Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

The artist is, no matter how paradoxical it may seem, a secret laborer of love. Against all odds, love continues to tempt the artist in exile as well, no matter how sarcastic, or evanescent his work. He daily reinvents the premises of the difficult search; he honors his virtual reader, a stranger similar and dissimilar, with the gift of an exacting love. Thus he can continue his never-ending adventure and humanize his shipwreck wherever he may be.

Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, April 1992

In the morning, when my gaze meets a new day, I am welcomed by the tree’s crown of leaves. Its harmonious connection with time. I watch it, I remember the lesson it offers me. Stability, the everlasting harmony emanated by nature’s inner nature.

I look at my watch, I wait. An annoying dependency, maybe, a subterfuge. One should probably depend only on oneself. Never wait for anything, be self-sufficient. Or else, be content with each morning’s silent message, the sky, the sparrows, the tree in the courtyard. … In front of the window, a solid tree with many rich branches keeps vigil. I understand the lesson it offers me. Yet, I look at the watch, I wait for the postman to arrive.

One could ask me whether, in a foreign country, human relations end up acquiring an unnatural sense of drama as a consequence of travel and long-distance correspondence. But I’ve been familiar with this tense situation for years, since I lived at home. I find it now away from home. I could say that I find myself again, thus, in this unpacified tension.

Partir, c’est mourir un peu (To leave is to die a little) … Today, for many people, the famous quotation no longer has a melancholy touch.

To travel has become, at least for a part of the planet, a constant possibility and even a fashion. Partir, c’est changer un peu (To leave is to change a little) … A natural need to get away from the familiar, a need for regeneration, for contact with the new. Nostalgia for the exotic and the unknown. A sort of self-deceiving therapy. Partir, c’est tricher un peu (To leave is to cheat a little) … Western standards aren’t, however, valid everywhere. One shouldn’t forget the contrasts and contradictions of today’s world. The geographical areas where the economic and political reality is an impediment to this need for circulation, for emotional and informational exchange, are still numerous.

I left Bucharest on a cold, crisp Sunday. The hours I shared with friends before my departure had taken on the weight of a painful uncertainty. Not only the uncertainty of the departure that could have been stopped at any moment. Another uncertainty, which resulted from the departure itself.

We couldn’t or didn’t dare give it a name. Long, ashen silences, interrupted at lengthly intervals by the glasses’ clinking. In wartime, separation must have been like this. Now there was war only between Iran and Iraq, or in Nicaragua, or who knows in what faraway places, inscribed only on a map, not in memory. We promised each other a happy reunion, with everyone in a better mood.

By comparison with my fellow citizens, my travels began rather early. At five years old, my first expulsion. A journey, from one place to another, in cattle trucks, in carts or on foot; the camp where I was sent. The unknown, death’s mark. The second journey sealed another unknown: fifty years old! … Another sound of the gong before the curtain rises, another speed of time. Another destination.

The Saturday before departure I canceled all dates. Except one, which I couldn’t give up. I waited for my guest in the hall on the first floor, by the elevator. He showed up at twenty past eleven. A short, skinny man with thinning blond hair, a shy smile. Pale face, blue eyes, always moist. His blue uniform was crumpled as always, his hands trembled slightly.

He was staggering under the weight of his bag. He began to take out the piles, he set them down on the radiator. I let him sort his stuff, finish his business. When he was about to leave, I came out of the dark. I greeted him, shook his hand. I asked him to come for a few seconds up to the little apartment on the fourth floor. He seemed surprised, but didn’t say anything. He just nodded his small, pointy head. In the elevator, next to one another, I could smell the mixture of sweat, alcohol, and soap that he usually gave off. He was freshly shaven — that didn’t happen every day.

I went in, invited him to sit down. On the table were set the bottle and the glasses. I poured. I gave him a glass. We toasted. He didn’t ask anything. He just took his heavy bag off his shoulder. Put it down by the leg of the chair. Sat down. Watched me and waited. I didn’t know how to start.

For years I had been preoccupied with a text. It kept moving inside me in shifting versions, but I could never just sit down at the desk and begin. Maybe because it would have been finished in several impatient, grandiloquent sentences. It needed a narrative structure fit for a longer, coded text, in order gradually to develop the true complicity between character and theme, between subject and object. The object was more than just an object. Something virtual, an obsession. Every day, the character ran down the stairs from the fourth floor all the way to the first to open, at a certain morning hour, the gray box. The unwritten narration had a title, “Defining the Object.” I knew the premise it needed in order to function, how the relation between man and object would gradually have come to life until their nebulous merging — a man who someday, after his death, becomes destiny, and an object that gives him daily servings and messages about this destiny, at the time still a work in progress.

The man before me couldn’t have understood such idiocies. I had once asked him how he’d become a “mail carrier.” He explained it to me: he’d been a carpenter, he’d gotten ill with a lung ailment. Stayed a long time in hospitals, then changed his job.

It wasn’t easy to carry day after day, morning and afternoon, rain or shine, in cold weather and through muddy streets, that heavy bag full of newspapers and envelopes. Quite different to carpentry, which he couldn’t continue. Money wasn’t too bad. The addressees to whom you bring a letter or money or a notice for a package give you something or other. When you have a certain relationship with people, you “carry on” their lives.

Talking to him about the magic box would have frightened him. Telling him that he stored the messages from the Big Unknown whom we strive to find a name for, babbling absurd, codified pseudonyms, I would destroy any hope of congeniality. I filled the glasses again; we toasted. I confessed I would be gone for several months. I asked him to give the mail, as always when I was absent, to my old neighbor living next door. He downed the glass in one gulp. He liked to drink, I knew it. Then he took a piece of pound cake. He watched me cunningly, smiling. I filled his glass once more. He wiped his lips with his palm. “Far away?” “Not that far away. Now the world is small, everything is close.” “Yes, I understand. I meant, beyond?” “Yes, I’m going to the West.” “I see …. Only several months? Several months, you say? Well, now!” … “Well, sure! How long should I stay? I have to come back home.” “Now, it’s none of my business. I’m just talking, no offense. I’ll leave the mail with the neighbor, the teacher. Not to worry. Don’t you give it a thought. Just look after yourself. I mean, see how things are going over there, think about it. The mail will be taken care of, it’s no big deal. That should be the least of your problems …”