‘What could this be?’ mused Dronţu. ‘Tenth of December,’ we remembered simultaneously, laughing. I have to admit there was a celebratory air to the whole demonstration, the light-hearted rambunctious mood of the start of the holidays. We stopped along with everyone else at the roadside to watch the march.
‘Down with the Yids! Down with the Yids!’
The shout passed from column to column, syllable by syllable, in a long, winding chain of sound. It was beautifuclass="underline" I ask myself if that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but it really was beautiful. A crowd of young men — most of them certainly first-year students. Tremendous high spirits, an atmosphere of schoolyard fun. Nothing serious.
We remembered our first 10 December, Dronţu with enthusiasm, me with a trace of bitterness.
‘The blows I dealt that day,’ he testifies.
‘Perhaps you were the one who struck me.’
‘Perhaps. Where did it happen?’
‘In the main lecture hall in Law.’
‘No, I wasn’t there. Us architecture students went to the college of medicine, because we didn’t have enough Jews in with us.’
He is moved, almost. It would be unfair of me not to understand: these are his memories of his younger days. They’re mine too — though they’re less cheerful. In any case, it would be grotesque of me to want to get indignant about these dead and buried matters. It’s not serious or aggressive any more. These ‘Down with the Yids’ of today are almost innocent, almost likable.
We strolled until late, relating innumerable tales of those times. Marin boasted of his deeds.
‘Back then I had a cudgel you wouldn’t believe. The Jews scarpered at the sight of me. I’d become famous at the faculty of medicine. ‘Dronţu from architecture.’ Who hadn’t heard of me? I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of me … I was wild!’
Isn’t it strange that I find myself good friends today with the unhappy heroes from the notebook of 1923?
I couldn’t say exactly how the successive truces which have brought us together were made. In any case, in our first year of university we were thrown into opposite corners, while today we find ourselves together in the same place. It’s no small matter.
A new page has been turned, and new questions arise. The uproar at the university was fine and well, but insufficient. You can’t build a life out of that kind of thing. Not even for those engaged in ‘a struggle to claim their rights’. Nor for us, whose struggle concerned ‘internal problems’.
I realize, as though in the wake of a storm, that the same winds buffeted us both and that we were being wrecked in the same sinking vessel. It’s easy to cry ‘Hooligans’, and very convenient. It’s almost as simple as ‘Down with the Yids’. Is that all there was to our little drama?
Back then I guessed there was something else to it. Now I’m sure of it. But it’s got nothing to do with a natural bandit like Marin Dronţu. It concerns Pârlea. Marin Dronţu flailing about with his cudgel is irrelevant. He’s just a demonstrator. Pârlea is a more serious case and, with him in mind, I wonder if it is always easier to be a hooligan than a victim. I have no doubt that Pârlea has suffered greatly through the path he has taken. His political nihilism, his innocent revolts and his formidable imprecations perhaps show puerility of thought, but what is interesting is not their quality, but his sincerity in living them, the passion he submits them to. It goes without saying, when someone is beating your head with a stick, it’s all the same to you whether he’s a bandit or a hero, and I won’t get so precious about it as to declare I’d prefer to be killed by an ideological revolver than by an illiterate one.
Though I can see my personal situation as being just as bad either way, I can still allow myself to reflect a little on my aggressor. Well, in the case of Ştefan Pârlea, I don’t envy him at all. Student unrest was for me perhaps a tragedy, but it was for him too. I provoked him one evening into speaking about his role in the movement. He replied with deliberate harshness.
‘I’m not sorry about what happened. I’m sorry about how it ended: in indifference, in forgetting … Smashing windows is fine. Any act of violence is good. “Down with the Yids” is idiotic, agreed! But what does it matter? The point is to shake the country up a bit. Begin with the Jews — if there’s no other way. But finish higher up, with a general conflagration, with an all-consuming earthquake. That was our ambition back then, our real aspiration. But I for one have not finished. I’ll suffocate if nothing new happens.’
Perhaps Ştefan Pârlea is being poetic, with his symbols and myths, but in fact this tumult is for him a form of political thought. Who can guarantee that S.T. Haim’s ideas and calculations are closer to the truth than Ştefan Pârlea’s visions? What I find refreshing in this fellow is his total incapacity for schematic thought. His thinking is a flash-flood that demolishes, overturns and embraces, without method or criteria, according to the rhythms of his frenetic outbursts. I can trace in his habitual vocabulary a number of terms that he has never properly clarified, either in writing or speech, but which have some magical significance for him. He’d probably find it difficult to say exactly what is meant by the ‘barbarian invasion’ he calls for, or by ‘the seeds of fire’ he says lie latent in each of us, and which we need to blow into mighty blazes. It’s all so vague and inconsistent as to sometimes seem ridiculous … Yet Ştefan Pârlea passes from words to action with utter commitment. His departure from the university, for example, which came as an immense relief to everyone as, with a little patience, he would have been a lecturer within a few years, was not permitted to be a mere departure.
‘The only thing I can do for the university is burn it down,’ is what he is said to have written to the dean in an explanatory letter.
Even if this was what he really wrote, I still don’t see what the fuss was about. The recklessness of youth. A poor person has to compensate internally for poverty by slamming a few doors. Otherwise he’ll never learn to open life’s big doors. Pârlea’s abandonment of university was certainly a piece of nonsense, but I tell myself it was a healthy one. Or could have been.
But it turned out otherwise. And other pieces of foolishness followed, some were harder to explain than others. I confess that his escapade at Records is beyond me. Sub-archivist at the Ministry of Records? Perhaps. Perhaps, though, it’s stupid to accept such a low-ranking, badly paid and menial job when you could have been a professor or the editor of a big magazine. And, once finding yourself there, to continue experimenting with self-mutilation seems like childish play-acting.
In September he was listed for promotion; he would have received a higher salary and have been moved to the central office. He turned it down. He just returned the difference in money to the cashier, saying he wouldn’t accept a penny over 3,300 lei. ‘He’s crazy,’ they said at the ministry three days later, where the news passed from office to office, from person to person. The General Secretary called him to his office, in order to take a look at ‘the man who turns down money’.
‘Are you in your right mind, good man?’
‘I believe so,’ replied Pârlea, without further explanation.
But he erupted that evening, among us, when I reproached him for performing experiments ‘pour épater les bourgeois’.
‘You turned down 1,200 lei in exchange for the chance to astound a ministry of 600 people. That’s 2 lei per person. Never has a reputation been bought so cheaply.’