Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Yet if I am not able to risk an honest dialogue with an old friend, is it surprising that I hate public rhetoric so much? Am I embarrassed by the burden of “celebrityhood,” one for which I am so ill suited? “A literary celebrity in exile” is the descriptive tag employed here for those of my kind. But I am also a domestic celebrity, known in the motherland as a “traitor,” and so forth. In 1986, it seemed to me that I was reliving the 1940s. Was this awareness the source of my last-minute escape? “The stigmata of trauma” was how a younger literary critic described my writing. “The neurotic nucleus of the deportation,” he said, “the reticence, the refusal, the aloneness” could well be some kind of “autistic reaction,” some mechanism of “introversion.”

I cannot see myself taking part in some partisan debate, followed by applause. The artificiality and aggression of public performance depress me. Nor do I wish to confront those who have pushed me against the wall and now stand ready to celebrate me. But it would appear that even those I like can inhibit me. I can predict the framework of the whole journey from the start, but if, fearing the hurt, I do not go out of my shell, I cannot hope to discover what’s around me.

Golden Brain has left me to my silence. He is smiling, pleased with his new padlock and with our reunion. He tells me about the difficulties of post-Communist life, about the new class of nouveaux riches and the prevailing poverty, about his wife’s retirement and return to work at menial, tiresome jobs, about the regrouping of old and new literary stars. His joviality blocks lament or resentments; this is a serene, lucid summary. He marvels at the hotel room’s tackiness and is stupefied at the cost.

I see him downstairs to the lobby, then go out of the hotel and walk over to the Dalles bookstore nearby. I go in with some hesitation. Thank God, I see none of the old pilgrims, that sect of readers who used to recognize each other even without knowing one another. My old friend Liviu Obreja, familiar to all the booksellers in Bucharest, is not there either, thank God, prowling in his customary hunting grounds. The shelves are well stocked with volumes, in Romanian, French, and English. There are many browsers. Suddenly I am dizzy, unsure of my movements. I remember a similar sensation back in 1979, during my first trip to Western Europe, when I ran like a madman from one shelf to another of the FNAC bookstore in Paris, noting down titles, counting, again and again, the available cash I had to spend.

This time it will not happen; there is no reason it should. My confusion and unease, I realize, derive from the fact of seeing so many Romanian books, of being surrounded by such a plethora of Romanian print. I can still see the wall-length bookshelves in my last Bucharest apartment, the one that vanished with my departure in 1986. After that, I stopped buying books. Now my library grows only from offerings of friends or publishers. I have learned the lesson of dispossession, and not only about books. No, this is not the same kind of faintness that overcame me in Paris in 1979, it is just the emotion of being once again in a Romanian bookstore.

At seven-thirty I head to the Atheneum, for the rehearsal. Magheru Boulevard, unchanged, seems, however, somewhat altered. The façades look dirty, the pedestrians rigid, diminished, ghostlike. The atmosphere is alien, I am alien, the pedestrians alien. The street is almost deserted. Suddenly I see a familiar face. Could that really be Dr. Buceloiu? There is no room for doubt, the slow movements, the big, gloomy head — yes, Dr. Buceloiu indeed. I remember his thick, smoky voice, his tangled mane of dark, thick hair. He moves slowly, like an old man, in his short leather jacket, a thick woolen scarf round his neck, although it is late April. He has his arm lightly placed over the shoulder of an even older man, bent, short, completely white-haired. I seem unable to wrench myself from this dream sequence, and yet I move on, turning to look at the two men now walking away with small, slow steps.

I cross the boulevard over to the Scala cinema. Next to it is the Unic block of apartments where Cella’s mother lived until her death. Everything is the same and yet not the same. Something indefinable but essential has skewed the stage set, something akin to an invisible cataclysm, a magnetic anomaly, the aftermath of an internal hemorrhage. Maybe it is the squalor, but if you look closer, it is not just that. There are signs of unfinished roadwork everywhere, but even this does not seem to point to real change. I stand and stare for much longer than I should. I gaze at the Unie store, then turn around to face the Scala cinema and the pastry shop of the same name, then the Lido Hotel, and the Ambassador Hotel.

The estrangement is still incomplete, the wound still not healed, the rupture still active, although now somewhat muted. There is something else at work here, of an objective nature — the traumatizing, alienated reality itself. Gloomy immutability appears as permanence when, in fact, it is just a disease, a perverted wreck.

Death has passed this way, in the footsteps of the dead man now revisiting the landscape of his life in which he can no longer find a place or a sign of himself. After my death, Death visited this place, but was it not already here, was it not that from which I had fled? In 1986, the dictatorship had become Death, owning the landscape and the streets and the pedestrians, and all else besides.

I cross over quickly to the other side of the boulevard, where the former Cina restaurant used to be. I enter a narrow, deserted street. A thin rain begins to fall. I feel something unnatural surrounding me, some unnatural sense within myself. Could this moment and this no-man’s-land be the time and place of an accident, a murder, a mysterious aggression?

I step up my pace and reach the Atheneum. The façade is under repair, covered in scaffolding, the sidewalk all dug up, muddy. I enter the lobby, where I have been so many times before. Two men stand there, chatting. They could be construction workers, they could be from the management. Attracted by the sound of music coming from the auditorium, I ascend the splendid marble staircase and enter the first door on the left.

Leon is on the podium, facing the orchestra, sleeves rolled up, a bottle of Evian at his side. The disorder of both orchestra and chorus is unbelievable. Yes, Death has left its mark here, too. Gone are the orchestra members of yesteryear. Scruffy-looking types in jeans and shabby vests, chatting away, have replaced them. “Once again,” comes the command. The players continue to chatter and giggle. They are hypnotized by their own hysteria, and seem to have been picked off the streets. First one, then another, score in hand, disputes the interpretation of notes, pauses, flats and sharps. Leon is overwhelmed, his interpreter can hardly keep pace with the hubbub. “Once again,” the exasperated conductor orders. He signals to the first violinist, now standing, to translate the command: “Once again, from the third bar.” The cacophony begins anew.

Leon gulps down another mouthful of Evian, rolls his sleeves up higher, and again raises his imperious baton. The scene has come to resemble a boxing match between orchestra and distinguished visiting conductor. Now the conductor is on the floor and the referee is counting. Dazed, the conductor rises again, with some difficulty. It is ten past eight, and the match is supposed to be over by eight-thirty. Tonight there will be no winner, not even a draw. The only possible outcome of this fight is disengagement between the two combatants.

Leon descends from the podium, exhausted. Raising his hands toward the ceiling decorated with portraits of Romanian princes, he whispers, “Ave Maria” I get up to greet him. Joanna assures us that the second rehearsal will be better and that the night of the concert will produce a fine performance. The pick-up orchestra, she explains, has to work under difficult conditions, with miserable pay and humiliations of all kinds.