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

He kept returning to the Palas district and wandering off to names he discovered with delight to be still in his memory or that he saw hypnotically for the first time. “ Concordiei and right next to it, look, Discordiei. So … Concord and Discord! And here we have Trofeelor [Trophies], Oi elor [Little Sheep], Olimpului [Olympus], Emancipata [Emancipated]. Listen, Emancipata! Isn’t it wonderful?” Emancipata. We were speaking English: he did not seem comfortable conversing in Romanian, but he liked to throw in a Romanian word here and there and savor it. Our discussions about Romania always confirmed an affectionate complicity of minds, but for me they were also a constant challenge to rethink the past with the fierceness and seriousness of despair that the past deserves.

Saul had wanted to accompany me on my 1997 trip to Romania. He thought himself too frail to undertake his long-postponed journey into the past alone and wanted the companionship of a much more recent émigré. Before I set off, he had sent me a copy of a map of Bucharest on which he had drawn a circle around the AntimJusti tiei neighborhood. There were a few lines of explanation: “Apr 12, 97. Dear Norman, Here is my magic circle: Strada Palas off Antim — Strada Justi tei crossing Calea Rahovei (now George Georgescu!). Cella had told me that nothing remains — but have a look if you have the time. Bon voyage. Cu drag, Saul.”

Saul told me that he went instead to Milan, the city of his youth, which he thought would serve as a “safer” and less overwhelming substitute for present-day Romania. He did not return, it seemed, any happier than I did from Bucharest. He had found not the city of his youth but a vulgar and noisy place that not even his small, expensive, and well-situated hotel could render more appealing.

In the spring of 1999, weighed down by the difficulties of writing A Hooligan’s Return, about my trip to Romania, I thought that Saul’s memories, with their inimitable blend of the sardonic and the emotional, might help me find the right tone for an over-complicated subject. Even at the time of my trip I sometimes saw him as an essential figure in the exile’s dilemma, helped in his difficult adaptation to new places and codes by the resentments that his native land had bred in him, yet constantly troubled by the memory of his magical initiation into existence in the old place, in childhood.

Our first real conversation had taken place some seven years previously. It was more of a conflict, in fact. New to America at the time, I was invited — and even went — to a number of parties in luxurious houses where the artistic elite of the city of my shipwreck gathered. We had already been introduced to each other a few times on such occasions, but we had never done more than exchange a conventional word or two. The short gentleman with a bald patch, glasses, and a mustache was simply dressed yet with a touch of eccentricity, whether in the color of his muffler or the shape of his hat. My hosts presented me to him as a “Romanian,” thinking that this would make me more to his liking, but not surprisingly it appeared to have the opposite effect. He reminded me of Tudor Arghezi, a prominent Romanian poet of the interwar period, who had had an enviably long creative life. It was not just Steinberg’s morose air, chary of words, but the boredom he displayed so readily at the approach of strangers — and, more than once, in the face of people familiar to him.

The sardonic Arghezi would probably have liked Saul’s drawings of crocodiles: not only the type that stays alive by feeding on itself and digesting its own tail, but also another type — or the same — placed in the service of the symbolic as well. That crocodile bites with sawteeth into the cry “HELP,” inscribed on an abstract baguette loaf. The despairing man’s cry is the link with the assailant who has seized him as prey. “The vulnerable part of the man in danger,” Saul writes, “is the cry for help, which is the part by which the crocodile holds him and which has the function of an appetizer. What do I want to say? That he who cries his terror becomes the victim of his statement.” Skeptical and sometimes cynical to an extent that intrigued conversational partners, Saul guarded his vulnerability, avoiding confession and complaint alike.

Our quarrel took place at dinner. Someone asked me to describe the situation of writers in Romania during Ceau sescu’s last decade, and as I began to speak I heard, across the table, a voice interrupting me: “But how can anyone be a Romanian writer? Is there such a thing as Romanian literature?”

Two quotations immediately came to my mind: Montesquieu’s famous question of the eighteenth century—“How can anyone be Persian?”—and the words of Camil Petrescu, a Romanian writer of the 1930s—“With heroes who eat five olives in three weeks and smoke one cigarette in two years, with a little market tavern in the mountains and a farm with three pigsties belonging to a teacher in Moldova, no novel or even literature can be made.”

“When did you leave Romania?” I heard myself heatedly ask.

“In the thirties,” the Romanian replied.

“In those days there was already a generation of distinguished modern writers,” I said, and I went on to name a number of important Romanians, among them Rebreanu, Blecher, Urmuz, and, of course, Ionescu.

“Maybe, maybe,” he replied. “It’s been many years since then. I’m not up to date on Romania.”

That was probably the beginning of our friendship. It would seem that Saul regretted his rudeness that evening. Several times he gave me to understand that his affront had been one of those stupid social games he usually despised, although he sometimes fell back on them at parties because they had won him pleasant, if temporary, female company.

He grew lonelier with age, as the number of people with whom he kept in touch continued to diminish. He went through periods of depression. I really drew closer to Saul Steinberg, I suppose, on the morning when he called me and, having asked how I was, commented on my conventional reply in a way that cast a different light on the evening of our argument. “You can’t be well. I know you can’t. We carry a curse — the place we come from — we carry it inside us. It doesn’t heal easily. Maybe never.”

I was surprised to hear this near-confession on his part. He had been in America for more than half a century, happy to have come and to have found here purpose and fame. Yet the Romanian wound did not seem to have healed, although, as I later discovered, there was more to it than merely the horror, scorn, and resentment evident in his crude opinions the evening of our confrontation.

Anti-Semitism was one theme he did not fail to mention, as if it were an inseparable part of his native geography. He treated it with disgust, as a hideous and incurable disease or an emanation from natural waste seeping into every pore of social life; it poisoned its victims, too, inuring them to the surrounding hatred, training them in a constant bargaining that deformed their characters forever. He spoke with acrimony of both the primitive aggression of the persecutors and the humbleness of the persecuted, with their grotesque accommodation that combined pitiful little domestic pleasures and oozing hypocrisy.

As we became friends, he also began to tell me about his family, his school, and his schoolmates. Neither his relatives nor his friends were safe from his irony, and this irony also seemed to contain selfpity for the misfortune of his ridiculous place of origin; an attachment that passed insidiously, one might say, into a view of the world in general, including even the America he so much admired. One name alone enjoyed the perfect intangibility of love: that of his adored sister, Lica. He did everything he could to get her out of the communist hell of 1950s Romania and, subsequently, to make her life easier in France.