Within me the longings swelled, expanded. I saw the whole year crumbling away because of Nonora. If only I liked her. But I did not like her. She merely troubled me.
As we neared her house, Nonora whispered to me, with her mouth very close: ‘Tomorrow I’ll come over.’
‘I might not be at home.’
Smiling, Nonora looked at me, without growing annoyed, without frowning.
‘You’re beginning to be interesting.’
I paid the cabman, who drove away with his ears pricked up. I felt the urge to say: ‘Nonora, I’m the one who’s bored now. I have feelings, I’m made of flesh and blood. You irritate me without even being a femme fatale. And you’re certainly not La femme et le pantin. Under no circumstances will I go to the cinema with you, and I won’t even see you very often. You’re pursuing me in vain. And besides, I have things to do.’
Nonora was walking beside me. I sensed something was wrong.
‘You’re ridiculous. You and Radu are both sick: you both think that you’re irresistible. You probably think I wanted to seduce you, am I right? I only ever visited you in passing, that’s all. Don’t play the victim. You might have been more polite, if you had other things to do.’
I was not sure how to respond. We wished each other a cold and reserved good night. On the street, on my way back home, I felt strange but somehow happy. ‘I have will power, I have will power.’ I lied to myself.
After that, Nonora never knocked on the door of my attic again.
They got rid of Mr Elefterescu through questionable methods: they gave him rum and white wine to drink. He sang Gaudeamus all by himself in the restaurant, started crying, swore that he loved Nonora, and promised to enrol Malec’s wife and sister in the club.
Gaidaroff and Radu sat next to him, to make sure he did not break any glasses. The chairman personally apologised to the families the ‘Lion’ had sat down next to and asked: ‘Are you anti-Semites?’
After midnight, he started speaking Italian with Gaidaroff, ending every phrase with the lament: ‘Il fovero, Malec.’
He accused the association of not knowing how to party ‘like students’: they should have made Nonora stay, and punished her by forcing her to kiss him. What was more, they should have banned dancing in couples and forced the public to perform a traditional Romanian ring dance. He said he would have sung, if Nonora had accompanied him. He told numerous stories about Malec’s father, who knew how to play the flute. He laughed so loudly during these stories, that he had to take off his collar. He wanted to enter the hall and address the public. To hold him back, Radu stepped on his foot. Mr Elefterescu began to cry and then insulted the chairman in his absence, calling him a ‘Yid’.
After two bottles, he passed out.
FOUR: INTERMEZZO
It was a dark and restless winter for me. For two months, from when I first met the chairman to the night I parted with Nonora, I had been a stranger to myself. I felt, at an organic level, how I had changed under the influence of the visitors to my attic.
I had grown incoherent, disoriented, beset by weaknesses, like all the other members of the choir. I spent too much time thinking about Nonora, and these thoughts did nothing to enrich my soul, but rather upset it, sucked it dry, coarsened it.
The walk home was excruciating. I had felt so wonderful, every evening, in a full attic. Warmth, cigarette smoke, young voices, Nonora’s nearness, Radu’s friendship, Gaidaroff’s jokes – but now, silence. I had forgotten about the temptations that overwhelm the soul on solitary evenings. I rediscovered the austere voluptuousness of a day concluded in silence, at a wooden table, unknown and unwanted by anyone. The nostalgic serenity printed on my brow by temptations overcome, by a society life left behind once and for all, by the joys the soul had tasted, savoured, and never revealed to another soul.
Day after day I forced myself back onto my old path. I sank into difficult questions, fretted about the decisions I had to make, without having the courage to do so. Once again my nights were disturbed by insomnia-induced anxiety. I promised myself that I would not avoid the deepest self-scrutiny.
My first decision: to repair the deficiencies I had discovered in the autumn. I rediscovered the discipline of morning study in my attic, writing notes and abstracts. But such work neither drained nor soothed me. Torment came in the form of Nonora and the experiences I foresaw with the continuation of our relationship. I told myself: that was life, this is reading; that was courage, freshness, novelty, this is undemanding cowardice and vicariousness. And I was not sure whether I should congratulate myself on the step I had taken, one that provided me with a purpose and focus, but which had, perhaps, separated me from life.
I attempted a return to asceticism. Insincere, and subject to Radu’s temptations, my asceticism would soon fail. I had resigned myself to submit to biology, without sentimentality and without wasting any more time. I did not want to squander myself on pointless sexual liaisons. What could Nonora have offered me in exchange for my self-denial? A few months of sexual companionship, and even then her promises were doubtful. But I would have welcomed those months, genuinely and with arms flung wide, on a purely sexual basis, as befits two creatures with different souls and minds. But the danger lay elsewhere: in the derivatives of the carnal act, in the sentimentalism and posturing. I was afraid we would lie to ourselves and waste time in cheap and idle talk. The time of my youth, dedicated to struggle or delight. Time, which I fiercely desired and fecundated with my blood and brains, would drain away to nothing with Nonora, as with any other thoughtless and mediocre youth.
The sincerity I had struggled stubbornly to maintain would have been destroyed, all the experiences of adolescence annulled. I would have become a statistic, a marionette, a frame animated by the life of other bodies.
If I only loved her.
The hours were more and more my own, and yet they brought me no solace. I waited for it; a tranquillity as cold and serene as the clarity of the sea after a storm. But my soul was murky, murky.
Difficult days followed, in a snowed-in attic. My decision to remain alone made its impression on my new friends. The chairman found another headquarters, in a room at some company. I was so sad the day they took away the files, the leftovers from the raffle, the library. Nothing remained but shadows in an empty room and memories in my soul. An autumn and a past started to coalesce. Oh Nonora, Nonora – if only her lips and her curves had never tempted me, I would have remained close to everyone else. I would have come to know mediocre happiness and the dull grey of a life lived, without any significant steps forward. I would have acquired the cynical, sentimental bitterness of those who say: I was so alive when I was young! Why do people confuse wasting youth with living it? Why do my peers not understand that a certain kind of personality, guided by a certain kind of mind, can, over the course of a few vivid and intense weeks, experience whole years’ worth of their hopes and dreams? And why do they not understand that the imperative of youth is always to move on?
I waited, waited for the quiet and calm of winter thaw. But once my troubles with Nonora had departed, other troubles took hold of me. I was not trying to find out who I was. None of the people who endured the flesh and the spirit alongside me knew themselves, so I told myself. I would never succeed in knowing myself as well as I knew my library. But sometimes, I surprised myself. I had moments of clarity; I was struck by the feeling that this was me, and anything I did or said differently came not from me, but from someone else inside me. I tried to make sense of these experiences. But I found little success; they were mutually exclusive, contradictory, and cancelled each other out.
I decided to choose certain of my personal traits and declare: this is me! I correlated these features and commanded myself not to live inwardly except to nourish them and help them to grow. I wanted to create a unified whole, no matter the risk of self-denial and self-mortification. Otherwise,