Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  The war is here, even if it sometimes leaves us in peace for a few days.

  Monday, 5 June

  Rome has been occupied by the Allies.

  The news thrills us less today, nine months after the Italian armistice, but it is still a splendid twist of fate!

  We are too tired to rejoice. We need an end to the war, not intermediate victories.

  I had a conversation with Şeicaru5 on Friday evening at Curentul. He is a swine of a man. I feel disgusted that I talked to him at all.

  All quiet on our air front. Four weeks without a raid on Bucharest. How much longer will it last?

  I translated Bourdet’s Vient de paraître for Sicâ in four days.

  I might leave tomorrow with Aristide for three or four days in Butimanu.

  Tuesday, 6 June

  The Allies are landing in France, on the Normandy coast. The invasion has begun. Eisenhower has made a declaration to the peoples of Europe. Churchill says that four thousand large ships and eleven thousand aircraft are taking part in the operation.

  Saturday, 10 June

  I returned yesterday from Butimanu, where I spent three days with Alice and Aristide. Nothing pleasant, apart from a visit for lunch to the home of Mrs. Culag at Bujoreanca (a splendid mansion, with a veranda straight out of Sadoveanu). The idyll of country life has too many drawbacks, what with the fleas, the dust, and so on. But the fields are beautiful everywhere. I could lie in the grass and never leave. I long for the mountains. I long for the sea. I long even for Corcova.

  All the time I was in the country I was restless and impatient to know how the invasion was going. We had newspapers, but they were not enough.

  Now that I am back and up with the news, I realize that since the first breathtaking moments, the rest has been proceeding at a slower pace. The crucial fact is that the landing has taken place, that the Allied divisions have a foothold on the continent. So the “Atlantic wall” was not an impassable barrier, nor did the “secret weapons” sort everything out.

  Sunday, 11 June

  An alert yesterday, another one this morning. Distant thunder. The dull sound of aircraft passing overhead without dropping any bombs. Yesterday, it seems, there were machine-gun attacks on cars, carts, and people on foot in the vicinity of Bucharest.

  It’s strange that they have time for raids on Romania when they are so busy in Italy and France.

  Tuesday, 20 June

  In Normandy, after marking time for a while, the Allies have cut across the Cotentin and are approaching Cherbourg.

  The offensive is continuing in Italy, with Perugia on the point of falling.

  In Finland the Soviet offensive launched a week ago directly threatens Vyborg.

  And yet the whole DNB press has been jubilant for the past three days. Triumphant shouts, sensational banner headlines, as in the headiest moments of German victory. What’s going on? The secret weapon has been unveiled! A pilotless aircraft! A mysterious rocket. Wunderwajfe. Hell’s hound! London ablaze! Millions in England flee in panic! London destroyed! London evacuated!

  I had lunch with Camil at the Continental. At the next table were Onicescu, Crainic, Dragos Protopopescu, Ivascu—all four beaming with joy.

  “At last!” Onicescu exclaimed.

  “But it’s not enough,” Crainic added. “Washington must be hit— Washington!”

  A boy passed by with the afternoon papers. Onicescu opened one and read it aloud as the others expressed their amazement and enthusiasm.

  In the end, people always see what their point of view allows them to see.

  The facts are the same for Onicescu and for myself. We read the same papers and know the same things, but everything is fundamentally different for him and for me, as if we lived on two different planets.

  Good Lord, can human intelligence really be such a ridiculous instrument? Is Onicescu an imbecile? In the two years since I saw him last, waiting at a table at the Capşa for Rommel to enter Alexandria, the war has changed in the most radical way. Yet the facts pass him by and leave him with exactly the same smile, the same unshaken assurance. A fixed idea signals a closed universe.

  Tuesday, 27 June

  The Allies took Cherbourg yesterday. The DNB press spells out how Montgomery’s plans have failed. He had wanted at all costs to capture the port in two days—and it took him twenty. Moreover the town is completely destroyed and does not represent any real gain.

  In Finland, after the fall of Vyborg, the Russians are advancing in two directions.

  In Russia, on the central front, a major Soviet offensive was launched on the symbolically important 22nd of June. Vitebsk has already fallen.

  It is a sharp moment for the whole evolution of the war. July and August may bring things to a head, but in any event we have a sense that there is no longer room for pauses.

  Things are quiet here for the moment. There were air-raid alerts on Friday and Saturday morning (bombers over Ploiesti), but nothing fell on the capital.

  I have finished Volume VII of the Pléiade Balzac—Les chouans—a laborious but interesting read. (The action takes place in Normandy, more or less in the zone of the landings.) Now I have started Volume VIII. I am reading Les paysans, especially for the light it throws on the origins of Balzac’s political attitudes. He is a reactionary without being hypocritical about it. But the novelist is stronger than, and cancels out, the doctrinaire. I’d like to write about this—and much else besides.

  Zissu’s wife is a strange woman. She came here in a cab to collect me, and I couldn’t get away from her. Yesterday, another walk on the $osea.

