Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

I seem amazed by the flattery, so he explains: “Even when we chatted about minor stuff, you had a way of always speaking in nuances, a phrase within a phrase, a bracket within a bracket.”

I recall my walks with Bedros, the Proustian detours, the twists and turns of the socialist tunnel. We go out on the balcony and he points out the Telecom Palace and Calea Victoriei running as far as the bridge, the street of my last residence in Bucharest, at number 2. The city appears old, tired, apathetic. Proustian memories? Proustian exile, in one’s own room? What about the genuine exile, what about the charge of “enemy” that was hurled at me by the motherland’s newspapers?

Our reunion has the calm, affectionate air of an earlier one, in 1990, in Paris, at the Salon du Livre. Bedros had traveled from Bucharest; I, from New York. My book, displayed at the Albin Michel booth, bore the title, appropriate to our present conversation, Le thé de Proust . Bedros on this occasion was a mere extra, not part of the official delegation, the new elite, among whom I found myself an alien. Our lunch in a small restaurant confirmed the genuineness of our reunion. Now, here at the Intercontinental, I am grateful to Bedros for reminding me of my old private self and rescuing me from the caricature that has served as my substitute on the Romanian public stage.

“Would you like a drink? Beer, mineral water, Pepsi?”

Pepsi, he says, and I bring two bottles from the fridge and two glasses. After a hearty swig, he continues: “Recently, when Sebastian’s Journal was published, I reflected on the similarities of your situations. I can understand why you don’t want to meet people and give interviews. These days, most Romanians returning from abroad scramble for all this attention, interviews, applause, celebrations. They bask in all the kowtowing they get in abundance here, at the Gates of the Orient. They love adulation.”

Then he speaks about the country’s misery, its literature, its politicians and members of the Securitate turned nouveaux riches, the stray dogs and the vagabond children. After half a century of waiting, the country deserved better. I look at his new book on the table, with the face of an Armenian priest on the cover.

The ringing telephone saves me from imminent melancholy. It’s Joanna, the poet, a former cultural attaché at the Romanian Embassy in Washington, now working for the Soros Foundation. I have to go downstairs and discuss with her the schedule of Leon’s visit. More than ten years have passed since our last meeting, just before my departure from socialist Jormania. It was springtime then, just like now, lunchtime. “The place of our truth is here. We are writers, we have no other solution,” she had said. I was familiar with such banalities. I myself had once been a victim of misery’s pride, it had often fed my despair. That time, however, I had a different answer: “You have to be alive to write. Death is keeping an eye on us, and not only from the offices of the Securitate. The unheated apartments, the pharmacies without drugs, the empty shops — these are the masks of death.” Joanna had survived nicely the nightmare of those years. She had become an able cultural and diplomatic official after 1989, and she had published books. I had survived in exile, and now I had some difficulty in stopping her flow of politeness and bureaucratic detail.

I am now back on the balcony, looking at Bucharest from the hotel’s fifteenth floor. Bedros points out more landmarks, the building of the television center, the Atheneum concert hall, the Lido Hotel, the university. We go back into the room and resume our chat. We have to pass over many things rapidly — too many things have happened to us, in different ways and in different places, over the last decade. He inquires about Cella. I tell him she had a difficult time adapting but now has her own restoration workshop. She works hard and has also finally come to terms with exile.

“I didn’t know her very well,” Bedros says. “My wife, too, only met her once, at that birthday party at your place, in 1986, in July. But she’s remained very vivid in our memories. That’s why I always end my letters with regards to the lady of the house.”

We need to be able to spend a longer time together, unhurried and without words, in order to recapture the simpler exchanges of the past. Rushed as it is, our meeting feels more like a consolation. Is it my tense watchfulness, “Proust’s wound”? We exchange whispered words and the shadow of a knowing, but subdued, smile.

It is now five o’clock, and my friend Naum appears in the doorway. With his shiny, bony skull showing through the cropped hair of a conscript, we dubbed him Golden Brain. His eyes are quick, taking everything in. We look at each other without illusions, at what we are, at what remains. He looks even bonier than before, dried up by the winds of another age. His hair is whiter, too, but his detachment, his wit are the same. His nonchalance had been the asset that, a decade earlier, when he was a member of the Central Committee of Liars, had helped him cleverly negotiate the tightrope of the circus, amused at his own performance, no less than that of others. He still has, I am pleased to note, his old smile, his laughter, his carelessness and self-confidence. “Politics never interested me,” the former politician would tell me over the phone in recent years, intrigued that I, of all people, nonpolitical and isolated from public affairs, should wish to rake the “old garbage.” “I don’t want to understand or explain. I’m just telling a story, as simple as that,” he would repeat, again and again, without ever telling, in fact, his own story in that masquerade.

We had been brought together by books, jokes, perhaps even by his pro-Semitic sympathies, in a place where such things do not earn you merit badges. We are still held together, even now, by the same things. Near or far, our sense of fidelity has held fast. The opening gambit is awkward. I show him, on the bed, the padlock I have bought for him, the one he asked for.

“This lock is very expensive,” I say. “The Romanian thieves will have some trouble getting past this one. You’re going to be inviolable. Not even the germs will be able to get into your house.”

Our last meeting took place in the autumn of 1986. The president of the Writers Union had wanted to talk to me, out of reach of the official microphones. The message was transmitted by our mutual friend, Golden Brain. The three of us walked together. The park was brewing in autumn’s cauldron. Tense and strange, the resonance of our voices disturbed the shivering vapors of the bushes. It did not seem that we had different views or different opinions: the president was complaining that nothing functioned properly anymore and deplored, for both our sakes, the official anti-Semitic hysteria. I maintained an approving silence, and Golden Brain, the go-between, was also silent. Was that a final attempt at domesticating the would-be defector? He must have been aware of the underlying reasons for that meeting. Subsequently, less than two months later, I learned, in Washington, that the Party had scrapped the prize that the union had awarded me. Was that all there was to it? Could the pretext for the conspiratorial walk have been so minor? The negotiations between the Party and the Writers Union had failed, obviously, and the president had wanted us to part on good terms. Doubtless, Golden Brain knew what was behind that mysterious walk.

Family and friends waiting at home that day were alarmed by my lateness, convinced that the Securitate had laid a trap for me. Even now, on the fifteenth floor of the Intercontinental, I hesitate to ask my friend if the purpose of that walk had been merely an attempt to tame me, before my “defection” to the West, and prefer instead to look at him and be looked at by one who had been a friend even when he played at politics, and who has remained a friend even after the Party’s roulette wheel has stopped spinning and I now belong to another place. It would be futile to ask. This citizen of Bucharest would respond with a joke, as usual, bewildered by my naïveté, cutting me off with “Are you still interested in politics, old man? I was never interested then, nor am I interested now.” Are these his words or are they mine? Who knows, and what is the point of questions in a place that has no answers to give.