I don’t know why I haven’t written in here for so long. Weary of scrutinizing myself… But tonight I’m happy I’ve stayed in and read a book (Esquisse d’un traité du roman, Léon Bopp); I’m going to proofread City of Acacia Trees[i]. I’ve been overdoing it a bit lately with these sleepless nights.

          Last night, after the Opera – the opening of the season – we went to ‘Zissu’s’. Maryse was wearing an exquisite white dress (beautiful like that of a film star), Gheorghe[ii] a tailcoat, Marietta Sadova an evening dress too, and I a dinner jacket. Not many people, excellent atmosphere, whisky, cocktails, cigarettes. Danced a lot. Maryse – touchingly delicate, tender, saying things that take me aback by their sincerity and lack of hesitation. ‘You have no idea how much I love you.’ And I’m stupid enough to feel flattered.

Yesterday morning, at ‘Alcalay’s,’ a guy sprang towards me, hand stretched out, cordial, smiling, voluble.

          ‘Are you angry with me?’

          ‘Angry?’ I stretched out my hand too, without knowing to whom, as I hadn’t recognized him. Realizing that, Ocneanu introduced us to each other:

          ‘Mr. Niculae Roşu.’[iii]

          I was petrified by so much lack of tact. ‘I don’t bear grudges,’ he told me several times.

          I relished addressing him in the second person plural throughout the conversation.

          ‘You see, sir, angry I am not, but I must tell you one thing: your ill will is enormous.’

          He turned pale, and started mumbling something. Ocneanu was wringing his hands, trying to make peace between us – but I kept my nerve and went on speaking with exaggerated politeness. Which was the only way I could conceal my disgust.

          The guy was full of commonplaces. He went on and on about Jews, who are intelligent, who are cultivated, who are this, who are that. He has great respect for Jews. He has great respect for me. He reads me. Always has. My education, my style, my talent, and so and so forth.

          I let him speak and took great delight in watching him drown in that sea of platitudes, retractions, and compliments.

          But I got it eventually: poor chap had a book coming out and – he told me straight in the face – he wouldn’t want it to be welcomed with a series of Pandrea-like articles.

          ‘I’ll send you the book,’ he assured me on parting.

          What a man! I don’t remember ever meeting anyone with more abject a character. But let’s not get angry! I’m getting pathetic.

I’ve given up following the stages of my love affair (?) with Leni. So many contradictions, returns, blunders, broken projects.[iv] I saw her yesterday – and the mere fact made me happy. But it’ll go away, it’ll go away.

Monday, October 28 [1935]

1 a.m.

          Piatigorski Concert. Frescobaldi, Toccata. Boccherini, A-major Sonata. Bach, C-major Suite (solo cello – I may have heard it before, in Leipzig, last winter). Weber-Piatigorski, Sonatina in A, Schubert, Arpegionne sonata. Skriabin, Poems. Glazunov, Espagnole Serenade. Ravel, Habanera. De Falla, Terror Dance.

Thursday, October 31 [1935]

Bach: Passacaglia in C minor.

Mozart: Concert for piano and orchestra in C major. Soloist – Wilhelm Kempff.

Brahms: Symphony No 1.

Last night, from Vienna, Symphonies no 4 and 5 by Beethoven, Weingartner.

The night before last, from Juan les Pins, fragments from Ma mère l’Oye by Ravel, and the ending of the Separation Symphony by Haydn.

          Long lunch today, at the French Institute.

Sunday, November 3 [1935]

Kempff and the Philharmonic at the Athenaeum this morning – three concerts for piano and orchestra, in C minor (op. 37), G major (op. 58), and E flat major (op. 73), Beethoven.

          Moments of overwhelming emotion, such as I had never experienced with music. And some kind of nervous tension, some kind of continuous vibration that runs through my day.

          I’d have liked to have had Lilly by me. A bit further down, in a box, Jeni.

Monday, 4 [November 1935]

Exquisite radio evening. A short concert for cello and clavichord, from Zurich. Also a sonata by a classic whose name I didn’t get right (Andrea something), Variations by Händel-Goldschlager (for clavichord only), an Adagio by Tartini, and a Rondo by Boccherini.

          From Warsaw, a trio for oboe, bassoon, and piano by Poulenc. Wonderful in terms of humor and invention (presto, andante, rondo).

          Still from Warsaw, but later, a sonata for orchestra by Corelli, Concert for piano and orchestra in C major by Beethoven (very Mozart-like – I still have one to go before I know the five of them) – and finally, The Classic Symphony by Prokofiev.

          Amusing visit to Dorina Blank, who’s bluntly offering herself to me. Moving letter from Şuluţiu[v]. I’d never have guessed there was such a fervent ‘admirer’ in him.

Friday 8 [November 1935]

Last night, at the Philharmonic, Mozart: Symphony in E flat (horribly played), Haydn: Concert for cello and orchestra in D major (Cassado), Tchaikovski: Variations on a rococo theme, for cello and orchestra, Stravinsky: The Firebird.

In the evening.

          What more could I reproach Lena after our conversation today? She was kind, tender, nice, with no fake guile, just a tiny bit of coquetry, with some enthusiasm and, most importantly, with no hypocrisy. Should I call her, she would come. She couldn’t really tell me it was difficult for her to see me at her place because of Froda. But she hinted at that pretty clearly. (And there was no need for it either, since while I was there he phoned and the servant mumbled something on the phone saying that ‘Miss was reading’ – at which lie Leni was embarrassed.)

          We walked for about half an hour and I talked loads of nonsense. She however came up with something admirable, which I’m trying to remember: ‘It’s true I’m whimsical, coquettish, and frivolous. But I’ve never done anything out of whim, coquetry, or frivolity only.’ I’m really sorry I can’t remember her exact words. Her phrasing was much better.

          So here I am, a step away from ‘happiness’. Are you pleased?

Friday, 15 [November 1935]

Just back from Galaţi where I last night spoke at the ‘Freedom’ literary circle.

          I don’t think it’s showing off, but I do enjoy being able to connect with a roomful of people for an hour – especially when speaking about things that are unfamiliar and indifferent to them. As I was talking I got amused by various things that occurred to me on the spot and I let myself carried away by the rhythm of my own speech.

Wednesday, 27 [November, 1935]

So many things I should have put down! But I don’t think I’ve ever before been drowned like this in things I have to do (things I don’t even finish: I just get agitated, mess them up, postpone them…).

          I should mention, even dwell on, Nae’s opening lecture. This year he’s going to deliver a series of lectures on ‘political logic’. For now, the introduction’s been just a brief profession of faith in the Guard. He flattered his students with an electoral insistence. He praised the ‘political generations’ and defended them against ‘the scholarly generations’ which, he said, had a huge fault: they were scholarly. Politics means action, life, reality, direct contact with existence. The book is abstract. So what you’re doing is right, truth is on your side, hurray, hurray, hurray!

          At the end (Ghiţă[vi] was also there, deep in a shattering silence, so were Mircea and Vasile Băncilă), I reminded him of his article of May 1928, ‘What the Youth Think,’ in which, conversing with Petrovici, he said that the meaning of the young generation should not be sought in the streets, which are full of agitators and breakers of windows, but in libraries, where the representative values are.

          ‘Yes,’ he said imperturbably, ‘that’s how things were then. The situation is different now. That was a spiritual moment – this is a political one.’

          Poor Nae! How fast he’s going down…

          To stick to politics, I should also mention the brief, tense conversation I had with Mircea at the ‘Continental’ on Monday evening, after coming out from the theatre. It’s not the first time either. And I can see he’s increasingly sliding towards the right. When it’s just the two of us, we still get on pretty well. In public though, his rightist position becomes extreme and categorical. With some amount of aggressiveness, he told me a pure enormity: ‘all the great creators are rightist’. Just like that.

