Gaudeamus E-Book

Mircea Eliade

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 373

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In this exuberant and touching portrait of youth, Eliade recounts the fictional version of his university years in late 1920's Bucharest. Marked by a burgeoning desire to 'suck out all the marrow of life', the protagonist throws himself into his studies; engaging his professors and peers in philosophical discourse, becoming one of the founding members of the Student's Union, and opening---up the attic refuge of his isolated teenage years as a hotspot for political debate and romantic exploration. Readers will recognize in these pages the joy of a life about to blossom, of the search for knowledge and the desire for true love. Already an accomplished writer as a young man, this follow-up to his Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent reveals a keen observer of human behaviour, a seeker of truth and spiritual fulfillment whose path would eventually lead him to become the ultimate historian of 20th-century religions.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Foreword by Bryan Rennie, British historian of religions

GAUDEAMUS 1928

Part One

One: The Setting

Two: The Chairman

Three: Nonora

Four: Intermezzo

Five: The Professor

Six: Spring

Seven: Works and Days

Eight: The Trip to the Monastery

Nine: Her Name is Nişka!

Ten: L’Heure Sexuelle

Eleven: My Friend Is In Love

Twelve: Storm at the Hermitage

Thirteen: Departure

Fourteen: End of the Holidays

Fifteen: Mysteries

Sixteen: The Newspaper Office

Seventeen: My Girlfriend in Autumn

Eighteen: Jassy

Nineteen: Petre’s Nemesis

Twenty: The Characters Judge the Author

Twenty-One: Death

Twenty-Two: Light in Rome

Twenty-Three: Meditation on Two Autumns

Part Two

Letter One

Letter Two

Letter Three

Letter Four

Letter Five

Letter Six

Letter Seven

Letter Eight

Letter Nine

Letter Ten

Letter Eleven

Letter Twelve

Letter Thirteen

Part Three

Afterword by Sorin Alexandrescu, Professsor of Cultural and Visual Studies at the University of Bucharest, and Mircea Eliade’s nephew

The Author

The Translator

Mircea Eliade

GAUDEAMUS

Translated from the Romanian by Christopher Bartholomew

First published in 2018 by Istros Books

London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

Copyright © Estate of Mircea Eliade, 2018

The right of Mircea Eliade to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation © Christopher Bartholomew, 2018

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

ISBN: 978-1-908236-34-0 (print edition)

ISBN: 978-1-912545-05-6 (MOBI)

ISBN: 978-1-912545-06-3(ePub)

Istros Books wishes to acknowledge the financial support granted by the Romanian Cultural Institute

FOREWORD BY BRYAN RENNIE

Gaudeamus igiturIuvenes dum sumus.Post iucundam iuventutemPost molestam senectutemNos habebit humus.

Let us rejoice, thenWhile we are young.After pleasant youthAfter distressing old ageThe earth will have us.

Thus runs the commercium song or student anthem for which Mircea Eliade entitled his novel, Gaudeamus. Originating in the Middle Ages but given its familiar form in the late 18th century, this paean to seizing the day is belted out to this day at university gatherings around the world. Likewise concerned with ‘seizing the day’, Eliade’s Gaudeamus, written between February and March of 1928, is a coming-of-age novel based on his undergraduate years at the University of Bucharest (1925 to 1928). His earlier novel, Romanul adolescenului miop (Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, Istros Books, 2016) had focused on the final years of his Liceu (Lycée) education and had been serialized in its entirety in the Bucharest periodicals Cuvântul, Viața Literară, and Universul Literar in the 1920s, but the manuscript of Gaudeamus had a different trajectory. Finished before Eliade’s departure for India in 1928, it remained among his papers in the family house on Strada Melodiei in Bucharest. Only three pages, described as an ‘excerpt’ from Gaudeamus, appeared in Viața literară in March of 1928. Eliade attempted without success to place the manuscript with the publisher, Cartea Românească, but the novel was to wait more than fifty years to appear in print. Eliade did revisit and reread it in 1932–33, when, according to his Autobiography, he found it ‘both lyrical and frenzied, too pretentious, timidly indiscreet, and quite lacking in grandeur’. He never again tried to have it published, nor, indeed to have any contact with it. The house was demolished in 1935 and the manuscript passed into the possession of his younger sister Cornelia (Corina) Alexandrescu. It was not until 1981 that a high school teacher and Eliade enthusiast, Mircea Handoca, along with the philosopher, essayist, and poet, Constantin Noica, were given access to Mme. Alexandrescu’s attic and recovered the manuscript. Together they assembled the first 2,500 typed pages of Eliade’s writings from 1921 up to 1928. Several chapters from Gaudeamus appeared in three issues of the journal Manuscriptum in 1983, three years before Eliade’s death, but the entire text of the novel did not appear until 1986 when it was published in Revista de istoire și teorie literară and then again as a single volume with Romanul adolescenului miop in 1989. Curiously, the three-page passage from Viața literară was absent from the final version of the manuscript. Thereafter Gaudeamus was translated into French in 1992 and Italian in 2012, and now appears for the first time in English.

