‘Please, don’t insist. I feel there’s nothing more ridiculous these days than beginning something — whatever it might be. I’m certain the earth will quake tomorrow, so I’m not going to start building a house today. You’re well aware how ridiculous it would be. It’s out of the question. This is a time for demolition, not construction.’
*
He’s lived in the same house since 1923. Everything is as it was when I met him first, the long rectangular curtainless window, the camp bed, the books, the small Brueghel on the wall … And he himself, in a long house coat, under the light of his desk lamp, seems unchanged. He speaks slowly, defining as he goes, checking each hypothesis, responding to his own questions, overturning his own objections.
As he is calm and self-controlled, who can judge how pressing the problems preoccupying him are? Listening to him, I often have a sense of being with a chemist who, with a vial of ecrasite in his hand, declaims on the explosive qualities of the human body. And that this cold person is the most passionate and tumultuous of men.
I reminded him of our first conversations here, of the 1923 course on ‘the development of the idea of value’, the indignation of the specialists, and how amazed we students were … I pulled an atlas from the shelf and opened on the map of Europe to mark with a pencil the very centres of crisis, which now validate the predictions he made back then.
He took the pencil from my hand and pointed to the centre of the map: Vienna.
‘This is the pressure point. From here everything will fracture. Observe how from a clearly trivial matter, like the Anschluss, a totally disproportionate point of tension is created. Everybody takes a side in the game, everybody joins in, and the more deadly the stakes, the more desperate the pressure. When things collapse, they will collapse completely.’
Leaning over the map, he looked like a general reviewing the course of a battle that is imminent.
*
There’s not much to do in the workshop, so I almost always attend Ghiţă Blidaru’s course. The slide in the British pound has for the last three weeks fuelled his lectures and given them the vivacity of a serialized novel. From one lecture to the next, a new set of monetary certainties falls apart. The professor receives the latest reports on the disasters with professional detachment, but I find it hard to credit that the general collapse provides him with any satisfaction. However, I don’t think the monetary phenomenon interests him except insofar as it is a symptom and an element of disintegration. A strong currency means, in any case, a focus of value, which automatically guarantees the stability of all values, at whatever level you care to look, whether in economics or culture. A provisional stability, obviously, but real nonetheless. Conversely, monetary inflation provokes instability in every aspect of life, and first of all in the collective mind. (Isn’t revolutionary Germany a result in large measure of the years of inflation? — this is a question for Blidaru.)
Sometimes at the professor’s course I feel like we’re gathered together in a kind of ideological headquarters of an immense world war, waiting from hour to hour for telegrams about the catastrophe, dreaming of the new world that will be born from its ashes.
For the moment, beneath the surface, the old strata silently shift. Ghiţă Blidaru has a fine sense of hearing.
3
The first telegram from Uioara didn’t look too serious. ‘Men at Well A 19 refusing to work.’ It’s not the first time. The only thing that strikes me as odd is the sending of a telegram when so many telephone lines are free. At the offices in Piaţa Rosetti, however, everybody was calm.
An attempt was made in the afternoon to make contact with Uioara, but it proved impossible. The operator in Câmpina gave the same response for an hour: ‘Uioara is not replying. Probably there’s a fault with the line.’ It was quite plausible, but I found it suspicious. ‘Perhaps you should warn old Ralph,’ I suggested half seriously. They laughed. ‘Where will we look for him? We’d have to search all Europe. Anyway, we can’t trouble him for every trifle.’
At seven that evening Hacker, from accounting, burst into the office. He’d come straight from Uioara, with two punctured tyres, an overheated engine about to ignite, a shattered windscreen and the half the hood torn away. I was at the workshop and was immediately called to Piaţa Rosetti. En route, the master was silent and pale.
Truth told, Hacker’s news was less alarming than the figure he cut. He had been imprudent enough to pass through New Uioara, where people protested with a bit of stone-throwing, which is really nothing serious. The real danger, should it arise, is Old Uioara, where the wells and refinery are. But at that point there were just the beginnings of a more than usually contentious strike.
‘I fear for the refinery,’ said Hacker. ‘They’d all gathered there in big groups, talking. The ones from the refinery were still working when I left, but who knows what’s happened since then? Or even if anyone’s left at the factory, so that we have electricity. Lord preserve us from darkness! I think it’s just what the plum brandy drinkers of New Uioara are waiting for. It was them who cut the phone lines.’
I waited all night for news. Not from Uioara, which we were definitively out of contact with, but from the Interior Ministry and Prahova Prefecture. There was a terrible commotion at the office. Marjorie had come too, with Marin. She was very concerned, yet self-controlled. She was absolutely determined to leave immediately for Uioara, with Hacker’s car, which she said she’d drive on her own.
The master had a faraway look. Just once he said to me: ‘I’d be sad if they went and destroyed Uioara on us.’
*
The morning papers are alarmist and confused. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. Two directors from the office have gone to negotiate, accompanied by a Ministry of Labour representative and preceded by platoons of police. Certainly, things could settle down if it were just a labour dispute. Is that all it is? I doubt it.
However vague the information we’ve received is so far, it seems there are two distinct movements in Uioara, though they’re both caught up in the same storm. The first group is made up of refinery, factory and oil workers, all from Old Uioara. Then there are the viticulturists in New Uioara. The first group have wage demands, while the second group ask for nothing. They just want to go down to Old Uioara and destroy it. The oil revolt and the plum-tree revolt.
There’s unanimous enthusiasm at the Central. On Calea Victoriei, a rumble of war. It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming! What is? Revolution, obviously.
This morning, speaking to me, Ştefan Pârlea looked transfigured.
‘You know, I feel our moment has come. I feel we’re about to leave mediocrity behind. Leave it behind, even though we pass through blood, through flames. There’s no other way. We’ll be stifled otherwise. When you’re suffocating in a house filled with gas fumes you don’t waste time opening the windows: you smash them.’
*
The master, Dronţu and I tried to slip off to Uioara in Hacker’s Ford, which has nothing to lose anyway. But it was impossible. At Câmpina we were turned back by the police.
What has happened beyond there? Nobody knows. The most sinister rumours are going around. That the peasants from New Uioara have burned down the refinery, that they’ve emptied the fuel tanks, flooding the whole internal line with crude, that they’ve barricaded the Americans in the offices, that they’ve attacked the police with rocks, that the police opened fire, that sixty people are dead …