Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Uncle Aron’s and Aunt Rachel’s indifference did not reassure me. On the contrary, I sensed that their seeming indifference masked a hidden fear. They seemed to be concealing something they could not entrust to the frightened child who had just rushed in, breathless, having witnessed a Communist demonstration. I told Uncle Aron that I wanted to return to Suceava. He gave me a long look and, to my amazement, agreed. “Fine, you can go back home,” he said. “I want to go immediately,” I said. Husband and wife exchanged glances, then looked with concern at their distressed nephew. A brief silence followed, while they were deciding how to deal with these hysterics. “Fine, Bernard will harness the horse,” my uncle said calmly. Aunt Rachel was silent, but her hands twisted nervously. Their son Bernard, who was deaf, was sent for. He was given to understand, through expressive mouthings and gestures, that he was to harness the sleigh horse. “In half an hour,” said Aron and Rachel, pointing to the clock on the wall, “everything must be ready.” Bernard was as deaf as a radish, but he understood the instructions.

Only then did the unexpected guest take off his overcoat and sit down to eat as he was invited to do. He savored the meatballs, the fresh salad and bread. When he was done, Bernard, smiling, pointed to the clock. Hurriedly, he put on his overcoat again, pulled the cap well over his ears, and put on his gloves. He was ready to go. Uncle Aron embraced him, Aunt Rachel kissed him, Bernard took his hand, the sleigh was waiting in the courtyard. They swathed him in blankets, furs, and straw, and off he went on his Arctic expedition.

They rode through hissing wind, swirling snow, furious gusts. The road was a glistening white, the sky was white, the horse white, an end less expanse of white desert through which the sleigh, driven by the mighty White Knight, glided effortlessly, to the sound of fairy-tale bells jingling on the horse’s strong, slender neck. It was freezing cold, the many blankets were soft, the sheepskin enormous, all covered by a heap of straw. Still, despite his thick woolen socks and solid boots, the passenger’s feet were turning to icicles. The sleigh driver, well insulated by his stocky physique, drove on, unheeding, deaf to the howling around him. The white road seemed without end. The biting cold, the swirling snow, the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves, their vapory snorts, the slithering of the sleigh’s runners, the insanely jingling bells, the desperate wailing of the wind — an endless terror.

Home at last, the child of the snows was carefully unwrapped from his swaddling clothes and immediately set down by the hot stove. He was given a cup of hot tea sweetened with honey. He was babbling away, muttering nonsense; his mother and father couldn’t understand what it was he wanted. “Leaving, leave, leave, leaving,” he kept saying, with strength for only one syllable at a time. “Im-me-di-ate-ly, im-me-di-ate-ly,” was all they could make out from his mewing sounds. “Leaving? You’ve only just got here,” came Father’s voice through the distance. “Tomorrow. Morning. We’re leaving,” the little Eskimo repeated. “Who’s leaving? Where to?” Mother kept asking in complete bewilderment. “Tomorrow. Immediately. Tomorrow morning.” There were no protests, no laughter. “Fine, we’ll see about it tomorrow. For the time being, drink your tea. You’re frozen, drink your tea.”

“No, no,” said the small voice again. “It’s over, over.” He kept staring into his cup. “You must promise me.” They did not contradict him, nor did they agree. “Promise! Now, now, you must promise,” he insisted, his wool-clad feet knocking furiously, rhythmically, against the wooden table leg. Someone had taken off my frozen boots and I sat there in my thick woolen socks, kicking angrily against the leg of the table where my refilled teacup had been placed. “Drink, just drink your tea for now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” I had heard it all before — the cautious, fearful message of the Old World, the archaic code, the compromises, the stagnant stasis of terrors. These things exasperated me, they suffocated me, as they always had. “All right, we promise, word of honor. Now drink your tea while it’s hot,” I heard their gentle, hypocritical voices, the delaying counsel of the ghetto, from which I longed to escape.

Almost forty years had passed since that winter of 1947, when my desire to leave had exploded into hysterics. In the meantime, I had learned to sing a different song. The hesitations, the refusal to swap the exile at home for a real, inevitable exile, had become my ongoing lot.

It was now the summer of 1948, and I found myself looking forward to attending the State Primary School No. I, a white one-story building located in the midst of the town park. Education reform had done away with private schools, and my new school meant new friends, new teachers, and perhaps a new me, immersed in geometry theorems, the laws of physics, and the history of the Middle Ages. Later in the term, the school principal solemnly informed me that I was eligible to join the Pioneers, an organization intended for only the best pupils between nine and fourteen years of age. My scholastic achievements entitled me to become the “commander” of our school’s Pioneers troop, and I expressed my feelings in a poetic report in the local newspaper, Lupta Poporului (The People’s Combat) . On Sunday, May 29, 1949, a Party activist, a former railway worker, tied the sacred red scarf around my neck and ceremonially handed me the red flag with gold lettering. The Union of Working Youth was to be our older-brother organization, and the Party, our parent. The activist, speaking to the audience gathered in the park, spelled out the mission entrusted to the youngest soldiers of the Party. “In the cause of Lenin and Stalin, onward!” he concluded. The infants’ infantry responded with one voice: “Forever onward!”

Thus at age thirteen — the traditional Jewish coming-of-age — I became a partner in the task of righting the world’s wrongs. The occasion was celebrated with cakes and sweets at Wagner’s Confectionery. In 1949, in its narrow basement, the establishment still offered pastries and ices in the imperial tradition, of the kind that were available only in decadent, capitalist Vienna. This was the kind of “bourgeois” celebration that I would enjoy many times in my revolutionary career as a fervent partisan of the revolution.

After meeting Comrade Victor Varasciuc, Maria’s husband and the leader of the local Communist organization, my father’s situation also changed in a decisive way. The former accountant’s cautious moderation had kept him away from politics. After the war, he avoided the Communists, the Liberals, and the Zionists alike. But this time, the suggestion for Mr. Marcu Manea to join the Party came from a most authoritative source. Mr. Manea was a man whose honesty and decency were vouched for by Comrade Varasciuc’s own wife. Mr. Manea, it was suggested, should take his rightful place among those engaged in building a society of equality and justice, with no exploitation or discrimination. After all, wasn’t it capitalist exploitation under which the employee of the sugar factory in Içcani had toiled? And should Mr. Manea not bear in mind the racial discrimination he had suffered as a deportee in the camps of Transnistria? Maria, Comrade Victor’s wife, had been like one of the family. More enterprising than our own relatives, she had tried during the war to help us, or even save us from the camp where we had been sent by Marshal Antonescu, Hitler’s ally. The Communists had executed the Marshal and were now gradually assuming power with the support of the Red Army, which had freed us from the camps, saving our lives.