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

From fragments translated by Alexandru Vlad,

Tess Lewis and Sean Cotter

Notes

1. Itzik Manger, The World According to Itzik (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 237.

2. George Steiner, No Passion Spent (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 321.

“The besieged man had finally escaped from the Colony of Rhino.” Those were the words I used in my 1999 essay on Eugen Ionescu, entitled “Berenger at Bard” (see pp. 157–175). The Rhino colony, of course, stands for the penal colony of socialism administered by the ultimate Rhino leader: president Nicolae Ceau sescu. July 9, 1989 was another crucial watermark in the life of the wanderer I had since become. Now at Bard, an American college, I found myself right in the middle of Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead game, transposed to the end-of-the-twentieth-century New World.

I began my life at Bard first living in the house of a professor of chemistry gone on sabbatical, then in the house formerly belonging to Mary McCarthy, which comprised several spacious, sunny rooms on the first floor and three tiny bedrooms upstairs, haunted at night by strange distortions of the daily academic games. At the beginning of my third year, I moved into a shack away from the beaten track, which had instantly caught my fancy with its basic utilitarian charms. It might well have been designed as a cabin for deer or wild turkey hunters, as it stood surrounded by hospitable woods that sheltered, indiscriminately, teachers and students alike along with squirrels and stags and rabbits and birds of all colors and sizes. The doorway opened unobtrusively into a large living room sporting one huge window facing the forest. This wall of glass imposed no boundaries to the surrounding landscape and brought its soothing presence right into the middle of the room. One minimalist bedroom and a bathroom to match, as well as a den, were part of the house that some of my acquaintances called with congenial irony “The Unabomber’s House.” The label stuck not only on account of the cabin’s secluded location, but also because of its inhabitant, the eccentric East European refugee. Neither Berenger nor myself, the solitary exile, were in any way connected to the notorious Theodore John Kaczynski, the brilliant Harvard graduate turned recluse, who had compiled his “Manifesto” against an industrial society in his own hut and who had mailed it along with his bombs to various universities and airline companies (Unabomber stands for University and Airline Bomber). Even though this champion in the struggle against modernity had ended up killing three people, wounding twenty-three more, and eventually getting a life sentence, the label that graced my abode seemed neither hostile nor unpleasant to me. Rather than claiming the right to rebel, my self-imposed isolation and withdrawal was a quest for peacefulness. I needed a haven.

Almost fifty years had passed since another similar autumn, no less enchanting than the ones I was enjoying at Bard. I recall the day when I was forced to leave my birthplace in Bukovina and was shipped along with other sinners of the same ethnicity, to the extermination camp. The world of my childhood with its sweet scents and colors had lost its ability to protect me. When we were ordered to leave our home, my parents took along the money they had been saving for their very first house, a house they would never live to acquire.

The Red Army eventually freed us, so we were able to return to Romania after the war was over. Eastern Europe was sizzling now in the light of a utopian and oppressive Soviet sun. THE LIGHT COMES FROM THE EAST. This exalted formula was repeated ad nauseam in all possible keys … Private property had been abolished: factories, banks, farms, movie halls, flocks of sheep, private homes, stadiums, hospitals, buses, and hotels, they had all become state property and so had all of us associated with them. In what came to be known as Romania’s multifaceted socialism, “the housing norms” had come to allocate a scant 8 square meters (less than 100 square feet) per person. An extra room was a rare privilege, assigned by draconian laws and obscure byzantine practices. The notion of an “enclosed town” was beginning to take root: only those born within its confines were permitted to remain there, with the few exceptions of those allowed to do so by the fiat of a Higher Authority. The secret police undersigned all passports for traveling abroad and the few beneficiaries were those who were ready to reciprocate and serve its shady purposes. The public space became the stage for political masquerades while private space dwindled under the watchful eye and keen ears of secret police informers. It was hardly a paradox that the common citizens struggled to erect additional walls to protect their privacy within this restrictive, mistrustful space. The results, similar to Kafka’s Chinese Wall, thickened progressively the boundaries of the enclosure, keeping a threatening environment at bay, until the living space within dwindled to the point of smothering its occupants. Time itself had become state property by way of countless impositions: political meetings, demonstrations and parades, and sundry civic duties in the service of the Party. As a young man, I seemed to live out of a suitcase, always on the move from one temporary apartment to another, in a continuous succession of stages. I felt like a larva perpetually and hopelessly waiting for the time of a final metamorphosis.

At long last came the moment when I broke away from the Rhino Colony. As an exile, I felt that the future opened itself up to puzzling uncertainties written in a new code of probabilities that I could not read clearly. The Unknown appeared boundless, to be sure, and the frantic sense of a newly acquired freedom was overwhelming. Liberty came at a price, too: feeling dislocated and dispossessed has always marked the life of the wanderer. Mutability was the actual “physical” foreign space of freedom, and time became the remaining and transcendental property of the homeless. My only refuge and possession was my native language, the language into which I was born, that has shaped and misshaped my very being. I yearned to reacquaint myself with my own fractured self.

I enjoyed looking at the old buildings at Bard designed to house Protestant seminaries, admiring the way the stern, Anglo-Saxon Gothic style blends with the “nouveau style” of the more recent dorms, with the library built in the fashion of a Greek temple, and the newer, postmodern wing, with the chapel for sacred and profane services, with the institute for curatorial studies and the museum, rendered more modern by the recent acquisitions, with the imposing building of the Levy institute, its plateau reminiscent of the deserted park scene in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. One could see the Hudson from this site. Far in the distance, the faint blue mountains reminded me of the mountains of my native Bukovina, in northeastern Romania. Bukovina on the Hudson —just like in the title of an interview I gave here in New York. Having missed a “sense of nature” all my life, I ended up here in its turbulent splendor, intangible and meaningful.

My cabin I liked to call — imagine that! — CASA MINIMA— The Minimal House. It had belonged to Irma Brandeis, whose grave is next to Hanna Arendt’s, another legendary lover guilty for having fallen in love with a word craftsman. Casa Minima was incomparably larger, brighter, and more hospitable than the monastic cell Kafka had rented close to the castle in Prague in order to protect his solitude and writing. The woody Bard College muffled the darker overtones of an East European past, offering a rejuvenating new homeland to a suspicious stranger who had never enjoyed one before. Eventually, the exile no longer came to see his estrangement as a handicap, but rather as beneficial uprooting.