Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The store nightmare always culminated in the hysterical days of stocktaking, when the staff worked from morning till late at night, itemizing and pricing the goods. The tension this occasioned would affect even my father, who, after his own working hours, would check the various accounting procedures at home, to correct the errors of incompetent or even downright corrupt managers. Eventually, all the black forebodings were confirmed, and in the aftermath of a disastrous accounting error, Mother escaped prison only because of her age and some discreet string-pulling. She broke down at her trial, as she had on the night train that took us back after a visit to Periprava, where Father was churning in his humiliation. Humiliation itself did not affect her, but when it touched her husband or her son, she assumed the guilt for their disgrace.

“God will help you for all you’re doing,” she would repeat on those mornings in Bucharest when I accompanied her to the doctor — the same words she had used on the train from Periprava and in the days of her trial. Blind, she would wait patiently on the street corner for me to return with a taxi, no mean feat at rush hour in Bucharest.

Her obsession with my estrangement and with my plans for leaving our hometown brought on devastating nervous crises, often triggered by something trifling. She had no strength to confront me directly. Incapable of hurting me verbally, she still wanted to hurt me, deeply, incurably, for the indifference with which I distanced myself from her impasses and traumas. Her tenseness, aggravated by her feeling of helplessness, turned me into an exasperated, ice-cold witness. Were her wailings and laments a performance, produced for effect? I tried to armor myself against these assaults, but was not always successful. I was unable to escape from her possessiveness, her steely, irredeemable egoism. She seemed to want to punish all those in her immediate surroundings, by torturing herself and them, only because they were unable to reward her spectacular martyrdom, her absolute devotion.

This, indeed, was the tyranny of affection, the unbearable malady of the ghetto. The claw, covered in velvet and silk, would clutch at you when you were least prepared. I could not escape, even after I had extricated myself from the ghetto. Then, unexpectedly, she would become serene again and her sense of humor and her gentleness would, miraculously, return.

Paradoxically, the calmness seemed to authenticate yesterday’s anxieties and hysterics. Retrospectively, serenity afforded a strange foundation to her previous lack of balance. It was a case not so much of split personality as of a confirmation of both sides of herself. She could not be one thing, she seemed to be saying, without also being its opposite. Neither side could assume supremacy over her troubled, turbulent personality. A mysterious ancestral strength persisted in the face of her vulnerability “I’m praying for them as well,” she appeared to be saying, casting a glance at the Christian society surrounding her. She thought long and hard about that contingent world, her hands covering her eyes, as though in prayer, as she implored protection from the unknown.

The cemetery seemed to mean more to her than the synagogue. It was a form of natural, unmediated, but also transcendental, communication, a way of inserting herself into history. Our ancestors were once us, now we are them; the past and the present are fused. We come out of Egypt every year, as they did, without ever leaving it behind altogether, we relive other Egypts again and again, their fate is ours, just as our fate is theirs, forever and ever. This mystical connection, the identification with all the generations, the invocation of divine potentiality, became more frequent, of course, whenever things here on earth were not going well.

She accepted the fact that the world had changed. One could not, however, believe in the equality that was being offered or consider oneself a patriot, that is, someone entitled to be a critic of the country’s predicament, as I patiently attempted to explain to her. She tried to avoid this delicate topic, just as she avoided talking about my books. But she was always nervous when I was in the center of the storm. She sensed the moments of crisis, and she never demanded that I admit she was right in her apprehensions. In any case, it would have been too late. I refused to let myself be reclaimed and chained by the clan. I had trained myself in skepticism and had learned from that great skeptic Mark Twain that nothing could be worse than being a man. Had I wanted to be Romanian? Did I enjoy the joke played on me? the American wit seemed to be asking. What would it have felt like being Paraguayan or Chinese? Or Jewish, for that matter? This particular piece of bad luck was not less interesting than the others.

Had I really been conceived in God’s likeness, did He really have my face? In that case, the Supreme Being, who had brought everything into existence, had given birth to me. Was He embodied in the nearest of my near ones, the woman who in actual fact had given birth to me? Indeed, no conflict with divinity could have been richer than the quarrels from which I had benefited as my mother’s son, nor could the chains be any stronger.

My mother was no Jeanne-Clémence Proust, née Weil, and her son was no reincarnation of Marcel. I never received any good-night kiss from her, and even now, decades later, when I revisit her in memory and am assailed by nostalgia, this is not what I lie in bed waiting for. The claw of the past is no less painful. Occasionally, she forgets to put in an appearance, but when I wake up from my mindless vagrancy, I can see again, through night’s red heavens, the passage of the blind woman in her wheelchair. In His celestial chair, God is dozing off. He has taken the shape of an old moribund woman. The infirm, blind, and weary form has my mother’s sunken face. Among the foreigners who surround me, here and beyond and everywhere, my confusions — the exile’s ultimate treasure — bring me a familiar and accessible God.

The family album is composed of very few photographs, the rest have been lost in the family’s wanderings. The young woman with a hat, veil, and black fur cape gazes shyly at her new husband. With her dark, vivid eyes, finely chiseled nose, flared nostrils, high forehead, arched eyebrows, she is the very picture of a nervous Mediterranean beauty, tempered in the fire of the East European crucible. Photographs do not represent memories. There are no memories from the years prior to the Initiation, those years were obliterated by amnesia. Those isolated, unforgettable sequences from Transnistria come with no visual aids, they were lost from the archives of history and are replaced, today, by the clichés of lament. The photographer who took the picture of the straggling bands of people dressed in rags, on the streets of Iaşi, as we returned in the spring of 1945 to the motherland that had expelled us, did not, unfortunately, go on to document the images of the rebirth — the year-end festivities, the summer holidays, the park for holiday-makers in Vatra-Dornei, the scorched fields around the dams of Periprava, my father’s labor-camp uniform.

She turned pale when I told her I wanted to drop out of the university. “You’re right,” she finally said, “if you don’t like it, you mustn’t continue.” She had the same reaction when, as a newly graduated engineer, I told her I was renting a room in town. “Well, if you cannot take it anymore …” She fretted in her kitchen as she prepared a meal in honor of her new daughter-in-law. She waited impatiently at the front gate for the postman to show up. In the throes of the illnesses of old age, she accepted her lot and railed against it. She turned her bitter sarcasm on her husband: “When I was young and I gave you pleasure, it was better, wasn’t it?”