Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

What about the troubles and the suffering? That question remains unanswered. “Did you have any troubles at the time?” I ask softly. “Ariel mentioned some scandal, some troubles.”

“What sort of troubles — when did he tell you that? In Paris, in 1979?”

Instantly we have turned into protector and protected. The question has unwittingly raised the irritation the son has always felt at the mother’s wish to protect him. She went on protecting him even when it became suffocating. But now the situation is reversed and he is protecting her. This doesn’t seem to bother her; actually she seems touched, even flattered. In his insistence she sensed not only curiosity but also tenderness, in harmony with the serenity of the afternoon, which affects them both. She is being pulled back to the past and is being asked questions that should have been left far behind, but this time she doesn’t seem to mind.

“Yes, there were troubles then about the divorce.”

“Which divorce, whose divorce?” is the unuttered question. The story has barely begun, it needs room to breathe.

“We lost a house, with that divorce, the house given to me as a dowry. My brother, as a male, had priority, but even though I was the youngest, and also a female, I was the favorite.”

I am no longer looking out the window, but now give my full attention to the storyteller.

“Had you been married before?”

“Yes, to a swindler. He lost everything gambling. He’d disappear for long periods of time. It was a disaster, it lasted less than a year.”

“And you never said anything about this?”

She does not seem troubled by the son’s naïve bewilderment, nor is she in a hurry to answer.

No one in the family had ever mentioned the episode, not the slightest allusion. The silence had been tightly maintained all these years and was only now being broken, in the train carriage where mother and son sat once more in silence. Not even Ariel, her cousin, had mentioned the divorce, that day in Paris, on the only occasion we met. He had just smiled, suggesting something questionable in his cousin’s past, but had never mentioned another marriage. Ariel had quickly switched to the core topic of our meeting — the departure . “How,” he asked, “can you live in that cul-de-sac? How can you put up with the petty local pleasures, the delicate diminutives, the charm and the feces?”

I used to bristle at such arrogant aggression; I had been its target so many times, both in Romania and abroad, but in the late 1970s, when the disaster of dictatorship had run its course, I had no counter-arguments left. My mother, Ariel’s cousin, was prey to the same obsession, the departure , but she had learned not to press me with questions. She knew why I could not leave and had stopped asking. Ariel himself now learned why I chose to stay in the cul-de-sac he had left a long time before — I was a writer, and I had to write in my own language. After all, he too had flirted with the idea of writing in his youth and had remained an avid reader, as testified by the shelves laden with books and the chairs covered with books, and the tables and the couches and the floors all invisible under the piles of books.

“What was that man’s name,” Ariel asked, “the writer who created such a furor in the 1930s? Inner and outer adversities, that’s what he used to talk about, didn’t he?” He was lost in thought, he knew no cure for the madness of writing, but turned to me after a few seconds, staring at me with wide, opaque eyes, like a blind man’s, and then grabbed me by the left arm with his powerful grip. “There’s no cure for that, for writing. Not even women; even less, money; and even less, freedom or democracy,” he said, laughing.

However, he did know a cure. He kept my arm firmly in his clutch and transfixed me with the stare of his large, dead eyes, ready to impart his revelation. “Only a belief in God can cure the writer’s disease, or at least faith.”

“Maybe. But I…”

“I know, I know, I really didn’t mean it. You are not a believer, and you don’t see the attraction of the Land of Canaan, where I shall soon retire to live out my last days. Of course, you could not be a taxi driver or an ice-cream vendor, or an accountant, like that decent man, your father, I can see that. But then again, why not a yeshiva in Jerusalem, where you can engage in passionate study.”

I managed to free myself from his clutches, and stared, wide-eyed, at the blind man, who looked back at me with his unseeing eyes.

“A yeshiva? What sort of yeshiva? At my age, and with my lack of faith?”

So here I was, engaged in dialogue. Was this a sign that the absurd idea could after all compete with the absurd chimera that kept me chained among those Danubian diminutives? The rebellious Ariel had no hair left, or eyes, but the devil’s fire was still raging in his goblin-infested mind.

“A special yeshiva, a theological seminary for intellectuals who have never had an opportunity to study such topics but who need to ask questions about religion, even though they may have doubts. I can fix it for you. I’ve got good Zionist connections. Believe me, this is the only solution. This is a true inspiration, and I haven’t had one in a long time. But inspiration comes when you need it most.”

It would have been useless telling my mother about all this, it would only have fed her meaningless hopes and illusions. After my return to Bucharest, the inspired Ariel would ring me up at the oddest times of night, not only to repeat his yeshiva proposal, but also to pour scorn on the country he had left behind. “Diminutives, sweet terms of endearment, are these the things that keep you all there?” he whispered in his Frenchified tones, while the Securitate agents on duty were assiduously eavesdropping. “I’m warning you of the horrors to come, as I warned your mother half a century ago. Such endearments, even about your stammering President. I’ve heard that the people call him Puiu, baby chick, can you believe it, Puiu! So, Puiu goes abroad and gets hugs from the planet’s crowned apes and presidents and general secretaries and zoo directors …”

Surely this was meant for the Securitate eavesdroppers, to make life difficult for me, and have me arrested perhaps, or at least force me to leave the cul-de-sac and go, by remote control, straight to the theological seminary in that capital of capitals, where he was about to settle his final accounts. Not once did he ask about his cousin, my mother. As for the matter of that bizarre divorce, destiny was reserving that for the train trip of several years later, in that resplendent Romanian autumn that was now embracing mother and son with the softness of a diminutive term of endearment.

Ariel had simply smiled as he made insinuations about his cousin’s tempestuous youth, he never mentioned another marriage. The reason for the divorce may not even have been the one the old woman was disclosing now. It was one of those non-issues, a topic on which everybody had always observed total silence. One knows next to nothing about the people one has lived with for a whole lifetime.

The mother was now over seventy-five years old, the son turned fortyfive. They were traveling to Bacãu — some two hours away from Suceava— to see an ophthalmologist. Her eyesight had deteriorated markedly, in phase with the general weakening in the last few years of her whole body, assaulted by disease and pain. The son had come all the way from Bucharest to accompany her to the doctor. They had no luggage, only a small case containing their night things and some frozen provisions; the hotel room had been booked in advance. He carefully helped her off the train. They walked slowly away from the station, the old woman supporting herself on her son’s arm. The hotel was nearby; the room, on the third floor, was clean. She then took the food out of the bag and placed it in the small refrigerator. She took out her slippers and nightgown and housecoat from the bag as well. She took off her dress and stood there, barefoot, in her camisole. It was a humbling moment of awkward complicity: the frail body, sagging, old, with disproportionately big hands and feet — her usual lack of modesty. Long-forgotten memories were instantly unlocked, the doubts and confusion of puberty, the guilty moments — the prenatal home, the placenta. The woman would have offered herself, any part of her body, anytime, as a sacrifice, if it would be for her son’s good.