          But I won’t let such differences cast the tiniest shadow on my love for him. I’ll try to avoid having ‘political controversies’ with him in the future.

          Let me also put down the Credinţa trial, where my pleadings were most effective[vii]. I could tell it not only by the attention of the court, by my supporters’ congratulations and by my adversaries’ irritation. But I could also tell it from the silence that had fallen and by that nervous flux that had suddenly lifted the debates above the previous jokes and harassment.

          Needless to say that the defenders of the Credinţa had not overlooked informing the Court that I was a Jew. Medrea promised to beat me. I told Marysia, and only half-jokingly, that I was looking forward to the day when Vulcănescu, Gabriel, Titel and Tell would make peace with Sandu Tudor, Stancu and Medrea on discovering that the yids were solely responsible for the fight, especially me, who had bred dissension among the Christian brothers. It may seem a joke, but it is in fact highly plausible.

          Other than that, nothing. I’m gradually turning into an animal and it seems I’ve given up waiting for any kind of salvation.

December 17, Tuesday [1935]

2.30 a.m.

          I’m dead tired, and in the morning I have to be at my desk at 8 at the latest, but I can’t help putting down right now the amazing confession Maryse made to me. I’m doing my best to transcribe faithfully:

          ‘You have no idea how much I’ve suffered because of you. I wanted so much to go to bed with you. I was obsessed with you. For a week it was a real torture – physical even, you know. Do you remember that time when I came to meet you at Rampa and we drove on together? That day I was determined to speak to you openly, as I could see you did not, or would not, understand otherwise. I’d even decided I’d take upon myself the most embarrassing details. Finding a room where to meet, bringing you there, preparing you, anyway, everything… But right on that day you had a… toothache. Had it not been for that, I would have most certainly been yours. I’d have had no hesitation in speaking to you about it – and you couldn’t have refused. No man could.

          At the very beginning – do you remember, after the first time we’d been at ‘Zissu’s’ – I was thinking of going to your place one day, getting undressed, and lying on the bed waiting for you. You’d have found me there and you’d have had no choice. But before I could do anything you gave me a copy of Women and I saw I’d have only repeated an episode from the past. I got sick of me and gave up, as you’d have thought I was copying your heroine.

          Then, at ‘Corso,’ when we had lunch together. I’d come to tell you everything and ask for everything, and you asked me if you could finish an article. I never hesitated but you just wouldn’t get it.

          I’m telling you this now because I seem to have got over it. It’s no longer a thing of the present. I wanted it too much to take any pleasure in it now. I was crazy, I’m telling you. With Gheorghe, with his mother, I could only speak about you. Oh, how I suffered!…

          What? You think I wouldn’t have cheated on Gheorghe? You think I don’t anyway? Oh yes, I do, with various people, not very often, but when I really like somebody – what do you expect me to do? I think it would be stupid to deny myself that. I love him, but this is nothing to do with it. And only once, in Constanţa, when I was left alone for three days with a guy that was courting me and whom I really liked actually, did I resist – don’t even know why, either stubbornness or stupidity – something I’m anyway sorry for to this day.’

[Monday] December 30 [1935]

Sceaux

          I’m in Paris and still incapable of realizing it. I think I’ll wake up in ten days’ time when I’ve left it.

          There’s something unreal about this return that annihilates five years of life as if they’d never existed. On Saturday evening I dined at Fanny Bonnard’s in Yerres. I found her totally unchanged and the mere thought of five years separating us seemed to me absurd. Strange feeling of being old.

          I walked one morning through the Rue de la Clef neighborhood. Nothing’s changed, nothing – not even I who, out of all the five years of separation, only carry with me what the 22-23 year old knew and lived in 1930. I went up Rue Soufflot, saw again the Sainte Geneviève library, went on to Rue Clovis, Rue Mouffetard, Rue Monge, Rue de la Clef, Rue Lacepiède and entered Jardin des Plantes, where I stopped for some time under the big cedar. To be honest, I can’t quite realize that time’s passed.

          But I’m not going to write in this notebook that I’ve taken with me for nothing.

          Maybe I’ll catch up with things when back in Bucharest.

          And now, because I didn’t do it at the right time, I don’t really feel like summing up the latest events in my love affair with Leni. We love each other – we said that to each other and separated in a friendly manner, kissing. I wonder what’s going to become of me in Bucharest. I’ve got a special talent for complicating terribly this miserable life.

[…]

Friday, 11 [February 1938]

The Goga government fell last night! Reflex, sudden, exuberant reaction, like an irrepressible nervous relief. I kept telling myself – still do after a night of agitated sleep – that things are most unclear, that they can remain equally serious, at least for us, that the anti-Semitic repression may well go on – and yet I can’t help being ecstatic about it. It’s so comforting to see how this huge imposture is suddenly deflating.

          But what really gave last night a dramatic touch, of anxious joy, joyful anxiety, excitement, optimistic agitation, was the news, or the rumors rather, from Germany.

          Riots, street fights in Berlin, three army corps in open confrontation with the assault troops, etc. It was unbelievable but uplifting. My old skepticism was trying to reject the news, but my thirst for happiness – however momentary, however deceiving – wanted to believe, was beginning to believe.

          Until 2 a.m. by myself in the street, around the Palace, lost in the crowd, clinging to various people – Carandino[viii], Camil, Ghiţă Ionescu – asking, passing on information, convinced when coming across a skeptic, skeptical when coming across somebody convinced. I just couldn’t bring myself to go home – I’d have kept wandering all night. And the atmosphere in the street was indeed feverish, stimulating, full of expectation, doubt, supposition.

          Now, several hours later, after reading the papers (uncertain about Germany, where the situation is muddled, but not acute, or at least not immediately and imminently acute), I’m calmer and less suspicious. I feel like after a night of partying.

Saturday, 12 [February 1938]

The night before last (the night of the crisis), Camil saw me in the Palace Square where I was waiting for news. He seemed taken aback by what was going on, and I enjoyed being voluble with a Camil ‘reduced to silence’.

          ‘You should see how the Jews have invaded the “Corso”. The whole café’s full of them. It’s a real “take over”.’

          ‘You’re so anti-Semitic, Camil! Come with me and I’ll show how wrong you are, or how wrong you just can’t help being.’

          I took him by the arm, entered the ‘Corso,’ went round the whole place, stopping at every table, and counting all the suspicious faces. We may have, all in all, counted about 15 Jews in an overcrowded, agitated café, full of passionate groups.

          Camil kept smiling, and took it all back when faced with such evidence.

          This morning, Perpessicius, whom I met at the Foundation, talked to me about Cuvântul, where life in the editorial staff seemed unchanged from what it used to be once. The same old fights with the administration, the same ironic hostility with Devechi, the same old petty squabbles, which did nevertheless make up some kind of family atmosphere.

          Besides, an avalanche of legionaries. The comeback party was held at the legionary restaurant.

Monday, 21 [February 1938]

Three days in Predeal, from Monday morning until last night, at villa Robinson.

          I’d left Bucharest to get away from tiredness, exasperation, and disgust. So many troubles, small and great, which I found increasingly unbearable!

          I’m coming back recovered. Partly at least – despite the terrible insomnia and then nightmarish Saturday night. (I find it so difficult to get used to a place I don’t know!)

          Snow relaxes me, makes me younger, helps me forget. The Veştea slope is the steepest I’ve been on in my short skiing career. I fell numberless times. But also learned some things, I think. This morning for instance I finally managed to go all the way down without falling, reaching that small spot of ice that marks the end of the track right where the wood begins.

