I’m unable to accept this ordinariness and every detail of our evening comes back to me, as though each one might contain a clue. His grey suit, his blue tie with white dots, the Chesterfields he’d bought on the way from the tobacconist’s beside Châtelet …
*
No reply from Pârlea, none from Marin either. On the other hand, a grocery-store envelope, with the address hurriedly scrawled. I open it: it’s from S.T.H.
You’ll remember the hour of crisis we spoke of once. It has arrived.
He has an extraordinary memory. I had forgotten.
PART FIVE
1
At the upper end of Şerban Vodă, where the houses begin to thin out, a motor car provokes something of a stir, as in a provincial town. You see the faces of the curious at the windows, doors opening as we pass, children trooping after us.
‘Are you going to the crematorium?’ a woman leaning in a doorway asked the driver. ‘Go to hell,’ he replied, furious at the potholes we’d just landed in.
To our left was a sad, dirty wasteland, with broken crates, rags, tin cans and smouldering heaps of rubbish. A tree that had shed half its leaves, a sheepdog with nothing to do and, in places, tufts of grass that had endured until early November.
… Perhaps my visit is a mistake. What can I say to him? What can he say to me? Nothing makes me feel more powerless than a solemn situation, since ordinary phrases seem insufficient and I find serious declarations embarrassing. For three days, since obtaining a visitor’s pass, I can think of nothing but the moment of farewell.
I’ve imagined every gesture dozens of times, and each time it strikes me as either excessive or inadequate. I’m even uneasy about the tin of cigarettes I’m bringing him: I don’t know how to give it to him. I’d like to manage the casual gesture with which you ask someone to help themselves by proffering a cigarette. I’d like to shake his hand simply, as I would in the street, to make it seem nothing has changed, that our meeting here is nothing out of the ordinary, that his presence here in jail isn’t a catastrophe …
‘Stop!’
The driver braked hard, jolting us yet again.
‘We’ve arrived,’ he tells me and points to an imaginary line ahead, past which you could only see the points of three bayonets.
‘Jilava Prison?’
‘Yes. It’s underground.’
The ringing of the bell, the repeated shouts of the sentries (‘Changing of the guard!’ … ‘Changing of the guard!’ …), the document checks, the suspicious looks from the officer on duty, are all simple, bearable. The only dark and oppressive thing, my old friend S.T. Haim, is this small wooden door at the end of a stone alley, this threshold I will, within minutes — seconds — cross. From here on I am powerless to avert my gaze. From beyond, strange, distant footsteps can be heard, as if from another world. There, the door is opening. I have to come up with a smile. At all costs, I must find it in me to smile.
Blessed S.T.H.! He appeared in the doorway as stormily as ever, blond, agitated, impatient, his whole face illuminated. He stopped there for a moment to seek me out from twenty metres, from the other side of the bars. How many steps does he take to reach me? One, I think.
He talks quickly, hastily, with animation, with eyes and hands, with the lock of hair that always flops over his forehead, with his whole being, as though under fierce internal pressure, exulting now with the joy of release.
‘If you could know how great it is here! People, the first people I’ve met. Centuries of prison are behind the door, no? Thousands of years. And it’s still not enough, because these people can take it without complaint. I would’ve been ashamed to feel sorry for myself, for my twelve-year sentence. If it weren’t for the lawyers and Mother, I wouldn’t even have appealed. Because this is where I’ll end up in any case. For us in here, there’s no review board, no appeal. I don’t delude myself with that nonsense. But the biggest appeal of all is coming — and coming soon, you might as well know. I don’t know what it’ll be like on Calea Victoriei, but here in the cells there’s a great smell of revolution. Don’t laugh. I can feel it. It’s a definite, physical feeling. There’s not a night I don’t fall asleep thinking that in the morning we could find the doors swinging open. We could be out before the first snowfall.’
His absurd confidence astounds me. No, I’m not going to grab his shoulder and shake him awake. What good would that do? It’s better if he believes and waits, even if he’s only waiting for a pathetic shadow, a chimera he has taken with him on his journey into a land guarded by machine-guns and rifles.
Farewell, S.T.H. Ten minutes have passed, and Jilava’s clock is more exact than the clock of history. Jilava measures minutes and seconds, you count out decades and centuries.
*
I dropped into the Central, where I was sure to find Ştefan Pârlea. He doesn’t move from here from dawn until after midnight. He has a table at the back, on the right, beside the bar, which everyone recognizes as his domain. It’s been a long time since he’s been at the ministry. He resigned in order to be free. Free to do what? I don’t know. Free for ‘the new dawn’. I’d have liked to tell him that his new nihilist hangout — unkempt and tatty — is ridiculous. But I was afraid he might explode with his old cry: ‘Shut up! You’re an aesthete!’
I’d gladly avoid him, but he’s the only person who can really tell me what’s going on with S.T.H., why he was arrested, why he was convicted and what his prospects are. His file contains a German police report, which identified him in Berlin three months before his arrest, speaking at a neighbourhood communist meeting. There’s also the evidence of a senior functionary, who heard him speaking loudly on the Orient Express about ‘important secrets about arms’. In addition, depositions, allusions, presuppositions. The whole thing is flimsy and insubstantial. What’s true, though, is that it concerns S.T. Haim, an eager revolutionary any day of the week. It would have been no surprise had he been caught with nitro-glycerine in the pocket of his waistcoat. The man is as capable of carrying a bomb as an umbrella and of calmly depositing it at a cloakroom: ‘Please, put this bomb under my number; though mind it doesn’t go off.’
Pârlea finds my questions irritating.
‘Why did they arrest him? Why did they convict him? Blather and nonsense. They arrested him because they had to. Him yesterday, me today, tomorrow everybody. That’s the only way you can have a revolution: with everyone sent to jail. Is he guilty? Innocent? He gets five years? Fifty-five years? His problem. For us, there’s only one question: is the state at the point of collapse or is it not?’
‘I hadn’t taken you for a communist.’
‘And I’m not one. What does that mean? Communist, reactionary, left, right … Superstitions, man, half-baked ideas. There’s only an old world and a new one. That’s all. A world that’s at breaking point and one that’s being born. Am I supposed to sit here lamenting S.T. Haim? I’ve no time. Full stop. We’re all stumbling through the night, pell-mell, some falling, others not, each to his fate. When morning comes, we’ll see who’s still standing.’