The novel is, of course, a testimony to a vanished world – the Bucharest of the late 1920s, specifically the life of the university student of the time, but it is more than just that. Eliade’s principal biographer, Mac Linscott Ricketts, deems it a document of inestimable importance, ‘a precious testimony to one phase of Eliade’s personal spiritual itinerary’.1 It also can be read as evidence (positive or negative?) of Eliade’s literary status, of the development of his understanding of the history of religions, of his relation to anti-Semitism, and of his unfortunate sexism – and these four interdigitate intriguingly. Of course, as a novel it is difficult (but not always impossible) to know when we can recognize Eliade in the protagonist. Ricketts assesses the novel as ‘being (up to a certain point in the narrative) a candid and authentic account of the author’s actions and thoughts. At those points where it can be checked against other sources, it shows itself to be factual and reliable’.2 For example, Eliade’s Autobiography informs us that the principle female character, Nișka, is based on Eliade’s real-life friend, Rica Botez, the name of the character being taken from a friend of Rica’s. But, at the same time, some events were clearly fictionalized. This inseparable intertwining of fact and fiction is one of the primary characteristics of Eliade’s trăirist style in which he seeks to invoke an inescapable authenticity.

The critic, Eugen Simion, sees Gaudeamus as a notable novel for two other reasons. Firstly, it introduces the ‘young generation’ of 1920s Bucharest on a wide front, from sexuality to philosophy, and secondly, it attempts an innovative reinterpretation of the psychology of the couple: ‘The author’s thesis is that the post-war generation is destined to seek God and that the redeemed are but the insane, that is, those fleeing from sentimental and cerebral mediocrity, from the illusion of comfortable happiness’.3 As a Bildungs­roman, Gaudeamus shows the influence of authors whom we know Eliade to have read: André Gide, Giovanni Papini, Henrik Ibsen, and Jack London, but it does not follow them slavishly. Commenting on the Italian translation, the Historian of Religions, Giovanni Casadio, pointed out that Gaudeamus plays on three themes in three different registers. The first is the author’s relation to the bohemian world of students and professors, and it sounds a comic/realistic tone with tinges of farce. The second concerns Eliade’s relations with women and his intimate ‘romantic education’. This uses a romantic/idyllic mode with spikes of harsh realism. The third theme is Eliade’s dialogue with his own will and ego, couched in melodramatic mode; sometimes restrained, as in the novel’s almost elegiac opening: ‘The chestnut trees were wet after the rain, the boulevards were cold. Above me, only autumnal sky. … I felt hopes and desires swelling and anxiously stirring …’, sometimes emerging with astonishing arrogance, as in the final – ‘My soul is harsh, vast, serene. I sense the others left behind me, and before me, the glimmers of destiny’ – echoing the titanic pride of Hyperion in the closing of Eminescu’s Luceafărul.4

Eliade wrote Gaudeamus in two week-long bursts in February and March of 1928 while staying at a friend’s house in Clinceni about twenty-five kilometres outside of Bucharest. That same year he was working on the tezei de licență (the thesis required for his Bachelor’s degree), which he defended in October. His thesis was on ‘Renaissance Contributions to Philosophy’, to which he also referred to as ‘Italian Philosophy from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno’.5 Thus we can be comfortable that he was already aware of, and undoubtedly influenced by, both the Italian Renaissance humanists and their precursors such as Dante Alighieri and Boccaccio, whom we know from the Autobiography that Eliade had read in his youth. It seems beyond doubt that among the many contributions to Eliade’s understanding of the history of religion was Ficino, whose translations of Plato introduced the term ‘Platonic Love’ to Renaissance Italy and whose translations of the Corpus Hermeticum supported the idea that all truth is one. Of the twelfth chapter of the book, Storm at the Hermitage, Ricketts is confident enough to say ‘I believe that the views on religion expressed by the narrator of the book are indeed Eliade’s own at that time’. Here, not only does the narrator repeatedly express his inability to believe in God, he also expresses an understanding of the development of the monotheistic God that is clearly indebted to the work of Raffaele Pettazzoni, with whom the young Eliade had corresponded since 1922.

