Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Formed and deformed by his childhood as an orphan and then by his struggle to achieve a respectable social position, Father was close to the typical “Bukovinan” type, although he was born not in Bukovina but in Moldavia, near Fălticeni. He was rational, solitary, prudent, taciturn, undemonstrative, dignified, fussy, modest, with a constant, sad reserve of shyness that translated into a reluctance to engage in or condone aggression. Quite happy to be left to his own devices, careful not to intrude, he valued and embodied decency, discretion, and dignity, even in extreme circumstances. Discretion, no doubt, implied a secret life, and indeed, here and there, there were small signs of secrets, which his wife discovered with astonished indignation. Assailed by the enormity of her reproaches and incriminations, he neither protested nor denied, but simply wished the incident to be forgotten and to recede into the obscurity it deserved.

The laconic and precise style of his writing expressed the same discretion: no lyrical effusions, no outbursts of feeling. “I was born on June 28, 1908, in the small market town of Lespezi, then in the county of Baia”—so begins his terse autobiography, a document of just a few pages, written not in 1949 for the dossier that was required of every citizen of the People’s Republic of Romania but four decades later, at his son’s request. In the 1990s, my father was no longer a director, the son no longer a commander in the Pioneers, and we were both far from the town where we used to live and far from each other.

At the age of five I started attending cheder, the beginning Hebrew school, where I was taught the rudiments of the Jewish alphabet. At seven, I started at the Jewish school in Lespezi. I learned Yiddish and Romanian. In 1916, my brother Aron was sent to the front, my father was conscripted. In 1917, there was an outbreak of typhus. My mother passed away in that year. I was left an orphan with my brother Nuca, three years my junior. I was only nine at the time, but I had to look after him as well, for about a year. Then an aunt of mine, a sister of my mother’s, came from Ruginoasa, county of Iaşi, and took us both to live with her. Nuca started as a young, too young salesman in a food store, where he also received room and board, and I went to school. When my father came back from the army, he remarried, a young girl, Rebecca, from Liteni, in the county of Suceava. I stayed in Ruginoasa for a year to finish primary school. There was a cheder there as well, and I excelled because I already knew quite a lot from Lespezi.

The narrative continues:

At the end of that year in Ruginoasa, I returned to Lespezi to find I had a stepmother. I studied privately at the gymnasium in Paşcani, which meant that I did not attend classes, only sat for the examinations. Then I went on to high school in Fălticeni. I gave private lessons to primary-school children, in order to support myself. Afterward, I got a job at the glass factory in Lespezi. When the chief accountant moved on to the sugar factory in Itcani, he took me along. So I started a more civilized life, among engineers, technicians, and economists. The factory had a canteen run by those who ate there. When my turn came, I arranged for sweets and pickles to be served, in addition to the more traditional fare, as I had learned to cook as a young man. In 1930, I was conscripted for military service. I first served with Infantry Regiment 16, in Fălticeni; then I returned to Iţcani, and to the factory, where I had a very good income. I could afford most things and was very contented. I worked at the sugar factory in lucani until the deportation, and was appreciated as a good organizer and accountant. At that time, each summer in Fălticeni there was a great annual fair, on St. Elias Day. The whole of Moldavia went. I would go every summer, and spend a whole Sunday there. In 1932, as I was returning from the fair, I spoke to the young woman sitting next to me on the bus. She looked like Mrs. Riemer, from Fălticeni. She told me she lived with her parents in Burdujeni, where her father, Mrs. Riemer’s brother, ran a bookstore. Our idyll lasted three years. I used to go to Burdujeni on Sunday and would return to Iţcani in the evening by horse-drawn carriage. In 1935, we got married. I worked in the bookstore, and the book business seemed to go well, but after a while, the expenses started to exceed the revenue, so I returned to the factory. We moved to Iţcani, leaving my wife’s parents to run the store. Maria came with us… you were born in 1936 … Our normal life ended in October 1941, when we were deported.