  She lets her imagination run wild, eagerly trying to be interesting. She puts on the most absurd acts, for no other reason than to arouse other people’s curiosity. On Saturday she told me that Nae Ionescu once asked for her hand in marriage. And yesterday—I shudder to think of it!—she confessed that she had last year, and still has, a strong “béguin”6 for me. If I had wanted and understood, if I now wanted and understood . . .

  I did all I could to wriggle out of it. She is crazy and lies deliberately, setting up emotional scenes and then acting them out. A real case, that’s for sure.

  Wednesday, 28 June

  There was an air raid this morning. I don’t yet know what it was like elsewhere, but it was pretty serious in our part of the city. A bomb in Strada Apolodor, one in Bateriilor, one in Iuliu Rosea. The arsenal is on fire. Thick smoke drifts over the houses. There is a clinking of broken glass all over the neighborhood, and glass fragments and dust lie in the streets. In the shelter I felt at least once that danger was close, when the blast from an explosion hit the walls. A cloud of dust and smoke followed, even though it had been quite a long way off. How strange the “all clear” then sounds! All clear for whom? For us who emerge safe and in one piece? Or for the others?

  A day like any other continues amid the corpses and fires.

  Monday, 3 July

  Air raids last night and this morning. It seems that Malaxa and Distribute were the hardest hit. Nothing in the city center, which looks its normal self. But all day thick clouds of smoke have been floating across.

  Tuesday, 4 July

  It was a quiet night, but the sirens sounded again in the morning. Distant rumbling and the noise of engines.

  In Russia there has been a major breakthrough in the center and a rush of unclear movements. Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk have fallen one after the other. Yesterday Minsk. Today Polotsk.

  In Normandy things have not moved much since the fall of Cherbourg.

  Saturday, 8 July

  I have finished Les paysans with some difficulty. The book’s construction is obscure and unwieldy. A surfeit of characters clog up the action, without themselves being clearly individualized. You lose them along the way, unable to remember them. The preparation is meticulous, to the point of appearing forced, for a plot that is eventually resolved with fewer and much simpler elements. But it is an unfinished work—and I don’t know what Balzac w
ould have done in the end with all this material.

  We have had four days of quiet. No alerts. The rainy weather gives us a little security.

  I have translated a short play by Guitry for Birlic. The money from it will keep me afloat—we’ll see how it goes later.

  Fighting continues at the fronts, but with no great change.

  Doubts sometimes creep in about whether it will all be over this year. Could it last another winter?

  No, no. It’s too early to draw conclusions. We are in the middle of the summer campaign; all outcomes are possible.

  I am always alone: not desperate but not happy; rather lethargic and somnolent.

  Monday, 24 July

  An air raid last night at one. Again we were out of the habit. It lasted a short time but seemed to be intense.

  Nothing looked different in town this morning. The bombs probably fell on the suburbs.

  On Friday an attempt was made on Hitler’s life at the German high command; it doesn’t seem to have changed anything.

  Somewhere in the background, the process of disintegration spreads like a cancer.

  In Poland the Russians have occupied Lwow and Lublin.

  Friday, 28 July

  We’re having another run of bad luck: an alert this morning; air raid last night; alerts both morning and evening the day before yesterday.

  Last night’s bombing was terrible. We felt all the while that waves of aircraft were heading for our neighborhood. The shaking was the kind of thing you feel in an earthquake. The walls rocked. A cloud of dust blew open the cellar door and brought with it a smell of burning.

  When I left the shelter, huge flames could be seen near the Central Post Office and the Metropolitan Church. I walked through the streets with Benu, Mircea, and Nora. It seemed as if a fire in Selari would engulf the whole city. White and yellow flames were bursting forth on all sides. Up the Dimbovita toward Calea Rahovei, a number of smaller fires marked out a large circle.

  I haven’t been into town today, but apparently all the fires have burnt themselves out and the disaster is not as we imagined it last night.

  What is the point of these air raids? Are they the prelude to a Russian offensive? Are they an attempt to shift Romania from its alliance with the Germans, now that the front in Poland has collapsed and the internal German front is tottering?

  You try to find a justification, a political rationale! Otherwise the bombing would be too much of a random affair.

  Bialystok has fallen in Poland, as have Dvinock in Lithuania and Narva in Estonia.

  At least in the center, the German resistance seems to have been pulverized. Warsaw is the main immediate objective.

  Meanwhile, farther to the south, the fall of Stanislav7 and the fighting around Kolomyya mean that the offensive may move down toward the Moldavian front.

  In any event, it is hard to believe that the Romanian front, overtaken as it has been by events, will continue to remain stable.

  Monday, 31 July

  Another air raid this morning. It wasn’t very long or particularly heavy, but the engines in the sky had a sinister sound. For a few moments I thought that Friday night’s ferocious attack was going to be repeated.

  If, as people have been saying for a few days, Turkey breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany (expected for the 2nd of August), the availability of closer bases could easily make the bombing catastrophic for us. The war seems to be approaching the end. It may all be over in ten weeks. The question is how we can survive these final weeks in one piece.

  I spent the whole of yesterday at a farm not far from Bucharest, in an enchanting house like a stage set for Jocul de-a vacanţa.

