A little history

Founded in 1694 by Constantin Brâncoveanu, at the suggestion of his stolnic Constantin Cantacuzino, the Princely Academy of Sfântul Sava was initially housed in the buildings of the Sfântul Sava Monastery, which stood in front of today’s University of Bucharest. The language used by the teachers in their courses was Greek. In time, this school became one of the most important academies in the Balkan area.

In 1864, under Cuza’s reign, the Academy gave rise both to the University of Bucharest and to today’s Sfântul Sava College. In the 1840s, the high-school library was based on a large part of the books left to the country by stolnic Constantin Cantacuzino and on a complete collection of classical authors purchased in Paris.

The high school produced famous Romanians, among them Gheorghe Lazăr, Grigore Alexandrescu, Constantin I.C. Brătianu, Ion Gheorghe Duca, Take Ionescu, Constantin A. Rosetti, and 17 heads of government. Other famous Romanians taught here, among them Anton Pann, Nicolae Iorga, Tudor Arghezi, Spiru Haret, Henri Coandă, Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea, Eugen Ionescu, Gala Galaction, and others.

The “Palatine Class”, established by Carol II for his son, King Michael, and made up of representatives of all social categories from all the historical regions of the country, was integrated into this high school in 1940. The members of the “Palatine Class” had to possess certain qualities: to be “sound in mind and body” and to have passed the admission examination with an average grade of 10.

When I entered high school, the school, named “Nicolae Bălcescu” since 1948, was, as it is today, one of the capital’s most prestigious high schools — indeed, the foremost one. At that time it occupied the same building as today. The massive building of the high school can suggest the permanence of the moral and aesthetic values that produced the school buildings erected in Romania from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. This permanence is called “tradition”, and our teachers at “Sava” knew how to pass on this ideal. To be a “Sava student” is more than being an “engineer” or a “doctor”: the term goes beyond the boundaries of a career. The “Sava spirit” comes from the human quality of those who stepped into and lingered in this place. It belongs to the soul, to aspirations and dreams, to knowledge and rules of conduct that last a lifetime and guide our behaviour in society. It is a state of grace one discovers both in classmates and in teachers, and it comes from a long history transformed into tradition.

Entering the high school

The imposing entrance of the high school, with a monumental staircase of broad stone steps, dominated by a colossal Ionic order with six tall columns supporting a classical pediment, opened into an immense hall, itself supported by Doric columns.

In the hall stood the solemn bust of Nicolae Bălcescu, a former pupil of the school and the figure most representative of those times. In fact, from 1952 the high school took the name of this Forty-Eighter. The walls of the hall were covered with panels on which, besides the obligatory slogans of the period, stood portraits of other famous graduates. The hall was reserved for solemn events — ceremonies and official meetings — thus emphasizing the prestige of the institution. The same hall also hosted the dance gatherings organized by the high school on religious holidays, Christmas and especially Easter, with the idea of preventing the pupils from going to church to attend the evening services.

The rules were strict. At the entrance gate we were checked to see whether we wore the imposed uniform correctly and whether we had the school badge on our arm. Access to the classrooms was not through the monumental staircase — indeed, access to the hall was forbidden to us — but through a tunnel under the official wing that led into the courtyard. From there, through one of the three entrances, we climbed toward our classroom.

The building and its spaces

From the hall a staircase led to the entrance of the high-school theatre. Also in the hall were the entrances to the teachers’ room and the secretary’s office.

From the hall also began the long, rather dark corridor which, on the right, had our classrooms, and on the left the laboratories. A similar corridor existed upstairs, with other classrooms and laboratories. These corridors sheltered the crowd of pupils during breaks, when the weather was unfavourable.

When the weather was fine, however, we spread out into the broad square courtyard, guarded by three massive three-storey wings, connected like a U: the official wing on the left, the twenty classrooms in the central part, and the dormitory wing for pupils who were not from Bucharest on the right. But the school grounds were larger. Beyond the building, behind the school, there was another fairly large plot, one side facing Știrbei Vodă, where football or lapte-gros games were organized, as well as physical education classes with a teacher when the basement gym was not sufficient. There was also a sand pit there for athletics: high jump, long jump, and triple jump.

The structure of the high-school classes

In 1957, when I took the admission examination for high school, secondary education was still strongly marked by the 1948 reform and by the Soviet model. After grades I–VII, the compulsory general school, high school proper began with grade VIII. At the end of grade IX, pupils had to choose one of the two main tracks:

After certain hesitations, I chose the science track. I did not dislike formulas, logic, and clear structures, although at the same time I devoured literature and was attracted to Latin and history. According to my father, however, the science track seemed better suited to the offspring of a modest intellectual family, forced to face the difficulties of one’s social “file” in a world increasingly oriented toward technology and industry. The intervention of the Latin teacher, who liked and appreciated me, in an attempt to convince my father to let me choose the humanities direction, failed. It was, without my realizing it then, a choice that prepared my path further on, toward science and research.

I wrote separately about my father’s role in this choice, and more broadly about his “plan” for me: My father and his plan.

The road to school

My mornings began at the Puișor tram stop, directly opposite my house. There I boarded tram 3, which rattled for three stops along Calea 13 Septembrie, swaying slowly on the narrow, worn rails, especially at intersections. At Niță Stere it turned left onto Uranus, passing by the monument to the firefighters fallen in 1848, which I often looked at with respectful curiosity, without knowing its whole story at the time.

The tram then descended past the Arsenal and the State Archives, when the panorama suddenly opened toward the Dâmbovița. At Podul Izvor I crossed it along the river embankment, after which the tram passed over 6 Martie Boulevard and stopped in front of “Lazăr” High School. From there began the walking part, the one I liked best: I entered Cișmigiu Garden.

I always crossed it at a brisk pace, but my eyes could not detach themselves from the alleys, the lake, the poplars. It was a world both quiet and lively, with pensioners on benches, mothers with children, and, from time to time, a classmate who crossed my path. Then I climbed past Schitul Măgureanu, an oasis of silence in the heart of the city, and reached the Eminescu spring on Știrbei Vodă.

I crossed Știrbei Vodă and entered Spiru Haret Street, a quiet street running parallel to the long courtyard of the high school, which I walked from end to end, as if through a corridor leading me toward a new day in my life as a pupil. At the end, I turned right on Mendeleev and, after about a hundred metres, before me, also to the right, opened a sloping little street with the Lipova restaurant on the corner. Down below, at its end, stood the school gate. There the daily journey ended and another, more difficult and richer, began: the journey of learning.

On my way to school, I told myself almost every day: “On the way back I’ll have more time; I’ll make a detour through Cișmigiu.” But the return trip, when I was alone, with lessons waiting at home, was just as hurried. When, however, it happened that I returned home in a group, together with other classmates who lived in Dealul Spirii, the path through Cișmigiu had a different charm.

In fact, it was the seasons that changed the face of my road through Cișmigiu.