Accusations of anti-Semitism have long dogged Eliade’s path, unsurprisingly, since he gave his enthusiastic written support to the Legion of the Archangel Michael for about a year spanning 1936-1937. The Legion was a fervently Nationalist Romanian political organization which spawned the terrible Iron Guard (Garda de fier), guilty of heinous anti-Semitic atrocities. Eliade never disavowed his support for the Legion and some have seen this as incontrovertible evidence of his anti-Semitism. Others (including myself, to be fully open) have defended Eliade against these accusations, pointing out that he cannot be accused of any known actions against any Jewish person or persons – especially of no acts of literary defamation for which he had infinite opportunity. Gaudeamus provides fuel for this debate. Although there is casual reference to anti-Semitism throughout the book, not only is this an accurate representation of the Bucharest of 1928, but it is never ascribed to or embraced by the narrator. On the contrary, one of his student friends warns him that ‘Before long you’ll turn into an anti-Semite too …’ – implying that he is known not to be such. In fact, the narrator explicitly denies being anti-Semitic, and those who do (proudly!) identify themselves as anti-Semitic are either very dubious characters, such as ‘Melec’ and ‘the Boss’ who gate-crash a student gathering in the narrator’s attic; or profoundly confused, such as the young medical student who is engaged to, and obviously in love with, a Jewish girl, yet still claims to be an anti-Semite. Although little is overtly made of the fact in the novel, one of the narrator’s best friends, ‘Marcu’ is known to be based on one of Eliade’s real friends, Mircea Mărculescu, who was Jewish. The Romanian commentator, Liviu Bordaș, is not alone in explicitly using Gaudeamus to defend Eliade against accusation of anti-Semitism.6

Far more problematic, in my estimation, than this putative anti-Semitism is the apparently dreadful sexism of the text. Eliade was explicitly influenced by the dolce stil novo, with its familiar theme of angelicata – elevating the female to a position of inhuman adoration, as with Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura. Eliade’s childhood vision of ‘the little girl on the Strada Mare’, familiar to readers from the first pages of his Autobiography, is reminiscent of Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice Portinari (although Eliade was four or five years younger than Dante was when this happened). In Gaudeamus, the narrator transforms his love for Nișka from what could have been a simple student infatuation to an act of heroic self-denial, ‘elevating’ her from a flesh-and-blood woman to a sacrificial fetish. Eliade explicitly invokes Dante (and Don Quixote) in the novel, and he overtly referred to the relation of Dante and Beatrice in an article from January of 1928 on ‘Beatrice and Don Quixote’, where he says, ‘why don’t we seek a Beatrice as an occasion for heroism – rather than sentimental love and sensual satisfaction?’7 (He sees both Dante and Don Quixote as ‘mad’, but heroic in their madness.) Gaudeamus paints a picture of the narrator’s ‘fathering’ of Nișka as object of adoration in a Pygmalion-like process of spiritual sculpting until she becomes the woman of his dreams, with whom he can fall utterly in love – and then resist! Immediately after this incredible act of manipulation and objectification, the narrator meets another female friend, Nonora (based on Thea of the Autobiography), with whom he has had earlier, superficial sensual encounters. He treats her, physically, even more callously in an act which brutally inverts his relationship with Nișka.

Eliade was aware of early 20th century feminism, introducing ‘a snub-nosed girl who read German philosophy books and was proud of her feminist views’ in the opening pages of the novel. Yet, throughout, the novel is littered with statements of shocking male supremacy: ‘Waiting is a feminine attitude … The feminine soul reveals itself through the process of confiding itself in a masculine soul … the feminine soul is passive, waiting to be fecundated by masculine spirit … the feminine soul tires easily … woman alone is not capable … the furrow of her soul ached for my will as for the sower.’ And here the major theme of the novel emerges: the ‘masculine’ will. For the narrator, the truly ‘masculine’ soul is equipped with an ithyphallic will to which the ‘feminine’ yields. We know from the Autobiography and elsewhere that Eliade had read – and been much impressed by – both Jules Payot’s L’éducation de la volonté and Ibsen’s Brand. He recommended both to Rica. It is a central theme of Renaissance humanism that humanity can ascend (or descend) the great chain of being by an act of will. Papini and Friedrich Nietzsche, both authors who praise the power of the will, were models for Eliade’s writing. These are ingredients in a heady brew engendering intoxicating visions of indomitable will. The true education of the student narrator of the novel lies in disciplining his will to the point that he can seize any opportunity presented to him, simply because he wants it (which is, no doubt, why he feels more sympathy for magic than for monotheism).

However, the narrator’s shameless treatment of Nonora towards the end of the novel resulted from something he felt ‘more strongly than my will, more strongly than my respect for Nonora’s love’. The point seems to be that such acts of brutality emerge from a failure of the will, contrasted to the ‘success’ of the steadfast will required to reject Nișka. From our perspective in the 21st century, the physical abuse of Nonora casts light on the spiritual abuse of Nișka, revealing it to be a corresponding opposite: two extreme – and extremely ‘masculine’ – vices between which a morally virtuous mean is yet to appear. The objectification of Nișka is thus another act of violation – but it seems improbable that, in 1928, either the 21-year old Eliade, or his fictional narrator, could see that.

