Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The episode that had caused so many nervous breakdowns, and that acquainted me for the first time with the word “divorce,” was narrated flatly, as if it were a minor detail: Minna Graur, Rebecca’s daughter, was with us. Rebecca was Mother’s older sister, and her daughter’s name was taboo in our house. Minna was involved in a family scandal, and her name was never mentioned again, not until Mother went to the funeral of the guilty Minna’s sister, Betty. Only then was the family reconciled to Minna and my father’s adultery.

The officer in charge of the village summoned me to come to police headquarters. I knew him, he had treated us well. Without asking me anything, he took a bullwhip out of his drawer and started shouting, swearing, and hitting me savagely over the head with the whip. My head was swollen. I thought I was going to die. Finally, we ran away from the village. We arrived back in Moghilev. This happened after Stalingrad, when the German Army was retreating. When the Soviets arrived, we tried to follow them in their push toward Bessarabia and the Romanian border. However, the Russians caught me, conscripted me into the Red Army, and tried to send me to the front line. I escaped, running through the forest, keeping away from all human settlements for a few days. As if by miracle, I found you all in a small town called Briceni. It was there that, under Russian occupation, you started school.

One day, you came home and said you wanted to be in second grade with your cousins. I went to the school and talked to the teacher, and because you were a good pupil, you were allowed into the second grade. In April 1945, we were back in Fălticeni. First we lived with the Riemers. Leah Riemer was Janeta’s aunt. Then we went over to Rădăuţi. There I worked as an accountant at the office that coordinated the shipping of sheep and cattle to the Soviet Union, as stipulated in the armistice agreement. The animals had to be fed and looked after, so I hired veterinarians, assistants, and workers. Farming had not yet become socialist, and the Romanian exporters were present at the weighing of the animals, to make sure that everything went according to plan, as big profits were at stake. Many cattle were kept there for a while, if they were sick. Over 5,000 cattle and some 20,000 sheep were then handed over to the Russians, the new masters of Romania. The operation lasted until 1947. We then moved to Suceava.

Brevity was also noticeable in the way he talked about his reunion with Maria, after the war, and with Comrade Victor Varasciuc, her husband, as well as about his subsequent entry into the ranks of the Party. The laconic words were the mark of the man. He avoided talking about conflict, error, and failure, just as he avoided ambiguity. When asked, toward the end of his life, why he had never mentioned, not even to his own son, the fact that his wife had been married before or that she was four years older than he, he answered without hesitation, “What would have been the point?” Had I asked him about the Securitate officer who— after his release from Periprava — pressured him for a whole year into becoming an informer, and about how he had resisted, silently, calmly, stoically, until the police got tired, he would have said much the same thing: “What’s the point of talking about this now? What’s the point?”

In 1947, my father’s younger sister turned up on our doorstep with the good news that she had made boat reservations not only for herself and her boyfriend but also for our family. Father’s response was immediate: “I’ve just unpacked and have no energy left to start packing again.” Of course, there was nothing to unpack after our return from Transnistria in 1945, so there wasn’t much to repack in 1947. His little joke was just an attempt to cover up his reluctance to embark on adventures.

The question of departure haunted us periodically, and for good reason, but over time, I became the one reluctant to leave. The question arose again when I was at the university, in connection not only with Periprava, but also because of the emigration of a friend.

We had grown close a few weeks into the first academic year. Dark-haired, tall, slim, Rellu was a brilliant student and a music lover. He liked mathematics, basketball, and concerts, and even seemed willing to give literature a chance. He noticed my lack of enthusiasm for engineering studies, my long hours spent in Bucharest’s libraries, as well as my dalliance with the beautiful daughter of the beautiful Mrs. Albert. He was aware of my discontents, my aspirations, my whims, and we became inseparable friends. His excessive, irritating sensitivity counterbalanced the equally irritating pragmatism that made him avoid anything complicated. However, none of these differences — not even his lack of interest in the opposite sex — were significant enough to stand in the way of our friendship.

In the spring of 1958, Rellu brought me some sensational news: his mother and sisters had decided to emigrate to Israel. They had filled out the forms and had included him in their plans. We had heated debates over the issue. It seemed like a millennium had passed since that cold day in December 1947 when the King’s sudden abdication sent me flying home through the snow, muttering, “It’s over, we’re leaving now, immediately.” The Zionist ideal, which had attracted me in the early postwar years, when I was drawn to the militant ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky, had by now lost much of its appeal. Escape to the capitalist paradise beyond the Iron Curtain, with its trappings of well-being and illusions of freedom, now seemed a vulgar notion. I was skeptical of any childish attempts to alter destiny. Taking responsibility for, and understanding, our imperfect, ephemeral condition appeared to me preferable to a mere change of geographical coordinates.

Not only did my friend come to accept the idea of departure with serenity, he even adduced a few serious arguments in its favor. His father had disappeared in the Iasi “death train” atrocity of 1941, when Jews, hunted out of their homes and dragged through the streets, found themselves packed together like sardines in the cars of a sealed freight train bound for nowhere. The train wandered the countryside aimlessly, in the summer heat, until the starved, suffocated bodies were nothing but corpses.

I was no stranger to such horrors myself. My Initiation had also begun in a freight car, sealed off and guarded by armed soldiers, but that train had a destination: its carload of captives was to be dumped onto the human garbage heap of a labor camp. Rellu’s justification for departure, however, seemed to me somewhat rhetorical and “contrived.” I had grown wary of attempts to intellectualize what were mere biographical circumstances. Even Periprava could not diminish the force with which my cowardice sought out the most pretentious justifications for staying.

The candidates for emigration to the Holy Land began lining up the night before, so that on the following day they would have a chance of reaching the desk where the magic application forms were being handed out. The wandering tribes were on the move again. It reminded me of our return to the land of the living, the rebirth of 1945. I recalled the voices and the colors of the fairy tale, the fairy-tale dishes and the fairytale book I received from my strange bookish cousins, the Riemer progeny, who were also my teachers. The blackboard covered a whole wall and was filled with formulas, tables, and puzzles. In that wondrous place I discovered the joys of normality, the colorful sideshow being put on by the relatives who had never been dislodged by war and transported to labor camps. I awoke each morning to a fresh new day, and I gamboled happily like a frisky lamb.