Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The final item on the agenda is meting out punishment to miscreants, enemies of the people, and traitors to the revolution. These hapless creatures are the son of a nouveau riche farmer, the son of a butcher, the son of a former Liberal Party lawyer. “These are dangerous times for the country, which demand closing ranks around the Party, its Central Committee, and its Secretary-General,” Comrade Activist intones. “We must strengthen our vigilance and eliminate dubious elements.” His voice rises: “We cannot go below three! Three!”

The first defendant remains silent, while the audience waits. The farmer’s son cannot summon the courage to tell them that his father was not exactly a kulak, a peasant landowner who employed hired labor, he had simply refused to join the collective farm. The eighth-grader, new to the town, is almost ready to faint with emotion and remains foolishly tongue-tied. The vote is taken. It is unanimous: expulsion.

Next in the dock is Fatty Hetzel, son of a butcher and cattle trader. A mediocre student, the assembly is informed, the only things he is good at are fighting and cows, just like his father. Worse, the father has applied to emigrate to Israel! The son of Zionist exploiter Isidor Hetzel mutters something, but fails to find the right words. The verdict, again unanimous, is expulsion. Young Herman Hetzel, now no longer Comrade Hetzel, advances toward the red table of the Red committee and hands back his red Party card.

Next up is Dinu Moga, from the top class, the lawyer’s son. The expulsion verdict comes easy. Tall, impassive, handsome, he hands in his red card to the Red secretary and walks with composure to the exit, looking as though he had no connection whatsoever with either the kulak, the butcher, or the tribunal.

This was an ordinary procedure, like so many others of the times, and yet this occasion was somehow different. Truth to tell, the Secretary of the Union of Working Youth was not at all happy with his revolutionary deed. Embarrassment was eating away at him. I was no longer a boy of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, no longer proud of my privileged function. Lost in the glamour of the show’s magic, that solemn, glacial farce, I was busily trying to cover up my doubts and embarrassment by stammering the routine inquisitorial slogans. An up-and-coming actor, I was imitating other, more senior actors, performing on bigger stages, to grander scripts, and unfurling, over all those red stages, huge red flags and banners, with the gold-and-red hammer and sickle and the gold-and-red five-pointed star. Could revolutionary consciousness separate itself from moral consciousness? Was my initial elan still buzzing under the apathetic, aping gesturing? What did it all add up to, the Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Qestions of Leninism , that verse by Mayakovsky, that phrase of Marx’s, Danton’s laughter?

At the close of that memorable meeting, did the Secretary-orator distance himself from the dirty revolutionary deed? I was sixteen. The occasion had not yet revealed to me the full horror of what was going on, but I sensed that something had gone wrong under the weakened surface.

Was I so privileged that in such a short time and at such a tender age I had undergone experiences others extended well into old age? I had taken part in meetings, expulsions, informing, and assorted rituals, which, I must admit, had an enormous effect on the ego, to the point where it believed itself capable of ruling the world. Appointments to positions, the techniques of secrecy, the vanity of honors — others, to be sure, had experienced these on a much grander scale, reaching heights of glory and depths of tragedy beyond my range. My moment in the spotlight, in that auditorium, over which I presided from the red-covered table, was something that all players of that utopian-turned-inquisitorial game knew only too well. It is the moment when you are forced to choose, from all the selves who inhabit and claim you, not only the one required by the moment’s ultimatum, but also the one who genuinely represents you. It is not only during childhood, puberty, and the teenage years that we experience our potential multiplicity. I was not the head of a family, I did not have a profession, I did not have to face the real risks of a political renegade. However, my dilemmas were hardly frivolous, to say nothing of the fact that for adolescents there are no frivolous dilemmas.

Fortunately, there are actors who lack the gift for power, even when they are attracted to Utopian constructs and theatrical games. On that autumn afternoon of 1952, I fell back, without anyone noticing it, to the humble level of the anonymous crowd. It was a major turning point, a moment when the wound has turned gangrenous and something must be done. Was it the face of that young man, Dinu Moga, as he left the school auditorium in silence, stripped of the precious red card? I did not reveal my personal feelings in front of that audience, transfixed as it was with fear and curiosity, nor would I ever tell anyone. Subsequently, I took pains to learn the destiny of the young man expelled that afternoon. The bright and capable Dinu Moga was admitted, the following year, to the Polytechnic Institute in Iasi, where he did not do so well. A few years later, he came back to Suceava, where I was to find him in 1959, when I returned home as a newly graduated engineer. It was only then that we became friends. With his books, records, and strings of casual affairs, the young man was building an enclave for himself in which he could agreeably spend the passing years — snug in his bachelor’s apartment, untouched by Party or public trivialities, discreet in his liaisons, laconically polite, a comforting symbol of failure, invariable and permanent, like a monument.

“Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, fellow fighter and heir of Comrade Lenin, great leader of the Soviet people, died on the fifth of March 1953 at…” A medical verdict without appeal. The supreme leader of peoples, the great ideologue, strategist, and army commander, promoter of the sciences, bastion of the peace, revered father of children throughout the world, the one deemed immortal, was, after all, mortal like the rest of us. His office in the Kremlin, where the lights were never turned off, was now in darkness.

The column of students and teachers was advancing toward the city’s central square. I followed along, outside the marching ranks. Large loudspeakers fitted on trees and power poles were broadcasting the funeral live from Red Square in Moscow. The sonorities of funeral dirges filled the air. Party leaders, as well as delegates of all the organizations— youth groups, trade unions, women’s leagues, sports associations, the disabled, stamp collectors, hunters — all marched, wearing red armbands with a black stripe in the middle. I was wearing one, too, on my left arm, at the very place where my ancestors would wind one of the two phylacteries, the very thing that might have reconnected me to the Chosen People.

The square was packed, but I had a reserved place, between the girls’ lycée and the mechanics’ school. I saw the Secretary of the Union of Working Youth of the girls’ school sobbing helplessly into the arms of two of her schoolmates. Other schoolgirls were crying, too, and even a few of the teachers. The boys were manfully controlling their sorrow.

The Great Leader’s death had sent shock waves into the African jungle and the Mediterranean, and as far as the Chinese Wall and the Wild West. The whole earth was in mourning. The Romanian People’s Republic was also holding its breath. Bukovina, too, was grieved. Suceava was draped in black banners, including the boys’ lycée.

At the start of the new academic year, I was seeking to be replaced as Secretary of the Union of Working Youth. I had begged off serving an other term because I needed time to prepare for the university entrance exams. I had already nominated my successor and had been assiduously training the peasant’s son from the eighth grade for his important new mission. He was now standing on my right, eyeing me with the shyness and respect due to a veteran militant about to retire.