6 March 1960

So I am finally taken out as well, led inside an office hid in that tiny niche of the arched corridor; examined, identified, undressed. I am only left one towel, one bar of soap, one toothbrush, one toothpaste, two pairs of socks, one shirt, one pair of underwear, all of which I tie up in a bundle. I look at the clock above the niche arch and see that it is much earlier than I thought. A very tall and strong guard beckons me along. (At the “snakes” they were quite talkative; now they work without a word). But he does not take me towards the row of metal doors laden with locks and latches, behind which I suspect the cells. We arrive outside, in the yard. This night in early March is one of snowstorms.

I have a shirt and underwear on. The guard shows me a huge heap of suitcases, sacks, rucksacks, parcels, saddlebags, and orders me to carry them all from the yard inside a storeroom next to the entrance in the corridor along which the doors are. Some trunks weigh very much. I potter about for two hours, shivering and chattering, as not only is it cold, but I am also in a terrible draught. The guard, muffled up in an immense Siberian fur coat, his boots inside felt shoes, has raised up his fur-lined collar, has pulled the flaps of his cap down over his ears and has coiled up – much like the invisible man in the film after H. G. Wells – on a chair spitefully thrown in a corner, where he probably watches me from. He must be cold as well and – why I don’t know – but I have the impression he is not very pleased to see me rummaging about in the snow, undressed, scrawny and wretched.

I finish the work, merry that I have not shown any signs of weakness, beginning to warm myself. The guard beckons me along again, shaking up a ring with a lot of enormous keys on. He stops before cell 18, opens the door with difficulty, yawns and throws me inside.

In the end it may be that God does not even need to punish us. He turns his face from us; which means he withdraws his protective grace and leaves us at the hands of chance and the interrelations of the material world. We enter a zone of hazard and mechanics: alas the day!

7 March 1960

He has thrown me inside. Now I stand petrified by the door. I look around. I am in a hole of gigantic proportions; an unbelievable stench hits me. The hole is highly lit up. A sort of night asylum amplified geometrically. I am overwhelmed by a two-fold contradictory feeling of desolation and agglomeration. On both sides four rows of iron beds that go nearly as high as the tall arched ceiling. The window in front of me is bolted with boards, with bars on the inside. In the space between the multitude of beds, a narrow table, two rickety benches, themselves narrow. In the right back corner, a tub, a trough, a covered barrel. That’s it. Down, along the beds, lines – that seem endless – of boots.

Several strong snores do not break the deep silence, just like isolated clouds that do not overcome the unity of a violently blue sky. The odd rattle. The metallic noise of latches and keys has not awaked anyone; and this surprises me.

I start to tremble with cold, riveted in my scant clothes, bundle in my right hand, blind to the aggressive light. The breathing is different and dissonant. I stand like this for a long time and wait, but I cannot make out any moves. My eyes look for a place where I might rest, go to bed. I cannot see any. And nobody sees me.

After I have long scrutinized the walls with exterior coffins, my eyes look down and I come across a mixture of clay, cement, gravel and mud. The room seems to me unbearably hostile and evil, I feel ridiculous and lost. I feel defeated by tiredness, frightened especially. Like before an exam where you do not know the subject matter. A wholly different horror than the Securitate.

(Premonitions are not always valid. I did not know on the threshold of that stinking hole, intensely lit up and caught in a forked whirlpool of snoring and silence, that I would find an access to happiness there.)

For now my eyes wander up and down, right, left, everywhere, persevering, scared.

Light and void.

(Everything can be soiled; here even light is cold and mean. How did you fall from the sky, bright star, and son of morning? Winston Smith in 1984 (in the place where there is no darkness?) and what sort of place proves that to be: investigation and prison rooms! Still, he was not lied to: there is always light, but what kind of light? Of the kind the fall of the angel Lucifer probably sent out, as God saw him breaking down, lightning, into the deep.)

Suddenly, up above, at the gallery, to the left, on the highest row, a hand has raised a finger and motions me to climb up.

Climb up – but how? The hand – that must surely be endowed with sight and understands I am turning about looking for a means to ascend – is joined by a second one, its sister, no doubt. They sketch out a climb. With my bundle, like a poor wretch, with cowardly movements, chattering, I find myself enough of a monkey to be able to hang all the way up, holding myself by the iron beds. A muffled-up apparition, short of stature and horribly thin, of a pallor that may well depend on a different chromatic prism than the one in our universe, moves closer to another mummy and, silently still, urges me to lie down beside it; it covers me with one half of a ragged blanket. And whispers to me: sleep for a bit; there’s not much time left.

Maybe the most terrible words uttered by Our Savior can be found in Luca 22:67: “If I tell you, ye will not believe.”

This is the human condition. We do not believe Him. We do not believe each other. We do not want to, we cannot, we do not know how, we do not dare, we do not strive to believe the others. Experience is not transmissible. We come to understand some things – so what? we are not believed. We can speak, but we cannot establish communication. What else can we do but, following His example, remain silent (not frowned).

I do not think ten minutes pass by, when a more that deafening noise begins; of those stars broken into pieces that in Le Napus by Leon Daudet cause the instantaneous disappearance of men? Lasting uproar, demented clamor; an explosion I would never forget, that would later, through the years, still wake me up at five, even a few minutes earlier, out of anticipatory dread. This acoustic rush – of doorbells? church bells? bugles? fire arms? – penetrates into the most Freudian, most Jungian, most Adlerian strata of the self and sets up its den in unknown places of the being.

Miracles exist. God works all the time. N.N.P.’s predictions come true straight away. Hardly did the squall of trumpets stop, than my well-meaning neighbor introduces himself: he is an orthodox monk-priest. Another couple of ghosts wake up beside him, one stout and heavy, the other lean and youthful: it is two Greek Catholic priests.

I know, in the middle of the tumult that arises after the awakening is over, when a sea of bald heads fills up the space and the covered barrel entails, comet-like, a huge line, I know I am now in the hands of God the living.

“I trust I make myself obscure”[i].

My monk is a Moldavian from beyond the Prut[ii]. He is a young man, sentenced for having had visions and having sent the Department of Cults a letter in which he protested against the suppression of the hermitage where he had been living. No sooner do I get to tell him – I am striking the iron while it’s hot – that I am a Jew and that I wish to be baptized, than he expresses his agreement. He is meek, slow-moving and silent. The two Greek Catholics are different from one another. Father Nicolaie, from Alba, young, is lively and excited, funny and fond of idle talk; very much like a seminarist in a Russian novel. Father Iuliu is big, strong, wise and as lonely as can be. His eyes show the pain caused by the fact that his daughter, a nun, is convicted as well; she was part of a lot of mystic nuns. Since we are talking about strange pairings of situations and words, I tell him, I was part of a lot of mystic legionaries[iii], too. But father Iuliu also has other reasons for depression: a catholic priest, he signed, unconvinced, his transition to Orthodoxism in 1948; for this he cannot forgive himself. Now he is here on accusations of stubbornness in Catholicism and work in the service of the Vatican. The obsession of the first deed does not leave him, however, and I find myself in the paradoxical situation of me comforting him, saying that only in Judaism, Brahmanism and Buddhism do facts stay on record forever and cannot be erased, whereas in Christianity faith and repentance abolish them completely (therefore, Christianity has discovered gravity), and that even in Judaism, Brahmanism and Buddhism there is a law of compensation, and so, that his present suffering balances a past mistake. Father Iuliu listens to me, sighs and nods – but it is clear he is still having regrets.

