Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

For a few weeks after the willing surrender of her virginity, the Bukovina Juliet lived in isolation from her parents and siblings, alone in her room, studying for admission to the university. Her lover was at the seaside, wandering in solitude along the shore and going in and out of restaurants. His family had, in the meantime, received a phone call from someone who claimed that the happy couple were seen together on the Black Sea coast. Could this be the work of the adulterous wife of Armenian Street? The millennia-old anxieties had set in motion the ghetto’s many tentacles, now delving everywhere for suspicious signs.

“Cousin Riemer says he has never seen a more clever girl in all his years as a teacher,” the Jewish mother repeated. But she turned the tribute into caricature, not a sign of the student-enemy’s scholastic excellence but an indication of her cunning. The comedy of the situation turned into melodrama racked with anxiety. It seemed as if the victims’ centuries-old delirium, their fears, their demented memories had been freshly reactivated. There was no way to deal with, nor could one ignore, the tirades, the announcements of heart attacks, the threats of suicide. Mater Dolorosa was no novice in such matters and she played her prescribed role to the hilt. This time, there were no arguments, no medication that might afford relief. Her logic was unpredictable, and so were the performances. Was this the result of the damage done by the years in the labor camp, or were they evoked by earlier fears? With or without reasons, the crises escalated. At first, I could feel only compassion for this theater of despair, but compassion alone could not prevent the anger that built up in the aggrieved son. Adversity, as we have been taught by the protagonists of Verona, far from destroying passion, only served to fuel it. And so the romance continued, in idyllic groves and borrowed rooms.

In the early autumn, Juliet left her chamber for the university in Bucharest. In October, the young engineer himself journeyed from Suceava to Bucharest. On his return, Romeo moved into his own bachelor’s room in a hotel in the center of town. Communication between the capital and the provinces remained intense, and the crisis seemed to have abated. However, the drama took a vaudevillian turn and produced some more surprises. One winter night, two young men, their faces hidden behind mufflers, could be seen on the platform of the Iţcani-Suceava railway station. It was after midnight. Outside, a car was waiting. The driver, one of the platform pair, was well briefed for his mission: to take the lovers to their golden cage on the first floor of Romeo’s hotel. It was snowing, the wind was strong, the platform deserted. According to plan, at 1:20 a.m., the Bucharest-Suceava Nord express pulled into the station. The shivering passengers got off, one by one, and sallied forth into the Nordic night. A few short minutes after the last passenger had left the platform, it was the turn of the mystery woman, disguised as Juliet, to emerge. Wrapped in a warm white coat, she carried a small black suitcase. Without looking right or left, she hurried to the shabby automobile parked behind the station, next to a billboard. The door swung open, the driver helped her in, and off we sped. Miss Capulet stayed for a week in that happy captivity and strictly observed all the regulations of the conspiracy. She did not step out of the room, did not answer the phone, and her departure went off without incident.

The young engineer’s attempts to secure a job in Bucharest always failed just when they seemed on the point of succeeding. Obscure details from his dossier got in the way every time. In the spring of 1961, during one of his trips to Bucharest, he stopped over in Ploiesti, a town fifty minutes away, for an interview with the director of the local building trust. The town center was then under construction, and building sites urgently needed engineers. The applicant received, then and there, a letter confirming his transfer from the Engineering Projects Institute in Suceava to the building trust in Ploieşti. By law, however, recent graduates were forced to stay for the first three years in the job allocated to them by the governmental commission. Upon submitting his resignation, he was warned by the Party leaders in Suceava that he would be brought back “in chains.” My family’s funereal silence also suggested chains, a silence far more effective than their former paranoid clamorings. But the real chains binding the rebellious son to the family’s warm bosom were, of course, chains of love — an affectionate captivity, a possessive claw in a velvet glove.

One Monday morning, the engineer, still carrying his two suitcases, arrived at the office of the director in Ploieşti. Comrade Cotae had thin, frail, spiderlike legs, a consequence of polio, and had to support himself on crutches, but was otherwise a handsome, intelligent man, formerly a top student at the Polytechnic. He was affable and firm, and it was difficult not to be won over by his directness. The newcomer was to report the next morning to the building site in the town center.

Ploiesti was, in effect, an extension of Bucharest; the distance between them was short and the trains hourly. Juliet, for her part, proved an intelligent listener and adept at taking risks. Extravagant, adventurous, unbridled, she possessed an acute and highly intuitive mind, as Cousin Riemer, her teacher, who kept popping in and out of the family saga like a Friar Laurence, had already noticed.

It was a cruel April, the first spring in the new couple’s life. At that time in socialist Romania, abortions were still cheap and legal. The waiting rooms were always crowded and patients came and went like characters in a mournful soap opera. The ghetto mother would have been appalled to know about what was happening behind those white doors— remorse, guilt, compassion. Did the old God-fearing woman care only about her self-absorbed trance? the guilty lover kept asking himself, waiting for his wounded Juliet on a bench in the hospital garden. It was a morbid wait, racked with terror and guilt. Had the beloved become the testing ground for her lover’s limitations and duplicity? Was this liaison indeed the family’s misfortune, or the ambiguity of his own wishes? Was it the temptation of the unknown, or the delights of the forbidden fruit?

“To whom do I owe my happy marriage? Maybe the magic sieve spun for me, too?” the former Romeo, now long married, would ask his mother some twenty years later. “I didn’t recommend your wife to you. You found her yourself” was the reply of old Lady Montague in 1986, then almost blind, but still able to grasp the allusion.

“No, you didn’t recommend her, but you stopped me from marrying somebody else once when it didn’t suit you,” her son insisted.

“Fate always decides,” came the prompt answer.

“Exactly, you protected me, you made me protect myself, from what fate had in store for me.” Quips and defiance were all that remained of the old wound. “You, protect yourself? You never protected,” the old voice, still articulating the ancient neurosis, shot back. “That Christian woman was not your fate,” she added. “Christian woman? Hasn’t she got a name? Isn’t that what you were asking for, from all the rabbis, dead and alive, that she should lose her name?” This is how he should have retorted in 1961 and 1962 and 1963, not only in the summer of 1986, when the past was old, diseased, and forgotten.

Of course she had a name — Juliet, love’s generic name. This is what the tired Romeo of yore should have shouted triumphantly, that summer of 1986, before the final curtain, before the ultimate exile. Time passes, mystifications no longer afford comfort, but the old self-justifications linger on. “I did not wish her any harm,” the old woman continued. “She has children now, she’s doing all right. In England somewhere.” Of course she’s in England, where else could she be? Certainly not in Verona or Ploieşti. She’s with Bill the Bard, of course.