Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Our apartment consisted of two medium-sized rooms. The first, the sitting room, where we had our meals and received our guests, also served as a bedroom and workroom for the family’s two schoolchildren. The next room was the parents’ bedroom, with the massive family wardrobe. There were no pictures on the walls, but in the front room, over one of the beds, was a rectangular photograph in a thin black wooden frame, history’s festive recording of the young Pioneer receiving his red neckerchief on Revolution Day, when the young activist made his fiery speech in the public square and saluted the red banner on which golden letters spelled out, in Russian: STALIN.

My student lodgings were also fine examples of socialist Jormania’s residential regulations — eight square meters per person. Old Mrs. Adel-man rented me her only room, at the back of the courtyard, on 27 Mihai Vodă Street, near Podul Izvor, in order to augment her meager income. There was a table, two chairs, and a bed. The lavatory was shared with the neighbors, Captain Tudor, who was always away on training exercises, and his always available wife, also occupying a single room. Proletarian equality had divided the old bourgeois house into units for several socialist families. On cold winter nights, old Mrs. Adelman would bring her folding bed from the communal kitchen, where she now slept, and install it next to her old bed, given up to her boarder.

The move to the row of townhouses off Calea Călărasi marked a step up. In one of these, I rented a room from Dr. Jacobi, a pediatrician who worked mainly at the hospital but also saw the occasional illegal patient at home. The glass door of his consulting room would open when you would least expect it. Out would come fat Mrs. Jacobi, jealous of her husband, or Marian, their son, a timid grind studying to become a dentist, who squirmed under his mother’s thumb, yet was always ready to tell stories about his father’s mistress, a garrulous, aggressive Gypsy who lived in the basement.

As I moved from one rented room to another, my suitcase was the only space I could really call my own. But after my marriage, I finally became officially entitled to a room, all housing being administered by the state. It was a pleasant room, overlooking the street, in an apartment on Metropolitan Nifon Street, not far from Liberty Park. We shared the bathroom, kitchen, and hall with a couple of old-age pensioners who lived next door.

The next move, both into and out of the spacious apartment on Sfîn-tul Ion Nou Street, near Union Market, afforded a good illustration of the socialist Byzantine comedy. One of the two apartments on the third floor of the apartment house was occupied by Cella’s parents, an uncle, and an aunt. In the other apartment, her grandparents occupied a room, while the other two rooms were home to a theater director and his family. When the director successfully applied to emigrate to Germany, we were given the opportunity to move into the vacated room. According to housing regulations, Cella’s grandparents could exercise an option right on the space for occupation by close relatives, and we, as their granddaughter and her husband, qualified. The two rooms, of course, were more than the one room usually permitted, but the law allowed for an extra room for members of artists’ and writers’ unions or scientific researchers, to be used as a study. Beyond the law, there was the customary baksheesh and string-pulling. At last we were installed in a respectable middle-class home, two big rooms, high ceilings, a hall, bathroom, and kitchen.

On the fatal night of the big earthquake of March 4, 1977, Cella came home from work carrying a box of pastries she had bought in town. I was in the study, sitting on the red couch by the night table, listening to Radio Free Europe. I rose to greet her when suddenly the room began to shake, the furniture shuddered, and the wall-length bookshelves collapsed noisily onto the very spot where I had been sitting a few seconds earlier. Terrified, we took shelter inside the door frame. Then we ran down the staircase filled with debris, out into the street. We joined a crowd of frightened people, lost and wandering among the collapsed buildings, and made our way to the center of the city. By now it was nearly midnight. We looked at each other with relief and realized that only good luck had saved us, Cella from being crushed under the wreckage of the Scala pastry shop’s baked goods, and me under the fallen bookshelves.

The next year, Cella’s grandparents decided, in spite of their advanced age, to emigrate to Israel. We had no rights to their room and didn’t qualify for the whole apartment. Accordingly, we notified the housing authorities that we would like to be allocated a new two-room apartment, as our current residence, now a three-room apartment, could be assigned only to a larger family or to a family belonging to the nomenklatura . If some Party bigwig had been interested in the apartment, he could probably have arranged for us to receive a suitable apartment in its place. Indeed, second-echelon Party activists and a few vice ministers did come to see the place, but weren’t impressed by it. Apparently, we had underestimated the tastes and aspirations of the people’s representatives. We made useless appeals for help to the Writers Union, placing our hopes in its own bigwigs and in its channels of communication with the authorities.

For two weeks after the old couple’s departure, nothing happened. Then, one morning, a family of Gypsies showed up with an authorization to take occupancy of the empty room — a father, a mother, their daughter, and a fourth member of the ensemble, in prominent view, an accordion. They had no furniture, just a few bundles, which they began to unpack. They then hammered nails into the walls, from which they strung a rope, onto which they hung all their possessions. The occupancy accomplished, the father grabbed the accordion and treated us to some lively cadenzas.

Our new neighbors’ cheeriness was in marked contrast to our more dour mien. Until we could find a way of solving the impasse, we ceded the entire kitchen to them, on condition that the bathroom would remain exclusively ours. For their rare ablutions, they could use the kitchen sink and the second toilet off the corridor. However, very quickly, they managed to invade the bathroom, and came and went as they pleased, as though we had never reached an agreement. The smell of roast sausages and the sounds of the accordion dominated our shared home, from dawn till late at night.

There was only one solution left — to take extreme measures. After suffering for a year, one Monday morning, at ten o’clock, I showed up at the Writers Union, to remind its vice president of our previous discussions. I also informed him that if, by 2 p.m., the issue was not resolved, I would hold a press conference in the apartment for the foreign press. I would show them how our poor working classes lived — three persons, mother, father, and daughter, sleeping on the floor in the same room and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with the couple next door, who were rather averse to the trio’s incessant accordion playing. My colleague, the representative of the state, attempted to calm me down. He understood, however, that it was to no avail, and anyway, the microphones in his office had already relayed my threats to the appropriate authorities. He made a phone call and, after a brief conversation, informed me that I had an appointment at the Party’s Central Committee, entrance B, floor 3, room 309, at eleven, in half an hour’s time.

Once in the inner sanctum, I was invited to sit down before a panel of four comrades. They seemed equal in rank and probably came from different departments — Culture, Ethnic Minorities, Security, and, who knows, maybe even Foreign Press, given the nature of my threat. I was invited to summarize the situation, and then was questioned by each member of the panel. Finally, I was asked whether I could suggest a solution. I repeated what I had already said: one year earlier, prior to the old couple’s departure, I had suggested that the apartment be allocated to someone legally entitled to occupy it and that my wife and I, in return, be given a smaller, more appropriate residence. Yes, they were aware, mistakes had been made, but did I, they asked, have a concrete proposal in mind?