Father Mina, the orthodox priest, has only required a few catechizing lessons and we do them sitting next to one another on the edge of an iron bed, our backs to the door, whispering. We are both wearing our convict’s uniform, of course: boots with no laces, a striped and ragged overcoat, a little cap (this time with horizontal stripes). The coat has no buttons, the trousers, too short, are on the brink of falling. In fact everything here at Jilava has the most violent appearance of dungeon, of sing-sing, not of severe jail. The building is dreary, but the inside of the cell looks like a fair, like a painting by Breughel, Chagall, like a madhouse. The crowd is inconceivable, you can barely move, the noise is formidable, although people only talk in a whisper (at least theoretically), the queue to the bog is uninterrupted. The most extraordinary questions are going around (how do you say chaffinch in French? which peace ended the Seven years war? how do you say brass in German? what are the names of the three Parcae, of the nine muses, of the three Graces, of the seven wise men of the ancient world? of the seven kings of Rome? Of the three gentlemen from Babylon? what about in Syrian? – what are the first names of the Buzeşti brothers?[iv] who wrote Tsar and Wheelwright? what is the capital of Suabia? what are the rivers in Eden? how about chervil, what do you call that in French? what about quince in French?)

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

We eat in two shifts, ten minutes apart. The food is incandescent, usually pearl barley. There are only enough spoons for a fifth or a sixth of the convicts. The first shift is forced to finish quickly so that the mess tins can be washed and gathered in a heap at the hatch for shift number two. But how can you, without a spoon and in five minutes, eat hot dough that resembles the presumed magma or soup where unicellular life on earth originated? Most of the food is left in the mess tins; it is poured in the tub, which fills to the brim. Washing the dish where the gluey pearl barley was is a highly laborious piece of work. (What were the twelve labors of Hercules? Who wrote White Birch Cross? Where is Alexander the Great buried? Turnip cabbage in French is novet. God forbid, it’s poireau. I’m sorry, but poireau is leek. You’re kidding, sir, how can it be leek. He was a military attaché in London. That’s how he knew English. At Răcăciuni, that’s where it was signed. I think they say Messing. I think you’re right. Oh, dill is easy, it’s fenouil. Oh no, it’s aneth.) As soon as the second or the third day, it is our turn, Al. Pal.’s and mine, to be on duty in the room. I do not know which well-meaning fellow urges us to use the ash in the little stove; the water – bad, stinking, worm-eaten water – is scant. We have to wash sixty or seventy mess tins in a few minutes. The ash combines with the pearl barley juice and forms hardy glue. The little water we had is gone. What shall we do? We are furious: two intellectuals awkwardly making a fool of themselves. We exchange looks devoid of any sense of humor. What shall we do? God takes pity on us and works a miracle.

(There would be heaps of miracles during our prison years. No one who has ever been in jail doubts miracles, more than that, they are surprised miracles are not admitted by everyone as the most regular thing.)

I did not know. I had lived like a blockhead, like an animal, like a blind man. In prison, towards dusk, I found out what kindness, decency, heroism, dignity was. Only talk! Idle talk! Idle talk for scamps and snitches; very useful and meaningful talk when you feel its coolness in the fiery mountain lake and you can taste its experimental charm. Let anyone believe what they will, I do not qualify to speak about absolute value, one thing I know: that this idle talk and the features it signified were more precious there than a shoelace, a thread, a nail (the nail even Geo Bogza[v] learned to respect in public prisons), a piece of paper or any other forbidden item that would make its possessor happy.

H. G. Wells in The Research Magnificent: two great forces: fear and aristocracy. Now I understand him. Fear must be defeated. There is only one thing in the world, only one: courage. And the secret is behaving like aristocrats. Only kindness, politeness, calm, good conduct are funny. I begin to realize that only character matters. Political beliefs, philosophic opinions, social origin, religious belief are mere accidents: only character remains after the filtering caused by years of prison – or of life – , by wear and tiredness: skeleton, code, electric model.

The miracle lies in the extra tub of water that the guards on the corridor most unusually bring. When the door is open, we are put face to the wall and hands on our necks; when it is closed, we turn around and find the tub. More than that, the food for shift number two is singularly late, so when asked at the hatch, Al. Pal. and myself can produce mess tins that could be seen as clean.

Manole was repeating the prayer of La Hire, one of the captains that fought with Joan of Arc: treat me, oh God, like I would treat You, if I were in Your place and You in mine.

10-15 March 1960

The catechizing lessons progress very quickly; father Mina is lenient and undemanding and it is also true that I prove to know quite a lot. The three priests hold council, and then come to ask me: what do I want to be, a catholic or an orthodox? I answer orthodox without hesitation. Very well. The monk will baptize me. But the two Greek Catholics will be present at the baptism as a homage to their faith and as proof we all mean to bring ecumenism to life in a period when John XXIII is on the papal throne, I will say the Creed in front of the Catholic priests. All three ask that I consider myself baptized in the name of ecumenism and that I promise to always fight – if I am fated to get out of prison – for its cause. Which I do wholeheartedly.

No one knows when we will be out of cell 18 (it is transitory) and scattered wherever. Therefore we had better not postpone this. The baptism will take place on 15. Consequently, less than ten days will have passed between my arrival in the cell and the baptism. N.N.P. was right.

Infernal noise, confusion, a growing crowd (new convicts are always coming in), most of the time there is not a single drop of water, ever longer queues at the bog (there are more of us every day and most everyone has a stomachache), jumble, cold, guards roaring, lieutenant Stefan’s unexpected visits: he swears like blazes, stares at us fiercely and threatens us he is going to “jump on our heads”; they do checks and those found with laces on their boots are sent to “the black”. There are no mess tins, no spoons, no beds… The Noica-Pillat lot, those that are here, disregard the muddle and organize a few cultural circles: Sanskrit lessons taught by Dr. Al.-G., the history of arts (Remus Niculescu), Spanish (Theodor Enescu), general biology (Dr. C. Răileanu), cultural history (Al. Pal.), agricultural techniques (Iacov Noica), the philosophy of law (Dinu Ranetti); I “open” an English course myself. Prompted on by doctor Al.-G. (who proves to be an entirely exceptional personality: firm, brave, high-spirited, profound in everything he says, obliging, upright), a few collective sittings on general themes take place, which all “students” must be a part of. The first theme is the theory of the act.

This is why it is so difficult to do the good because you are faced at every step with the obstinate opposition and the skilled impediments of the evil one.

Nietzsche: “We are especially punished for our virtues.”

As soon as he makes the decision to do the good, man takes on a huge responsibility and willingly puts the noose around his neck. On the other hand, the good being of divine essence, those who desire the good prove to be – it is a point on which we have to admit the devil is right – very daring and even haughty. Anyway, before rushing into the field of the good, you have to know that you are walking on a minefield.

