Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

It was six in the morning and the voice at the other end was not my old friend making jokes but someone from Suceava, the town of my childhood and teenage years, a polite, gentle voice — the director of the Commercial Bank in Suceava. He had learned about my forthcoming reappearance in Romania, and it was his duty to inform me, belatedly, that the previous winter the Bukovina Foundation had awarded me its Prize for Literature. The citizens of my native town would be honored if… Suceava! Bukovina! It was there that I had been reborn after my return from the labor camp, I had never forgotten it. Would it be possible for me to receive the prize without any ceremony, without television or publicity? The director assured me that the ceremony had already taken place the year before, in the absence of the American recipient. The banker from Suceava seemed ill at ease talking about literary matters, but he was doing his duty, urging me in his soft dialect, so familiar to me, to accept the “modest” award. The word “modest,” as well as the name of the speaker, Cucu, won my heart. I was firm, though, in establishing iron rules — no interviews, no public appearances. After all, the justification for the trip had already been fixed — the cemetery in Suceava. Truth be told, I wasn’t prepared for even that consolation.

In the autumn of 1986, before I left Romania, I took an eight-hour journey by train from Bucharest to Suceava, into the very heart of Bukovina, to say my final goodbyes. As I entered the train compartment, I had no difficulty in identifying my fellow passenger, a stocky man dressed in a suit and tie, an attaché case on his lap, engrossed in the Party paper. Unmistakably, he was the “shadow” who would accompany me to my destination and possibly stay with me the whole time I was there, and see me safely back. It was a cold, gray November day. In the end-of-world atmosphere that was Romania in those years, it was obvious that the once bustling little town of my youth had also fallen on hard times. The people looked diminished, muted. One could read the sadness and bitterness, the smoldering anger, in their dry, wrinkled faces, in their tense greetings, even in the most commonplace exchanges. It mattered little where or under what mask my “shadow,” or perhaps his replacement, was lurking. Those under surveillance and those doing the surveillance appeared equally condemned to the slow poisoning of their dead-end world. I expected no pleasant surprises, the situation was the same all over the country. Suceava, however, seemed permeated with a funereal sadness, which only added to the burden of my pending separation. I would have liked somehow to have been able to lessen that burden. I tried to focus on the amusing aspects, to convert the dour details of the daily routine into the stuff of jokes, but to no avail. All conversations kept coming back, not to the conditions of squalor and terror that were everywhere, but to the reason for my visit. I failed to convince my old parents, listening to me with depressed skepticism, that my going away was only a temporary separation.

The day before my return to Bucharest, I received the rebuttal to my naïve attempts at consolation. In the morning, while I was still lying in bed, my mother was led to my room. Her condition had worsened in the past year. She was blind and could walk only with support.

Their small apartment, in a socialist-style block, consisted of two rooms, a living room and a bedroom. My mother slept on a couch in the living room; the woman who looked after the house slept nearby on a cot. My father had the bedroom, where we both slept in the same bed during the short time of my visit. In the morning, we all shared breakfast, Bukovina-style, Kaffee mit Milch , in the living room, where all the other daytime activities took place, meals, visits, chats.

She had not waited, as usual, to speak to me at breakfast, but wanted to see me earlier, while my father was away at the market or the synagogue. She wanted to talk to me alone, without witnesses. She knocked on the door, then walked, hesitatingly, supported by her helper. Her heart condition had obviously drained her frail body. She was wearing a bathrobe over her nightclothes, her feet were in the slippers I had brought her as a gift from Belgrade. The thick robe was a surprise. All her life, she had complained of being hot. Now it seemed she was always cold and concerned with staying warm.

Supporting herself on her attendant’s arm, she came over to my bed. I signaled to the woman to help her sit on the edge of the bed. As soon as the woman withdrew, the torrent of words began to flow, unchecked.

“I want you to promise me something. I want you to attend my funeral.”

I did not want this conversation, but there was so little time, I could not afford to make a fuss.

“This time, your going away feels different. You’re not coming back. You’re leaving me here, on my own.”

She had been staying with me in Bucharest in 1982, when an official mass-circulation newspaper proclaimed that I was an “extraterritorial.” She knew that was no compliment. She also knew that the terms “enemy of the party,” and “cosmopolitan” were not expressions of praise either. She was with me when a friend phoned to ask whether my windows had been smashed. She used to read such signs better than I did. We knew, tacitly, what sort of memories were revived in both of us by those warnings.

I interrupted her, and told her again what I had told her repeatedly over the previous days. She listened attentively, but without curiosity. She had heard it all before.

“I would like you to promise me that, in case I die and you’re not here, you’ll come back for the funeral.”

“You’re not going to die, there’s no point talking about it.”

“There is for me.”

“You’re not going to die, we shouldn’t talk about this.”

“We must. I want you to be at the funeral. Promise me.”

I could only give her the same answer: “I don’t know about my return, I haven’t made any decision yet. If I get the grant for Berlin, then I’ll stay there for six months or a year, whatever the terms of the grant. I haven’t heard from the Germans yet. Who knows, the letter may be lying in some censor’s drawer. But I’ve heard rumors that I got the grant. Nothing certain, just rumors.”

She repeated her solemn request. Finally, I told her firmly but without real strength, “I cannot promise.”

She suddenly seemed diminished, shrunken. “This means that you are not going to come?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It means that you are not going to die, and that it’s pointless to talk about it.”

“Nobody knows when and how.”

“Precisely.”

“That’s why we have to talk about it.”

“No one knows what will happen to them. I don’t know what might happen to me.”

“I just want you to promise. Please, promise me, I want you to be here at my funeral.”

“I can’t promise. I just can’t.” I then added, without even meaning to, “And it’s not important.”

“It is for me.”

The conversation reached its end, there was nothing left to say. But I went on anyway: “Even if I didn’t actually attend the funeral, I would still be there, wherever I was. You must know that. Just remember that.”

I could not begin to guess whether that answer had satisfied her, and I would never find out. After November 1986 I never saw her again. She died in July 1988, when I was already in America. Father informed me of her death one month later — not because he had wished to release me from the obligation to attend the funeral, but because he knew that if I came back, I would never again be allowed to leave. He also wanted to spare me from the transgression of not observing the seven days of ritual mourning, the traditional shiva, which, in any case, he doubted that his son, however pained, would observe.