          Three days of skiing – and I’m coming back with my nerves calmed down and in their right place. But this Bucharest, this life I live…

Monday, 28 [February 1938]

Another two days – Saturday and Sunday – in Predeal. An impression of sunshine, of loads of light, of much childishness – something very similar to happiness. Nothing left of my usual bitterness, my stupid questions, my meaningless regrets, nothing of this life made of patches, broken promises, endless waiting, vague dissatisfaction, small tired hopes.

          Everything becomes simple again when I’m there. Only one day in Balcic – naked in the sun – can have the same intensity.

          Yesterday morning, sitting in the bright sun, I no longer had any bad thoughts, melancholia, or expectations. I was simply happy.

          I was wearing only a shirt – and I’d have taken that off too: a day meant to be spent in deckchairs, with only a vest on. And I’m coming back with a tanned face, like in my good old days.

          As for skiing, I’m making remarkable progress. This time I went without falling down slopes that no longer than last week were making me nervous. I’ve learnt a kind of christie that is really easy and gives me when I’m out there an unexpected feeling of skillfulness. It’s also true that the moment I leave the training track and ‘venture’ on an unknown one, all my practice proves to be totally useless. Yesterday afternoon I kept falling on the way from Veştea to Timiş, where I went with Devechi, Lupu, and two other persons from their entourage. Useful experience though, at least as a test of endurance.

          On Saturday I skied with Virgil Madgearu. Skiing turns everybody into a child again: including a former minister.

          But, needless to say, one has to get serious again when back home. I’ve got some things waiting for me to solve. I’m thinking of taking up writing The Romanian Novel again. As Roman is leaving for London and as we’re still not allowed in court, I’ll try, from now on, to work at the Academy in the morning.

Monday, March 14 [1938]

Emil Gulian, whom I met after a very long time, is the same confused boy, full of personal questions (love affairs, spleen, scruples, expectations), indifferent to all political events, poisoned by poetry… The Goga-Cuza ‘period’ depressed him. He says he was ashamed – and I believe him.

          Met Sân-Giorgiu the other day, at the Foundation. Unrecognizable. He no longer wears the swastika. Speaks about the mistakes of their government.

          ‘But after all, my dear, this is no better either…’

          He’s friendly, talkative. He tells me about his success in the German theatres.

          ‘Ibsen himself did not have this kind of triumph: not one negative review!’

          Skiing was indeed an admirable diversion. I haven’t been to Predeal for the past two Sundays – don’t think there’s any snow left anyway – and it shows. I’m not at all happy with the life I have. I read in fits and starts, don’t write anything, don’t do any work, waste my time at Roman’s and the Foundation, and am left of all this with a feeling of agitation and disintegration. I’d like to work – yet don’t have the courage to start. It would imply an effort of organization and discipline.

          Will I go to Paris for Easter? Will I go to Balcic? Will I ever get to write The Accident? Will I ever get to write the book about the novel?

          I live provisionally, from day to day. I don’t have any money, my clothes are going to pieces, and I don’t wait for anything really, only for the night to come, the morning to come, Thursday to come, Sunday to come. And why all this? and for how long?

Wednesday, 16 [March 1938]

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Forever tired. Totally incapable of bearing a few hours’ work. Needed several days for the latest review written for the Foundation, and kept crossing out, reading out loud, losing track, going too much into detail, and being too sparse with the main ideas. I see badly, think even worse. Read in fits and starts – for no longer than a quarter of an hour. A few pages from Saint-Simon last night, a few from Carlo Gamba’s Botticelli today, which I’ll never get to finish. I have difficulty even in writing these lines. The letter keep jumping in front of my eyes.

          I wasted yesterday scribbling a poor review of a play for Viaţa românească. The one I promised on Camil’s book scares me.

          All this is very serious. I’m thinking of my novel, of my critical works – and am wondering if I’ll ever get to finish them, how I’ll at least begin them, with these tired eyes and my concentration shattered.

          If I had money, I’d see again an ophthalmologist.

Thursday, 17 [March 1938]

Headline in Cuvântul of today:

          ‘The pseudo-scientist Freud arrested by the National Socialists in Vienna’.

Friday, 25 [March 1938]

Spring, unbearable spring… I’ve lived the whole week with the hope that I’ll be going to Balcic today. It’s a holiday. The Annunciation – skipping tomorrow and coming back to Bucharest on Tuesday I’d have easily had a five day holiday, of which four full days in Balcic.

          I can see myself in Paruşeff’s yard, lying on a deckchair, alone, the sea in front of me, I can see myself in a track suit in a deserted Balcic, lingering on at Mamut’s, on the pier, in a boat… Everything would have been forgotten, everything healed. I’ve got so much to forget, so much to heal.

          But out of laziness, hesitation, stupidity, I’ve stayed to crawl on in this spring Bucharest, where there’s no one out there for me, where I’m neither alone nor not alone, and where the hours, the days go by tiring and empty.

          What should I expect, what should I wish for? Maybe an effort of will, maybe a cold, dogged determination to work, not so much for the pleasure of working as to get rid of this feeling of uselessness.

Tuesday, 29 [March 1938]

Cella’s book’s out[ix], with the following on the wraparound cover band: ‘The writers Liviu Rebreanu, Camil Petrescu, Mihail Sebastian have recommended this book to the publisher.’

          Epilogue: yesterday morning Mrs. Rebreanu, alarmed, rang Camil Petrescu, asking him how he could allow such rudeness: the names of Rebreanu and Sebastian together.

          I’ll one day tell Rebreanu about this small incident. Jokingly, of course.

Saturday, April 9 [1938]

Last night I accidentally switched on my radio, which I hadn’t touched for about two months since it had last broken down. Its latest whim is that it would only tune in to Budapest, irrespective of the wavelength. But last night I happened to stumble on a very beautiful Mozart concert: Concert for two pianos and orchestra, Symphony in A major. An hour of good music – and the recovered pleasure of being on my own. I’ve been out so much lately, each and every night!

          Since I haven’t been able to use the radio I’ve given up putting down my musical itineraries in here. ‘Itinerary’ is anyway too grand a word. No new piece. I already know the entire repertory of the Philharmonic where I go regularly. No wonder really, after three years. This year seems to be poorer in terms of music. Only The Goldberg Variations, played by Kempff two weeks ago were a real event for me. Tonight I’m going to listen to Backhaus, The Italian Concerto by Bach, two sonatas by Beethoven.

          About ten days ago, at Grindea’s, I listened to something by Stravinsky on record, something I’d never heard of, Histoire du soldat. Very witty, very inventive. I am actually afraid that as far as the moderns are concerned it’s ‘ingeniousness’ I’m primarily interested in.

          I met Nina last night, in tram 16. There was this lady right in front of me and I was just about to ask her if she was getting off at the next stop. She turned: and it was her. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy seeing her again. I’d have liked to kiss her.

Tuesday, 12 [April 1938]

Sunday evening, dinner at Mircea’s. Haven’t seen him for quite a long time, but he’s still unchanged. I was looking at him and listening to him with great curiosity. Gestures I’d forgotten, his nervous volubility, a thousand details thrown in at random – entirely likeable, nice, charming. I find it difficult not to be fond of him.

          But I’ve got so many things to tell him about Cuvântul, about the Guard, about him and his unforgivable compromises. There’s no excuse for his political downfall. I was going to talk to him openly, without worrying about hurting feelings. Not that there’s much to hurt anyway. In spite of such reunions, our friendship is over… I couldn’t talk to him though because of the Pencis who showed up unexpectedly right when we were finishing the meal. Don’t know when I’m going to see him again.