Proverbs ascertain the situation cynically: “Give a slave a rod and he’ll beat his master”, “Give a clown a finger and he will take your hand”, “Let an ill man lie in thy straw and he will look to be thy heir”, and the Apostle does not in fact think otherwise when he writes (Rom. 7:15, 18, 19) that he does not do the good he wants to, but the evil he does not.

Anyone can do evil, however helpless he is. The good, however, is only for the tough souls and hardened natures. The evil: milk for children; the good: meat for grown-ups. By creating the poor employee Salavin, who was suddenly bent on holiness and ended up defeated, G. Duhamel understood how things were standing. Holiness and kindness are not at hand for everyone. Kicking a football around is one thing, doing fencing is quite another. It needs stern training. For this cause, monks mortify (and strengthen) themselves in various ways, before daring to make for the path of good deeds.

It is a pity the yogis drive at a removal from the world, beyond good and evil and not at doing the good and living the love, because well-trained they are for sure.

Bunuel’s film Viridiana, reckoned by many antichristian and shameful, represents as well a perfect intuition of the danger of looking for holiness on one’s own and in an idiorhythmic way. Viridiana is a justification of the church and the monastery and a demonstration of our little ability to assimilate and apply Christ’s teachings.

The heresy of humility, of fake humility, somehow the opposite of another: angelism.

The temptation to let yourself be sentenced to eternal labor and to go to Hell out of so much love for Christ that you would yearn to make the sacrifice that lies in giving Him up, this logical and demented temptation that Papini described in one of his short stories.

The temptation hovered around Jansenists as well, who are told to have been recommending the monks at Port-Royal not to take communion for a long time in order to suffer subtly and harshly by staying away from Christ.

On Iorga’s death, Ct. N. wanted to send Horia Sima the following telegram from Germany: “I asked to be entered in the legion the day Codreanu was murdered, I ask to leave the legion the day Codreanu was killed.”

But, out of humility, he did not do it.

But the temptation of fake humility – to refrain from good deeds and legitimate joys – in the end equals Judas’s sin. Judas resigned himself as well, he was humble while plunging into evil.

To give up out of humility, to resign ourselves to the rascals we are.

We can find an explanation for this mode of reasoning that begins with modesty and humility and arrives at demonism only in Chesterton’s work, that defined madness as the supreme form of logic.

There is, of course, the reasoning of the Papinian hero: I love Christ – Christ asks us to sacrifice ourselves for him – what greater sacrifice is there than giving Him up for good? – to commit, therefore, the vile and base deeds that would surely open up the gates of Hell for us is entirely logical. But it is only logical and, so, demented.

Orthodox monks reckon neither kindness, intelligence, love faith, nor patience, piety or holiness as the main feature of man, but good reason, which is a very complex virtue and difficult to put into words. (Its formula is as vast as the basic polymers’). Good reason contains, minutely, stealthily grained, both common sense, wisdom, obedience, will, and all of the above. No virtue is absolute – not even truth – , only the skilful consideration of several can help us keep away not merely from evil (this is quite easy), but also from learned blunders and sophisticated errors.

Unfortunately, one cannot use reason to prove a madman’s iron-strong logic wrong, but rather admit the truth Chesterton ascertained, namely that pure logic, unsupported and uncompleted by the other beneficent features, is a dangerous disease, fatal even.

The heresy of fake humility also disregards the advice of conquering the heavens. We are not asked to be resigned, but ambitious, overtaking. i.e., we are asked for concrete love, which is the same as desiring the presence of the bridegroom, the will to be on His side. Mary’s side, the good side. We do not even drive at being somewhere in particular – Heaven, Tabor, the Golgotha, Canaan – but only to be beside Christ, who Himself is the truth, the way and the life.

The heresy of fake humility is also opposed to the fundamental text in Rev. 3:20, where our Savior promises the one who respects His commandments that He will come in to him and sup with him. Christ wants to be together with us, He asks us to crucify our body in order to be able to be one with Him, and not to estrange us irretrievably from Him in the pits of Hell, on the generous aseptic corridors of syllogistic madness.

Only good reason can help us in this desert (or labyrinth?), because it is simple.

The unwill – especially Russian and known as the Iuradiviies’ – is a very special form of holiness. It belongs to those who pretend to be stupid, idiotic, crazy, confused in order to incite disdain and cause offences. The case of nun Isidora, Isidora the crazy, used by her fellow nuns only for the hard work and seen as a madcap till the day a great hermit reveals her, to the others’ shame.

Subtle mortification; true, it is terrible and so highly commendable, but it is just as dangerous and equivocal:

first, it implies putting the others in a state of sin (you cause their unjustness, the success of your plan presupposes their lack of pity, it anticipates their meanness);

then, it is a stumbling reason for many innocents who will mistake faith for madness;

finally, it puts noble reason under the spell of lunacy, disgracing it.

Everything happens in very labile regions, on quicksand; it is a dance on a volcano, on knife edge, where falling is always an option.

Not to mention another danger: that the hypocritical, the idiotic or the foolish one should in time get to turn his role into reality, and to actually become what he pretends to be. This consideration is maybe the most serious one and it brings out the observation that Christian life cannot be founded on pretence, masks, delusion, tomfoolery. In other words, on hypocrisy.

The Church has always walked the path of balance and common sense, sometimes a bit ordinary. Sophisticated paths belonged to heresies. Refined as they were, they seemed superior as well, and especially won over sharp minds, who could not believe that good reason was in its simplicity the supreme refinement.

Since Christ is the one that rose from the dead – and if he did not, what good is it to be Christian – , we cannot aspire to Hell, death’s abode.

Al. Pal. and Anetta told me that I was devoid of any humility and compassion towards a poor old man, that if I refused to be a prosecution witness, to make statements, to be reeducated, etc. – like so many others, like so many honest and virtuous people – , it was only out of pride. And maybe I would have agreed, had I not been in the know regarding the heresy of fake humility.

And is not this humility – which equals the intention of settling human worthlessness, of forbidding man to reach out and surpass himself – is it not itself a paradoxical arrogance, colored by ridicule, like the disconcerting sentence of a French bishop: in matters of Christian humility, I defy any sort of competition?

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

Sectarian B: So you lied in the investigation.

General A.V.: I did.

Sectarian B: And you call yourself a Christian? Don’t you know lying is forbidden by God?

General A.V.: I know that. But I can’t apply the principle with no discrimination. I have to tell the truth, but not all of it and not to anyone.

Sectarian B.: Yes. The whole truth and nothing but the truth to anyone. We are forbidden to lie.

General A.V.: Even if I maim another?

Sectarian B.: Even then.

General A.V.: Not even to free a man from unjust persecution?

Sectarian B.: No.

General A.V.: Then I prefer to take the sin on myself and expiate for it.

Sectarian B.: This is from the devil.

General A.V.: Let me tell you a story. My friend, engineer Al. Ştef., had a servant who was a millenary or “faithful” or I don’t know what, but anyway she wouldn’t have told a lie for the world. A very honest woman. When Mrs. Ştef. was at home and someone was ringing at the door and she wouldn’t have them (her headaches were tormenting her), she asked the servant to say she wasn’t there (I forgot to tell you their house was in the middle of a large garden.) The believer would absolutely refuse. Unpleasant situations and talks would arise. The woman, that she wouldn’t lie. Mrs. Ştef. didn’t want to release her, as she was honest and hard working. In the end they struck a deal: the servant would go to the door after her mistress had left the house and gone in the back garden. Then the servant would agree to say: “Madam is not in.” Not catching the drift, the uninvited guest would understand at home – and the fuss was over. So, tell me, how do you like that?

