Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

In the small market towns relations with neighbors and authorities were friendly. The peasants would come to old Avram for advice on legal and even religious matters, or to borrow small sums of money. The family loved Maria like a daughter, the orphan girl whom the bookseller had taken off the streets and brought into his home as a member of the family, where she happily remained. Maria was beyond suspicion, but all around them, in books, newspapers, in the eyes of customers, suspicions were arising. One had to be vigilant, extremely vigilant.

Avram the bookseller maintained a good-humored and skeptical detachment from these ancestral obsessions, as if decency and piety could ward off evil. However, his youngest daughter, my mother, reacted promptly to any dubious sign. Aunt Rebecca reminded me of the details, already familiar to me from family lore.

Marcu, the accountant from Iţcani, my future father, remained unperturbed, friendly, and prudent in his relations with everybody. He did not have many friends, but he had no enemies either. He was easy in his dealings with colleagues of any sort, although he felt more comfortable among his own kin. He was always baffled by his happy-go-lucky non-Jewish friend Zaharia, the party-loving, womanizing, hunting, and horse-riding local Don Juan, who went through life with a smile on his lips and his hat tipped at a rakish angle. They had always been firm friends. He could not imagine Zaharia taking any interest in frenzied slogans and parades of chanting Legionnaires.

In 1935, old Avram paid no attention to Ariel’s fiery calls for caution. Hostility and danger were, to him, part of the natural order of things. Since they could not be avoided, they were not worth worrying about. One had to get through the day’s work and accept the surrounding stupidity and suffering, that was all; people always remembered a kind, decent man — there was no other way. Ariel, after all, had won a dubious notoriety for himself with his extravagant dress and exaggerated language. The family had other concerns apart from Sebastian’s scandal, or theorizing about the confrontation between inner and outer adversity. Engrossed as they were in their wedding plans, their daily lives were dominated by other thoughts. In fact, the bustle of the preparations served as a reminder that they were at ease in the place where they had been living for as many generations as they could remember. True, they had not been born on the banks of the Danube, like Joseph Hechter, but then, the hills of Bukovina were not to be sneezed at, either. They loved their native land no less than Joseph Hechter-Mihail Sebastian, and did not have the inclination or the time to philosophize about such matters as — the diminutive , for example, Ariel’s latest obsession.

Normally, diminutives may be thought of as agreeable things; they have a charming sweetness and naïveté about them. Only zany Ariel, the bookseller’s nephew and cousin of the bride, could argue that they were bad omens. They distill poisons, poisons that could only be temporarily domesticated. Diminutives can spell disaster when you least expect it! “Here, anything can happen, nothing is incompatible,” the young man recited, quoting from Sebastian. Ariel devoured everything, memorized everything, twisted words in any way he chose. “Evasiveness,” that’s what he called it. Evasiveness! The term found an audience, it inspired trust. Fatalism, a sense of humor, hedonism and melancholy, corruption and lyricism, all played their part, the excited Ariel claimed, in this, the supreme technique of survival: evasiveness . This is what he kept repeating, with his usual contempt and arrogance. But who was listening? Rejoicing in the preparations for the wedding, his audience felt they had no reason to reject pleasure, or lyricism, or confidence in their destiny, all denounced by the youthful Ariel.

The so-called Hooligan Year of 1934 had been a happy one, so why should the next be any different? The bookseller’s favorite daughter had blossomed, joy had entered the household, the heightened emotions were a reminder that the place where they had been living for so many generations was no worse than any other. The landscape and the people, the climate and the language — all belonged to them. They lived in harmony with their neighbors. Adversity? There was no particular reason to be suspicious of the way people looked at you or to bridle at the odd world; after all, their co-religionists were no saints either. Occasionally, they even wondered whether the evil might not, after all, be in themselves, as they seemed to attract hostility wherever they went.

Did life necessarily need the galvanizing force of poison? Often diluted and almost absent, it was always ready, nevertheless, to erupt in sudden, terrible outbreaks, smashing the sweet little nothings — yesterday’s tender diminutives — and heralding disaster. That was precisely what zany Ariel did, throwing names and quotations at them that were designed to alert them to the traps they themselves no longer heeded. “Even Tolstoy allowed himself to be fooled. He liked it here during his brief Romanian sojourn. The charm of the place and its inhabitants … the old sage was young and naïve,” young Ariel pontificated. Ariel, the bookseller’s nephew, son of his sister from Buhusi, madcap Ariel, with his blue-dyed hair, reciting Rimbaud and capable of walking twenty-five kilometers every other week to play chess with his uncle, Kiva Riemer, making impassioned speeches on Jabotinsky and on the forthcoming Jewish state in the Mediterranean — this was a man who believed himself to be in a better position than Hechter-Sebastian. “Assimilation? Assimilation for what?” the young man fulminated. “To become like everybody else? Everything compatible with everything else? Do we live in the country of all compatibilities, as the author from Bucharest claims?” He did not seem to care that Uncle Avram smiled in amusement, or that Avram’s daughter listened too attentively to be actually listening.

“Would we have been able to survive for so long if we had been just like these, or like those, or like the others? Five thousand years! Not two thousand, as the gentleman from Bucharest believes! Let’s see how compatible Mr. Hooligan will prove to be with his hooligan friends!” Old Avram and his daughter, the speaker himself, and even the wretched Nathan, the Communist tailor who could not decide in favor of Stalin or Trotsky — they all seemed to be in a better situation than the assimilated Sebastian. And, of course, Rabbi Yossel Wijnitzer, too, the town’s spiritual leader, was in a clearer and better situation than Hechter-Sebastian. Their home was illusion! The illusion of home was what Mr. Sebastian no longer had.

The Braunstein family was happy in that Hooligan Year of 1934, and happy, too, in 1935, when the wedding was to take place, and in 1936, when their heir was expected. In the town of Burdujeni, these were not Hooligan Years, as Sebastian, his critic Ariel, and newspapers proclaimed worldwide. The hooligan times are upon us, or rather, they’re already here, declared the Romanian, Yiddish, German, and French newspapers that old Avram carried on his back from the station to his bookstore in Burdujeni. Everywhere there was the morbid delight in blaspheming, but in that small East European market town, the bookseller’s family lived their happy lives.

Had I been able to ask the old Chinese sage, half a century after the Hooligan Year, about what I looked like in the year before I was born, he probably would have answered with a cliché. He would probably have told me what I already knew and what time subsequently confirmed: as a mere hypothesis, as nonreality, one can have only the face that one will have later on, in actual life. I could not, for instance, become the Jewish-Romanian Anna Pauker, the star of world Communism, who left the ghetto and went straight through the red gates of proletarian internationalism; nor could I have become the worldly Jewish-Romanian Nicu Steinhardt, convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, even Legionnairism; I could not even have become Avram or his daughter Janeta Braunstein, and least of all Rabbi Yossel, their wise adviser. Likewise, I could not have been their rebellious relative, the Zionist Ariel. Rather, in 1935, the year before I was born, I was the hooligan Sebastian — and so I would be fifty years after and then ten more years after that and another ten and all the years between.