Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Ten days or so ago at Grindea’s, I listened on disc to a Stravinsky work that I did not know: the Histoire du soldat. Very witty, very ingenious. When it comes to the moderns, I’m afraid that I am most receptive to “ingenuity.”

  One evening I came across Nina on the 16 streetcar. I was just about to ask a lady in front of me if she was getting off at the next stop (so that I could pass by). She turned her head, and it was her. I can’t say that I didn’t feel pleased to see her again. I’d have liked to kiss her.

  Tuesday, 12 [April]

  Dinner at Mircea’s on Sunday evening. It was a long time since I had seen him. He’s unchanged. I looked at him and listened with great curiosity to what he said. The gestures I had forgotten, his nervous volubility, a thousand things thrown together—always congenial, straightforward, captivating. It’s hard not to be fond of him.

  But I have so much to say to him about Cuvântul, about the Iron Guard, about himself and his unforgivable compromises. There can be no excuse for the way he caved in politically. I had decided not to mince my words with him. In any case, there’s not much left to mince. Even if we meet again like this, our friendship is at an end. . . . I couldn’t talk to him because of the Pencius, who came unexpectedly just as we were rising from the table. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.

  Dinner at Ralea’s yesterday. It’s the second time I’ve seen him since he became a minister. Again we discussed his exit from the National Peasants. His explanations seemed inadequate for such a betrayal, even if it was committed out of honest conviction.

  According to Ralea, the Iron Guard is still a great danger. He told me some incredible things. Three-quarters of the state apparatus has been “Legionized.”

  Wednesday, 13 [April]

  Yesterday evening, the St. Matthew Passion at the Ateneu. By now I know it too well not to notice when it is badly performed. The lack of an organ began to bother me. The choruses were deafening, the soloists inadequate, the orchestra rusty, the general tone confused. It is no longer enough for me just to read the text; it has become too familiar to deliver by itself the emotion that I used to feel. I’d like to hear a proper Matthäus-Passion. But even so, I enjoyed again hearing the arias I have come to know. And I listened more analytically, more grammatically, more closely than before.

  Saturday, 16 [April]

  There are some simple things that I have always known, but that sometimes give me the arresting sense that I am discovering them for the first time.

  On Tuesday, as I listened to the St. Matthew Passion, I couldn’t get the Evangelist’s words out of my mind: “Now, the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him: ‘Where wilt Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the Passover?’ And he said: ‘Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, “The Master saith: My time is at hand, I will keep the Passover at thy house.’””

  It was the feast that we too have been celebrating since yesterday evening, the bread we eat, the wine we drink. . .

  I suddenly remembered that Jesus was a Jew—something of which I am never sufficiently aware, and which forces me to think again about our terrible destiny.

  In the same way I stopped last autumn at Chartres Cathedral to look at the Circumcision of Jesus. It was just like at an ordinary bris: an old man, holding the ritual knife in one hand and the child’s “willy” in the other, looked like the “Moishe shoikhet” in Brăila.

  I have been reading Nietzsche’s Daybreak since yesterday evening. Somewhere it talks of the “Jewish ballast” in Christianity.

  How terribly ironic is that ballast, but somehow also a kind of consolation for us.

  Tuesday, 19 [April]

  Cuvântul was closed down on Sunday.

  What was the point of its reappearing? So that it would have time for two or three acts of infamy! So that it could speak of the “pseudoscientist” Freud? So that it could claim that the Jewish attorneys mutilated each other fighting at the law courts? I’d like to speak to the professor one day about all this: not to reproach him, but to bring back to mind a Cuvântul that once really did fight “with its visor raised.”

  Restlessness, anxiousness, questions without answers. Iron Guard people arrested, a plot discovered or “staged,” rumors to your heart’s content— and not a single word in the papers, which leave it to you to believe whatever you like.

  I want to go for ten days or so to Balcic, but I wonder whether it would not be unwise to leave town. I can’t forget that my Christmas holiday was cut short by that dreadful Goga government, so unexpected, so implausible, so absurd. Another such incident cannot be excluded—and I wouldn’t like to be caught a long way from home.

