The Happiness Diary by N. Steinhardt (Translation)

February 1962

And no one will take your

joy from you.

John 16,22

In this way I too keep myself straight!

Not to lose my soul.

Paul Claudel

The cells from Reduit , at Jilava, are uncommonly gloomy and have the reputation of a more severe regime than “on sections”. In 34 I arrive coming from the “secret”, where I have been kept, as long as I went to the hunger strike, in a cell that has never been warmed since the fort has been constructed – at the same time with the useless belt road surrounding the Capital – by the engineer Brialmont. The coldness, more terrible than the hunger and the thirst (but the worse is the lack of sleep) has penetrated me deeply…

I must look really wretched, because the famous sergeant Ungureanu, who receives me at the gate of Reciting, almost smiles at me (like the lover of distinguished dishes would subdue facing a joint of certain tender venison) and ascertains me to the chief of room recommending him to give me a single bed and to take care of me. I am being placed in the bed near the door, like a suspect and looked at with attention by the chief of room, a Basarabean* with a Russian name, a bulky huge thing, sullen, with harsh looks; I find out soon that he is dangerous; they say he is an unfrocked priest. The cell 34 is a sort of dark long tunnel, with numerous and strong elements of nightmare. It is a tongue, a canal, an underground bowel, cold and profoundly hostile, it is a sterile mine, it is the crater of an extinct volcano, it is a pretty successful discolored hell image.

In this almost unreal** lugubrious place, I was to know the happiest days in all my life. How absolutely happy I have been in the room 34! Not even in Brasov, with mother, in my childhood, not even on the endless streets of the mysterious London; nor on the splendid Muscel hills, nor in the blue post card décor of Lucerne; no, nowhere.

There are also many young men in the room, who were put to a special treatment by the guards and especially by the chief of room. (The hate of the old men against the new generation, that goes up to the alliance with the most frenzied jail guards for the constitution of the common front against the shameless and the disrespectful. A sort of a generation and age solidarity, very similar with the class solidarity because of which some peasants, workers and little employees hate the titled co-detainees, nobles or bourgeois, much more passionately than they hate the representatives of administration.) From the first day I state in the whole cell a tremendous thirst for poetry. The learning by heart of the poems is the most pleasant and more tireless entertainment in the prison life. Happy are the ones who know poems. The one who knows by heart many poems is a trouble-free man in prison, his are the hours that go by without knowing and in dignity, his is the hall of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel and his is the coffeehouse Flore. His the ice cream and the lemonades served at the small tables of the brewery Florian in the San Marco place. He knew, the abbot Faria, what he does by preparing himself for the Monte-Cristo island by learning by heart all the books. And Nicolai Semenovici Leskov didn’t even guess how well had he spoken, advising: “Read and try to choose with benefit. You will have a share of good fun in your grave. " The prison being itself a grave, the advice turns out to be true in an excellent manner: who likes learning poems, will never get bored in prison – and he will not be alone.

From this point of view, I am alright. I know by heart Luceafărul, The Letters***, lots of Coșbuc and Topârceanu (he is very in demand), thousands (I think) lyrics by Gyr and Crainic (swollen from the beginning, together with the Morse alphabet, from the legionary**** veterans); I caught also lots of Verlaine, Lamartine and Baudelaire; Arvers’ sonnet, of course (Ma vie a son secret, mon name son mystere*****), Samain – Au jardin de l’Infante – which, when I rehearse or teach, takes my thoughts to Ojardindilifant from La Medeleni****** and to the paradisiacal afternoons from the street Pitar-Mosu. I find myself rapidly a circle of young men who want to learn Luceafarul and who waited like on fire for someone who would know it to come. In the room there is also a young Lutheran pastor from Brașov, who looks like Gosta Berling; German is his maternal language and he is a poet himself. An enthusiastic admirer of Rilke from whom he has translated; and he knows countless poems of the great poet, which he recites superbly, with a vibrant feeling and an incredible overtone; he has a patience of iron and a goodwill that is refractory to tiredness. Everything by him oscillates between demigod and saint. If he would tell us that

Mein Vater Parsifal traegt eine Krone

Sein Rittersohn bin ich, Lohengrin genannt.*******

or if he would confess that he himself is Siegfried fallen after the Rheinfarhf of his straight to Reduit everybody would believe him.