The seasons of Cișmigiu

In winter, the route through Cișmigiu acquired a special charm. The park was silent and solemn. Since the path necessarily passed by the Eminescu spring and the lake with pelicans, the temptation was strong to try the first slides on the lake ice. We had no skates, but tried all sorts of improvisations: cardboard or plastic sheets, with laughter and noisy falls. Sometimes the courage of some exceeded prudence, when the thin ice broke under their steps. Then, with trousers wet and boots squelching at every step, the hero of the day set off home in shame, in a hurry to arrive before the cold turned him into a block of ice. On blustery days, the wind entered under my coat. I hugged my schoolbag to my chest and could barely stop myself on the snowed-in alleys. Crossing Cișmigiu became a struggle with the cold of those winters, but also an adventure that, seen today, belongs to the beauty of that age.

In spring, everything changed. Alleys bathed in fresh green, flowering magnolias and chestnuts, lilac bushes and the fresh smell of wet earth greeted me at every step. On my way home, I instinctively slowed down, as if wanting to prolong the spell of that park. My steps wandered among flower beds and fragrant blooms, while the hurry to reach tram 3 faded for a few moments. Pensioners occupied the chairs lined up along the path, watching passers-by hurrying to work or school. Lovers preferred the Rose Garden, with the bust of a benefactress of Romanian education and with the intoxicating, unfortunately fleeting, scent of red and pink roses. It was the season in which even impatience dissolved before the bursting forth of life, and, without realizing it, I was learning that not only textbooks, but spring itself could be a lesson about beginnings and the joy of life reborn.

In fact, my first distinct memory of Cișmigiu also dates from spring, on an Easter Sunday. I was in the fifth grade and my father took me with him to Cișmigiu to meet Uncle Toni, a first cousin of my mother, and his daughter Antonia. At that time, my father and Toni walked together to work in the morning: Toni to the Sportsmen’s Polyclinic at Mihai Vodă, where he was a cardiologist, and my father to the Construction Trust on Strada Doamnei, where he was chief accountant. Our walk took us to the Writers’ Rotunda. To my surprise, the busts of many writers I had studied at school and knew from textbooks acquired a face and weight there. My father took photographs of us with his Agfa bellows camera. In one of them I appear beside Antonia, a tiny five-year-old in a coloured skirt and with pigtails, standing on the marble pedestal of Eminescu’s bust in order to reach my shoulder. I was wearing a beige suit — jacket and short trousers — cut, as I remember, from one of my mother’s light overcoats. It is the image of my first affectionate encounter with Cișmigiu.

In summer, I did not cross the park regularly, being mostly on holiday, but I carried it in my memory as a promise of return. When, at the end of the week, I nevertheless passed along its alleys to shorten the way to the centre, I wished rather to get out as quickly as possible from the streams of Bucharesters. At Buturuga, the crowd pressed together for grilled minced-meat rolls, beer, and lemonade; on the island, at Monte Carlo, the restaurant rebuilt after the earthquake attracted a motley public. The lake was full of boats with lovers and families, sometimes colliding because they had nowhere to pass. At the landing stage, the queue for boats was always there. Sometimes I even came upon a military band performance; the music spread festively over the lake, mingled with the creak of oars and the shouts of the rowers. On torrid days, the boldest ventured under the cool spray of the artesian fountain in the middle of the lake, and their cries of pleasure echoed like an echo of summer.

In the evening, under the light of the street lamps, the side of the park facing 6 Martie Boulevard came alive, becoming an extension of little Zalomit Street, behind the “Spicul” store. Groups of young women walked arm in arm up and down, closely followed by young men, especially soldiers, in search of company. In the almost ritual quiet of the promenade, fragments of Hungarian words could be heard from time to time.

Autumn meant the beginning of school. Cișmigiu sank into a melancholy story: the alleys were covered with rusty leaves scattered by the wind, while the poplars and chestnuts watched their crowns grow barer day by day. On my way home, my steps fell softly on the carpet of leaves, and their rustle accompanied my thoughts. The air smelled of smoke and of must coming from Buturuga. I hurried as usual, and every broken breath told me that one cycle was closing and another beginning.

Thus, my daily road to school actually passed through another school: that of the seasons of Cișmigiu. And there I received lessons that no class could teach: about the beauty of beginnings, about the promise of return, about the melancholy of time passing, and, above all, about the power to be reborn.

My classmates

The four years of high school passed for me naturally and pleasantly, without spectacular upheavals. After admission, I was assigned to class VIII D, an all-boys class. We looked with longing at the other parallel classes, full of smiling and exuberant girls, but for us they remained only distant apparitions. The foreign language, besides Russian, was French in classes A–D; only class VIII E studied English.

Later, in grade X, I was transferred to a mixed class with a science profile. There were twenty-five boys and only seven girls, who immediately became a “bastion” to be conquered. But nothing came of it among us. They remained alone — at least in our eyes, for we were too immature to keep pace with the delicacy and maturity of a sixteen-year-old young lady. Who knows, however, what love stories they were weaving through the city, beyond our glances?

Our class was a small universe, a world in miniature. I can still see my classmates: the boy with the joke always ready, who always had a punchline even during the most serious lessons; the sportsman who dreamed of becoming a football or basketball champion and who, in the school courtyard, was already living the world finals; the studious classmate, always with his hand raised and his notebooks full of orderly notes; the impassive one, who at the blackboard seemed made of stone, but during breaks became the soul of football games or horseplay.

Lessons were for some a cause for panic, and for others an opportunity to shine. Sometimes teachers called three classmates to the blackboard at once for a more difficult lesson. In our benches, the rest of us exchanged glances and tried to whisper the answers to them, risking being caught. Beyond the fear of marks, we remained united, as in a team in which everyone, according to his powers, tried to save the situation. Perhaps we did not all become equally close friends, but that solidarity, even silent, still makes me smile today.

Breaks were a whirl of noises: the shouts of those running in the courtyard, the tramp of feet along the long corridors, sudden bursts of laughter at a joke, the smell of sandwiches taken out of schoolbags. The girls, more discreet, gathered quietly in small groups, in the corridor or in the classroom, sharing who knows what secrets while eating their sandwiches.

The boys’ uniforms were all the same: rough cloth, second quality, cut to the same pattern and quickly worn through at elbows and knees. They seemed inevitable to us, as if they were part of our schoolboy skin. The only exception to the monotony was Radu Budeanu, a classmate from class E, who wore a first-quality gabardine uniform. The smooth material and elegant cut made him stand out in a sea of coarse fabrics, wrapping him, as it were, in an air of distinction that none of us could ignore. It was not his fault but his parents’, yet for us, who lived in a world where everyone had to be “the same”, that small difference seemed an enormous distinction: it was immediately visible and remained in memory.

On the sleeve of the uniform jacket each of us had an unpleasant cloth badge that identified us, like an inventory label, a symbol of the docility demanded by school. That is why we attached it with safety pins in the morning, before entering the school gate, and removed it as soon as we left, as if wanting to free ourselves from its burden. It was our small gesture of freedom, of detachment from imposed uniformity, a way of telling the world that, beyond the rules, we were free.

