I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette. I thought of taking her back to my place, but the driver was heading in the direction of Calea Victoriei and I couldn’t be bothered telling him to turn around. I dropped her off at the Central. She gave me a soldierly salute from the doorway, her finger to the usual imaginary cap. A smile that communicated nothing flickered on her lips.
I went back to the Central yesterday out of curiosity and stayed the whole evening. I had nothing else to do. It was too early to go home and the weather was too bad for walking around. Five minutes, another five, another five. Someone came and asked me for 26 lei, someone else for a cigarette, someone else for 3 lei for a newspaper. I had the feeling I knew everybody and perhaps I did in fact know them, from the street, the tram or somewhere else.
‘I should go,’ I said to myself several times, but felt too lazy to stand up. Vally, going from table to table, acknowledged me with a few words in passing.
‘Still here?’ she asked casually, not pausing for a reply.
In Ştefan Pârlea’s group they were discussing ‘disintegration’. The boys followed the conversation with great concentration, as though each had personally borne witness to the stages of this breakdown. Watching them falling under the narcotic spell of the discussion — some of them pale, others earnest and tense — made me want to bang my fist on the table to snap them out of it. ‘They need to be stampeded,’ I thought. ‘They need to be cleared out of here urgently; they’ll never get out of their own volition.’ As if putting up a weary struggle against sleep, I was myself unable to arise from my seat. ‘Oblomov,’ I reflected, recalling that lazy Slavic hero. ‘A café full of Oblomovs. And me, among them, on the way to becoming one.’
We left late, all together. Outside, they bid each other farewell at various street corners, taking the unfinished debate on to their neighbourhoods in smaller groups. After Lipscani Street a fellow happened to be walking alongside me.
‘You live around Carol Park.’
‘Yes … more or less …’
I felt awkward walking alongside someone I didn’t know and to whom I had nothing to say. I tried to make conversation, as the silence was intolerable, but it was no good. I couldn’t find much to say and he didn’t feel much like replying.
I turned right at the Church of the Holy Apostles, thinking he would carry on ahead towards Antim Street. But he turned the corner with me. I made one last attempt on Emigratului Street, too insignificant a street for his route to coincide with mine. He followed me. I was furious with him and would have liked to stop there and then and demand to know where he was going. But I restrained myself, as there weren’t more than a hundred paces left to my door, and once there I quickly extended my hand, taking him by surprise, thereby leaving my farewell half-accomplished.
‘What? … You’re going?’
‘Yes. Goodnight.’
He stood there on the footpath, in front of my gate, leaning against a lamppost with his hands in his pockets, suddenly disoriented, as though he’d just missed a train. I took several steps into the yard, unsure whether I should turn around. I had an intense feeling of relief, which an inner voice summed up nicely as: ‘He can go to hell.’ But I also felt I was doing something ‘one ought not to do’. I felt a vague sense of shame, and I foresaw that it would not let me be. I know how I am. I’m not incapable of committing certain minor infamies to protect my personal peace. But once committed, the memory of them nags at me like a speck of dirt in my eye.
I turned back to him, fed up, and snapped:
‘What are you doing here? Why don’t you go and sleep?’
He shrugged and smiled (probably at the naivety of the question).
‘Where do you live?’
‘Hmm! Wherever.’
My first thought was this: ‘How good it would be to be upstairs already, in my room, alone in bed, making myself at home, turning on the bedside lamp to read.’ To be alone at that moment seemed the greatest happiness possible.
‘Come on, you can sleep here.’I went on, cursing him in my thoughts with utter fury and cursing myself for this bit of unforeseen bad luck. We undressed in silence, me furious, he unperturbed.
What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him.
I won’t be able to sleep. There’s no point shutting my eyes, I won’t sleep. It’s better if I accept insomnia and resign myself to wakefulness. He’s worn out. What has happened this evening probably happens to him every evening. Nothing that need bother him.
A stranger sleeps next to me, like a stone beside another stone.
He’s the first person ever to enter my life without knocking. Everyone I know, I know on the basis of an implicit pact of solitude. ‘Look, this is me, that’s you, I can give this much, you that much; we’ve shaken hands and have thereby sworn comradeship as regards certain things, ideas, memories — the rest is off limits, remains within ourselves, we’re well brought up and will never overstep the boundaries or open the doors which we have closed.’ The pact is clear, the parties well defined: me, you.
A single stranger sleeps next to me and I feel like a whole crowd has come in with him. He hasn’t said anything to me, I haven’t said anything to him, but I feel I have nothing else to say to him, nor to hide from him.
*
‘Revolution … Could be. Within a month, two, three,’ say the boys at the Central. Ştefan Pârlea is more specific:
‘By George’s day the gallows will be busy.’
Perhaps they’ve got the dates and modalities wrong. But they’re not wrong about the atmosphere, which is suffocating.
Where do they come from, these crazy, homeless, superfluous, empty-headed, empty-handed boys, with their undefined roles and blind expectations?
They sleep here tonight, there tomorrow, the night after that they don’t sleep at all. They spend their lives passing from one table to another, looking for a penny, a cigarette, or a bed for the night. From time to time one of them finds a rallying call, a message for everybody, an absolute truth, and he elbows his way to the front. After a day or two, after a weekend or two, they lose their way out of boredom or the boredom of those around them.
‘We’re going to put them up against the wall.’ I’ve heard that expression a thousand times. I bump into an avenger at every street corner.
Who is it they’re going to put up against the wall? That hasn’t been clearly established yet. The bourgeoisie, the old, those with paunches, the complacent? It’s all confused, blind, chaotic. They’re all discouraged and strung out. They’re worn out with waiting. This endless wait that consumes hours, days and years and still has room in its belly. This goalless, limitless, aimless waiting, a pure state of expectation, composed of nerves and tension.
‘It has to collapse, it absolutely has to collapse …’
‘What does?’
‘Everything.’
2
I accompanied the master and Professor Ghiţă to Snagov to take a look at the professor’s plot. It’s a small site belonging to the association of teaching staff, in which Blidaru has reserved 200 square metres with the idea of one day building himself a house. He doesn’t seem at all inclined to build now. The site is well positioned, on the side furthest from Bucharest, with a vantage above the lake that would allow us to create a superb terrace. I’d like to build the house just for the pleasure of such a terrace. The master and I both tried to convince him, but the professor appears determined not to begin anything.