Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

He recognizes the church, with its pointed roof and the metallic arrow of its belfry aimed at the sky. He sees, as through a fog, the unending highway that might lead anywhere. He doesn’t stop, he doesn’t hesitate. The yeast of all those slumbering days is finally doing its job. There is no time to waste. He lets himself be carried farther away, along the highway to Czernowitz, about which he has heard. The road unrolls before him, steadily taking him forward.

It is hard to say how long that rebellious adventure, in that autumn morning of 1940, lasted. The stranger who stopped the fugitive at some point did not seem threatening, merely polite. He was one of those faces he had left behind in that lazy, slumbering past, back home. The man looked on with amusement at the face and dress of the walker. Concerned, he asked him his name. Bad luck, that was all…

The punishment was commensurate with the scandalous misdeed. Spanking — rarely resorted to, and only on extreme occasions — did not seem sufficient. The criminal was tied to a table leg with the belt that was used to punish him. At first, his mother had demanded a punishment to fit the crime — capital punishment, if possible, for such an ungrateful son. But backing off as usual, she asked for the hooligan to be pardoned, invoking extenuating circumstances. Hooligan? In her anger and worry, she must have been searching for the appropriate word, and “hooligan” would have been apt, better than “good-for-nothing,” “brat,” “rascal.” The next moment, however, the mother, alarmed at her own severity, turned from fury to tears, and to appeals for mercy. “He’s just a child,” the hapless mother kept repeating, imploring clemency, but it was too late, tears were of no avail. The paterfamilias — that Court of Final Appeal — remained adamant in his stern decisiveness. The adored offspring must receive the appropriate punishment. The verdict was not subject to appeal: the runaway was going to stay there, tied to the table leg. Who knows, it might bring him to his senses.

Was this destiny’s rehearsal? A few months after that failed escape, the fugitive was to undergo the real Initiation, compared to which being tied to the leg of a harmless kitchen table — laden with food — was Paradise itself. The real captivity was to prove not only difficult and instructive but also a rite of Initiation.

For the next forty-odd years, captivity and freedom were to strive for supremacy through hypothetical negotiations, compromises, daily complicities and feints, occasionally allowing secret enclaves of rest. The Initiation continued, however, and the captive, tied to the granite pylon of the socialist system, kept on dreaming, like all captives, of liberation and escape. In the meantime, however, he tied himself, like a pathetic Ulysses, to the mast of his own writing desk.

If ten righteous men could be found in the wicked city, would Gomorrah be saved? The friends — more than ten — celebrating, in July 1986, my fifty-year war, were embodiments of the motherland, not of departure. Here come the artists, watch out! / The artists go from door to door, the monkeys, the mimics, / The fake one-armed, the fake one-legged, the fake kings and ministers. / Here they come, drunk with glamour and heat, / The sons of Emperor Augustus . Among them, the poet himself, with a page of verse between his teeth, my friend Mugur, Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare.

V-Day… The guests gathered on the evening of July 19, 1986, in the apartment on Calea Victoriei, were celebrating precisely this — V day. I had survived, they had survived; we were alive and together, lifting a glass of wine, sheltered by heaven and earth — poets, novelists, literary critics, the apes, the mimics, the false kings, the false one-armed men, all relatives of Emperor Augustus the Fool.

I was not interested in drawing up balance sheets at that particular time, but I was prepared to confront the invisible Chinese sage who was waiting, in a corner, to tell him not just what I looked like before I was born but what I was going to look like after the death that had already set in at the passport desk. Missing at the gathering were my neighbor Paul, the Flying Elephant, the Communist who reread Proust and Tolstoy every year, and Donna Alba, his artistic and ethereal wife. Also missing were the dead, the exiled, and the simply forgotten friends. However, those who were actually present could easily constitute the appropriate quorum for the symposium at hand. An intruder such as myself had no right to forget the delights and joys of Gomorrah, the intensity of the present moment, life as transient moment.

I had been born a Romanian citizen, of parents and grandparents who had been Romanian nationals themselves. The books from before my birth told of Hooligan Years. The horror could not, apparently, annul the charm. They seemed inseparable emblems of the times.

Before the Initiation I knew nothing of these things, happy as I was in a happy, sunlit world. Only at the age of five did I myself become a public enemy, the impure product of an impure placenta. It was then, in October 1941, that the Initiation began. At the final count, after four years, the numbers of the fallen came to about half of those who had been delivered to the great void. I was among the lucky who survived, and in July 1945, I was safely back in Paradise, overwhelmed by the everyday miracles of a fairy-tale normality — narrow streets dripping with green foliage and festooned with flowers, ample, kindhearted aunts, who reintroduced me to the delicious taste of milk and pies. The name of this Eden was Fălticeni, the place where the bus of destiny had left from nine years before.

It was a languid, deserted afternoon, in a shaded room. Alone in the universe, I was listening to a voice that at the same time was and was not my own. I was immersed in a book with thick green covers, a book of folktales that I had received as a gift a few days earlier, on the nineteenth of July.

It was then, probably, that it began, the disease and the therapy of words. I had already experienced the need for something else , an urgent, all-consuming need, when, at the age of four, I had made my first attempt at escape into nowhere. Now literature opened a dialogue with invisible friends, rescuing me from the disfiguring grip of authority. The system was doing everything in its power to liberate us from the chains of hope, but we were still imperfect and prone to hope. Only those who took a romantic and fatalistic view of art and writing as being ill-fated activities could not be scandalized by the threats against writing under the dictatorship. What was indubitably scandalous, however, was the fact that all those deprivations and dangers had become common currency, as though all the citizens had to atone for some obscure guilt. In the society of institutionalized lies the individual self could survive only in those enclaves that protected privacy, however imperfectly.

The evening of July 19, 1986, was one such enclave, perhaps our final one. But despair had already insinuated itself into each of us who was present that night. Our small isolation cell was no longer the ivory tower of olden times.

In April 1945, the charm of places that had been reborn with my own rebirth seemed not only irresistible but also inexhaustible. Horror had receded into the past. I had banished it, not without irritation, shrugging it off as the “disease of the ghetto.” External adversity seemed to disappear, but the internal one, of which Sebastian had been so proud, remained as its residue. The decades that followed were filled with daily attempts to negotiate the strange compatibility between horror and charm, the inexhaustible combustion of confusion. By 1986, what should have been clear forty years earlier, when I had taken shelter between the green covers of the book of folktales, finally became obvious. Communist horror under the tyrant clown not only replaced the previous horror but coopted it.