Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The very differences between the two seemed to have cemented their relationship in the early stages of the marriage and possibly even later, though they were both to remain their own selves up to the very end. Engagement versus aloofness, an almost theatrical yet genuine pathos on one side and solitude, discretion, moderation on the other. Alertness versus apathy, panic versus prudence, risk-taking versus reticence and dignity. The end result of their union — not necessarily a perfect dialectical synthesis of thesis and antithesis — had new contradictions added to it, naturally; otherwise the comedy would have been utterly humorless. Was there some impatience in the contradictions that had fused in the newborn? Paradoxically enough, the premature birth of their only child, in July 1936, on the eve of St. Elias Day — the day of the Fălticeni fair — was no indication of impatience but rather of reluctance. The unborn refused in fact to be born, refused to activate his innate and acquired contradictions. He remained stuck in the placenta, and this lingering endangered his emergence, which only looked like a birth, a wounding that was dangerous for both mother and child, as they struggled for life, day after day.

Everybody sighed with relief upon learning that the young mother, she being more important than the fetus, would live. As for the child, only when his fate was no longer so closely dependent on his mother’s did the grandfather, old Avram, ask, “Has he got fingernails?” Told that I had, he calmed down: I would survive. Over the short time that I knew him, and later, during the years in the labor camp in Transnistria, he should have taught me that in the real world it was not just fingernails that one needed for survival but claws.

Premature birth indeed, followed by a time of solar blankness, without contours or memories. An idyllic time out of which the mind picks up only a flash of a sloping street and the entrance to my grandfather’s bookstore. Memory does not say much about the way I was before the true birth, which was still to come. Much later, fiction was perhaps more eloquent: a scene from the Tarkovsky film lvan’s Childhood , which I watched endlessly, many years later. The blond child, the laughing mother, happiness. Suddenly the arm of the water well swinging madly. The mirror of the lake shattered by the thundering explosion: war.

The thunder of October 1941. Thunder and lightning in one stroke split the floor of the stage set. Expulsion, the exiles’ convoy, the train, the dark emptiness. The hole into which we had been hurled was no baby’s cot. Behind us, only the desperate scream of the Good Fairy Maria, who had not wanted to relinquish me from her arms and was pleading with the guards to let her come with us into the abyss, she, the Christian, the Holy Virgin, together with the sinners whom she could not possibly abandon. Night, shots, screams, plunder, the bayonets, the dead, the river, the bridge, cold hunger, fear, the bodies — the long night of the Initiation. Only there and then was the comedy about to begin. Transnistria, beyond the Dniester … Transtristia, beyond sadness. The prebirth Initiation had begun.

Yes, I know what I looked like before I was born. And I know the way I looked afterward, in April 1945, when the surviving expatriates had been repatriated to the patria , the motherland that had banished them and that had not, after all, managed to get rid of them. Though it did get rid of some — old Avram the bookseller; his wife, Haia, and so many others. A diaphanous spring day was embracing the town, in 1945 still called Fălticeni, as it had been in 1933, the same departure point of destiny’s bus.

The truck bringing us in 1945 back “home” to Fălticeni, to the relatives who had not been taken away, did not, however, stop near the park or the booth where bus tickets to Paradise used to be sold. It stopped next to the market, on the corner of Beldiceanu Street.

A bell sounded. The wooden screen at the rear of the truck was removed. From Beldiceanu Street the crowd came running toward us, bit players whose role was to celebrate the return. A melodrama as sweet and delicate as the placenta of the newly born swelled the concertina bag’s rainbow in honor of the victors — us.

I watched them cry, embrace, recognize each other. I hung back on the platform of the truck, biting my fingernails. The street was the stage and I was a bewildered spectator. Finally, they came back for the one left behind, left behind in the past.

Before I allowed myself to be lowered back into the world, I managed to bite my fingernails deeply once more. I had acquired this bad habit. I bit my fingernails.

The premarital idyll of the baker’s son and the bookseller’s daughter lasted from 1933 to 1935. Mrs. Waslowitz, the Polish dressmaker who catered to all the ladies of Suceava and environs, could barely cope with the orders issuing from the bookseller’s household. Elegant and serious, the future bride’s knight insisted on escorting her in a different dress to each of the town’s charity balls. The slim, nervous brunette had blossomed. Her vivacious black eyes sparkled, the intensity of her face was transfigured by a magic aura whose origins were easy to ascertain. Always rushed and pressed for time, she worked, as before, from morning till night, but now she also devoted more time to her dresses, shoes, bags, hats, gloves, face powder, hairdos, and lace trimmings.

One can imagine embraces in the carriage and car, visits to Suceava, Fălticeni, and Botosani, perhaps also to Czernowitz. Balls, walks in the moonlight, gatherings at the synagogue, and festivities at the home of the future bride’s family. Cinema and theater and summer gardens, skating rinks and jingling sleigh bells, trips to Bukovina’s resorts. Perhaps they even stopped by the bachelor’s rooms. The scenario is easy enough to imagine, the quick pulse of love throbbing with the rhythm of the times, the last idyllic holiday before the catastrophe.

The year 1934 could be called, then, a happy year. The few kilometers of road between Burdujeni and Iţcani became the Milky Way for the love story that had begun one year earlier in the hot, crowded bus bringing the pair back from the St. Elias fair in Fălticeni. The people in Iţcani, and especially the inhabitants of Burdujeni — the shtetl metropolis, as it were — were keen to comment on events as they unfolded: political debate and female gossip enjoyed an equal share in that particular corner of the world theater; small events and grand utopian discourses, the clamor of the planet as heard in the Romanian, Yiddish, French, and German newspapers jostled with workaday noises. Friends and relatives all partook in this feast, the brother and the sister and the father and his ailing and pestering wife, my grandmother Haia, nicknamed Tzura, “the affliction.” A keen participant in all this was the beautiful Maria, the orphaned peasant girl adopted by the family, eager to accompany the bookseller’s youngest daughter to her new household.

A happy year, then, 1934. The young Ariel, the well-educated Zionist rebel, always up-to-date with the latest news, had, however, decreed that it was the Hooligan Year. The future bride and groom were among those who gathered in old Avram’s bookshop, turning the pages of the day’s newspapers and the latest books. They were therefore probably not in the least surprised by Ariel’s announcement: the novel De două mii de ani (Two Thousand Years) , published the year before, was enjoying a succès de scandale in Bucharest. The author’s name, inscribed on the gray-blue cover, was Mihail Sebastian, the pen name of Joseph Hechter, and the incendiary preface was by the Iron Guard ideologue Nae Ionescu. Incredibly, this extreme right-wing national was poor Hechter’s mentor! In the introduction, Legionnaire Ionescu claimed that his admirer and disciple was not purely and simply a man from the Danubian area of Brăila, as he had assumed, but a Jew from Danubian Brăila.