Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The name of Suceava was to reappear on the map of our conversations only in 1947, the year when the circle closed and we were back where we had started.

April 1945. The truck stops at the intersection of two streets. The wooden tailgate is removed, to allow the passengers to get out. Another moment’s wait, an endless moment of disruption. When it passes, everything begins to move again, quickly. The dead street suddenly becomes alive with a crowd of strangers, men and women running toward the truck. Within seconds, they reach the ghosts who had already alighted from the truck onto the sidewalk — into the world. Embraces follow, lamentations, tears.

Out of the void a new world has been born. The boy stares at his parents with the same bewilderment with which he gazed at the strangers. Another second or two, and it is his turn to be hugged and kissed by the possessors of unknown, freckled faces, big, rough hands, and guttural voices — uncles, aunts, cousins. The excitement of reunion! Reunion? He does not recollect ever having met these people. The world, however, has just been brought back to life, and with such people in it.

This had been the real return, the descent from the truck that had brought us back, in April 1945, from Iasi to Fălticeni, the small Moldavian town, all flowers and picture-postcard views, where my father’s older brother lived. Uncle Aron, short, stumpy, with red cheeks, an intense gaze, and quick speech, was one of those creatures shaking with tears and laughter. He kept squeezing us, one by one, with great warmth, in his strong arms. As they lived in Fălticeni, Moldavia, rather than in Suceava, Bukovina, this branch of the family had not been deported. The distance between Fălticeni and Suceava was only twenty-five kilometers, but of such trifles is the stuff of which history’s farces are made.

It was almost four years since we had been driven into the wilderness, and less than a month before the official end of the war. The curtains were about to close on the nightmare. On that early spring afternoon the future reappeared, a colored bubble into which I was invited to blow as hard as I could and fill with tears and saliva and moans, thereby saving myself from the clutch of the past. Here was this little actor, starving for recognition and eager for new experiences. He was alive, he had survived, the surroundings themselves existed — unbelievable! There were trees and skies, words and a variety of foods, and, above all, the joy of the place.

In April 1945 I was an old man of nine. Forty years later, in the spring of 1986, 1 found myself in the Piaţa Unirii Market in Bucharest. I was watching a truck being unloaded of its cargo of apples in front of a mansionlike white building, Manuc’s Inn. The tailgate of the truck had been removed and two swarthy young men were pushing the mountain of apples onto the sidewalk. There was a shortage of almost everything in Bucharest that spring of 1986, but there were plenty of apples, and they were splendid.

In a few months’ time I was to reach the young age of fifty. Over the years I had acquired enough reasons to be skeptical about anniversaries and coincidences. But on that spring morning in the marketplace, forty years later, I was suddenly transfixed in front of the apple-laden truck that seemed to have emerged out of the blue. I was staring, without really seeing, at the truck and its load of golden apples. I lived nearby, just a few minutes away. The nuclear accident in Chernobyl had occurred only a few days previously. I rarely went out, avoided parks, stadiums, and squares. The windows of my apartment had remained shut for several days.

However, it is not Chernobyl that claims the attention of the three people in the room — my mother, sitting on the couch, myself, and Ruti, the cousin just arrived from Israel, both in facing armchairs.

“Marcu became orphaned when he was very young,” the blind woman on the couch is saying. “His father died in ‘45, you’re right. He had nine children. My grandfather, your great-grandfather, had ten children. People had lots of children in those days.”

“Our fathers’ father, our grandfather, was a sort of peasant,” I explain to Ruti, although she has already heard this story many times. But maybe in the ten years since she settled far away, in the Holy Land, she has forgotten all these old East European tales. “He was the village baker. He owned a farmhouse, with cattle, sheep, horses. Our grandmother died when our fathers were children. She left three orphaned boys, Aron; Marcu, my father; and Nuca, the youngest, your father. Grandfather remarried and had six more children. I saw him in 1945, when we returned from the deportation.”

The blind woman is waiting patiently for her turn to continue the storytelling — an old, tired voice, slowly penetrating the listeners’ memory.

“He was only eighteen, my grandfather, your great-grandfather, and there he was, already a widower. He remarried, grandmother’s sister, who was fourteen at the time. At fifteen, she gave birth to her first child, Adela, mother of Esther. You’ve probably heard of Esther, she had a son, an only son; he died in the Six-Day War. After Esther came my father— Abraham, Avram — followed by two boys and a daughter, Fanny, Ariel’s mother. You met Ariel in Paris,” she said, turning to me. “Then came Noah, you were named after him. Then another one, whose name I forget. He died young a long time ago. Then Aunt Leah, Leah Riemer, in whose house we lived when we came back. There was another son; he went to America and died there, of cancer, at nineteen. There was also, of course, the child by his first wife. So, there were ten of them, my grandfather’s children, ten starving children. They were very poor, extremely poor, but not a week passed without some pauper or beggar joining them at table on a Friday evening.”

“Eating what?”

“Well, whatever there was, nothing, something out of nothing.”

“And Grandfather? Did you know him? My great-grandfather.”

“No, he was before my time. Manoliu, the veterinarian, and Du-mitrescu, the notary, used to tell me: Sheina — that’s what they called me — it’s a shame you didn’t know your grandfather … his snow-white stockings, his immaculateness, his air of holiness. He was a religious man, very learned, very stern, that’s what they all said.”

“Sheina, does that come from schòn, sbein in Yiddish, beautiful?”

“Well, that’s what they said …”

She continues to speak, but her voice never recovers its former vitality. The questions I ask do not have the hoped-for effect. The story is not new, and we who have heard it so many times before are no longer young. The ritual retelling is in honor of the guest from afar, to remind her of what she has left behind.

“What about Great-grandmother, the widow with all the children. How did she manage?”

“She had a small pension from the community. The children all worked, from a very young age, especially the boys. This was a family trait. Aunt Leah used to say, and so did her children: One must work, one must work hard, work hard.’ Her sons started to work when they were ten. They were poor, they had no clothes. And those cold winters … they gave private lessons to children from rich families, the Nussgartens and the Hoffmans from Fălticeni. At five in the afternoon, these people stopped for tea and cakes, but they never offered any to the poor tutors.”

“And these were your fellow Jews, all pious people? It wasn’t your Uncle Marx who invented the class struggle… Now tell us about Grandfather, your father.”

“There were no newspapers in Burdujeni in those days. You could only buy them in the big city, Suceava, a few kilometers away. Burdujeni was really just a small town then, but it was very lively, buzzing with life. All our family comes from there, from Burdujeni, my grandfather, my father, all of us. My father was the first in Burdujeni to order a newspaper by mail, Dimineafa (The Morning) —one copy, just for him.”