By the end of school, I could fairly say I had become a “many-sidedly developed individual,” to paraphrase the communist slogan so fashionable in that era. I had studied as much as was required.
I was selected for the school basketball team, coached, as I have already mentioned, by the celebrated physical education teacher Victor Tibacu.
I also became part of the school theatre troupe, again through a rigorous selection process, in which my talent for feigning a genuine passion for biology probably played a decisive role.
My interests ranged widely, but I read a great deal and I read good books at the right age. I began with Petre Ispirescu’s fairy tales, the Legends of Olympus and The Three Musketeers — I practically committed all three volumes to memory, as though I had been programmed to memorise every duel and intrigue at the court of France. Then I read Jack London (absolutely everything that had been translated into Romanian), Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Ilf and Petrov, Hemingway, Gogol, Tolstoy, John Galsworthy, and many, many others. I was very fond of Eminescu from the outset, although I believe I only truly understood him much later. At least, that is what I should like to think.
Towards the end of school, I discovered science fiction, and it was love at first sight — something akin to the romantic tales in Galsworthy’s novels. The mysteries of the universe and the possibility of extraterrestrial civilisations fascinated me. I devoured Stanisław Lem, Ivan Yefremov and Isaac Asimov, who told of interdimensional voyages aboard formidable rockets and of robots more intelligent than any modern artificial intelligence.
Everything was brilliant in those worlds: the rockets employed advanced propulsion technology or simply hopped into hyperspace like cosmic rabbits, whilst the robots debated moral and ethical dilemmas.
And so I fell in love with astronomy — or at least so it seemed to me, like a teenager experiencing bewilderment for the first time. That is how I decided to go to university, to the faculty of mathematics, to the faculty of astronomy.
The truth is that, as I understood it then, engineering held no appeal for me.
Perhaps it should have been law — the idea of justice intrigued me, a concept I had learnt from the pages of Dumas, from d’Artagnan, ever ready to draw his sword in defence of the wronged. But four years earlier, my brother had “applied” — to use a term only recently adopted into Romanian — to the faculty of law, and his candidacy had been rejected on the basis of his political dossier.
And so astronomy seemed a sound choice, a field of the future in which I could gaze at the stars instead of looking over my shoulder.
In the end, the catalyst of my destiny was my mathematics teacher, Mr Lapușneanu. For reasons known only to himself, he had taken a liking to me.
I was the sort of pupil who had “bursts” or “revelations.” When he posed a difficult question to the entire class, the answer would come first from me: “the penny dropped,” as the saying goes, as though my brain were a telephone from the 1960s. I did not work hard enough at mathematics, and the teacher had never awarded me marks for dropping pennies, yet I was still among the best pupils in the subject.