          Dinner party at Ralea’s last night. Second time I’ve seen him since he was appointed minister.[x] Another discussion about his leaving the National Peasant Party. His explanations don’t seem enough for me to cover a betrayal, be it out of good will or conviction.

          According to Ralea, the Guard is still terribly dangerous. The things he told me are unbelievable. Three quarters of the state apparatus, he says, is infiltrated by the Guard.

Wednesday, 13 [April 1938]

Last night, at the Athenaeum, Matthäus Passion. I know it too well by now not to be aware of how badly it is played. The absence of the organ is beginning to bother me. The choruses are deafening, the soloists insufficient, the orchestra rusty, the great overall touches confusing. Only the reading of the text that I already know so closely is no longer enough to stir in me the old emotions. I wish I could listen to a proper Matthäus Passion.

          …But even so it was nice to listen again to my old familiar arias. Besides, my listening was more analytical, more grammatical, more minute than before.

Saturday, 16 [April 1938]

There are some simple things that I have known for ever but at which I sometimes stop with the feeling that I was discovering them for the first time.

          On Tuesday, while listening to Matthäus Passion, I couldn’t get rid of the Evangelist’s words: ‘Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him, where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the passover? And he said, Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand, I will keep the passover at thy house.’

          It is the same Easter we celebrate now, like last night, the bread we eat, the wine we drink…

          I suddenly remembered Jesus was a Jew, a thing I’m never sufficiently aware of, and which forces me to contemplate again our terrible destiny.

          It was the same last autumn, in Chartres, when I’d stopped in the cathedral to look at Jesus’ Circumcision. Everything looked like a usual bris[xi]: the old man holding the knife in one hand and the child’s little penis in the other reminded me of Moişe şoihăt[xii] from Brăila.

          Last night I started reading Aurore by Nietzsche. He speaks at some point about the ‘Judaic ballast’ of Christianity.

          Terrible irony this ballast and anyway some kind of comfort for us.

Tuesday, 19 [April 1938]

Cuvântul has been suspended since Sunday.

          Why was it started in the first place? Just to come up with one or two infamies! To be able to speak about the ‘pseudo-scientist Freud’? To claim that the Jewish lawyers mutilated in Court fought among themselves?

          I wish I could one day speak to the professor about all this, not to hold him responsible, just to remind him of another Cuvântul that used to indeed fight with the ‘guard dropped’ in the old times.

          Disquiet, anxiety, questions without answers. The Iron Guard arrested, a plot discovered or ‘staged,’ a lot of rumors and complete silence from the newspapers which say absolutely nothing, letting you believe absolutely everything.

          I’d like to go to Balcic for about ten days but I’m wondering if my leaving now wouldn’t be a bit foolish. I can’t forget how terribly my Christmas holiday was interrupted by the Goga government, so unexpectedly, so unlikely, so absurd. One can’t rule out an accident of the same kind – and I wouldn’t want to be away from home when it happened.

          On Sunday – because there was all sort of rumor about the arrests of the members of the Guard – I phoned Mircea and then went to see him.

          Marietta was also there, she came a bit later actually – and they were all indignant about the arrests and suspensions which they found absurd, arbitrary, and illogical. I felt like telling them that that was what dictatorship was about, the same dictatorship they wanted – on condition it did not affect them and actually allowed them, and only them, to administer the blows.

          I stopped myself though. There was no point starting with an irony or a hint a quarrel that I would one day have to have with them anyway, openly and without any trace of sentimentalism.

Balcic, Saturday, April 30 [1938]

I’ve been here for a week now. In villa Dumitrescu again, in the same room I had last year.

          Why I haven’t written one single line in here all this time? Maybe because I’ve been haunted by the thought of the diary pages written a year ago, in exactly the same room, facing the same sea with its thousand colors, with its thousand whims – and which I was to lose several months later in Paris together with the manuscript of my novel. I can still see them, as if I’d held them in my hand just yesterday…

          So many things to put down… I’ve let them all go by at random and now that I’m about to go back home it feels like I’m leaving behind not one, but ten or fifteen weeks of laziness.

          Yesterday, spent the whole day naked, on the sea. Went to Ecrene with Cicerone, Julietta (to this day I don’t know her other name), her sister, and the major. On the beach at Ecrene I walked barefoot and naked through the wood (an incredible wood, just 50 meters away from the sea), broke a twig of a wild pear tree in bloom, broke a reed stalk, long like a spear, fought, howled, lay lazily in the sun – and went back to Balcic fairly late, burnt by the sun, with a fever in which I felt had gathered the sea air, the wind, the several hours of anarchy on the beach, this whole day of sunshine and childishness.

          I haven’t managed to find out the name of the major’s wife. For some reason, she’s called ‘Iancu’ – and I like this male name, a bit funny too, for a melancholic woman. She’s not beautiful. Quite far actually from being beautiful. But some kind of controlled tenderness, quite moving in a woman her age (35?), gives her so much femininity.

          Their marital tragedy is quite simple. An impotent husband, jealous to madness. A provincial life with no escape, monitored by the whole town.

          She came here one afternoon, cried, told me everything, she was very calm, with tears trickling down which I wiped, like off a child’s face. She kept caressing and kissing me, I refusing her advances, quite gently, but firmly. Last night, on the way back from Ecrene, she talked to me about the sudden passion she cannot help ‘unleashing’ for me.

          No, Iancu dear, no.

          Nae Ionescu was here too for Easter. Since my way to the center goes past his villa, I stopped by. (I think it was right on my first day here, that is last Saturday.)

          Unchanged, eternal Nae! Out of the blue, with no preparation and no transition whatsoever, he started telling me everything he’d said to Nicholson and which needless to say had just bowled the latter over. His inimitable touch of detached modesty! How childish he is, how much he wants to impress, and what a pleasure I take in helping him with my air of utter admiration, infinite wonder, and surprised, intrigued expectation. This childishness of his is one of the last things that makes me still be fond of him.

          To Nicholson (the Labor MP that had been to Bucharest two weeks before) he’d said that as long as he would judge Romania according to the criterion of ‘individual freedom,’ he was not going to understand any of it. That is a value we don’t know, which we had borrowed from God knows where, and over which the organic, natural evolution of the Romanian nation passes necessarily without paying the slightest attention.

          Fine, I’d have liked to say to Nae. But when you say that on the terrace of a magnificent villa in Balcic, or on the balcony of a sumptuous palace in Băneasa, when a Mercedes Benz is waiting for you outside, when all your clothes are brought from London, the linen from Vienna, the furniture from Florence, the toiletries from Paris, all this theory is terribly reactionary. Could it not be by any chance some kind of unconscious defense mechanism?

          The first thing I saw yesterday morning when I opened the window was a young woman coming out of the villa across my house and starting jogging down the road, dressed in white shorts, white sport shirt and an orange blouse, all shining in the sun.

          She could well have been an ugly girl (and indeed later, at Mamut’s, where I had a closer look at her I could see there was nothing exceptional about her), but in that particular moment she was the embodiment of youth, freedom, morning itself.

          Une jeune fille en fleurs… (Especially as I’m reading – as I always do when on holiday – Proust.)

          I found out, not without surprise, that Virginica Rădulescu, the little lady I had met one night some five years before at Carol’s and with whom I ended up having some kind of love affair (she was at the time living on Mîntuleasa), had married an architect who loves her passionately. I met them both in Balcic – and couldn’t help remembering the devastating story of Aurică Rosenthal and Geta, something quite similar.