Known in the English-speaking world as an historian of religions, Eliade authored more than twenty major works, including Patterns in Comparative Religion, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, and Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, decades before this success as a scholar of religions, Eliade achieved recognition as a novelist in his native Romania with Maitreyi in 1933 and continuing with Huliganii (The Hooligans, 1935), Șantier: Roman Indirect (Work in Progress: An Indirect Novel, 1935), Domnișoara Christina (Miss Christina, 1936), Șarpele (The Serpent, 1937), and Nuntă în cer (Marriage in Heaven, 1938). After his exile from Romania at the end of the Second War he focussed more on his career as an academic and his publication of novels became sporadic. In his Journal for 15th December, 1960, Eliade claimed that he was “more and more convinced of the literary value of the materials available to the historian of religion. … what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years is not totally foreign to literature. It could be that someday my research will be considered an attempt to relocate the forgotten sources of literary inspiration” (Journal II: 1957-1969, 119). If there is any truth in this observation – and I am sure that there is – the understanding of the scholarly and the literary worlds of Mircea Eliade are finally interdependent and the appearance of this novel, available for the first time to the English-speaking public, constitutes a significant contribution to both.

Bryan Rennie is a British historian of religions and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Westminster College, Pennsylvania, USA. Rennie is known for his works on Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade and was awarded the Mircea Eliade Centennial Jubilee Medal for contributions to the History of Religions by then Romanian President, Traian Băsescu, in 2006.

1Mac Linscott Ricketts, Romanian Roots, Vol. I, p. 229.

2Ibid., 127

3Eugen Simion, Mircea Eliade. Nodurile şi semnele prozei, Bucharest 2011, p. 37.

4Giovanni Casadio, Unpublished presentation, Bozza, Sept. 9th, 2012.

5Mircea Eliade: Ordeal by Labyrinth, Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, 204.

6Liviu Bordaș, ‘Between the Devil’s Waters and the Fall into History: or an Alternate Account of Mircea Eliade’s Diopteries, The International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, 4 no. 2 (2011): 43-75.

7Mircea Eliade, ‘Beatrice și don Chuichotte’, Gândirea, 8 no.1 (January 1928): 31-32.

GAUDEAMUS 1928

PART ONE

ONE: THE SETTING

The chestnut trees were wet after the rain, the boulevards were cold. Above me, only autumnal sky.

I walked apprehensively; intimidated by the glances the others gave me. I set my face in a scowl, to give myself courage. Leaning against a wall, in the passage that led to the administrative offices, I felt a stir of excitement. I did not want to be discovered by any­one; and yet I wanted to discover everyone. I loved everything about them, and I thought about how henceforth they would all be my classmates. There were so many young women, all of them beautiful to me, and all of them, I decided, Hypatias. I felt hopes and desires swelling and anxiously stirring about inside me. I observed; is it not true that these are the best years of my life? And I was not sure whether I should take control of them or allow them to control me.

Gone were the torturous nights of Greek Grammar. One painfully­-clear morning I came down from my attic. I was seduced by the chrysanthemums. And the sky, the expansive blue sky. My home seemed so perfect, and so beloved. The courtyard had become my friend. Large lilac bushes bowed humbly in the sunshine. It was then that I decided: I am going to give up Greek, at least for now. You might say that I was waiting for something, promised long ago. But for what, I could not say.

I would have to find new friends. But I did not dare talk to any of my classmates taking their seats at the back, who looked mistrustfully at my glasses and smiling face. Nor did I dare speak to any of the young women taking their seats on the front rows, who were not looking at me at all. I would just have to wait.

It rained, and rained. I bought piles of books after the Bacca­laureate exam. Alone in my attic, I read them. My first autumn, I thought. And I smiled.

Attending my first lecture in the Maiorescu Auditorium, I sat next to the window, tormented by too blood-red a sunset and the hand of the girl sitting next to me, too pale, too warm. Below, on the boulevard, passed people who had never heard of our professors. This stupid thought hindered me from understanding the lecturer’s eulogy to Philosophy as the crowning achievement of human endeavour. He spoke slowly and clearly, excruciatingly slowly and clearly. At the end of the lecture, young women took the edge off their irritation by opening and closing their handbags. There were also young women who took notes. They had big ears, and hair heaped wildly on top of their white necks. Other students struck the attitude of thinkers: high foreheads, knitted brows, chins resting on their hands.

I descended the stairs, and yellow globe lights appeared in the night.

In the corridors were couples and groups. The couples were next to windows, with autumn in their eyes. The groups stood along the walls, pointing at shy students, or students whose dresses were too long. Groups always laugh; couples always keep quiet.

My first change: I developed a liking for sentimental souls. At least they don’t think that everything is just a joke, I thought. Why was I saddened by the choices of adolescence, made worse in tumultuous times?

