Norman Manea: The Hooligan's Return

Unimpressed with my musings, my listener kept smiling benignly

“As I said, I escaped from the dictatorship relatively clean, I managed to keep myself apart. But I found that guilt, compromise, and even heroic resistance are easier to forgive than apartness.”

My friend didn’t seem bored and had failed to notice that I was. I was tired of myself

“I was neither a Communist nor a dissident. Isn’t that a bit arrogant? Anyway, I wasn’t too visible in the Balkan world of Bucharest. More arrogance, of course. And then, emigration … as far away as possible … supreme arrogance.”

The slim blond waitress appeared, with her miniskirt and the name tag Marianne on her right breast — a French girl from Israel, studying in New York and working part-time as a waitress at the Café Mozart, on Seventieth Street, on the Upper West Side, not far from the apartment where I was busy experimenting with my afterlife. She had brought the two bowls of gazpacho, the spoons, the bread, all that was needed.

My grandiose country — this was what I had tried to describe to my listener, the grandiosity of Dadaland, which I had not wished to forsake and to which I did not wish to return. The ineffable charm and the ineffable feces. It probably wasn’t too different from anywhere else, but what happened in other places didn’t really interest me.

“Over the last few years, I’ve suffered from a particular sickness. The Jormania Syndrome.”

The pianist of the Café Mozart hadn’t turned up yet, and neither had the lunchtime habitués. The newspapers were in their place, arrayed in their specially designed rack, trying to impersonate old Vienna. Wolfgang Amadeus was gazing skeptically from the gilded frame of his portrait at the two bespectacled diners at the table in the back.

“Self-hatred masquerading as ‘Come, let me embrace you, mister.’ The Romanians have this saying, as untranslatable as their soul— Pupat Piaţa Independenţei general embracing in Independence Square. It’s a quotation from our great writer Caragiale, impossible to translate, just like that world full of charm and feces that is equally lost in translation. It’s not the embrace of Cain and Abel but a wallowing in the national mud-bath after a bitter fight, the same muddy pond where, before a new assault, the swan-whore and the ass-scholar and the hyena-minister and the innocent kid are locked in drunken embrace. No, believe me, the Romanians did not have to wait for Sartre to discover that hell is other people. Hell can be as sweet and soft as that stagnant quagmire.”

I stopped, exhausted after this lengthy speech, to readjust my syndrome. “Have you heard how much mutual hostility there is these days between East and West Germans? You would need someone like Céline or Cioran, rather than myself, to describe such bilious hatred.”

“Oh, stop moaning. After all, you’ve written about clowns and the circus. You’ve got a good story to tell. God has sent you one. He hasn’t passed you by.”

“The story is too complicated, it can be told only in aphorisms.”

“Well, on this trip, your boss is coming with you. He’ll be well received as the superstar of the superpower. The powerful White Clown, as you say. As for you … you know all the dodges, you’ve got everything in your head. What more could you wish for?”

“The imperial White Clown from imperialist America? And next to him, Augustus the Fool, the exile. In fact, God has sent me too many interesting stories to tell, and I haven’t been able to do them justice.”

“The Almighty can’t do everything.”

“Do you remember what Flaubert said? If you keep preaching the good for too long, you end up an idiot. Flaubert, the idiot of the family, knew what he was talking about. Can sermons change the world? No, I know that, idiot that I am. I’m preaching not to change others but so that I can stay unchanged, a rabbi once said. And yet I have changed. Look at me, I have changed.”

I took a short break, just to draw breath. After all, I knew that speech by heart, I had been hatching it for a long time. I did not really need a break.

“A hooligan? What is a hooligan? A rootless, nonaligned, nondefined vagabond? An exile? Or is it what the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language says it is: ‘The name of an Irish family in South East London conspicuous for ruffianism’? In the Romanian novel The Hooligans , by Mircea Eliade, one character says that ‘there is one single productive start in life — hooliganism,’ meaning rebellion unto death, ‘militia and assault battalions, legions and armies linked together by … togetherness in death, perfectly and evenly aligned regiments within a collective myth.’ Did Eliade overcome his Romanian frustrations in exile once he became famous as a scholar? His was the revenge of the periphery against the metropolis. What about his Jewish friend Sebastian? The Jews had isolated him as an enemy, his Christian friends-turned-Legionnaires considered him a Jew and a pariah. Rootless, exiled, and a dissident, was this the archetypal Jewish hooligan? And the homeless cosmopolitan talking to you now, what sort of hooligan would he make?”

I took out of my pocket a letter from Romania, an undated letter, like a long-festering wound. “Disorientation, confusion, sadness,” wrote my woman friend from the motherland. “You should come over, twice a year, and humbly salute the intellectuals, lend yourself to photo opportunities, participate in talk shows, frequent the taverns, replace the caricature they have made of you. I would like to know what this final outcome means: the poisonous motherland’s attitude toward you.”

Could it have been otherwise? Would it have been better had it been otherwise? Don’t let yourself be bought with sympathy — this was Gombrowicz’s advice. Remain a foreigner forever! In his Argentine exile, he used to relish sticking out his tongue at himself in an ever-present mirror.

The listener’s response was an amused smile. Before we went our separate ways, he brought our conversation to a close: “You’ll fax me daily from Bucharest. Just two words, to let me know that everything is okay. And if you can’t cope, leave immediately. Go to Vienna, Budapest, Sophia, and from there, back to New York.”

The old-new questions had been haunting me well before we reached the corner of Broadway and Seventieth. I did not need to be at the Café Mozart or at Barney Greengrass’s to become their target.

“You shouldn’t go back there,” Saul B. had told me over the phone. We had met twenty years before in Bucharest and then renewed our acquaintance in America. “It’s not right that you should return, not because you’re going to be in danger, but because you’re going to feel miserable. I was reading the other day the biography of another famous Romanian. All well-educated, clever hypocrites, as you know, old-fashioned, fine manners, kissing ladies’ hands, but…” The former friend of Eliade and former husband of a well-known Romanian mathematician was not discouraged by my silence. “You shouldn’t have agreed to make this trip, you just don’t need it.”

I explained that what was at stake was the “tyranny of affections”; I had been won over by the insistence of Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College. I heard Saul’s delicate laughter at the other end of the line. Instantly, I could see his friendly, wrinkled face, his lively eyes. “You shouldn’t have been. I know that country. Just cancel everything, protect your peace of mind. You have enough difficulties here, but here you have the advantage of distance. Don’t waste it.”

July 19, 1986, an evening of celebration. My invited guests had been treated to Russian vodka, Bulgarian wine, Greek olives, and Romanian cheeses, all purchased well in advance and with great difficulty.