Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  I read the piece of paper and handed it back without a word. It doesn’t interest me. Sincerely, without posturing or an ounce of exaggeration, it doesn’t interest me. It was hard to explain this to Cioculescu, nor did I try. But as he insisted that I must come to the general meeting, I told him that I wouldn’t be coming. Is it possible that he, who is neither a fool nor a complete lackey, cannot see how grotesque the whole situation is?

  The new president of the SSR will be Victor Eftimiu. His name is everywhere: at the theatre, at the Writers’ Association, at the association of property owners who have suffered war damage (where Paltin says that he gave a thundering speech on Sunday about the revolutionary spirit).

  A salty detail. Cioculescu suggested to Eftimiu, the likely president, that the new committee of the SSR should include “from the Jewish writers, F. Aderca.” To which Eftimiu replied: “But why? They should be pleased we’re having them back.”

  A taste for pamphleteering alternates in me with a kind of helpless disgust. Sometimes I shudder with an urgent need to speak out against all the shameless posturing, against the whole farce being acted out around us. But then I remember that it doesn’t concern me. What am I supposed to do in this great Balkan swamp?

  Yesterday at Beate’s I met two Soviet writers: Boris Epstein, a thirty-year-old captain and Pravda drama critic, and Yura (I don’t remember his surname), a twenty-two-year-old sublieutenant and poet. Both are editors at a front-line paper. They moved on this morning.

  Boris spoke German badly, Yura French badly. Both had an expression of humanity (a little melancholic in Boris, more youthful in Yura), which was impressive after the faces of Soviet soldiers in the street, bons enfants7 but wild.

  I saw Branişte on Sunday. He was reserved, discreet, buttoned up. No mention of our old vows to work together. Not a word about his plans for the future.

  He is scared of the Russians, worried about the Communists. He strikes me as irredeemably the chief editor at Adevarul and Dimineata.

  It is strange that I haven’t noted anything for so long about the course of the war. I have no radio, I read the papers without attention, and above all I don’t have a map. (All our maps were destroyed at Strada Antim.)

  The war has interested me less since I felt the outcome was settled. The peace preoccupies me more. I think that Germany will be finished in six or seven weeks. I can’t see it lasting beyond November.

  But some think that the game is not yet over. Enescu8 surprised me today when he said that all we risk by uncovering the Steaua fără nume mystery is execution if the Germans return to Bucharest.

  “Do you think that’s possible?” I laughed.

  “I don’t myself. But there is a lot of talk of a new German offensive, from Timisoara.”

  Nearly the whole of France has been liberated, half of Belgium, plus Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The Siegfried Line has been breached at numerous points. Aachen is within range of Allied machine guns. Can anyone really still imagine a “German offensive”?

  Anything can be imagined in this big wide world.

  We are always on the move. Today we left our temporary accommodation on Bulevardul Carol for another temporary accommodation in Strada Dmitrie Racoviţă. I don’t know when this “waiting room” life will be over and we will again have somewhere to call home.

  I am still, above all, a war victim.

  Saturday, 16 September

  I am not willing to be disappointed. I don’t accept that I have any such right. The Germans and Hitlerism have croaked. That’s enough.

  I always knew deep down that I’d happily have died to bring Germany’s collapse a fraction of an inch closer. Germany has collapsed—and I am alive. What more can I ask? So many have died without seeing the beast perish with their own eyes! We who remain alive have had that immense good fortune.

  And now? I don’t know.

  And now, life begins. A kind of life, which has to be lived. The only thing for which I longed was freedom. Not a new definition of freedom—but freedom. After so many years of terror, we don’t need to have it explained to us what freedom is. We know what it is—and it cannot be replaced by any formula.

  There are certainly miserable tricks, farces, impostures. There is Victor Eftimiu, with his impudence, his bad taste, his eternal vulgarity. There is young Macovescu,9 who had a comfortable life under the Germans and is now a fierce Jacobin. There is Graur, obtuse, dismal, triumphant. There are thousands of incidents and happenings that offend you. There is a frightening spirit of conformism, new in its orientation but old in its psychological structure.