  On Sunday—because all kinds of rumors were circulating about the arrest of Iron Guardists—I telephoned Mircea and then went to see him.

  He was there, and Marietta came a little later. They were all indignant at the arrests and shutdowns, considering them mindless, arbitrary, and illogical. I should have liked to tell them that that is dictatorship (which they want too, so long as it does not strike them personally but allows them, and only them, to strike at others).

  But I held my tongue. What good would it do, through irony or allusion, to begin the settling of accounts that I must one day have with them, openly and without sentimentality?

  Balcic. Saturday, 30 April

  I have been here for a week. I found the same room that I had last year at the Dumitrescu villa.

  Why haven’t I written a line since I arrived? Maybe because I have been haunted by the thought of those journal pages that I wrote here exactly a year ago, in the same room and facing the same sea with its thousand colors and sounds—but that I lost a few months later in Paris, together with the manuscript of the novel. I see the pages before me, as if it were just yesterday that I held them in my hand. . . .

  How many things there have been to record! I let them all pass randomly, but now that my return is approaching I feel that I leave behind not a week of idleness but ten, fifteen.

  Yesterday, naked in the sea. I went to Ecrene with Cicerone, Julietta (even today I don’t know her full name), her sister, and the major. On the beach at Ecrene, barefooted, undressed, I walked through the forest (an unlikely forest, fifty meters from the sea), pulled a branch from a wild pear tree in blossom, tore off a stem of bulrush as tall as a spear, wrestled, shouted, wilted in the sun—and returned late in the day to Balcic, sunburnt, with a fever in which I could feel mixed together the sea air, the wind, the few hours of revelry on the beach, the whole day of sun and childhood.

  I still don’t know the name of the major’s wife. For some reason they call her “Iancu”—and I like that rather odd male name said to a melancholic woman. She is not beautiful. I’d even say she’s far from beautiful. But a certain meek tenderness, moving in a woman of her age (thirty-five?), gives her so much femininity. Their conjugal tragedy is simple: a husband who is both impotent and wildly jealous; a provincial life with no escape, watched over by the whole little town.

  She came here one afternoon: she cried as she quietly told me everything, letting the tears run and wiping them away like a child. She stroked me, kissed me, but I declined her sallies, not sharply but firmly. Yesterday evening, as we returned from Ecrene, she told me of the sudden passion she could not help “having” for me.

  No, Iancu dear, no.

  Nae Ionescu was here over Easter. As my way to the center of town passes by his villa, I called on him. (I think he was actually here on my first day, last Saturday.)

  Still the same perennial Nae! Suddenly, without leading up to it in any way, he told me everything he said to Nicholson—which was to get stuffed, of course. His inimitable tone of pert modesty! How childish he is, how he wants to shock people! And how much I enjoy helping him, with my air of forbidden admiration, constant amazement, and curious expectation. This childishness of his is one of the last things for which I am still fond of him.

  To Nicholson (the Labou
r M.P. who was in Bucharest two weeks ago), he said that he would understand nothing in Romania if he judged it by the criterion of “individual liberty.” It wasn’t a value with which we were familiar; we’d just borrowed it from somewhere, but the natural, organic evolution of the Romanian people passed it by as something dispensable.

  Very well—I’d have liked to say in reply to Nae—but when you say such things on the terrace of a magnificent villa in Balcic, or on the balcony of a sumptuous palace in Baneasa, when a Mercedes-Benz is waiting for you outside, when you get your clothes from London, your linen from Vienna, your furniture from Florence, and your toiletries from Paris, this theorizing is all terribly reactionary. Isn’t it somehow an unconscious act of defense?

  When I opened the window yesterday morning, the first thing I saw was a young girl leaving the villa opposite mine and running down the street in white shorts, a white sports shirt, and an orange blouse, all gleaming in the sunlight.

