Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

As my mother knew only too well, such childish mind games were part of my nature. It was the same when I indulged in the urgent need to leave the ghetto. Did I expect to find on the other side friends with extended arms rather than the comedy of more ghettos? One becomes tired of oneself, as Sebastian said. My mother felt no need to define her “belonging.” She lived it purely and simply, with that fatalistic faith that does not exclude anguish or depression. “We are we and they are they,” she would say. “We have no reason to feel enmity toward them, or to expect gifts from them. Neither can we forget their horrors, can we?”

The hysterical reaction with which I responded to such clichés, at the ages of thirteen, twenty-three, thirty-three, and ever since, never moderated her tenacity. Character is fate, the ancient Greeks said, and I was witness to this daily, in the neurotic matriarchy of my immediate surroundings, as well as in the collective “identity.”

The departure, yes, Ariel had been right. Time would eventually convince me as well. This is what you kept repeating, Mother, time would force me to admit my error and pack up to leave, but that would not be until much later. “It will be late and it will be evening,” as the poet said, “and you will leave this place, you’ll see.”

Are poets more prescient than prophets? Sebastian’s Journal , published in 1997, half a century after its author’s death, describes the “adversities” that come from friends turned foes. “An anguished evening … obscure threats: as if the door isn’t shut properly, as if the walls themselves are becoming translucent. Everywhere, at any moment, it is possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside.”

I had finally left, feeling guilty for not having done so earlier, feeling guilty for having finally done it. In 1934, Sebastian’s alter ego declared: “I would like to know what anti-Semitic laws could cancel the fact that I was born on the Danube and love this land … Against my Jewish taste for inner catastrophe, the river asserted the example of its regal indifference.” In 1943, the writer wondered: “Will I ever come back among these people? Will the war have passed without breaking anything, without bringing about anything irrevocable, anything irreducible?” At the end of the war, Hechter-Sebastian was finally getting ready to leave “eternal Romania, where nothing ever changes.” The Judaic taste for catastrophe seemed easier to cure on the shores of the Hudson than on the banks of the Danube.

Death had prevented Culianu from returning to Romania and Sebastian from leaving it. With me, death, that nymphomaniac, had adopted a different game: she offered me the privilege of a voyage to my own posterity.

It was not only the Danube that provided the setting for the biography that had to be left behind; Bukovina, my native province, could serve equally well. Language, landscapes, stages of life are not automatically annulled by outer adversities. The love for Bukovina, however, does not annul Jormania. Where exactly was the borderline that united and divided Jormania and Romania? “Nothing is serious, nothing grave, nothing is true in this culture of smiling lampoonists. Above all, nothing is incompatible ”—these are Sebastian’s statements to which loan Petru Culianu himself would have subscribed. “Here is a concept that is totally absent in our public life at all levels: incompatibility,” Ariel, my mother’s young and fervent cousin, used to say a long time ago. “Incompatibility is unknown in the lands of the Danube.” I could have said this myself, entrapped as I was, like so many others, by the dilemmas of the old-new impasses. Outer adversities? I had received my initiation into such banalities at a very early age. As for the hostile campaigns of more recent years, when one is under siege, it is not easy to avoid narcissistic suspicions, or pathetic masochism. Again, a victim? The idea exasperated me, I must admit. Oh, not again, the whinings and jeremiads of the victim, especially now, when all and sundry are claiming their own threadbare badge of victimhood — men, women, bisexuals, Buddhists, the obese, cyclists …

But the mask was now glued to my face — the classic public enemy, the Other. I had always been an “other,” consciously or not, unmasked or not, even when I could not identify with my mother’s ghetto or any other ghetto of identity. Outer adversities can overlap with inner adversities, and with the fatigue of being oneself. Without shadow or identity, should I go out only after dark? If I did that, it would be easier to engage in the dialogue with the dead who are claiming me.

What is the loneliness of the poet?” the young Paul Celan, my fellow Bukovinan, was asked more than a century ago, just after the war. “A circus routine that has not yet been announced,” he answered.

Circus clowns — this is how I saw myself and my writer friends, as we engaged in the skirmishes of daily existence. Our situation could be described as that of Augustus the Fool, as old Hartung nicknamed his painter son Hans. He was alluding to the inner nature of the artist, ill equipped for everyday life, a bungler who dreams of other rules and rewards, and looks for solitary compensations for the role he has been saddled with whether he likes it or not. Inevitably, Augustus the Fool comes up against his opposite, the White Clown, the representative of power and authority. These two prototypes in the history of the circus may personify the two sides of History; all human tragedy may be seen in this encounter in the history of the circus as History.

Augustus the Fool, a clown whose sarcasms turned on himself rather than on others, was always suspiciously lying in wait for the moment when he would be offered, yet again, the role of the victim, which the audience always wanted him to have.

Leaving socialist Jormania behind in 1986 gave birth to a kind of symbol-laden symmetry: my exile, which had begun at the age of five because of a dictator and his ideology, came full circle at the age of fifty, because of another dictator and an ideology that claimed to be the opposite of its predecessor. Emphatic laments over this duplication were nothing to be proud of and irritated me again and again. I would simply prevaricate in the hope that, suddenly, a moment of enlightenment would stop Augustus the Fool’s amorphous monologue.

“I came out relatively clean from the dictatorship. I didn’t get my hands dirty. And this is not something that’s easily forgiven. Do you remember Bassani’s Ferrara stories?” My interlocutor remained silent, unwilling to interrupt me. He knew I was straining to come up with arguments as to why I should not go back to Romania, precisely because at that point the trip had become inevitable.

“Bassani,” I continued, “is known here for the film based on his work, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini . Among his Ferrara stories there is a novella entitled Una lapide in via Mazzini . The Italian sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? U-na la-pi-de in vi-a Maz-zi-ni , a commemorative plaque on Mazzini Street.”

My listener seemed happy to listen patiently for as long as that kept me pacified.

After the war, Geo Iosz returns unexpectedly from Buchenwald to his native town, Ferrara, the only survivor of all those sent to hell in 1943. His former neighbors look away in embarrassment, wishing to forget the past and the old sense of guilt. In the end, the unwelcome witness, now even more of an alien than he was on the night of his deportation, chooses, of his own free will, to leave his native town forever. Should I mention, by way of contrast, the joy Primo Levi felt, upon his return from Auschwitz, of being able to live in the same house in Turin where his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents had lived before him?”