  But over and above everything, there is the one redeeming truth: the Germans are done for.

  Sunday, 17 September

  I had lunch at Byck’s with Belu, Rosetti, and Vişoianu. We waited for Vişoianu with lively interest, as he had just been to Moscow for three days as a member of the Armistice Commission.1 Very interesting things, told by an intelligent, free-minded man without prejudices. I am too tired this evening, but I’ll try to note something tomorrow.

  Monday, 18 September

  A lot of sadness in Russia—Vişoianu says. He didn’t see anyone smiling in the street. But, as he himself added, there is a certain sadness in the big Slav cities. Moscow is sad, as Warsaw was too in peacetime.

  The war in Russia really is total. You see very few men. Women have replaced them everywhere. Ugly, badly dressed women, naively eager to flirt (lipstick, clumsy and pretentious hairdos). Life is terribly hard (four or five people live in one room), and terribly expensive (130 rubles for a bar of soap). A mixture of arrogance and inferiority complex. They are aware of their great victories but at the same time fear they are not being shown sufficient respect. This upsets them.

  The Romanian delegations were first summoned by Molotov at eleven in the evening. Then they were told to report an hour earlier: at ten o’clock. When they entered the Kremlin at ten sharp, a mighty cannonade began. They asked what it was and were told they were salvos for the capture of Bucharest.

  Then the door opened and they went into Molotov’s office.

  The discussions did not change a comma in the prepared text of the armistice agreement. The objections fell one after the other—there was no point. From time to time Molotov asked: What were you looking for in Stalingrad?

  I didn’t know that Vişoianu played such a major role in organizing the plot. On the night he left for Cairo, the King gave him his word that he would carry out the coup d’état as soon as he heard from Cairo that the time had arrived.

  The amazing thing is that such an operation, prepared over a long period of time with emissaries and written correspondence, could take place right under the noses of Antonescu’s people and Killinger.

  Probably there was a kind of paralysis of will, a disappearance of self-protective reflexes, which usually sets in when a regime is on its last legs.

  Wednesday, 20 September

  Another long conversation with Vivi [Vişoianu], this time alone. He tells me that he doesn’t dare express all the bitterness with which he has returned from Moscow.

  He believes in freedom—but there is no freedom there. People are terribly afraid to speak their mind, to say clearly either yes or no. There can be no doubt that Romania must go along with the Soviets, but it is not easy to get through to them. People there hide away and cannot be found. The material and intellectual level is low. Great ignorance, and great poverty.

  I tend to agree with Vişoianu—but then stop myself.

  He is a Westerner, a man for whom comfort, well-being, good manners, and politeness are ingrained habits, necessities of life. But the regime in Russia is for workers and peasants, for people who are only now learning to write, to wash, to eat properly—tens of millions who are rising with difficulty toward an elementary level of civilization. It is a world without refinement. All the things that have been dear to me—discretion, moral elegance, irony, respect for ideas, an aesthetic sense of life— are impossible in such
a world, which has to solve the immediate problems of hunger and cold.

  We may be deceiving ourselves when we think that the broad masses share our same thirst for freedom. We need Montaigne’s freedom: an intellectual freedom that defends its solitude. Peasants and workers—the “crowd”—have simpler and more powerful demands.

  Yesterday evening there was a Soviet music-hall show (estrada, the Russians call it) at the Alhambra. It was a wretched front-line troupe, with a ham-handed pianist, two Circassian fairground dancers, a couple of athletic dancers, an awkward young actor (who recited Pushkin, immediately followed by some anecdotal verse), and finally a comic actress who spoke in monologues. Nor should I forget a tenor in a brand-new tuxedo, which he had probably bought off the rack in Bucharest and wore with a touching lack of grace.

