Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Actually, I did. The numberless small ads that I had placed, seeking an apartment exchange, had finally yielded a result, which the comrades might take into consideration. A lieutenant-colonel from the Executive Command, with a wife and a son in his last year of high school, were willing to move into our three-room apartment, in exchange for their two-room apartment, at no. 2 Calea Victoriei. However, this required special approval from the army, complex formalities, as the lieutenant-colonel explained. I gave them the officer’s name, and one of the members of the panel, a grumpy-looking sort, signaled to his bald colleague, who dialed the number of Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, who confirmed what I had said.

Suddenly the Party activists relaxed and I was assured that everything would soon be sorted out. I was even presented — would you believe it — with an apology for the misunderstanding. It was a splendid day, and as I walked home, I told myself that I didn’t give a damn about the pages that I was certain would now be added to my already bulging dossier. The threat of an international press conference, it seemed, had had an immediate effect. Was this a good sign, a bad sign? Was it all a farce meant to put my nerves to sleep, before the dropping of the final ax?

I was in no hurry to get home. The day was sunny and this latest development was a lift to my spirits. I arrived at no. 26 Sfîntul Ion Nou Street around one in the afternoon. I did not take the elevator but climbed the stairs to the third floor. The accordion must have been resting or wandering through town. Our neighbors’ door was wide open, with no signs of life inside. I looked in — nothing, nobody, not even the rope strung from one wall to the other, no bundles on the floor, absolutely nothing. As if no one was ever there. The windows were wide open; a ghost had taken pains to air the room.

As I went out, bewildered, I bumped into the building superintendent, who was just dropping by to let me know that the Gypsy troupe had been taken away, bundled into a truck and driven off. Who had taken them? Nobody knew for sure, but it must have been on the orders of somebody higher up. The socialist circus had performed with admirable dispatch, with a magician’s deftness and efficiency. Within one single hour, a whole year’s tensions had evaporated.

The two rooms at no. 2 Calea Victoriei — one half of a pre-socialist apartment — would be my last residence in Romania. The hooligan had finally abandoned his high-wire act and had become what he had been reluctant to admit — a writer; a dissident writer, to boot. I had quietly published, in a provincial magazine, a few critical lines about the new Romanian National Socialism. The official attack was prompt. The stone-throwing came from every quarter: I became overnight “extrater-itorial,” a “traitor,” an “enemy of the Party.” In due course, time tore away my masks, one by one — my caution, my timidity, my sense of humor. My insomnia grew worse. I would wake up each morning deprived of yet another of my masks. Before long, I risked losing whatever had remained of my habits as a quiet, respectable citizen. I did not enjoy the new farce. The hooligan had not forgotten the hooligan war, or the years of hooligan peace.

Time passed swiftly. It seemed as if only a second had elapsed from that distant afternoon forty years ago when I had heard the voice — mine and yet not mine — coming at me from everywhere and from nowhere, assuring me that I was not alone in the universe, as I had thought. Alone in that strange room in the Riemers’ house in Fălticeni, and alone in the universe, I had discovered another home, another universe, and another self. The world of books would become my new home. I lived in this world throughout my apprenticeship years, in Suceava, my fling with revolution, the years of engineering study in Bucharest, my stay in the houses of old Rebeca Adelman, and Dr. Jacobi, and all the other shelters where I dragged my baggage of illusions, my only personal possessions.

Had I really been protected, as I had hoped, by analytic geometry and the resistance of materials and the structure of building and fluid mechanics and hydroelectrics — had all these protected me from the surrounding demagogy or from the fault lines in my own mind? Duplicity, split personality, schizophrenia were teaching us how to bury collective history deep within our personal history. My need for “something else” had not diminished, however. I had taken refuge in the home that only books could promise. The double exile of the divided ego — was that a redeeming disease? Had the hope of protecting myself from myself been replaced, finally, by the hope of recapturing myself? I followed my own zigzagging route, toward and away from myself, trying to get back to myself, to replace myself and to lose myself, and then do the same all over again. The deprivations I suffered and the dangers I risked had, in the meantime, become everybody’s lot, as if everyone had to atone for some obscure crime. Under the terror, my attractions to books intensified, and I acquired invisible partners in dialogue who, by offering their companionship, delayed death.

In the room on Mitropolit Nifon Street, next to Liberty Park, where I lived with Cella in the first year of our marriage, I was finally granted the privilege, in the summer of 1969, of listening to my own voice in my own book. The volume had green covers, just like the one in 1945.

I had finally found my true home. Language promised not only a rebirth but also a form of legitimization, real citizenship, and real belonging. Exile from this ultimate place of refuge would have been the most brutal form of extirpation, would have touched the very fiber of my being.

Fifty years of a hooligan century had passed since Grandfather Avram had asked whether the newborn infant had the fingernails necessary for survival. In 1986, history seemed to recycle its black farces. Did Augustus the Fool get tired of the old role of victim? The Initiation had been precocious, and its educational value relative. I had delayed leaving the motherland I had regained in 1945 out of some hypnotic illusion that I could substitute language for homeland. Now all that was left for me to do was to take language, my home, with me.

I would be carrying the snail’s shell on my back. Wherever the shipwreck would toss me, the snail’s shell, the juvenile refuge, was still to be my true home.

My struggle against the ghetto was, above all, a struggle against the anxieties, the exaggerations, and the panic that my mother possessed to excess, and that she also transmitted, in excess, to all those around her. I did not emerge victorious from this never-ending confrontation, I merely survived.

“The only comfort, as I went to bed, was that my mother would come and kiss me good-night,” as Proust wrote, is alien to my life story. The Jewish Jeanne-Clémence Weil, married to the Catholic Dr. Achille-Adrien Proust, was quite unlike my mother, and the social, religious, geographic, and historical differences between them were considerable. Inner adversity, which Mihail Sebastian, Proust’s Romanian admirer, considered inherent in a Jew, abated when external adversities were themselves diminished. The rarely resolved tension between inner and outer adversity in the world of my childhood required different conventions and different masks. The ritual of the comforting kiss before going to sleep would have jarred with the anguish of the real or imaginary conflicts in our East European family.

By the early 1940s, my mother had foreseen the catastrophe. Confronted with disaster, her energies abruptly changed direction. The neurotic exhaustion of waiting was refocused on brisk action.

After the early weeks in Transnistria, my father abandoned any illusions. He had started without many opportunities in life and he would have liked simply to live in quiet dignity. What he dreaded was not death but humiliation. The attempt at redressing the situation was assumed, as so often before, by his wife. Her inner anxiety was nourished by uncertainty and exacerbated by a need for hope. Extremes of behavior and of danger, stormy relationships, the excitement of shared news and gossip, as well as a strong sense of community — all these mobilized her vast energies. She was good at planning the transactions of survival; she would borrow here, give back there, surfacing with a bowl of cornmeal, or an aspirin, or some piece of wonderful news.