Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Four decades after my first exile, the current one has the advantage that it allows no fantasies about return. The witnesses of my life are now scattered to all the corners and cemeteries of the world. Images from the past visit me occasionally at night, courtesy of the Chinese sage who learned about the way I looked before my parents met. I see shadows on the wall and I can distinguish my mother’s silhouette outlined in the dark. I can make out the frontiers, the place where I was born, the cemetery. When they met, in 1933, my parents could not foresee that they would be buried at such great distance from their own parents, and from each other — and at an even greater distance from the likely grave of their only son, now setting down this report for posterity.

The shadows flicker on the wall and I can see the nameless, unmarked graves in the forests of Transnistria, where my maternal grandparents were left behind. I see the flower-covered grave of another grandfather, my father’s father, in pastoral Fălticeni. I see also, on one of Jerusalem’s hills, the slab of stone set on fire by the Judean sun under which my father rests. Only Mother, of all people, remains in the place where she had always lived and always wanted to leave. She was the only one of us to remain in the motherland to the very end and lies in the cemetery in Suceava, a beckoning motherland for her nomadic son. She had always considered herself to be in exile, and the destiny she so believed in exiled her to eternal rest in the place from which she set out. Was this done to burden her son with yet another reason to feel guilt? Guilt, always guilt — a rich substitute for the lost family albums of the lost families.

Only now, in his more mature years, does the exile appear to need the mother’s adoration and her anguish. Only now can I recognize myself in that whining mama’s boy in Paris. Is Marcel’s East European twin, having long thirsted for liberation, in his senescence now yearning for the comfort of a reconnection with his people? Would I ever hear my mother’s steps, signaled by the swish of her velvet dress, returning from the world of no return, passing through the corridor toward the bedroom of the abandoned child? “A painful moment,” says Marcel, “announcing the next, the next moment when she would have already been gone.” How long would this vision last? How soon will it be before I am left alone again? “The moment when I heard her climb the stairs, then her steps along the corridor … I had reached the point when I wished her to take as long as possible, so that the waiting could be prolonged.” Marcel’s words are now mine, although, unlike him, I was not raised in the world of cathedrals and organ music. I am a different sort of exile, claimed as I am by the dark fogs of Eastern Europe. “I am allowed no moment of calm, I cannot take anything for granted, everything has to be fought for, not only the present and the future, but also the past,” Franz Kafka wrote. I would never have appropriated such words before, but I would certainly have recognized myself at any time in the plight of the East European exile. Yes, everything had to be fought for, nor had we been allowed a moment of calm.

Not only the ghetto had vanished, but a whole world disappeared. It was late evening. There was no way now to begin my search for those lost times, and no miracle drugs could restore them to me. Without past, without future, was I inhabiting the illusion of a rented present, an insecure trap? One late evening I asked Franz Kafka, “Are you really nostalgic for the ghetto?” “Oh, if only I had had that choice,” he whispered. Then he whispered again:

Had I ever been given the chance to be what I wanted to be, I would have been a little East European boy, in one corner of the room, standing there without a trace of anxiety. Father would be in the middle of the room, talking to other men; Mother, warmly wrapped, would be ransacking through travel bundles; my sister would be chattering away with the girls, scratching her head and that beautiful hair of hers. And then, in a few weeks’ time, we would all be in America.

I had often said these words to myself before. Now I was repeating them, and I gazed at the inscrutable sky, across which my old blind mother was crossing in her wheelchair. I was holding my breath, overwhelmed by nostalgia and solitude, and then, like someone in cardiac arrest, I felt the stab of her claw tearing at my chest.

It was raining, but hardly the Deluge as recorded in Scripture. The biblical hero’s latter-day namesake, Noah, was merely playing his refugee role in the comedy of the present.

In the elegant dining room of the elegant country house in an elegant part of New York, the talkers appeared oblivious to the persistent drizzle. The shipwrecked exile found himself telling the company about Transnistria, about the Initiation, about the war, and about Maria, the young peasant woman who was determined to join the Jews on their journey to death. Responding to their interest, he went on to talk about Communism and its ambiguities, and about the ambiguities of exile. The mirrored door opened and closed, and suddenly he saw in its crystal panes the image of the memoirist he did not want to recognize. By now it was too late to stop, and he continued with his story, to wrest a fake victory from the war against the past.

The next day a letter arrived: “I don’t think it was just because it rained, but I spent a good deal of time after our pleasant luncheon thinking about you, and by that I mean thinking about your story, a fascinating one, not just because it is you, but because you lived and thought and acted at the center of the worst time in history.” The publisher also wrote: “You were an eyewitness, and as a writer you must react.” Publicly decoding his life, writing a personal memoir? Cioran had warned about it: “A cinder bath, a good exercise in self-incineration.” It would also be like peeling away one’s skin, layer after layer, in competition with the tell-all confessions of television talk shows or the self-revelations of group therapy.

I pondered the typewritten lines. Public commemorations have transformed horrors into clichés, which have been worked over until they have become petrified, thus fulfilling their function, followed, of course, by fatigue and indifference.

If I committed my life to public scrutiny, would I become its pen-wielding proxy? The audience is hungry for details, not for metaphors called Initiation and Trans-tristia. The training in evasiveness I had received during “the worst time in history” was still palpable. Did I still panic at the thought that I might suddenly be picked out during an unexpected roundup of suspects? I preferred the masks of fiction. Yet the mirror is summoning, I can see there the routes followed by the deportees, the transit camps, the sorting centers, the graves planned by the Marshal.

“I am in favor of forced migration,” Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Romania, army commander, and leader of the Romanian state, declared in the summer of 1941. “I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire committed many barbaric acts and yet it was the greatest political establishment the world has ever seen.” The noble barbarian did not want to miss the opportunity afforded him of at last eradicating the national pest. “Our nation has not known a more favorable moment in its history. If need be, shoot,” Hitler’s ally declared.

Sporadic massacres had begun one year earlier, the autumn of 1941 merely accelerated the campaign. On October 4, the general gave the deportation order; on October 9, the trains — with record efficiency — were already on the move. The proclamation was explicit: “Today, October 9, 1941, the trains will begin transporting the Jewish population of the communes Iţcani and Burdujeni, as well as of the city of Suceava, from Ciprian Porumbescu Street to Petru Rares, Street and down to Sf. Dumitru Street and the Jewish House, from Queen Marie Street down to the Reif drugstore on Cetăţii Street, from the first street after the American Hotel to the Industrial Gymnasium for Girls, and all of Bosancilor Street.”