Physical education classes began with a kind of ritual. We were lined up by height, and I remember clearly how, between grades IX and X, I gradually moved from the middle of the line to the left side, that of the taller boys. It was only a natural repositioning, dictated by growth, but for me it had the taste of a small victory: the sign that I was detaching myself from the anonymous mass and beginning to define my place. At first glance, it seemed an insignificant detail, but for me it was a sign. I was no longer the frail child carried along by others; my body was beginning to change, to lengthen, to acquire strength.

That move of a few steps toward the far left of the line had for me the value of a threshold. It was as if someone invisible had drawn on the floor of the gym the line of demarcation between childhood and adolescence. I had begun to feel differently the gaze of my classmates, differently the reaction of my body to effort, differently that restlessness which, imperceptibly, tells you that you are no longer a child, but not yet a grown man either. It was a change of place in a line, but at the same time a move into another stage of life.

From grade VIII I had already formed a lasting friendship with two classmates, Gigi and Radu. Like me, they had been sent to school young, at six, and perhaps that is what brought us together. We were nicknamed “the three musketeers” and were almost never apart. It was a simple friendship, without declarations, but solid. Both came from intellectual families, and this could be felt in the way they spoke and looked toward their future. None of us had a relationship with a girl, but attempts were not lacking: it was, after all, an age of trials and approaches.

It was not only study that kept us together. When we caught a free period, we escaped to the cinema. Our favourite cinema was “Feroviarul”, on Calea Griviței, at the intersection with Buzești. There I saw many of the Italian films that were causing a sensation at the time and which, through their stories of love, comedy, or drama, opened to us a world often hilarious, at other times unknown or incomprehensible. At other times, we gathered as spectators at a football match in the school courtyard, where our classmates played with such fury that their trousers tore and their shoes were ruined. But nothing mattered then — we were young, noisy, and convinced that the whole world would open before us.

Alongside all this, school life was also permeated by the rigours of the period. The celebrations of 23 August or 1 May forced us to parade in the stadium, with uniforms pressed to a crease and little tricolour flags. We rehearsed the steps for days until our movements turned into mechanical choreography. Teachers often reminded us to be “worthy” of the party’s trust, and slogans on the corridors spoke of the bright future of socialism. For us, the pupils, these remained only a background, an imposed stage set over which life continued its natural course.

My teachers

If I were to reconstruct the faces of my high-school years, they would not be complete without the teachers who guided our steps. Each teacher came to class with his or her own aura, and the atmosphere of the class changed with that presence.

“Nicolae Bălcescu” High School had, in my years, a respectable and generally venerable teaching staff. The youngest had already passed forty, while the others were people who had lived through the war, changes of regime, and the transition to the new socialist order, some bowing to the demands of the new regime. They came from other times, with other mentalities and another attitude toward culture and knowledge. They took care of us with probity, passion, and exacting standards; besides the knowledge of their disciplines, they passed on respect for work, a sense of measure, correctness, and dignity, in spite of the intrusions of official impostors. Whatever their subject, they all wore the garment of authority, and we pupils looked at them with a mixture of respect and irony.

Some imposed themselves through silence: as soon as they entered, the whole class fell quiet, as if pulled by an invisible string. Others, by contrast, were closer to us and managed to turn the lesson into a dialogue, even though our replies were often clumsy. There were also teachers who, without our realizing it then, taught us discipline and rigour through their very exigency. From them I learned not only formulas, but also respect for order and for one’s word.

With some I felt anxiety, with others unexpected moments of closeness. Overall, however, between us and them there existed a form of quiet and stable respect. We never thought of openly challenging or mocking them. Their authority did not need punishments; it rested on a natural dignity, and we recognized it instinctively.

Looking back, I realize that these teachers, each with his or her own style, gave us more than knowledge in a subject. They built the framework within which our adolescence, with its anxieties and curiosities, could unfold.

Every teacher had a nickname — some invented with humour, others more awkward. It was our way of bringing them closer to our world, of lowering them a little from the solemnity of their desks into the benches where we judged them with young and insolent eyes. Here are those I remember:

• Vasile Angelescu (Natural Sciences), called “Zarzavat”, was the form teacher of my class during the first two years of high school. He was an enthusiastic, active form teacher, full of care for the “army” under his command. A man past sixty, nearing retirement, Angelescu carried in his own way the gravity of the old world. He was also responsible for the school garden, which completed his profile as a man of nature. The nickname “Zarzavat” probably came from his passion for botanical examples, where vegetables always appeared as main characters. We giggled in our benches, but he remained imperturbable, convinced that even the most modest plants could find their place in science lessons. Professor Angelescu lived at the highest intensity the theme of the day’s lesson, as if striving to “transplant” it directly into our young pupil brains. You could see from his sweating face and from the drops of saliva he sprayed uncontrollably that he experienced the sacred moment of imparting knowledge almost in a trance.
• Alexandru Anghel (History), called “Zărzărica”, looked strikingly like the actor Fernandel: the same elongated face, the same mouth with many teeth, and the same ironic smile, always ready to sting. He liked to surprise us with questions that were not in the textbook. He wanted to know whether we really understood the material or merely learned it by rote. Most often, his questions left the class speechless, while he went through the register, name after name, with the same question to which no one could give the correct answer. For every answer — right or wrong — he made a mysterious sign, known only to him, in a little notebook. From those signs, without ever explaining their logic, the final term average was born. A kind of personal justice of history, which he applied consistently.
• Gheorghe Anghel (Romanian Language), nicknamed “Salam”, was a massive man, with a heavy gait and a deep voice, who entered the classroom with the air of a theatre actor ready to give the performance of his life. He liked to dramatize passages from the Romanian classics, especially Sadoveanu and Rebreanu, uttering them with long pauses, as if every sentence were a memorable line. He had the habit of smoothing his hair with his palm before asking questions and fixing the pupil with an insistent gaze, as if the correct answer depended not only on what you knew, but also on how brave you were before him.
• Zlate Bogdanov (Mathematics), called “Momâia” or “Fonfi șliț”, was a figure apart. Thin and tall, he did not seem to amount to much. When he spoke, he rather snuffled, hence the merciless nickname we gave him. In reality, I learned a great deal from him, and he appreciated my efforts, giving me high marks after the mathematics crisis I had gone through in the previous years. I owe him my successful admission to the faculty.
• Gheorghe Caloianu (Mathematics), nicknamed “Calu”, was the exact opposite of Bogdanov. Younger, vigorous, upright despite his right leg, which he swung after childhood polio, with a firm voice and precise explanations, he imposed order and rigour. His lessons flowed logically; the demonstrations on the blackboard seemed perfect constructions. He did not accept approximate answers, but he knew how to appreciate the real effort of a pupil even when that pupil did not reach the correct solution. He cared about me, as shown by the averages of eight he gave me despite the disastrous written papers I produced. I believed I was well prepared in mathematics from middle school. But I was wrong: high-school mathematics was different from that of general school. Professor Caloianu was very good at teaching, but something did not work in my case. I got high marks orally, the teacher liked me, but in the term papers I received low marks: 5 or even 4. With goodwill, he gave me an average of 8 at the end, but I was not satisfied. Nor did the teacher understand the reason for my failures in the written papers; the probable explanation was that I could not control my emotions and made calculation errors. So it went until the end of grade IX, when, in the last term, the miracle happened: I got 10 for the best paper in the class, where there were at least two classmates very good at mathematics. This event completely changed the situation. Whereas until then, out of fear of mathematics, I preferred to choose the humanities specialization from grade X, I decided to enrol in the science track, as my father also wished.
• Alexandru Dabija (Basics of Darwinism), called “Biju”, had a jovial way of teaching. He liked to turn lessons into small stories, sometimes seasoned with jokes. He was a corpulent man who wanted to appear authoritarian, but at heart he was a good man.
• Ștefan Georgescu (French Language), called “Câțu”, was a small old man, with an olive complexion, a heavy smoker, mocking, with an impeccable French pronunciation that intimidated us. I had him as French teacher during the first two years of high school. Himself a graduate of our school, he was a consummate professional pedagogue. He transmitted to me a spirit of respect and passion for the values of French literature and culture, which, in their period of glory, represented a cornerstone of universal culture. He also took care of the high-school theatre circle, contributing to the organization of the annual festivities.
• Emilia Gheorghiu (Physics, Chemistry) — with no clear nickname in my memory — was a lady of about sixty, with grey hair tied in a bun, who preserved her authority without raising her voice.
• Gheorghe Guțu (Latin Language) was a tall, distinguished gentleman, author of the Latin textbook, a passionate lover of Latin grammar. His eyes lit up when a pupil managed an acceptable translation from Cicero. He had taken a liking to me because of my performance in Latin, I being the Latinist of the class, a qualification in which, it must be said, my mother, a failed Latinist, played an important role. When, at the end of grade IX, I had to decide where to enrol, in the science or humanities track, my father and I chose the more pragmatic science track. Guțu called my father to school, asking him to change our decision. Of course, we did not change the choice, although I was sorry: my middle-school dreams of becoming a theatre director or archaeologist suddenly fell apart.
• Alexandru Iliescu (Russian Language), relatively young compared with other teachers, dark-haired, with wavy hair, kept a sober air, as if carrying on his shoulders the whole responsibility of Pushkin’s language. We were not killing ourselves over Russian, and he was aware of that.
• Florica Negoiță (Political Economy), called “Țiganca”, was small, young, and dark-skinned, hence the nickname. She was the only teacher who openly made communist propaganda. For that reason, pupils almost hated her. She had a direct, almost sharp style of teaching. I found fascinating the way she taught: she began by writing on the blackboard the structure of the lesson in the form of a tree, with the root on the left side of the board and horizontal branches extending from it. The rest of the lesson was the traversal of this tree, branch by branch. The memory of this method of learning later helped me, at the faculty, to get out of the crisis of my second year.
• Gheorghe Pascali (French Language), “Georges” to us, was a distinguished gentleman, wearing a bow tie, well past youth, with almost aristocratic manners, with a discreet smile and a constant expectation that things be done comme il faut. He taught me from grade X. My knowledge of French helped me greatly to concentrate on French literature, and I was appreciated for it. I esteemed him greatly, and the sympathy was mutual. He expected exceptional performance from me, and for that reason I had to overbid. The topic of the term paper was more or less known in advance. I came to the written test with the paper already written in a thin examination notebook, which I substituted for the official one. I prepared that paper for weeks, consulting textbooks and dictionaries. I wrote the resulting synthesis over many pages — hard to imagine that they could have been filled in a poor hour of examination. The teacher accepted this deception benevolently, and I received the highest mark.
• Constantin Tudose (Physical Education), called “Bibanu”, was a good teacher, not very energetic, but with a natural authority. He preferred refereeing to participating.
• Ion Zăinel (Workshop), called “Șpiral”, was a darkish fellow, with a broad forehead and shiny black hair. He taught us to work with tools in the school workshop in the basement. He was the subject of many jokes because of his unacademic language.
• And, not least, Aurel Corodeanu, the representative of the Communist Youth Union. He did not teach a subject proper, but he gave us ideological speeches during our weekly programme. In a camp at Mamaia organized by the high school, he punished us by making us do knee bends: one hundred, two hundred, depending on the seriousness of the offence.

All of them, with their manners, their tics, and the nicknames we uttered among ourselves, formed a mosaic which, seen from behind, is perhaps one of the liveliest images of my high school.

The high-school library and my reading

The high-school library was as familiar to me as my own home. I knew every shelf, every corner, every sound of the door. It was on the first floor of the main building, right next to the entrance to the theatre hall. Entering the library, one found several tables with chairs waiting for readers who wanted to read on the spot. At the back of the room stood a high desk where the librarian sat and where the card catalogue was kept. Two of the walls of this first room were covered with carved walnut cabinets designed by Theodor Aman, a former teacher at the high school, rising up to the ceiling, with shelves full of books. More than 25,000 volumes were stored in the cupboards of this main room and of the adjoining rooms, just as full, with a special smell of old paper that I still feel in memory today.

Every Monday I entered determined, with my mental list of readings, and left with my arms full. Four or five books a week was the norm, and I never happened to leave with fewer. I read together with my grandmother Linica, each with his or her own copy or, if there was only one, alternating pages. In this way we consumed “industrial quantities” of literature. Jules Verne and Victor Hugo I had exhausted already in general school, but in high school I entered the world of classical theatre — Shakespeare, Molière, Corneille — and of the great novels: Balzac, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Zola. I cannot list them all, but a few have remained in my memory like luminous milestones.

Balzac and The Human Comedy

Balzac was not an easy reading for a high-school boy, but once you entered his world, it was impossible to leave. He demanded attention, but rewarded you with a gallery of characters more alive than many real figures. Reading Balzac was for me a kind of apprenticeship in observing people. In his pages I discovered not only plots and characters, but the discreet mechanisms of ambition, of the power of money, of love and betrayal. Balzac forgave nothing — neither hypocrisy, nor vanity, nor compromise. Yet at the same time he did not despise his characters: he allowed them to betray themselves, with the meticulousness of an anatomist of the soul. For me, an adolescent in full formation, it was as if someone had offered me a detailed map of human passions and weaknesses.

