I descended at peace.
The city was baking beneath a blazing sky. At noon, the deserted streets glared white. People crept close to the walls, sniffing out shade. The sun poured into the attic, yellowing the white of my books.
I left once more, this time for a village whose cottages were scattered along the seashore. There, sunrise was blinding above the watery horizon. Noon shone like a glassy dome above the naked bodies on the burning sand. Sunset bled over the clayey hills. Evening set in only with the rising of the moon from the briny wastes. And night radiated a lofty blue.
At the train station I bumped into Marcu, who was accompanied by a dark-haired young man and a young lady. I had not seen him since winter. In the midst of the hurried couples and the porters, we embraced. He introduced his new friends: the young lady, who had a complicated Jewish name, was a student of the Natural Sciences; the young man was a medical student and an anti-Semite. Marcu laughed, and I would have thought he was joking, had I not seen a silver swastika on his friend’s lapel. There was no time for surprise or questioning. We still had to find seats in a compartment that was not too crowded, so that we might travel and talk in peace.
We had to settle for leaning against the windows in the corridor of a carriage. Marcu and his travel companions were headed for Constanţa. He was going to stay there until September, and then to travel by sea to Marseilles. In Marseilles, his father has relatives. He would holiday there and then go to Paris for six or seven years, to attend Medical School.
He told me how he had passed his baccalaureate that summer. His failure to do so on his first attempt had made him even more determined. He sat out a year; and did not even have time to do his military service. He had begun to feel that he was discriminated against, that he had failed because of the examination board’s anti-Semitism. Only then did he begin to study. For eight months, he had studied hour after hour, just like we had the year before in the Foundation Library. The two of us recalled the winter and spring we had spent together, with thick books with grey bindings. I remembered so many details about time spent with my friend, who was now going away.
I asked why he had not come to see me. When I had gone to visit him, a neighbour told me he had moved without leaving a forwarding address.
‘Radu told me that you had become an anti-Semite, that you had opened your house to a Christian student association, that you were working on manifestos and conspiracies.’
We laughed, and laughed.
‘Naturally, Radu told you nothing of the sort. It’s true that my attic was the headquarters of the club for two months. Many of the students were anti-Semites, but you know me: I’ve never been an anti-Semite.’
‘How unfortunate’, interjected the student with the swastika. ‘As I’ve told my friend Marcu many times: any enlightened Romanian student who is not an anti-Semite is either a coward or a fool. An enlightened student has to be nationalist.’
‘Absurd’, smiled Marcu. ‘An enlightened student must be a citizen of the future: a Communist. If we don’t abolish the superstitions of nationalism, borders, and blockheaded ethnic theories, then who will?’
‘You’re a Semite and a poseur. The abolition of which you speak of doesn’t seem to prevent you from being a fanatical advocate of Judaism.’
‘We have to leave ourselves the final law, because without the law we have nothing.’
‘You exaggerate; you have too many qualities. As a matter of fact, what persuaded me to be your best friend was precisely your intense and sincere Judaism, combined with your trite and insincere Internationalism.’
‘Internationalism can be achieved only through Judaism.’
‘Gentlemen’, I pleaded, ‘this conversation makes me feel awkward. Marcu is my good friend, and besides, there is also a young lady here.’
‘The young lady won’t take offense, because she’s my fiancée.’ smiled the student with the swastika.
All three laughed at my surprise.
‘Can you believe it?’ asked Marcu. ‘This renegade young lady.’
‘I beg your pardon, but assimilated’, clarified the young lady, with a laugh.
‘When you become assimilated with an uncivilised nation you are a renegade.’
‘The nation is still young’, the medical student continued. ‘And this foreign girl now finds herself in a country of her own. Two thousand years ago she would have been a slave: and now she is a wife and sometimes a mistress.’
‘But now she’s a slave to Christianity’, I said.
‘Unfortunately.’
‘Don’t even start’, said Marcu, interrupting him. ‘My friend here is an authentic Christian.’
‘The gentleman can’t possibly be Christian. From what he’s written, I’d say he’s a pagan, torn between Apollo and Dionysus.’
‘Please don’t forget about Jesus too.’
‘If you like, but I consider you intellectually evolved enough still to retain a primitive mentality. Christianity is religiosity, which is to say, condensed polytheism, which is to say, animism, fetishism, magic, savagery.’
