Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

How long did this strange condition last — a year, two? Alin proved that, even in the Communist police state, friendship could be affectionate and enduring.

He continued to provide his reports and keep me informed of their trivial contents until, at last, he decided he had had enough of the socialist paradise and opted for emigration to a faraway place, from which he would write me regularly. We met again years later, but never referred to the delicate subject of his informing. I was happy to know that my friend had remained one of the few from whom destiny had not separated me.

Alin’s replacement was less quick to reveal himself, and I never discovered his identity. The powers above must have refined their criteria for recruitment. I kept an eye on my close contacts, one never knew who the informer might be, every face wore a mask. This apprehension, verging on paranoia, had become so generalized as to be considered the ordinary condition. Anxiety was now a collective possession.

The exploitation of man by the state had proved no more appealing than man’s exploitation by man. The dismantling of private ownership had fractured the economy and gradually established the state’s ownership over the citizens. Xenophobia became more refined, suspicion ruled all individual lives. Instead of the demagogic competition among parties, there was now the absolute demagogy of the single Party. The chaos of the free market and of free speech was replaced by the schizophrenia of taboos. Enforced complicity culminated in a symbolic perversion — the red card.

Were there taboo topics, even on the psychiatrist’s couch? The doctor I went to see to discuss a medical discharge from my engineering job, whose dissatisfactions were becoming intolerable, was a poet, too, like my informant of a few years later, but unlike him, he was not a friend. The risk of talking openly remained difficult to assess. The anxieties confessed on the psychiatrist’s couch were no longer an individual’s private property.

As the new order extended its domination, the gray areas in which one could maneuver became more restricted, as did the enclaves of normality. Years passed as everybody waited for the magic thaw. Indeed, this happened periodically, but only in order to reinforce incertitude and add to the number of traps. Suspicion and duplicity gradually infiltrated the kitchens and the bedrooms, insinuated themselves into sleep, language, and posture.

Should I tell the psychiatrist-poet what he surely knew very well, that not only the schools, hospitals, publishing houses, and printing presses belonged to the state but also the forests, the air, the water, the earth, the stadiums, banks, cinemas, button and weapons factories, the army and the circus, the kindergartens and old people’s homes, the music industry, pharmaceuticals, and the flocks of sheep? The doctor and his patient, too, were state property. When you bought your package of tissues, your bed, or your morning milk, your watch or shoes or dentures, you were at the mercy of apathetic and insolent state functionaries who subscribed to the code of “socialist ethics and equity,” which translated as “We pretend we are working, they pretend they are paying us.”

What else was the psychiatrist but another state employee — with a red card, probably. The Party was supreme. It was the Party Secretary, not the directors, themselves appointed by the Secretary, who respectively ran the high schools and the slaughterhouses and the tailor shops and, of course, the clinics.

In a country with a strong tradition of right-wing politics, the number of red cards had increased exponentially. Without a red card you were worth very little, but even with one, you did not amount to much. In the new party of the parvenus, after half a century of Communism, one would have been hard put to find many genuine Communists. The propaganda clichés served the jugglers of the totalitarian circus, but nobody believed in them anymore. Life, or what remained of it, had moved into underground tunnels filled with muted sounds and secret codes.

Would Comrade Doctor allow himself to be psychoanalyzed by a patient obsessed with the comedy of double roles? Could the poet find the lyric correlative of duplicitous chaos, conducted on the surface by the masked men of power and perpetuated, underground, by the venom of resentment?

The patient’s questions quickly rebounded back to himself, as though he had borrowed the doctor’s mannerisms and was able to read the theme of the psychiatric session with closed eyes: the Initiation after the Initiation. Or should it be called adaptation? And what exactly did the survivor adapt to? A familiar question. Over a decade later, it would also be asked by an American psychiatrist. The answer was familiar, too: The patient adapted to life, as simple as that. Indeed, it is to life that all survivors adapt, whether they are survivors of black, green, or red dictatorships. They do so with that impertinence of normality which is life itself. This was how I summarized my own biography on the eve of exile, an experiment no less educational than the preceding ones.

How can one be a writer if one has no freedom was the dilemma posed by the American psychiatrist, an expert on the psychoses of freedom in the New World. The question would have sounded like a bad joke if uttered by his East European counterpart, but an exchange of expertise between the specialist in the pathology of constraint and the analyst of freedom’s traumas would not have been useless. The psychiatrists of these two very different worlds would have discovered many surprising resemblances alongside the differences.

The freedom of the New Man meant accepting necessity — this was what doctor and patient had learned from the Marxist dialecticians of a party that became less Marxist every day: necessity, hence adaptation; adaptation, hence pragmatism: hence, accepted necessity. Adaptation to life, Doctor, this was the task facing the apprentice in the banality served pedagogically by daily life. Life, that was all. In the East, in the West, in the cosmos.

The future promised in the Communist fairy tales became a hell for those under interrogation and in prisons. In between, there was the burlesque of purgatory, subject to the Party’s variable shifts. When the grind of earning one’s daily bread ceased to be the only purpose, the traffic in subterfuges allowed for some delectable falsifications. This was the face of the post-Stalinist “liberalization” in Eastern Europe. The growing ambiguities even allowed us — doctor and patient, patient and informant— to make our debuts in the periodicals and publishing houses of the Party and the state.

It was a game with shifting rules: the taboo words and the taboo ideas and the taboo allusions were regulated according to the capricious canon of the Party’s shifting necessity. After one book, and then another, which I managed to squeeze past the censor’s detectors, did I enjoy greater social protection? To be sure; but the surveillance also increased. The Party honored artists with privileges and penalties, writing was a profession legitimated only by membership in the Writers Union, run and controlled by the Party, and a suspect with no job and no income risked being accused of “hooliganism,” that is, of leading a parasitic life, as socialist legislation termed it.

Evasiveness was all that was left — is that not so, Comrade Doctor? The true face of reality was revealed not only by the condition of the fruit markets and butcher shops, but also by the condition of the hospitals. The story was told of a policeman who had been called to the capital’s largest psychiatric hospital and been shocked to find the patients deliriously shouting, “Down with Communism! Down with the Leader!” He was on the point of having them arrested, but was stopped by the hospital’s director, who objected: “We are in a psychiatric hospital. These people are mad, don’t you understand?” The policeman replied, with perfect common sense, “Mad? What do you mean, mad? Why doesn’t anybody shout ‘Long live Communism, long live the Leader’?” Unwittingly, he had stumbled on the crux of the very ambiguity of the national malady.