Gherla[vi], March 1962

A cold afternoon, that nevertheless reveals a faint promise of spring. Through the interstices of the boards we guess there is a spell of thaw outside. Nostalgia and apathy overcome me. I would like to be able to shrink on the oven like a child or a cat. I am visited by the clear and close images of the boundless yard at the factory in Pantelimon[vii], the Armenească[viii] street and its unbelievable quietness, the Christmas tree in the Seteanu house, Mrs. Boerescu smiling in her violet velvet dress, the forest between the Târgului river and the Doamnei[ix] river at Clucereasa, Mrs. Florescu’s hurried gestures, Mrs. de Bransky’s anti-Catholic imprecations, the many different cries of street merchants that pierced the domes of peace and quiet that rose above the lanes and the streets… And Anetta who looks straight into my eyes and Manole vituperating at the Duque against the liberals and for the Junimists[x]…

I ask doctor Serafim Pâslaru to recite one of his poems for me, and then, even more taken with nostalgia, I crouch down – as much as we are allowed – under the board-covered window of the cell – a vague strip of hill is visible through the interstices – and, like a child muttering well-known stories to himself, I go over and systematize the theory of the nine circles that I have been turning around in my head that that has soothed me for quite a while now. God the Creator, the Maker and the Keeper, Blaga[xi]’s Great Anonym, Voltaire’s Great Clockmaker, the freemasons’ Great Architect reigns and works in the first three circles. The righteous Judge that frightens, the Legislator of the Old Testament, the God of harsh justice dwells between the fourth and the seventh circles. Beginning with the seventh circle, unexpected final secrets are revealed – to those that are so fated. Only that, contrary to what Guenonist, theosophical, anthroposophic, spiritualist initiates or positive people with generous ideas or atheists of agnostic coloring may think, the divinity in the ninth circle is not a “force” or an “energy”, as impassive and impersonal as possible, a hidden coordinator or constructor, but it is God with a white beard, gentle and kind, the God of remotest childhood and carols, of cakes and carol rolls, of the most beautiful Christmas evenings, of Dickens and Bibliotheque Rose.

This is where Christ the Soother and Reliever lives, who promised to cure us of evil, meanness, sins and suffering, whom Chekhov’s heroes in Uncle Vania have in mind. (We shall rest, uncle Vania…) God the highest, final, the secret of all secrets and the saint of all saints is not at all abstract, he is no cold Creator, no unending and unchanging Brahma, he is not the thinking deity of the gnosis, counting the eons. And of course earthly seriousness does not reign over this ninth heaven, uninhabited by Brahma; no trace of that so-called seriousness of pedants, hard workers, hypocrites and bookkeepers. We are asked to be serious in the world in the sense of virtuous, honest, sensitive to other people’s suffering, but not gloomy and mere merciless practitioners of the regulations imposed by transient kingdoms and ephemeral police stations. Monks are cheerful – they refrain from showing it in public, but their behavior inside the “ark” is different – sour are only devils and clerks – , and I bet heaven is full of merry-making. How could it be different, since the Savior tells us clearly that you will not get inside unless you are like babies. Are babies “serious” or wildly cheerful?

Everyone is ready to admit the Creator, even the more conciliatory atheists, the agnostics in corpore. The freemasons as well admit an Architect, a Supreme Being. Just like Robespierre. Neither of the more or less faithful followers of theosophy and Hinduism (and there are many in the world) rejects the idea of a guiding spirit. Nowadays, even people familiar with the popular scientific language and fond of objective modes of expression mention an Energy, a Force, an Engine without any grudge.

It was an Engine in Aristotle, too. But to us, here, in prison – quintessence of life – how ignorant they all seem, from the Stagirite to Rene Guenon and Edouard Schure! Maybe it is, I will not deny it, maybe it is like they say around heavens one or two. There, yes, there is math, there is the gnosis, two and two is four, there is architectonics, planetary orbits, laws, justice, I don’t know, stuff…

From the third one upwards, things change, however. All traces of bookkeeping disappear. We are mounting towards Christ. The galaxies and eons are left quietly behind. The most difficult part of the ascent begins. Customs show up more frequently. In order to pass from the Creator to the idea of Trinity, to the reality of a divinity not only almighty and ordering, but especially kind and worried about the fate of its creation; loving people in a self-sacrificial way, delivering and comforting. Christianity is not only a religion that bows before a Maker, but believes madly in a Savior that gave Himself, out of love, to the world.[xii] Lesski says clearly that the Christian is not a monotheist, but a believer in a Trinitarian religion. He, the Christian, belongs to a different field from moralist, fair or systematized monotheism.

As we mount the stairway to heaven, the views are ever more unexpected. Among constellations and flocks of galaxies, novae, dim and white stars, forgetting about angry sermons, volumes of theology and apologetic arguments, overtaking eternal springs of hydrogen – regulated by professor Hoyle’s spirit – , leaving behind judges, constructors, reckoners, prophets, stern philosophers and non-Euclidian geometricians, the Soul rises ever higher, purging itself, up to the terminus station: the place of light and verdure, the flowery meadow, swarmed with small and plump puppies and white kittens with bow, there where the chords of Mozart’s diversions resound and the winged angels of Liliom take the trouble to continually serve jams and sherbet, there where the true God is, the God of children – finally – allowed to come, no matter how old in years or laden with wearisome memories, and see: the Father with a white beard in the middle, Christ bearing the stigmata and cross on the right, the Holy Spirit, purging and soothing, on the left.

Christianity, mind you, is not merely a school of honesty, purity and justice or a noble and rational explanation for life (theology, rather than zoology, unravels the secrets: Emil Cioran); or a high code of behavior (Confucianism, Shintoism); or escapist therapeutics (Stoicism, Yoga, Zen) or a set of questions (Taoism); or an act of submission in front of the One (Judaism, Islam). It is more than that: it is Christ’s teaching, of love and the saving ability to forgive. No religion conceives of correcting sins in any other way than the logical path of compensation (in Brahmanism and Buddhism the theory is taken to its most absolute consequences by samsara); only in a religion where God does not accept sacrifices but sacrifices Himself could the hope appear of a total and instantaneous erasure of sins, through the most dramatic and anti-bookkeeping – therefore the most scandalous – of acts. (This metanoetics, revolting to order, reason and justice, probably contains the explanation for the strange repulsion that, alone among all the other confessions, Christianity provokes to many.)

The Christian looks to respect Buddhism, Brahmanism, Judaism, the Islam wholeheartedly… but not to forget that his religion is very different from these. It is a religion whose final heaven I do not think belongs to mathematicians or philosophers, but to white locks and fat puppies and bowed kittens. (Since God calls the children and likens his kingdom to them, it would not be at all surprising if what was in it was to their liking.) Mathematics is true, like justice, order, the mechanics of spheres. But only on a portion. High up, things are different.

