Mihail Sebastian: For Two Thousand Years

Disoriented as we are, we will perhaps one day find the truth that returns us to the soil, simplifying everything and installing a new order. One not invented by us, but grown by us.

*

They’re talking again of closing the university. The fighting has intensified. The faculty has been under military occupation for a week.

What remains is Ghiţă Blidaru’s course, hidden in that obscure room on the second floor, where nobody goes because nobody knows about it.

Evening. The dorms as silent as a snowy wasteland. From time to time, in the corridor, tired footfalls, a door closing, a cry that goes unanswered.

You can work well in this silence. I re-read an economic treatise with Ghiţă’s notes in my hand. An impassioned confrontation.

*

It’s worrying. There were too many people at the lecture. Strange hostile faces in the front rows.

Blidaru, brilliant. Success is ultimately achievable, perhaps. But if things don’t work out? We’ll see.

No, this is one thing I won’t give up. I’ve left civil law, left the aesthetics course, left and will leave any course you want, history, sociology, Chinese or German, but I will not give up Ghiţă Blidaru’s course.

I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.

Some of them stopped me at the door.

‘Student ID.’

It would have been stupid to present it. I tried to rush past them. They knocked me to the wall with a single blow. I watch them from the corner into which they have pushed me. The door was ajar. Laughter, voices, shouts from one bench to another could be heard. Five minutes to six. Ghiţă will enter now. If I could get in too … If I go to those idiots at the door and talk to them, perhaps they’ll understand. Good God, a seat in the back row … It’s hardly too much to ask … No, that’s an idiotic idea … Silence. Then applause. He’s entered, surely. The door closes. One of them, the only one who has remained to guard the lecture hall, stares at me.

‘What’s up, pal?’

‘What’s up? I’m terribly ashamed of you and the others, I feel a head taller than you, because you’ll never know the sad pride of defeat, alone against ten thousand. And I’m going to see Ghiţă Blidaru and I’m going to talk to him.’

*

I can’t re-create the scene. I’m powerless to remember it all now. It was brusque. Just two or three words and a puzzled glance.

Ghiţă was leaving the secretariat. I went up and spoke to him. I don’t know what I said. I swear I don’t, and that this isn’t a ruse to spare myself one more moment of self-disgust.

He interrupted me.

‘Young man, what do you want?’

‘Professor, they threw me out and …’

‘Well, and what do you want me to do about it?’

He walked off without waiting for a reply.

I should run for hours through the streets, or chop up a wagonload of barrels with a hatchet, to collapse in my bed in the evening and sleep and forget.

*

Third night playing poker. We played in the library, around a candle, until three or four in the morning.

Yesterday I won 216 lei and then treated everyone to some girls, where we went in two at a time.

Ionel Bercovici kissed me. ‘Hey, and we all thought you were stuck up.’

A disgusting dive. That vinegary white wine is really pretty awful. The first few glasses make you wince. Then in the end it works.

It goes on until late in the night. At The Cross, at Mizzi’s, that whore from Cernăuţi, who for an extra 10 lei will do anything.

We walked between bayonets all day. There was a small group of us downstairs, at the secretary’s office, when compact bands arrived from the faculty of medicine. We were surrounded on all sides and only got out between a line of police two-deep. They escorted us through the streets like that, closely followed. We changed direction several times, hurried on, ducking into courtyards in the hope of shaking them off. Until nightfall. Until now.

If it weren’t for the consolation of the bitter-tasting nights of gambling, the dizzy pleasure of poker, what would life be?

Then there’s another matter. The voluptuousness of being dirty, your secret pride in letting yourself go. Today you give up brushing off your hat, tomorrow you don’t change your shirt, the day after you don’t repair your worn-out heels. To sink down deeply, irrevocably in filth and to love it for its dirtiness, for its familiar smell, for its dry crusts of bread, for the intimate warmth of humiliation. And to know that you are once and for all rudderless, that control slipped from your hands one morning when you didn’t change your collar, because you couldn’t be bothered.

Haven’t they always told us we’re a dirty people? Maybe it’s true. Perhaps our mysticism, our asceticism, our piety is just that — dirtiness. A way of getting down on your knees, a form of slow, voluptuous self-mutilation, ever further from the white star of purity.

*

This morning, in the yard of the dormitory blocks, Marga Stern said to me, awkwardly, as if the news had nothing to do with me:

‘Look, spring is on its way.’

I fled. Two weeks ago, on a day when I told myself I had to choose between being the fourth hand at poker or living. I fled, and I’m glad, because it was hard.

It’s a small room. A garret. But it’s mine. A chair, a table, a bed. Four white walls and a high window, through which the tops of the trees in Cişmigiu Park can be seen.

The formula is simple and I wonder why I didn’t discover it earlier.

Two thousand lei per month: 1,000 for the room, 300 lei for thirty loaves of bread, 300 lei for thirty litres of milk, 400 lei remainder.

I’m going to write to Mama asking her to embroider a handkerchief with the motto I’ve discovered: LIFE IS SIMPLE!

Fourteen days on my own. I’d like to know exactly how many people in this city, in the wide world, are freer than me.

I found a superb Montaigne for 60 lei in a second-hand bookshop, from 1760, with fine matt paper and amazing footnotes. Impassioned. The more impassioned he is, the more of a libertine, sceptic and artist he is. Me? I’m just tortured.

What a break. And I never, ever guessed, fool that I am, that such a holiday were possible.

I’ve put up a big map of Europe on the wall facing the bed. I need a globe but I haven’t enough money.

Maybe it’s childish, but I need to draw upon the symbolism of this map and to read off the cities and countries on it. It’s a daily reminder of the world’s existence. And that every kind of escape is possible.

*

It was beautiful just now in Cişmigiu, with that white metallic sun, the water green with vegetation, the still leafless trees, naked like a herd of adolescents drafted into the army.

People are so ugly in their out-of-season coats, their hats worn out from winter, with their sun-scared smiles and heavy, trudging steps. I watched how they passed and pitied them their graceless lack of awareness.

*

A young, smartly dressed girl stopped on the boulevard in front of the window of a fruit shop. I said the first nonsense that entered my head. She laughed and agreed to walk with me.

She didn’t ask where I was taking her. She ascended the stairs, and undressed readily once the door was closed. A small body, pleasant rather than beautiful, very young. We made love in the middle of the day, the window open, both of us naked. The girl cried from pleasure and afterwards walked through my bedroom with my clothes over her shoulders, curious, looking through the papers on the desk, opening books, closing them loudly.

‘Will you come here again?’

‘I will.’

She didn’t ask me for anything. I forgot to ask her name.