I was embarrassed by my hat, which was too big and too black. My brother had teased me about all students being poets and bohemians. But I had my attic, and I never wrote poetry. Under my big hat, I looked more like a German house painter. I only wore it when it rained. And in autumn it rained, and rained.

The first sign that adolescence had definitively ended: I stopped writing my Diary. From now on, everything would be worked out in my soul, in secret. Another sign: I demanded and received money for the things I published. I had plenty of money and bought myself expensive books.

The streets were colder now, and the walls even gloomier. The chestnut trees were yet another autumn older and around the windows the ivy was turning red.

In the mornings, my soul was serene. But at night, clouds gathered. Why could I not remember the dreams that bourgeoned and took flight in nights of restless sleep?

In the corridor, one evening, in front of a door, I bumped into a girl who looked up at me angrily. I turned pale, and then red, and then pale again. I found out later that she went by the name Bibi. From then on, I greeted her timidly. She never answered. Why did I, of all people, call her Bibi?

I did not have much luck. None of my lycée friends were in any of my classes. But I had got to know a few new faces. One was a student from Bessarabia, tall, blond, and nearly bald. He was majoring in Theology, Law, and Philosophy. He never missed a class and wrote his notes in huge lined notebooks. He had been to Athens, Sofia, and Paris. No one knew anything else about him. He was friends with a Jew who was in love with a beautiful Jewish girl. He was ugly, but he loved her. I realised this when he told the Bessarabian: ‘She’s so intelligent!’ Sad, so sad.

I had also met a snub-nosed girl who read German philosophy books and was proud of her feminist views. She discussed German Philosophy and Feminism with anyone and everyone. She had a rather odd way of beginning a sentence: ‘I mean, do you or do you not agree with me?’

The feminist looked down on the girls who were pretty or uncultured. I overheard the following snatch of conversation.

‘If they haven’t read Hegel, they’re good for nothing!’

‘Really?’

Someone else, indiscreetly, ‘Who put you in charge?’

‘I, sir, am a feminist.’

Another voice, ‘More power to her!’

Every once in a while she would arrive with a pale, delicate young man. The students at the back whispered that he must be one of her disciples.

I also met a brunette, whose hair was cut in a fringe. She spoke in a soft voice and crammed Latin vocabulary before lectures. Once, I caught her reading a book of verse. She blushed. After that, she would smile at me, and I would say hello to her.

If it rained at night, after seminars, we sheltered in a corridor with large windows. Little by little I shed my shyness. I met theology students with long hair, and youthful, unkempt beards. And destitute literature students, who cursed the rain, because they would miss their meal at the cafeteria. And students from distant cities, with wide eyes and mud-specked socks. All kinds of groups set off to the student halls of residence, with their briefcases tucked under their arms.

Once the rain had passed, I made my way home along cold, laved streets. I looked at the lighted windows and imagined warm, cosy rooms, with languid female footfalls on soft rugs. But I did not allow myself to feel any sadness.

*

Autumn, with its sadness and twilight, passed. Two years later, my memories are bitter and heavy. I write this story with peace of mind, hardened by the path that I have taken. But I write a story that is not yet finished. Life goes on, and I write only of the life that has been lived.

TWO: THE CHAIRMAN

I finished that autumn, alone. And then, all of a sudden, in early December, the attic came to life. Evening fell, but upstairs, in my attic, choirs intoned. It had all happened so fast – I am beginning to forget exactly how I came to meet the doctoral student with the broad forehead and nervous smile at the corner of his thin lips. He explained to me, walking down the boulevard, how the city did not yet have a student association, how at the university year after year passed without anyone attending or establishing one. An older gentleman wished to donate his fortune for a students’ club, if only an association existed, but there was no association, because students were happy to spend their years with old friends to whom they were connected by childhood or lycée. If only a room could be found somewhere, a room in which to organise.

‘I have a attic.’

The doctoral student demurred; young men and women are noisy, unruly. They would disturb and annoy whoever else might be at home.

‘But the attic is mine.’

He consented, but only for the choir. Happy, we went our separate ways in the night. The next morning, he climbed the wooden stairs and knocked on my door.

‘So many books, so many books.’

He told me everything he had done since we parted; he had recruited five friends to form a committee, written an appeal to the city’s students, taken receipt of the first funds from the old gentle­man, and ordered membership cards from the printers. Medical student that he was, he gauged the volume of air in the room.

‘No more than two hours, for fifteen people. After two hours we’ll have to open the windows.’ He had been wanting to announce a student assembly in the newspapers, but had not found a room large enough. I quickly put on my coat, and together we set off to visit the headmaster of the lycée.

The old man attempted to be nostalgic: I had first arrived there nine years ago, a small, shy boy, but look at me now: a university student! Did I still recognise my old headmaster, the parent of my adolescent soul? The doctoral student bit his lips in impatience. But what good was any of this now? A new, fruitful and dynamic life was beginning. Could he lend us a helping hand? Would he agree to let us use the music hall for our first few meetings?