The “theologians of God’s death” hit the other extreme: they contest God the Father and admit only Christ. But in what way! Only as a symbol of man, of the neighbor, of human problems – which they are ready to mistake for their political preoccupation: the war in Vietnam, the civil rights of blacks, the progress of developing countries. Got it? God is abolished and Christ secularized, politicized, secretly turned common.

Until cybernetics, scientists lacking faith in God may still have found excuses. Although Bettex was saying as early as last century that lack of faith is understandable with the common and the uncultured, but never with scholars. Bacon also had the learned men in mind more than three centuries ago, when arguing that they cannot think the Father only because, according to the words of the Gospel, “they lose their way not reading the Scripture and not knowing the power of God.”

Cybernetics has peremptorily proved what the continuous progress of the sciences was slowly unraveling: the implied, absolute necessity of a Great Programmer. Biology: it admits in the end that analyzers (of sight, for example) come into action on a predetermined program (inborn, says Monad) and that they only transmit selectively – there are neurons specialized only on the vision of straight lines, for instance – , reality being analyzed in every situation on preexisting criteria.

The genetic code? Fixed and invariable, programmed. The build of the atom? Only on certain archetypal, programmed patterns. Language? Itself structured, like the unconscious, after a program. The invariance of species? Also a proof of stipulated limits. The network of kinship? Many variants, but not an infinite number, so structures again, programming.

These are all cybernetic views of the world, i.e. just as many recognitions of patterns. Are they all merely spontaneous and accidental? Come on! Cybernetics is the supreme rationally scientific proof of creation, the universal notion of programming allows no further doubt regarding the existence of the Creator.

Which, of course does not contain the necessity of a savior and his embodiment. Further on, these remain as a sign of freedom, they are our most precious act, most specifically differentiating and anti-entropic: the act of faith, as much of an anti-destiny as art for a Malraux, as anti-history for a Mircea Eliade.

The hypothesis of life-creating chance seems to me, unlike divine creation, less and less probable: as reality unfolds in its amazing complexity and connection. Less probable equals zero in probabilistic language.

(What about the calculation with the millions of monkeys typing for millions of years? Will they not type Hamlet in the end? The possibility is purely theoretical, and the example – scholastic – is as likely to come true as the tragic end that awaits professor Buridan’s donkey. Even if they did type it, it would never be singled out of the flow, nor would it ever be stored or copied out. It would still be virtual reality.

That the instance with the typing monkeys[xiii] is inconclusive and constitutes a pseudo-scientific allegory also results from the fact that the entire mode of reasoning implied tolerates a fatal mistake. Monkeys do not type in the operational sense that alone would give birth to series of combinations that would stand probabilistic calculations, but rather hit the typewriter, much like kids sitting at the piano and pretending to play. Should the monkeys be taught to actually type, the example would again be wrong, since in this case we are not dealing with a series of events anymore, but with conscious acts.)

God, specifies the Jesuit Hausherr, is not infinite, but true. God is not the Infinity but the Truth. He created infinity, but is a Person. (Just like He created man-person through breath, through the most direct and personal of relations. An Idea or a Force, having to solve the same problem, would have found a different means, but surely not the one indicated in Gen. 2:7: He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”.)

Hausherr’s statement and the biblical text spare us the “syllogism of grief”, despair and the “nightmare of dialectic”.

If I allow myself to talk about a white beard, animals, jams and flowers in ninth heaven, I certainly do not do it out of such extreme anthropomorphism that it cannot even be guessed, but because I am thinking of a spiritual state whose metaphorical equivalent is best conveyed by puppies, kittens, etc.

Do I not? Are they not only states but also their transfigured materialization?

Maybe we do not stress enough the fact that heavenly Jerusalem will not be another world but the same one, de-witched, with other meanings and values, with different levels of purity and intensity, but not detached from the imagery of the beings created in the image, according to the likeness of divinity.

Old Haydn is asked why his religious music is cheerful instead of being ceremonious and solemn.

His answer: because every time I think of God, I am overwhelmed with joy.

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

“You, Mr., may well be a prince and direct descendant of God knows how many rulers, but you sure pissed and didn’t wash your hands…”

“Me!?”

“Yes, you, pretend you don’t know, you handled your gear and then touched the cup we drink out of, who didn’t descend from princes…”

“But I never even…”

“Yes, you did! I’ve been following you for three days, Mr. prince, and yesterday you used the bog again and didn’t wash, you want to infect us all…”

“If I had washed, I would have touched the cup with my whole hand…”

“Yes, but did you wash…”

“But can’t you see there is no water…”

“You don’t fool me. Wasn’t there water yesterday? And you still didn’t wash. What are you thinking: the hell with these cads…”

“You’re putting words in my mouth…”

“You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“If you bring it up, shame on you for putting me on trial for intention and bringing me unfounded accusations…”

“Shame on you, for all the prince you are, you ass…”

“You sl..”

“Good for them, for getting you in here, you deserve it…”

“…imy son of a bitch!…”

Silence, silence, gentlemen, SILENCE. The cop’s coming!

From Pantelimon we moved to Armenească Street in the center. It is nice, but the atmosphere is not different, only there are more people and the buildings are closer to one another. An ancient peace and a sort of trust in the world and its elements reign here, as well.

The street is asphalted, as quiet as can be, there are “nobility” houses, yards, gardens and flowers on its sides, just like in the suburb we were coming from. In front of our house – a house on the corner, made of fake and burnt bricks: green, blue, white – live the Boerescus. Mrs. Eliza Boerescu, born Florescu, is the daughter of general Ion Emanuel, former prime minister and the owner of a small castle on Calea Victoriei.[xiv] In memory of her parents’ residence, the house in the Armenească also has a smaller tower. Mrs. Boerescu’s sister, Ms. Florescu lives there as well, an agile and itinerant “spinster”, always looking for some suffering to soothe. Colonel Florescu, the brother, the black sheep of the family – gone down, now a cashier at the racecourse – is not received by his sisters.

Not only excitement and haste are enemies to freedom, but also speed itself.

Denis de Rougemont: the most magnificent natural spectacles are spectacles of slowness and immobility. Rapidity cannot be the deed of an embodied spirit, but only of its perverted imagination. The effects of speed have to do with the field of matter left prey to its own mania of falling. As soon as the spirit comes into play, it causes slow-downs and delays, therefore time-wasting. Inventions meant to fill it always miss their target. And so an era of speed becomes the era in which matter prevails. Temporarily: for something curious happens, at certain great speeds matter turns into spirit.

Gherla, 1964

In the last few weeks the atmosphere is suddenly more relaxed. At the showers we are allowed to wash; we are not ordered “clothes on” anymore as soon as we get wet and soap. The more remarkable convicts are summoned for lengthy councils with the administrative bodies and Securitate officers come over from Bucharest and Cluj. They are asked – as proof of their reeducation – to make statements admitting their guilt, promising to behave well in the future, supporting the regime. On an improvised screen in the big hall on the ground floor they can see entire neighborhoods of new blocks in various towns. “Can you recognize them? You can’t, can you?”, exults the head of the prison. Some, especially those from Botoşani[xv], from the so-called house of lords – only “historians”, fine cigarettes, distinguished magazines and all sorts of trifles – are taken away in a car and driven around the country to see the achievements. Many of them do not know how to act regarding the statements: should they make them? should they not? Should they write long autobiographies – suddenly here come reams of paper, ink, pens – in which to deny their social origin, their parents, their youth, their friends?

