For Two Thousand Years Read online

  *

  I ate at the canteen between a bad-smelling loud-talking Russian and a thin girl with chapped hands and badly applied lipstick. A concrete floor, the cold, a coat thrown over my shoulders, a plate shoved before me, a tin fork on the ground.

  I’m never going to be a social revolutionary, I who in that moment somehow managed a cheerful smile.

  There are eleven boys in the room, including me. Sadigurski Liova, my neighbour to the right, shaves with the old razors given to him by Ionel Bercovici, my neighbour to the left. I’m still guarded in my interactions here. I fear greater familiarity.

  Towards morning, whenever I happen to wake, I like to listen to the chorus of breathing of the ten people around me, in this long, cold room: the rasping breath of the polytechnic student by the door, his neighbour’s fluting whistle, Liova’s sighing, the bumblebee buzz of someone towards the back, by the window and, above them all, the loud, penetrating, animal snore of Ianchelevici Şapsă, the giant.

  *

  I watch how they return in the evening from the university, in dribs and drabs, or singly, worn out. And each one grimly enumerates the fights he’s got into, like a billiard score, so that a competitor won’t steal their points.

  Marcel Winder is up to fifteen. The other day his hat also got ripped, which puts him well ahead on the road to martyrdom. Loudly, in the middle of the yard, he points out each of his wounds. This one and this one and this one …

  *

  Today they removed Ianchelevici Şapsă’s mattress. He hasn’t paid his bill for three months and they’re taking action. He watched calmly, leaning against the wall, without protest. In the evening he laid down on his bed board and uttered a choice curse. I threw him one of my pillows. He sent it sailing back, high through the air, nearly smashing the lamp, and turned over to face the wall.

  *

  It was a tough day. It’s been decided that we absolutely have to get into the civil law faculty, where they grade you for attendance. Up until now we’ve only been going in scattered groups of three people at most. This avoids major confrontations, but it achieves nothing as they usually identify us all and kick us out.

  So today we had to change our tactics. We entered in a compact group and sat in the front rows, by the lectern. We don’t respond to minor provocations, but defend ourselves if we’re attacked. ‘Until the end’ – that was the slogan.

  It’s a bad strategy, I think, but I’m not going to tell the boys that, so thrilled are they with today’s success. We gave as good as we got, perhaps, but did nobody notice Liebovici Isodor, jammed in the corner by the blackboard, with his coat ripped and a bloody split lip? Ianchelevici Şapsă did wonders: he was pale and serious, holding the leg of a chair he had broken off for the fight.

  Evening. Marcel Winder made a list of those who were beaten up, to give to the paper. I told him to rub my name out: I don’t think I received more than two blows and, more to the point, Mama doesn’t need to find out.

  *

  Calm exteriors. Perhaps antagonism has acquired a certain style.

  ‘Dear colleague, would you kindly show me your student identification card?’

  Three of them surround me, waiting. I take out my student card and display it to the one who spoke.

  ‘Aha! Please vacate the lecture hall. Come along.’

  He points the way.

  *

  Liebovici Isodor got badly beaten up. Again. I wasn’t there, but heard from Marga Stern, who was.

  I’m rather fond of his curt manner, his proud, firm reserve.

  ‘Again, Liebovici?’

  ‘Again, what?’

  ‘They beat you up again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course they did.’

  ‘All right, they did, then … You seem to know all about it.’

  He turns and leaves, irritated, head bowed.

  I lost my gloves in the scuffle or they were taken. And the weather is icy … Damn.

  *

  No, I’m not the tough kind. Where are the oaths I made two years ago, on the freshly shut cover of Zarathustra? Why did I wander aimlessly in the street last night, alone, miserable because I was unable to cry and terrified at the same time that I might have been about to? Why in the evening, when I lay my head on my pillow, is it like collapsing in exhaustion after being chased?

  Imbecile. Three times over.

  What depresses me most is the feeling of losing, with each day, the refuge of solitude, of finding myself in solidarity with Marcel Winder and Ianchelevici Şapsă, descending the stairs together, united in common feeling, becoming one with them, the same as them, a fellow sufferer and sympathizer. Jewish fellow-feeling – I hate it. I’m always on the brink of shouting out a coarse word, just to show that even though I’m in the midst of ten people who believe me their ‘brother in suffering’, I am in fact absolutely, definitively alone.

  Listen, Marcel Winder, if you pat me on the shoulder one more time, I’ll punch you out. My business if I’m hurt, your business if your skull gets cracked. I’ve nothing to share with you, you don’t need anything from me. You go your way and I’ll go mine.

  *

  We’ve had no fire for three days. We’re out of wood and awaiting a promised subsidy.

  Liova is sick, a fever of 39 degrees. An intern from Caritas came to see him and promised to take him there as soon as a bed becomes available.

  The polytechnic student has got frostbitten ears and a big yellowing bandage covers his entire cheek. It turns my stomach at mealtimes in the canteen, along with the tattered cotton wool and gutta-percha.