Several Balzac novels remained landmarks for me:

• Eugénie Grandet – I came to know her as a bronze figure in a provincial town: silent, modest, but with impressive inner strength. It was not only the father’s miserliness that struck me, but the way Balzac showed how money, once placed at the centre of life, distorts everything, even love.
• Father Goriot – The drama of the father who sacrifices himself for his ungrateful daughters disturbed me deeply. The parallel with Shakespeare’s King Lear was inevitable: how a father can give everything and receive nothing. Years later, I saw the novel again as a lesson about affective blindness and the destructive power of vanity.
• Lost Illusions – Perhaps Balzac’s most youthful and cruel novel. I felt Lucien de Rubempré as an elder brother, caught between high aspirations and inevitable compromises. The lesson was bitter: talent is not enough if you do not have the strength to preserve your integrity. In my high-school years, when I dreamed of the great roads awaiting me, the novel made me think more than I would have wished to admit.
• Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans – The natural continuation of Lost Illusions, but with a darker tone. I was fascinated by the mixture of charm and cruelty in the Parisian world of courtesans, glittering on the surface and merciless in depth. It taught me that social ascent is never free and that each step forward has a hidden price.
• Cousin Bette – Here Balzac seemed to have reached the maximum of his power of observation. The cousin, apparently humble and insignificant, becomes the pivot of a methodical revenge. In high school, the novel seemed to me a demonstration that resentment can be as formidable a weapon as money or seduction.

Together, these novels formed in my mind a true moral map of ambition, love, betrayal, and revenge. Perhaps without realizing it then, Balzac was teaching me to look at the world not only on the surface, but to seek the invisible threads that connect people’s actions to their consequences.

Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland

On a gloomy autumn afternoon I took from the shelves of the high-school library the first volume of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, published by the State Publishing House for Literature and Art. It was a new acquisition, in a simple format, smelling of fresh print. I had previously read a novella by the same author, very fashionable at the time, and had been fascinated by his talent as a portraitist. I borrowed the book and began to read it out of curiosity; within a few pages it caught me as if it had been written for me. The following week I took the second volume, then the third, reading them breathlessly. This river-novel is the chronicle of the life of a talented German musician, from childhood through his turbulent development as an artist, to maturity and recognition. Set against the cultural and political landscape of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the novel follows a life of passion, struggle, and tireless search for artistic freedom.

More than the story of the artist’s formation, I was impressed by Jean-Christophe’s male friendships. Two, in particular, remained imprinted on my mind:

In my high-school years, when my friendships formed easily and sometimes broke abruptly, these literary models remained with me as a kind of reference. Rolland showed, without preaching, that true friendship is not measured in years, but in loyalty and in the capacity to accept the other as he is.

I remember that, after finishing the last volume, I had the strange impression that I was leaving behind not a character, but a friend whom I had accompanied on a long road, strewn with joys, quarrels, and reconciliations. And every time I thought about my friendships from high school, the literary faces shaped by Rolland came, unbidden, beside the real ones. The immense success and considerable influence that Romain Rolland exercised in his time, as well as the quasi-prophetic role played by his work in the interwar period, have faded in the following decades into an inexplicable quasi-oblivion.

Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks

In the same period I had the opportunity to read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, published in two volumes by the same incomparable State Publishing House for Literature and Art. It opened the series of Mann’s novels that shaped my adolescence and youth.

The story of the Buddenbrook family, with its rise and slow decline, carried me into the midst of a German family across three generations. I lived with them their joys, ambitions, and failures, understanding for the first time how yesterday’s decisions roll over the lives of today. What fascinated me was Thomas Mann’s attention to the details of daily life: meals, family conversations, small rivalries, compromises made out of pride or fear. This family chronicle made me look differently at the stories I heard in my own family. I understood better how not only names and houses are transmitted, but also ambitions, fears, and ways of looking at the world. Today, when I try to reconstruct the history of my family, I realize how difficult it is to give life to a past. On the other hand, I cannot fail to notice the resemblance between the rise and decline of the Buddenbrooks and what happened in the Niculescu family, which reached prosperity thanks to my great-grandparents and then entered a slow disintegration under their children and grandchildren.

Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus

Reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus was a more difficult and disturbing experience. I began it during a summer holiday, believing I would find a classical story about the pact with the devil of old Goethe’s Faust. Instead, I entered a labyrinth of ideas, music, and despair.

The main character, Adrian Leverkühn, a brilliant and cursed composer, seemed to me a dark projection of Jean-Christophe. If in Rolland music was light and liberation, in Mann it became at times the imprisonment of a haunted mind. The fascination with absolute creation, even at the price of one’s own life, disturbed me. In high school, when I still did not know what it meant to devote oneself totally to an idea, the novel left me with the impression of a warning.

I read it slowly, rereading passages, stopping not from fatigue but from the need to breathe. It had a density that attracted and oppressed me at the same time. And I think that, without realizing it then, Doctor Faustus planted in me the question that followed me all my life: how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice in order to reach perfection?

Books and the lessons of life

With the books devoured breathlessly, the high-school library was for me a training ground of mind and conduct. There I learned to recognize the ideas that attracted me, to carry on dialogues with authors, and to share the pleasure of reading with my grandmother — the only one who could keep pace with me.

My high-school readings were a parallel school, invisible but intense, in which there were no marks and no lessons recited at the blackboard, but in which I learned with an intensity difficult to match. The teachers set the framework; the books filled it with colours and depths. In the morning, I entered the classrooms, among benches polished by generations of pupils, and sat before the desks occupied by our teachers, people of respectable age, with life experiences I could only suspect. In the afternoon, I returned home, where I met Balzac, Rolland, or Thomas Mann, each with his style and lessons. Today, looking back, I know that many life decisions were influenced then, without my realizing it. Classical literature extended my circle of references beyond family and the immediately visible friends; it offered me models, traps, and alternatives. And it taught me that the great decisions of life are not made only with one’s own experience, but also with the memory and wisdom of others.

In a retrospective view of my life, I can say that the influence of the books read in adolescence appeared years later, when I faced choices concerning love, family, career, friendships, social problems, foreignness, and so on. When a person makes an important decision in life, all relevant knowledge counts in the inner deliberation. Such knowledge usually includes one’s own experiences, the experiences of one’s parents, and those of anyone familiar. The lives of these people often become examples the person can consider. The good ones should be followed, and the bad ones avoided. Each of us has a limited circle of friends and family from which to draw knowledge, but classical literature can be a much broader and often much deeper source of knowledge. The knowledge one learns from books, especially from classical literature, can help one make better decisions, just as knowledge from real life can.

Trips and episodes

In those years, the high school also organized extracurricular activities: mountain trips, dance evenings in the school hall, school competitions. All these added a dose of effervescence to a life otherwise fairly regimented.

I remember two mountain trips made with my high-school classmates. In 1960, after grade X, I first went to the Retezat Mountains and, toward autumn, to the Vrancea Mountains along the Soveja Valley, with a visit to the Mausoleum at Mărășești.

The trip to Retezat

From the trip to the Retezat Mountains, one almost unbelievable scene remained vivid in my mind. We were climbing in single file along rocky paths, above the forests, on the bare ridges of the mountain. Suddenly my classmates from class A, proving themselves good connoisseurs of opera music, began to sing at the top of their lungs the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida, in Italian.