I advise whoever asks my opinion to forget about it, it is clear we are about to be set free; we are leaving with or without those statements. However, what if it does not turn out that way? What if the decree does not come? So people make their statements, wash their hands of their most precious ideas, of themselves, write feverishly. You would think they would write short and simple. (Or they would refer to generalities, waffle about patriotism, runs my advice, and about the people.) Seeing is believing: people that could hardly write acquire themselves the fluency and the skill of story-telling. The trigger effect of the patient lying on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Spinning the wheel.

Sittings are organized. During one on controlling the sectarians, Lutheran pastor Wurmbrandt begins to speak, dressing down the JWs. (Ugly. I do not like it. JWs are what they are, for now, though, we are all comrades in grief. However, is not what Wurmbrandt says true? It is, but the truth ought not to be told anytime and anyplace. It is not an absolute value. In the prison yard and in the presence of the administration the truth about JWs is not that they are a poor bunch of blockheads, but that they are victims and martyrs.) I am all the more confused, since everything I know and have found out about Wurmbrandt are all very good things.

I find myself being hauled to a sitting whose Marxist theme is the gradual disappearance of the state. (I have to mention that the State seems, nevertheless, to be fairing quite well nowadays.) Only convicts take part, no guards, no politicos, no one. And yet things are going like clockwork, the debate progresses undaunted. Ça vous donne un avantgoût of what it will be like outside.

At the next meeting they do not snatch me anymore; they do not force me, but I am demanded to wash and scrub the stairs of Gherla’s three floors. The water I get from the pump in the yard. Scrubbing the ground and dirty stone is not easy. But really, I am not broken-hearted, because nothing compares to the sorrow and emetic power of a sitting on reeducation and theory. The foreboding image is clear: the machine will work by itself, by itself and very smoothly.

I shall have to talk, at least a little bit. After healing the sick, the possessed and the sinful women, the Lord tells them to go in peace and to be silent. They went in peace, but they were not silent! How could they be silent and not cry out what had been done to them?

Psalm 34: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

1967

Towards evening, beginning of autumn, Camil Demetrescu rings at the door. I show him gladly in. I’m in a hurry, he says, I just passed by to see how you’re doing. But do come in for a minute! He hesitates, seems ill-at-ease on stepping inside, and one would say indeed that he feels if not hot and bothered, at least bothered. I do not understand.

At last he explains. He is not alone but accompanied by someone, a man waiting downstairs in front of the house. Ask him in, I exclaim, go and fetch him immediately. – He doesn’t dare. – How’s that he doesn’t dare? – Yes, it’s Belu Zilber[xvi], he doesn’t dare, he doesn’t know whether…

I am wearing my pajamas, a gown and slippers. I quickly throw my light coat over my shoulders and, without allowing Camil to finish his sentence, I rush down the stairs. Before the front door I find Belu Z. slowly doing les cent pas. I take him by the hand, I pull him in the hallway of the block and I embrace him. We are both very moved.

The mystery of Time. The pranks life plays on us, the surprises it has in store for us always. “On the other side of the barricades”… How far away and “exterior” that scene seems: that tea in the 30s when he squabbled with Manole! The context. Well. Vanity of… Who would have suspected, back then, among cups, sandwiches, glasses and quotations, that we would both be customers (he a much more devoted one) of communist jails and that we would find ourselves again, me strengthened in my anticommunism, he cured of it?

Upstairs in the room we cannot stop talking and recounting. He proves to be more “reactionary” than me and very embarrassed, repentant. Which robs the dialectic of much of its irony and colors it with overt human tenderness.

July 1964

In the end everything is jumbled up: positions get hazy, prison years add up in geometric progression, the merry-go-around and the swing daze everyone. Two secrets gradually come out: 1) everybody is a little bit right and 2) every man is crazy although he thinks only the others are. In the beginning the Zionists and the legionaries, the peasants and the intellectuals, the liberals and the Cuzists[xvii], the communists and the social-democrats, the Carlists[xviii] and the Antonescists[xix] distrustfully got the wind of and stared at one another amazed. How can you be a Persian? In the end the routine of living together renders glasses with narrowing diopters obsolete, you begin to realize that everyone is right in some respects and that you may well be a Persian.

Pierre Lasserre’s theoretical explanation: the world is much too complex to be contained within a single systematization, no matter how grand this is. There is no doctrine able to give all the answers.

This does not mean you do not have the right to formulate convictions and support them. Chesterton: as long as it is my opinion, of course I consider it right and I believe in it, otherwise I would be dishonest.

I know, however, that human condition itself prevents you from believing and claiming to have found an absolute formula. Light and darkness are the same for all and rain falls on the good as well as on the bad.

Crazy, he’s crazy. Look how he eats the pearl barley, he lets it cool down and eats it cold. – Crazy, he’s totally crazy. Look how he gulps down the hot pearl barley, as if he couldn’t let it cool off a bit. And then he wonders why his stomach aches – he’s crazy, man, utterly crazy, he holds the cup in his left hand and washes himself with his right. Abnormal, you know that’s abnormal. Insane, really insane, what can you expect from a man – only by name – that washes his ass with his left hand, holding the cup in his right. Crazy, whenever you see him, he washes himself, that’s why we haven’t got any water. Crazy and stinking, he doesn’t wash in weeks. Have you ever seen him near the bucket? Didn’t I tell you he was crazy, look how he goes to bed face up with a handkerchief on his eyes. – What, am I as crazy and mad as him to sleep on my side with eyes uncovered to ruin my sight? – Crazy, only a madman can still admire Sadoveanu and Arghezi.[xx] – The man’s crazy and there’s nothing you can do about it, he’s learning poetry from dusk till dawn. – To have the opportunity to learn such beautiful poetry and not to use it is pure insanity. – Can’t you see he doesn’t take any time on the bog, as soon as he sits he’s up again. – Crazy… he sits on the bog forever, people like that deserve their punishment, you know.

It is not only everyone’s war against everyone else, but also a general and mutual certification of the state of madness. Shortly you understand that no one is crazy or, better even, that everyone is a little. Our walkie-talkie is usually tuned on a single wavelength and it seems to us – an audiovisual illusion – that any other length is aberrant.

Out of their custom, mania, whim or preference, everyone makes a rule of principle that they reckon universally valid, much like Kant’s moral principle. Says Kant that we should behave in such a way that we could become an example for all, and we have translated this like an unimproved electronic machine: anyone that doesn’t do things exactly like me, doesn’t wash, doesn’t hold the cup, doesn’t drink, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t relieve himself like me is crazy and worthy of any calamity.

They are all a little bit right. Even sectarians shed light on certain shortcomings of the great cults, not everything they say is childish. Even social-democrats sometimes utter wise things. Even… Look, for example Iorga.[xxi] Meanly murdered, the apostle of the nation, the scientist, the writer, the great journalist, the phenomenal worker, and the genius. They filmed the display of legionary corpses on the sidewalk at Cotroceni[xxii] after the murder of Armand Călinescu[xxiii]. The film features Iorga and Argetoianu[xxiv], there for the show. With the toe of his boot Iorga pushes a body away. At least this is what the legionaries tell me. There is his vindictiveness against anyone that had criticized him, turning them out of work, depriving them of their daily bread. His behavior, unforgiving to the end, towards E. Lovinescu[xxv] and Mircea Eliade, who had formulated moderate, respectful observations.