          And well, whom should I meet on Thursday night at ‘Lacul cu Peşti’ [Fish Pond], accompanying Virginica and her architect? Je vous le donne en mille… Geta, of course, with her new man. Secret solidarity of faith, profession, temperament.

          Poor Swann. Poor Saint-Loup. There’s always a new Odette, a new Rachel.

          And you who write these lines, are you sure you don’t have an Odette of your own in Bucharest, whom you have actually already sent two sentimental letters, which she’ll have read when going to or coming back from a romantic meeting?

Bucharest, [Sunday] May 8 [1938]

For a week, since I got back from Balcic, I’ve been living an unforgivable life, the life of a lazy man exhausting himself doing nothing. I haven’t managed to stay in at least one night. I’ve wasted my nights now with Nelly Ehshich (after Gotterdämerung), now with Cicerone (after Rosen Kavalier), or with Cella (at the cinema one evening), or with Leni and Froda at ‘Melody’ (last night I got back at 4 a.m., not even aggrieved enough after watching her flirt all the time with Lazaroneanu, Hefter and some hundred other guys whom she was constantly throwing smiles, greetings, calls, retorts…). In fact I must be fair to her: she’s been extremely tender all week and out of seven days she did come to see me three times.

          I promise myself to become hardworking and wise. I can’t stand myself when falling apart like this and prey to laziness. Laziness is all right in Balcic, the only place where it doesn’t depress me.

Sunday, 23 [July 1939]

In a deserted, thinned out, shuttered, scorched[xiii], prey to white, invisible flames city – I translate and translate and translate…

          Last night, in spite of the open doors and windows, there was no breath stirring, not one tiny rustle, in the whole house, the whole city even.

          I’m holding on though. I’m even feeling more rested than the other day – heartened perhaps by the thought of going away at the weekend.

Sunday, 30 [July 1939], Stîna de Vale

I didn’t leave Bucharest: I fled from it. At the end of a day of running around I packed in 15 minutes, jumped into a taxi with my suitcases not properly closed and with the raincoat fluttering behind me, reached the station two minutes before the train left, ran like crazy to my carriage with the porters hurrying behind me, picking up the things I was losing in my rush (one of them brought me one glove, the other the second…) I was completely dizzy when the train started. Couldn’t believe though I was on it.

          Slept for nine hours last night without waking up at least once. How long is it since such a miracle happened to me? I’m obviously still far from being rested. I wonder how many nights I’ll need to get enough sleep and fully recover? For the time being I’m totally incapable not only of writing but of even thinking about it. In principle, I’m giving myself a week off. Then we’ll see.

          I walked up the mountains this morning with Comşa. An almost five hour walk to some rocky tops that the Catholics in the area had nicknamed Golgotha, but whose local name must be totally different.

          Clean, light, white room, overlooking the whole clearing which makes up Stîna de Vale proper. ‘Your room’s a real looker,’ said the boy who helped me move my stuff from room 47 where I slept last night to room 43 where I’m going to stay. A certain Beate Fredanov is staying in 45, a nice, pleasant and, hopefully, single girl. One can get here from the small station by a strange sort of bus, shabby beyond description. There’s also a most interesting log-train.

Wednesday, August 2 [1939]

Still on holiday. After some reconnaissance walks (to Aria Vulturului and Muncei Custuri) and after the longer one to Golgotha, yesterday I took a real trip to the springs of the Someş river, or, to be more precise, to the Redesia Citadel, a huge cave that the Warm Someş goes through. We left at 7 in the morning (together with Fredanov, Comşa and Furnarache), we got back at 8 in the evening, after 10 hours of walking and 3 of rest. Wonderful area, where past each corner another country opens, other mountains, other valleys, other forests.

          I’m beginning to get rid of the paleness, exhausted eyes, and tired forehead I had when I got here.

          But my first day of work is drawing near – and I’m beginning to be frightened.

Sunday, 6 [August 1939]

I’m starting work tomorrow morning. I think I’ve had enough rest. I just wish I was alone. Fredanov and Comşa are both very nice, but I need to be on my own. Today I’ve read what I’ve managed to write so far. It’s long and dense enough to be able to estimate I’m half way through with it.

          We’ll have to see about the rest.

Monday, 7 [August 1939]

Two and a half pages written. It’s true though I’ve only worked for 3 or 4 hours all in all. I’m still a bit shaken, it’s difficult to pull myself together and focus. Difficult beginning, as always.

Tuesday, 8 [August 1939]

Very slow, very slow, very unsatisfactory. Only three and a half pages in about six hours of work, with absolutely nothing interesting in them.

          But it takes a lot of patience.

Wednesday, 9 [August 1939]

Last night I listened to the communiqué of the General Staff on the radio and suddenly felt nothing was of any relevance anymore. There will be massive call-up and, judging by the tension in Danzig, probably war too.

          Had a difficult evening and agitated night. Some kind of disgust, some kind of tiredness of being human. This morning though I’m back at my writing desk. This novel has to be finished at any cost.

Friday, 11 [August 1939]

I was seized last night by a real ‘anxiety,’ and I don’t think I was the only one either. The entire hotel seemed in the grip of worry. The news is serious. Danzig will receive a blow one of these days. The war may break out this very month. The communiqués of the General Staff that we listen to every evening are quite alarming.

          We’re quite far from what is going on there, we’re like on a boat – which of course enhances our anxiety.

          Late last night I listened to Symphony no. 9 and the 3^rd Brandenburg Concerto. I think there was more than mere musical emotion in the way I listened; that concert gathered for me the sadness of all those things I was losing in such a stupid, criminal, crazy way.

          And I keep on writing. It’s still going very hard. Long day of rain yesterday when I worked for more than 7 hours (didn’t keep close track of time really) but could only come up with a bit more than 4 pages. I’m slowly getting up to Gunther’s chalet, where I’ve no clear idea yet what’s going to happen. But things will get clearer if I have time.

In the evening

Six and a half hours of work, five pages written. I’m beginning to get back to normal, but I must say again this ‘normal’ is of very low efficiency. I should hurry and can’t. I’m getting to the chalet very slowly. It’s a simple fact, no possible incidents (Nora and Paul just go up from Poiana to S.K.V – that’s all), but I feel I have to write it out in a very slow rhythm and full detail to put as much distance as possible between the world they leave behind them and the one they’re going to find up there. Nothing’s more difficult than trying to suggest the passing of time without resorting to action proper. Despite my dissatisfaction though, if I’m left alone I’m going to work and finish it. Gunther – completely unknown so far as I hadn’t been anywhere near him is beginning to shape up, though not enough yet. He’s still a bit in the shadow.

Saturday, 12 [August 1939]

Only 3 pages written. (I have finally made it to the S.K.V. chalet – or almost, to be more precise.) It’s only 5.30 and of course I could still work for a couple of hours, but I’m tired. I’m going to take a short walk – maybe to Aria Vulturului, and I’ll try to make up for these wasted hours tomorrow. I should finish chapter 8 tomorrow, now that I’ve got it so clear in my mind. I’m waiting for Gunther with a lot of impatience, curiosity, and friendliness.

Sunday, 13 [August 1939]

Five pages written – but the chapter’s still not finished. I stopped work at 7 in the evening although I should get to the end of this last moment of the chapter, which I can see so clearly and feel it’s so exact and intense. But I’m tired. Can’t say I’m happy about the state of my health. I’ll have to see an ophthalmologist again. A healthy person would not get up from the writing desk – even if they had to sit there for ten, twelve, a hundred hours – until they had all the things I can see so clearly finished. Things are really shaping up, they are getting clearer and more substantial as I go along. Gunther is coming more and more to the fore. But I’m not quite there yet.