I knew the triumphal march, which I had played on the piano at Steierdorf with Amalia, without however paying attention to the words. But my classmates were obviously better trained in opera, knowing by heart arias and choruses in Italian. The secret, I think, was the film Aida, released on screens in those years, with Sophia Loren and the angelic voice of Renata Tebaldi. After the march died away, Flutur, the tallest classmate, nearly two metres tall, with a bass-baritone voice, launched into Ramfis’s invocation from the third act, the scene of Radames’s condemnation by the priests: “Radames! Radames! Radames! Tu rivelasti della patria i segreti allo straniero! Discolpati..... Egli tace.” Flutur’s classmates from class A answered with the priests’ chorus: “Traditor!”. The solemn invocation was repeated several times, exactly as in the opera. The mountain echo amplified the voices, the solemn passages mingled with the wind and broke against the silence of the rocks. In that setting of stone and sky, theatre and life met. It was as if the mountain itself had become an immense opera stage transferred from the banks of the Nile.

Another moment that remained in my memory from that trip is the photograph taken on the ridge around the middle of a torrid day. The girls were wearing short shorts, we boys were bare-chested. Our group, almost twenty pupils, sat on a rock suspended above a threatening abyss, which nevertheless had a wide platform sloping toward the path and on which, climbing it, one could approach the void. The girls sat in front, at the edge of the rock, stretched out on one side, while we stood or sat behind them on the sloping surface. Immortalized like that in the photograph, at first glance what jumps out is not our faces, nor the grandeur of the mountain behind, but the white and plump thighs of Mariana M., exposed in the foreground. They inevitably attract the eye, eclipsing everything else. It was the image of an unconscious, amused, and playful youth, in which mountain, heat, and adolescence merged into a scene as memorable as Aida sung on a mountaintop.

The trip to the Vrancea Mountains

I do not remember the route of the trip to the Vrancea Mountains in detail. Forests reigned everywhere, paths slipped through the shade, and openings were rare. Yet one moment remained impressed on me more than any other, not because of the mountain, but because of my Agfa camera. I had received it from my father; it was a pre-war bellows camera, kept in a leather case with a nickel clasp, which I wore around my neck on a long strap. It took pictures on 6x9 film, but I had to advance the film manually after each frame, following the number of the photograph through a red little window, twelve pictures in all. If you forgot to advance the film, you risked bizarre superpositions of images: practically, two spoiled pictures. In the picturesque heart of the Vrancea Mountains, reached through the Soveja valley, there is one of the massif’s waterfalls; I think it was called Cascada Mișina and was the result of a fall of about twenty metres by the water of a small river over a series of stone steps. The area was then an oasis of quiet and natural beauty, where nature and time seemed to have conspired to create a corner of paradise, still unaltered by mass tourism, an ideal place for a pause in which to reconnect with nature. We stopped there to rest and eat what we had brought in our bags. First of all, I took out the camera and photographed the falling water. But I forgot to advance the film. The next picture, taken by a classmate, caught me in only swimming trunks, stretched out in the sun on the grass of a clearing as if on a beach. When developed, the two images were obviously superimposed: the waterfall and, over it, my translucent silhouette, turned from horizontal into vertical, like a kind of white ghost floating naked over the foaming fall of water. That photograph, involuntarily surrealist, remained one of the strangest memories of adolescence.

The Mausoleum at Mărășești

The trip to Vrancea ended with a visit to the Mausoleum at Mărășești. After the days spent through the forests of Vrancea, among rivers and waterfalls, the encounter with the monument to the heroes had a special force. Suddenly, the adolescent joy of hiking turned into respectful silence.

The mausoleum rose imposingly, white, with its high dome, broad arcades, and stone alleys, in a plain that seemed to increase its dimensions. Inside, the silence was heavy. On the walls were inscriptions with the names of the regiments and of the heroes fallen in the Battle of Mărășești in the summer of 1917, an endless list of broken lives, while in the underground crypts, graves were aligned, each with a simple cross. In the centre of the mausoleum was the sarcophagus of General Eremia Grigorescu, with his famous motto inscribed: “They shall not pass here!”. For our generation, raised in the midst of the communist regime, this formula was presented as a slogan of national heroism, but beyond the propaganda of the time, it vibrated authentically: there, under the stone, were the people who had truly stopped the German army with their bodies.

I remember how we walked in a line, descending to the lower part, where light filtered weakly and our steps echoed dryly on the stone slabs. For the first time, I truly felt what it means to hold before one’s eyes not a page of a textbook, but the concrete place where thousands of soldiers rested. After the merriment of the road through the Vrancea forests, the solemn image of the Mausoleum remained as a grave counterpoint. It was both a lesson of history lived directly, in a place where time seemed to have stopped, and a confrontation with the idea of sacrifice, which, at that age, I was only beginning to intuit.

My first erotic experience

As I grew, I felt more and more strongly the need to break away from the image of the spoiled boy, protected by all the women in the house.

The high-school years were not only about formulas, theorems, and compulsory readings, but also about that silent yet implacable revolution called adolescence, with the awakening of curiosities which, once lit, could no longer be extinguished. Amid the jokes of classmates, the hum of corridors, and the emotions of written tests, there insinuated itself the call of an unknown world, the world of maturity, which each of us sensed but did not fully understand. It was not a conscious choice, but an instinctive tendency, difficult to define, to seek my own path, to distinguish myself, to define myself as an individual. This diffuse aspiration toward independence pushed me to try, to risk, to seek experiences that would place me among men.

And inevitably, one of the strongest curiosities born then was connected with sexuality. The stories of my classmates, told in whispers with a mixture of fascination and bravado, ignited in me a desire I did not even know how to name. It manifested itself in erotic dreams and in that morning embarrassment when I tried to hide their traces on my underwear.

Thus, one day — I think I was in grade IX — I stepped for the first time into the room of Rozina, a prostitute about whom people in the high school spoke in whispers, with a mixture of fascination and fear.

Rozina had been a dancer at the Constantin Tănase theatre and at the Melody bar in the basement of the Aro block, and for most of the sexually precocious boys in the high school she was a kind of urban legend: the woman who could transform curiosity into an experience. I remember how, listening to the whispers of the classmates who had known Rozina, after hearing so many stories about her, I told myself that I had to meet her, to lose my virginity as quickly as possible, even if that meant paying cash. So I asked the initiated for all the information needed to reach Rozina’s favours.

The meeting with Rozina took place in her small room on Popa Soare Street, a room with its entrance directly from the street. In the days before, I lived with clumsy impatience, mixed with a dull anxiety and erotic dreams. To have courage, I convinced two good friends and classmates, Gigi and Radu, to accompany me to our first encounter with sex. We had been warned that, to avoid crowding in front of the entrance, a geranium placed in the window would be the signal that we had to wait a little longer, because another client was next. After a walk of about a quarter of an hour, the geranium disappeared, and, as we had been told, we burst into the room without knocking.

The room was large enough to contain two beds, separated by a curtain made from a sheet. The larger bed, near the entrance, was used like a bench in a waiting room and as a place for the hasty removal of the clothes of the candidates for pleasure, while the smaller bed, the place of pleasure, was hidden behind the curtain, a sheet stretched on a wire. There too was a small sink with a towel for clients and a white chamber pot for Rozina.

