When night really set in, we went through the Tatar quarter to the outskirts, high on a hill, where we stayed a long time gazing at the moon-flooded sea, and at Balcic gleaming in the light.
Seen from there, my whole life seems misguided, idiotic, full of meaningless effort.
Monday, 8 [May]
Friday was the Day of the Book: and I had to go there in the uniform of the Front.2
Did I have to? I don’t know. It may be that if I had taken a really hard look at things, I would have resisted. Maybe I wouldn’t even have placed my position at the Foundation in jeopardy. So many plausible pretexts can be found. Was it so hard for me to be sick that morning?
I feel ashamed, and I felt even more ashamed at the time. Do I have the right to judge anyone’s moral qualities when I didn’t have the strength to resist that comedy? What would I do in the face of greater pressures? How would I behave in a concentration camp? How much pride would I retain in front of a firing squad?
I am paying with my personal liberty for a 5,535-lei-a-month job! Doesn’t that seem rather a high price to pay?
Assuming that what I write may one day mean something to a still distant reader, will not this livery cancel out any moral significance, any moral value, in what I have thought, felt, and written?
I am a writer who wore livery. And to think that writers have died at the stake for refusing to put up with much less!
I feel disfigured and disqualified—as if I have forfeited the right to use the word “I” with that sense of self-esteem, of pride in oneself, which alone justifies the writing of it.
“I am a civilian,” I wrote in Cum am devenit huligan—and I was proud of what seemed to me a declaration of liberty, independence, and nonconformism. . . .
“Avez-vous remarqué,” Princess Bibescu (Antoine’s wife Elisabeth, not Martha) asked me at lunch on Saturday, “que les fanatiques ont les yeuxs clairs? Seul un homme aux yeux clairs peut être un fanatique. ”
“Et moi, madame?”
“Je me le demande. Vous les avez presque verts, mais pas assez pour un fanatique. Enfin, votre cas n'est pas résolu. ”3
That isn’t the only piece of wit that I remember from her conversation. At first sight she seemed quite stunning. “The most intelligent woman in the world” is something you might say off the top of your head. But I would retain it in this case, because no other woman I have known has ever given me such an impression of verve and nervous spontaneity. In two hours she said dozens of words of which Oriane would have been proud. (“Moi je m'ennuie une fois tous les vingt ans. Eh bien, avec Calimachi je me suis ennuyée pour les vingt ans. ”
“Les domestiques sont terrifiants. Ils sont les seuls à se rendre compte, avec une exactitude absolue, si quelqu'un est un homme de qualité ou non. Moi je voudrais fonder une société pour la protection des nouveaux riches, contre les domestiques. ”4)
But she says it all good-heartedly, without ostentation, almost without being aware of it. I’d like to see her again, though it’s possible that, once you get to know her, she might lose some of, I wouldn’t say her spell, but her extraordinary power to surprise you with each new word.
She is ugly, dresses with an amusing lack of taste and attention, appears to have no trace of feminine coquetry, and yet is not in the least vain about what she is: a princess, an Englishwoman from a great family, a friend of all considered in Europe to be the most illustrious, most refined, most eccentric. Her best friend is Léon Blum, but another “best friend” was Antonio Primo de Rivera (about whom she spoke a lot, with warmth and passion, though this does not prevent her from remaining on the extreme left: “Je savais qu'il allait être fusillé, et pourtant ma sympathie pour les républicains n'a pas fléchi”5).
I am enough of a snob, or perhaps enough of a child, not to be pleasantly bowled over by the fact that the woman sitting opposite me at table is a close friend of royalty and Socialist leaders, with the King of Spain (who calls her “ma petite Elisabeth”), and with the head of the Spanish Communists, who in 1931 did her the favor of allowing the Duke of Alba (“Jimmy,” as she calls him) to cross the frontier without being checked. I also like her for her philo-Semitism, which relaxes me in conversation in a way that would otherwise be difficult. “J’aime les Juifs. Je les aime passionement. Ce n’est pas pane qu’ils sont malheureux. Non. Je les aime parce qu’ils eloignent /’horizon.”6
I shall send her some flowers and add a few lines. I don’t know if it is the done thing, but I feel bound to tell her how she filled me with wonder.