          I met a shepherd from Mezeat[xiv] on my walk (to Muncei) last night, and had a long conversation with him. I should find time to put down the things he told me. He touched me by the ‘human condition’ he revealed, with such simplicity but with such pathos too.

          I may go on an ‘izgursion’ to Mezeat tomorrow. I know it’s a breach of my work program, but maybe I’ll be more relaxed when I get back.

Tuesday, 15 [August 1939]

I was absolutely convinced that since I wasted all day at Mezeat yesterday I’d at least finish this chapter 8 today, but here I am wasting today too, together with the five and a half hour work. I have no choice but give up the two pages written this morning and the half page written this afternoon. I was very happy about them and everything seemed to be going just fine (I was even thinking of writing four or five more pages to make up for yesterday), when I suddenly realized I had started on the wrong track and just had to go back. The whole scene was false.

          Nora has to set off with the skis in the middle of the night in a sort of desperate dizziness. Only like this can Gunther’s chalet be a miracle, a salvation for her. In the version I had this morning when she puts her skis on she is completely calm and at peace and thinking of the next day. But at that moment there can’t be any ‘next day’ for Nora. If I don’t get that, I blow the whole thing and risk giving her meeting with Gunther a touch of artificiality. I should keep in mind the fact that the Gunther episode has something artificial about it anyway and that I need infinite tact to save this rather literary, rather factitious character from becoming totally forced.

          But all this doesn’t make up for yet another wasted day. I’ve got so few of them left to the end of the month that I’m getting really scared at the thought I might have to leave here without having finished.

Wednesday, 16 [August 1939]

I’ve replaced the two pages written yesterday with another two written this morning, which seem more right to me. But I’ve been stuck for an hour now and I simply can’t get going again. Stupid resistance that I don’t understand. The whole scene is clear and it seems fairly easy: should be written without any difficulty. But difficulties do arise for no reason and with no meaning whatsoever where you least expect them.

          I’m not happy about my morning. It’s raining – gray, incessant rain that I welcomed because it’s keeping me in, making me feel like writing and keeping[xv] the hotel silent – yet all these favorable circumstances don’t seem to be helping me too much.

          I’m going downstairs for lunch and I’ll see what happens in the afternoon.

          In the evening

          I’ve been working since 3 up until now, a quarter to 8. Finished the chapter. Wanted to do it at any cost. I can’t quite tell how it is. I’m a bit dizzy. I may be able to see it more clearly tomorrow.

Thursday, 17 [August 1939]

It’s not working, it’s not working, it’s not working. I’m not talking about the chapter I finished yesterday (which I’ve reread today, and it seems acceptable, and to which I’m not going back anyway). I’m talking about the new chapter, the 9^th, which I was supposed to begin today and which is stuck, impossible to start, although the first part at least seems clear and I had a feeling it would be easy to write.

          The weather’s ideal for writing: it’s raining, the woods are overcast, the entire hotel seems asleep, everything’s perfectly quiet. And still, here I am, in front of the same chapter since 9 in the morning up to now when it’s 5 in the afternoon, writing tens of opening sentences, crossing out, replacing, getting back to them, giving them up again, incapable of taking at least one step forward.

          I’m disgusted. I won’t say I’m losing my nerve. But I realize the only thing that can still take me to the end of this bloody book is stubbornness – and I have to preserve at least that.

Saturday, 19 [August 1939]

Gunther’s chalet (where Nora’s finally been since last night) is beginning to look like a theatre stage. I realized that about fifteen minutes ago and it seems that in fifteen minutes I’ve sketched in my head a whole play which I have the feeling I could write on the spot. I can see things so clearly that I’ve even cast the parts.

          Gunther’s full name is Gunther Grodeck (I don’t know if I’m going to keep the name in the novel but if I ever get to write the play I probably will). Tomazoglu could play him. He’s not blond, he’s not that young, he doesn’t have Gunther’s childish beauty – but he does have the cardiac patient’s intensity of the character. Old Grodeck could be played by Bulfinski. Hagen by Storin. The whole conflict is between the three of them. There’s also a girl, who is not Nora though. If it is to be turned into a theatre play the Gunther episode has to be completely separated from the novel. Only the starting point is common.

          The old Grodeck is a big industrialist. The money though is his wife’s, who’d died some two years before, and is going to be inherited by Gunther. Gunther’s still underage: he’s 21 in March. He’s come up there on the mountain and wants to stay there. He’s waiting for his coming of age to be into possession of his fortune and stop his father’s forestry operations. I don’t quite know yet why he wants to do that. It all stems in a strong resentment against his father, who may not even be his real father. Here comes in the as yet mysterious character (mysterious for me too) of Hagen. Was this Hagen the late Mrs. Grodeck’s lover? Maybe. He was anyway the only man in the Grodeck family the young woman got along with – she who had come from, perhaps, the Austrian Tyrol to that Saxon colony from Sibiu or Braşov.

          These are the characters. What’s going to happen with them eventually I’m not quite sure yet. But I feel them so intensely that it seems to me it would be enough just to set out and they would alone take me to the end of the road.

          I wanted to write this entry right now (11 in the morning) to get it out of my mind. I felt I couldn’t have gone on with the novel.

          As for the novel, I’ve recovered after the discouraging blip of the day before yesterday. I’d gone out in the rain, angry[xvi] with myself, angry with the book, angry with everything, and started through the woods up to Băiţa and then back on the General’s way. About two hours of walking. I was trying to put some order into this chapter 9 and divided it into three distinct moments in order precisely to mark out my field for the following day. Then the name Hagen (Götterdämmerung) just sprang into my mind and, all of a sudden, triggered by this name, I could see a whole new character taking shape and could sense all sort of mysterious things going on in Gunther’s chalet. It all started, I think, with the name of Hagen – the way he looks, his clothes, his bearing and even his story, if not completely clear yet.

          I wrote 5 pages yesterday. I’ve no idea what I’m going to do today. I should – if I was a serious man – finish the chapter.

Monday, 21 [August 1939]

I won’t be rid of this play unless I write it. Today I have again wasted a lot of time thinking about it. I might write it in the winter. Have it staged in February-March. I might think of a part for Mrs. Bulandra. (She’ll be Aunt Augusta.) But if I do that, I’m afraid old Grodeck’s part might lose some of its importance. One of them has to truly, sternly, intolerantly stand for the ‘Grodeck spirit’. And I can easily see the spirit of the young[xvii] Mrs. Grodeck (Gunther’s dead mother) hovering over the whole play.

          What I cannot see yet is what is going to happen to the girl that enters Gunther’s chalet at the beginning of Act I. I also don’t know if the whole conflict is to be played out up there in the chalet or it should, in the second part, come down to Sibiu or Braşov, where the ‘Grodeck works’ are. In this latter case the play might have four acts.

          The first two are almost completely outlined. The first act is ‘the winter night’ from the novel (chapter 9): obviously with certain changes made necessary by the fact that the focus is on Gunther, not on the people coming from the outside. The second act will take place several days later and will be about old Grodeck’s arrival. And this will become clearer as I continue the work on my novel. And after that everything’s possible…

          As regards the novel, I’m terribly dissatisfied with myself. A whole day and not even three pages done. It’s intolerable. I won’t reproach myself the fact that the two and a half pages are totally, utterly uninteresting. That is for God to say. What I can’t forgive myself for is having written so little.

          Time’s going by, my boy. You should understand that. You should understand that you won’t have these long and free, free from morning till night, days in Bucharest.