Bruder Harald Sigmund – because so is he named, Wagnerian enough – proves himself suddenly, to be that miracle which is rarely given to the prisoner to meet, but from which, when he meets it, he finds out what could joy mean: he is courageous, he is proud, unconquerable, polite like in the Salon of the prince Conti where they serve la the a l’anglaise, always smiling and dignified like the models of the portraits of La Tour, Perronneau or Van Loo, and good-humored, never sleepy or grim, eager and ready in any moment to teach anything, to discuss, to listen, to recount, to communicate everything he knows: a sir, a noble, a hero. Such a man gives you, strongly, the nostalgia for the middle ages and you start feeling, in the presence of one like him, a dreadful hostility against nowadays and against the democracy in the tram at high hours. (Why are you pushing yourself? If you don’t like it, buy yourself a car! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You think you’re a lion or what?!) But (contrary to this), he is a lion, lions exist! There are not only skunks and reptiles. Life can also mean something else than the supreme ideal of maintaining the order in the queue or taking the neighbor out of the room next-door so that you can extend yourself in his place.

The presence of the youth – incomparably more resistant (morally, for most of them have tuberculosis), kinder and more vertebrate than the old men – and of the pastor have made an atmosphere of grandeur, of hieratic medievalism possiblle in this room; there flutter invisible purple cloaks, there shine flashing blades of Damascus. Every gesture reveals a smoldering donquijotism. I don’t know how, but my coming here, repulsively thin and impressively pale, reeking of frost, shivering even in the glances, accompanied by a hunger striker aura, contributes also to the emphasis of the atmosphere of noble defiance of reality. There are also two physicians, very nice men and some soldiers from the Army of God and some sectarians, apiculturists and craving for psalms (I know also psalms, almost all of them learned from the good-natured Hariton Rizescu, honorific verger at a big church in the center of Bucharest); and it is as if all of them compete in being gentile with each other and everybody learns poems from early in the morning till evening, all in one breath, and serious books are being recounted, and Bruder Harald surpasses himself – he recites, translates, teaches – and relates at large – with modesty, love and the ecumenical sense of relativity – the life and doctrine of the doctor Martin Luther. From everywhere – like the clouds in the mountain – that ineffable and incomparable atmosphere, which just the prison may create, appears and condensates in the cell 34: something very close to what may have been the court of the dukes of Burgundy or of the king Rene from Arles or of a Provencal court d’amour, something very similar to the paradise, something very Japanese, gallant, something that would drive Henry de Montherlant, Ernst Jűnger, Ştefan George, Malraux, Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn, crazy, something made out of courage , love of paradox, stubbornness, holly madness and the will to transcend the miserable human condition no matter what; something that evokes the aristocratic exquisite names as the most important ones by Barbey d’Aurevilly: Hermangarde de Polastron and Enguerrand de Coucy; something that, without understanding exactly how, reminds me painfully of the unsuccessful assault from 20 July ’44 of von Stauffenberg and of the German aristocracy. Something that recalls in my memory these words by Leon Shestov: “It seems like there are two theories, completely opposed, about the origins of the human species. Some assert that the man descends from the monkey, others that he was made by God. They fight awfully. I myself believe that both of them mistake themselves. My theory is the next: those who believe that the man descends from the monkey, really descend from the monkey, and form a special race, exterior to the one of the people created by God and who believe and know that they were created by God.” Something that sounds similar to the magnificent rhythm of the verses of Gyr: “Where is Vodă Caragea? Iancu wants to see him!” Something that confirms in a splendid and tangible way the affirmation of Simone Weil: “Because of the joy, the beauty of the world penetrates our souls. Because of the pain, it penetrates our body.” In the cell 34, the joy – risen from aristocracy, poetry and defiance – and the pain (because there reigns a terrible coldness, the food is completely scarce, the water continues to be maggoty, the room is oppressive like in a horror movie, the snubbing flows abundantly, every observation of the prison guards is accompanied by thumps under the jaws and fists in the head) mixes so inextricable, that everything, including the pain, transforms itself in ecstatic and uplifting happiness. When the cow eats grass, the grass changes itself to cow meat. Likewise, when the cat eats fish, the fish changes itself to cat meat. The suffering we assimilate becomes suddenly, euphoria. The verses of Georg Trakl, learned from the father Harald, reinforce them too this sensation:

„Wanderer tritt still herein

Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle;

De erglaenzt in reiner Helle

Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.“********

Yes, it is as if we all are being penetrated by the sensational joy from after the holly communion with bread and wine, with the greatly pure Body and the very dear Blood. Didn’t the Hasid get drunk with bare water invoking the name of Savaot? Shouldn’t we also be able to change the misery bowel made out of stone and degradation into enthusiasm? The lack of enthusiasm, Dostoevsky says, is the sure sign of perdition.

But the enthusiasm is the last thing that could be absent in room 34, and if the things are like this, nobody and nothing is lost. We are not ashamed neither of the exaltations at cold and of a sort of uninterrupted ecstasy, preventing and solemn, also according to the recommendation of Dostoevsky whose words “The man exists only if God and the immortality exist” we repeat smiling with intimation and they seem to us blindingly true.

And here, at 34, it is showing itself to me again, what had also flashed me at the 18: that the miracle is part of the real life, that it is a component of the world. Adhemar Esmein, on the level of Constitutional Law, stated of course, the same thing when he asserted – against the so-called realists of the law science – that the fictions too are themselves realities. The wonder in cell 34 is known and accepted as an indisputable fact.

A wonder is also the manner in which we behave with each other, competing in helping each other, in speaking to each other delicately, making each other's the life as pleasant as possible. A search confiscates me the only small bottle in which I kept the black liquid which – to my luck – is being served to us in the morning as coffee, in the place of the more consistent porridge. Because I don’t eat anything from what is being given to us, “the coffee” is for me a precious reserve. The confiscation of the small bottle takes the proportions of a catastrophic loss. The search has taken place in the morning and for possessing the small bottle I have been violently scolded and menaced. In the evening, at the time of putting out the light (nominal, because the bulbs don’t cease spreading their powerful light), when I push along the blanket, I find underneath a bottle, bigger than the other one. The charity is conformable to the stricter critical precepts, because I don’t know who put the bottle there, I can’t ask, I can’t find out. This charity (and how was it possible that the precious object has slipped out from a severe search?) is gratuitous did in full gidian sense, it is more gratuitous than the murder of Lafcadio. The absolute discretion recommended by the Lord is faultlessly present. This gesture overwhelms me, the thrills of pride pass through me, I totter and – could it have been otherwise? – I wet my so called “pillow” with the sweet hot tears of happiness.

*Basarabia - approximately the actual Moldavia

** He meant "almost in an unreal way lugubrious" ("aproape ireal de sinistru")

*** Poems by Mihai Eminescu, the Romanian romantic national poet.

**** "Legionarii" were a far-right, ultra-nationalist, antisemitic, with an emphasis on orthodox christianism and with a fascist character party and movement in the interbelic Romania (a post about them will come on this blog soon)

*****"My life has its secret, my soul, its mistery."

****** "La Medeleni" is Romanian book by Ionel Teodoreanu

*******"My father, Parsifal wears a crown, I am his son, the knight named Lohengrin.", Richard Wagner, Lohengrin, Act III, Scene 3

********"In stillness, wanderer, step in:/Grief has worn the threshold into stone./But see: in pure light, glowing/There on the table: bread and wine.", the poem Ein Winterabend - A Winter Evening (Translation taken from here)

# I want to note here that the translation is made by an amateur, thus far from being perfect.

# Unfortunately, this wonderful book has not yet been translated in English, you can find for the moment some more excerpts from "The Happiness Diary" here.