Rozina greeted us with a professional smile, dressed in a semi-transparent pink robe decorated with feathers around the neck and sleeves, through which her naked body could be glimpsed. On her feet she wore high-heeled slippers, also pink and feathered. While putting the geranium in the window, she told us that she accepted three clients at once only exceptionally. She was a beautiful blonde, with a magnetic presence and a cold professionalism that fascinated and intimidated us at the same time. I was not sure whether I was more attracted by her physical presence or by the images of her as a bar dancer, in different erotic poses, that decorated the walls.

Rozina knew exactly what to do with a beginner. It happened that one of us, whether from shyness or emotion, did not manage to carry things through. “Another time... I’ll be waiting for you.” I, fortunately, passed the test successfully and even received Rozina’s praise, of course a professional flattery that always “works”. After everything was over and we had dressed, we put the money on the bed; Rozina lit a cigarette and smiled at us tiredly. Looking at her face, I had the impression that it would be a while before the geranium disappeared from the window again. She invited us not to forget her and to return to repeat the experience another day.

I had fulfilled a fantasy, but I left with a bitter taste, realizing that sex, in that form, had none of the magic I had dreamed of. The encounter, as I had lived it in Rozina’s little bed, hidden behind the curtain beyond which the two friends waited their turn, had been short and intense, but I felt it as mechanical, deprived of intimacy and meaning. It was more an exploration of the limits of my imagination than an immersion in sensuality, a rite of passage into another world, that of men, the ticking off of an adolescent stage that left me only with a strange emptiness in my soul and the feeling that the sexuality I had dreamed of was something else. Although I did not fully understand what true intimacy with a woman meant, I was aware that what I had experienced was a superficial spectacle, not an authentic emotional bond.

That did not prevent me from then taking part in a “round” organized in the house of a classmate, Valeriu, again with Rozina as protagonist. The event had been repeated many times in the past by the organizing classmate who, as Rozina’s business partner, was exempt from payment and perhaps had the right to an encore if his resources allowed it. The invited boys knew the rules, and I submitted to them. We sat quietly on chairs, in the half-light of the living room, waiting for the lucky one in the bedroom to finish so another could take his place. In the short interval between clients, Rozina performed a summary self-cleaning in the bathroom. Although I passed this trial as well, I was left with the same feeling of superficiality, of lack of emotional participation, the same dull dissatisfaction and a feeling of distance from what I thought intimacy and sex meant. Rozina had been more a symbol of adolescent curiosity than a true partner. Although I ticked off the sexual experiences as I had intended, I felt I was in a world where emotional connection was almost absent, and the act itself was only a transactional exchange of humours, empty of meaning. Rozina remained, in my memory, a symbol of the beginning: the first lesson about the difference between desire and intimacy.

I understood then, perhaps without being able to put it into words, that true closeness to a woman is not reduced to hurried gestures and transactional rituals. That sexuality is not only a satisfied curiosity, but also a language of emotion and of spiritual bond. That bitter lesson, begun on the benches of high school, followed me for a long time afterward and pushed me to seek beyond the body, toward that mystery of a communion of desires and especially feelings which, in fact, was only beginning to reveal itself to me.

An unrequited love

Probably every high-school boy has had, at least once, a silent passion, hidden under the anonymous embrace of the class. Mine was R., without that love being reciprocated. She was the prettiest and most spoiled of the seven girls in our class, assiduously courted by boys, and among the suitors I was the most obvious. R. was a brown-haired girl with green eyes, with the air of an inaccessible doll, always with her nose in the air, always with the smile of a child conscious of her magnetism. She lived near the Grozăvești thermal power plant and walked home, since there was no direct means of transport between the high school and her house.

Shortly after I met her, pretending that I lived near her house, I began to accompany her on the way home. For two years I walked her home after classes, thus prolonging my route along streets that were not mine, hoping in the illusion of a closeness. We walked side by side like old friends, talking about anything, usually about teachers or classmates, but never approaching the subject of the relationship between the two of us. It was a ritual that gave me hope, but also fed my uncertainty.

The boys whispered and some laughed at me, telling me that R. was in love with Cornel, the repeater of the class, an athletic type who delighted the whole class when questioned, because he almost never knew how to answer or answered comically, making fun of the teacher, who finally threw him out of the classroom. R. addressed complicit glances to Cornel, and he pierced her with sidelong glances of the James Dean type or, rather, “macho” Latin American. I never found out how serious the relationship between R. and Cornel was, although perhaps some classmates knew. I did not have the courage to ask R. what she really felt for Cornel. I risked my friendship with her — and I preferred that silent, almost ritual presence to any loss. I continued to court R., and she continued to accept without offering me anything in return. On the contrary, whenever she had the chance, she made me jealous and frustrated, paying attention to other classmates at my expense. I had read The Sorrows of Young Werther and was therefore warned, but hope does not abandon the poor lover.

The end of the baccalaureate examination coincided, by date, with the seventeenth anniversary of my birth. My parents organized a restaurant meal with relatives and friends, and a “tea” at home was also decided upon, to which my closest classmates would be invited, among them, of course, R. We young people occupied two rooms emptied of furniture, where we could dance, while the “old people” — parents and relatives — withdrew into the other two rooms. From time to time, my uncles made incursions in order to amuse themselves at the expense of the young. During one of these incursions, Tibi, a doctor, a great connoisseur of women and fond of giving advice, pulled me aside and, pointing to R. as she moved while dancing, whispered to me with gentle irony:

“Keep insisting; in my opinion she has been taken from behind for some time.”

Although I did not like the expression at all, and it remained stuck in my mind with its vulgarity, I said nothing to Tibi. Instead, this observation opened my eyes, and from then on I decided to abandon the “maître-chevalier servant” relationship with R. that had been established in high school. Our relationship became, from that moment, simple, cordial — “friendly”, but without nuances.

In the autumn of that year, we both entered the Polytechnic, the same faculty, and for a year we were in the same cohort. We saw each other almost daily, in crowded lecture halls or in the university corridors. But the chain of high-school days had been irrevocably broken. What had been was not repeated: glances cooled, jokes became fewer, each of us was caught up in other circles and other concerns.

The relationship with R. was one of the most confused and tormenting amorous experiences of my life. Although it was obvious from afar that I was in love with her, R. did not seem to share my feelings, yet neither did she reject me. My attempts to win her ran into a wall of indifference, which made me feel powerless and frustrated, but above all uncompetitive. It was an unrequited love, one that consumed me and made me doubt my own masculine charm and, in general, when I am in society, my own charisma. From the whole story, what remained with me was not an unfulfilled longing, but an endless question about myself. It hurt me that she did not choose me — it confirmed what I feared: that I was not someone to be chosen. I carried with me, for years, the shadow of a mistrust: that I did not have enough charisma, that my attention, my discretion, my small and patient gestures were never enough. It was not her fault, nor mine. It was the vulnerability in me, at the age when one asks whether one is sufficiently “good”, “interesting”, “loved”. This complex followed me all my life. After that, whenever a woman tried to approach me, letting me understand that she liked or admired me, she first had to pass through the long process of verification that she was not making fun of me. The relationship with R. taught me many things about the complexity of human feelings and especially about their vulnerability. I understood that love is only rarely truly reciprocal and that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot make someone truly love you.

