Virgil Mehedinţi, the councilor, would have been astonished that I hadn’t acted independently, that I hadn’t stormed out of the classroom and let the administration know what was going on. As it was, the coward in me feared the consequences of defeat as much as the fullness of victory. When the coward couldn’t stand it anymore, he let himself be pushed by his desire to become a paragon of virtue — though not in a particularly steadfast way. He’d fail and then try again — a matter of half attacks and half retreats.
In the middle of a class about the circulatory system, Laurenţiu Sofronie lifted his elbows off his desk, straightened the label of his crumpled jacket and took out his eyeglasses. The classroom waited. The professor’s thin, dirty, salt and pepper hair fell in greasy locks. He smoothed them with his hand.
— Dear children, you must learn what life is.
Sofronie rattled on for fifteen minutes about the heroism of Japanese pilots during the last world war who had hurled themselves at enemy warships and depots and blew themselves up in their planes. The souls of those kamikazes (in their jerkins with seven metal buttons, stamped with the three-petaled cherry blossom) deserved our admiration. Symbolic death, divine afflatus, contempt for pointless lives, the sacrifices of those who not only confront death — “which is natural in a war,” as the professor was saying, “but seek it out. .” — the reactionary argument drove toward a single conclusion: death was the trophy, the flower of courage.
During break, the director listened to my denunciation with horror rather than attention. Professor Sofronie came back the next day with all his buttons closed and his hair neatly combed. He dictated the new lesson slowly, starting sentences over again whenever he stuttered. He didn’t look at the rows of desks, and he behaved this way through all the following lessons. “Very well, children.” “That’s it, children.” He had raised grades: “Be more careful, dear child,” “Please respect me, dear children.” Sofronie didn’t cast an eye in our direction, didn’t look at me once. Anatomy class had become something else, the professor, someone else. Following him tensely, eyes fixed on the professor’s face, my colleagues listened to him with their hearts in their mouths as they watched his tired movements — so ill at ease — his frightened old walk, his dread of words. Something had changed him; someone powerful and perfidious had changed him: someone who should have been feared had become just that.
I made myself small. I was afraid. I was ready to grovel at the feet of the victim and beg for forgiveness, to try joking with him, to find a moment when no one would be able to see us, when I could whisper (in some corner of the hall) that spies had forced me to denounce him but that he was actually safe: I knew him and would defend him.
I was ready to do anything so that my classmates in their rows of benches would recognize me as one of their own, so that I could be one of them, so they’d let me into their fraternity. Terror of remaining alone forever mixed with an unshakable fear of a slow, disgusting collapse, a state of half-heartedness, negligence, abandon. I kept wanting to be left alone, to forget, to escape the pressure of my ambiguities, to meet with myself, to avoid confrontation, to fall asleep. My classmates had no way of knowing my remorse, but they seemed to accept me, sympathetically even. I was, after all, a prize winning pupil who chased girls and was willing to lend my notebook so they could copy the answers to the next day’s math problems; as for my political role in the school, by reducing Party meetings and going easy on discipline, I managed to perform it in an approximate way without overdoing it. The torture of great hardliner ambitions only wracked me in secret. My rigid determination only exploded at home, as attacks of fury and contempt. Outbursts like the anatomy class incident would take place rarely enough that their effects would wear off in the meantime.
That wasn’t all. The class turned to stone several months after Sofronie had changed. I stood up at the end of a history class and proposed that the professor change his grading system: since we all knew when our turns were coming, all we had to do each semester was learn two lessons each by heart. Popovici, the kind priest who had become our history professor, turned red to the tips of his ears. It was true that he used this system of calling on us in alphabetical order to let us off the hook. Now, he remained silent for a few moments and then stuttered something, vaguely admitting that I was right, because after all “we had to master all our subjects as well as possible.” The class was now being forced to give up easy marks, which were evidently in their own interest, yet afterward, in the following days, my classmates spoke to me in the same way they always had. They must have understood it was the head of the class’s duty to strike out at the former land-owning, exploiting class, and if he gave away a few of their advantages, that was his right, which was inevitably the basis for his becoming a caricature of “the little proletarian hero.”
In the end, Professor Laurenţiu Sofronie had rounded up everyone’s grades, and he wouldn’t have had any reason not to raise the grades of his best and most dangerous student. The priest-turned-history-professor now wanted everyone to correctly recite a long passage from a book, and it was natural to give the highest grade to whoever recited with the best diction and without messing up the grammar. But when the professor of anatomy or history, or even the director, with whom I was going to all kinds of political meetings, listened to me with fawning attention and handed out exaggerated praise, I didn’t know where to run, ashamed as I was of the prestige I’d won. And I couldn’t find the courage to endure or accelerate my stubborn, solitary rebellion either. I would have run to all my subordinate classmates, ready to share smiles and answers to final exams, to organize excursions, dances in the evenings with the students from the girls’ school, or athletic competitions with the neighboring town. I wanted to feel them around me, to witness and approve my betrayals, and understand that I always wanted the best for them and that I only acted out of pure idealism and in complete candor.
They may have perceived my openness toward them despite the inconsistency of my behavior. Otherwise, Sebastian Caba, who lived with them the whole time in the school’s dormitory, wouldn’t have listened to me as peacefully as he had when I told him I’d visited the salt mine where his father worked. Pale and worried, Caba would have cornered me with all the questions he could have stammered out: how the mine looked, how long I stayed there, what they said to me, if I’d met his father. He should have pestered me with all kinds of sly questions to clarify whether I knew the one thing he was trying to keep secret. He had heard how I talked to the history teacher. He saw how Laurenţiu Sofronie, the former landowner, wisely acquiesced, bowing his old shoulders. He should have been frightened by these warnings. Yet, in the middle of his first winter among us, he had asked if he could join our organization. He had seen right through me. And he ignored the fact that I had waited until the eleventh hour to receive his truth or anxiety or contrition.
• • •
Caba was a mediocre student but liked by his classmates, and his father was now part of the working class; no one had any reason to keep him out of the organization. On the contrary, he represented a rare acquisition, bearing in mind that most of the students came from peasant backgrounds: we would finally have a member from the working-class.
I expected a visit from him every day. I followed him. I watched over his every move. I answered him dryly and treated him rudely to disarm him, so he would have to ask for forgiveness, confess. I counted the days until the meeting. It was a frosty winter. Thursday afternoon the organization would receive new members from each class. The snow had frozen and crunched under foot. Night fell rapidly, a couple hours after we returned from school. I was alone with Donca. I remember everything that happened then, at the end of the first January that Caba lived among us. I had memory back then. I was powerful. People like Sebastian Caba should have feared me. So the new order demanded. I was expecting him to knock shyly on the window, ask for mercy, kneel in the snow to confess the truth, and withdraw to his destined place.