But the turpitude of the victim never pardons the killer. There is no excuse, therefore, for what happened in the forest at Stâlpnicul[xxvi], but only the conviction – for us and not for the killer – that the right and the wrong, the light and the darkness, the good and the bad are distributed in a more variegated manner than we think.

Bossuet’s words about abbot de Rance apply in fact perfectly to Iorga: c’est un homme contre lequel on ne saurait avoir raison. He is so great that you cannot be right over him.

Anyway, anytime I hear he is crazy, I smile and shudder, although I can see that no conviction is better established than this: everyone else is crazy, I’m the only one normal here. The superior man, says doctor Al.-G., is he who consolidates his personal emission wavelength and at the same time continuously widens his scale of reception.

I have learned another thing about madness: that what matters – in prison or extreme situations – is not to go crazy. George Orwell (1984): not by making yourself heard, but by staying sane could you carry on the heritage of man.

Why? Because madness is contagious and because any totalitarian regime is also mad.

It is. But on the other hand, the dialectic: many endured just because they were crazy. Madness substantiated many cases of saving one’s dignity. Maybe because the individual possessed by a monomania scorns more readily than others the temptation of goods.

Crazy. I myself have a well-established reputation of being crazy, especially among Jewish friends. How good this madness was for me in the last twenty-five years! What would I have done, had I not been crazy? You would have gone crazy! reason answers.

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

The only direct descendants from the Basarabi[xxvii], the Brădeşti… Marcellus tells Demetrios…

What are we left with in the end? With the poetry quoted by engineer Radu Rosetti, a good narrator of novels and especially Kipling’s short stories and who provides us with interesting details about the mission undertaken in March 1918 by his grandfather, colonel Radu Rosetti, who was commissioned by the royal pair and the government in Iaşi to explain the allied powers – in London and Paris – the signing of the peace in Bucharest. The lines are simple:

Life is mostly froth and bubble.

Two things stand like stone:

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

Simple, but their ideal is less modest than it seems.

1967

Something of the sort in Henry James: There are three important things in man’s life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If love for our neighbor is inaccessible to us in its essence, we can at least manifest it relationally in the form of kindness.

With Floriana[xxviii] about what she calls Marmeladov’s eschatology.

In the end, God will call all sinners in heaven as well. Come on in, you pigs, you drunks…

Because they were not conceited.

What is irretrievably antipathetic and repulsive with Pharisees is the continuous awareness of their own value and righteousness; the good man’s temptation of conceit.

The non-Christians are offended precisely by the sinners and the drunks being forgiven (there must be an error somewhere with the bookkeeping, the balance is not right). But Christians know better: that the sin of haughtiness is more serious than the habit of drinking.

(He says: you pigs, but he does not say: you sadists, you torturers, you denouncers…)

1932

Up on Traian Street, at a big number, there is a simple house, but not without some comfort: a garden with globes of colored glass, four spacious rooms around a hallway, with old furniture; only in the girls’ room there are too modern low sofas, upholstered in blue. In this house, reckoned – through setting, build and distribution – as entirely in accordance with honor by Manole, lives the family of engineer Sorin, a united and happy family. The parents only live to provide for any pleasure the girls may have. And they are good girls in fact, both students, they do not miss any lectures, seminars, plays or films. They read all the new books, they are always busy and everyone comes to see them, students, schoolchildren, cousins from the country and the capital, young writers, modernist poets, left-wing intellectuals. The latter prevail.

In one of the rooms there is a big book case, with both paperback and leatherback volumes; in the hallway there is the gramophone, in the dining room Mrs. Sorin prepares treats.

Sevastia and Silvia sometimes write small articles in extreme left-wing magazines, Silvia held a film review for some time, but they are not the center of the literary preoccupations in Traian Street, a few very avant-garde young poets and some journalists specialized on reports are. The Sorin girls’ cousin, Sirena Rabinovici, is the soul of this literary and political saloon, a girl with a black and curly shock of hair; a former student of medicine (she is reading philosophy at the moment), she is kind and tender to the people she supports, to those that give evidence of activism (this is the word she uses), but also capable of giving the others murderous looks and sharp words. Although Mr. Sorin, who is an engineer, wakes up early, the meetings last until very late in an atmosphere of great livelihood.

I am surprised, on coming in (it is one of the first days of November) by the fact that Sevastia is wearing black half gloves that do not cover the fingers entirely, called mitts, like elegant ladies used to wear in the old days, something très fin de siècle. Silvia, glad that everything related to her sister is noticed and causes a sensation, shows me that she is wearing them because she has read in a recent book on André Gide that the great writer used to put on such gloves in his youth. She smiles at me with watery eyes: “Has she not intellectual taste?”

While in the girls’ room Sevastia recites poetry sitting on the couch, her hands clutching her knees, and then everyone discusses the political context and hints at the working class party slip in, and bunch of youths who had their photographs taken stark naked and then sent them to Iorga’s house are glorified, I pass into Mr. and Mrs. Sorin’s bedroom, where there is no one. It is an old-fashioned bedroom with wooden beds laden with much flowery embroidery, the pillows and the duvets are heaped in the middle, there is also a big wardrobe with mirror, family photographs on the walls. The curtains are not drawn, out the window one can see the yard all the way to the street, it rains lightly, the street lamps are on. Above the beds are the faces of two old people, probably Mr. Sorin’s parents. Old Silberherz is wearing long whiskers and glasses. In the girls’ room the talks are heated. Boys and girls have gathered on the couch all around Sevastia. The theme of the debate is the future, which they are happy to anticipate and which they promise to deliver to everyone without exception, and to the whole world. I have the impression I see them not gathered together, but aligned on a shelf, subjected to Manole’s amused, condescending inspection.

What will be left of their letters (they write to each other a lot), their little articles and debates? Maybe in libraries, at the periodicals section, a few stray issues of some forgotten literary magazines, present only in the notes and documentary machinery of various works, where their often strange, ostentatious, frolicsome names will give later readers feelings of nostalgia.

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

…The Tigris, the Euphrates, Faison and Geon, Moesha and Abed-Neoga…

December 1971

An evening spent at Magdalena S.’s in a small circle. From one of the guests I find out details about the Sorin sisters and their once usual guests and about other literary saloons – well – with similar tendencies – especially about a certain Rudich family’s.

I was deeply wrong. Of the guests that used to frequent the semi-central houses of Jewish merchants and free-lances there are not only footnotes left in textbooks of literary history; there are more palpable memories.

