Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Before he himself left Romania for Israel, in the summer of 1989, at the age of eighty-one, my father described to me in a letter my mother’s final months. For as long as I remained in Germany, she seemed to be clinging to life for one reason only, so that she might get news about me. Neither the letters, the frequent phone calls, nor the parcels with food and medicine were able to calm her. In fact, they only confirmed the inevitability of the separation, as she saw it. The news of my departure for America finally shattered her illusion that I might yet return. She had nobody or nothing left to struggle against, nothing to hope for. Soon after, her mind began to wander. Helping her became difficult, even for the few steps needed to go to the bathroom. One day she fell, and it was only with great difficulty that one could lift her frail, inert body. The vivacious speaker she had always been turned deaf and mute, oblivious to her surroundings. When she did speak, it was in a sort of trance, about her father and about me, often confusing the two. She believed we were there, in the immediate vicinity, and was worried that we were late coming home or that we hadn’t told her where we had gone. Sometimes she would say she had been murdered — Marcu and Maria were the names of the murderers, and somehow that didn’t seem strange. She had brief spasms of resistance, but soon tired and fell back into her thin-layered peace of sleep, interrupted only by the same worries: Where is my son, where is Father Avram? The delirium followed the same pattern, and came on without warning, followed by the same gentle slipping into the healing peace of unreality that was to be her real home now. “Are they back? Is the boy back? Where’s Father? Still in town, still in town? It’s late …” She could not let go of these two phantoms, even when she seemed to have given up on most other people and things.

After her death, she began to visit me in strange, haunting dreams. I could sometimes feel her presence, too, in the anonymous rooms where I found rest in my nomadic life. The atmosphere would suddenly become charged, and I felt a strange and tender embrace; the gentle spirit of the past fluttered its wings over my tired eyelids and forehead and alighted in a soft embrace over my shoulders.

I saw her again in the week before my return to Romania. We were walking together in the streets of Bucharest. She was talking to me about Mihai Eminescu, the national poet, and telling me how dearly he would have liked to be with me again. She was animated, focusing on matters that seemed to give her pleasure, but that were mainly intended to please me, when suddenly she fell into a deep trench along the edge of the sidewalk, a kind of shaft where workers were repairing the sewage system. It happened in an instant, leaving me no time to catch her. But she had held on to my arm, and her old, heavy body was hanging suspended over the pit, while I lay flat on the sidewalk, gripping her with my left hand, so that she would not drop into the abyss. With my right hand I clutched the edge of the sidewalk, while my left hand gripped her bony fingers. I could feel myself slipping, I couldn’t hold on to the burden of her body swinging desperately above the void, her thin, pale legs thrashing helplessly in the air.

There were men working in the bottom of the hole below. I could see their white helmets, but they could not see me or hear my vain cries for help. I was screaming as loud as I could, but I didn’t produce a single sound. I was suffocating, I could feel my strength draining. I was being pulled down by the bony clasp of the old hand into the black void. I was slipping toward the edge of the sidewalk, ready either to let go of the burden or to let myself be dragged into the bottomless depth, over which my mother was writhing. I had just found her again, I had been talking to her, and I could not bear to lose her again.

No, I could not surrender that familiar touch. The thought sent a pain shooting through my mind, but it failed to give me the strength I needed. On the contrary, I almost fainted, my last reserve of energy drained. Still, I was not beaten, it was not over yet, I was still struggling, although I knew it was hopeless.

I held tight to the hand clutching mine, but I could feel the grip loosening with every second that passed. We were slipping, together, into the abyss. But no, it was not over yet, I could not let go … Whimpering, exhausted, I kept slipping, inch by inch, deeper and deeper. The fingers of my left hand were already numb, defeated, while my right hand, almost useless, could barely keep its grip. It was over, I was letting go, helplessly, guiltily. It was over, finis. So be it, the end, I could resist no longer, I surrendered. As we were falling, I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if I had been stabbed repeatedly by a stiletto.

I woke in a sweat, spent, defeated, in my familiar bed on the Upper West Side. I was in bed, next to the window bright with morning sun. It was Wednesday, the sixteenth of April 1997, four days before I was due to return to the motherland.

A torrid summer day in July. Standing in line to buy bus tickets, the would-be travelers fan themselves with newspapers and wipe away the sweat with their handkerchiefs.

The newcomer, with his cropped light-brown hair, full lips, and bushy eyebrows, did not seem troubled by the slowness of the queue or by the scorching heat. His look was friendly. His nose, although quite prominent and somewhat hawkish, was not unattractively so. He wore a pale-gray lightweight suit, double-breasted, with wide lapels, complemented by a white shirt, a stiff collar, a dark-blue tie with white polka dots, and shoes with pointed toes. The tip of a blue-checked handkerchief poked out from the right upper pocket of his jacket. The very picture of an impeccably dressed young gentleman, around twenty-five years of age, intent on respectability.

Propped against a wall, and secured by one of the young gentleman’s feet, was a small leather suitcase, about the size of a largish briefcase, and a leather cylinder that looked almost like an umbrella, over which he had placed his straw hat.

The young man took a shiny brown leather billfold out of his breast pocket and extracted two banknotes, crisp new bills, folded in two. As he unfolded them, they made a pleasant rustling sound. He handed the banknotes to the mustachioed clerk behind the counter, leaned forward, gave the name of his destination, then straightened up. His voice was hard to make out, for all that had been spoken was a brief request, addressed to the ticket seller. The young man took the ticket handed him and put it inside his left trouser pocket. He then folded the crumpled bill he had received as change and slipped it among the others in his fine leather wallet. He then bent down and picked up his suitcase, his leather cylinder, and his hat. He looked at the rectangular Anker watch on his left wrist. He still had half an hour before his bus was due to depart. He turned toward the park. The only vacant bench was in full sunshine. The bus stood waiting a little way off. He sat down and took a newspaper from an inside pocket of his jacket. The front page of the Universul carried the date in bold letters: July 21, 1933. The editorial was warning, in two columns of feverish text, that the world was “laden with dynamite” and could ignite sooner than the skeptics might expect. However, the earnest, concentrated expression of the newspaper reader had not changed since he had bought his ticket. The printed words did little to intensify the moderate attention with which he viewed his surroundings, or quicken the slow-rising yeast of that sluggish afternoon hour. He seemed pleased with himself, content with the world in which he lived, with the day he inhabited. The park, the lake, the sky, even the garrulous bustle of passengers were a sort of confirmation: he was part of the world, part of society. Only those who had never had to work hard enough to find their place in the world could fail to grasp exactly what such an idyllic day had to offer.