Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

What about the actors, those on stage? The child-actor was no different from the orators of the nomenklatura , the socialist establishment. Both the smaller and the greater pulpits of the agit prop festivities were part of the same general hypnosis of the mise-en-scène . The young guinea pig went through all the stages of the rise, the decline, and the fall.

It was now my turn to taste the miseries of the renegade. It happened in the autumn of 1954, my first year at the university. At last I was in Bucharest, captivated by the choruses of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” the academic anthem that greeted the entrance of the professors into the auditorium. A few days later I was informed that, on the basis of my activities and academic achievements in high school, I had been nominated to be a member of the executive committee of the Union of Working Youth.

This time, I declined the honor. I justified my desertion by saying that I now wished to devote myself fully to my studies. The court-martial was promptly convened, and this time I found myself the defendant, much like Dinu Moga a few years before, my flimsy justification being nothing less than an excuse to evade my duties. However, unlike Dinu Moga, I was spared expulsion.

Freshly arrived from the provinces, I was relatively unknown to my peers. The few colleagues who took a stand at the official meeting attempted to minimize my sin out of a sheer sense of skeptical decency— “If he doesn’t want it, let him be, we’ll find someone else.” The aborted expulsion infuriated the puppeteers working behind the scenes. Comrade Çtefan Andrei, “number two” in the student political hierarchy, took the initiative of sending me to a higher political court. At the headquarters of the Bucharest University Center, I had to submit to the appropriate reprimands and threats.

I was to meet Çtefan Andrei again, one month after the start of the academic year, at Medgidia, in the country’s south, on the site of a cement factory, where our entire student body found itself unexpectedly dispatched for “voluntary work.” Coming from “up north” to see his son — so precipitously snatched from his academic cloister — my father was shocked to see my huge rubber boots, duffel coat, and Russian-style cap. When he arrived, I was wading through the building site’s endless quagmire. We looked at each other, and in that quick glance swapped memories of the war and the labor camp. That, of course, was an exaggeration. The workers’ sheds were improvised and the food dreadful, but the atmosphere was pleasant enough, not unlike that of an adventure film. In the evenings, someone would play the guitar or the accordion; there were attempts at conversation, even romance.

I did not feel at ease with the man in the bed next to mine and tried to ignore him. However, Çtefan Andrei, a fourth-year student, soon started to initiate nonpolitical chats. He enjoyed talking about books, a rarity among the polytechnic students. I reacted with cautious reserve. During one of our talks, he mentioned the book he was just rereading, How the Steel Was Tempered , by the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky. The plot concerned a writer who was both paralyzed and blind, and it demonstrated how adversity could strengthen human character. Had I read it? Yes, I had read the book, which at the time of its publication, had been hugely promoted. “And what did you think of it?” asked Comrade Andrei. “A book for children and Pioneers,” I replied honestly. “I read it myself when I was a Pioneer.” My companion remained silent, gave me a long stare, and inquired about my recent reading. I did not know which titles to name. I casually mentioned Romain Rolland’s LÂAme enchantée . My companion fell silent again and changed the subject.

This cultural interlude was no compensation for the misery of the “voluntary work.” The reward came, however, when I least expected it — a weekend trip, just one hour away from Medgidia, to Constança, the Black Sea port. Bukovina-born, raised among forests and hillsides, I would be seeing the sea for the first time in my life. That historic encounter was to be the first in a series, over the next decades, of annual pilgrimages to the shores of the Black Sea. During that time, my former classmate, Ştefan Andrei, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s admirer, was climbing spectacularly to the top and into the charmed circle of the new leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, whose Foreign Minister he would eventually become. He also became a serious book collector, the owner of rare books and early newspapers, as well as valuable foreign volumes, gifts from his foreign colleagues. Comrade Minister Andrei enjoyed a reputation as a literate and benevolent man, the understanding husband of a beautiful and talentless actress, whose amorous adventures were spied upon by the agents of the priceless consort of our priceless President. The Foreign Minister indulged his refined tastes during visits abroad and meetings with his opposite numbers across the world and, back home, conformed to the standards embodied by the dictator. I did not enjoy his privileges, nor did I crave them. Fidelity to the Party had conferred its advantages in his case, infidelity had conferred its own advantages in mine. I made no attempt to cross the path of the now famous admirer of Nikolai Ostrovsky and of Nicolae Ceausescu, nor did I exult when he mouthed the customary official ineptitudes in his East European French at the annual sessions of the UN.

However, thirty years after our literary discussion, the Foreign Minister surprised me. It was during his visit to the Laboratory of Book Pathology of the Central State Library in Bucharest, where old books and prints were restored. Welcoming him, the head of laboratory, who happened to be my wife, was taken aback at the familiarity with which the distinguished visitor greeted her: “And how is your husband doing these days?” Diffidently, Cella replied with a brief “Fine.” It seemed clear that the visitor had studied the couple’s dossier and knew everything about her and her husband. Later, he acknowledged his former acquaintance with her husband, with whom he had attended the university a few decades earlier, and for whom he had the highest regard. He asked her to kindly pass on his greetings, as well as his request for two copies of her husband’s latest book. The book could be purchased — as many copies as one wanted — directly from the publishers or bookstores, property of the state and Party, as were the books themselves, as were the authors, as was everything else produced in socialist Jormania at the time. Why two copies? It was sheer lunacy, and that cryptic request would stay with me in my faraway exile, where it seems even more absurd.

Could engineering really protect me from political pressure and the idiocy of the “wooden tongue”? The slogans, the clichés, the threats, the duplicity, the conventions, the lies big and small, smooth and rough, colored and colorless, odorless, insipid lies, everywhere, in the streets, at home, on trains, on stadiums, in hospitals, at the tailor’s, in tribunals. Imbecility reigned everywhere supreme, it was difficult to remain immune.

Was our inner life the only treasure that could be saved? Was this oh-so-vague inner life all that important? Did it not also have its own sources of conformity and complacency?

Hydroelectric engineering studies were difficult, I could tell that immediately, although I did not know at the time that, out of one hundred and twenty students registered in the course, only twenty-seven of us would finally graduate. The starry-eyed enthusiasm of my debut into the academic unknown received a shock at the outset — lunch in the students’ canteen. “Eggplant casserole” and “cucumber casserole” were the names of socialism’s gastronomic innovations. After only a few mouth-fuls, I blacked out, poisoned, and fell into serene nothingness. My stomach, used to the delicacies of Bukovinan cuisine, was registering a protest against the garbage of the metropolis. However, the first lectures offered some compensation for that early setback. Everything seemed new and interesting, especially mathematics and applied mathematics, but I would soon have to grapple with technical descriptive disciplines, which held me back.