  She may have been an ugly girl (and later, when I saw her more closely at Mamut, she proved to be not at all out of the ordinary), but at that moment she was youth, freedom, morning itself.

  Une jeune fille en fleur . . . (especially as I am reading Proust, as I usually do on holiday).

  I learned to my surprise that Virginica Radulescu—the little tart I met five years or so ago at one of Carol's parties and with whom I had a bit of a fling (she was standing in for Mîntuleasa at the time)—has married an architect who is head over heels in love with her. I met them both in Balcic, and I couldn’t help remembering the dreadful story of Aurică Rosenthal and Geta—a rather similar incident.

  Well, who should I meet Thursday evening walking by the Fishing Lake with Virginica and the architect? Je vous le donne en mille4 . . . It was Geta, of course, with her new husband. A secret solidarity of destiny, profession, and temperament.

  Poor Swann. Poor Saint-Loup. There is always a new Odette, a new Rachel.

  And you, who write these lines, are you sure you don’t have an Odette of your own in Bucharest, one to whom you even sent a couple of love letters from here, which she may have read on her way to or from a rendezvous?

  Bucharest, [Sunday], 8 May

  Since I returned from Balcic a week ago, I have been leading the inexcusable life of an idler, who wears himself out by wasting his time. I haven’t managed to stay at home for a single evening. I’ve wasted my nights either with Nelly Ehshich (after Götterdämmerung), or with Cicerone (after the Rosenkavalier), or with Celia (an evening at the movies), or with Leni and Froda at the Melody (tonight I returned at four in the morning, not even too distraught to have watched her flirting all the time with Lazaroneanu, Hefter, and a hundred other guys to whom she flashed smiles, greetings, summonses, remarks . . .). I must give her her due: all of last week she was extraordinarily affectionate, coming to me no fewer than three times in seven days.

  I promise to be more hardworking and sensible. I can’t bear myself when I become lazy and let myself go. Idleness is all very well at Balcic, the only place where it doesn’t demoralize me.

  [Wednesday], 11 May

  Nae Ionescu has been arrested. I haven’t been able to find out any details. Mircea doesn’t call, and I can’t very well keep insisting—that would seem indiscreet in present circumstances.

  It seems he was arrested on Saturday morning. What will happen now, I don’t know. Is he really at Miercurea-Ciuc?5 Will he be kept there under house arrest? Will he be implicated in the trial of Codreanu? Will he lose his professorship?

  I’m distressed at what is happening to him? What a strange turn of events!

  Friday, 20 May

  Yesterday evening at Viaţa românească, Suchianu6 and I were talking with each other and moving toward the open window (it all lasted no more than three minutes or so). Then who should appear on the pavement below, walking slowly and in her amorous way with an elegant young man? Leni!

  I don’t know if I gave a start, but in a split second I sized up the situation, felt the shock, made up my mind, left Suchianu hanging in midconversation, and reached the street door in a few steps. Leni and her flirt were just then in front of the building, and I called out:

  “Leni!”

  I think she was stunned, but I don’t really remember. All I could see were her big eyes and a kind of smile that said nothing.

  “Leni, I’m glad to see you. I was at the Court of Appeal until seven o’clock for your case. It’s been postponed until the 17th of September.” (“The 17th of September,” she repeated, as if making a note of it.) “I rang you at home, but there was no answer. I ’phoned Rampa, but I couldn’t get hold of Mr. Froda to tell him. . . . Look, this is Viaţa românească here. I tell you so that you won’t think I was on lookout duty.”

  All in a single breath. I kissed her hand and went back inside.

  (I know the guy. He’s the architect who gave expert testimony at the Maryse-Anghelache trial.)

  I felt dizzy. Or, to be more precise, I didn’t know what I felt. “Does it hurt?” I asked myself attentively, with some concern. I didn’t feel that it hurt, but there was a kind of agitation, an emptiness in my heart, an oppressiveness that was hard to define—come on, I’m familiar enough with all that! I had one clear thought: how lucky I was to have been at the window just at that moment. A second later and I wouldn’t have seen anything. I’d have remained in ignorance, continued to make a complete fool of myself.

