Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The Führer’s Final Solution did not take into account the thoughts that went through the minds of the victims condemned to extinction. Nazism defined its purpose in clear terms, kept its promises, rewarded its faithful, and annihilated its victims without hesitation, without offering them the chance to convert or to lie. In contrast, the Communism of universal happiness encouraged conversion, lying, complicity, and was not reluctant to devour even its own faithful. The thought police, so essential to the system, imposed a truth serving the Party. Between the increasingly irreconcilable promise and the reality, the field was open for suspicion, perversion, and fear.

These were the thoughts that coursed through my mind that autumn afternoon in Bucharest in the eighth decade of the mean and insatiable twentieth century. In the quiet room, reader and book were engaged in silent dialogue when, barely audible, the phone rang. I didn’t feel like talking to anybody and had turned the volume down; still, I picked up the receiver.

“Do you care to go for a walk?” asked my friend.

“It’s raining, where could we go? Come on over and we’ll talk.”

“No, I’d rather go out. The rain is stopping. Let’s meet in half an hour, in Palace Square, in front of the library.”

My friend was ordinarily a sedentary sort, and his sudden eagerness for a walk surprised me. The rain had indeed stopped, and the air was fresh. He led me to the small deserted park nearby. The benches were still damp.

“It finally happened. We always think that it will be just the neighbor who falls into their net. Now it’s happened. They struck.”

I kept silent, waiting for him to continue.

“There were two of them, a colonel and a captain. The captain took notes. The interrogation lasted about three hours.”

The reason for the walk became clear. Rooms have ears, policeman’s ears.

“It all had to do with you. They wanted to know everything about you, what you do, the people you see, the mail you get from abroad and send. They wanted to know if you have a mistress, or if Cella has a lover. They asked about your financial situation, your parents’, your mother-in-law’s. They asked if you had expressed any hostility toward the Supreme Comrade and his wife, whether you intend to emigrate.”

In socialist Romania, the roster of informants came to resemble a census of the population. The strategy of self-effacement, to give the appearance of normality, no longer functioned. Isolation had proved no protection.

“You won’t believe it, but I finally gave in and signed. There was no choice. They also gave me a code name, ‘Alin.’”

The name the policemen had chosen for him was the very pen name their new informant used for the poetry and theater reviews he published in literary magazines. Let this be a lesson for him; both vocations, poet and informant, after all, probe the mystery in which we all hide.

“Why did you sign? You’ll only get rid of them in your coffin, and perhaps not even then. Had you held out for another hour, they would’ve given up. This is no longer Stalin’s time, they would’ve left you alone.”

Alin did not reply, so I fell silent, too. After all, I couldn’t pretend that I was such a great hero myself, it would have been condescending. Advice or reproaches would have been equally pointless. In hell, bread means everything, and it means a good deal in purgatory, too. On the gate of the labor camp, the guards used to write: “Paradise,” “Hell,” “Purgatory.” Bread was everywhere the leverage for blackmail.

“They threatened me. You are a public employee, they told me, you have a duty to help us.”

In other words, one could lose even a mediocre job. Such a threat was contrary to the law, as this public employee knew, but he also knew that law was the plaything of power. Not only Alin’s bread was at stake, so was that of his old, ailing parents.

Thus my friend became Alin in life as well as in literature. His usual double-triple life as a socialist citizen was now augmented by a precise, secret, unpaid mission: to report on the double-triple life of his best friend. He would be having weekly meetings with the liaison officer, not in the latter’s office, the expected venue, but in “safe” private houses that the Securitate had at their disposal. Was the humble domestic setting, a gray, constricted, socialist living space, supposed to humanize the activity? The number of police informants had grown much more rapidly than the gross national product, and the recruitment campaign had speeded up. “The traumatized survivors of the ghetto make no distinction between the police of the prewar nationalist state and the successors of the socialist regime, Comrade Commanders,” I once had occasion to say.

The all-night train trip from Bucharest to Suceava — from one end of the country to the other — ended in a short visit to the old couple. There was time for a cup of coffee and an opportunity to look into their faces and read what the telephone conversations couldn’t register, their look of panic, panic nurtured by millennia of terror and ever renewable. I looked at my parents once more and got up to go out, leaving my coffee half drunk. The sense of urgency that drove me onto the train was now impelling me back to the streets of the past.

The guard at the entrance of the former Austrian town hall, now the headquarters of the local Communist Party, listened attentively to what I had to say. The Writers Union membership card still carried some authority in provincial Romania of the late 1970s. Gogol’s employee seemed somewhat disconcerted by my sudden appearance and was not sure how to respond. He wrote down the details and, looking at his appointment sheet, said, “I don’t know when Comrade First Secretary will be available to see you, but I shall pass the message along.”

“I must see him today. I have a train to catch back to Bucharest tonight,” I insisted. He hesitated for a moment, then said, with the air of someone resigned to his fate, “Come back around lunchtime. I’ll have an answer for you by then.”

I wouldn’t wait and decided, increasing my risk, to go over to the Securitate headquarters, located in a new, modern building not far from the old hospital. Again, I showed my membership card. The officer did not seem impressed. An interview? With the commander? Today? Why the rush?

“Yes, today, before lunchtime. After that, I’m seeing the First Secretary.”

The guard picked up the phone and dialed a number, then he left and someone else took up his position. After a lengthy wait, the first guard reappeared.

“Comrade Commander is not in town, but the deputy commander, Comrade Vasiliu, will see you at eleven.”

It was now five past ten. On every corner my idyllic native town offered flowery gardens and inviting benches. Alder Park was nearby. The spring sunshine was making me drowsy. I walked past the old trees, witnesses of ages past.

At eleven I was escorted to the first floor. Behind the massive desk was a pale man with thinning gray hair, dressed in a gray woolen vest and a white shirt with no tie. On his left sat a handsome, dark-haired man with a black mustache, in a captain’s uniform. I came right to the point: “For months, pensioner Marcu Manea has been pestered by an agent who keeps accusing him of being either a spy for Israel or a crook making shady deals as Secretary of the Jewish community. If there is evidence, let him be prosecuted. If not, this campaign of terror must stop. The suspect has suffered enough, both in the past and more recently. People in the town where he has lived for the whole of his life know him as the decent man he is.”

The colonel’s intense gaze signaled that he was aware of the past called “Transnistria” and, more recently, “Periprava.” He also knew what “decent” meant. Both the guilty and the innocent survivors of detention were subsequently pressured into becoming informants for the state. However, former comrade and former inmate Manea had declined the honor for over a year, invoking the same refrain: “I am a decent man.” Repeated with idiotic monotony, the comic statement had finally vexed the policeman, and his superior was duly informed of the failed recruitment.