  It was all quite wretched, but not without a certain warmth. I still can’t help feeling that there is something miraculous in the presence of these troops, so candid in their wildness. There is also something dreamlike in it. Around me were soldiers and officers with all kinds of faces (a Mongol, a Tatar, a Jewish major with a wonderfully kind expression, a nearsighted young soldier looking somehow melancholy behind his glasses). I laughed with them. I applauded with them.

  Tuesday, 26 September

  Still the same disjointed life. The lack of a stable home disorganizes me. I have no practical ability; I am par excellence the type of person who “can’t sort things out for himself.” I am, in the worst sense of the word, a “poet.” I don’t know how to talk with the landlord, or quarrel with a neighbor who is bothering me, or arrange something at the local police station. All I want is to be left in peace. I miss opportunities, I give in, I swallow things, just to be left in peace. It is absurd and very harmful. At thirty-seven years of age, I am as helpless as a child.

  Monday, 2 October

  I am somehow installed in the Mehedin^ household. All sorts of problems, but at least I have a room from which no one threatens to evict me (for the time being).

  The house at Strada Antim is being repaired. I don’t know when it will be ready, nor do I know if and when we’ll be able to return there. Meanwhile I want to calm down and wait, with less nervous fretting.

  I am terribly tired. I don’t know why. Obviously my health has been deeply affected. I sleep badly, have dizzy spells, and look wretched. I ought to take more care of myself, but I have never known how to do that.

  Nothing new at the fronts, nothing new in internal politics. The German resistance is desperate but still firm. And here the old reactionary Romanian state is putting up a dull, stubborn resistance.

  It’s not serious, of course. They will all go to the devil: both the Germans at the front and the Legionaries inside the country.

  Meanwhile I feel a little disgust for the eternal Romania in which nothing ever changes.

  Camil Petrescu read me a couple of articles in which he has taken sides with “the Left,” one violendy attacking the Germans, the other attacking Gide. Like hell! Didn’t he have any time to write before the 23rd of August?

  I advised him to take it easy. For five years Camil has been exculpating himself and joining something new.

  Yesterday evening, as they returned from three shows at the theatre, Nora and Mircea were attacked by a Russian soldier. With his revolver at Nora’s head, he took from them a hundred thousand lei—and a watch.

  He had to run into them, of all people. There are thousands of people who might have deserved something like that (Ghiolu, Kazazian. . .). Why Nora and Mircea?

  Friday, 13 October

  Always tired, without any normal explanation. Am I really ill?

  I live in a constant state of nervous tension, unable to regain my equilibrium. The house is largely to blame. But it is mostly my own fault, because I let myself go too easily, too quickly.

  Life keeps passing me by. Some people, in these new conditions, at least try to find a position for themselves (Gruber, Comşa). But for me, nothing whatever has changed. I have some money left over from Steaua fără nume, and I’ll probably get another two or three thousand lei from the Baraşeum. Without that, I’d be really up against it. I have no position—nor do I see any prospects. Money as such (whether it’s 100, 300, or 500,000 lei) doesn’t mean anything at all. We are in the grip of inflation and keep falling down and down. What counts, then, is not money but the capacity to work, to keep your head above water, to be part of some institution.

  But I am always alone.

  The government went into crisis a few days ago, though there have not been any resignations. The stubbornness or inertia of the old state (if not its manifestly reactionary ambition) will have to be abandoned. The Liberals and the National Peasants are caught between total disappearance and relegation to the background of political life. The Left is throwing itself into the attack. For the moment there is no question of a Communist revolution. But if democracy is to become a reality in Romania, deeply radical changes will have to be urgently introduced.

  A funny incident. In a pastry shop I met a Greek doctor (I don’t remember his name) whose acquaintance I made in Paris in 1930. Since then we have greeted each other whenever we meet.

  “I’m glad you’ve developed,” he said to me.

  “How have I developed?”

  “I heard you’re no longer on the Right.”