Tuesday, 16 [May]
I’ve been called up. This time I don’t think I shall get out of it. Nor do I want to. Since it has to be done anyway, it’s better to do it now than in July or in autumn maneuvers. Tomorrow morning they’ll give me my “things” again, and the next day it looks as if I’ll be off to Mogoşoaia, where my company—the Eleventh—has its training camp. I don’t know how it will go, but I am determined to remain very calm and resigned, even good-humored.
On Friday I was in Brăila between two trains. (I have a train pass again, thanks to Rosetti. I don’t know how, but the thought that I have this in my pocket gives me a peculiar sense of freedom: I can go off whenever I like. It is true that the capacity in which I have it is no longer that of a journalist but of a state employee. The distinction is without practical consequences but significant nevertheless. Since the decree issued by the Goga government, not a single Jewish journalist—do they still exist?— has been able to get back a train pass.)
Anyway, I was in Brăila—a Brăila with all the acacias in bloom, but heartrendingly sad, neglected, decrepit. Not one new building (or rather, a single horrible one, where the Diana Baths used to be): everything is as I knew it ten or twenty years ago, only older, more worn, more sunk in poverty. Even Bulevardul Cuza looked a wreck: I had preserved an impression of its majesty, but that is not what I found there.
I can’t say that I am making progress with my English. I’ve stopped my lessons with Mangeriu. Besides, he no longer has anything to teach us.
But I continue to read. I read quite easily Arnold Bennett’s Grand Babylon Hotel. Now I am reading, less easily, a novel by Joseph Conrad: Almayer's Folly. I have not used a dictionary for either. There are certainly dozens and hundreds of words I don’t know, but I don’t like reading with a dictionary (though I ought to); I prefer to be carried along by the rhythm of the sentences, whose general drift I always manage to understand. I would need something to compel me to work with a dictionary: a translation, for example, which I had to do meticulously, with a sense of responsibility. I intend to ask Rosetti if I can do a translation for Energia.
Thursday, 18 [May]
I collected my army things yesterday—some foul rags, which are impossible to keep indoors without all the windows open. All night I tossed and turned in bed, terrified at the thought of lice. It’s impossible for me to don such repulsive things. I forced myself to put together a uniform from various clean bits: my old tunic from 1933, my puttees from the same period, my summer boots. The trousers I got from Comşa.7
A little while ago I had a dress rehearsal. My God! What a wretched figure I cut! I look miserable, downcast, crushed, and disfigured. I am no longer myself: I am nothing, nothing, nothing. Something that can be killed off in a scramble, without the slightest importance; something that can be dragged through the mud, dumped in stables, abandoned in a field; something without a name, without identity, without eyes of his own, without a will or a voice, without life—a Romanian soldier.
Since I heard that I’d be going to a “training camp” in Mogoşoaia, I have lived with the illusion that I need only tell Princess Bibescu that I’m nearby and she would call me into her castle and offer me a room. I saw myself installed there as on a country holiday, and I counted the evening hours that would be left for reading after I returned from the training grounds. I also wondered if I shouldn’t begin work there on the Sadoveanu chapter in my “Romanian Novel.”
; From the regiment I called Antoine Bibescu at the Athenee Palace to tell him what was happening, but I was informed that he was away in Strehaia.
I decided to write to him there, though I didn’t quite dare. But yesterday afternoon, around five o’clock, I received in the mail from Strehaia a book about Proust (Arnaud Dandieu) and a few affectionate lines from Antoine. Several hours later, when I returned after midnight from Ralea’s banquet (where I had gone to spend a final evening as a civilian), I found the following telegram: “WANT TO DISCUSS EXTRAORDINARY AND ADMIRABLE BOOK ABOUT PROUST—PLEASE LEAVE SATURDAY AT ONE—WILL SEND CAR TO COLLECT YOU IN STREHAIA AND YOU CAN STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE—BIBESCU.”
It felt like a telegram from heaven. There could have been no better pretext to speak to him of the training camp in Mogosoaia. I therefore wired him straight back: “SORRY CANNOT COME STREHAIA—AM CALLED UP AT 21 INFANTRY REGIMENT AND FROM FRIDAY WILL BE AT MOGOSOAIA TRAINING CAMP—LETTER FOLLOWS.”