‘For university students, naturally.’

The student thanked the headmaster briefly but warmly, then left, heading for the university, the newspapers, the dean’s office, the cafeteria.

On my way back, alone, with bitter memories of the headmaster in my soul, I encountered the first snowflakes of the season.

‘December.’

Two days later, my little windows were lit blue by the snow. In my room, it was cold and dark. I brought up loads of coal and wood, dusted white. Sitting by the stove I read, in disbelief, the announcement in the columns of Universitare: ‘Today, at five p.m., students of the university who wish to join the city choir are invited to enrol at the provisional headquarters in the attic of.’

I ran downstairs.

‘We’ll be having guests at five o’clock.’

‘How many?’

‘I’m not sure; twenty or thirty. But we’ll be holding auditions – some will be leaving almost as soon as they arrive.’

Mother did not believe that I would be having ‘guests’ until she met a girl asking for directions.

‘Excuse me, is there a attic here, some kind of provisional head­quarters?’

As luck would have it, it was Bibi. The doctoral student had not yet arrived. I was nervous and wondered if it was warm enough, if the armchairs were comfortable, if the bookshelves were tidy. Bibi had not expected to see me or, even more so, to see me there all by myself.

‘Are you the only one here?’

‘Yes, I am … well, you see.’

‘Ah, so this is your attic.’

‘That’s right.’

An awkward silence.

‘You were working when I arrived; let me take something to read, something from here.’

She took a copy of Corydon. I blushed.

‘Is it any good?’

‘It’s interesting.’

‘A novel?’

‘No. Gide.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you read anything by Gide?’

‘Yes I have. A textbook: The Political Economy.’

Charmed, I explained, ‘That’s by Charles Gide.’

‘Oh! Sorry! And this is by Andrei.’ She smiled, looking through the book.

‘I know somebody called Andrei, a polytechnic student. He skis.’

I nodded.

‘Yes, yes.’

I invited her to sit down in an armchair between the bookcases.

‘Don’t you get bored up here all alone?’

I lied, presumptuously.

‘I wouldn’t say I’m alone, exactly.’

She took a long look at me.

‘That’s strange; you don’t look like someone in love.’

Pale, very pale.

I was saved by the doctoral student; he entered without a word, with a bag, damp from melted snowflakes, his forehead red from the cold.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to the young lady?’

How was I supposed to introduce her by her nickname, Bibi? But she introduced herself. I made a mental note of her name.

Within half an hour, the attic was full of students. The provisional committee assembled at the table. I recognised a few of them. Two from the Polytechnic: a second-lieutenant in his final year at medical school, and a stooped, skinny young man, who smoked copiously and weighed his words carefully. The others were strangers. There were only a few girls; they sat on chairs and the bed. We listened to what the chairman had to say.

He was not a gifted orator. He struggled to find the right words, but when he did find them, he delivered them resoundingly. He reminded us of the old gentleman’s donation. But the association did not yet exist. It would have to be established as soon as possible. The choir and the festival would bring in funds. We would sing carols for government ministers, for the dean of the university, at the royal palace. The association would have to be officially registered. That way, we would be able to receive donations. At the same time, we had to foster ‘the student life’.

My guests were inspired. They promised help, work, with enthusiasm.

‘And discipline’, added the chairman.

A young man with black hair was appointed choirmaster. Flattered, he asked to hear everyone’s voice. The girls protested.

‘We’ve been singing since lycée.’

The boys teased, ‘Then it’s been a long while, hasn’t it.’

A pale, quiet girl capitulated.

‘Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti!’

A tall, swarthy, thick-lipped student, who stood leaning against the door, opined: ‘She’s a tenor.’

Laughter. The girl turned red, and shrank back apologetically. The chairman interjected, ‘Gentlemen, you promised.’

A young woman, with dark, sunken eyes, moist lips, and trembling nostrils spoke up. She had wavy, neck-length black hair and her arms were bared to the shoulder.

‘Chairman, sir, they should go first!’

The boys protested, suddenly nervous.

‘Ladies first.’

‘The boldest first’, replied a blond girl.

Amid this hubbub, I took a look around my attic: Cigarette smoke, the smell of women’s clothing, shadows. The bookshelves paid silent witness.

Above the headboard of my bed, the dried willow garland around an icon shed its dry leaves. I felt so happy and such a stranger!

The chairman’s ruling solved the dilemma: ‘The girls will sing scales, and the gentlemen will go downstairs and wait in the courtyard for a few minutes. Make sure not to break any windows!’

I could hear them plotting.

‘But we’ll catch cold.’

The girls agreed to go first, but only if the boys promised to behave themselves. The young lady with the dark eyes gave a perfect, defiant rendition of the scale.

