Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

For her son — that perpetually hungry, ghostly creature — the supreme evocation was not Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea but onion pie, a miracle as unknown to the Parisian Marcel as was hunger. Tea for me, as for many other East European youngsters, was the hot drink offered by the Red Cross upon our return from the labor camp.

Fragile, crumpled, invincible — this was how our traumatized savior looked as she stood on the border of the motherland in 1945. She was instantly caught up in the vortex of revival, chained, as usual, to her brothers in suffering, dependent on that association, which contrasted strongly with the dignity and silences of her husband, who preferred solitude. She gave of herself with careless generosity, and demanded devotion and gratitude in return. My father’s prudence, his self-effacing awkwardness, did not depend on others. This gentle man did not demand or expect gratitude.

When we returned to Romania, all contact with the family of my aunt Rebecca Graur was broken off. The names of my mother’s older sister and her daughter Minna were never uttered by my parents, not even in the heat of argument. The ban on speaking the unmentionable names was shattered by a piece of news that struck like thunder: the death of Aunt Rebecca’s other daughter. Mother took the first train to Tîrgu Fru-mos, home of the Graur family, and returned after the week of mourning. A year later, in our house in Suceava, we celebrated the marriage of Minna, the “sinner,” to the widowed husband of her deceased sister. The festivities confirmed the re-established family link, and my mother could once more share in the events, good and bad, of her sister’s family; the incident of Minna’s and my father’s adultery was never mentioned again, not even in passing.

My mother’s relations to the others in the family seemed to protect her, for a while, from herself. Her son, so intimate a part of her, received no good-night kiss in that narrow, constricted refuge of ours. I was never read to or told bedtime stories. Mater Dolorosa had no time or patience for that. Bound up with herself, and with an exaggerated emotionalism, she was prey to her own contradictions; only the core of her strong, vulnerable, agitated personality remained indestructible. Her theatricality stimulated her passion, and her panic did not undermine her spirit, her resilience, and her devotion.

Even if the roles had been reversed and the son had been able to give the mother what he had not been given, he still would not have been able to re-create a Bukovina version of the Proustian childhood. Fearful and narrow, the East European ghetto had survived, wrapped in its twisted mysteries, secure in its peculiar sins, a shadowy space that in the course of time had learned to adapt to all the convulsions that had come its way. And beyond the ghetto was the packed closeness of the Orthodox churches, so different from the majestic spectacles of the Catholic cathedrals in the West, with their soaring Gothic stage sets, a backdrop for magnificent performances of grace and harmony — a sacred staging, to the accompaniment of the solemn, stately chords of the organ.

When she took her lunch break from the socialist store where she worked, Mother instantly reconnected to the ghetto. She preferred the exchange of news and whispers with the neighbors to conversations with her son. She had a regular route. First she would look in on the overweight Mrs. Abosch, who lived in the first apartment with her small daughter, following her Zionist husband’s disappearance into the Communist prisons. Then there was Mrs. Segal, the widow, with her beautiful daughter, Rita, a final-year student at the high school. Then there was the family of the accountant Heller. After all those calls, there was little time left for lunch. She grabbed a quick snack, then perfunctorily asked about the two schoolchildren in her own family. But what a fuss she made when we were laid up with flu or sunstroke! Any unforeseen event in the lives of her husband or her son, or some relative from near or far, signaled an imminent catastrophe, for whose warning signs she was ever on the alert. This most devoted mother and wife seemed, in fact, totally unsuited to her role, just as her extreme involvement in the daily round of life seemed to cover some essential lack, for which she found a measure of relief in religious faith.

Food was mainly Austrian-Bukovinan cuisine, with its own specific sweet and sour flavors. Meat was not separated from milk, as the Law prescribed, but all dishes and pots and pans were thoroughly scrubbed for Passover, as was the house. In autumn, the New Year brought with it seasonal rituals and reflections, culminating in the fast of Yom Kippur. Faith had become a sort of genetic tradition, an encompassing code of rules to help one cope with all the major and minor events of daily life. Mystical, superstitious, with an unfailing faith in the workings of fate, Mother, the daughter of the ghetto, maintained a cordial suspicion of the surrounding Christian milieu, as well as a moderate curiosity about it. On the other hand, her absolute solidarity with her own people did not preclude her directing her wit at critical assessments and judgments.

Socialism did not seem to have affected her. She was aware of the new order and its myriad regulations, but she was untouched by the vision of utopian happiness that had turned the heads of so many of her coreligionists. She regarded the changes with resignation. She saw her son distancing himself day by day from the world of his ancestors. These were troubled, dangerous times. The past, for all its bleakness, was remembered as a time of color and élan, and pointed an accusing finger at the venomous drabness of the present. Like the Greek agora, the ghetto had stimulated an active trade in emotions and ideas, as well as business. Socialist propaganda may have unmasked the petit bourgeois spirit with its speculators and traders, but it also promoted corruption at a deeper level, she seemed to be saying. I myself was suffocating in the ghetto, choked by those possessive excesses and that incessant panic, but my hostility became only another face of servility and bondage. After my juvenile fling with the Communist madness, I had come to hate anything that had to do with “we,” with collective identity, which seemed to me suspect, an oppressive simplification. The chasm between “me” and “us” was one I was no longer disposed to cross.

My co-religionists were disparagingly accused by the socialist tenets, as by the former nationalist tenets, of an addiction to commerce. It was not until much later in life that I untangled the complexity of this ancient occupation and came to appreciate what it required — intelligence, risk-taking, a flair for negotiation, hard work with no fixed hours, trust, a good name. Only law or psychiatry would have suited Mother equally well, had she had the chance to pursue higher education. Socialism, however, had stifled freedom of initiative and innovation, and the trade of old, under the new dispensation, had become forced, stultifying labor, “planned” bureaucracy. Salespeople, marketing experts, planners, accountants — all were under constant surveillance by the Party watchdogs or the regular police.

From the socialist Our Bookstore, Mother stumbled into another job in a socialist haberdashery, one for which she was completely unsuited. Now, instead of books, her lifelong calling, she dealt with buttons, threads, ribbons, laces, scarves, and stockings. On unsteady feet, she would climb the rickety ladder to reach the boxes of the upper shelf. She then climbed down slowly, panting, with the needed box trembling in her big, wrinkled hand. Meanwhile, the customer, usually a peasant woman, had changed her mind. However, there was no time for argument, as other customers claimed her attention. On more than one occasion, it happened that the length of embroidered lace or a roll of ribbon vanished, along with the presumed thief, possibly a young apprentice whose work ethic was minimal and who cared only about her socialist salary, equally minimal. “Thief, thief!” I could hear my mother shouting at the part-time salesgirls, always different ones with dexterous fingers that frequently dipped into the till.