Norman Manea: The Hooligan's Return

“I didn’t travel on government money,” the suspect protested. “My relatives in the West sent me the money.”

“Relatives? Generous people, those relatives. Where do they live?”

The applicant hurriedly listed the countries where his nomadic family had settled.

“In the United States as well?” said the American, his face brightening. “Where? What sort of relatives?”

“My wife’s sister, married for over ten years to an American. A mother with two American kids, a ten-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son.”

“And how did you get to Berlin? I don’t suppose it was your relatives who chose this place, Berlin.”

A prolonged silence followed. The American seemed pleased with himself. “I came here on a grant from the German government, as I noted in my personal file.”

“Yes, you mentioned that,” the civil servant admitted, picking up the file from his desk, holding it up for a moment, then putting it back and pushing it to one side, as though it were irrelevant. “The grant that the vanquished offer to the victors. Can we call it that?”

He appeared in no hurry to be done with the German issue. After all, he seemed to suggest, defeating the enemy had been no easy feat. This is what united them, the young American and the aging East European sitting across from him. An award prompted by guilt … Yes, the thought had crossed the mind of the awardee himself. It was an award offered by the vanquished to the survivors whom they had failed to crush, an award tendered, after its defeat, by the now prosperous Germany to the wretched of Eastern Europe, always destined to poverty, to exile, not at all strangers to defeat themselves. Even within its diminished borders, postwar Germany remained the same country of hardworking, efficient people, with the same flag and the same anthem, even in Bavaria, which the pundits had predicted would end up being ruled by the survivors of the extermination camps. They also postulated that the Jews would demand from the Germans proof of philo-Semitism for three generations before reclaiming their German citizenship, lost in the catastrophe.

Of course, a joke read backward, from right to left, like the Hebrew Bible. For it was the Jews who were in fact asked, as they came out of the camps, to offer proof by blood of belonging to the state that had sought to exterminate them. Only if they could pass this test would they be awarded the enviable status of citizenship in the new postwar Germany, generous with its disbursements to the impoverished and the lost, who no longer hoped for a share in the spoils of victory.

The applicant had no chance to say all this. His young examiner turned to other matters and was now intent on filling out the forms. A pity, for he probably would have appreciated such ironic digressions as a form of pro-American flattery intended to win the favor of the Great Power. When he raised his eyes from his briefcase again, the applicant saw that the American official had stood up, was smiling and extending his hand.

“Good luck to you, sir, the best of luck,” he wished him, American-style, finally abandoning the language of their common enemy.

The next step on this fateful day was to see the British lion, no longer a lion. The lady at the controls was engrossed in a telephone conversation and failed to notice that the American examination was over. Even when she finally hung up, she appeared not to see the shadow standing in front of her.

“What happens next? The interview with the British?” the applicant asked timidly.

“Nothing happens next. It’s all over. Mr. Jackson signed for the British as well.”

The applicant gripped the handle of his briefcase and headed for the door.

“Don’t forget, sir, tomorrow morning at nine-thirty.”

He looked at the secretary, bewildered.

“Tomorrow you have the final interview with the German authorities. First floor, room 202. Remember, nine-thirty sharp.”

The day was leaden and damp. He walked slowly to the bus stop, then slowly up the stairs to his third-floor apartment, took the key from his winter-coat pocket, opened the door, and remained standing on the threshold for a few moments. The apartment was warm, silent. Without taking off his coat, he picked up the thick red pen and went over to the calendar. He crumpled the page for January 20, then the page for the twenty-first. He drew two thick red circles on the page for January 22, 1988. Across it he wrote, “If I’m still alive tomorrow,” adding, in brackets, “Count Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana.”

…

He had survived another night. He remembered The Report on Paradise , by the Polish poet, and started to recite it loudly.

In Paradise the work week is

fixed at thirty hours

the social system is stable and

the rulers are wise

really in Paradise one is better

off than in whatever country.

It was easy to guess the place the poet had in mind. He transcribed the verse into prose. The French, American, or English officials might have understood the code: In Paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours, prices steadily go down, manual labor is not tiring (because of reduced gravity), chopping wood is no harder than typing The social system is stable and the rulers are wise. Really, in Paradise one is better off than in whatever country . He then condensed the text in his mind: The social system is stable, the rulers are wise, in Paradise one is better off than in whatever country . Well, this, he thought, makes a good daily prayer.

He read the poet’s words over and over again, read other verses, choosing one or two lines from each, for the benefit of the German officer he was to see the next morning. They were not able to separate exactly the soul from the flesh and so it would come here with a drop of fat, a thread of muscle . Then: Not many behold God. He is only for those of 100 percent pneuma. The rest listen to communiqués about miracles and floods . At last, he sank into a dreamless sleep, until the alarm bell rang.

As he was leaving his apartment, he turned back to pick up the scrap of paper on which he had written his final version of the prayer: In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. The social system is stable and the rulers are wise. In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country . He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He felt more protected, he had survived the night, he would survive the day as well.

At nine-thirty sharp he was in the interview room, with the German civil servant, a short, stumpy man. Oddly enough, he was wearing not a suit and tie but corduroy trousers and a thick, knitted green vest over a woolen shirt, also green. He had fair hair, parted in the middle, and big hands with large discolored patches, which also showed on his forehead and throat.

After an interrogation that lasted for an hour and a half, the applicant emerged unable to remember the questions he had been asked. What he had retained, however, was a remark the bureaucrat had repeated twice: “The road you are taking is going to be long and uncertain, and the first step is just that, a first step.”

Of course, Bukovina, his birthplace, had been his very first step, but, as the applicant knew, German identity is about blood, not place. “We are not French or American or British, simply because we find ourselves here, at the headquarters of the Great Allied Commission,” the German bureaucrat had said, raising scandalized eyebrows and arms toward the heavens. “One is not German simply because one is born in German territory, even if it was Germany proper, not to speak of, well…”He bent over the application form, looking for that barbaric name. “Oh yes, Bukovina, admittedly a former Austrian province, but only for some hundred years. Austria and Germany are two very different things, you know. That madman who destroyed Germany, it’s because of him the Allied Commission now sits in Berlin.” The purebred German civil servant again lifted his eyebrows and arms toward God Almighty, who so unashamedly played with Germany’s destiny. “Because of that madman, Germany has to pay and pay, incurring new debts and swallowing insults and suffering the invasion of tramps and beggars delivered by the Allied Commission. That madman was not German but Austrian, as everybody knows. Mad Adolf came from Linz, Austria. He never denied it. And even if one is German, if you have been away from your country for the last eight hundred years, what sort of a German are you? I watched that lady, your compatriot, on TV the other day. Being of German extraction, she said, she had now been repatriated to Germany. After eight hundred years! Eight hundred years, let us be clear, sir! It is eight hundred years since the German colonists arrived in, what do you call it… the … Banat.”