to the student dormitories the day after tomorrow. A group is being organized for every faculty. The boys are determined to attend lectures on 10 December. A matter of principle, Winder says.

The whole thing bores me to death. I’d like a big, clear, severe book with ideas that challenge all I believe in, a book I could devour with the same intense passion with which I first read Descartes. Every chapter would be a personal struggle.

But no: I’m involved in a ‘matter of principle’. Ridiculous.

*

10 December. Walking straight ahead, head uncovered, in the rain, blindly, looking neither right nor left nor behind, without crying out, to avoid crying out, above all, and allowing the noise of the street, the people who are watching, and this hour of confusion, to wash over me. There. If I close my eyes, nothing remains but drizzling rain: I can feel the fine droplets on my cheek, trickling from my eyebrow towards my nostrils and from there falling suddenly to my lips. Why can’t I be profoundly, imperturbably calm, like a horse drawing an empty cart through mud, through a storm?

I’ve been beaten. That’s all I know. I’m not in pain and, apart from a punch to the thigh, none of them were severe blows. He had a strange expression, under his cap. I hadn’t believed he was going to strike me until I saw his raised fist. He was a stranger: perhaps it was the first time he’d laid eyes on me.

I’ve been beaten and the world doesn’t stand still for such things. Italian-Romanian Bank, paid-up capital, 50,000,000. Where Minimax guards, fire doesn’t spread. The capital of Iceland is … Liebovici Isodor, what happened to you? If he found the door to the secretariat, he escaped. If not … But what the hell is the capital of Iceland? Not Christiana, for God’s sake, and not Oslo either, because they’re the same place …

If I cry, I’m lost. I’m still self-possessed enough to know that much. If I cry, I’m lost. Clench your fists, you fool, if necessary, believe yourself a hero, pray to God, tell yourself you’re the son of a race of martyrs, yes, yes, tell yourself that, knock your head against the wall, but if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and not die of shame, don’t cry. That’s all I ask of you: don’t cry.

*

If I thought it would do any good, I’d rip out that page I wrote the other day. One more pathetic outburst like that and I’ll give up keeping a diary. What matters is whether I can understand calmly, critically, what is happening now to myself and others. Otherwise …

People say that this afternoon they’ll decide to close the university indefinitely.

Yesterday, on the platform, as I was getting off the train, Mama looked thinner and older than ever under the weak station lights. It was probably only her usual nerves, in our first hour of being together again.

Her nerves … ‘Have you got all your parcels? You didn’t leave anything on the train? Button up your collar properly. Now, to find a carriage …’ She talks a lot, hurriedly, about so many little things, and doesn’t wipe the tear from her lashes, afraid I’d notice it.

*

First walk in town. Triumphal procession down Main Street, between two rows of Jewish shopkeepers who salute me loudly, each from his own shop, with discreet knowing nods.

‘It’s nothing, lads, keep your chins up, God is good, it’ll pass.’

‘For two thousand years …’ says Moritz Bercovici (manufacturing and footwear), trying to explain to me the cause of our persecution.

At the barber’s, the owner himself takes the honour of cutting my hair and asks during the operation if I have any bruises, scars … if you know what I mean, sir.

‘No, I’ve no idea.’

‘Well, the fighting.’

‘What fighting?’

‘The fighting at the university. Didn’t you get beaten up?’

‘No.’

‘Not at all?’

‘Not at all.’

The man is perplexed. He cuts my hair grudgingly, unenthusiastically.

*

A family evening. My cousin Viky has returned with her husband from their honeymoon. Seems she’s pregnant. An uncle finds the matter amusing.

‘You’ve been hard at work, you two!’

Viky is embarrassed, her husband serious.

‘Well, young fellow, there you go! You’re done for now! Whether you like it or not, feel like it or not, you have to … You know the story about the train?’

He tells the story about the train. Everybody laughs loudly. In the corner, Mama looks at me, confused …

I might have ended up like the rest of them, a fat married shopkeeper, playing poker on Sunday evening and talking dirty to newlyweds. You know the one about the train?

I sometimes ask myself, fearfully, if I have wholly succeeded in escaping them.

*

I asked Mama if we could stay at home. She works, I read. I look up from the book from time to time to see her, beautiful, calm, with the most peaceful forehead I know, with her eyes a little tired with age. Forty-three? Forty-four? I’m afraid to ask her.

‘How are you getting on in Bucharest?’

‘Fine. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason.’

She continues working, without looking at me.

‘You know, Mama, if sending me 4,000 is too hard …’

She doesn’t respond. I go to the other side of the table, take her right hand in mine and squeeze it inquiringly.

‘It’s late, son. Time for bed.’

I should have guessed. Things have not been going well at home. There’s no more money. I’ve told her that from now on I’ll manage on 2,000 a month. I’ll stay in the student dormitories. It’s fine there too, it’s warm and clean and comfortable. (She doesn’t seem to believe me — and I talk quickly, surprised at the positive qualities that I’ve suddenly discovered in those barracks in the Jewish quarter in Văcăreşti.)

*

I can hear her breathing in the next room. I’m well aware that she can’t sleep and deliberately breathes as if she’s sleeping to fool me so that I won’t be worried.

Such childish nonsense. I should be ashamed of it, but I am not. At my age, unable to leave home for three months without that feeling of something clutching at my heart, without that great yearning overwhelming me just as I am about to be embraced goodbye. If I weren’t ashamed, I’d go and kiss her now, as I would in the past, when I woke in the night from a bad dream. The bad dream: that suitcase packed for the journey.

The voluptuousness of being alone in a world that believes it owns you. It’s not pride. Not even shyness. It’s a natural, simple and unforced sense of being left to yourself. Sometimes I’d like to leave my own body and from a corner of the room observe how I talk, how I get worked up, see what I’m like when I’m cheerful or sad, knowing that none of those things is me. Playing at having a double? No, that’s not it at all.