Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Love starts out as revolution, then come the chains and the ambiguities, bringing in their wake the temptation of escape, escape from love, escape from family, escape from the chains. Let us, we pray, allow life to complete, in its own way, the work of erosion of hope and disgrace. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, life will usurp our illusions of perfection and erode the vanity of our sense of uniqueness. This was Wise Will’s lesson for us all. The ball, the night of union, the flight from Verona, and then the alternate ending — the protagonists escape death by poison only to perish by a slower poison, the passing of time. Blood flows not in well-choreographed duels but also in miserable abortion clinics. The poison was not simply the antagonisms of the two families, their different traditions and social hierarchies, but life itself, with its limitations and surprising twists.

The lover struggled with the limitations of their relationship and with the limitations of a profession that did not suit him. The beloved, in her turn, struggled with her neurotic possessiveness. There were scenes of jealousy and tears. The tension to which they were now prone was no longer prompted by the hostile world they both faced but derived from their own ambiguities, the discovery of hostility, not against the enemy, but against the beloved and against oneself

We are inhabited by many different selves. Is the true birth marked by the emergence of these selves? Is lying our inevitable teacher? Its oily oozings disappear, and here we stand, the same, unscathed, as though nothing has happened, until we slip back into the tragicomedy of substitution. The lover was becoming irritated by the unannounced visits of the beloved, terrorized by her possessive claws, as she hovered above him, haunting his nightmares like a bird of prey. The beloved, fretting about being incapable of hiding or healing her wound, once appeared on his doorstep, after midnight, and discovered him with another woman. Another time, she intercepted a guilty exchange of letters. The flower of evil was blossoming, its phosphorescent petals discharging poison.

There seemed to be no escape, and yet, there was one — the lie. That filmy cloud of breath was at the ready, helping one out of trouble, by transforming reality into its many variants, a two-tongued monster, come to rescue you. Had the tale of Verona, like all tragic recurrences, become a farce? The finale was lingering, separation seemed imminent, not through tragedy and death, but through boredom. He wished for the regeneration of solitude, with its great riches and promises. The role of the tragic, purehearted lover had turned into the comic role of a man irritated by his consort and by the monotony of cohabitation. The protagonists of Verona had become consumed by exaltation, doubts, treason, and remorse. Resignation to their condition could not reignite the idyll. Their marriage had been consummated without legal confirmation, there was no barrier to their parting. Each would find, in the future, a happy marriage, a real marriage — as had been predicted by both the Gypsy woman on a street corner and the rabbis in the Suceava cemetery, and by the clouds’ whisperings through their long, sleepless nights.

He revisited the image of Juliet, lying blood-smeared in the clinic, skipping along the seashore, dancing at the graduation ball. The years gradually dissipated those images, until all that remained were guilt and gratitude for that stormy apprenticeship in love. Youth had abandoned him to the lessons in imperfection.

There was one last, cryptic message, like a threat: “It’s me, I will return.” In the next sequence, her image fills the night screen. I see a bench, next to the stone rail of the seashore promenade. The woman is wearing a flowery dress, with brownish Oriental motifs, a silk scarf around her neck, and brown, high-heeled shoes. Visible between the shoe and the hem of her dress is a portion of white skin with bluish veins. Next to her lies an open bag with small boxes and packages, and on top of it, another thin yellow scarf. Her hair blows in the wind, she gazes intently, focused on something unseen, outside the frame of the screen. Her face bears the expression of a gentle, evasive solitude, but retains its old intensity.

I hear her saying: The first crisis happened two years ago. I was just back from a happy trip to Spain. A good friend of mine had just died. Then I heard the news of the accident in which my youngest sister was killed, the most cherished member of my family in Romania. I was hospitalized and had to stay there for a few weeks. I went through a desperate period of rehabilitation. My true salvation came from my children. I had to look after them, to protect them from the torment that had engulfed me .

The voice seems to come from behind the image or from nowhere. It is the same familiar voice, the same familiar face, the same appearance, and even the same self-absorbed expression of pain: I had a terrible relapse, like an endless, dark heavy sleep. Then, having partly recovered, we went to live wherever my husband’s business took us, the Far East, Africa, Latin America. He does business with Communist countries, as you probably guessed from that cheerful group picture with the Communist leader. Now I’m coming out of the hospital again. This time I’m trying traditional Eastern remedies, teas and special powders. You have probably guessed what I’m suffering from .

The sound trails off. There is a long pause. I wait for something to move: her lips, her hands, her body, or at least the waves. I’m trying to forgive, to forget my beggar princess’s pride. I am praying that my heart may heal, that the pampered child within me may be healed. You know how intensely I sometimes resent the malevolence around us. I am too impulsive and honest, as you know. Our strange closeness still hurts me sometimes. What have I been for you, a mere source of amusement, a catalyst? That’s the chemist in me speaking. But I haven’t been in a chemical lab once in the last ten years. They can’t allow a chemist with this sort of illness into a lab, can they? My children are now grown-up, and so am I .

The image remains motionless, on the promenade at the edge of the sea. Behind her, equally motionless, stretches the flat expanse of water and the sky’s gray horizon. The image is frozen, like a picture postcard. Only the voice animates the bizarre daydream. Yes, the dawn of that morning in Verona … those big, encompassing moments of adolescence. Nothing could have stopped me from completing my burning journey through that experience to the very end. Now here, at home, I come across all sorts of strange objects — an old cigarette pack from thirty years ago, a small mound of earth, a half burned candle. No, I’m not frightened, the disease protects me from everything

Her face becomes blurred, fragmented, like her voice. Maybe they will return later, but the dream was lost, memory could no longer hold it in focus. The ghost had disappeared.

Congested waiting rooms, overcrowded hospitals … The long lines of patients were like mystical processions, and access to health care required special connections — So-and-so knows So-and-so, a friend of one’s wife, or sister, or mistress. Finding a taxi to take you to the hospital in the morning rush hour, at the other end of the city, was also a challenge to the apathy of the socialist system. To transport a patient to the clinic, you had to know an accommodating taxi driver or have a friend with a car. If successful, you finally found yourself in the anteroom of the suffering, in full possession of the right to wait, along with all the others so privileged, for the magic moment when the doctor would deign to see you.