Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

That alien name Banat —the name of a province in southwestern Romania, where descendants of the long-ago settlers still lived — was not to be found in the application form on his desk, unlike Bukovina , but in his own memory. He looked very pleased with himself.

“Yes, yes, bestimmt , the Banat! After eight hundred years … One can tell the difference immediately. From the accent, the vocabulary, the attitudes, believe me, really.”

So, nothing of what had happened yesterday in the American’s office, or the day before, or today was decisive. This seemed to be the message that the benevolent German representative had tried to convey to him.

He boarded the bus, then the tram, thinking all the while of what the German civil servant had said. He forgot to get off at his stop and found himself at the other end of town, a suburban area with pleasant, low houses. He hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him back to the center of town, near the ruins of Gedächtnis Kirche, the Memorial Church. The streets were alive with people, especially young people. He ambled on, absentmindedly, down a side street and went into the first restaurant he saw, ready to make peace with the futility of the day, with its cryptic codes.

He returned in the evening to his apartment, and as he opened the door, he heard the usual greeting from his roommate. “Decision is a moment of insanity,” Mr. Kierkegaard whispered insidiously, as he did every evening. That’s true, but the insanity of indecision is not to be forgotten either, and therefore, such nocturnal debates are now meaningless.

Before he went to bed, he said his evening prayer: In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. God is only for those of 100 pneuma. 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. The social system of Paradise is stable, the rulers are wise. God is only for those of 100 pneuma. In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country .

One month later, he was in Paris, where he had numerous occasions to regret that he had not kept the business card of his French reader from the Allied Commission. Another month later, he took an even bigger step — toward the Afterlife world, the World Beyond, the giant step across the ocean that brought him, in March 1988, to the New World.

The joy of being a foreigner among other foreigners, the limitations and masks of liberty, new lands and new grammars, not only without but also within himself, the trauma of dispossession, new maladies of the soul and of the mind, the shock of dislocation, the chance to live on into one’s Afterlife. He gradually accepted the new calendar, the leap years of Paradise: each year in the exile of liberty counted as four conventional years in the old existence.

One and a half years after his arrival in America, that is, six years according to the new calendar, the Berlin Wall collapsed. In socialist Jormania, the Clown of the Carpathians and his wife, Comrade Mortu, were executed. Did he now entertain hopes of repatriation, back to the olden days and to the land of yesterday? The messages coming from the Other Side discouraged such jokes. He reassessed the confusions in which he had lived, reread the Report of the Polish poet that served him as a prayer, remembered the pragmatic message of Paradise: DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER. Did Ovid, the ancient poet exiled from imperial Rome to the Scythian wilderness of Tomi, far away to the east, by the Black Sea — did he transcend the sadness? Now the terms had been reversed, each day added distance between himself and provincial Tomi. In his new home of New York, the new Rome, on the shores of the Hudson, where he had been shipwrecked, sadness was being treated with antidepressants and workouts in the gym. DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER. Everything can be fixed. Call 1-800-HELP.

In 1997, nine years into the new calendar, that is, thirty-six years from his D-Day in Berlin, back in the winter of 1988, he was now being offered the chance to return to the time and space of old. According to the new calendar, he was now ninety-four years old, too old for such a journey. But, at the same time, he was only eleven years old, counting by the time elapsed since his departure from the old life. Such a pilgrimage seemed premature for so young and emotional a person.

You should always be allowed in,” said the professor from Brooklyn. “Considering the circumstances, this is an exception, and God will always make an exception for you, believe me.” I could accept such a hypothesis, but this was not about me. It concerned the person waiting there for me — and the One Above, if He existed at all, knew very well who it was. I was keen to play by His rules only because the woman waiting for me there had been playing by them.

That is why I had phoned the Hebrew Burial Free Association and the Jewish Chapel Services, as well as the local synagogue on Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street. Everywhere, the answer, short and abrupt, had been the same, “Call your rabbi.” I was given no opportunity to say that I had no rabbi and didn’t belong to a synagogue, that all I wanted to know was whether one is permitted to visit a Jewish cemetery during the Passover week. Even someone like me, who had never belonged to a synagogue or, for that matter, doesn’t belong anywhere, was entitled to such information. Finally, I called the professor from Brooklyn, whom I had introduced to the works of Cioran, and asked him whether he, an atheist in love with nihilist paradoxes, might possibly know a rabbi.

“Of course. My friend, Rabbi Solomonchik.”

I explained to my listener my dilemma, suspecting he was ready to grant me the dispensation himself, standing in for the One Above, whose existence he denied.

“You’re right,” I reassured him. “I could scramble over the fence of the cemetery in Suceava, that hallowed bit of ground in my native town. I’m not too old for that. But I don’t want to break the rules, not this time, at any rate. If access isn’t allowed, I’ll stay there, in front of the cemetery gates, until I die, like Kafka’s hero, eyeball to eyeball with the Law. But first, I must know what the Law says. Surely there are provisions for exceptional situations, but I must know what the Law says. You understand what I mean, the Law! I need a rabbi.”

“I can call Solo,” my Brooklyn friend said. “I’ll phone him at once. He’ll know; that man knows everything, absolutely everything.”

As it turned out, the rabbi did know everything, and a few other things besides. He pronounced: “Entrance into a cemetery is forbidden in the first two and last two days of the Passover week. It is allowed in the interim days.” I had a calendar in front of me and noted down the dates: The first two days of Passover would fall on the twenty-second and twenty-third of April 1997, that is, 13 and 14 Nisan, 5757. The last two days would fall on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of April, that is, 21 and 22 Nisan, 5757. This would leave me four permitted days, enough time for my purpose. The rabbi, however, had added something that was above and beyond the Law. Learning that I was about to depart for Romania, he felt he could allow himself a doubt. The go-between who was passing on the sage’s wisdom could not hide his bewilderment.

“Can you imagine such a thing? When the rabbi heard about Romania, ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Romania? Romania? Then I’m no longer so sure. He’ll have to ask the people in Romania.’ That’s what he said. Would you expect an answer like this from Alyosha Solomonchik?”

Alyosha certainly was a sage, I had to admit. The next day, a Friday, I rang up my Christian friend in Bucharest.