  (No other interpretations were possible, of course. A man with whom Leni goes for a walk at seven in the evening, on a little side street, is a man with whom she has already slept, or with whom she will sleep in the shortest possible time.)

  I went away flummoxed from Viaţa românească, and all the way on the No. 32 bus (I was going to Mermoz and Lilly Pancu, the young couple I’d met at Easter at Balcic) I kept repeating stupid little phrases to calm myself down: just so that the time would pass more and more quickly. For the moment I had a single wish: that it should be nine o’clock, when she’d finally be at the theatre and therefore alone. Not that I wanted to see her (from that moment I knew I’d never see her again), but it was necessary for my immediate peace of mind that she should be alone. Alone, above all else. As for the rest, we’ll see . . .

  At Mermoz’s, where I thought I’d stop by for half an hour, a Balcic-style party was awaiting me. There was the whole of our group from late April, plus two young women—one of them Zoe Ricci, the painter I met last November at Lena Constante’s.

  We had some drinks. I had decided to get drunk, and never was an evening’s boozing more timely. The memory of Leni faded. From time to time it still hurt, like a sore spot that suddenly throbs again for a while. Maybe it’s not quite right to say that “it hurt.” I just saw again the brief scene that took place at seven o’clock. It had all been so sudden; I hadn’t even noticed the color of her dress.

  I spent all evening close to Zoe Ricci—at first by chance, later because I found it pleasant. Soon our mutual attraction was being helped along in the usual way by the other people there, who teased us, drew attention to silences, gave an occasional prod, and turned a simple joke into the beginning of a relationship.

  We went onto the balcony, which looked onto open fields. Mermoz’s house was on the outskirts of Bucharest. Beyond there was grass, trees, a few solitary houses, some telephone poles. It was quite similar to the “zoned” landscape in the grounds of the Herald Hospital.

  We sat chatting for a long time, Zoe in a chaise longue, I at her feet. She seems very young. Her body, in particular, is extremely youthful. She has slanting eyes, slightly overdefined cheekbones, a child’s mouth. She kisses timidly, but also with a kind of desperation. Later, at her place—for we left the others without too much embarrassment and went to her third-floor studio flat on Piaţa Rosetti—she cried in my arms:

  “How nice it is not to be alone.”

  That’s something that Nora could have said.7 She actually says it in a way. So here is life, a year later, repeating a
situation in a novel. . . .

  I don’t know what will come of the incident with Zoe. Certainly not love, J’en sors,8 and I’m not aching to start again. But she’ll help me “d’en sortir. ”

  Anyway, whereas I might have spent a night of insomnia and suffering, I spent one of wine and love. So it’s not so serious. . . . And when I think about it, the affair with Leni had to finish in any case, so this ending is perhaps not the worst that could have happened.

  Baltazar has gone mad. Creeping general paralysis. They’re admitting him tomorrow. What a terrible business!

  Tuesday, 24 May

  “You have a face that’s easily forgotten,” Zoe said to me the day before yesterday, when I went to see her again.

  I started. Nora said the same thing: “You have a face that’s hard to remember.”

  I don’t know where this new affair will lead me. I accept it with a certain lack of responsibility. I don’t know how it may end. For the moment I’m happy that she is so young, so beautiful. Naked, she is miraculously beautiful. Her breasts are small, firm, and tender—rather like a teenager’s. Her face is serious, and she has a severe way of looking at you—something sad and disconsolate in her expression. But her body is lively, youthful, athletic, undulous. I felt good listening to her breathe in my arms, stroking her dark, slightly wiry hair. I especially liked it when she made simple and unrealistic plans for a summer holiday together, in a mountain village somewhere, just the two of us, working alone during the day (she painting, I writing) and making love at night.

  That is happiness, my impossible happiness . . .

  Monday, 30 [May]