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.
Up till then I hadn’t known any more about him than all the others. But I soon realized that I was wrong. He was crazy about Balzac, and even managed to convert me. We read only Balzac, everything we could lay our hands on. We were soon great authorities on La Comédie Humaine, and competed with each other to know the most about the characters, minutiae and all the other curiosities of Balzac’s work. When our supplies ran out, we scoured the bookshops and second-hand dealers until we found what we wanted.
Between us we introduced the rest of the class to Balzac. One of our first disciples was Robert. We tormented him by giving him the worst novels to read, and he admired them. When he began to suspect that we were making fun of him, he would assure us hesitantly: ‘To be honest I didn’t think L’Enfant Maudit* was brilliant. It’s good, but not very...’
The other boys call Marcu a communist and an anarchist, but it doesn’t bother him, because it’s his own fault that they use these names. One morning, he came to school with some socialist propaganda material, booklets by Engels and Kautsky, and Marx’s Das Kapital. Another time he took two French books with red covers out of his bag: Stirner’s L’Unique*, and a large volume by Kropotkin. Marcu said they were very interesting, but the others – who knew all about him – discovered that the books were anarchistic, and began to be frightened of him. They don’t hate him, but look down on him, and some speak with aristocratic disdain of the danger of the ‘Bolshevik hell.’
Marcu was never really serious when he said he supported anarchism. He simply said that it was interesting, and if we asked he would explain anarchist ideology to us. But if he felt like annoying the aristocrats, he would admit to being a disciple of Kropotikin and Bakunin.
The aristocrats are convinced that he really is a follower of anarchism and communism, but that he’s afraid to admit it publicly. If anyone were to tell the aristocrats that anarchists and communists are irreconcilable, they would say he was talking nonsense.
Marcu assures the sons of the gentry that it won’t be long before their land is expropriated again. When I asked him how he knew this, he told me he made it up, to worry the landowners’ sons. In our class there are only two, but Marcu claims that there are actually far more.
Not everyone knows how to talk to Marcu. He always finds a reason to doubt whatever he has just said. This doesn’t bother me at all; on the contrary, I find him most original. Only when I produce one argument after another and he still won’t accept them as valid – because he finds them dubious – do I get angry. I think he actually enjoys all this, and maybe I’m not far wrong in guessing that the aim of all his arguing is just to annoy the rest of us.
‘I’ve got him going!’
Whenever he manages to ‘get someone going’, Marcu is very pleased with himself. He runs his fingers through his curly hair and can’t sit still. That’s why not just anyone can talk to him.
Whenever there’s a general discussion in class and the aristocrats are involved, he automatically takes the other side, even if it’s wrong. He always ends up ‘getting the aristocrats going’.
Particularly Furtuneanu. Furtuneanu refers to him as a ‘destructive Jew,’ forgetting that he’s actually very close to another Jew, Lazimir, a rich boy with whom he plays poker every week. Furtuneanu has loathed Marcu ever since he was ‘discourteous’ to him. We all had to have our hair cut, shaved to at least number 3, and most of us did as we were told. The few who forgot were sent to get it done during class, to their great delight. Furtuneanu was the only one to come back with his dark, flowing locks still intact, untouched by clippers for two years. His father came with him, and told the Headmaster that if his son were forced to have his hair cut then he would remove him from the school. The Headmaster gave in, and accepted the ‘medical certificate’ that explained that the pupil Furtuneanu Petre couldn’t have a hair cut because he suffered from an ear infection. It was true that Furtuneanu had had otitis, but that was a year ago and he still had long hair. The rest of the class rebelled at first, but then gave in, just like the Headmaster.
However, the other masters demanded an explanation. So Furtuneanu provided one: ‘After suffering from an ear infection I now catch cold easily. If my head were shaved, it would only take the slightest breeze and the infection would come back. That’s why...’
‘...His mummy keeps him wrapped in cotton wool,’ Marcu whispered to the boy next to him, but loud enough for Trollo to hear. The others all sniggered.
‘Please don’t address me in a way in which I wouldn’t address you. Please behave with decorum. Please make an effort to be well-mannered, even if that’s not the way you’ve been brought up at home...’
‘It sounds like you’re going to choke’, Marcu replied, impassively.
The roars of laughter prevented Furtuneanu from saying any more. But after the lesson had finished, he went and sat next to Marcu and talked to him for a quarter of an hour. His face turned bright red, and he kept spraying saliva through a gap where two of his front teeth had fallen out. He insulted Marcu, told him he was badly brought-up, and concluded with these terrible words: ‘Don’t ever shake my hand in the street again!’
Marcu was red in the face as well, but seemed unperturbed. Later on he told me how glad he was to have been able to make Furtureanu spit and bellow for a quarter of an hour.
From that moment on, Furtuneanu became Marcu’s sworn enemy.
He had no reason to admire him in any case, because he didn’t really know him. During lessons, in front of the master and his classmates, Marcu rarely says anything original. Only in our private discussions is he able to be himself. Perhaps he’s nervous in front of the other boys, or thinks it’s wiser not to reveal himself too much. All the same, I was astonished when, quite inexplicably, Marcu wasn’t able to analyse Eminescu’s poem, the Emperor and Proletarian without referring to the criticism by Gherea. Yet this wasn’t the first time that he couldn’t answer a question in class without relying on other people’s work. Perhaps he finds the presence of the class and the master intimidating.
Marcu told me that he doesn’t believe in anything, and doubts everything. Yet when he’s defending a theory or opposing someone, he will only challenge – and with great precision – the actual arguments that they put