Radu Jörgensen

The editor-in-chief of The Intellectual was a burly, bearded man, a kind of Danubian Castro, who (also) resembled the Cuban when it came to his tumultuousness, his vital energy; he was the kind of editor who demanded strict control over all the material that ended up on the page. That Castro took me to heart. I’ve no idea why. And he did me ill thereby. For a while, I did secretarial work, trying to swallow my pride and telling myself that any kind of work was good in the presence of such men. It was better than having my name appear on the masthead of some old newspaper that had been renamed and which to legitimise itself needed a few young (post-)revolutionaries in its cesspit of corrupt timeservers. […] It was preferable to accept for the time being the dubious status of a job on the editorial staff of The Intellectual.
             But I couldn’t go on closing my eyes to it all forever. The more its articles originated from the upper echelons of Europe’s revolutionary intellectuals, the more arid the magazine’s articles became. True, there were figures that had to be introduced to East-European readers who had been kept in the dark for a very long time. But the texts themselves, even if they were representative of their authors, and this was something I was beginning to doubt, were pushing the magazine further and further away from the idea of “social dialogue.” […] For a while I preferred to deceive myself, keeping faith with the magazine’s attitude. But then the doubt began to resurface.
           One evening, I was reading some proofs, happy at having had my second article published in the magazine in the company of so many prestigious names. It was cold in the boyar palace, in the large, high-ceilinged rooms, which seemed very tall to all of us, who came from eighth-floor bedsits and mansards with sloping roofs. The walls of the ballrooms dazzled me with their phosphorescent whiteness, the old-fashioned furniture made me feel tense, and I could barely open the solid-wood doors with their gold appliqués, so heavy were they. The red velvet armchairs and long meeting tables, at the ends of which lords had once sat facing each other at breakfast, but at which in the last forty years the comrades had held their meetings on how to bury us, were covered in hoarfrost due to the unwonted cold inside the building. God had been on the side of the children, I thought, on the side of those who that December had taken to the streets wearing only shirts and light jackets as they faced the tanks. It had been a warm December. But now God had started to lose patience with us, those who had begun to forget the sacrificed lives and were now caught up willy-nilly in the game of the reinstalled communists. Even if they were caught up in that game only as peaceful opponents. Around the tables in the meeting rooms, the members of the group were wearing mittens and were smiling icily. After all, at the time the great thaw had barely begun.
           That evening Castro came up to the editorial office from the kitchen, munching on a huge schnitzel and holding a mug of hot tea in his left hand. He sat down without paying any attention to me: I was in his office, as it was the only one that was habitable, given its two radiators radiators.