An alert this morning. Air raids on Ploiesti and Brasov.
The fighting in Italy remains intense — but this does not stop the British and Americans from pummeling us too. Well, anyway, we have had three weeks’ grace.
In my view, as soon as something new happens at the fronts (the fall of Rome, an invasion, a Russian offensive), we’ll see another round of bombings here, perhaps worse than the last. I am thinking of leaving then — but will it be possible?
I am translating Vient de paraître for Sică. He has a season at the Studio and wants to open it in a few days’ time with Steaua fără nume. But I don’t think he’ll actually manage it by then.
The war is here, even if it sometimes leaves us in peace for a few days.
Monday, 5 June
Rome has been occupied by the Allies.
The news thrills us less today, nine months after the Italian armistice, but it is still a splendid twist of fate!
We are too tired to rejoice. We need an end to the war, not intermediate victories.
I had a conversation with Şeicaru5 on Friday evening at Curentul. He is a swine of a man. I feel disgusted that I talked to him at all.
All quiet on our air front. Four weeks without a raid on Bucharest. How much longer will it last?
I translated Bourdet’s Vient de paraître for Sicâ in four days.
I might leave tomorrow with Aristide for three or four days in Butimanu.
Tuesday, 6 June
The Allies are landing in France, on the Normandy coast. The invasion has begun. Eisenhower has made a declaration to the peoples of Europe. Churchill says that four thousand large ships and eleven thousand aircraft are taking part in the operation.
Saturday, 10 June
I returned yesterday from Butimanu, where I spent three days with Alice and Aristide. Nothing pleasant, apart from a visit for lunch to the home of Mrs. Culag at Bujoreanca (a splendid mansion, with a veranda straight out of Sadoveanu). The idyll of country life has too many drawbacks, what with the fleas, the dust, and so on. But the fields are beautiful everywhere. I could lie in the grass and never leave. I long for the mountains. I long for the sea. I long even for Corcova.
All the time I was in the country I was restless and impatient to know how the invasion was going. We had newspapers, but they were not enough.
Now that I am back and up with the news, I realize that since the first breathtaking moments, the rest has been proceeding at a slower pace. The crucial fact is that the landing has taken place, that the Allied divisions have a foothold on the continent. So the “Atlantic wall” was not an impassable barrier, nor did the “secret weapons” sort everything out.
Sunday, 11 June
An alert yesterday, another one this morning. Distant thunder. The dull sound of aircraft passing overhead without dropping any bombs. Yesterday, it seems, there were machine-gun attacks on cars, carts, and people on foot in the vicinity of Bucharest.
It’s strange that they have time for raids on Romania when they are so busy in Italy and France.
Tuesday, 20 June
In Normandy, after marking time for a while, the Allies have cut across the Cotentin and are approaching Cherbourg.
The offensive is continuing in Italy, with Perugia on the point of falling.
In Finland the Soviet offensive launched a week ago directly threatens Vyborg.
And yet the whole DNB press has been jubilant for the past three days. Triumphant shouts, sensational banner headlines, as in the headiest moments of German victory. What’s going on? The secret weapon has been unveiled! A pilotless aircraft! A mysterious rocket. Wunderwajfe. Hell’s hound! London ablaze! Millions in England flee in panic! London destroyed! London evacuated!
I had lunch with Camil at the Continental. At the next table were Onicescu, Crainic, Dragos Protopopescu, Ivascu — all four beaming with joy.
“At last!” Onicescu exclaimed.
“But it’s not enough,” Crainic added. “Washington must be hit— Washington!”
A boy passed by with the afternoon papers. Onicescu opened one and read it aloud as the others expressed their amazement and enthusiasm.
In the end, people always see what their point of view allows them to see.
The facts are the same for Onicescu and for myself. We read the same papers and know the same things, but everything is fundamentally different for him and for me, as if we lived on two different planets.
Good Lord, can human intelligence really be such a ridiculous instrument? Is Onicescu an imbecile? In the two years since I saw him last, waiting at a table at the Capşa for Rommel to enter Alexandria, the war has changed in the most radical way. Yet the facts pass him by and leave him with exactly the same smile, the same unshaken assurance. A fixed idea signals a closed universe.
Tuesday, 27 June
The Allies took Cherbourg yesterday. The DNB press spells out how Montgomery’s plans have failed. He had wanted at all costs to capture the port in two days — and it took him twenty. Moreover the town is completely destroyed and does not represent any real gain.
In Finland, after the fall of Vyborg, the Russians are advancing in two directions.
In Russia, on the central front, a major Soviet offensive was launched on the symbolically important 22nd of June. Vitebsk has already fallen.
It is a sharp moment for the whole evolution of the war. July and August may bring things to a head, but in any event we have a sense that there is no longer room for pauses.
Things are quiet here for the moment. There were air-raid alerts on Friday and Saturday morning (bombers over Ploiesti), but nothing fell on the capital.
I have finished Volume VII of the Pléiade Balzac—Les chouans—a laborious but interesting read. (The action takes place in Normandy, more or less in the zone of the landings.) Now I have started Volume VIII. I am reading Les paysans, especially for the light it throws on the origins of Balzac’s political attitudes. He is a reactionary without being hypocritical about it. But the novelist is stronger than, and cancels out, the doctrinaire. I’d like to write about this — and much else besides.
Zissu’s wife is a strange woman. She came here in a cab to collect me, and I couldn’t get away from her. Yesterday, another walk on the $osea.
She lets her imagination run wild, eagerly trying to be interesting. She puts on the most absurd acts, for no other reason than to arouse other people’s curiosity. On Saturday she told me that Nae Ionescu once asked for her hand in marriage. And yesterday — I shudder to think of it! — she confessed that she had last year, and still has, a strong “béguin”6 for me. If I had wanted and understood, if I now wanted and understood. .
I did all I could to wriggle out of it. She is crazy and lies deliberately, setting up emotional scenes and then acting them out. A real case, that’s for sure.
Wednesday, 28 June
There was an air raid this morning. I don’t yet know what it was like elsewhere, but it was pretty serious in our part of the city. A bomb in Strada Apolodor, one in Bateriilor, one in Iuliu Rosea. The arsenal is on fire. Thick smoke drifts over the houses. There is a clinking of broken glass all over the neighborhood, and glass fragments and dust lie in the streets. In the shelter I felt at least once that danger was close, when the blast from an explosion hit the walls. A cloud of dust and smoke followed, even though it had been quite a long way off. How strange the “all clear” then sounds! All clear for whom? For us who emerge safe and in one piece? Or for the others?