Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

“I sort of lost my nails later in life. He was right, they would’ve come in handy, at any age, a sign of life.”

The three of us laugh, Mother with her short, weak laugh. She has been out of the hospital only a few days, which is why Ruti has come all the way from Jerusalem. Ruti was like a daughter, the orphaned niece, daughter of my father’s brother, who was raised in our home.

I carefully rewind the tape recorder on the coffee table. The blind woman on the couch cannot see the machine, she is not aware that she is being recorded. She is completely blind. The operation has solved nothing.

“What about your husband, the baby’s father. How did he win you?”

“That’s another story, a long story. I used to go to Fălticeni in the summer. It was July 20, St. Elias Day. I went from Burdujeni with my friends, young men and women. On that particular day, I was waiting for the bus home in Fălticeni, the same as I did every year. Suddenly this smartly dressed young man appeared, with a folding stool.”

“A folding stool?”

“The bus was always overcrowded. He placed his small stool next to me. And after a while he asked, Are you related to Mrs. Riemer? Leah Riemer, from Fălticeni. Mrs. Riemer is my aunt, I said. I looked very much like Auntie Leah, that’s what people said.” The old, sagging face, ravaged by time and illness, looks older than that of old Leah Riemer, the way I had seen her for the last time, about twenty years ago, when she came — the clan’s diplomatic envoy — to persuade me to break off my pagan romance with the shiksa, which had scandalized the whole family. Leah Riemer’s calm, biblical face showed no signs of the traumas I now read on the blind mask before me.

“He knew Mrs. Riemer and her husband, Kiva the chess player, chess partner of the writer Mihai Sadoveanu. Kiva was quite difficult to live with, Leah had trouble with him. He was very smart, an upholsterer by trade, but he hung around at the café, gambling his money away. The young man also knew the Riemer children, brilliant, hardworking students. At that time, the Riemers spoke Hebrew at home, the only such household in town. He asked me if I knew Paulina, the lame seamstress married to a cousin of his. Then, after a while, he told me he was courting someone, Miss Landau. I knew her, Bertha, the pharmacist, a nice girl.”

“So, confessions at first sight.”

“Well now, how long is it from Fălticeni to Suceava? Just over an hour. He got off at the junction in Iţcani, he worked at the sugar factory there. I went on to Burdujeni. When I got home, I went over to Amalia, to tell her all about it. Amalia was my neighbor and friend. I told her I’d just met a very nice young man on the bus, a friend of Bertha’s.”

“Nicer fifty years ago than today, wouldn’t you say?”

“The following Saturday, I got a picture postcard from him,” the convalescent continued, as though she hadn’t heard my question. “ ‘To Miss Janeta Braunstein, bookseller de luxe,’ that was all that was written on it. Then, one day, I saw him pass through Burdujeni on his bicycle. He stopped and told me there was a ball in Iţcani the following Saturday and would I like to go with him. He turned up that Saturday at five, when everybody in Burdujeni was out on the porch, in patent-leather shoes and a handsome jacket. A taxi was waiting, but my parents wouldn’t let me go, they didn’t know who he was.”

“You were so submissive? I don’t believe it.”

“After that, Marcu and I went to all the balls. He’d always come by on a Saturday and on Sunday afternoon, as well as on Wednesday evenings, on his bicycle. There were always balls in Iţcani, charity balls, collecting for all sorts of things, a school, a skating rink, the hunters’ club. I wore a different dress to each ball. The purple dress created a sensation: purple satin, with shoes and hat to match.”

“He could afford all those balls, on an accountant’s salary?”

She points to her dry lips with her fingers, she is thirsty. I bring a glass of water and offer it to her, but she cannot see it. I bring her hand to the glass. The hand trembles as it holds the glass. She takes two sips, signals me to take the glass away. I put it on the table in front of her; she does not see it.

“Of course, on his salary, he had a good income at the factory. He would send me flowers, lilacs and roses, and letters. We were young, those were different times.”

“And who made your dresses?”

“Mrs. Waslowitz.”

“The Polish lady. The same Mrs. Waslowitz I knew ten years ago, twenty years ago? She must be two hundred years old by now.”

“She charged three hundred lei per dress. She’s ninety now, but she still goes to church on Sunday, I’m told, every Sunday, summer and winter, come rain or shine.”

“So, she made your dresses under the King, and under the Green Legionnaires, and under the Red Stalinists? And now under our beloved Green-Red leader. What did she say when you disappeared in 1941? She must have known what was going on. And what did she say when you came back?”

“When we were taken away, the mayor would not allow me to put even my slippers in the knapsack. I left them in the corridor. Maria was clinging to us at the station, she wanted to get on the train with us, wouldn’t let go of us. At the frontier, by the Dniester, at Ataki, they let us out of the train. It was a freight train for transporting cattle, we were one on top of the other, like sardines. At Ataki, the plunder began, screams, beatings, gunshots. When we recovered, we were on the other side of the bridge. My parents had been left behind. I saw a soldier. He could have been one of those who had been pushing us with their guns off the train. I am now old, poor wretched me, but then … then I was brave. I went to the soldier and told him: Mister, my parents were left behind at Ataki, they are old. I’ll give you 1,000 lei, please bring them here.”

Transnistria had not been much of a topic of conversation in our home. The Holocaust had not yet become the popular subject of later years, and suffering was not cured through public confession. Usually, these ghetto lamentations irritated me. But were we now reconciled, with the passing of time? Could the bitter, intractable conflict become the stuff of humor?

“Let’s go,” she would say again and again in 1945 and 1955 and all the years that followed. “And there will come an evening … and I will go,” as the poet predicted. Had she ever read at Our Bookstore in Burdujeni that line by Fundoianu-Fondane? The Romanian poet had gone from Paris, not to Jerusalem, but to Auschwitz. Had I finally accepted the burden of this line of verse, as well as the obsessive foresight of my mother, now unseeing and unable to go anywhere? I no longer jump when I hear words such as “goy,” “shiksa,” “going away,” I can now tolerate all the ghetto mannerisms I had previously tried to escape. She signals again that her lips are dry and she needs a drink. She takes a sip, hands the glass back to me, and is ready to return to center stage.

“‘I’ll give you 1,000 lei,’ I told him. He could have shot me or searched me and taken all my money away. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll go back for your folks, for 1,000 lei, but I also want a jar of Nivea cream.’”

“Nivea? What did he need Nivea for? And how come you had Nivea cream with you?”

“I did, one of God’s little jokes. I had squeezed two jars of Nivea into the knapsack.”

“So, no slippers, but Nivea you took with you.”

“I gave him the Nivea, and he brought my parents back. We took them with us, and they stayed with us until they died. When my father was dying, Frau Doktor Helmann told me she had a small bottle of medicine that might help, Dejalen drops, for the heart. She asked for 1,000 lei.”