Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

“Ah, the famous American enthusiasm, the goodwill, the openness to the world.”

“Had I told anyone at that table that I had nowhere to sleep, I’m sure they would have offered to put me up. Who would do that in America?”

“Bard College.”

Leon laughs, we are both laughing.

“Taxi!” A miracle, the cab stops, and off we go into the post-Communist rain and darkness, squeezed together, in a beat-up car, a relic from a museum of socialism, the conductor-president in his handsome suit and bow tie and his fellow traveler, Augustus the Fool.

“To the Intercontinental, please,” I repeat for the third time, in Romanian.

The taxi has not turned left, as it should have, but has gone straight on, toward God knows what subterranean garage of the mafia. I look through the window, trying to recognize the route; no, it is not the old Calea Călăraçi, which no longer exists. We are probably coasting along the avenue formerly called the Victory of Socialism, which leads to the new Balkan Versailles, the White Palace, the residence that our beloved Supreme Leader Ceauçescu had no time to enjoy. The taxi finally turns onto Bălcescu Boulevard in the direction of the university and the hotel. There we are, at last, on the twenty-second floor, in the deserted bar. One last toast in honor of our first day together in Bucharest. Leon seems content, the Seder has regenerated him, it all looks like a promising adventure. We say good night at one o’clock, 6 p.m. in New York, twenty-four hours since our takeoff from Kennedy.

I am here and I am there, neither here nor there, a passenger in transit, claimed by several time zones, and not only by them.

The red light of the phone blinks to signal a call. It is Ken, an American friend who has come from Moscow especially to see me. On my night table a blue-covered notebook lies open, with bold white lettering reading BARD COLLEGE, the logbook to record my pilgrimage.

Ken works for the Privatization Project in Eastern Europe sponsored by the Soros Foundation. I met him five years ago, after receiving an unexpected letter from him. “This is something of a shot in the dark,” he wrote, and went on to describe a project he was working on, a book about the aesthetic reaction to the Holocaust as reflected in literature, music, and art. “Something you said at the conference at Rutgers/Newark last spring has troubled me ever since. The phrase of yours that haunts me is this: the commercialization of the Holocaust.”

We arranged to meet in an Irish bar in Manhattan. He told me about his grandfather who, as a penniless young man, had emigrated to America, eventually to become an important scientist, winning a Nobel Prize; about his French mother, who taught at Princeton; about his brother killed in the Vietnam War; and about himself, author of several books and a forthcoming critical study of modern conservatism. Gradually, a friendship developed. I appreciated his openness of spirit and his cosmopolitanism, the result of his French and Irish origins, as well as his Oxford education, his Catholic moral sense, and his jovial American sense of fair play.

He had come from Moscow to see me, here, in my old haunts. “When you were talking in Romanian to that young man at the reception desk,” he said to me, at our reunion in the lobby of the Intercontinental, “your face lit up. You were relaxed, even transfigured. I can see that language remains an open wound for you.”

Transfigured, talking to a state hotel employee, about whose secret allegiance I knew nothing? However, I accepted the challenge, language is indeed a subject worth talking about. “My country is my language” was my answer, in 1979, responding to my American sister-in-law, who kept trying to persuade me to leave socialist Jormania as soon as possible. I finally did leave, but I did not leave the language in which I lived, only the country where I could no longer breathe. “I wish for you that one morning we will all wake up speaking Romanian,” Cynthia, aware of my linguistic distress, once wrote me. An impossible dream … but not in Bucharest. Maybe Ken is right. It might very well be that the language in which I was immersed is working its magic on me. Then again, perhaps not. I have discovered that, in the years of my absence, the Romanian language has recycled all the old clichés of the socialist wooden tongue with injections of jargon deriving from American movies and advertising. Yesterday, when I switched on the TV in my hotel room, I was greeted by a battery of members of the Romanian Senate, all incapable of articulating a fully formed sentence. In the waiting room of the Frankfurt airport, I was assaulted by the same mutterings, the same mutilated words.

Ken and I are walking toward my former home. We pass the State Library, a massive, dusty building, proceed along Lipscani Street, a sort of bazaar arcade, then past the Stavropoleos Church, a miniature jewel set awkwardly amid the surrounding grayness and impoverishment. We encounter potholed sidewalks, decayed walls, comical shop signs, nervous, shivering, harassed passersby. We walk past the former Comedy Theater, cross the new bridge over the Dîmboviŏa River, and find ourselves on Calea Victoriei. The old building, at number 2, is still there. I show Ken the balcony of apartment 15, on the third floor.

When we moved in, the balcony was enclosed with glass panels, which created a bit of extra space. The order to demolish this type of extension came from the country’s First Lady, Comrade Mortu, as Culianu would say. I was bold enough to launch a legal war against the authorities, only in order to obtain written proof of this abuse, one more act of naïveté to add to the list in my Jormanian biography.

“Shall we go up to the apartment, to see who lives there now?” Ken asks.

“I know who lives there.”

Ken insists, but I hold my ground, and not because I am sentimental about my former residence. After I left the country, I continued to pay rent on the apartment, in 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1989, the years of my wanderings through Germany and America. In 1989, after the collapse of the Communist regime and the hunting down of the dictator and his spouse, the building’s administrator had forced open the door of the apartment and had moved in quickly. He had obviously been helped by the country’s Supreme Secret Institution, for which he had been working undercover, like all his sort. The naïve transatlantic tenant sued the administrator, but the authority stood by its collaborator. The impossible proved, once more, possible: democratic Romania’s democratic judicial system pronounced, both in 1990 and in 1991, in favor of the administrator and against the traitor from across the ocean. The alien was ordered to pay not only the court costs, but also, with his filthy dollars, for the expense of redecorating the apartment on which, from his exile, he had been paying rent during all those years.

Socialist law stipulated, as I tried to explain to Ken, that whenever someone left the country “for good,” they had to bequeath the apartment to the state in perfect condition. But even though I had not “returned” the apartment to the state, and the socialist law no longer applied, socialism’s secret police, with its informers and administrators, had survived.

We go up Calea Victoriei and walk past the Central Post Office, turned into the Museum of National History erected by Ceauşescu but, in fact, a shrine to his and Comrade Mortu’s contribution to the glory of the country and the people. The impersonal street, as impersonal as posterity itself, does not seem to have missed me and is not aware that I was its faithful pedestrian for so many years. On our left, next to the Victoria department store, now restored to its prewar name of Lafayette, an ugly modern building is rising. Next to it is the building of the old militia, now restyled as the Bucharest city police headquarters. To the right, as in the old days, is the Fashion House and the Cinemathèque.