The letter did follow this morning. I wrote at length about everything that has happened to me, and since Mogosoaia is a kind of Donciéres for me, I asked him—as Marcel would have asked Saint-Loup—to approach Martha Bibescu and ask her for hospitality.
At the same time I rang Dumbrăveanu’s wife and told her about my military experiences. She promised to call the princess, and at four in the afternoon she rang me with the reply: “The princess is sorry, but as she has not received any officer in the castle, it would be hard for her to receive a soldier.”
So that’s it. Maybe she is right. Maybe my being a soldier strips me of any other quality. I am neither novelist nor critic nor playwright nor friend: I’m nothing, a soldier—and a soldier cannot be received in a castle. I force myself to understand, force myself not to feel slighted, force myself to accept that she is right, and yet I shall keep from this episode a painful sense of having been insulted.
In any case, I am just now sending Antoine Bibescu another telegram: “IF YOU RECEIVE LETTER I SENT TODAY I BEG YOU WRITE NOTHING TO PRINCESS MARTHA—HER SECRETARY TELLS ME ON PRINCESS’S BEHALF THAT I CANNOT BE RECEIVED AT MOGOSOAIA—I KNEW IT WAS MADNESS—THOUSAND PARDONS AND IN FRIENDSHIP AS EVER.”
With that, my little princely comedy has come to an end; I shall return to my fate as a commoner. Tomorrow morning I leave with my kitbag on my back.
Sunday, 21 [May]
What is terrible about my situation as a soldier is not the physical tiredness but the moral degradation. I would have to lose my pride as a human being for such a life to appear bearable. Anyone, absolutely anyone—my doorman, the humblest street sweeper or shopboy—counts for more than I do beneath these clothes, which at best arouse one’s pity.
I effectively joined the army only last Friday, but it feels as if ten days have already passed since then. How terribly long is a day that starts at four in the morning, with the rising of the sun! And especially, how endless is such a day when you spend it in the training grounds, running, throwing yourself down, jumping, taking imaginary objectives by assault, then falling to the ground in moments of rest, in a kind of brute stupefaction from which you would like never to awake.
I came back home on Friday night, and when I saw again my white room, my gleaming bathroom, my clean bed, the terrace, the bookshelves, the light, I felt I was returning from an infernal molelike existence to a free, dignified, magnificent life above ground.
I tell myself that millions of people, tens and hundreds of millions, normally live in conditions that seem to me quite hellish—in filth, in promiscuity, in physical and moral squalor, exhausted, famished, and ragged—and I tell myself that it is not a bad thing to encounter, at least on army exercises, a fate which, if it doesn’t make you better, at least makes you more skeptical, less sure of yourself, more modest.
I am beginning to understand why the poor cannot make revolutions. Physical degradation destroys the resources of human dignity. Revolt is then a luxury.
Thursday, 25 [May]
I haven’t written anything here about my last days on call-up. I haven’t been able to. When I return home at nine in the evening, I am completely wiped out. A hot bath and cold shower liven me up for a few minutes, but then I drop, unable to read a page before falling asleep.
I have two alarm clocks, set five minutes apart to eliminate the possibility of an accident. It would be a disaster if I were late one morning for roll call. Besides, I have timed with such exactitude my fitting operations and my journey to the North Station—where I meet five comrades each morning before traveling together by taxi to Mogosoaia—that I have gradually succeeded in gaining an extra forty minutes of sleep. Now I wake up at 4:55 on the dot, not at 4:15 as in the first couple of days.
Everything becomes mechanical, every movement habitual, routinized, automatic. I found so many things unbearable in the first few days, and now I am growing indifferent to them. The physical brutalization is stronger than any moral revulsion. Little by little you lose not only the power to resist but even the taste, the fancy, the urge. . . . You let yourself be overwhelmed and dragged along. The morass of vulgarity at first disgusts you, but then you sink into it without realizing when.