‘Your name and faculty?’

‘Nonora – Law, and the Conservatory.’

The boys ‘Aha!’

Two days later, rehearsals began. The young women one afternoon, and the young men the next. This arrangement was not to the liking of the men. They arrived late, smoked, and ignored the chairman. It was decided to hold joint practice sessions. The men arrived half an hour early. Some politely asked me to forgive the intrusion. They began to discuss the student strike. Some were for it, others were carried along with the tide, and others still were against it.

‘And what do you think?’

I did not want to think anything. I listened. When the first young lady arrived, the discussion grew impassioned.

‘Sexual selection’, I said to myself.

The women complained to the chairman about the men ‘talking politics’. The chairman banned any further talk of politics, as it was conducive to disorder. If the men in the room wished to discuss such matters elsewhere, they were perfectly free to do so.

We rehearsed Gaudeamus igitur – a certain feeling descended into the attic, amid the cigarette smoke and the books, a feeling of Heidelberg coming to life. It was hot between the white walls, we were happy that it was snowing outside, that it was snowing heavily. Our voices resounded through the windows and enlivened the street. The women had befriended each other. They huddled around the tiled stove, and leafed through German books in fascination. I divined how, evening after evening, they were becoming more drawn to the attic. In the beginning, they had voiced concern about entering so small a room, without rugs, and with so many bookshelves and burning cigarettes. But it was so novel, so unusual. They then found themselves starting to look forward to our rehearsals. It was ‘pleasant’. Perhaps they were dreaming, perhaps it reminded them of novels, or perhaps they were hoping.

Nonora was becoming more and more forward. But she was still undecided. She smiled at all the men and received never-­ending compliments from admirers who cast furtive looks at her knees, breasts, shoulders. She annoyed the women because every night she positively demanded a gentleman walk her home. Even the chairman was charmed by her. In discussions he now began to ask her to take the floor: ‘And what does Miss Nonora think?’

One afternoon, I saw her standing at the top of the stairs after being kissed by a dull but handsome student.

‘You’ve got a cheek! You’ve wiped off all my lipstick.’

‘Is that all?’

She and Bibi had become friends. They came to rehearsals together.

‘Who will help me take off my wellingtons?’

Maybe she was speaking to me as well. Five tenors bent down to assist her.

‘Wait a second, wait a second! Just my boots.’

She liked Radu. She met him one evening at my place, maybe what she liked in him was his ungainliness, his cheerful short­sightedness, his cynicism, which was that of a man who submits to fate. Radu was the only friend who had not abandoned me in the autumn. I met the others only seldom, and when I did, we talked about insignificant things. They were furious that I had hired out the attic to a club of strangers.

‘Before long you’ll turn into an anti-Semite, too.’

We preserved the same closeness when we talked, but I was looking for new friends. Radu might as well have been a new friend. After we had gone our separate ways, in him I had discovered very many qualities that nights spent drinking in taverns had not managed to destroy.

And Radu came to my attic every night, once he found out that Nonora came too. He alone walked her home now. Nonora liked him best of all the students, because he was intelligent, cynical and ‘witty’. The others were handsome and vulgar. Nonetheless, she continued to let herself be embraced by any who dared. She kissed with open lips, her head thrown back. And she would complain afterwards about ‘the savages wiping off all my lipstick’.

Bibi introduced me to Andrei, who was tall, dark, broad-shouldered, and had a look of hard-working ambition about him. He wanted to become a chief engineer. Intelligent and voluble, he pretended to be curious about science, but found it difficult to conceal his ambition. After all, he did want to become a chief engineer. It seemed as if Bibi loved him. She asked me two days later what I thought of him. I praised him, of course. Bibi had given herself away.

‘Did you see his eyebrows?’

At the very first meeting I met a multitude of students. They couldn’t believe all the chairman’s promises: the officially registered body, the student club, the holiday camp. But even so, they felt happy to be in that music room with so many beautiful girls and intelligent boys. The chairman had managed to obtain the signature of the university rector for an official charter, a grant from city hall, and a permit for a carol concert, festival and raffle. His briefcase was always stuffed full and he was always in a hurry. In less than twenty days he had formed a recognised student organisation, had registered members, had found a provisional headquarters, and had delegated the workload to committee members. At the same time, with white lab coat and furrowed brow, he was preparing his thesis on balneology.

The members were thankful to him for one thing: he had given them the opportunity to get together and enjoy themselves. The tall student, who always stood next to the door was known as ‘Gaidaroff’. He was the only one to interrupt the proceedings of committee meetings without being called to order. The members were fond of him, and pelted him with snowballs after every rehearsal.