‘A thousand mistakes in a single sentence’, I said, in annoyance. ‘First of all, monotheism was never condensed polytheism, but the exaltation of the supremacy of the sky god taken to the point where all the other gods were abolished and disappeared. A single god therefore becomes the Lord God, rather than hundreds of gods being reduced to a single synthesis, as the school of Mythology would have it. Your second mistake is so egregious that it lowers you in my estimation to the level of any other mediocre, puffed up, uncultured, impertinent medical student.’
‘Oh! What compliments!’ exclaimed the young lady, in irritation.
‘Because only a medical student of that ilk could possibly confuse the experience of Christianity with the origins of the religious. Don’t you see the terrifying absurdity of what you are saying? If you invert the phases of evolution like this, then can’t you see how I might just as well say to you: Einstein is a savage?’
‘Let’s hear it, let’s hear it!’ rejoiced Marcu.
‘Because I too have the right to move back down the levels, as you have done, descending from three-dimensional to two-dimensional geometry, from the Greeks to the Egyptians, then the Chaldeans, then the lines scrawled by savages on cave walls. Given that Einstein’s theories originate in three-dimensional geometry, which originates in cave painting.’
‘The savages’ paintings were not a science.’
‘That’s precisely what I am accusing you of: magic, fetishism, polytheism do not comprise authentic religiosity, but only a series of spiritual phenomena that have nothing to do with Christian experience. Your conflation of Christianity and primitivism is downright absurd. In conclusion: Christianity excludes neither science, nor philosophy, nor civilisation.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. In any event, you cannot be a Christian – your duty is to be an anti-Semite.’
‘Idiocy. I cannot be party to a solution so long as I have not studied the question.’
‘Who prevents you from studying it?’
‘Anti-Semites. Do you think I can be objective when they break windows, when they beat up their Jewish classmates, when Christian colleges are barred to them, when they no longer have student canteens or halls of residence?’
‘Even more reason for you to take a stance. To wait and see what happens is cowardice.’
‘Well said’, smiled Marcu. ‘I’ve always admired the politics of force; it’s the only kind that gets results. I’m no longer a socialist, because there were too many theories and too little courage. In Paris, I won’t be organising demonstrations against Romania, but attacks against the government. For every deputy killed – I’ll drink a bottle of champagne!’
‘Marcu’, I pleaded, ‘You’re goading me gratuitously. I have always avoided talking about this issue with you.’
‘You don’t have the courage to take a side’, insinuated the student.
‘I have far more courage than you might suspect. I have the courage to wait. My duty is to achieve equilibrium and the enlightenment of my consciousness.’
‘And let the country go to hell.’
‘You are mistaken; the country won’t go to hell because five students avoid the Jewish question, preferring first to discover themselves, to create their own criteria and values.’
‘That’s an example of disorder. If I were a dictator, I would have you shot. What does the country care about your consciousness?’
‘Maybe my consciousness will, after much struggle and progress, come to reflect the soul of the country.’
‘It’s obvious you’re a philosophy student, what with your talk of “the soul of the country”.’
‘And as for you, it is obvious that you’re a medical student. You contradict yourself with every sentence. You’ve forgotten that you were defending ethnicity. What is this ethnicity of yours: blood, or skin, or soul?’
‘There’s no need for you to quarrel’, interrupted Marcu.
‘What the gentleman says is interesting; he’s trying to defend the young lady. I like talking to literature students; they are naive and sentimental.’
‘Sadly they’ve changed. They’re too interested in medicine.’
‘Oh! My mistake.’
‘Literature students borrow the freedoms of Medicine, without borrowing the mentality and the subject matter.’
‘It would be interesting to know what you mean by the freedoms of medical students’, inquired Marcu.
‘Fundamentally interesting’, said the Medical student, sarcastically. ‘But perhaps the gentleman also believes in love?’
‘While your indiscretion is embarrassing, I take no offense. But neither will I be able to provide you with an answer.’
‘Naturally, we wouldn’t understand’, laughed the girl.
‘That’s not what I said. But you’re mixing up the sex drive or cohabitation or “sympathie amoureuse” with love. I won’t even attempt to go into detail about the levels of authentic love.’
‘Now that would be interesting’, smiled the girl.
‘What would be interesting for me, despite the gaffes I am quite aware I am making, is to discover the motivation for the liaison between you’, I said.
All three blushed. The girl looked out of the window. The student tried to make a joke.
