Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Had engineering, at least, cured my uncertainties and anxieties, my inclination to sloth and the scattering of my energies? Did it help me conquer my vice of hair-splitting and excessive nuance? Engineering introduced me to situations that otherwise would have remained inaccessible to me and to people whom I would otherwise not have met. These were gains, to be sure, but how positive was another matter. Such gains had been paid for with that priceless currency, time. However, no error deserves to be overestimated. Would life lived otherwise have matched our idealized blueprint for it? Was engineering slavery? What about the slavery of commitments to family to friends, lovers, and children, or the slavery of hatred toward one’s enemies?

Among the hopes I had pinned, at eighteen, on that modest profession had been the need to protect myself from myself. Such hope remained unfulfilled. Engineering had not cured me, thank God, of myself.

I didn’t recognize him at first in his prison uniform as he suddenly materialized before me, pale, head shaven, cap in hand, eyes lowered. He sat quietly across from me on the opposite side of the long, narrow table, among the other prisoners. Guards kept alert watch on each side of the table. We had ten minutes, and the parcel I had brought was to be opened only under a guard’s scrutiny, at the end of the visit.

He was waiting with bowed head for the words he needed to hear. They failed to come. He looked up, smiling childishly, eyes red, swollen, scared, with deep, purplish bags under them, blotched, scorched lips. He assured me he was in good health and was coping. The work was hard, naturally, all heat and dust, but he was coping. He continued to smile, with the gratitude of orphans happy to find their parents again.

Father was fifty years old, but the desolate circumstances made him look older. I was in my fourth year at the university in that spring of 1958.1 was twenty-two. Weakling that I was, I was struck dumb by the enormity of the moment, helpless to disregard the rules and cross over to the other side of the table, hug my father, and comfort him, as you would a child. I was unable even to utter the few words allowed.

I did not immediately answer his inquiries about Mother. It was better that he should not know that, because of his conviction, she had been fired from her position and finally had had to take a job as an unskilled laborer in a canning factory. She slaved for ten hours a day, stooped over the huge troughs of peppers, potatoes, and cucumbers that she was required to slice by hand. I reassured him that Mother would come to see him next month, and I also gave him the news he had been waiting for: the lawyer claimed that political tensions were easing, that the campaign of arrests had slowed down, and that somewhere “at the top” there had been acknowledgment that abuses had been committed. I leaned across the table, when the guard wasn’t looking, and whispered, “The lawyer’s brother is a Supreme Court prosecutor.” That meant the appeal was going to be successful, probably, and the injustice removed.

His freshly shaven face was in contrast to the miserable uniform. Normally, his clothes assumed something of his own fussy, tidy nature. Now the uniform clothed a mere louse, as in the early weeks in Transnistria, when he had noticed in horror a louse on the collar of his once white shirt. “This is not a life worth living,” he had said at the time, defeated, overwhelmed by shame, ready to give up. Mother, the great spokesperson for hope, had then assured him he would be wearing white starched shirts again, but she was unable to shake him out of his despair. Nonetheless, he had survived, only to find himself back again what he had been in that long night of deportation, a louse. Now, here, it was I, the young louse, son of a louse, promising rebirth, the hope of a clean white shirt again.

A few years before his arrest, he had been dismissed, without explanation, from his position as director of OCL Metalul, Suceava’s metal and chemicals state trade. He had always been disciplined and honest in his work; even those who didn’t like him had to admit that. With no other choice, he took a job as an accountant at OCL Alimentara, the local food-distribution organization. “Socialist commerce” was a contradiction in terms, just like “socialist philosophy.” The ancient trade that kept people and goods moving implied individual will, initiative, and intelligence. State commerce, on the other hand, since all businesses belonged to the state and operated on a strictly planned basis, required only bureaucracy, regular replenishments, fresh victims.

My father had neither the vocation nor the experience for commerce. Its psychology, strategies, risks, and subtleties had always eluded him. He simply became a conscientious state functionary, just as, before the war, he had been an exemplary functionary in the private economic system.

“When we moved to Suceava,” he once told us, “in 1947, I worked in marketing for the Cooperative Association. I was in charge of supplies for the newly set up cooperative farms. One day, someone came to us with an offer to sell us wood for heating. The director asked my opinion. I said it was a good deal and we immediately agreed on terms. However, we did not have enough cash to pay the man. So I contacted a few families I knew, offering them wood for heating over the winter. Most households at that time were still heated by woodstoves, and wood was hard to get. Many were ready to pay in advance, so we collected the money and paid the man who brought us the deal. The Cooperative Association made a handsome profit from this transaction. When the top people in Bucharest learned about it, I was promoted to head of supplies, which meant I had the power to sign bank drafts as a member of the association’s management team. All this stopped in September 1948, when the socialist state took over all businesses and I was appointed director of the local trade association for metals, chemicals, and construction materials.”

What happened, in fact, in September 1948, was that trade as such ceased to exist. Having joined the Party at the insistence of Comrade Varasciuc, Maria’s husband and the city’s leading Communist, my father was brought into the ranks of the new stars of that great aberration named state commerce. Disciplined and persevering, with the zeal of an old-fashioned white-collar worker, Father seemed oblivious to the absurdity he was serving. By 1953, after Stalin’s death, both I — the high school’s secretary of the Union of Working Youth — and Father — the director of Metalul — came to the crossroads: I disengaged myself from the political militancy, and Father was demoted from his management position.

This is what Father told us some years after: “When, some time later, I asked an activist from the regional Party committee why I had been let go, he answered with a sort of parable: During Hitler’s time, a Jew who was frantically running down the street was stopped by another Jew, who asked why he was running. Haven’t you heard? Hitler has just ordered every Jew with three testicles to have one cut off, the panting runner answered. But have you got three testicles? asked the other. Well, they cut first and count later, shouted the runner, as he ran off. This is exactly what happened to you. An anonymous letter claimed that you gave someone a bicycle for free… How could I give away bicycles? I wasn’t in charge of supplies, I was the director. You’re right, nobody bothered to verify the charge. Only later did they find out that it had all been a lie. What could one do?”

In 1958, when he was head of financial services of Alimentara, Father was suddenly placed under arrest. Was it bad luck, the outcome of a curse? Plenary sessions of the Party regularly pointed to rivalries at the top; there were unexpected tactical shifts that scrambled the ranks of the nomenklatura , sending shock waves through the vast network of the anthill, whose apathy needed to be shaken with capricious prods of terror. The mist of socialist daily reality was quickly becoming a blood-tainted darkness. Distinct “minorities” were singled out for attention.