Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

I was eating grilled sturgeon, washed down with a light, slightly acidic wine. I was smoking Greek cigarettes and looking into the eyes of my Juliet — and also sneaking a peek at the other jeunes filles en fleur , there in the seventh-floor Boulevard restaurant, in the Romanian town of Ploiesti, close to the 45th parallel. I didn’t give a damn about the Party or the Securitate. I was young, but considered myself old, knowing, justified in my ignoring of the penal colony and its assorted inmates, political prisoners or otherwise. My head was abuzz with all the political, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, and even liberal and humanist ideas I had gained from my reading, but when all was said and done, I simply didn’t give a damn about anything. World history bored me, my own history was running according to its own beat, as I ate my fish and smoked my Papastratos, alive to the day’s rhythms and not concerned about Comrade Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s illness, absorbed with my Juliet and all the other Juliets around me and not with the disaster of the Vietnam War. I tried to flee into the picaresque particulars of a profession that was alien to me. Eager to know more about the unknown people who crossed my path, exultant in the mountains and the sea that always received me in triumph, avid for the books that might hold the answers to my questions, I did not wish to be drawn into the world’s un-happiness, not even that of my immediate world. I was old and tired, but also obscenely young, engorged with desire and confusion.

“Comrade engineer, your mother is calling, she’s on the line.” The secretary had run to the top of the scaffolding, where I was supervising the pouring of the cement. “Hurry up, she’s waiting. She called yesterday, too, from Suceava. She says she hasn’t had any news from you for the last two weeks.” Two weeks… the boy hadn’t written home for two whole weeks, horror of horrors. Now he was running along the concrete-sheathed girders, past the piles of bricks and the heaps of glass panes, rushing to assure his mother that there was nothing wrong, that nothing bad had happened, that there was no catastrophe. His tribe’s sufferings no longer interested him, he was far away from Mater Dolorosa and the ghetto’s claws — but it would never seem far enough.

The past was hunting me down, always one step behind, and caught up with me when least expected. The escape into books, the majesty of the mountains and the sea, erotic adventure, politics, dictatorship, the fragile egg of the Big Lie — nothing could compete with the tyranny of affections. The velvet claw was always there, ready to reassert its power, its strength, its permanence. Was this a surrogate for normality, the metabolism of duplicity? Why couldn’t twenty million people join in unison to voice their discontent and self-interest, why couldn’t they all explode, simultaneously, in a burst of collective revolt? Were they all protected by the membrane of the eggshell? “Protected, protected,” my brain repeated, as I ran past the wet concrete and the piles of bricks. I was an old man on the run, escaped from the tribe’s clutches without having really escaped. At the age of twenty-five I no longer had time, or eyes, or ears for the political cacophony, for all the speeches, threats, police, prisoners, choruses festive and mournful, the fireworks, all the tragedies and comedies of the socialist reality.

I had no time, no eyes, no ears for any of this — or did I? Perhaps I did.

The crook who had married Avram Braunstein’s daughter and squandered her dowry forced the old man to sell the house he had bought just one year before. It was always possible to buy a house, he told himself, but his beloved daughter’s peace of mind was more precious. Not long after, the true, intended son-in-law appeared, charmed by the partner sent to him as a gift from St. Elias.

After the wedding, the new couple started saving for a new house. In October 1941, they had almost accumulated the necessary sum. However, in the end, the money would be used to negotiate destiny’s pathways in that terrible winter of the Initiation. The return, in the spring of 1945, did not mean coming home. The houses they left had been reallocated, the personal property sequestered. The survivors had to be content with their survival. My grandparents had died, my parents had survived, and so had we, the younger survivors. The house of their dreams was gone; now the socialist state owned all the houses and all the inhabitants.

The building of Our Bookstore in Burdujeni and the living quarters behind the shop where I was born had been relegated to memory — the pale yellow walls, the door perpetually open in the summer, the colorful interior filled with books, pencils, and notebooks; the back rooms, dark, crammed. I had no recollection of the house in Iţcani, it remained in that historyless time from before the Initiation. It was shown to me, many years after we returned from the labor camp. It stood opposite the railway station, behind a park full of benches, a solid house, in the Germanic style, with a severe façade, flaking paint, a sort of ocher in color, rectangular windows aligned on the front. Entry was through the courtyard.

In the postwar years, I had frequent occasion to be in and out of the railway station, but I was never curious enough to go into the courtyard of the house across the way and walk up the two steps leading to the front door. I also have no memory of the rooms where I languished during the four years in the labor camp, windowless and doorless, with many families crammed together, which I know about mainly from hearsay. Nor do I have any recollection of the houses we lived in in Bessarabia, after the Red Army liberated us — lost spaces all, belonging to a lost time. Only after our return did time recover me, and space, too, began to acquire a shape.

In July 1945 I was restored to fairy-tale normality; the new habitation was in the house of our relatives, the Riemers, in Fălticeni. I recall a room in semidarkness, an imperial-style bed, with its iron bedstead, old-fashioned cushions, and a bedspread of yellow plush, whitewashed walls, a round black table, two chairs, a narrow window covered by heavy curtains. For the first time I felt at home. That time, too, probably marked the beginning of something different from and beyond the immediate calendar. The green book of folktales I had received for my ninth birthday opened up for me the world of the word-magicians who became my new family.

My grandfather had invested his money in a house; my parents, in the early years of their marriage, were saving up to buy a house. After the war, when the state became the sole landlord, people were no longer looking for houses to buy but for shelters. In 1947, after our return to Suceava, we moved into a rented house, on a street that ran parallel to the main street, next to a small, pretty, triangle-shaped park. We had the last apartment on the left side of a single-story building. The entrance was around the corner, through a sort of veranda. One small room was used as a kitchen, which opened onto a shared dark corridor, from which one descended into the basement, used to store potatoes and jars of pickled vegetables. In the corridor to the right stood a basin fitted into a wooden stand, with grooves for soap and toothbrush glasses. On the opposite wall were the towel racks. Water came from a well in the courtyard and was stored in a tank next to the basin.

The first door to the right led to our rooms. The next door, also on the right, led to the apartment of Nurse Strenski, who, not long after we moved in, married an apathetic but gentle drunk. The door at the bottom of the corridor opened onto the communal lavatory, a tall, narrow room, one step wide, the toilet lacking a seat, the flush chain rusted and useless. Water was brought in a bucket from the tank in the corridor.