Most of them taking – like Goethe’s descendants in Ollănescu-Ascanio’s reception speech – the Rabinovici Sirens’ advice, were active after 23 August[xxix] and did not remain unknown: some managed to distinguish themselves, at the same time confirming a few of their not only moderate but also extremist opponents’ theories. Among the guests of the Sorins, a few rose high. (One poor guy killed himself while on the rise.) And among the young men photographed naked, at least one is well-known to this day under the name of Aurel Baranga.[xxx]

After a period of intransigent diligence (Felicia Brey., daughter of a great banker, former schoolchild at Regina Maria[xxxi] College, asked in 1948 by a classmate for a reference in order to obtain a job as a worker, denounces her in writing as a landlord’s daughter, a fascist, racist, exploiting, while Felicia’s husband, wearing the uniform of a Securitate officer, as if in a hurry to change the setting on a revolving stage, proves to be a sturdy defender of the same working class conquests that were once extolled in the house of engineer Sorin) followed another of no less than total disappointment. Felicia Brey.’s husband – the father of two children called Vladimir and Lenina – is not wearing his major’s uniform anymore. Many of the staff in charge cannot bear the successive waves of relegation. So the picture has changed again. They are not diligent anymore. Most of them are now scattered all over the world (in New Zealand, Brazil, Holland, Spain, Canada – even Israel). Sevastia Sorin is in Argentina, Silvia died in Australia, after having been married to a great diamonds merchant. Others, still in the country, struggle to obtain the highest possible pensions and special allowances as old communist outlaws. They have trouble with the new staff service – oh, how I believe and understand them – and with the new machinery of the state that inexplicably regards them with indifference and even with a lack of sympathy.

Our tonight’s hostess is no longer head of the Supreme Court: after not being more than a judge in a regional court, she is now retired.

Their main diversion now is telling jokes (against the regime), of which they know myriads – however, not so many that they would not have to repeat them. Silent, I am caught in an avalanche of jokes purposively told – surprise, surprise! – with a slight Jewish accent. The conversation turns into a sort of oratorio made of recitatives where everyone brings in their respective contributions of bitterness by telling a joke, but not before asking – sketching out their apprehension with a dubitative gesture and knitting their eye-brows – if people know it. They do (as the number of jokes does not form a series aspiring to infinity), but since they apply a tacit convention (of mutual help and general lenience), all present declare themselves ignorant and ready to listen. The effect is monotonously ritualistic and quasi-totemic.

Sainte-Beuve was therefore right when he said: Il n’y a que de vivre; on voit tout et le contraire de tout.

Here we have the guests of the Sorins and the Rudichs now feeling offended and disillusioned. Mystics turned into politics and politics into resentment.

BOOGEY MAMBO RAG

…be careful to pour the hot chocolate sauce on the semolina, which needs to have cooled off…

“There you have it: from now on you

see yourself condemned to shout ‘Me, me, me’ at nothing,

and there is no answer to that.”

Saint Exupéry

But not only former guests of the Sorins, the Rudichs and others’. There is a general resentment. The jokes are all over the place. They are all disappointed, in themselves and in one another, the announcers of the happy world. The passport service, the new forms, getting in line with the masses again have made them sour. Resigned, pensioned off, transferred, tired, bored, sick of envy and ambition, they only crave for big capacity fridges any more, for central apartments, imported cars, bank accounts, fresh Prague ham, beef fillet and individual trips.

The enthusiastic and magnanimous days of 1946 are gone, when Mrs. Neuman, wife of a great merchant and mogul, taking part in a game of canasta for popcorn in high society – is money worth anything anymore? – sheds a tear midway through the game (although she is not losing, heaps of golden coins rise in front of her) and answers the other players’ discreet question: no, I’m not in pain, but I keep thinking of the Vietnamese children.

From then on, other closer worries troubled her: her son-in-law, himself the party’s general cashier, served some time; peace was signed in Vietnam, there were the Korean children, an armistice was signed there as well, they shot Calmanovici, Steluţi killed herself when they arrested her boy, and God knows what else happened.

They have all had it with each other – yes, all – their friends and colleagues disappointed them, thankful is no one, everything is ugliness, boredom, void. Their eagerness, their trust in beautiful tomorrow and faith in the party were replaced by the dusk of sour old age.

But is it not the same among former political convicts? The memory of prison years is gone. I almost regret their absence. (Like Gambetta used to miss the National Assembly where he had been a minority and under attack, but had lived among the most distinguished and refined people of his country.)

The observation in Imitatio Christi regarding the inevitable character of disappointment at the end of life, of any affair, happening, regarding the feeling of complete emptiness and incurable bitterness is valid for all, no matter on whose side they are. Former political convicts disappointed each other as well: some were dishonest, others slanderous, ungrateful, spiteful, careerists… If you mention jail to some of them, they will shrug, consider you a bore, decrepit and senile.

Trixi, who was set free in ‘62, found a job as a very unimportant clerk. Then she was a teacher of western foreign languages at a people’s democratic legation. She now has a better job, not a great one, though. Her luck was she got an inheritance from the West and she is allowed to travel there pretty often.

After 23 August, Petre Iosif (doctor L. Brauchfeld) was appointed head of the Opera House (he could only play violin); he then worked at the Central Committee[xxxii]; his disappointment made him apply for and obtain an “ideal position”: he is a cultural attaché in Rome.

They make jokes, tell anecdotes, they go back on their word.

And think they are delivered.

Only everything is more complicated than that. Not all sinners have the right to bear the cross, Ion Caraion[xxxiii] tells me, and then explains:

In order to be able to crucify and set yourself free, you must:

first repent, confess your faults in public, denounce yourself and admit: I was wrong! I was an animal!

Secondly cleanse yourself through self-imposed suffering, passing through the desert stage, the hermitage, the purifying fire;

only then can the third step follow, only then do you get the right, the privilege to bear the cross.

You do not simply bear the cross at will, you do not cross the borders by telling a joke.

If those filled with remorse or political disappointments or turned sour by investigations and interviews (they denounced each other), by cohabitation (where they exasperated and hated each other), by the staff, by the changing of the guard have so visibly decomposed, what would I look like with the mire behind me, with my wasted and pigsty of a life? Were I not a Christian!

Here I am, though. The bells are now calling me, too, in a friendly and familiar manner. In a way, I can reveal myself like in Hauff’s Caravan: “Ich bin der Raeuber Orbazan”. Christianity conserves my youth, saves me from boredom, disappointment, disgust, anger. I owe it to Christ’s continuously refreshing presence that I do not yeast and ferment in hatred for others and for myself. This is my unusual, my unexpected luck: to be fated to believe in God and in Christ, while in fact knowing what Unamuno said: to believe in God is to want him to exist and to behave as if he did.

Only by being a Christian am I visited – in spite of reason – by happiness, this strange fluke. Only thanks to Christianity do I not walk – uptight, offended the diurnal and nocturnal streets of the town – a Proustian space decomposed by time – nor do I get to be myself – as François Mauriac said in Destinies – one of those living corpses that the flowing waters of life carry along, and to count among those that have not yet understood – The Acts 20:35 – that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

N. STEINHARDT (1912-1989) was a prose writer, literary critic and translator, but also – to quote the critic Valeriu Cristea – “an extraordinary moralist, a philosopher, a jurist, historian, advisor, guide, almost a preacher, a man who aims to edify.” His works include In the Way of the Young (under the pseudonym Antisthius, 1934), Essay on a Catholic Conception of Judaism (1935), Between Life and Books (1976), Literary Uncertainties (1980), The Diary of Happiness (1991) – an enormous success in Romania, The Danger of Confession (1993), The Journey of a Prodigal Son (1995).