Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Soon the noise around him increased. People were hurrying toward the ticket booth and the bus. Quite a throng — women, children — a summery bustle. Remaining on the bench, he observed the commotion. Reluctantly, he got up. As usual, the bus was packed. This happened every year after St. Elias Day, the day of the famous fair in Fălticeni— iarmarok , as the local Ukrainians called it. The crowds came from near and far. He tried to push forward down the aisle of the bus, then stopped. The bus was due to depart any minute now, he had to settle down. He carefully opened the leather roll, which turned out to be a tripod chair. He carefully extended the three legs of the chair and positioned it next to the small suitcase, on top of which he had placed his hat.

He sensed he was being watched by the young woman sitting to his left. He had noticed her in the park, as he was eyeing the passengers heading to the bus. She was dark-haired, Spanish-looking, with dark, deep-set eyes, a slender waist, and delicate ankles, in a white short-sleeved dress with a flowery print pattern, high-heeled suede sandals, a fancy leather handbag shaped like a basket. Slim and graceful, she seemed eager to see and be seen.

The handsome elegant gentleman had no trouble engaging the beautiful elegant lady in conversation. His young tenor led off in even, measured tones, her young alto vibrated in a quick rhythm, but avoided the higher notes.

“Are you by any chance related to Mrs. Riemer?”

This was the question that had occurred to him as he watched her hurrying toward the bus earlier.

Startled, she turned her delicate face to him, scrutinizing him intently.

“Yes, Mrs. Riemer is my aunt. My father’s sister.”

After only a few remarks, they felt like old acquaintances. The tripod seat lent a comic yet engaging touch to the young man’s otherwise impeccable appearance. Clearly, he was mindful both of his place in the crowd of society and on the equally crowded bus.

The conversation passed from Leah Riemer to her husband, Kiva, the upholsterer, and also chess partner of the writer Sadoveanu during the latter’s summer vacations in Fălticeni; then it moved on to the Riemers’ academically gifted children, and proceeded to mutual acquaintances who lived in the town where the July fair was to be held, a town that, as they now discovered, they both visited frequently.

Neither of the pair got off at Suceava, as each thought the other would, but at the adjacent market towns — the gentleman at Iţcani, the first stop after Suceava, and the lady at Burdujeni, the first stop after Iţcani

Engrossed in conversation, they were oblivious to the contours of a strange gestation forming in the air, though perhaps they did sense something. For in spite of the conversation, animated as it was by the young woman’s Mediterranean vivacity, they had observed each other attentively all the time. When they parted, the feeling that they had indeed been on a journey, not homeward, but into the unknown, sought an appropriate means of expression in each.

They saw each other again, as agreed, the following week. The young man showed up, on his shiny bicycle, in front of Librăria Noastră—Our Bookstore — a medium-sized house-cum-shop halfway up the sloping main street of Burdujeni, with yellow walls and narrow shuttered windows. Only three kilometers separated the sugar factory in Iţcani, where the young gentleman worked as an accountant, from the other little town, where the bookstore, owned by the parents of the young woman, was located. An easy, pleasant ride, especially on a sunny Sunday morning.

My earliest memory is linked to this trip. A memory preceding my birth, a memory of the being I was before I came into being — the legend of a past before the past.

When the ancient Chinese sage asks me, as he has so many of his readers, “What did you look like before your father and mother met?” I conjure up the strip of road between two neighboring towns in northeast Romania in the mid-i930s, a narrow expanse of cobblestones between two slender columns of trees under a homely, sleepy sky. A ribbon of golden space made time, the necessary length of time to go from somewhere to somewhere else, from something to something else. Fairy tales call this love, the comedy of errors that we all seem to need.

After that first Sunday meeting, the accountant from the sugar factory of Iţcani continued his visits to the neighboring town. That strip of cobblestones, earth, and dust gradually turned into a magnetic tape of illusions making that forgotten corner of the world into its very center. Destiny’s Chinese brushstrokes were chasing each other chaotically all over that bucolic sky, offering no vision of the future but the incandescent nebulae of the moment.

However, the young gentleman was to discover, over the next few months, what I discovered only half a century later, in the early 1980s, on the train taking me and my mother, by then almost blind, to an ophthalmologist in a town situated more than two hours away from those old places.

During my first trip to the West, a few years earlier, I had met in Paris my mother’s famous cousin Ariel, the subject of some exotic family legends. By then, he had stopped dyeing his hair green, or red, or blue, as he had done in his youth, and it was not clear whether he still dealt in arms sales, as in the days of De Gaulle, or whether he still wrote for Le Monde , as he had claimed. The heavy, bald gentleman, almost blind himself, like many in the family, owned a dazzling personal library where you were hard-pressed to choose one book over another. When I asked about the early years of my mother, the daughter of Ariel’s adored Uncle Avram — the bookseller — what she was like in her youth, all I got for an answer was an ambiguous smile. He refused to go into the matter, in spite of my insistence.

Had there been an unsettling episode in her youth, from the time before she married my father? Did the young woman, when my father met her on the bus, have a past that had scandalized the provincial society of her small hometown? Not scandalous enough, it would seem, to deter her distinguished suitor from persevering for three years through all the phases of courtship. What was I like before they met? I am not Chinese enough to remember the past before the past, but I can see the beginning before the beginning, that interval between July 1933 and July 1936, from the meeting on the bus to the arrival, more dead than alive, of their only offspring.

It was in my maternal grandfather’s house, where the family’s culinary and diplomatic talents were always on display, that the potentialities that were to culminate in my birth were accumulating — at the sumptuous Austrian-style balls organized in Iţcani and Suceava; during those rare trips to Czernowitz, Bukovina’s end-of-the-world Vienna, at the holy days of the old-style calendar in Burdujeni; at the Dom-Polski theater in Suceava and in the old movie house where the screen flashed before the lovers the name of that American or English or Australian actor, my namesake Norman; on the bus route between Fălticeni and Suceava. The air was heavy with the smell of conifers and speeches about Titulescu and Jabotinsky, Hitler, Trotsky, and the Baal Shem Tov; the smoky rooms, redolent with the vapors of hot frying pans, the buzz of gossip and rumors. The darkness was electrically charged and the newspapers filled with alarms of planetary passions.

Nothing, however, could be more important than the hypnosis that had suddenly placed a man and a woman at the very center of the world: a sober and lonely young man, who had risen through his own efforts from an obscure family of country bakers, discreet and hardworking, keen on preserving his dignity and the respect of his fellow citizens, and an ardent young woman, avidly searching for the signs of the destiny that would embrace her panic and her passion, inherited from the neurotic Talmudic scholars and booksellers who were her ancestors. The coming together, you might say, of bread and the book.