  Thursday, 3 August

  Turkey has broken off relations with Germany.

  The president of Finland has resigned and been replaced by Mannerheim. This is interpreted as a prelude to fresh peace negotiations.

  In France an American push toward Rennes threatens to isolate the whole of the Breton peninsula, in a repetition of the Cotentin operation.

  In the east the Russians are simultaneously attacking Warsaw, Riga, and Memel. In Italy, Florence is still holding out, but not for much longer.

  As the situation grows more acute, we become more and more impatient. Yesterday and today we were constantly overexcited, as if news of something definitive might arrive at any moment.

  Monday, 7 August

  It is hard to follow what is happening in France. The German front, broken in both the west and the south, is crumbling away. In Brittany the “Atlantic wall” lies flat and useless. The Americans are inside Brest, Saint Nazaire, and Lauriau, while the respective German garrisons still hold the fortifications that were supposed to defend them from the sea. Armored thrusts crisscross the whole of the German rear, suddenly springing up where no one expects them. The operation is identical to the German advance in May 1940—only so far on a lesser scale. Paris is not excluded as an Allied objective: if things continue at this pace, anything is possible.

  Tuesday, 8 August

  I have written the scenario for a play. Act One: a perfect outline, scene by scene, with great wealth of material. Act Two: less detailed. Act Three: completely general, except for the denouement. For a moment this afternoon, working my thoughts out on paper as they jostled for my attention, I was in the grip of a kind of fever (my old fever that makes me a little dizzy when I “see” a book or a play). I felt impatient: I’d have liked to get straight down to work; I wanted to tell someone the great news.

  I went out and walked as far as the Alhambra, where Nora and Mircea are doing rehearsals. (It was as if I needed to be in an atmosphere where everything was bubbling behind the scenes.) But I felt out of place and returned home.

  Now I have calmed down. I have put the scenario aside and will leave it for a while. I have other work that needs to be done (redoing Antoine’s play, rewriting Act Three for Potopul8). In a week’s time I’ll look again at the pages I wrote so hastily today and see what can be done.

  If I write this play, I shall owe it to the idea of a stage set. That is all I saw at first: no characters, no conflict, no ideas—only the set of a house that is under construction in Act One, furnished in Act Two, and flattened by an earthquake in Act Three. All three phases of the set are dominated by a single sight in the distance, which serves to link and unify them.

  Today all the living material of the play has grown up around this bare schema. A funny starting point.

  Thursday, 10 August

  Air raids last night and this morning. I don’t think Bucharest was the main target, but at least once last night the gunfire was deafening. I swallowed. And poor Mama, who suffers like a frightened child!

  Friday, 11 August

  It seems that American armor has pushed as far as Chartres!

  I see again that Sunday in October 1937, with Poldy and Benu at Chartres, when we were so excited by the beauty of the cathedral. Paris is not far.

  Sunday, 13 August

  Nothing new on the western front. The Russian offensive has come to a halt, more or less at the 1939 frontiers. Riga, Memel, Warsaw, and Krakow are still to be reached. Is this a Soviet pause to regroup? Or a German attempt to use massive reserves to stop the advance to the frontiers of the Reich? A new assault may begin at any time, but for the moment the fighting (though still intense) is not of the same proportions as before.

  In France, on the other hand, the battle is confused but is expanding in scale. We know nothing definite about Chartres, nor how far the thrust from Le Mans to Paris has actually reached. Bypassing Alen^on, it is aiming to strike the rear of the German front line in Caen—a sector that has been wobbly ever since the landings. If the operation succeeds, the invasion will become truly “invasive.”

  It is a hot, enervating summer’s day. I am apathetic and cannot pull myself together enough to work. I have been redoing one of Antoine’s plays, but I am stuck on Act Four and find it impossible to move ahead. I also have to finish Act Three of
Potopul for Beate9 and Finţi.1 All this has to be done double-quick, and I’m incapable of putting two words together.

  Tuesday, 15 August

  A Franco-Anglo-American landing in the south of France!

  Thursday, 17 August

  Alerts this morning and evening. They surprised us because we had been expecting a period of aerial calm following the landing in southern France. They’ve got so much to do there—and they still find time for us.

  The landing force is advancing smoothly and rapidly across the south of France: Cannes, Nice, Saint Maxime, Saint Tropez.

  In the north the Allies have taken Orléans, Chartres, and Dreux. Paris is on the horizon!

  Yesterday evening the Comoedia had Steaua fără nume “in a new production,” as the poster put it.

  I didn’t go—nor do I feel at all curious about it.

  Saturday, 19 August

  I am writing these lines during a morning alert. Our run of bad luck continues. We also had an alert yesterday morning. From the street you could see swarms of aircraft passing in the distance, with their metallic glitter in the bright sunlight. Sometimes, when they show up against a whitish cloud, they become dull and hazy. Yesterday and today they have been to Ploiesti. Today they seem to be heading for Brasov. For the time being.

  The advance on Paris continues, with the Americans already at Rambouillet. But the front is too fluid for the shape of the battle to be visible.