This morning in the tent—where, because of the rain, the whole of our third platoon had gathered to disassemble a t.B 1932 submachine gun—didn’t I too guffaw at Mălai Vasile’s obscene jokes? Doesn’t the stupid, never-changing dialogue between Private Spiegelmann and Private Crişan begin to amuse me too? How long would it take for me to become birds of a feather with them, to lose all pride and share everything really abject in barracks life, made up of pranks, dodges, bad jokes, and everyday misery endured without self-respect?
Yesterday I ate the food from the bucket, out of curiosity. Another day I might eat out of hunger—and then each day out of habit. Habit kills everything: disgust, dignity, the need to be alone.
I like being with people who don’t laugh: one such, Săgeată Iulian, always has a rather severe look on his face, and another, Răduelscu, a sad, disarmed expression that I find heartrending.
Starting from today, I shall be free every afternoon. This is a great favor, all the more surprising in that the regimental commander, Colonel Mardare, is said to be a stern disciplinarian. I don’t know to whom I owe this exceptional arrangement. He was told about me by Mişu Fotino8 (who brought him a theatre program with my photograph and “biography”: “Look who you’ve got here in the regiment!”), and by a Colonel Manolescu, who had himself been set up. Also, Antoine Bibescu’s telegrams—one sent direct to the colonel, another to me via the regiment—must have created something of a sensation. I don’t know what was in the one to the colonel, but mine sounds really over the top: “TO THE WRITER MIHAIL SEBASTIAN 21ST INF. REGT BUCHAREST—HAVE INTERCEDED WITH REGIMENTAL COMMAND TO GRANT YOU 60 HOURS LEAVE TO COME STREHAIA ON IMPORTANT MATTER—BIBESCU.”
At first the telegram both amused and frightened me; it was so unmilitary, so fanciful, and so venturesome. It must have done the rounds of the battalions before it came into my hands, open and read by all and sundry. But then I pondered that—at least from what I had been given to understand by the lieutenant and my captain—things did not have for them the importance I had assumed. In their eyes, all this remains “civilian matters,” “business between civilians.” The fact that I am a writer, that Antoine Bibescu is also a writer, doesn’t impress them at all; indeed, it arouses in them a slight feeling of contempt. Didn’t Lieutenant Neguti say the day before yesterday, while he was explaining the submachine gun, that what we do in the barracks is much more interesting than anything anyone might do in “civvy street”?
Another telegram today from Bibescu, delivered to my home this time: “WHY NOT COME TO CORCOVA FOR FEW DAYS? HAVE WIRED COLONEL 21ST MOGOSOAIA—BIBESCU.”
At the same time I received an envelope, also from him, containing just a telegram sent by Martha Bibescu from Mogosoaia to Strehaia: “SEBASTIAN INTROUVABLE MOGOSOAIA—TENDRE MARTHA.”9
I can’t say that this flood of
telegrams doesn’t amuse me.
I think I’ll go to Strehaia on Saturday.
Monday, 29 [May]
I am back from Corcova, where I stayed from Saturday evening until this morning. I think whole pages could be written about these two days. If I were not so tired, the pleasure of being lodged in the Bibescu household (albeit for such a short time) would certainly have been more intense. Elisabeth Bibescu is, without doubt, “somebody.” And her husband is interesting at least in Proustian terms and for “what goes on behind the literary and theatrical scenes in Paris.”
Maybe I’ll try after all to note something here about those days in Corcova. But only if the army leaves me in peace. Tomorrow morning at five I’ll be in Mogoşoaia-—a soldier again.
Sunday, 4 June
I cannot note here everything that happens day by day at the regiment. What makes an “army journal” almost impossible is the terrible physical tiredness. In the evening, when I get back from Mogoşoaia, I simply do not have it in me to write a few lines, nor even to pick up the receiver and telephone someone. Today is Sunday, and after a good night’s sleep (nearly nine hours), I am still more dead than alive. But I will try to write the review for Viaţa românească.
Sometimes in the morning, when I am running in fields with the kitbag on my back, panting, sweating, breathless, my heart ready to burst, I tell myself that death in war must be indescribably restful—a death that stops you short, a death that means you will no longer have to stir at the order: “Jump!,” a death that finally allows you to sleep . . .
Journal 1935–1944 Page 27
