Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

It was getting dark when I stepped off the train, and I had to reach the nearby village before nightfall to look for a place to sleep. Through the dust, I could just make out the villagers on their porches, looking, without much interest, at the cluster of strangers gathered down the streets. These were people like myself who had come to visit the prisoners. It seems that such spontaneous gatherings took place regularly, to exchange information and rumors. I got closer and stopped a small distance away. I could hear what they were talking about, but felt unable to participate. After a while, a woman, dressed in a shabby coat, broke away from the group and came over to me. Had I unintentionally given her some sort of signal? The young, freckle-faced woman immediately asked me where I had come from and whom I came to see. The next day she would be visiting her brother, she told me, who was convicted, along with other employees of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, on trumped-up charges in a politically motivated trial, the collective nature of the verdict making individual appeals impossible. The personal disaster that had brought her here to the edge of the world seemed to have shattered any reserve she might have had. She told her story simply, directly, in her deep, guttural voice.

We left the small cluster of people and walked along the narrow, winding streets of the village. Her nervousness was evident in the way she occasionally shook her large head and hunched her coat around her shoulders, despite the heat of the day. When she adjusted her scarf, I could see her tangle of abundant hair, like a wiry crown. She was speaking about the brother she was going to meet, and about the other brother back home, and her mother, who, upon hearing of the sentence, suffered a stroke and was now nearly paralyzed. I asked her again what she knew about the camp. “Sinister, sinister!” she repeated. Had I heard of the Communist prison at Pitesti, she asked, where each prisoner, in turn, was forced to torture his fellow prisoner, the tortured becoming the torturer? And had I heard about that Stalinist project, the Danube-Black Sea canal, where the prisoners — those who had not been brutally murdered — had died in the thousands? Periprava was certainly the worst of the post-Stalinist camps, she continued to inform me, small portions of pig swill for food and labor performed by blind slaves, from dawn till night, with the perpetual barking of the guards in their ears, filthy, overcrowded barracks, and the daily quota of square meters to dig — barbaric! Those unaccustomed to physical work, or those no longer young enough, collapsed on the spot. In addition, from spring till autumn, there was scorching heat to contend with, and in the winter, merciless winds.

Obviously, she needed to unburden herself, but I no longer heard her, preoccupied as I was with the meeting of the following morning. What did he look like now, the man who undoubtedly, at that very moment, was thinking of the next morning’s reunion? What was I supposed to say to him? That he was going to survive this tribulation, as he had so many others? He had survived the camp in Transnistria and would survive this one, too. What should I say to him — that these were hard times, that innocent people were being dragged through absurd espionage trials, that they were being beaten in brutal interrogations about their relatives in the capitalist world? Or should I tell him about the Yankee or Zionist or Catholic conspiracies against Communism? Could such idiocies serve as consolation?

My companion had stopped talking, perhaps because of my prolonged silence. Then she told me that the villagers were renting rooms for the night, that I had to wake up at dawn in order to make it on time to the penal colony’s barracks. Then she quickly walked away. I had not listened to everything she had been telling me. The thought of seeing, next morning, the prisoner I had come to visit overwhelmed me. The minutes started ticking away, my thoughts wandered aimlessly.

The next morning, when I saw that weather-beaten face, creased by the winds and the dust of the hard labor, I still could not find words for my unspoken thoughts. What could I tell him, how could I overcome the awkwardness that had always stood in the way of our communication? Should I offer the slogans of hope, the clichés of common sense that were a mockery in the face of his lice-ridden uniform? I shook myself, determined to find my voice, to let emotion speak directly, but my mind kept repeating the same commonplaces: “The case will be reopened, I shall be graduating soon, you’ll be coming out of this hell and we’ll be leaving; we’ll leave and be out of here, like all our relatives, like so many of our friends.” But the soothing words couldn’t come out. Some obscure and powerful force inhibited me. Why?

Months before, I might have said to him, “I am going to tie myself to the table leg to which you once tied me. Only now can I understand what you thought I should have understood then, the price of freedom and price of captivity. You have no idea how I inverted these terms.” These were the thoughts that were going through my mind months before I knew of the disaster that was about to fall on us. In my vanity, I had thought I could define my captivity as freedom, and imagine myself the inhabitant of a language rather than a country. Now, of course, I could not burden him with my selfish, naïve obsessions, neither did I find the strength to conjure up the prospect of departure. Feeling guilty as I did, I could not promise him, even now, the break with the past called Transnistria and with the present called Periprava. I remained silent, ashamed, unworthy of the miracle of seeing him, with my own eyes, still alive.

We were both silent, our eyes lowered, after the short conversation in which he kept asking questions, like a child trying to encourage a parent, while I answered in a parental voice, bewildered with emotion, as my father, like a shadow, emaciated, pale, humbled, sat there before me. His small accountant’s hands were on the table. His palms were bruised from the spade handle and full of blisters. The blond hairs on the back of his hands and on his fingers were interspersed, I could see, with white hair. His nails were cut, as always, but unevenly this time, who knows how, in the absence of scissors.

A bark from the guard and he was out of his seat in a second, propelled toward the columns of uniforms suddenly springing out of nowhere. I caught a last glimpse of him, with my parcel under his arm, walking leadenly with his comrades, each with his own parcel under the arm, all perfectly enslaved by fear of committing the slightest error. Their terror, the rapidity with which they all got in line like robots ready to move on command, shattered my hopes of ever seeing him again.

However, I did see him again. Unlike so many other terrible socialist legal masquerades never or belatedly set right, my father’s more modest case was reopened and the sentence reduced from the original five years to the ten months he had already spent in the Periprava camp. A reduction rather than a revocation of the penalty enabled the socialist state to cover up its “judicial error” and avoid paying damages to the prisoner, who, in any event, remained state property.

Father was strict and authoritarian as a director and as a parent. His fits of rage were implacable, his moments of tenderness rare and understated. He was not unjust and never lied even when that would have been the easier solution.

Mother, shifty, fearful, was of a subtler order. She advised him, even on professional matters. She possessed intuition and instinct to spare, but she couldn’t say no and couldn’t resist appeals. Prone to shifting emotions and black fits of depression, she would veer quickly from reproach to remorse. She had retained strong ties to family and people in her past, from the time she had been her father’s favorite. Hungry for affection and recognition, anxious, enterprising, passionate, fatalistic, sociable, she believed in miracles, kindness, and gratitude, but suffered frequently from despair. The interdictions and punishments she tried to mete out to her son seemed slightly ridiculous, because she always appealed to her husband to administer the correction and was ready to retract when the latter, as so often happened, was too severe. Life together had brought no changes in either of the partners nor did it until the very end.