Last night, at the end of a very agitated day, I nevertheless tried to write. My current inability to start a sentence and finish it is absolutely revolting. I write one word and I cross it out, I write it again and again I cross it out. I don’t even think it is anything to do with stylistic scrupulousness. I think it’s simply a tic. The last pages of my manuscript are literally massacred. When transcribed ‘clean’ two manuscript pages would hardly make three quarters of a normally written page.

          Out of sheer curiosity I’ve just had a look at the For Two Thousand Years manuscript to see if it was equally difficult to write. Well it wasn’t! The manuscript is amazingly clean. Two or three words crossed out or added a page. The odd passage left out. Almost 400 clear and legible pages, written without torment – at least without the graphic torment that is now making my writing impossible to read. Why is it more difficult to write now than it was six years ago? I should be more experienced, more skilled, less afraid of the written word – but I’ve also come to know traps that I was then ignoring. Could it be because I was also writing for newspapers at the time? Could the habit of writing an article a day – for which Albu would sometimes give me only an hour – have made my hand faster, more practiced? I don’t know, I can’t understand. I’m looking for all sorts of explanations. I’m also wondering if this very diary is not limiting my freedom to write. After all, it may be just that a novel cannot be written with diaries, critical comments, ongoing tests – that all end up paralyzing you. But this may not be it either. I’m just trying to blame whoever and whatever I can. I am for instance exasperated by the cyclamen I’ve had for two weeks, and which I think is bad luck for me because ever since it entered my house I haven’t been able to work.

          I find in the For Two Thousand Years manuscript the following sentence, left out eventually from the book (one of the few left out): ‘I write with great difficulty, with countless halts, with many hesitations and with a permanent fear of exaggerating my thoughts; for an error of expression is a double trap, first of all because it says something else than what should be said and secondly, because it ties you to what you have said wrong.’

Sunday, 17 [December 1939]

Six pages written. Almost seven. True though I’ve been working all day and now it’s past 2 a.m. But at least I’ve started. But tomorrow morning at 9 I have to be at the regiment.

          Will I be able to resume writing tomorrow afternoon?

Monday, 18 [December 1939]

All day wasted at the regiment. It was impossible to get a deferment. It’s only now at night, from 10 to 2 that I could go back to my novel. I’ve written two pages that end chapter 17. It’s dull. I’m afraid it might be even more than that: it might be artificial, arbitrary, amorphous. I’m really sorry for this book that might have come out completely differently, had I been more persevering and the events less hostile. But it’s an unlucky book – and I’m afraid there’s no way I can change that.

Tuesday, 19 [December 1939]

All day at the regiment. Got back at half past eight in the evening, exhausted and on top of everything with my left arm numb with pain. They gave me an inoculation in the infirmary and it’s making me feverish now. It’s absolutely impossible to write anymore. It’s almost impossible to even think about the novel, of which all I am left with is a feeling of remorse. I have to give up, postpone, give in. Can’t you see there’s always something preventing this unfortunate book from coming out of this circle of obstacles and bad luck surrounding it?

Wednesday, 20 [December 1939]

Night of fever and insomnia. Couldn’t sleep a wink. Couldn’t feel my left arm at all. Went to the regiment with a fever of 39 degrees. I’m sick of explaining, asking, complaining. I’m still ill. I think this inoculation is one of the most barbarian things in a soldier’s life.

          There’s an atmosphere of refuge at the barracks, at least where the depot is. As I was still wearing civilian clothes, I looked in that sordid dormitory like a fugitive locked up in a concentration camp.

          I’ve listened tonight to the Christmas Oratory broadcast from Braşov, and it’s just finishing as I’m writing these lines.

          Lots to put down (especially about the Oratory chapter in my novel), but I’m incapable of thinking and phrasing.

          I have to be at the regiment at 6.30 tomorrow morning.

Saturday, 23 [December 1939]

Army, army, nothing but army. I don’t have a gun, don’t do any drill, and still I have to be at the barracks every morning before seven and am forced to stay there until 7, if not 8 or 9 in the evening. All in all about 14 hours exasperatingly wasted a day. Rosetti’s attempts (not to mention mine) to persuade them to give me an 8 day leave to finish my book have all been in vain. Today (after a day of running all sorts of errands for the colonel) I have finally managed to get 4 days off for Christmas.

          I’m leaving, or at least so I hope, for Sinaia, where I’m going to stay at villa Roman. At least I’m going to ski for one or two days. And maybe when I get back I’ll be able to re-establish some kind of connection with my novel, connection that I have felt has been totally interrupted lately.

[…]

Saturday, April 8, 1944

Four days after the air raid the city is still crazy. The initial confusion (nobody knew exactly what was going on – nobody actually believed it…) has turned into panic. Everybody is running away or trying to. The streets are full of lorries, carts, carriages loaded with all sorts of rags, like in an immense and tragicomic Saint George.

          Some trams have started running here and there today. Most rails are still blocked, though. Half the city is without electricity. There’s no running water. The heating doesn’t work. You can see long rows of women and children bringing water in buckets from various wells and pumps, where there are long queues.

          In an hour (and I don’t think the raid proper lasted an hour), the vital functions of a city with a million people got completely paralyzed.

          The number of the dead is still unknown. The most contradictory figures are being circulated. Several hundred? Several thousand? 4200, Rosetti told me the other day – but that is uncertain too.

          I went to the Griviţa neighborhood yesterday afternoon. From the station to the Basarab Boulevard there is no house – not a single one – left untouched. The sight is heartrending. Bodies are still being dug out, cries can still be heard from under the rubble. At a street corner three women were crying, tearing their hair and clothes, over a carbonized body that had just been dug out. It had rained a little in the morning so there was a smell of mud, soot, and burnt wood all over the place.

          The sight – atrocious, nightmarish. I couldn’t go past Basarab – and I came back home with a feeling of disgust, horror, and helplessness.

          Five years ago, when I was conscripted at Mogoşoaia, I used to pass every day, both in the morning and in the evening, through the station neighborhood. I would devour the morning paper on my way there and the evening paper on my way back, I would anxiously read all the telegrams… I knew the war was hanging low above our heads… I knew our fate too was decided in those telegrams, the fate of those who were heading for the drill field, of the merchants who were noisily opening their stores, and of all the passers by hurrying to the market, station, works, but nobody, nobody could have predicted the funereal sight of a cold spring day – five years later – smoking among ruins, in a haze of fire and massacre.

          And none of us could have done anything, neither then, nor now.

          What is strange is that during the raid I didn’t have the feeling it was at all serious. To begin with I thought it was an exercise (there had been one three hours earlier). Then, when the roar began, I thought it was the anti-aircraft artillery. There were a couple of quakes, but they didn’t seem like those caused by a bomb.

          When I got out into the yard I saw all those colored papers floating (leaflets probably) and thought that the planes had dropped nothing but leaflets… The first rumors coming from the city (a bomb on Brezoianu, another on Carol Street…) seemed fabrications.

          When I went into the center, there was a strange nervous agitation in the streets, seemed more out of curiosity though than horror. Only later could I grasp the full extent of the disaster.

          Leni’s house, completely destroyed. Went there the day before yesterday to help them rummage through the rubble looking for things that could still be saved.[xviii]

          Mary, the young manicurist that came every Friday morning, was killed. She was so young, so nice, so clean. She was a midinette, but graceful like a child and good like a private school girl.

          When out the thousands of dead comes one with a face you know, a smile you’ve seen before, death becomes again something horribly concrete.

          Aristide, Rosetti, Camil, Vişoianu have all run away. Wherever they could. Nobody’s staying, except us – for whom any thought of leaving is out of the question.

