Mihail Sebastian - For Two Thousand Years

‘What? … You’re going?’

‘Yes. Goodnight.’

He stood there on the footpath, in front of my gate, leaning against a lamppost with his hands in his pockets, suddenly disoriented, as though he’d just missed a train. I took several steps into the yard, unsure whether I should turn around. I had an intense feeling of relief, which an inner voice summed up nicely as: ‘He can go to hell.’ But I also felt I was doing something ‘one ought not to do’. I felt a vague sense of shame, and I foresaw that it would not let me be. I know how I am. I’m not incapable of committing certain minor infamies to protect my personal peace. But once committed, the memory of them nags at me like a speck of dirt in my eye.

I turned back to him, fed up, and snapped:

‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you go and sleep?’

He shrugged and smiled (probably at the naivety of the question).

‘Where do you live?’

‘Hmm! Wherever.’

My first thought was this: ‘How good it would be to be upstairs already, in my room, alone in bed, making myself at home, turning on the bedside lamp to read.’ To be alone at that moment seemed the greatest happiness possible.

‘Come on, you can sleep here.’I went on, cursing him in my thoughts with utter fury and cursing myself for this bit of unforeseen bad luck. We undressed in silence, me furious, he unperturbed.

What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him.

I won’t be able to sleep. There’s no point shutting my eyes, I won’t sleep. It’s better if I accept insomnia and resign myself to wakefulness. He’s worn out. What has happened this evening probably happens to him every evening. Nothing that need bother him.

A stranger sleeps next to me, like a stone beside another stone.

He’s the first person ever to enter my life without knocking. Everyone I know, I know on the basis of an implicit pact of solitude. ‘Look, this is me, that’s you, I can give this much, you that much; we’ve shaken hands and have thereby sworn comradeship as regards certain things, ideas, memories — the rest is off limits, remains within ourselves, we’re well brought up and will never overstep the boundaries or open the doors which we have closed.’ The pact is clear, the parties well defined: me, you.

A single stranger sleeps next to me and I feel like a whole crowd has come in with him. He hasn’t said anything to me, I haven’t said anything to him, but I feel I have nothing else to say to him, nor to hide from him.

*

‘Revolution … Could be. Within a month, two, three,’ say the boys at the Central. Ştefan Pârlea is more specific:

‘By George’s day the gallows will be busy.’

Perhaps they’ve got the dates and modalities wrong. But they’re not wrong about the atmosphere, which is suffocating.

Where do they come from, these crazy, homeless, superfluous, empty-headed, empty-handed boys, with their undefined roles and blind expectations?

They sleep here tonight, there tomorrow, the night after that they don’t sleep at all. They spend their lives passing from one table to another, looking for a penny, a cigarette, or a bed for the night. From time to time one of them finds a rallying call, a message for everybody, an absolute truth, and he elbows his way to the front. After a day or two, after a weekend or two, they lose their way out of boredom or the boredom of those around them.

‘We’re going to put them up against the wall.’ I’ve heard that expression a thousand times. I bump into an avenger at every street corner.

Who is it they’re going to put up against the wall? That hasn’t been clearly established yet. The bourgeoisie, the old, those with paunches, the complacent? It’s all confused, blind, chaotic. They’re all discouraged and strung out. They’re worn out with waiting. This endless wait that consumes hours, days and years and still has room in its belly. This goalless, limitless, aimless waiting, a pure state of expectation, composed of nerves and tension.

‘It has to collapse, it absolutely has to collapse …’

‘What does?’

‘Everything.’

I accompanied the master and Professor Ghiţă to Snagov to take a look at the professor’s plot. It’s a small site belonging to the association of teaching staff, in which Blidaru has reserved 200 square metres with the idea of one day building himself a house. He doesn’t seem at all inclined to build now. The site is well positioned, on the side furthest from Bucharest, with a vantage above the lake that would allow us to create a superb terrace. I’d like to build the house just for the pleasure of such a terrace. The master and I both tried to convince him, but the professor appears determined not to begin anything.

‘Please, don’t insist. I feel there’s nothing more ridiculous these days than beginning something — whatever it might be. I’m certain the earth will quake tomorrow, so I’m not going to start building a house today. You’re well aware how ridiculous it would be. It’s out of the question. This is a time for demolition, not construction.’

*

He’s lived in the same house since 1923. Everything is as it was when I met him first, the long rectangular curtainless window, the camp bed, the books, the small Brueghel on the wall … And he himself, in a long house coat, under the light of his desk lamp, seems unchanged. He speaks slowly, defining as he goes, checking each hypothesis, responding to his own questions, overturning his own objections.

As he is calm and self-controlled, who can judge how pressing the problems preoccupying him are? Listening to him, I often have a sense of being with a chemist who, with a vial of ecrasite in his hand, declaims on the explosive qualities of the human body. And that this cold person is the most passionate and tumultuous of men.

I reminded him of our first conversations here, of the 1923 course on ‘the development of the idea of value’, the indignation of the specialists, and how amazed we students were … I pulled an atlas from the shelf and opened on the map of Europe to mark with a pencil the very centres of crisis, which now validate the predictions he made back then.

He took the pencil from my hand and pointed to the centre of the map: Vienna.

‘This is the pressure point. From here everything will fracture. Observe how from a clearly trivial matter, like the Anschluss, a totally disproportionate point of tension is created. Everybody takes a side in the game, everybody joins in, and the more deadly the stakes, the more desperate the pressure. When things collapse, they will collapse completely.’

Leaning over the map, he looked like a general reviewing the course of a battle that is imminent.

*

There’s not much to do in the workshop, so I almost always attend Ghiţă Blidaru’s course. The slide in the British pound has for the last three weeks fuelled his lectures and given them the vivacity of a serialized novel. From one lecture to the next, a new set of monetary certainties falls apart. The professor receives the latest reports on the disasters with professional detachment, but I find it hard to credit that the general collapse provides him with any satisfaction. However, I don’t think the monetary phenomenon interests him except insofar as it is a symptom and an element of disintegration. A strong currency means, in any case, a focus of value, which automatically guarantees the stability of all values, at whatever level you care to look, whether in economics or culture. A provisional stability, obviously, but real nonetheless. Conversely, monetary inflation provokes instability in every aspect of life, and first of all in the collective mind. (Isn’t revolutionary Germany a result in large measure of the years of inflation? — this is a question for Blidaru.)