  Ianchelevici Şapşa has washed his socks and hung them on the edge of the bed to dry. A girl was looking for him today. I think she’d come from a market in his town and she brought him a bag of walnuts. He laughed awkwardly: I think he was embarrassed to receive her in front of us.

  Am I not ridiculous here, with my fussy judgements, and minding how I ‘carry’ myself? An aesthete. That’s what I am. ‘Decency, reserve, solitude’ – worthless virtues that oblige you to grin through the pain.

  Unshaven for four days. It’s too cold to spend a quarter of an hour in front of the mirror.

  *

  Things could have gone badly today. I was coming down from the administrative offices, where I’d gone to get warm, and was two steps from the door when Ştefăniu went out ahead of me. He hadn’t noticed me. I’ve just realized that. But I lacked composure and foolishly spun about to avoid him, and that’s when he saw me. He could only reach me with his walking stick (a good blow on the right shoulder). I ran from him, though this risked attracting the attention of the others, and took a left into the hall. With him in pursuit. I went through the upper gallery, towards the senate, calculating I could stop in the chancellery. But there was no key in the door and I wouldn’t have been able to hold it shut indefinitely with my shoulder. Luckily the door to the senate steps was open. Once out in the street, I supposed he wouldn’t pursue me. And he didn’t.

  And I should write to Mama this evening. But what?

  Ten in the evening. A while ago the Bessarabian medical student brought two pieces of wood in the pockets of his overcoat. But since we haven’t had a fire for so long the stove smokes and now it’s gone cold again and the acrid smell in the room chokes Liova.

  Somebody went out and left the door open. Nobody gets up to close it. Ionel Bercovici is playing poker on his bed with Marcel Winder and two others whom I don’t know.

  You can hear Liova coughing from time to time. Somebody is beating his
hands together, either because the coughing annoys him or because he’s cold.

  Saturday evening

  Every Jew is a king

  And every corner of the house rings with laughter

  And everyone’s happy

  Ianchelevici Şapsă is singing. Leaning against the wall, overcoat draped over his shoulders, hands in pockets. He has a heavy, drawling voice that has trouble with the high notes and he stumbles a little at the end of each verse.

  ‘… A ieider i-id a melah … Every Jew is a king …’

  It’s a melody I’ve heard before somewhere, long ago. At home, perhaps, in Grandfather’s time.

  My eyes feel hot. It’s nothing, kid. Nobody can see you. And don’t you feel it does you good, infinitely more good, than proudly gritting your teeth and holding it in?

  Sing, Ianchelevici Şapsă. You’re a big fellow, twenty-five years old, and haven’t read a book in your life, you’ve passed through life aware of everything around you and steady on your fine animal feet, you wash your own socks and eat a quarter of a loaf of bread and three walnuts for lunch, you talk dirty and laugh to yourself, you’ve never looked at a painting or loved a girl, you swear like a trooper and spit on the ground, but look at you now while we, the rest of us, watch you silently as though by the roadside, you alone Ianchelevici Şapsă, dispirited, sullen and starved though you are – you alone are singing.

  *

  I’d gone to the rector’s office to ask something. On returning, the vestibule – empty ten minutes before – had been invaded. I didn’t recognize anybody. But it had all the makings of a nasty fight.

  So – I’m trapped. I’m noticed by somebody, or so it seems to me. I go up the stairs three steps at a time, slam behind me various doors, hit walls as I veer left and right. On to the second floor, then left, and I don’t feel I can keep going much longer: I stick to the walls and with a trembling hand seek a door. In trepidation, I push a handle. It’s open.

  A small, uncomfortable classroom. Ten or twelve in attendance. A very young man is at the lectern: a student or assistant. He’s talking. Probably it’s a seminar.

  My head is spinning and I don’t know if I’m afraid of those outside or embarrassed before those inside. I have to do something to occupy myself and compose my nerves. I take out my pencil and pad: I make notes. Mechanically, absently, simply to behave coherently and get a grip on myself. I don’t know what the man at the lectern is saying. I record like a stenographer, like a machine. Involved only in the motion of pencil on paper, indifferent to everything said, completely detached from what’s going on.

  And now, this evening, I find this strange piece of paper in my hand:

  There is something profoundly artificial in the entire value system underpinning our lives. Not solely in political economy, where the stresses are visible and the evil easy to locate. Financial instability is the most obvious, though not the most acute, crisis of the old world. There are breakdowns that are even more serious, and even sadder agonies. We will understand nothing about the economic crisis we are studying if we get bogged down in technical details. These are secondary. Absolutely secondary. It’s not a financial system that is collapsing today, but a historical system. A structure is being razed, not a handful of forms, facts and details. A crisis of concepts of value in economics and finance is not an isolated fact, as it partakes of a general crisis on all levels of modern life. We live with too many abstractions, too many illusions. We’ve lost the ground beneath our feet. It’s not only the gold standard that has been lost, but any fixed relationship between our symbols and ourselves. There’s a gulf between man and his context. These expressions that you see have become dehumanized. Or, perhaps more accurately, they have become inhuman.

