Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

What did the American police know about the murdered professor’s delvings into magic, premonition, ecstatic experiences, parapsychology? What did they know of the reaction to his assassination among the nationalists in Romania? “The worst crime, in the case of that refugee in the gangster megalopolis of Chicago, was the nauseating apologia dedicated to that piece of excrement over whom not enough water was flushed in the fatal toilet prepared for him as if by destiny,” wrote Romania Mare . This was a weekly paper that had not hesitated to heap abuse on me after 1989, but also before, under the Communist regime, when, under the name Sãptãmína , it had acted as a kind of cultural mouthpiece of the Securitate. Was Officer Portofino aware that unsolicited issues of Romania Mare carrying praise for Culianu’s murder had been received by most American institutions and organizations dealing with Eastern Europe? Sent by the same Securitate, perhaps?

Should I describe for Officer Portofino, now, before returning to the motherland, the postcard with Chagall’s Martyr , that son of the ghetto, his body wrapped in the devotional prayer shawl, white with black stripes? Neither the arms nor the feet were bound with rope, as I had initially thought, but rather with the thin straps of the phylacteries. Outlined against the sky of smoke and fire were the purple goat and the golden cock; by the side of the pyre stood the mother or the betrothed, the fiddler, the old man with the book. Was the postcard a threat or a sign of solidarity? I am no renegade, Mr. Portofino, nor a convert, and therefore, I cannot disappoint those who, in any case, expect nothing from someone like me.

Would Officer Portofino be interested in the fears Culianu and I shared about returning to the motherland? Yes, Culianu had apprehensions over the idea of returning to the country that had become his homeland two hundred and fifty years earlier, when his Greek ancestors had found refuge there from Ottoman persecution. The Romania he had loved, in whose language he had been educated, had gradually become Jormania. He had described it thus in two quasi-fantastic short tales vaguely influenced by Borges. In the first tale, the Maculist Empire of the Soviet Union collaborated with the spies of Jormania to assassinate the local dictator and his wife, Comrade Mortu — Comrade Death — thus founding a banana republic-style “democracy” of pornography and execution squads.

The second tale was a reading of post-1989 realities disguised as a fictional review of a fictional book of memoirs by a fictional author, which described the false revolution, followed by the false transition to a false democracy, the get-rich-quick schemes of the former Securitate agents, the shady murders, the corruption, the demagoguery, the alliance of the former Communists with the Wooden Guard, the new extreme-right movement. The fictional memoirs of the fictional witness also describe the false trial and rapid execution of the dictator and of Madame Mortu, the coup d’état, the funerals of the false martyrs, the “cheating” of the people. The new ruler, Mister President, the murderer of his predecessor, Comrade President, commented on the situation with the traditional native sense of humor: “Well, isn’t this the essential role of the people?” To be cheated, that is.

Yes, Officer Portofino. You are right. It was not any supernatural force but Jormania — the one in the Balkans or the one in Chicago — that had prevented Culianu from ever seeing his native land again. But what about friends, and books, and love; what about the shared jokes and songs, what is their place and who can afford to ignore them? And what about the mothers who gave birth to us, our real motherlands? Can all this become one day, purely and simply, the land of the Legionnaires, or Communist Jormania? Anywhere and at any time, can’t they, Jimmy, can’t they?

Like Culianu himself, I had grown tired of scrutinizing the homeland’s contradictions. My past was different, and it was not the gun from Bucharest that I feared. I was afraid of the knot of entanglements from which I had not yet extricated myself.

None of the pedestrians passing in front of Ottomanelli’s looked like my guardian angel from the FBI, and I did not miss him. No, Officer Portofino would certainly not be able to interpret Chagall’s pyre for me. In fact, Officer Portofino was not the person I was waiting for on that bench where I had been sitting, petrified, for a long time.

The woman I was waiting for, my would-be interlocutor, knew more about me than I did. She would not need any explanations. Would she remember the slim volume from my grandfather’s bookstore of sixty-two years ago?

Her cousin, the young Ariel, the bohemian rebel, with his hair dyed red and his jet-black gaze, would read to those assembled around the counter from that booklet, with its pink covers, How I Became a Hooligan , as if it were a handbook for hypnosis. His cousin, the bookseller’s daughter, was turning the pages feverishly. The same comment recurred, a single word: Departure! Insistent, vehement, firmly articulated, it sounded like Revolution, or Salvation, or Rebirth. “Now, immediately, while we can: Departure!” From time to time, Ariel turned the book over, staring with a mocking expression at the author’s name on the cover: “Sebastian! Mr. Hechter, alias Sebastian!” No, the premise of my journey was not Culianu but another dead man, another friend of Mircea Eliade, from a different period: Mihail Sebastian, the writer I mentioned over breakfast at Barney Greengrass’s, whose Journal: 1935–1944 , written more than half a century earlier, had just been published in Bucharest. But this posthumous book could not be placed alongside the former ones on those bookshelves of the past. The bookstore was no longer there, and neither was my grandfather or his nephew Ariel. But my mother, no longer there either, would surely remember the “Sebastian Affair.” My mother had a perfect memory; she must have it still wherever she is now, I have no doubt about that.

That old, boring, and everlasting anti-Semitism, of which pre-fascist Jormania was a textbook case, seemed to Sebastian to be located merely “on the periphery of suffering.” He condescended to register “outer adversity” as rudimentary and minor, compared to the ardent “inner adversity” that, so he said, assails a Jew’s soul. “No people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one has kept stricter watch on himself more severely. The biblical prophets are the fieriest voices on earth.” These words were written in 1935, when outer adversities had already begun to announce the devastation to follow. “The periphery of our suffering!” Ariel, my mother’s cousin and my grandfather’s nephew, shouted indignantly, in that small bookstore in Jormania in 1935, the year before my birth. “Is this Mr. Sebastian’s teaching? The periphery of our suffering? He should speak for himself! He’ll soon see what this ‘periphery’ is about!”

One year earlier in 1934, Sebastian had had to face the scandal that followed the publication of his novel De doua mit de ani (Two Thousand Tears) , with a preface written by Nae Ionescu, his tutor and friend, who had become the ideologue of the Iron Guard. The author of the preface regarded the Jew as the irreducible enemy of the Christian world and, as such, one that had to be eliminated.

Attacked from all sides by Christians, Jews, liberals, and extremists alike, Sebastian had responded with a sparkling essay, How I Became a Hooligan . In a sober and precise tone, he candidly reaffirmed the “spiritual autonomy” of Jewish suffering, its “tragic nerve,” the dispute between a “tumultuous sensibility” and a “merciless critical spirit,” between “intelligence at its coolest and passion at its most unbridled.” A hooligan? Did that mean marginal, nonaligned, excluded? “A Jew from the Danube,” as he called himself with some delight. He defined himself clearly: “I am not a partisan, I am always a dissident. I can trust only the individual man, but my trust in him is complete.” What does being a “dissident” mean? Someone dissenting even from dissidents?