Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

He turned away in embarrassment, as he had done so many times before. He went to the window and cast his eyes far beyond the street. He could hear her slow movements, the rustle of the dressing gown. She slowly pulled her nightgown over her sad, humble body, one sleeve, then the other. Then silence… she must be fastening her dressing gown. Then she bent down to put on her slippers, first the left, then the right. The sun was setting in the window’s narrow frame. The echoes of her surprising confession on the train lingered in the air. However, the day’s harmony had not been broken. She took out her knitting; he went out into town, but quickly returned. He found her still knitting away, calmly, even happily. Our short reconciliation with the world still prevailed. Where had the son gone, to the bookstore? She knew his habits. Was he hungry? She had already taken the food out of the refrigerator and put it on a plate, to let it thaw. She sat at the table, facing him; he watched her, in silence. He had brought with him another surprise, apart from the question he had asked her on the train, in that improbably empty carriage.

He had discovered a few years earlier, in the archives of the Jewish community in Bucharest, documents about Burdujeni, the market town where his great-grandparents, grandparents, uncle, and aunt had lived, where the old woman now sitting opposite him had spent her youth, had got married, not once to his father, but twice, as she had now disclosed; the place where she had been divorced, remarried, and borne the son with whom she was now sharing this autumn idyll. He was about to take from his pocket the sheets of paper that, he was certain, she would find amusing. But that sensational confession, made in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as if the news were some commonplace comment, had somehow stopped him in his tracks. Everything else paled compared to that moment of shock that revealed to him how easily the long-time secret had been kept and how casually it was revealed. Could the chronicle of the past, enclosed in those typewritten pages, surpass the secret he had just learned that afternoon?

“Are you interested, shall I read it to you?” he should have asked. Yes, most certainly, how could she not be interested? After all, she must have known all about the people mentioned in the documents, she must know about all the places and dates, the people and their families, professions, ages, appearances, circumstances. But he said nothing. The papers remained in his pocket.

At that time, in the early 1980s, I was not yet used to irreversible loss. Wasteful of moments, I was also skeptical about the possibility of storing them in archives. Therefore, I had no tape recorder, I did not transcribe events, I did not preserve the voice and the words of the woman who was still of this world, alive, there in front of me.

On May 6, 1986, Ruti returned to Jerusalem. Two days later, my parents went back to Suceava, in Bukovina, after my mother’s operation, which was unlikely to prove successful.

The days that ensued were days that Leopold Bloom would probably have sauntered through with greater detachment than myself. But if Dublin was less than an ideal place for living one’s true life, as the exiled James Joyce seemed to be saying, Bucharest, in the spring of 1986, had reached levels of degradation for which even sarcasm was no longer sufficient. Not even the chimeras could survive in the underground labyrinth of Byzantine socialism. Everything seemed about to fall into decrepitude and die, including the chimeras. Facing the inevitable, a writer could either become a character in fiction or disappear altogether.

I was still supposed to be a writer. According to the rumors circulating at that time among the German-speaking literati of Bucharest, I had been awarded some kind of grant in West Germany. However, the letter of invitation to Berlin never materialized. Was all this a figment of the Bucharest intellectuals’ gossip? What had happened to the proverbial punctuality of the German authorities, even though, in this case, they were only cultural authorities? Surely they would not have neglected to inform me of the award, had it been true. Thus, skepticism and hope played out their counterpoint for months on end. Finally, I decided to take action.

On June 16, the day when James Joyce sent his hero Leopold Bloom, the new Ulysses, roaming through Dublin, I arrived at the police station to fill out an application for a passport, for a one-month trip to the decadent West. I left the mystique of numbers and names for destiny to decipher.

I had in my pocket the credo I had learned by heart a long time before: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” I was finally leaving, I refused to become a mere fictional character in the place where I had hoped to be counted as a writer, and I had accepted the fact that I was not going to die in the place where I had been born. And yet, in exile, what else was I about to become but a character in fiction — a Ulysses without country and language? However, there were no other alternatives, I had run out of excuses for delay.

I had read and reread the Irishman’s text dozens of times, I knew it by heart, but on this particular day it was important to write it down and carry it in my pocket, like some kind of identity card. “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,” I repeated silently, as I slowly moved up the appropriate line, “whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.” The credo deserved repeating: “… as freely as I can and as wholly as I can.” Next followed the words that legitimated that anniversary day for me and the way I had chosen to celebrate it: “… using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use.” Yes, “… using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.” The word “exile” had revealed its true meaning on that anniversary day — Bloomsday.

The hesitation to leave Romania was mostly due to the question of how much of me was going to die with departure. I was wondering if exile was the equivalent of suicide for a writer, yet I had in fact no doubt about that. But what about the death lurking here at home? The rapid deterioration of living conditions and the increasing dangers rendered irrelevant any doubts about a rebirth in my mature years in another language and another country. Still, I was gripped by such uncertainties even after the celebration of Bloomsday at the passport section of the police department.

This was probably what was going on in my mind as I walked along the street, unaware of the passersby. Raising my eyes, I looked straight into the serene face of Joanna, a poet friend, just back from a trip to Paris. She promptly started to tell me about the frivolousness of the French, about the decline of French literature. Most of the East European writers, myself included, were experiencing provincial frustration and were also subject to a kind of megalomania. Our Western colleagues, sheltered from socialist suffering and dilemmas, were incapable — so we chose to believe — of producing work that was in any way comparable to our grand, complicated, tragic, obscure writings, which had remained faithful to what we supposed was genuine literature.

“There’s nothing we can do, we have to stay here,” said Joanna. “We are writers, we have no alternative.” I had repeated the same words to myself many times before.

“Is there really no alternative?” I asked, smiling. The young, tall, blond poet, with her good Scandinavian looks, was smiling, too. It was hard to believe that we were engaged in such a grave dialogue.