  Take any of our institutions, ideas, attitudes, skills or shortcomings, take them one at a time and sound them out. You will notice that they ring hollow. Life has fled from them, the spirit has left them. Why? I don’t know why. The result, perhaps, of the abuse of intelligence. I’m not joking. We have made for ourselves a civilization based on intelligence as the basic value, and this is an expensive luxury and a terrible presumption. Between ourselves and life, we have posed ourselves as arbiters. That is a tragic conceit. We are nothing and it was Descartes who believed otherwise. See now how we pay the price, three hundred years later.

  I fear the hour of the fools is upon us. Rather, I don’t fear it at all. I’m glad. Because I have seen what intelligence has done and where it has taken us. Now we turn back, penitent, embittered and with three centuries of weariness, heading back into the forests of foolishness and real life.

  You can call that obscurantism. All the better.

  *

  He’s neither student nor assistant. He’s a professor of political economy. This year he’s teaching a course on ‘the concept of value in the history of economic doctrines’. His name is Ghiţă Blidaru. The boys just call him Ghiţă. He’s come from Munich or Berlin, I’m not sure which. He looks much younger than his thirty-five years. He has a long, drawn, asymmetrical face, with something shy in his smile and commanding, joined eyebrows. He speaks in an offhand drawl, interrupting himself at times with a ‘no?’ like a fiery full stop.

  From today’s lecture, a passage that was just a parenthesis:

  To be logical? To be logical is not, as is stated in our books, to think according to formulae and equations, but to think according to the essential nature of things. If you really require a definition, try this one: logic is the systemization of intuition.

  And laugh.

  *

  The lecture on Adam Smith:

  If you were to ask me what we are doing here, in a class in which the parentheses are longer than the treatment given to the subject of the course, I might respond as follows: we are disposing of values. Clearing them away like dead wood. Intelligence, individualism, free choice, positivism … And we are looking for a single ‘value’, one that contains them all. That is called, if I am not mistaken, life.

  *

  Mondays and Fridays, from six to seven, Blidaru’s course. We’re a small group of regulars, and we know each other but don’t talk. Sometimes, a new figure appears and takes a seat at the back. I like to look around from time to time and observe, as the lecture progresses, the growing surprise on the face of the new arrival.

  *

  He spoke today of the superiority of the physiocrats over all the modern schools of economic thinking. Too broad for me to transcribe my course notes here. He spoke stridently, aggressively, with sudden twists in the movement of the argument. (The effect is that of an intelligent agitator working a crowd.) We were waiting, intrigued, for the denouement – when a military march struck up outside our window. A passing company with its colours.

  He jumped from the lectern, sprang towards the window, opened it and stood there watching, nodding his head to the rhythm of the big drum.

  He then turned to us.

  ‘Isn’t the street wonderful?’

  *

  The third lecture on the physiocrats. Blidaru’s course rearranges hierarchies with the greatest of ease. Only a couple of words on what the textbook considers sacrosanct, then ten furious lectures on what the textbook despises most.

  There is an element in physiocrat economics which is more powerful than any of their naiveties. Of course, those old men of 1750 had no idea of the mechanism by which goods circulated and what they imagined in this realm is romantic and fantastic as well as false. But for all these errors, there remains one intuition
worth incomparably more than any dry statistic. Their economics starts with the earth and returns to the earth. Behold a peasant idea, a simple idea of life, an idea that comes from nature, from the most natural everyday human intuitions. Nothing can demolish such a simple, clear truth.

  Disoriented as we are, we will perhaps one day find the truth that returns us to the soil, simplifying everything and installing a new order. One not invented by us, but grown by us.

  *

  They’re talking again of closing the university. The fighting has intensified. The faculty has been under military occupation for a week.

  What remains is Ghiţă Blidaru’s course, hidden in that obscure room on the second floor, where nobody goes because nobody knows about it.

  Evening. The dorms as silent as a snowy wasteland. From time to time, in the corridor, tired footfalls, a door closing, a cry that goes unanswered.

  You can work well in this silence. I re-read an economic treatise with Ghiţă’s notes in my hand. An impassioned confrontation.

  *

  It’s worrying. There were too many people at the lecture. Strange hostile faces in the front rows.

  Blidaru, brilliant. Success is ultimately achievable, perhaps. But if things don’t work out? We’ll see.

  No, this is one thing I won’t give up. I’ve left civil law, left the aesthetics course, left and will leave any course you want, history, sociology, Chinese or German, but I will not give up Ghiţă Blidaru’s course.

  I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.

  Some of them stopped me at the door.

  ‘Student ID.’

  It would have been stupid to present it. I tried to rush past them. They knocked me to the wall with a single blow. I watch them from the corner into which they have pushed me. The door was ajar. Laughter, voices, shouts from one bench to another could be heard. Five minutes to six. Ghiţă will enter now. If I could get in too … If I go to those idiots at the door and talk to them, perhaps they’ll understand. Good God, a seat in the back row … It’s hardly too much to ask … No, that’s an idiotic idea … Silence. Then applause. He’s entered, surely. The door closes. One of them, the only one who has remained to guard the lecture hall, stares at me.