Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The attempt to flee the Communist cage seemed to me both justified and vulgar. I was not complaining about the mental handicap that prevented me from making this natural decision, and I would have preferred it if my friend Rellu had shared the same handicap. Was his moral argument for leaving the country prompted by the fact that this was the scene of the brutal anti-Semitic murder of his father, the same country that never offered his family the least official apology for the atrocity, just as my own family had never received one after Transnistria? I was irritated by those who invoked such reasons. My cynicism had reached such depths that I regarded those horrors as a mere step toward the great, ubiquitous, universal crime, Death, the premise of all our lives. Premature death, violent death, was just the same old, plain, unfair death, and it did not matter how and where it hunted us down — such was my insensitive logic on the matter. In the heat of debate, I did not seem to care to whom I was addressing such words.

I had a bond, naturally, with Nicu Steinhardt’s anger. There was a certain connection between us, but the differences between us remained unbridgeable. Romanian citizenship did not appear to me as exalted as it did to Nicu Steinhardt, who regarded it as a certificate of membership in the gentlest and most Christian people on the planet. No, for me, being Romanian was a fact, nothing more, nothing less. I had no liking for “transfigured” people, be they Romanian, French, Paraguayan, or Cambodian. Lacking the comfort of religious faith, as well as the convert’s passionate nationalism, I believed that those who chose to change their citizenship were no worse than those who changed their faith. No, I would not ask forgiveness from the Legionnaire who, on the contrary, should himself kneel and beg the Jew’s pardon. Was I condescending toward my poor fellow Jews, lining up for their exodus? Did I feel contempt for their lucidity? In the same way that the Christianized Jew and litterateur Steinhardt spasmodically defended his chimeras, I, the agnostic Jew and litterateur-to-be, defended mine. It was not religion or nationalism that kept me in Romania but language and all the chimeras it offered — and not only language and its chimeras, but my whole life, of course, with its good and bad, a life of which language and its chimeras were the essence.

When my friend Rellu spoke about the adventure on which he was about to embark, he displayed none of the con man’s “scam,” as Steinhardt so elegantly put it. There was nothing in him of the “odious mama’s boy” or of the “winning gambler who gets up from his seat, grabs the money, and leaves.” This did not describe any member of my family either, all hardworking, humble people, living in privation and fear. The applicants for the perils of uprootedness are not necessarily worse than those who accept the hazards of rootedness. In the country where they had lived for so many generations, there had not been many “winners” among them, certainly not of big money. Even those who had “danced” the waltz of Communism, even those who had paid the “fiddlers” and cheered at the masquerade, had a right to admit their error and to leave for the other end of the earth, taking their guilt with them. My relatives did not, however, belong to this category either, and neither did Rellu. That accusation would have applied appropriately to me, the Red teenager, the inflexible thirteen-year-old commissar. Yet I chose to stay, not because I considered myself guilty or because I still believed in the “specter that haunted Europe.” Rather, I had found another chimera that, unlike the political one, made no promises of happiness to anyone.

No, my friend Rellu embodied not “the trick, the scam, the treachery, the lie” of Steinhart’s scornful litany but its very opposite, and neither was he a traitorous Judas. Far from being “disgusted,” any people in their “right mind” had every reason to envy him for seizing an opportunity they wished for themselves — to leave the country. Had the gates been opened to all, irrespective of nationality and not on the basis of the deliberate campaign of discrimination aimed at the “evil” of which the country had repeatedly tried to rid itself, then the lines of people seeking to get out would have criss-crossed the land. It was not the first time that Jews were the object of such campaigns, but this time their departure confirmed the failure of Communism in Romania, the happiest place on earth, according to Father Steinhardt. Their departure was an indictment of Communism, with which Steinhardt and his partners in philosophical debate — themselves arrested for anti-state and anti-Party “conspiracy”—should have agreed as a matter of course.

Measures placing a cap on emigration were soon introduced and reprisals launched against those who applied. Rellu, immediately expelled from the university, was lucky to escape early. In the spring of 1959, I saw him to his train for Vienna, from where he would proceed to Italy, where he would board a boat for Israel. The moment of separation was charged with emotion. His mother asked me, smiling, just as the train was about to pull out, “How am I going to cope with him without you?” It was hard to tell whether she referred simply to the disruption of our friendship or whether she meant more. Awkwardly, Rellu handed me a thick notebook, which turned out to be a diary of our happy youthful friendship. Reading his tidy hand, which covered the wide pages, I soon discovered an account of an intense, even erotic affection of which neither of us had really been aware. His departure signaled the end of an era we had lost forever. On the first page of the notebook he had written: “The separation from the main character of these pages seems irreversible. It is only natural that this journal should stay with him.” The world that lay ahead would be deciphered only by a cryptic code to which neither of us had the key. I did not see much chance of a reunion.

I left the station, on that soft spring evening in Bucharest, filled with questions, but I had no doubt that my decision to stay, in spite of all the servitude that would be demanded of me, and the dangers, was the right one — right for me, that is. I did not believe that changing the place from which I observed the game-play of the world, or changing the religion into which I had been born, would improve my chances for happiness. In any case, I was suspicious of such changes, and even viewed them with contempt. The “common people,” I thought, can continue sucking on their dumb lollipop of hope, they can keep on believing in instant rewards. My claustrophobic survival depended on other reflexes, but it would have been unfair, I admitted, for others to adopt my strategy.

What about the prisoner of Periprava, exhausted by his forced labor and humbled by his prison uniform? What strategy for survival could I suggest to him, forever indifferent, as he was, to rewards, wishing simply to be left alone to live in peace and dignity? That question opened up an emptiness in my brain, in my stomach, in my heart. Fidelity to a chimera — a fierce selfishness — had, once again, proved stronger. I had been busy constructing my own rhetoric of self-justification. I had no wish to join the ranks of the free in all their competitions, least of all in a foreign place. I had nothing to offer on the free market, the handicap of exile would annihilate me. I was content with the local brand of discontent and could do without the complicated adventure of escape. Impoverished in my twisted socialist tunnel, I even felt, probably, a glimmer of satisfaction with the socialist attempt to “equalize” unhappiness, to diminish social divides by reducing opportunities for the greedy acquisition of money, honors, and position. This sleight of hand was by no means innocent. The crises which my parents underwent periodically— especially Mother, whose links to family and Israel were strong — failed to move me.