‘Perhaps you believe we’re in love?’
‘I don’t believe anything; I await your explanation, should you choose to confide in me, of course.’
Marcu spoke up.
‘They are students of the future: they are building a conjugal life founded on the communality of interests, losses and gains.’
‘It’s not exactly like that’, protested the young woman. ‘I’m studying biology, he medicine. We’re very good friends, we get on well with each other.’
‘Except for one thing: she believes in neither nationalism nor internationalism.’
‘I believe in Science and in you.’
I gave a start. They had said they were not in love.
‘That resembled a declaration of feeling, but I’ll allow it as an exception.’
After stepping out of the train carriage at a station to buy fruit, the couple found seats by the open window when they returned and sat whispering to each other. I talked to Marcu about our lycée years, about his future, about my future. He was thinking of remaining in Paris permanently. I was saddened by the thought of parting with a friend forever. To me, Marcu embodied all the most arduous, intrepid, and sombre experiences of adolescence. Marcu reminded me of ambitions, defeats, books read, and my painfully precocious growing up, throughout experiences sought after and exalted. Now, he was leaving. Who could tell whether we would see each other during the next five years, as long as Marcu was to be out of the country?
Smiling, we both gazed at the fields in the sunlight. Then we fell silent, he alone with his thoughts, and I with mine. Perhaps he was saying to himself, ‘This man will soon be a stranger to me.’ I felt sad. I understood Marcu less and less, he with his medical studies and anarchist books, I with my inner life. I thought him stale, simplistic, ‘a pharmacist’; he saw me as mystical, historical, hallucinatory. Which one of us was right?
‘Only me’, I answered myself. An innate epicurean, Marcu had avoided spiritual conflicts, forays down unfamiliar paths, the courage to accept absurdities, the madness of accepting contradictions and deadly experiences. I was right, because I had suffered more. My serenity was bitter, but effective. His was false and littered with doubts that had never become intense and absolute. Marcu was a friend who was leaving. I was a young man who was still waiting, confronting himself.
I thought all this, but said nothing to him. The train sliced through the plains trailing white smoke. We glimpsed stations, people bent under the weight of summer, wells at crossroads, carts nudging the horizon. ‘This is my land’, I thought. Marcu gazed, and gazed. Perhaps he was moved by his departure from the country where his parents were born and fell in love, where he grew up, on a sunny street, in a city with factories. Perhaps he was thinking about lycée, his friends, the girls at the library, all the sacrifices he had made, the nostalgia you feel when the party is over, Purim nights, when the two of us roamed the streets wearing black dominos capes, and a delicately smothered romance, and the death of his grandmother Esther.’
Both of us were silent, almost until evening. Marcu smiled and started to tell me about the life he would live in Paris. Then, of the couple whispering by the window, he said: ‘I think they’re both insane. He says he’s an anti-Semite, and she brags about her science. In fact, they love each other, but neither of them wants to abandon the lie. Perhaps, to each other, they’ve confessed. They’re like two love-struck, sentimental teenagers.’
He gave a malicious smile.
‘Will you ever fall in love?’
‘I won’t run from it’, I admitted. ‘But I won’t tell you my thoughts on what comes after love.’
‘Since when have you been a convert?’
‘We haven’t seen each other for so long.’
‘Although in lycée it always seemed like you were in love. You too have fallen: mediocrity, mediocrity.’
‘If the love of Dante and of Don Quixote is a fall, then I have fallen.’
‘I don’t understand you, and you still bore me with that literature of yours.’
‘But it’s not literature.’
Marcu shrugged, with a weary smile. We lapsed into silence once more, he reading the newspapers, I waiting for the night.
In the station we embraced. I was tempted to cry.
‘Marcu, it’s as if you were going away for good. I can barely hold back.’
‘I’m flattered, but I’ve still got three weeks in Constanț. If you like, come to visit.’
‘No, it’s better we say our goodbyes now.’
I shook hands with the couple, who regarded me cheerfully. As the horse-drawn cab pulled up, Marcu called out to me.
‘Don’t forget to write! I’ll send you my address. Write to me about Robert, about Radu, Dinu, Fănică. Write to me about our parents and our teachers – about everybody.’
I promised. ‘He’ll take the whole country with him, to France, through my letters’, I thought. Old friends, and classmates from lycée, and the faces of teachers thronged about me that night. And my soul was beset with the sadness of a desolate adolescence.