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

Although economic progress is visible across Romania, and a gradual renewal of a civil conscience with the arrival of democracy has appeared, Romania’s burlesque of a political life — despite its European Union membership — shows how persistent its bad old habits of duplicity, inconsistency, fatalism, inertia, and corruption are. Corruption, indeed, now seems to be the society’s engine. There remain in Romania today disadvantaged and neglected groups who are pushed to society’s sordid margins. In fact, of the Roma population 41 percent are seasonal workers, 33.5 percent lack any professional skills, and 38.7 percent are illiterate. This is a Romanian problem, but it has also become a problem for all of Europe.

Nicolae Romulus Mailat, the young man of 25 accused of Giovanna Reggiani’s murder, had been interned at age 14 in a school for re-education. He was later condemned for theft, but was pardoned a year before arriving in Italy.

Was poverty the cause of his juvenile offenses in Romania and his crime in Italy? In Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is pushed to commit his crime by his nihilism and rebelliousness, but also by poverty. His social identity is not the same as Mailat’s, his spiritual “entity” is drastically different, but his double crime is no less abominable.

For now, there is no reason to hope that Mailat will find through his crime a new start towards salvation through suffering and spiritual renewal. But perhaps we should listen again to the words of one of Raskolnikov’s interlocutors when he speaks about the “disgusting Sodom” in which he wanders and says that poverty is not a vice, but misery. In poverty one still has a kind of “innate noble sentiment,” while in misery moral collapse is inherent and disastrous.

Maillat sought escape from his Romanian misery and his Romanian past, but could not imagine that he would find in an Italian refugee camp as much misery as before; that the image in his mirror of his daily new life would be that of a killer. People who know the frightening neighborhood of Tor di Quinto, where Giovanna Reggiani was killed have harsh words to say about the neglect and indifference of Rome’s city government. This isn’t, of course, an excuse for this or any other crime, but it cannot be ignored.

Although we cannot expect a miraculous reincarnation of the criminal Mailat, we can and must ask for a radical review of the situation faced by such marginalized people. That review must be carried out by Romanian and Italian states, by the Roma community in Romania and Italy, and also by the European Community itself. For the perpetrator is a member of all these communities.

We hear voices now that are exasperated by the EU’s enlargement and the social tensions it has provoked. Increased migration is, indeed, a daily fact in our centrifugal and global modernity, but it isn’t only a negative one. The free movement of people doesn’t only mean more social conflict and criminality. It also means a gradual and beneficial cohabitation that began immediately after World War II as a common effort to help out the defeated countries and enhance their chances for democracy and prosperity.

When I visited Barcelona and Madrid last year, I was delighted to receive enthusiastic news about the successes of the growing Romanian community in these cities. Some Romanian refugees were already candidates for the local elections, praised for their hard work and honesty. It will happen, I hope, in other places too and not only with Romanians but with all the people ready to face the provocations of our time. For these are not only examples of individual success, but also victories for the community as well.

Europe deserves to prove that it is a real community, one that is diverse, democratic, spiritual, free, and prosperous.

What happens after the euphoria of revolution fades? Today’s Eastern Europe, some two decades after the revolutions of 1989, may offer a salutary warning for today’s defiant and jubilant Arab youth that they must remain vigilant.

Ever since I left Romania for exile in 1986, my returns have been rare and tense. Although the schedule for my most recent trip was overwhelming, and offered little real contact with ordinary people, I could still grasp — from daily newspapers, TV programs, and conversations with friends — the profound economic, political, and moral crisis engulfing the country. Mistrust and anger at a corrupt and inefficient political class, coupled with skepticism about democracy — even nostalgia for communism — is to be found nowadays, not only in Romania but also in some other parts of Eastern Europe.

Some 70 percent of Romanians reportedly now claim to regret the death of Comrade Nicolae Ceau sescu, whose summary execution in 1989 elicited general enthusiasm. Of course, the source of such an astonishing finding is difficult to trust, like everything else in Romanian politics, but the vulgar and radical coarsening of public discourse — now peppered with old-new xenophobic elements — is clear enough.

I was offered a taste of this as a guest on a well-respected TV cultural program. I was amused that the debate focused not on my books, but on issues such as the “Jewish cultural mafia” and the “exaggerated” anti-Semitism of past and present Romania. My interviewer was kinetic, taking over the dialogue with insinuations and personal interventions. I assumed that I was supposed to be provoked into unguarded comments, a method that fashionable TV journalists everywhere use nowadays. But I faced a new surprise the following week, when, on the same TV program, the hostess was rather passive toward her guest, a militant journalist turned mercenary journalist, as he confessed his admiration for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the “Captain” of the Iron Guard. The journalist considered Codreanu a “Romantic hero.”

A group of Romanian intellectuals, including me, protested in an Open Letter against this effort to rehabilitate a murderer and propagandist of hate and xenophobia. Romanian TV answered promptly that it understood that victims of anti-Semitic crimes might feel hurt by such a program, but that the program had not promoted this kind of propaganda, offering the bizarre interview with me the previous week as proof of the channel’s good faith.

The debate didn’t end there. Soon after, the national committee for the media condemned the program. And soon after that, some leading intellectuals condemned the national committee’s condemnation as an affront to freedom of speech. No one mentioned the danger of inciting an already radicalized audience. In fact, the responses from members of the public to these controversies were mostly of a vulgar nationalistic and anti-Semitic tone.

Romania is not alone, of course, in reliving this dark comedy. Revitalization of the extreme right in Hungary and the rise of “National Bolshevism” in Russia, where Tolstoy is now re-condemned by the Orthodox Church as a proto-communist, suggest a deeper and more pervasive atavistic longing.

I was reminded of my last class at Bard College before my trip to Romania. We were discussing Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Commenting on the moment when “Asiatic cholera” kills the great and troubled writer Gustav von Aschenbach, a brilliant Asian student pointed out that Mann related the disease to the “pestilence” of the Ganges delta, which traverses China and Afghanistan, Persia and Astrakhan, and “even Moscow,” before reaching Europe through the “city of the lagoon.” She noted with gravity today’s migrations from poor to prosperous countries, the globalization of evil, the contradictions and conflicts of modernity, the angry terrorist response to it, and the contrast between a rational, pragmatic West and a more idealistic and superstitious East, prone to religious fanaticism and political extremism.