From among many family events, only a handful are mentioned:

In 1939, Anuţa, my brother Nucă’s wife, died of a heart attack. She just collapsed suddenly, with her little girl in her arms. I arranged to be sent, along with a delegation, to the sugar factory in Roman in order to attend the funeral. My wife, Janeta, was in Botoşani and I did not tell her anything about it at the time. In 1939, the Legionnaires were already in power. Janeta wanted us to cross the border over into the Soviet Union, to save ourselves, but I didn’t agree. When I returned from Roman, I told Janeta everything. We decided to take Ruti, my brother’s little girl, until Nucă could remarry. When I came back to Roman, I found Ruti in very poor condition, malnourished, unwashed, and neglected. Her grandmother was decrepit, and Nucă had never been much of a housekeeper. I brought Ruti back with me to Iţcani. Maria, who had worked for my in-laws in Burdujeni, was there with us in Iţcani, and so was Clara, my sister. At the dinner table, I used to feed you, and Clara fed Ruti. Maria took good care of her and Ruti blossomed. Maria looked after her as lovingly as she did you. But our normal life ended in October 1941, when we were deported.

So, in 1939, Mother wanted to save us from the Romanian Legionnaires by crossing over to the Soviet Communists. That initiative would have assured us, probably, free travel to somewhere well beyond Transnistria, where we were sent, not long afterward, by the former ally of the Legionnaires, the self-appointed “General” Antonescu. We would have gone, like so many others, to that renowned tourist spot, Siberia, where we would have become acquainted, sooner than we actually did, with the benefits of Communism. Instead, the Red utopia came to us as the dictatorship of the proletariat, traveling west from Soviet Russia to Romania. We were unsure of its benefits in 1949, but we responded to its signals. Father, who in 1939 had been skeptical of the Red promises, became, albeit halfheartedly, a functionary of the Communist regime, and his son, the Pioneer with the red neckerchief, believed himself to be the embodiment of the new world’s luminous future.

However, we had not forgotten the perilous lessons of the 1930s, and the memories of the deportation lasted longer than ten years, longer than fifty. Even my father’s terse narrative acknowledges this:

We were just collecting a few belongings in the house when the chief of gendarmerie, who knew me from the sugar factory, told me it was useless, we would have to walk a long way on foot and I would be able to carry only the two children. So we left everything in the house, we left with just a knapsack. I took you by the hand, Tătută [his pet name for me, which persisted long beyond childhood], and carried Ruti in my arms. However, we took the 160,000 lei we had saved to buy a house. We were squeezed into cattle cars on top of each other. The train took a long time, day and night, and another day. When it stopped it was night. We were taken off in a market town called Ataki, by the Dniester River. Then the attack started. Many were robbed by the Romanian soldiers, some were thrown into the Dniester. Among these was a neighbor of ours, Rakover, the owner of the restaurant in the Iţcani railway station. In the morning, when the money exchange opened, the money had to be changed into rubles, at a rate of 40 lei to the ruble. A kind Romanian officer whispered to us, advising us not to change our money and to wait until we reached the other side of the river, where the rate was 6 lei per ruble. That tip saved us for a while. But the money did not last. Mother paid a lot to have her parents brought over to Moghilev, the day after we arrived from Ataki, by boat and on foot and in carriages. The old couple had remained in Ataki, on the other side of the Dniester. In Moghilev, there were six or more of us to one unheated room. I did all sorts of work. The pay was one German mark per day, those were the regulations. One kilogram of potatoes cost anything between two and three marks. We sold our watches, our rings, our clothes for food. Then we arrived in a village called Vindiceni, where there was a sugar factory. Among the Romanian soldiers there was one who had worked in Iţcani, at the factory, and knew me. He would sometimes bring us bread, tea, and potatoes. That was where Maria found us. She arrived with two suitcases full of food and other things. Everything was confiscated. She stayed with us for a while, however, in all that poverty. She looked after the grandparents, both suffering from typhus, as well as after Janeta and Ruti. People would swap a gold ring just for a few aspirin or for bread. Only you and I, Tătuţă, were never ill. In 1942, in the winter, old Avram, your grandfather, died. Three weeks later to the very day, the old woman, his wife, went, too. In Vindiceni, there was an extremely malicious administrator, one Rakhlisky, a brute; he would do anything to torment us, to destroy us. We moved on to Iurcăuţi, to the spirits factory. Minna Graur was with us, the daughter of Rebecca, Janeta’s sister.