‘You’re fools. What did you want me to do? To receive an extra 1,000 lei today, another 1,000 next year? To be sub-archivist today, next year head archivist, main archivist, general archivist? Is that why I escaped from where I escaped from? Don’t you see that any job you accept from this state implies complicity? That every success in this culture is a betrayal? I want to demolish. I want to burn down. And to do this I have to keep my hands free. I don’t want to have anything to cling to, anything to lose, anything to protect. Nothing to hold me back on the day everything gets fed to the grinder. You accept a lectureship with the idea of working, and one day find that the 15,000 lei they give you are indispensable, that along with them you’ve created needs, imposed obligations on yourself. The habits you acquire end up choking you, paralysing you. You become prudent, cowardly, grow old. The great perfidy of the order we live in is that it makes us its unconscious servants. And it buys us cheaply, by stealth. You know, I look at you and it scares me. Scares me. You’ve all got your own little affairs, your own little things going on, your own little arrangements. Your wasted years disgust me. I wish you’d get pot bellies faster, that your hair would hurry up and fall out, once and for all. The great conflagration is coming without you, it doesn’t need you, it doesn’t burn in your hearts …’
What I find interesting about Pârlea’s problem is that its origin lies in the movement of 1923. What remains from those years is not only the bloodied heads, the careers that were made and a steady engagement with anti-Semitism, but also a revolutionary spirit, a seed of a sincere rebellion against the world in which we live. This seed of revolution couldn’t be seen from our unfortunate dormitory in Văcăreşti, but my unhappy memories are perhaps not the only testimony capable of shedding light on those years. Certainly no one is going to blame me for this, as you can’t expect exercises in moral objectivity or a dissertation on higher reasoning from someone who gets beaten perhaps twice a week, on average. Being persecuted is not just a physical trial. It is one that affects you intellectually. The reality of it slowly deforms you and attacks, above all, your sense of proportion. Now is not the moment to reproach myself for being slow to understand my assailants. That would be a belated and grotesque excess of objectivity. But I’m glad that times have changed in such a way that I can meditate in peace on the justifications for the beatings. The role of martyr has never sat entirely well with me, though I recognize in myself enough of a tendency towards this peculiarly Jewish occupation.
Pârlea represents the opposing side. For a long time I could see and understand nothing of it, owing to the endless coils of barbed wire strewn between us. It’s so comfortable and consoling to regard your adversaries as bad and stupid, to the point that, in my lamentable desperation back then, it was the sole crutch available, the last remaining bit of pride. That was a long time ago. More than the relatively few years that have passed. The clouded waters have cleared where the trouble was superficial and become yet more stirred up where the trouble ran deep. People have made their choices, opinions have hardened, foolishness has found the company of foolishness, truths have become more marked. Everything is more ordered. Perhaps the time has come to write the history of the anti-Semitic movement. By which I mean ‘the human comedy’ of people and what they thought rather than the dry facts of actual history, which I am familiar with and which have nothing new to tell. I’m convinced that once I excluded the imbeciles, the professional troublemakers, the agitators, the scattering of layabouts and dimwits, and after identifying in turn brutality, stupidity and scheming, there would still be something that would be a real drama. And that’s when Ştefan D. Pârlea would appear.
6
Ghiţă Blidaru’s course has become something of an ‘official matter’. Last Saturday a deputy from the biggest party asked the government at question time if it was going to tolerate the university becoming a centre of political unrest.
‘The authority of the state must not be disturbed, Minister, from behind the mask of general theories.’ (The evening papers reproduced this phrase as a headline.)
In fact, nothing serious happened. There were just some lectures about the liberal economic legislation of 1924. Very calm lectures in style, very violent in their stances and conclusions. Starting with the mining law of Vintilă Brătianu, Blidaru has analysed Romanian liberalism. The party is alarmed, the government bored. Vintilă Brătianu must have made a fuss at the last council. ‘He must desist, gentlemen. He must desist.’
Blidaru did not desist at all. For next week he has announced an inquiry into the stabilization plan and credit mechanism that’s being prepared. What’s peculiar about this whole struggle is that while the newspapers are censored and all opposition excluded, an economics professor can openly attack anything he wants and there’s no way to stop him.
Professor Ghiţă’s situation is excellent. He teaches his course, follows his schedule, and nothing else. However, his lectures have become the last refuge for anti-liberalism. The whole public crowds in. Blidaru, unaffected, converses with his students. He has been discreetly offered several foreign posts: the presidency of an economic delegation in Paris or, should he wish, a small delegation in a neighbouring state. He’s refused them all. ‘We’ll see, later, in the summer break. For now, I have my lectures to finish.’
I have trouble understanding his passion for politics. He has no personal ambition to satisfy, no fights to win. He’s certainly no warrior. He is an idler of genius. Rather than marching forward to meet life, he sits still and lets it come to him.
If I’ve learned anything from Ghiţă Blidaru, it is exactly this lack of aggression in dealing with life. His laziness is that of a plant, of a tree. Life grows and decays, storms come and go, death waits somewhere, in the shadows — all harmonious. I believe nothing will ever surprise Blidaru or shake his composure. Not because he is sure of himself, but because he is sure of the earth he walks upon and the sky he finds himself beneath.
‘Worries? Where do you find worries in this world full of certainties? Shouldn’t the simple fact that the sun rises and sets be enough to reassure us?’
If he had been a carpenter, a stonemason, a boatman on the Danube, a ploughman in Vâlcea, his thinking would be no different to what it is today. He is the only man I know whom I feel that fate can do nothing to harm, because he accepts fate, submitting happily to whatever it brings.
With his formidable laziness, his deliberate lack of initiative (‘I have nothing to do with life, life has everything to do with me’), Blidaru is ready to waste every big opportunity, to miss every decisive rendezvous which good or bad fortune arranges. He will always find a book to open in the final hour, a woman to love. For him, nothing is urgent. He has told me so countless times. Every joy has its season, and every pain. Let’s await the passing of the seasons. It’s useless to hurry, because you can’t arrive too soon for winter, which comes to meet you. There is an autumn for every hope, a springtime for each despair. In this race you can never come too early or late: you always come on time, whether you wish to or not.
*
I don’t know how many persistent pains, hidden deaths or unanswered questions Ghiţă Blidaru faces with equanimity. But I can guess. He has made countless renunciations in the fields of intelligence, pride, victory and excitement. Each one of us is barricaded within himself, and most of us seek to strengthen our barricades, to make our inner defences impermeable, while he cooperates with life to knock them down, surrendering before the fight, already beaten. Beaten? No. At most, he has conquered his own self.