Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

I lodged with an old lady who slept in a folding bed she managed to squeeze into the narrow space between the table and the couch. I had discovered, however, more welcoming hosts: the Central University Library, the Arlus Library, and the Library of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Exchange. Late into the night, I would escape into reading that took me far away from hydraulics, building structure, and reinforced concrete.

The results were predictable, and I was slipping down the academic ranks. Should I jump off the university bandwagon and give up my studies altogether? Mother declared in a pained voice, “The disease must be stopped in its track”—the aria of absolute devotion. But devotion, I knew only too well, went hand in hand with emotional blackmail. Psychoanalysis has taught us that one’s parents are to blame for the ruin of one’s life, but perhaps my life was ruined by my own conflicting emotions, and in any case, life destroys itself moment by moment, no matter what opportunities we miss. Would a degree in the humanities offer me an alternative under the dictatorship? My family counseled against it and I complied. The Ten Commandments were an attempt to tame my fractious ancestors, exile and the ghetto reinforced the rules of prudence, vitality and courage seemed provocative and risky. Had my over involved mother and father ruined my life? Formation through deformation, however, is not to be despised. Even within an authoritarian political system, there are imponderables.

I graduated in hydroelectrical studies in 1959. Then the conveyer belt of the profession started — probationary engineer, project leader, site engineer, chief project leader, principal researcher. Duplicity was recycled daily, time after time. After fourteen years, four months, and sixteen days, I was finally able to abandon the role of this character.

Had the Initiation of the deportation taught me as a child to reject the outer world, to resist being born, to delay the escape from the nurturing placenta? As a result, later in life, if you accepted all the scenarios that were available to you, did this lead to a multiplicity of selves, only one of which represented your real self? And should you ever be lucky enough to find this real self, should you ever renege on it? You have managed to be drugged and tortured by ambiguity. Churches and bureaucracies, careers and marriages only add, daily, to the archive of multiple identities.

Destiny thumbs its nose at us to keep things lively. In my last year at the university I bumped into Ştefan Andrei, now promoted to assistant lecturer in the Department of Geology. It was a modest interim job; he was pretending to be a “scientific” researcher before re-entering the political arena. Socialist residence regulations allowed a work permit in Bucharest only to those with long-term domicile there, and nobody was allowed to move to the capital city. I didn’t have the political connections of Comrade Andrei, who, like me, came from the provinces, and so, unlike him, I could not have this handicap overlooked. “You seemed to be in line for a great career, yet you chose to return to mediocrity,” I had been told in my high-school years after my withdrawal from politics. The same could have been said of me upon my return, in 1959, to my hometown in Bukovina.

I was to return to Bucharest six years later, after the “liberalization” eased the rules, having successfully passed a qualification test for an engineering post in the capital. On this occasion, I only had to produce evidence that I had a minimal residential space of eight square meters, the legal requirement for resident status in socialist Jormania. The Jewish community in Bucharest issued me a certificate testifying that I resided in a room in the ritual bathhouse of the former Jewish quarter, of all places.

Destiny was celebrating my residential victory, for no sooner was I settled than I learned about the publication, in Romanian translation, of Kafka’s The Trial . The news came to me from a former high-school friend, Liviu Obreja, now mixing in the capital’s obscure circles of cultural consumers. Booksellers in the city kept him regularly informed of such important developments. The line at the Academy Bookshop, next to the institute where I had just taken up my job, started to form on that spring day at around seven o’clock in the morning, an hour before the shop was due to open. I saw the first customers lining up as I went to work. I signed in, asked for a two-hour leave of absence, without divulging the reason, so as not to add to the suspicion already aroused by the bizarre newspapers, magazines, and books that my engineer colleagues, themselves readers of The Sport , had already caught me perusing. Those were the years of the great “thaw,” and new publications and translations would appear regularly, in small print runs, so that one always had to be in the right place on the precise day and early enough to join the line of avid readers, waiting to be lucky purchasers of a hot-off-the-press work by Proust, Faulkner, Lautréamont, Malraux. In this endeavor, Liviu Obreja, with his pallid face and shy conspiratorial amiability, was joined by a fanatic band of like-minded devotees, I among them, who, when the signal was given, showed up at the right bookstore at the right time.

At that same time, my own first book of fiction was being published. Concomitantly — fortune was still smiling on me — I got a new job at a top engineering institution, the hydro laboratory of Ciurel, where my job applications had been rejected for years because of my unfortunate dossier. At that point, in 1969, I became the youngest principal scientific researcher in a genuinely academic institution. In order to justify my new title, I was supposed to begin studies for a doctorate. Had I actually done so, the imposture would have reached its apogee. Instead — now my fortunes took a dip — I was admitted, albeit briefly, into, of all places, a mental hospital. Somehow, after some reflection, this seems the most appropriate crowning of my dubious professional achievements.

So here I was, in the mid-seventies, confined in a mental ward, twenty years after I had first attempted, in my third year, to drop out of the university. I had tried to keep up appearances for far too long, and this performance was now duly recorded in the psychiatrist’s notes. How did this compare with the duplicity and political imposture of my fellow citizens? “Professional maladjustment” appeared less serious than the alienation produced by the great political masquerade from which we all suffered, the schizophrenia of false self-representation in a false world where your substitute is not yourself yet exists within yourself. Was this not like the twisted posture of a Modigliani portrait or a caricature by Grosz or Dix?

Suddenly, when you least expect it, there you are, you have lost control, or you think you have, or you perfectly mime the condition. Now you can finally get the medical certificate that will send you home to your room, your cell, the coffin where you are quarantined from the environment — all paid for by the benevolent state. Did becoming an engineer protect me from the depredations of my society, as I had hoped? If so, it was a costly protection. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, my troubles, I concluded, were not just the result of interrogations, imprisonments, labor camps, and penitentiary colonies for “re-education” that were the hallmarks of socialist Jormenia, but were simply the outcome of the wear and tear of everyday somnambulism. The perversity penetrated everywhere, nobody was immune from the toxins of idiotization, nothing could provide a perfect shield against the insidious disease. On the other hand, a number of writers and artists and anonymous ordinary people had taken the risk of living in poverty and uncertainty, outside the reach of the brain-mincing machine. Maybe one did not have to become an engineer after all.