the next five minutes we listened to military music coming from the other side of the lake.
‘Have you read The Sin? Robert asked him.
‘I don’t remember...’
By the time we left the Cişmigiu Gardens it was getting late. As I write, I can’t hear a single electric tram out on the boulevard. I don’t feel like sleeping. It’s hot. And I’m not at all happy.
I know what I’m going through: I’m sentimental. It’s pointless trying to hide it. I’m as sentimental as any other adolescent. Otherwise I wouldn’t be unhappy now. I have no reason to be unhappy.
So I understand now why I’m unhappy. It’s because I didn’t ‘open my heart’ to my friends. I’m just like all the others.
I need friends as well. There’s no point in lying to myself. So I’m just like all the others.
I want truth, and nothing but the truth. I want to be sincere.
Yet apparently I’m not aware of this. Aren’t I aware that I’m sentimental and weak, completely lacking willpower? Don’t I also dream of blonde virgins, with whom I stroll through the park in the moonlight, or sail on the lake in a white rowing boat? Don’t I imagine myself performing heroic deeds, winning the victor’s laurels and the kisses of beautiful women who I’ve never met and who...?
But all these things are sad and foolish. I won’t get any better by writing about them in my notebook. And I can’t even write about them. They’re laughable.
I must do something else. I should get my rope and whip myself. Because I’m an imbecile. Because I waste time wandering round the Cişmigiu Gardens, and am wasting time even now, dreaming of radiant marguerites with my eyes raised heavenward and my hands clasped over my breast.
And there’s more. I’m the biggest simpleton of all, as much as I try to hide it. I’m such a simpleton that I’m not shocked at how I’ve wasted this whole evening, or at the feebleness of my soul, or the ruin that is my willpower, or the barren wasteland of my mind. And here I am, writing this instead of purifying myself with my whip. I’m disgusted with everything, even with pain. I was looking forward to physical pain. But now...
I’m not even tired. And I can’t even read.
Which is a sure sign that I’m an imbecile.
A Friend
My friend Marcu is tall and skinny, with large, bulging eyes, curly hair, long fingers and long legs. He sits at the back of the class and reads French novels. The other boys think he’s stupid, and they call him, ‘Splinter’ because of the length of his nose, and sometimes ‘Moses’ because he’s a Jew. Marcu doesn’t get annoyed at either of these nicknames. He arrives every morning with a novel in his bag, and sits quietly reading it at the back. If there’s any commotion he just frowns and carries on reading. If people climb onto the desks, he puts his fingers in his ears and keeps reading. Even if a fight breaks out at the desk next to him, he simply moves to another desk and continues to read.
He reads his novel.
He even reads when a master is in the room. At these times he props his book against the back of the boy in front of him. He even reads while the master is actually teaching, because Marcu believes that schoolmasters are without exception blithering idiots, and that what they teach is harmful to a healthy brain. Sometimes his neighbours warn him: ‘Marcu, he’s nearly got to you!’
This means that those whose names come just before his in the class register have already been called. Disgruntled, Marcu raises his large eyes from his book. He inquires about the lesson. Occasionally he even goes so far as to ask someone to explain something. He never misses an opportunity to throw the master a ‘red herring’ – as long as he doesn’t have to spend too long up at the blackboard, because the novel must be read at all costs. But if he’s asked a question in chemistry, however, he doesn’t move a muscle. He knows he’ll still get an ‘Unsatisfactory’ anyway.
‘Ionescu Corneliu, Ionescu Stelian, Malareanu Marcu...’
A classmate nudged him: ‘Up you go, Marcu! Your name’s been called.’
Marcu joined the queue in front of the blackboard, arms crossed. When his turn came, and Toivinovici asked him a question, he calmly answered: ‘I don’t know sir.’
‘What about the industrial preparation of sulphuric acid?’
‘I don’t know sir.’
So Toivinovici asked the first two boys, who had been cramming frantically all week.
They gabbled away and covered the board with formulae.
‘That’ll do. Marcu, could you draw a diagram of the structure of the compound pentaphosphoric acid?’
‘I don’t know sir.’
‘Go and sit down, Marcu.’
He walked away, grinning, his long arms bumping against the desks. When he got back to his seat, he complained to his neighbours: ‘Why did you make me close my book?’
Once Noisil caught him reading in class. The master was pacing up and down the room, explaining the different phases of the Hundred Years War, when he spotted Marcu immersed in volume I of Le Rouge et le Noir, which I had lent him.
Noisil promptly put his hand on his shoulder.
‘Reading books in history class is not allowed. What did I tell you before?’
Marcu couldn’t remember. Noisil suspended him for three days.
‘You are to donate the book to the school library,’ Noisil told him.
Filled with chagrin, I remembered that it was my book.
When he came back to school, Marcu told us that his parents hadn’t found out about him being suspended, because every morning he left home with his schoolbag and spent the day reading novels in the Cişmigiu Gardens, until the factory sirens sounded in the evening.
‘God bless Noisil!’ he said. ‘Thanks to him I was able to finish Les Miserables.’*
He always cheats during tests. He either gets out his textbook or a crib sheet, or his neighbours whisper the answers to him. Nothing seems to ruffle him, and he never spares a thought for what would happen if he were unlucky enough to get caught. The masters think he’s dense and uneducated. When he’s called up to the blackboard, he goes red and comes out with irrelevant nonsense, stutters or doesn’t say anything at all. This is why his classmates consider him incurably stupid. Although some people, those who are less inclined to judge hastily, wonder why someone who reads so many books is sent out of class so often, and either mumbles to himself, or says nothing at all like a complete ignoramus.
‘Because he doesn’t care about school or the teachers!’ I cry, taking his side.
I know that when he’s not forced to regurgitate schoolwork, Marcu speaks beautifully and with great originality. We became friends one evening as we walked home from school together. I was criticizing La Garçonne*, a novel by Margueritte, while he defended it.
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