  “Me? On the Right? When have I ever been on the Right?”

  “Well, that’s how I thought of you in Paris. Weren’t you with Action Française?”2

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, to protest, or to hold my peace. What could I say? How on earth did I come to be thought of as “Action Française”? From where, for God’s sake?

  How difficult it is to communicate with people. All kinds of images and ideas are spread about you. You don’t know where they come from, how they were born, what they are based on. You don’t even know what they are. Meanwhile your real life is like an island.

  Sunday, 19 November

  Why haven’t I written here for so long? I don’t know. I can give several explanations, but none of them is sufficient.

  I still live with a sense that everything is provisional. Since the 26th of August I have remained a war victim. I still have no home; I am still “installed” somewhere. In theory I am looking for somewhere. In practice I stay at the Mehedint home as if I were at a hotel where I have put up for the night.

  I work—but with the same sense that what I do is suspended in the air— and I postpone things to which I really should turn my mind.

  I have made a play from Nuits sans lune. I have translated Anna Christie. Now I am translating The Taming of the Shrew. I keep telling myself that I must finish it quickly—as if only then will I begin my main activity.

  I haven’t lost the wish to write my war book. I promise to do it as soon as I am rid of my theatrical chores. Meanwhile I translate, translate, and translate.

  Let’s be fair. The theatre does give me some money, for the time being. Otherwise how could I pay the rent or the daily household expenses?

  I have no “position.” I have refused in turn: 1) to rejoin the Foundation, 2) to resume my post at the college, 3) to become the confiscation administrator of a German company, 4) to work as an editor for the Radio, and 5) to join Branişte’s Jumalul.

  It’s hard to live on refusals.

  What will I do in January or February, when my income from the theatre dries up?

  It was a dramatic decision on my part not to go to work at Branişte’s Jumalul. It cost me a sleepless night and a couple of days of worry.

  I am fond of the man. I wrote him a long letter in which I tried to explain why I was neither able nor willing to work on the paper. Then I had a long chat with him, in which I was on the point of crumbling. Mais j’ai tenu bon.3

  Even at the risk of upsetting Vişoianu, even at the risk of somehow quarreling with Branişte, I no longer want to do journalism.

  Vişoianu, Pătrăşcanu, Belu, Rosetti tell me that I
will almost certainly be appointed a “press adviser.”4 I don’t know; I have my doubts. Nor do I even realize what such a function would actually mean. “Press adviser” in Romania means a kind of pencil pusher. And I don’t know how much chance there is of my doing it abroad (which has always been my dream); and it is unlikely to happen for a long long time.

  What if I were to drop everything (press, literature, theatre) and concentrate on advocacy? That idea comes back to me whenever my disgust with work as a “publicist,” in any form, starts to suffocate me. This morning I spent ten minutes or so at Siegfried’s exhibition. Lemnaru, Comarnescu, Musatescu, and Argintescu were there! They spoke about all kinds of things behind the scenes at the editorial office. Grotesque Balkan affairs. A world that doesn’t even amuse me. No, no, I need something completely and utterly different.

  Sunday, 26 November

  It was a big mistake to take on the translation of The Taming of the Shrew. A big mistake. Something like that should be done over six months, and I have to have it ready in a few more weeks. I have been working at it for a month now, and am still only halfway through. Whatever happens, I must do the rest more quickly.

  Besides, I am unable to work with Leni and Froda. I swear this will be my last theatrical experience with them. My very last. Everything irritates me. Scarlat’s superior airs as a “man of the theatre.” The “objectivity” with which Leni agrees with him on every matter. The fact that Jenica (who is playing a commonsense character, a “voice from the crowd”) always votes with them. They seem to be saying: you see, there are three of us and only one of you; if we all three say the same, why do you remain so stubborn?

  And then there is §ahighian, stupid, obtuse, and superior. Were it not for Leni, I’d long since have flung the translation into their faces and run off.