‘No, no, believe me, it’s all useless. And, anyway, my sense of this futility is also my only consolation.’
Again he was silent, for a long time, thinking. I couldn’t tell if he had been able to follow all I had said or had absently continued his own line of thought. Then he addressed me, with a certain weariness.
‘You dispirit me. I don’t know why, but I have the impression that every door you close opens ten more. Certainly, I’d find it difficult to reply to you. We would move still further from the heart of the matter. The heart of the drama, if you like, if that pleases you. You’re far too passionately Jewish and I’m far too self-restrainedly Romanian for us to agree. In argument, of course, as elsewhere in life, permit me to be less sombre than you are and to say that with Jews like you peace will always be possible. Even more than peace: love.’
‘“With Jews like you …” I’ve heard this expression before. “If only all Jews were like you …” It’s a familiar old way of being friendly. And so humiliating. I’m tired of it, believe me.’
‘Tired and intolerant. You don’t let me finish, you don’t let me explain myself. You’ll admit you’re a difficult person to converse with. I firmly believe that your “metaphysical” despair introduces too much complexity into what is a difficult practical problem, but one to which a solution exists. The fact that I believe this is the beginning of the solution. It remains for you to believe it too — all of you — and the job is done.’
‘You have a naive spirit.’
‘Yours is tragic.’
We both lit our cigarettes. We tried to talk, but it didn’t work — and it was late when we separated, a little embarrassed, with a truly warm handshake.
4
Ştefan D. Pârlea’s conference at the Foundation on the values of gold and the values of blood. An enormous crowd, on the balconies, on the stairs, on the steps to the stage. Pârlea had to struggle to the lectern. He was pale and resolute, as though bearing the burden of the masses, though at moments his gestures assumed such violence and directness that he seemed to hold everybody’s breath suspended in expectation with his upraised arm.
I don’t know what he said. I tried several times to shake free from drowning in the sea of people beneath his waves of words, some whispered, some shouted. I looked for a single island amid the shipwreck, to stem for a moment the insistent thundering flow of questions, to retain a thought, a judgement, a direction. It all seemed overwhelming, urgent, unstoppable, like an earthquake. I could no longer recognize the person who was speaking. He was glimpsed from afar, an unsettling apparition from a dream, something out of a legend.
I was brought back to the moment by the cheering and shouting and the thunder of applause. A familiar song arose from the galleries:
The foreigners and the Yids
All suck us dry, always suck us dry.
Obviously.
*
A moment of crisis, a moment of crisis … A world that’s dying, a world being born … History split into two parts … a dead epoch … a living epoch …
Don’t be afraid, dear old gentlemen. You have nothing to lose. Neither what you’ve been believing, nor your head, nor your money, nor your little certainties, nor your little doubts. Everything will remain in place, everything will stay as it was. As it happens, there is a cry that arises again on time to calm the fever of indignation and to take the sting out of great revolutions. There is another death, which can be demanded more easily than your own precious death. There is a race of people ready to pay up on time for you. To pay for the overfed, for the starved, for the white, for the red, for the thin, for the fat. Haven’t you always said they’re a race of bankers? So, let them pay.
*
No, no, no, a thousand times no. I mustn’t reproduce my 1923 notebook all over again. If I don’t immediately choke my taste for martyrdom, I’m lost.
I know: it’s incomparably easier to accumulate disappointments and to live on their embers, to immerse myself in stagnant pools and the warm waters of sadness, and to believe in the pride of that sadness — it’s much easier than remaining on guard, and being comprehending of others and harsh with myself. I will keep watch, even if I am keeping watch over my final hour.
(‘Keeping watch over my final hour’ is still too rhetorical. Almost a slogan. My dear friend, there are enough sloganeers. If you can’t manage to speak, keep quiet.)
*
I asked Pârlea:
‘Aren’t you afraid it’s going to end again with cracked skulls and broken windows? Don’t you ask yourself if it’s going to end up with an anti-Semitic disturbance, and go no further? Don’t you think calling this thing of yours a “revolution” is just using a new word for an ancient wretchedness?’
He frowned, and answered:
‘There’s a drought, and I await the rain. And you stand there and tell me: “A hard rain is what we need. But what if it comes with hail? If it comes with a storm? If it ruins what I’ve sowed?” Well, I’ll tell you: I don’t know how the rain will fall. I just want it to come. That’s all. With hail, storm, lightning, as long as it comes. One or two will survive the deluge. Nobody will survive drought. If the revolution demands a pogrom, then give it a pogrom. It’s not for me, or you, or him. It’s for everybody. Whose time is up and whose isn’t, I don’t care, even if I myself die. I only care about one thing: that there’s a drought and rain is needed. Apart from that, I want nothing, expect nothing, wonder about nothing.’
I could reply. I could tell him that a metaphor is inadequate in the face of a bloodbath. That a Platonic inclination for dying doesn’t balance out the serious decision to kill. That through the ages there has never been a great historical infamy committed for which there couldn’t be found a symbol just as big, to justify it. That, in consequence, we would do well to pay attention to great certainties, to great invocations, to the great ‘droughts’ and ‘rains’. That the temper of our most violent outbursts might benefit from a shade less enthusiasm.
I could reply. But what good would it do? I have a simple, resigned, inexplicable sensation that everything that is happening is in the normal order of things and that I am awaiting a season that will come and pass — because it has come and passed before.
*
‘Your presence is harmful,’ Pârlea tells me. ‘You’re too lucid. We need a generation of men who have had enough of always being intelligent. A small band of men capable of throwing caution to the wind.’
Pârlea isn’t joking. Like any missionary, he can’t stand those who wait and watch. Several times he’s hit me with: ‘Answer, man, black or white? Yes or no?’ The intolerance of the inspired is dreadful. I used to believe it was a Jewish defect, but I was wrong: the defect arises from fervour. S.T. Haim, at one time, criticized me for exactly the same thing as Ştefan Pârlea today: a deliberate lack of enthusiasm. Were I to tell him I have my own demons, he wouldn’t believe me. The only difference between us is that he lets his excite his fever while I keep watch over mine.