Mihail Sebastian - For Two Thousand Years

His pamphlet Academic Bombast and Revolutionary Bombast caused complete bafflement. Everyone had known Vieru as a modernist. Now nobody knew what he was any more. Anything was possible and there was no way to protect yourself. Vieru disposed of your peace, your freedom, your private arrangements. For three straight years he was the artistic police, spreading panic, sowing enmities that would bide their time, awaiting their moment. The moment wasn’t long in coming. Vieru’s first misstep gave the signal. And it truly was imprudent of him to accept at that moment a project in the Engineers’ Park. They gave him sole responsibility for building an entire neighbourhood. Admittedly, the enterprise was dizzyingly attractive for a man who had dreamed of nothing his whole life but building something grand, extensive, new, from scratch, his alone to direct and plan. But had he been more prudent, he would have known the moment was not propitious. A man in the midst of such hostility would not be granted the peace needed to create. A prickly Vieru would be put up with as long as he was poor. How could you hurt him? By attacking his intelligence? His passion for dispute? Lucky enough to possess nothing, how could he be condemned for compromising, for being afraid, for being cautious? But a Vieru engaged in something big, a Vieru on the path to realizing a grand project, went from being dangerous to being vulnerable. Very vulnerable. The day the ex-pamphleteer stepped on the site, his fate was sealed: there were old scores to settle and slights to be avenged.

And what a show it was! And not just the newspaper articles, the coffee-shop talk and the anonymous letters to the consortium that had hired Vieru. He could have defeated all that alone, he who knew about writing, arguing and declaiming. But there were neighbourhood meetings too, protesting against ‘the disfiguring of our Capital by irresponsibly ceding the construction of an entire neighbourhood to a pretentious bungler’.

And then there were questions raised in Parliament, telegrams to the Minister for the Arts, ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations in front of City Hall, mass walkouts of workers …

I remember well those enormous placards hanging from a cart pulled down Calea Victoriei by a donkey who became popular very quickly.

Citizens of Bucharest! Will you tolerate a newcomer’s risky experiments in your city, in the capital of a united Romania? Will you permit the sacrifice of the most picturesque corner of the citadel of Bucur?

I didn’t know the master during that period, and I would have been indifferent to the whole story if I hadn’t had an instinctual glimmer of sympathy for the man who had drawn such unanimous enmity. I followed the affair in the papers and was very distressed to one day read that ‘ good sense triumphs at last, architect Mircea Vieru’s contract has been revoked and work at the Engineers’ Park has halted, to general satisfaction’.

I met him several months later, in autumn.

It was an empty office. His friends had one by one deserted him, no clients appeared, the summer had passed without any work and winter was coming with no projects in store. Vieru was writing a pamphlet to ‘set the record straight’ about the sad affair of the revoked contract. He wrote at night to give us an overwrought read in the morning, complete with gestures and outbursts. He was at war with the universe: with the government, with Parliament, with City Hall, with the Liberal Party, with the Romanian people. When he found a strident phrase, he perked up: ‘I’ll show them.’ It was hard to say what he was going to demonstrate, or to whom.

One man alone remained always by his side, sharing his fury and suffering his disappointments: Marin Dronţu. He carried a stick and had obtained a permit for a gun. What he really wanted was to shoot one of the ‘thugs’ who wrote in the papers against his master, and if he didn’t do it, it was only because it was hard to know where to start. But there were some suspicious fights at night, resulting in some bloodied heads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Dronţu had a hand in them. And today, when I ask him, he smiles mysteriously. ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see anything.’

There were also days when Vieru caved in, when his fever subsided, when he lost his appetite for the fight, when he trudged through the workshop, when it all looked empty, senseless, worthless, when he despaired of the drawing boards, when he was tired of arguing, when nobody mattered to him, whether friend or foe.

‘One day we’ll shut up shop,’ he said with indifference, worn out, after ten cups of coffee and hundreds of cigarettes, smoked nervously down to the filter.

Sometimes Ghiţă Blidaru would come by and his breezy presence would shake the master from his apathy. They always found something to fight about, as there were no facts or ideas which these two men, who had known each other so long, could agree on. The arrival of the professor was always invigorating. When he had left, the desire for work would return, as would the courage to curse fate and to have faith in it.

‘Just you wait, I’ll show them.’

And so he did. In spring, Rice turned up out of the blue. True, he didn’t look like a gift from heaven, but he had plenty of money and a pinch of craziness, which was exactly what he needed to get along with Vieru. And now, nearly six years later, Der Querschnitt is presenting in Berlin the work of the great architect of Uioara in Prahova.

Last night I stayed up late talking with Marin Dronţu, drinking a glass of wine and recalling all that had happened.

‘Where are they, the ones who cursed him, where are they? I’ll eat them alive!’

I think what draws me most to the master is his wounded pride. I myself had so many personal humiliations to overcome that I find the company of this man, who has been struck at from every direction, stimulating. He had bursts of mania and disgust, turning vengefully on everything, like a flame, like a blade. I preserve an old sense of obligation, an inevitable sympathy, for the isolated or beaten individual. The only pain which I understand directly and instinctively, without needing it explained, is the pain of discouragement.

I too had breathed the diffuse poison of hostility, I too knew what it was like to have someone swear at you over their shoulder, or to land a punch without a word, or to slam a door in your face.

I’d known all these things, day after day, breathing the same adversity, bearing down on you from all around, anonymously, stubbornly, without beginning or end. Today, recalling it, this drama looks puerile and overdone to me. But back then, along with the experience of my first lamentable years of university, it was a burden I suffered. Anybody I met could have been an enemy, every hand held out could have been about to strike you.

Even Blidaru I approached with apprehension. The uproar at the university, the street fights and the tension of that year of confrontation maintained my consciousness of the sin of being a Jew like an ever-raw wound. I turned this feeling into an obsession, a mania, and now I understand that my perturbation was excessive, and it must have been deadly tedious to anybody not involved. The naivety of those with something to hide — a crime, a disgrace, a drama — is that they imagine they are under suspicion. In reality, there’s a strong dose of indifference in the world, enough that you can go off and die and nobody will notice. In the case of Jews, their mistake is that they observe too much and thereby believe themselves to be under scrutiny. Back then, I felt interrogated by every glance cast my way. I felt hounded. I felt the urgent, comic need to denounce myself: I’m a Jew. I was sure that if I didn’t I’d sink into compromise, that I’d slide into a series of lies, that I’d sully the part of me that longed for truth. More than once I envied the simple life of the ghetto Jew, wearing his yellow patch. A humiliating idea perhaps, but comfortable and clear-cut, because they had finally put an end to the horrible comedy of uttering their own name like a denunciation.