Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

“We have to stay here, within our language, until the very end, whatever may happen,” Joanna repeated. A short silence followed, quite different from those silences I normally used to signal my confusion.

“But to write, we must be alive in the first place,” I heard myself saying. “Cemeteries are full of writers who no longer write. They stayed here, in their graves and don’t write anymore. This is my latest discovery,” I added, cheered by my belated banalities.

My young colleague stared at me and stopped smiling. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve only been back one day. I’m happy to be back home, but I can feel death all around me.”

Indeed, the terms of the options had changed. Poverty and danger had been the staple diet, delivered to us in abundance by glorious socialism. However, the last years of that hysterical dictatorship had had a catastrophic impact on our capacity to cope. Departure did not mean only dying a little, as we say when trying to mythicize lovers’ separations. Departure could also mean suicide, the ultimate voyage. On the other hand, it promised at least a partial, temporary salvation, a fire escape, an emergency exit, a quick solution. Uncertain as to whether the roof of your house will hold, you get out as fast as you can to escape the blaze. The only thing you can do is save yourself from death, not a metaphoric death but a real, imminent, irremediable death. The urgency had its own challenges and confusions. Was it the survival instinct? My contemplated departure was more bewildering. I simply did not know where I wanted to be.

In the prehistory of my biography, in another life and another world, the unborn that I had been had previously attempted the experiment. The prehistoric time was that time before the Initiation of Transnistria — a world without contours or motion, happiness without history, the infinite peace of the unremembered unconscious of the time before I was five years old. There was one moment, however, that helped in the mythmaking — the Escape.

The period photographs help to reconstruct the details. After returning from the labor camp, we retrieved family photographs from relatives to whom the boy’s parents, over the years, had been sending regular visual reports marking the progress of their blessed progeny.

“With much love to my cousins,” my mother had written, signing her son’s name on a photograph showing a young woman, with dark hair, in a flowery dress and white strapped shoes. Standing next to a stroller, in front of a wall covered in advertisements, she is holding a blond, chubby infant. The poster on the left says: “Read about it today, May 12, in Curentul . The tenth of May celebrated at home and abroad. Loyalty and homage.” This fixes the day of the snapshot, two days after May 10, King’s Day, the anniversary of the Hohenzollern ascent to the throne of Romania. The year could well be 1937, when the baby was less than one year old. The woman’s body partly covers the second poster. One can see only the paper’s name, Timpul , and the text below: “Be on the lookout for your trusted daily paper, Timpul . Director: Grigore Gafencu.” To the right, the front page of Dimineafa , on which only one headline is visible: THE NEW YORK DISASTER.

“A photo taken on the occasion of my conscription,” wrote the soldier-father on the back of another snapshot showing the little two-year-old, which he kept in the pocket of his military tunic. The little cherub, with a small nose, chubby cheeks, and dressed in white, is looking straight at the photographer, rather than at liberty’s distant horizon. Even in the later photograph, in which he no longer wears a ribbon in his hair and has his arm around the shoulders of the orphan cousin-turned sister, his rebellious intentions are masked under the false, familiar smile.

When I was four years old I ran away from home. After the punishment that followed, my face remained the same, inscrutable, with no signs of trauma, visibly plumper perhaps, after resuming the normal routine and comfortably resettled in respectability. In this photograph, a studio portrait taken not long after the escape, the boy is wearing a heavy winter coat with large buttons and a brown fur collar. His hair is long, like a boyar’s, an Oriental mane, topped by a huge cone-shaped hat. His hands are folded behind his back, his stomach thrust forward in an arrogant pose. His feet are turned outward. Puffy breeches complete his costume, along with tumbled-down socks and solid boots. He has a double chin, a large mouth, and small teeth ruined by too much chocolate, the result of furious gorging after his recapture.

The four-year-old boy, hungry for freedom, does not seem to belong to quite the same world as the prematurely aged upstart of only six months later. The photographer, Sisi Bartfeld, to whose studio he was coaxed every few months to have his picture taken, treated him like a star in order to win the attention of his chaperone. He was unaware — stupid as he was — that Maria would never have betrayed her beloved charge for anything in the world. The photograph was stamped on the back: Film-Photo, Lumière, Josef Bartfeld, Iţcani, Suceava, October 1940 , one year before the hour of destiny, the deportation to Transnistria — the Initiation.

The images retrieved after our return from the camp are again to be lost, over forty years later. The Initiation does not end at nine, or at nineteen, or even at forty-nine. You escape from the burning house without loading your pockets with the decades-old juvenile portraits by the photographer Sisi Bartfeld. The picture of the runaway, in the autumn of 1940, appears to be full of promise, even after four decades. His eyes are vivid and intense, his mouth contorted halfway between smile and grimace, as if the captive can no longer put up with the allurements of his jailers, who force-feed him every morning the poison of soft-boiled eggs and Kaffee mit Milch . There were other things he could not stomach — the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by the grown-ups, their daily grind of worries, their hypocritical chattering, their marionettes’ gestures. Soon, the pampered, beloved son will run away without looking back. He will finally escape into the big, wide world, and take his destiny into his own hands.

The kingdom of emptiness is swallowing him up, second by second. He is counting, carefully, the blinks of the desert’s eyelids, the morbid cadence of routine — three, six, nine, ten, annihilation, torpor, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, the void is murmuring, nothing and nobody, death is slowly embracing the present moment, the age, the old man he has become. In a flash, the runaway shakes himself out of his hypnotic trance. Reborn, he finds himself out-of-doors, turns left, turns right, and then he is on the highway to freedom, bound for nowhere.

He passes the park and the railway station before stopping. He hadn’t hesitated, he just stopped, time to tighten the belt of his puffy breeches, to check his boot laces, to fasten the flaps of his military-style cap under his chin and push his hands deep into his soft, woolen gloves. He knows the way, past the German church where the road stretches on and on. He is on his way, this is it, his Big Chance.

The photograph shows the child’s girl-like face, with that pathos of the moment. The sudden disappearance of the renegade, at four years of age, meant estrangement, exile, the violence of rupture. In a trance, he had slipped away from the house, then into the courtyard, then into the street. Was he actually leaving the placenta, or was he just roaming through it, among the polyps and membranes that were obediently parting to let him pass? Was it merely a trancelike extension of the same old boredom, a slide downward into the belly of a huge anesthetized hippopotamus?