Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

He stares at the lines of sacred text, his head tilted backward. Jolted out of his reverie, he steps back and finds himself walking along Amsterdam Avenue again. There is an advantage to his new life — immunity. You are no longer chained to all the trivia, as in the previous life, you can walk on in indifference. He heads toward the restaurant/delicatessen Barney Greengrass, famous for its smoked fish. “The place will remind you of your previous life,” his friend has promised.

The buildings along Amsterdam Avenue have been reclaimed from the past, old houses, reddish, brown, smoke-gray, four-five-six stories, iron balconies, fire escapes blackened by time. These streets of the Upper West Side, when he first encountered them, reminded him of the Old World. However, over the nine — or is it ninety? — years since he moved into the neighborhood, the tall buildings have multiplied, dwarfing even the forty-two stories of his apartment building to the proportions of a paltry Stalinist construction — there is that insidious adjective again.

On the ground floor of the building, the old shops, as before — Full Service Jewelers, Utopia Restaurant, Amaryllis Florist, Shoe Store, Adult Video, Chinese Dry Cleaning, Nail Salon, Roma Frame Art, and, at the corner of Seventy-sixth Street, Riverside Memorial Chapel. A young girl with thick legs and long dark hair, wearing a black short-sleeved dress, black stockings, and thick, dark sunglasses, comes out of the building. Three long black cars with darkened windows, like huge coffins, are parked at the curb. Out of them step smartly dressed gentlemen in black suits and black hats, elegant ladies in black dresses and black hats, teenagers in sober dress. Once more the metronome has struck the hour of eternity for some poor soul. Life is movement, he has not forgotten, and he hurries away. One step, two, and he is out of danger.

On the sidewalk in front of the venerable Ottomanelli Bros, meat market (SINCE 1900, a sign proclaims) are two wooden benches. An old woman sits on the one on the right. He collapses onto the other, keeping an eye on her. She stares vacantly into space, but he feels she is observing him. They seem to recognize each other. Her presence is familiar, as if he has felt it before on certain evenings, in certain rooms suddenly charged with a protective silence that would envelop him. Never has he felt this way in broad daylight amid the hubbub of the workaday world.

The old lady gets up from the bench. He waits for her to take a few steps, then follows her. He walks behind her in the slow rhythm of the past. He observes her thin legs, fine ankles, sensible shoes, cropped white hair, bony shoulders bent forward, her sleeveless, waistless dress, made of a light material in red and orange checks on a blue background. In her left hand, as in time before, she carries a shopping bag. In her right hand, as in time before, she holds a folded gray sweater. He overtakes her and makes a sudden turn. She gives a start. She probably recognizes the unknown man who had collapsed, exhausted, on the other bench at Ottomanelli’s. They look at each other, startled. A ghost, out of the blue, on a bench, on a city sidewalk.

All is familiar — the gait, the dress, the sweater, the cropped white hair, the face half-seen in a fraction of a second. The forehead and the eyebrows and the eyes and the ears and the chin are all as before, only the mouth has lost its full contour and is now just a line, the lips too long, lacking shape; and the nose has widened. The neck sags, with wrinkled skin.

Enough, enough … He turns around and follows her from a distance. Her silhouette, the way she walks, her whole demeanor. You do not need any distinguishing marks, you always carry everything with you, well-known, immutable; you have no reason to follow a shadow down the street. He slows down, lost in thought, and the vision, as he had wished, vanishes.

Finally, at Eighty-sixth Street, he reaches his destination: Barney Greengrass. Next to the window, the owner sits sprawled in a chair, his hunched back and big belly enveloped in a loose white shirt with long sleeves and gold buttons. The neck is missing; the head, topped by a rich mane of white hair, is ample, the nose, mouth, forehead, and ears firmly drawn. On the left, behind the salami-halvah counter, stands a worker in a white coat. Another counterman tends the bread-bagels-buns-cakes section.

He greets the owner and the young man standing next to him, who has a telephone glued to each ear. Then he walks into the room on the left, the restaurant area. At the table next to the wall a tall, thin man with gold-rimmed spectacles raises his eyes from his newspaper and calls out the customary greeting: “How’re you doing, kid?” A familiar face, a familiar voice. Exiles are always grateful for such moments. “What’s up?”

“Not much. ‘The social system is stable and the rulers are wise,’” as our colleague Zbigniew Herbert says. “‘In Paradise one is better off than anywhere else.’” The novelist, to whom these quotations are directed, is not keen on poetry, but luckily, it sounds more like prose.

“How are you? Tell me the latest. News from here, not from Warsaw.”

“Well, I’m celebrating nine years of life in Paradise. On March 9, 1988, I was shipwrecked on the shore of the New World.”

“Children love anniversaries, and Barney Greengrass’s is the ideal place for such things. It has all the memories of the ghetto, pure cholesterol, Oy mein yiddtshe mame . The old world and the old life.”

He hands me the plastic-covered menu. Yes, the temptations of the ghetto are all here: pickled herring in cream sauce, fillet of schmaltz herring (very salty), corned beef and eggs, tongue and eggs, pastrami and eggs, salami and eggs, homemade chopped chicken liver, gefilte fish with horseradish. The chicken liver is no pâté de foie gras, nor are incubatorbred American chickens East European chickens. The fish isn’t like the fish of the Old World, the eggs aren’t like the eggs we used to know. But people keep trying, and so here are the substitutes for the past. Russian dressing with everything, with roast beef, turkey … Yes, the myth of identity, the surrogates of memories translated into the language of survival.

A handsome young waiter approaches. He recognizes the famous novelist and says to him, “I’ve read your latest book, sir.” Philip seems neither flattered nor upset by this greeting. “Indeed? And did you enjoy it?” He had, the waiter avowed, but not as much as the previous book, much sexier.

“Good, good,” the novelist says, without raising his eyes from the menu. “I’ll have the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and orange juice. Only the whites, no yolks.” The waiter turns to the customer’s unknown companion. “What about you, sir?”

“I’ll have the same,” I hear myself mumbling.

Barney Greengrass offers acceptable surrogates of East European Jewish cuisine, but it is not enough to add fried onions or to affix bagels and knishes to the menu to produce a taste of the past.

“So, how did you like Barney’s cuisine?”

No reply.

“Okay, you don’t have to answer that. Are you going to go back to Romania or not, what have you decided?”

“I haven’t decided anything yet.”

“Are you afraid? Are you thinking of that murder in Chicago? That professor … what was his name? The professor from Chicago.”

“Culianu, loan Petru Culianu. No, I’m not in the least like Culianu. I am not a student of the occult like Culianu, nor, like him, have I betrayed the master, nor, like him, am I a Christian in love with a Jewish woman and about to convert to Judaism. I’m just a humble nomad, not a renegade. The renegade has to be punished, while I … I am just an old nuisance. I cannot surprise anybody.”