Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

“I don’t know about surprises, but you’ve been quite a nuisance occasionally. A suspect, becoming more suspicious. This is not to your advantage.”

Professor loan Petru Culianu had been assassinated on the twenty-first of May 1991, in broad daylight, in one of the buildings of the University of Chicago. A perfect murder, apparently — a single bullet, shot from an adjacent stall, straight into the professor’s head, as he sat on the plastic seat in the staff toilets of the Divinity School. The unsolved mystery of the assassination had, naturally, encouraged speculation — the relations between the young Culianu and his mentor, the noted Romanian scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, with whose help he had been brought to America; his relations with the Romanian community of Chicago, with Romania’s exiled King, his interest in parapsychology. There was, in addition, the Iron Guard connection, that movement of extreme-right-wing nationalists whose members were known as legionaria the Legionnaires. The Iron Guard, which Mircea Eliade had supported in the 1930s, still had adherents among the Romanian expatriates of Chicago. It was said that Culianu was on the verge of a major reassessment of his mentor’s political past.

The Chicago murder, it was true, coincided with the publication of my own article about Eliade’s Legionnaire past, in The New Republic , in 1991. I had been warned by the FBI to be cautious in my dealings with my compatriots, and not only with them. It was not the first time I had talked about this with my American friend. Culianu, Eliade, Mihail Sebastian — Eliade’s Jewish friend — these names had come up frequently in our conversations over the previous months.

As the date of my departure for Bucharest approached, Philip insisted that I articulate the nature of my anxieties. I kept failing. My anxieties were ambiguous. I did not know if I feared meeting my old self there, or if I feared bringing back my new image, complete with the expatriate’s laurels and the homeland’s curses.

“I can understand some of your reasons,” Philip says. “There must be others, probably. But this trip could cure you, finally, of the East European syndrome.”

“Perhaps. But I’m not ready yet for the return. I am not yet indifferent enough to my past.”

“Exactly! After this trip, you will be. Those who come back, come back healed.”

We have reached the same old dead end. But this time, he persists.

“What about seeing a few old friends? A few old places? You did say you would be willing to see some of them, despite not being quite ready for it. Last week, you said something about going to the cemetery to visit your mother’s grave.”

A long pause follows. “I saw her again,” I finally say. “This morning, half an hour ago. I was on my way here, and suddenly there she was, seated on this bench, on Amsterdam Avenue, in front of Ottomanelli’s.”

We fall silent again. When we leave Barney Greengrass’s, our conversation returns to familiar topics and resumes its jovial tone. We say goodbye, as we always do, at the corner of Seventy-ninth Street. Philip turns left, toward Columbus Avenue. I continue down Amsterdam to Seventieth Street and my non-Stalinist Stalinist apartment building.

The figure of Officer Portofino came back to me as soon as I left Barney Greengrass’s. The wide face, languid gaze, neatly combed hair, small hands, small feet, amiable smile. A short, frail man in a dark blue suit and blue tie.

He hastened to tell me, almost as soon as we met, that he had been a chemistry teacher in a high school before he switched to his current profession. His square-cut clothes reminded me of the Romanian Securitate officers, yet his manner was affable, respectful, with no trace of the socialist policeman’s slyness or rudeness. He seemed to want to protect you rather than intimidate you or recruit you with the devious manipulations of a socialist cop.

In fact, he did not offer me protection, no bulletproof vest or plainclothes man, not even the instantly blinding spray recommended to unaccompanied ladies. Instead, he gave me moderate and friendly advice, as sensible as a grandmother’s. I should try to identify faces that looked familiar in the street, constantly change my walking routes and the time I went out to buy my newspaper; I should not open suspicious-looking letters. He did not even recommend that I should “lie low,” the customary advice in such situations. He did give me his card with his home phone number for emergencies. My self-absorption and carelessness in social situations remained the same, however, in spite of the talisman with which he had endowed me. But my nervousness and anxiety increased.

The reason for my meeting with Officer Jimmy Portofino was my New Republic essay. Discussing Eliade’s so-called felix culpa , his “happy guilt”—that is, his relations in the 1930s with the fascistic Iron Guard, which has sympathizers even today in both Romania and America — the article touched on a dangerous topic. The administration of Bard College, where I was teaching, had asked for FBI protection for its own Romanian professor.

About a year after the cessation of the FBI protection, I received an anonymous letter from Canada. The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar, but graphology is not my specialty. Inside, I found a picture postcard with no message. I discarded the envelope but kept the postcard — a reproduction of Marc Chagall’s The Martyr , in the collection of the Kunsthaus in Zurich, a Judaic variant of the Crucifixion, it would seem. Instead of being nailed to a cross, the martyr’s arms and feet are bound to a stake, in the center of a burned-out market town, with the supporting players in the drama — the mother, the fiddler, the rabbi, and his disciples — in the foreground. The face of the young Jewish Christ, with beard and side curls, bespeaks the image of a pogrom — not the Holocaust, whose unspeakable horrors are fast being turned into cliché. The East European pogroms had their own terrors. I did not know how to decode the message. I kept the postcard on my desk.

Six years went by. I had not been threatened or assassinated, but I saw a continuity rather than a contradiction between the invectives—“anti-party,” “extraterritorial,” “cosmopolitan”—with which the Romanian Communist press had honored me prior to 1989 and the post-Communist epithets—“traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” “American agent.” Could this be the reason I did not deem myself capable of returning to the motherland, even for a visit?

After saying goodbye to Philip, I returned to the bench in front of Ottomanelli’s where, one hour earlier, the past had come for me. Would it have been easier to explain things to the American policeman? At least he would not have had difficulties with the Culianu story: the bullet fired at close range from the adjacent toilet stall; the gun, a small Beretta.25, held in the gloveless left hand of the killer, probably not an American. The lethal wound, “occipital area of the head, four and a half inches below the top of the head and one-half of an inch to the right of the external occipital tubical.” Professional killer, execution-style killing; location, toilet stall; time, the Eastern Orthodox feast of Saints Constantine and Helena, the name day of loan Petru Culianu’s mother. Would Jimmy Portofino remember the murdered man’s face, instantly rendered older, as if death had suddenly added twenty years to his actual age? The American police were familiar with the Chicago-based Romanian sympathizers of the notorious Iron Guard. They knew that the granddaughter of its charismatic leader, “Captain” Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, had sought refuge there at some point and that the old Alexander Ronett, Eliade’s doctor and a fervent Legionnaire, also lived there. Suspicions had focused on the Romanian Securitate and its connections with the Chicago Legionnaires. The police were equally familiar with Culianu’s biography. His dossier probably also contained the letter in which he expressed his regret that his veneration for Mircea Eliade had turned him into an uncritical disciple. Was Culianu the novice ready to commit parricide? He had admitted that the mentor “was closer to the Iron Guard than I liked to think.” His appearance by the side of the former King Michael had certainly not endeared him to the Romanian agents of the Securitate, nor did his plans for marrying a Jewish woman and converting to Judaism. In the year before his death, Culianu had condemned the “terrorist fundamentalism” of the Iron Guard, as well as vilifying the Communist secret police, Romanian Communism in general, and the nationalistic trends in Romanian culture.