Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

At the next soirée, I found myself face-to-face with the amorous commuter himself. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, Mr. Nordman, that I’m a Stalinist monster, I suppose. In fact, I sided with Trotsky, I guess that makes me a Trotskyist monster, as well. You, as a liberal in the British tradition, would say it’s the same thing. Well, it isn’t; take it from me. It isn’t.”

He must have guessed my thoughts, the nickname “Nordman” being the evidence.

“I shall be remembered for my nicknames and puns,” he rasped, “not for my stock editorials of the ‘obsessive decade,’ as you anti-Communists call the time of class struggle. And not for my so-called multivalency during the time of liberalization, as you pacifists call that trap laid by Khrushchev, the so-called peaceful coexistence. It is quite possible that my novels of this new National Socialist period will not survive. But the nicknames and plays on words that I have launched will be remembered.”

Although he was not aware of it, he had a nickname himself — the “Flying Elephant”—which his doctor, himself nicknamed “the Bulgar,” had given him. Such masks and amusements were all that was left to liven that carnival-like country without real carnivals. The young, slim, ardent youth from the years of the Communist underground, maimed, as it was believed, by Antonescu’s interrogators, had become, after four decades of socialism, an enormous mass of diseased flesh, the disabled elephant, immobilized, hardly able to move between table, bed, and toilet. For all that, his mind was still boiling with ideas. The elephant could still lift up his trunk and let out a roar. “So, what’s Paradise like, General?”

I had dozed off again, or maybe I had just been diving into the mists of the past. I could hear that old voice, tipsy and insinuating, but I could not see him, and it was better like that. Sixteen years had gone by since he had bestowed upon me, over the phone, the title to which I did not aspire.

“I’ve read your interview, it’s the talk of the town. Your liberals are acclaiming your liberal courage, Tank Division General. There’s a tank division general inside you struggling to get out, you know. You won’t believe it, I read it, standing there, one clay foot in the air, the other on the ground. You must know what this means for an invalid like myself.”

“Nordman,” then “General”—who knows what other sobriquets he had attached to my name in his rounds of telephone gossip. The telephone had become his sole entertainment and only social life. In the months before my departure, I had acquired a new nickname, “Mynheer,” the name of the main character in the novel I had just published, not the name of the Dutch giant from The Magic Mountain .

“Well, Mynheer, what do you think about our sublime motherland, now that it is Communist-free? Green, bilious green, like the green uniforms of the Legionnaires. I warned you.”

It was not all Green, just as it had not been all Red, I would have answered, like the old-fashioned liberal that I was, had he been able to hear me. I could hear him all right and had recognized him — he was around there somewhere, although I could not see him, and I was quite wary of actually seeing him: the overflowing belly like a badly inflated balloon; the thick, massive nose like a trunk; the deep bags under his protruding, sad eyes; the big, yellowed teeth with gaps between them; and the small, nicotine-stained hands, with sausage-like fingers. He supported himself with both hands on the edge of the table to take the burden off his dead feet. After my departure he had grown a white, wild beard. He had not climbed out of bed in the last few years and his belly and beard had grown commensurately.

He was silent now, but the past was murmuring with yesterday’s voice. “So what’s all this crazy talk going on in the Atlantic democracy about the Stalinist monster? We are not in England here or in Atlantis. This is our own native patch, where it’s either the Reds or the Greens, there’s no alternative. Niente . You, for instance, with your fractured biography, should fear the Greens more than the Reds. Are you lured by free Atlantis, the Garden of Monetary Happiness? You may find that it’s going to be much harder for you there.”

He was absent at my July party in 1986, when I celebrated half a century of life in the motherland and also paid tribute to Leopold Bloom. He was also absent at my farewell last supper. But when he later learned that I had escaped, he was furious. After my departure, he was on the phone day and night. He called all our mutual acquaintances, spreading enough nicknames and terms of abuse to make sure that some would reach me. His affliction worsened and he did not live to see the downfall of the despised dictator, or the victory of capitalism, which he had never ceased hating.

Through the mists, I hear his raspy voice again.

“How do you like our dear little homeland, our dear little fellow citizens? I’m sure they are treating you with all due respect. And they’ve done so, haven’t they, ever since you were five years old. Do you remember, or do you refuse to remember? I’ve already told you, General, this is no place for democratic confusions and wishy-washiness. It’s Red or Green, that’s all that’s available. You had Green, then Red, then Red-and-Green, and then you made your escape. Are you better off in Paradise? Do you have a rainbow now with all the colors of the spectrum? I have traveled, too, and am now in postmortem Atlantis. We all get there. Only my poor consort is late arriving. Have you seen Donna? Have you seen what the incomparable Donna looks like today?”

No, I had not seen her yet, I would be seeing her Saturday; today was only Tuesday.

Suddenly I remembered I had an appointment. I was still half-asleep, but I knew I had an appointment somewhere, though I wasn’t quite sure where and when. I had been seduced by the siesta, the Oriental rest that socialism had made standard daily practice and that the novels of the former Communist critic had tried to spice up. The siesta depleted ardor, but stimulated decisive, tough action. Was this the revenge of the mind against the impotence of the body and the futility of the soul? Was the siesta the pyre of redemption, the fire of revolution, intended to shatter mediocrity, torpor, decency, sloth? “Alles Große steht in Sturm” Martin Heidegger never tired of repeating, his arm raised in the Nazi salute to honor the platonic citation — everything great is to be found in tumult. The Flying Elephant himself used to repeat, with his fist in the air, “Unlimitedness! Apocalypse and rejuvenation! Sturm, Sturm und Drang!”

By now I am fully awake. I look at my watch. Only eight minutes had elapsed, my reunion with the Elephant lasted eight minutes. I still have some time to spare. Maybe I could stop by the bookstore, after all, and buy a map of old Bucharest, so that my friend Saul S., like me, a Romanian in New York, can assuage his anti-Wallachian anger by reading aloud, syllable by syllable, all those enchanting names: Strada Concordiei, Strada Zîmbetului, Strada Gentilă, Strada Rinocerului.

I find I cannot move, so I lie back in bed, carefully watching the hands of time ticking away. I close my eyes and I am again at the American Embassy, the same buffet table, the same cutlery, undisturbed, the same familiar faces that time has not changed. There is the poet Mutu and the poet Mugur, my old friends. They are smiling. They see me, but remain frozen, silent, like mummies.

“What do you think, Mynheer, of these dead? Mutulache and Bunny were once your friends, were they not?” the Golem is whispering again.

Mutulache and Bunny, yes, nicknames worthy of the Lord of Sobriquets.