At the second meeting, dues were paid. To my surprise, no one protested. After the meeting ended, we all went to the football pitch next to the lycée for a snowball fight. We threw our snowballs with great gusto, especially in the direction of the chairman, who banned the wearing of gloves and the throwing of snowballs containing stones. We chose sides in a matter of minutes. Nonora battled to the right of me, shielding herself with a briefcase, shrieking, taunting, cursing. Bending down to make a snowball, I felt snow on my neck and hair. Nonora cackled defiantly, with her head thrown back.

‘Traitor!’

‘The name’s Nonora.’

‘What if I get my revenge by burying you in the snow?’

‘Burying me alive? I was only joking. You’ll forgive me.’

I shivered. It was getting colder. There was a spring in my step as I went home. I felt like breaking into a run. In the attic, I gazed into the mirror for a long, long time. I decided to let my hair grow long, groom myself, buy white collars.

I read, but my soul no longer belonged to books. With a pencil, I made notes on paper about what I had gleaned from the books, what they made me feel. I worked as if fulfilling a duty, or out of a sense of obligation. I spent less time thinking about myself. I avoided analysing myself, questioning and answering myself.

Now that I had abandoned the discipline of keeping a diary, I indulged in daily self-contradictions. I no longer pursued private thoughts. School work no longer caused me anxiety. I shut it away in my brain the moment rehearsals began. I was experiencing a new and tempting life. Day after day I discovered techniques to help girls with their clothes, how to respond modestly and politely to compliments about my library, how to smile, how to soften the severity of my looks.

The austerity of adolescence had dissolved with that autumn. With gratitude, I forgot the anxieties that had previously cut my nights short. I relinquished the ambitions whereby I had survived lycée. I felt so happy to be in my attic full of young men and women. I whiled away more and more nights with Radu. We talked about Nonora. He had kissed her; passionately; biting her lips. I pretended to be indifferent, preserving the mask of my old soul, which was crumbling without my fully understanding the circumstances.

I woke up later and later every morning. I sat down at my table like a labourer waiting for the factory whistle. I read and read. You would have thought that someone was forcing me to write summaries of certain titles. I summarised them properly, without rushing. I packed the summaries away in boxes. And I caught myself thinking thoughts impudently inapposite to my card catalogue.

After the night of carol singing at the Orthodox Patriarchate and the Royal Palace, we crammed into large motorcars. The girls were wearing traditional costume. We were flushed with the wine from the Patriarchate, drunk with success. And the King had asked each of us: ‘Und you?’

‘Industrial Chemistry, your Majesty.’

There had been a feast fit for a boyar at the Patriarchate. And then there was Gaidaroff, who had asked how many of the cigarettes we could put in our pockets, and Nonora, who had choked on a noodle, and the chairman, who had laughed merrily, sipping glasses of red wine, and the choirmaster, who had congratulated us.

We were in in even higher spirits when we sang our carols to the three ministers, the philanthropist, the newspaper proprietor, and the dean. After midnight, the motorcars dropped us off in front of an unfamiliar courtyard. It was a surprise from the chairman: a banquet room, at a friend’s, with preparations for a party until morning. Exclamations, disbelief. I ended up sitting between Bibi and Nonora. Bibi found a greetings card envelope and amused herself by writing questions on the back. ‘Who are you thinking about?’ Nonora answered: ‘About someone who ought to die.’ I added: ‘When?’ Nonora wrote: ‘Now.’ Bibi was perplexed: ‘Why?’ I quoted the line from Coșbuc: ‘Question not the laws.’ Nonora: ‘You’re hilarious.’ Bibi: ‘Is that all he is?’ Me: ‘And also tortured.’ Nonora: ‘Liar.’ Me: ‘You guessed right.’ Bibi: ‘Prudence is the key to happiness.’ Me: ‘Really?’ Bibi: ‘What impudence!’ Nonora: ‘Kiss and make up.’ Me: ‘There isn’t enough room on the envelope.’

Towards morning, with the snow frozen under the stars, I agreed to walk the ladies home. The night had passed so quickly – couples were now well-established, and tossed pointed jokes back and forth. Gaidaroff smoked all his cigarettes sitting next to a girl, a pharmacology student, a petite girl with roguish eyes and enticing breasts. With feeling, the chairman declared from the head of the table: ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’

The boys replied with enthusiasm: ‘Vivat profesores.’

Bibi, smiling, said: ‘I should.’

A blond girl said: ‘That made me hopelessly sad. It’s time to go home.’

Nonora: ‘I’m bored. Radu, go fetch my overshoes.’

Radu had suffered the whole night, stuck between two girls who spoke only to the people sitting on their other side. He was happy when Nonora called for him. He walked her home, arm in arm. I walked Bibi home and searched for phrases in which I could address her as tu without blushing. I succeeded.

*

Days filled with life. Self-doubt and consternation failed to find their way into my soul. I was happy at the beginning of that white winter.

THREE: NONORA