Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

“Can’t you find out this information in New York?” my former compatriot asked in amazement.

“I could. The rabbi explained the Law to me, but when he heard I was going to Romania …”

My friend Naum — Golden Brain, as he was nicknamed — laughed. I could hear him chortling at his end of the line in Bucharest. “Bravo! I wouldn’t have thought you had such clever rabbis in New York.”

“Of course we do. America has everything, but the American rabbi felt he could not assume any authority over the Romanian Jews. On Sunday morning — Jews go to work on Sundays, so it’s all right — could you call and find out about the rules, especially Suceava, and let me know.”

And indeed, on Sunday I received my answer.

“A very nice lady gave me all the necessary information,” Golden Brain reported. “I asked her to repeat everything, so I could take it all down. Here goes: The cemetery is closed between the twenty-second and twenty-ninth of April, access forbidden. It reopens on the thirtieth. That would be — I’m reading carefully now — the twenty-third of — how do you pronounce it? — Nisan, which, I repeat, is April 30. So April 30 is the first day after Passover, when entry to the cemetery is permitted.”

I fell silent. My friend didn’t know whether this was in tribute to Rabbi Solomonchik or to the nice Jewish lady in Bucharest, or maybe it meant something completely different.

“What’s the problem, say something. So, you’ll have to extend your stay by two days, it’s no big deal. That way, we’ll be able to have a nice long talk. Anyway, what’s the hurry? Think about it, we haven’t seen each other for ten years, what the hell!”

In fact, it had been almost eleven years, but Naum the Golden Brain was right about one thing, the cemetery wasn’t the problem. The truth was, I did not want to go on this trip at all. I would have liked someone, preferably not myself, to explain my neurosis. Better still, I would have liked to be done with both the neurosis and the trip. I needed a simple explanation, something like “You don’t want to go back to a place that kicked you out,” for example. I needed a coin that would fit all possible vending machines. You insert it and out comes the sandwich, the soda pop, or the tissues for wiping away the tears. But all I was offered were pathetic clichés: “At the age of five, in the autumn of 1941, you woke up in a cattle train, squeezed in with neighbors, relatives, friends. The train was taking you eastward, east of Eden.” Yes, I knew all the litanies, uttered in the name of memory and served out to posterity in films, speeches, and at fund-raising dinners. What I needed was a laconic summing up by an impersonal voice: “In 1945, when the war ended and you were a boy of nine, you didn’t know what to do with your newly earned title of survivor. Only at the age of fifty, in 1986, did you finally understand what survival meant. Once again, you were leaving, but this time, westward, the ‘definitive departure’—the phrase then in use for such leave-takings—‘to the West.’”

The impersonal voice was lagging in wit but gaining in rhetorical force: “But in the meantime, you had found a home — language.”

An “interstitial” home, is that what the voice had murmured? No, just a “home”—“interstitial” would have sounded too pretentious, although it conveyed the meaning exactly. The familiar platitudes followed: “Survivor, alien, extraterritorial, anti-Party … After all, language was your home, wasn’t it?” Yes, I recognized the recital. “At the age of five, you were dispossessed, the first time, because of a dictator and his ideology. At the age of fifty, a second time, because of another dictator and his opposing ideology. A farce, wasn’t it?”

I could recognize that simplified summary, although it failed to encompass the trap of hope, the education in futility. And what of the privilege of separation? “Being excluded is the only dignity we have,” the exiled Cioran said repeatedly. Exclusion, as privilege and justification? On the threshold of old age, exile offers the ultimate lesson in dispossession: preparing the uprooted for the final rootlessness. “In 1982, you were an extraterritorial and an enemy of the Party. Ten years later, now an exile, you became an actual extraterritorial, like the Party itself, now vanished into nothingness.” The newspapers of socialist Jormania had continued to pay their tributes to their exiled son: “traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” “Half-Man.” Indeed, the motherland had not forgotten me, nor did it allow me to forget it. My friends had spent vast sums of money on postage to send me these tributes across the ocean, year after year, season after season. In 1996, new patriots were demanding “ the extermination of the moth ”—a Kafkaesque formulation indicating that the despised cockroach had somehow metamorphosed into a moth and flown away to exile, across the ocean, to Paradise. Why couldn’t I compose such terms of endearment myself, why did I leave it to an intermediary? “One confronts one’s homeland out of a need for despair, out of a thirst for even more unhappiness,” Cioran had said in one of his monologues.

But hatred was not my métier. I would gladly leave it for somebody else to vent, anybody, including the motherland. I was content to leave that boiling lava behind me. It had not been too difficult, after 1989, to reject all invitations to visit Romania. However, now I found it difficult to refuse the invitation to go there with the president of Bard College, also a musician, who was scheduled to conduct two concerts in Bucharest. Bard College had been my host in America. It was only natural, therefore, that, at least for a few days, I should be his host in Bucharest. Such an opportunity, unhoped for ten years earlier, should have been a source of joy. It wasn’t.

When I had first heard about the projected trip, in 1996, I shrugged my shoulders and gave my reasons why I couldn’t consider undertaking the journey. But Leon Botstein wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. In the winter of 1997, his arguments were given new impetus. “The political situation is changing, Romania is changing. If you are ever to return, you might as well do it now. You will have a friend going with you.” I had left the motherland late, without really intending to leave. I was not prepared for a reunion with the self I had been, or for a translation of the one I had become. In the spring of 1990, after the collapse of the utopia, along with its buffoons, I had had a sudden and belated revelation. It happened at a cultural conference at the Salon du Livre in Paris. The Romanian delegation there was composed, for the first time, not of the usual cultural apparatchiks, but of real writers. It was an emotional reunion, laden with nostalgia. However, after a little while, I felt that morbid frisson of fear. I was sweating, without apparent reason, attacked by something deep, hidden, tortuous. I had to get out, and I left the hall in a troubled state. My former compatriots had been polite, friendly, and yet somewhat changed, as though liberated from the entanglement that had previously joined us. Living in exile as I was, outside my native habitat, I was like a snail wearing the shell of the Romanian language. Was that a scandalous imposture? Could this “extraterritorial,” of all people, properly represent Romanian culture to the world? “In the struggle between yourself and the world, you must side with the world” was Kafka’s advice. Had I heeded his counsel?

Leon insisted. I heard myself saying, “Perhaps,” then, “We’ll see,” “Possibly,” “I’ll think about it.” I could not get used to the idea, yet I was gradually coming around. Finally, I gave a timorous yet clearly audible “yes,” convinced that I would soon withdraw it. I didn’t. I had to break the chains finally, or so I was being told. Only a return, whether happy or unhappy, would mark the final break, liberating me. Could I really be helped by such slogans, or by some emotional reconciliation feast, a “cultural” lunch, perhaps, where I would find myself decorated with a red-and-green ribbon, awarded by the Society of Transcendental Pensioners for my services to my country’s reputation abroad? After partaking of the usual spicy sausages and beer and the usual jokes and embraces, I would then faint under the lightning stroke of destiny, the final stamp of approval: accepted in the motherland. You have been accepted at last, the old scores have been settled. You don’t have to prove that it’s merely a matter of your country putting on one of its performances to fool the rest of the world. No, you no longer have to prove anything … I could almost hear Golden Brain’s voice whispering in my ear, when, suddenly, I was startled from my half-sleep by the ringing of the phone.