Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The ophthalmologist, who only a few years earlier had been promoted from the provinces to the capital, Bucharest, had overnight become the miracle worker; to see him you had to make an appointment half a year in advance. The visit with him lasted only a moment. The miracle worker made the diagnosis and named a date for the operation.

The eighty-two-year-old patient had a heart condition, diabetes, and suffered from a nervous breakdown. Her son, no longer young himself, did not appear to have resigned himself to the inevitable, still troubled by the blind woman’s slow gestures and equally slow speech.

The old woman took the much coveted referral form. It was to be a hospital admission, “with accompanying caregiver,” for two days before and two days after the operation. Her daughter-in-law would have to take a week off from work to cope with all that was required, a week rather than just the four before-and-after days, because her role also involved acquiring the cartons of cigarettes, soap, deodorant, nail polish, and chocolate, all with Western labels, that were the currency of securing the goodwill of the nurses, cleaning ladies, and assorted functionaries whose assistance would be needed.

Payment for the operation itself would customarily require sealed envelopes with greasy, crumpled banknotes, the normal transaction under socialism’s free medical insurance, but in this case it was a question of finding something less conventional. An autographed copy of my latest book would hardly do the trick, we had to find out what would really please the miracle doctor. A painting? Fine, we’d browse through the studios of socialist Jormania’s artists. But even after the pastel drawing, in a gilded frame and paid for with a month’s salary, reached the doctor’s home, the coveted private room failed to materialize: the patient and her “accompanying caregiver” would have to make do with a single bed, in a shared ward with six other beds. They would sleep together in the same bed, for the two nights before and the two nights after the old woman’s operation.

These were nights of moaning and spasms, of lengthy confessions, nocturnal mumblings issuing from the depths of slumber. It was hardly the calm and quiet needed to sustain the preliminary tests, the delicate surgery and convalescence. The old woman demands attention — coded laments, incomprehensible requests. Nobody can understand the bizarre language… Only the daughter-in-law, lying beside her, knows it is Yiddish, although she herself does not understand the meaning of the alien words.

During the day, the old woman speaks only Romanian, but the unreal night is not erased by daytime realities. The peasant women lying in the adjacent beds scrutinize her suspiciously, but are not bold enough to make inquiries from the young woman who sleeps in the same bed as the old pagan. The next night come the same ramblings, first a murmur, like water, short guttural signals, followed by an agitated, secret confession, an arcane lexicon, wailing and reproaches, lyrical, tender refrains, meant for the ears of initiates only. The daughter-in-law listens tensely. It is a sort of hypnotic release of pain, in a nomadic language, the voice of an ancient oracle in exile, wrenching from eternity a message in turn morbid and unyielding, or gentle and forgiving, enhanced by the bizarre sounds of a barbaric, sectarian phonetics, electrifying the darkness. It sounds like a mix of German or Dutch dialect, mellowed by age and by a passionate delivery, Slavic and Spanish inflections, biblical sonorities, oozing forth like some linguistic alluvial mud, carrying with it all the debris gathered along the way. The old woman is telling a tale of wanderings to her ancestors and her neighbors, and to no one in particular; her monologue is punctuated by spasmodic sounds that could be laughter or pain, one cannot tell. Is this a soliloquy about the nomads’ Odyssey, the urgency of love, the call of divinity, the fears of today? The night is broken only by moans uttered in code by the incomprehensible spasms of the unknown.

In the morning, as if nothing has happened, the patient returns to the daily, communal language. Her daughter-in-law washes her, dresses her, combs her hair, feeds her, takes her to the toilet, lowers her underwear, helps her onto the toilet seat, wipes her skin clean, brings her back into the ward, helps her onto the bed. “God will reward you for what you are doing,” says the slow, weak voice from the bed near the window.

Darkness, however, invariably delivers her to her past. As night comes, she continues her old cryptic monologue, addressed to an even older and more cryptic deity, and accidentally overheard by that audience of strangers, unfamiliar with the nocturnal code. She tells tales of the son and the father and the husband and the daughter-in-law, and of God, who gave them their faces and their peculiarities. The tales speak of the sunny, idyllic years of youth and the Hooligan Years of yesterday and tomorrow, modulated by those old lips, dry with thirst and exhaustion. Here is the language of the ghetto, moaning, murmuring, demanding, living, surviving. The nights in the hospital are laden with untranslatable memories. The normal routine of family life, the earlier visits to ophthalmologists and heart surgeons, retreat from her mind. The biological collapse she suffered revives, with increased intensity, old traumas, to add to the burden of the new — a final rebellion, a swooping flight, before the beginning of the end.

Memory finds focus in that regret which binds us to those we can no longer bring back. It is the early 1980s, an autumn afternoon, in the small Bukovinan railway station. The serenity of that moment lingers in the minds of the two travelers, even after they have boarded the train. They sit down in silence, facing each other, in opposite window seats. An ineffable melancholy has washed over them. Their first words, and especially their tone, express an acceptance of the peace which has descended on them after lunchtime that autumn afternoon. The old woman does not seem to like the question that has been put to her, but she obviously delights in the harmony of the moment, in the opportunity for closeness and the interest her traveling companion takes in her.

After a short hesitation, she begins her story. She talks about her youth, about the pace of daily events in her small market town, where normally one would have expected the stasis of the province to stifle occurrences before they could happen. On the contrary, as it turned out, events happened at hurricane speed. So-and-so became secretly engaged and eloped to Paris, scandalizing the girl’s poor churchgoing parents, to say nothing of the community. The bride was forced into flight at gunpoint — imagine that. A teenager walked a distance of over twenty kilometers weekly — imagine that — to play chess with Riemer the upholsterer. The confectioner, Nathan, has started another lawsuit against his neighbor, the sixth within a year — can you imagine? — for trespassing on the sidewalk in front of his shop. His son — also Nathan, and also a confectioner — talks interminably about Trotsky and Stalin. The grand dramas of a small market town of yesteryear…

What about the bookstore, I ask. Peasants from neighboring villages would come not only to buy textbooks and school supplies for their children but also to talk about their legal troubles or to find out who won the elections, the Liberal or the Christian-Peasant Party, for Avram the bookseller knew everything.

“Father would get up early in the morning and walk to the station, to fetch the newspaper parcels, come winter or summer, sunshine or rain. He used to tell jokes all the time, and was kind to everybody; he never lost faith. But Mother was sickly, poor thing.”