The years passed, and at every class reunion I met R.: elegant, impeccable, sure of her charm, always attentive to details, with that enigmatic smile that has no age. After university, she married a colleague from the institute, has a daughter, a notary or lawyer, and remained alone after her husband died still young. She travels a great deal and tells stories of her journeys, surrounds herself with friends, but in essence seems to have remained that perfectly outlined character on the surface, hard to reach in depth — assuming that this depth truly exists. Some say she is cultured, but I do not feel in her the vibration that touches the souls of others, which only true culture gives. I look at the episode with R. without irony and without regret, with a natural gentleness, because the wound has healed. R. bears no blame: at that age one must learn and choose what is more attractive. I never found out how she lived with her own desires or regrets, but I know for certain how I crossed adolescence and youth: with nostalgic courage, seeking to discover and accept myself, even when I was not the chosen one. I understood many things about myself, about charm, shyness, and the secret desires of adolescence. More than that, I know how much beauty can be contained in a silent admiration, a chaste friendship, an unrequited love which, although it was not fulfilled, laid the foundation for a wiser view of the world and of myself.

I feel neither the desire to overturn the reality of the past, nor do the shadows of the fox claiming the grapes are sour assail me when I now say — with the calm of elapsed time — that that silent adolescent love was a youthful infatuation, and life, with its gentle irony, gave me the chance to get over the pride of the rejected suitor. And perhaps, in the end, it is precisely these unrequited loves that force us, forever, to become our own most patient and gentle friends. And then I learned a lesson: sometimes, the fact that our expectations were not fulfilled saves us from our own illusions. A love story with R. would have been beautiful, but a life beside her is hard for me to imagine. We were, and are, too different.

Epilogue

The high-school years passed like a late childhood, protected by family and school, in which the echo of great history was felt only as a murmur in the background. Born in war and raised in a troubled peace, we crossed adolescence like an apparently calm water, without suspecting its true depths and the contrary currents surrounding us. The shadows of history passed beside us and, even if we felt their breath, they did not fully touch us because we had not given them a name.

We did not discuss politics, nor existential problems. We were perhaps too young, but above all cautious. We had learned caution from our families: words had to be chosen carefully, questions stopped in time, confessions and bolder thoughts kept to oneself. Thus I learned, early on, the lesson of silence and discretion: we instinctively knew what could be said and what had to be hidden.

I remember among my classmates neither rebels nor dissidents, but neither informers nor opportunists; only young people seeking their way, with natural restraint but open hearts. We perceived propaganda with resignation, took part in it without zeal and without comments. We were a generation that kept away from excesses, from harshness, from suspicious positions of prestige.

We lived the beginning of life without tensions, with respect for teachers and without malice among ourselves. In that small and resigned world, where life was making its way among us, we discovered the normality and joy of a shared adolescence. We saw to school, friendships, and games, and thus enjoyed the beginning of life, without excesses, without complexes, and without strains. On the classroom benches we exchanged homework, as well as jokes and small secrets, and learned slowly but surely the art of friendship. Thus we lived the beauty of the beginning: friendships formed without concealment, games filling the schoolyard, learning that shaped us step by step. In classrooms, the faces of the teachers bent over us with gentle severity, and the blackboard, covered with formulas or quotations, was the daily witness of our small defeats and victories. And perhaps precisely through this apparent quiet our characters were formed, so that later we could meet the trials of the real world.

The high-school years stand under the sign of a paradoxical innocence: our adolescence, though silent and restrained, was luminous. In it, life was taking shape cleanly, like a spring bud, and settled within us like the gentle light that, every morning, entered through the tall windows of the classrooms.

Perhaps that is why high-school friendships were the most durable. Looking back, I realize that the bond with my high-school classmates was more alive and lasting than the one with my general-school classmates or even with my university colleagues. Around them, time folded differently, keeping us close even when our paths carried us through the world.

After the Revolution, the classmates who remained in Bucharest met month after month, on the first Thursday of the month, in the same place, keeping alive the flame of our bond. Lia Briceag (may God rest her in His Peace!), our classmate of the heart and the head of our graduating class, had this initiative and was the binder who knew how to gather us again and again, at anniversaries or spontaneous meetings. These meetings became another kind of classroom, in which time gathers us in the same place of memory, with stories, with recollections, and with that laughter of high-school pupils that has never left us. For us, those who had gone away, these reunions became celebrations of return: moments in which, beyond the present full of worries, we rediscover the freshness of adolescence and the warmth of shared youth.

Perhaps precisely for this reason the high school remains, for me, the pure beginning of life: the place where I learned friendship, discretion, solidarity, and the simple joy of being together. A beginning that, even now, I feel as a warm light, settled forever within me. Although the high-school years ended with graduation, they continue to live in us, as a deep layer of our memory and identity, the cleanest and most luminous of all.

For a long time, the high school remained for me a place of memory: the building, the corridors, the courtyard, the rooms — all preserved as in an inner photograph, and I often felt the need for a return “on site”. Thanks to the efforts of my classmates, such returns were organized on round anniversaries or whenever it was possible (Figs. 13–15). The last time I returned to the high school, together with several classmates, was on 5 December 2014, on the school anniversary, the day of the celebration of Saint Sava.

Returning to the high school (5 December 2014)

I entered with emotion the space that, in youth, had seemed eternal to us. This time I was no longer a pupil, but a witness of time. I took part in the festivities prepared in the school theatre hall and, as the ceremonial moments followed one another, I had the strange impression that two planes overlapped: adolescence, with its quiet light, and the present, with the gravity that years lay upon people.

At the end, the headmistress invited me to go up on stage and speak to the pupils in the hall. It was an unexpected moment and, precisely for that reason, all the more powerful: to return to the place that formed you and suddenly find yourself in the position of the one who says something to the generation that continues. I felt then that the high school is not only a closed chapter, but a continuity — a thread that passes through people, through time, and which sometimes turns back toward you in the form of a simple call: “say something to them”.

Someone recorded my speech; I can publish it here as a small testimony to this return and as a sign that the bond with the high school has not been lost, but has merely changed its form.

▶

On that occasion, I promised the pupils that I would return with my collaborator, Andrei Vasilățeanu, vice-dean of the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages — himself a graduate of the high school — to reveal to those interested the fascinating prospects of the computer science direction at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, where I was a professor and had served as head of department.

Soon afterwards, I found myself again in the theatre hall, before several dozen pupils from the terminal classes of the high school (Figs. 16–18). I spoke to them about the charm of Politehnica and of the computer science programme at FILS. I did not follow the results of our intervention, but the enthusiasm with which the pupils received Andrei’s presentation deeply flattered me.

Back to Adolescence Back to Memoirs