Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

In Red Square, the funeral cortège wound its sorrowful way. The Romanian delegation was led by Comrade Gheorghiu Dej, alongside Comrade Maurice Thorez and Comrade Palmiro Togliati and Comrade Dolores Ibarruri and Comrade Ho Chi Minh and Comrade Frédéric Joliot-Curie and so many other comrades from around the world, all known to us by name and face. The absence of television rendered the radio broadcast even more powerful. The funeral march, the graveside speeches, the sense of loss that had overwhelmed the world, the country, Bukovina, the city, the school, and my own tenth-grade class, all were evidence of the huge uncertainty that now surrounded us. What next, we thought, what was going to happen in a few hours, tomorrow morning, next week? The red-and-black armbands felt alien to me. I was no longer the same person I had been. The Dinu Moga episode had signaled the beginning of my break.

In July 1945, Fălticeni held its annual fair. That month, too, my formal education began, home schooling in the Riemers’ living room. There were books, notebooks, little classmates parroting declensions. There was a book with hard green covers, a book of miracles, the most amazing of which were the words themselves. No one had ever told me stories when I was a small child, and nobody now was patient enough to do so. I had gradually become familiar with the only story I knew — the one I was actually living.

The green book, however, was an object of instant fascination. It contained a topsy-turvy world, colorful, irresistible. Its picturesque language was flavored with wonderful spices and herbs and rare lexical condiments. A tale of traps, pranks, and delusions, it revealed to me the world as miracle, at once narcotic and illuminating. Other books soon followed, books about adventure, love, and travel. The words, the sentences, page after page, and book after book were clearing the ground and uncovering the unreal reality of the self. Books became my world, the vehicle through which the ego was discovering and inventing itself. The inner discourse was evolving slowly, imperceptibly.

In my first year of high school, I attempted to win the heart of my homonymous schoolmate, Bronya Normann, with an amorous speech that amazed not only the object of my juvenile love but also the schoolmates invited for the occasion. The power of words, their curious radiating force, expanded into caricature. On and on I kept reading: Engels’s: Anti-Duhring , Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter , Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , Goncharov’s Oblomov , the tales of Maupassant. The churnings were searching for a language of their own.

Then there was the language of the newspapers. The speeches of Comrade Dej, Comrade Suslov, Comrade Thorez, and Comrade Mao jostled alongside the more lyrical words of the poets Mayakovsky, Aragon, and Neruda. Was the word wedded to the Revolution? The gap between the language of the mind and the public language was growing. The language of the newspapers, the speeches, the Party communiqués, and socialist legislation operated on the basis of regimental simplification. The “struggle” demanded simplicity, determination, a restricted language, devoid of surprises. The single Party imposed a single language, official, canonic, without nuance, promoting an impersonal, remote style lacking warmth or wit.

Simple and clear though it was, the Party’s language remained encoded. Reading between the lines became the normal practice. The weight of adjectives, the violence of verbs, the length of the argument gave the measure of how serious the situation really was and how stringent the remedy was going to be. The terse communiqués about our leader’s meetings with East or West European politicians, or with the Soviet ambassador to Bucharest, allowed lovers of crossword puzzles to scrutinize the cabalistic meanings of the terms and determine their distinctions— “cordial,” “comradely,” or “warm friendship”; “mutual esteem and agreement” or “full agreement and cooperation.” These were the Aesopian formulas that expressed the tension within alliances and marked the opening or the closing of domestic and foreign political strategies. The regimentation of the language mirrored the regimentation of the social fabric. It was a language of encoded terminology, charades, a restricted, monotonous language that only served to undermine people’s confidence in words, encouraging their suspicion of words. The practical professions seemed the only safe haven from this language’s idiocy.

“What do you mean you’re not going to study medicine?” This was the question put to me at the graduation banquet by my amazed teacher of natural sciences, a discipline rebaptized as “foundations of Darwinism.” I had decided that medicine was not for me and that, instead, I would take advantage of my high marks in mathematics and go on to study engineering; more precisely, hydroelectric engineering. The press was awash with reports on dams and socialist hydroelectric power stations. In 1954, high-school students who graduated with distinction, that is, with a straight run of 5’s (modeled on the Soviet 1 to 5 scale), did not need to pass the entrance examination for the university. I was only vaguely aware of the nature of my choice. I could sense, however, that I was giving up the world of “words,” with all that this implied. Was I choosing “reality,” against my own better nature? Was I choosing the “masculine” over the “feminine,” taking a strong, manly stand against the more ambiguous, fluid, doubtful, childlike side of my nature? That masculine choice was supposed to protect me not only from the traps of the system but also from my own chimeras — the adventure of language.

The state was all-powerful. It was the absolute owner of persons, goods, initiatives, justice and transport, stamp collecting and sport, cinemas, restaurants, bookstores, the circus and the orphanages and the sheep pastures. All now belonged to the state, including trade, tourism, industry, publishing, radio, television, mines, forests, public toilets, electricity, dairy farming, cigarette and wine production. This was the central tenet of the dictatorship of the left, state ownership, and marked the basic difference from the dictatorships of the right, where private property at least allows one last opportunity for independence.

After state ownership of space came the most extraordinary of all socialist innovations — state ownership of time, a decisive step toward state ownership of human beings themselves, given that time was virtually their sole remaining possession. A new word was now added to the lexicon of the new age and the new reality: şedinţa , “the meeting.” “We keep meeting at meetings,” ran a satirical verse of the time, a banal formulation that encapsulated a banal reality. The individual’s time had been transferred over to the community: the şedinţa , a linguistic derivative from “to sit,” now signified a major new condition, the theft of time.

“If only 5 percent of the criticism leveled against you is correct, you have to internalize it” was the mantra repeated in the meetings of the early years of socialism. The rule had been enunciated by the great Stalin himself, and nobody would have mustered 5 percent of their courage to challenge it; implicitly, by accepting 95 percent to be untrue, the principle established the supremacy of imposture and false denunciation. It consecrated the intimidation of the individual and the exorcism of the community; it was distinguished by demagogy, routine, surveillance, intimidation, but also stage performance. Did this ritual of obedience also imply a subversive solidarity, in the act of submission itself and in spite of it? Whenever, with amused apathy, he voted “unanimously” in favor of ready-made decisions (“in the name of the people”), the anonymous individual became a part of the masquerade in which his consent was solicited as a token gesture. Alongside and together with others, the “dazed and confused citizen” joined the collective farce, which helped him dispense with his own individuality and personal responsibility, and be free of electoral dilemmas and political choices. Whether he laughed up his sleeve or was bullied into silence, the member of the “laughing popular chorus,” as Mikhail Bakhtin called it, was always part of a fake confraternity, a humorous subterfuge.