          The numbness caused by the Tuesday raid will slowly wear off. What will remain though is the anxious waiting for the next air raid. When will it be? How will it be? In what part of the city? Will we survive? Who will?

          And it’s not only about physical survival. It’s also about all the squalor of the aftermath and all the danger that’s part of a general atmosphere of desperation, anger, and hatred.

          No sign of an anti-Semitic outburst for the time being. But that can happen at any time.

Sunday, April 16 [1944]

Yesterday morning, between 12 and 1, the second air raid. I found it worse than the first one. Fortunately I was at home and could calm Mother, who broke down crying. At least once the noise of the explosion was so loud that I thought it was all going on in our neighborhood. The ongoing sensation that the planes were flying right above our house. We were waiting all tense: now… now… now…

          The center looks deplorable. The Elisabeta Boulevard, from Brezoianu to Rosetti, and Victoria Road from the Post Office to Regală are blocked. It is here – and the neighboring streets – that most bombs fell. What could they have been after? – don’t have a clue. Maybe The Telephones Palace, but in that case the bombing’s very imprecise. The block where Cartea Românească was is completely destroyed. The University and the School of Architecture are on fire. Many other buildings, hit. The flames could be seen from a distance last night. The ruins are still smoking today. I don’t know if there are victims or how many.

          I keep thinking of Poldy. When I’ve heard from him, everything will be much easier to bear. Until then I’m tormented by all kinds of thoughts.

          Spring! Full of anxieties, full of uncertainties. Somewhere, very far away, some dull hopes.

          I’m too alone. Old, sad, and alone.

          But I won’t let myself slip into a crisis of personal despair. Don’t have the right. Il faut tenir le coup.

          I’m reading Balzac. It’s the only thing I feel I can do. I couldn’t possibly work. I’ve reread, full of disgust, one of my plays (Alexander the Great). I never realized how bad it is. Inexorable.

          I’ve read with great interest Les illusions perdues (Les deux praîtres, Un grand homme de province à Paris, Les souffrances de l’inventeur). Ferragus, last night and today. I’ve begun Duchesse de Langeais.

Tuesday, April 18 [1944]

This morning’s alarm found me at the high school. The moment the ‘pre-alarm’ went off I got out and started running home. The big square looked as if just taken out of a film: a scene with crowds panicking. Hundreds of people running without any sense of direction, like some dizzy ants.

          I stopped for a moment at the corner of 11 Iunie (the alarm had just started) and went down into a ditch but came out again fairly quickly. No point doing that. I went on home, wanting to be near Mother as soon as possible. The streets were deserted, still some passers by left, though. No one trying to stop us. Terrible silence of deserted city.

          Sunday morning, raids in Braşov and Turnu Severin. Where today, I wonder.

Sunday, December 17 [1944]

Last performance of The Flood.

          What a mysterious thing success in the theatre is. I was in the audience and watched everything very carefully. Badly played, badly directed, dull scenery, mediocre actors (Finţi artificial, Măruţă pompous, Vurtejeanu boring, Athanasescu imbecile…). Nothing seems right, everything forced – and still… it’s going. The audience listens, believes, applauds. This is what success is.

          It made 85 shows. In the center it would have made even better. For me it’s been a most profitable little business. It’s given me four hundred thousand lei. Nothing else I’ve done in the theatre has ever brought me so much money, made so easily.

          But can I really keep in this line of business? It’s so cheap and easy that it becomes dishonest. The character I added, Miss King, came out of nothing. A line repeated over and over (‘I am a respectable person.’) is the only device I used, a very simple, yet infallible device. People laugh whenever the line strikes, as if at a press of button. It’s offendingly simple, boorishly simple, an artifice…

Monday, December 18 [1944]

Discussion with Vişoianu, at the ministry. Since he’s been a minister[xix], this is the third time I’ve seen him. He behaves in a friendly, simply, honest manner – but he can’t do anything for me. He can’t and won’t. He won’t give me the job of ‘press counselor,’ which he’d promised to me. The law is, apparently, against it. It is in fact Piki Pogoneanu[xx] who’s against it. And Vivi has neither the courage nor the interest to disregard this opposition. All he can offer is something on a ‘daily basis’. Needless to say, I refuse.

          I’ll always be just a yid for him. There might be some room for me somewhere in the shadow. But to try to move a bit to the fore is so cheeky on my part.

          Irritating afternoon at the ‘Baraşeum,’ where Moonless Nights[xxi] is being rehearsed in a panic. The day after tomorrow is the opening night and nothing’s ready yet.

          Maybe this is how the theatre’s always worked. In a chaotic way, fast, with anxiety, with fear. Nobody can see anything anymore. Is it bad? Is it all right? Is it disastrous? Is it admirable? Nobody can answer. Nobody knows.

          I myself am quite calm. After all I’ve only translated the piece. If it had been my play, I too would probably be swept away by this whirl of panic.

Friday, December 22 [1944]

I might go to Diham on Sunday morning with Herta, Andrei[xxii] and Herant[xxiii]. (Just found out the party’s grown: Lena and Harry.)

          I’ve been trying to recompose out of the little left from the past my ski outfit. A bit ragged, a bit patchy – but it’ll do. I was happy to find at Alice’s my skis and poles, which I’d hidden in her attic about three years ago, when an injunction forced us to hand in all skis at the police station.

          23 August[xxiv] is not, after all, a fiction – as it sometimes seems to me – if it’s at least given me back the freedom to go to the mountains.

          I wish I was happy there – and hope I will be.[xxv]

          Last night, reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Vivi insisted I should go so I did. Nice as a social occasion but disgusting as a political spectacle. The same people that five months earlier had been friends with Killinger!…

          I’m afraid there are plans to bankrupt the ‘Baraşeum’. Moonless Nights may turn out to be a success (at least as big as The Flood), but it may also happen that I won’t see a penny from it. Marcovici keeps complaining that he’s broke, that he doesn’t have enough money for publicity and posters, and he says he’s for the time being going to take everything that goes into the box office.

Sunday, December 31 [1944]

Got back from the mountains half an hour ago. We stayed a day in Predeal and then six days in the Vînători Chalet on the Diham. We didn’t have snow for skiing but it was nevertheless a good holiday.

          After such a long time it was really touching to see the Bucegi mountains again. A white, clear light outlined the winter landscape, which the fog wrapped only in the last two days.

          I can’t say or write anything. Words fail me. I often stopped to look at the landscape carefully trying to fix its shape in my mind, but it’s all more varied, more complex and more mysterious than I can remember.

          I must be very old. I couldn’t find my old exuberance on the mountain. More melancholic – almost sad. I’m prey to I don’t know what kind of old tiredness, and carry with me, all over the place, my incurable loneliness.

          Last day of the year. I’m ashamed I’m sad. It is, after all, the year that has given us our freedom back. Beyond all bitterness, beyond all suffering, beyond all disillusions, there remains this one fundamental fact.

          I’m thinking of Poldy, it hurts to be so far away from him, I can’t wait to see him again – and everything else melts in regrets and hopes.

Mihail SEBASTIAN (pen name of Iosif Hechter; 1907-1945) wrote successful plays (A Star Without A Name, A Game of Holidays) novels (The Accident, City of Acacia Trees), essays (For Two Thousand Years) and reviews. The surrounding anti-Semitism and his disappointment with famous friends such as the writer, anthropologist and historian of religions Mircea Eliade or the novelist, playwright and philosopher Camil Petrescu, before and during World War II, were brought up in the Diary, the publication of which (in 1996) stirred heated debates over the collective guilt of Romanians in connection with World War II.