Norman Manea: The Hooligan's Return

Here come the artists, watch out!

The artists go from door to door, the monkeys, the mimics,

The fake one-armed, the fake one-legged, the fake kings and ministers.

Here they come, drunk with glamour and heat

The sons of Emperor Augustus.

Among the guests, limping and sweating, my friend, the poet, the lonely, shy, half-disabled poet, thought he recognized himself in a character from an old Romanian fairy tale, Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. Short and stumpy, with a blond beard, swaying, limping, he walked always slightly inclined toward the left, gentle and fearful, terrified by his own duplicities, and ready to admit and pay for them, if that was the price of survival. He suffered for every word that he wrote, for everything written about him or his friends. As an editor in a publishing house, exasperated by the endless negotiations between censors and authors, he masterminded complicated transactions of flattery and emotional blackmail in order to promote the books in which he believed.

The pain of writing that he underwent, and on behalf of writing, was equaled only by his devotion to his wife. Julia submitted to dialysis every second day, in a socialist hospital, with ancient equipment and frequent power cuts. In addition to his poetry and the neurosis that was calibrated by the number of pills he swallowed in a day, Julia had also become the daily measure of his heroism.

As usual, he was sweating profusely. He wiped his face and forehead with a big white handkerchief he clutched in his large and powerful fist. However, he had not taken off his best jacket, or his best tie. He had withdrawn with Julia to a side of the room, by the wall-length bookshelves, overcome at finding himself surrounded by so many close friends — poets, critics, novelists — the monkeys, the mimics, the false kings, the false one-armed men, all the friends of Emperor Augustus the Fool. We were united by our books and our readings, made brothers by the competitive guild of vanity. Party members and nonmembers, the privileged and the merely tolerated, all had become suspect — the false kings, the false one-armed, the false apes — in the socialism of generalized suspicion.

That July evening in 1986, in Bucharest, in apartment 15 at no. 2 Calea Victoriei, was the celebration of the end of an era. Very few of my guests knew it, but the month before, on Bloomsday, the day set aside to honor James Joyce’s exiled hero, I had applied for a visa to the West. Little did I know where that trip would finally take me.

Exile rapidly swallowed up the decades that unrolled from that summer evening. It was as if I inhabited a set of Russian dolls, one figure retracting into another and then another and again into another, with each new time identical to the time before yet also different.

Infantilism is what feeds the TV talk shows in which fifty-year-old children claim that their unhappiness stems from God knows what unfortunate event that happened to them at the age of five or fifteen, misunderstood children, misunderstood women or men, to say nothing of age abuse, sex abuse, religion abuse, and race abuse. Victimization, the whole repertoire of planetary complaints. The trauma that happened at the age of five explains the compulsion that manifests itself at the age of fifty? Or sixty, or six hundred? Wouldn’t a real grown-up, by that time, have developed a thick rhinoceros hide of insensitivity?

I was racked by the guilt of not having left my motherland in time, by the guilt of not having stayed there to the very end. In that land, the chimera of hieroglyphs first appeared to me. In that land, I concluded the pact that did not promise anything but demanded everything instead. Lady Art had remained as intangible as ever, a specter here and there, on random pages of the obituary.

In the weeks before my return, I looked back on the bends in the road of time. I remembered the taste of food and jokes, the wine and song, the mountains and the sea, the loves, the books. And, of course, the friendships that had lit up so many impasses. Yes, even someone like me, born under the sign of the intruder, was permitted to enjoy the delights of Gomorrah.

The charm of the place and its inhabitants was no illusion, I could testify to that. Paul Celan, too, had experienced it, when he lived in Bucharest after the war, the time of “puns on words,” as he later called it with amused nostalgia. Tolstoy had known it, too, in 1854, in the seven months or so that he spent in Bucharest and Kishinev, in Buzău and other places. The mix of charm and sadness had not escaped his youthful gaze, hungry as he was for reading, but also for carnal adventure, obsessed as he was with perfecting his character and his writing, yet also keen to accost the barefoot young peasant girl or enjoy an evening in a whorehouse.

Yes, the intensity of a whole lifetime within one moment…

V-Day, Victory, this is what we were celebrating on that evening of July 19, 1986, in the apartment on Calea Victoriei. Decades after the first exile, I was facing real exile. That celebration was — although many of the guests, myself included, were unaware of this at the time — a rehearsal for the separation to come.

In April 1945, I was a boy of nine, reborn and repatriated, returning from the Transnistria labor camp. I rediscovered food, clothes, school, furniture, books, games — bliss. I had obliterated the horror of the past, that ghetto disease. I was healed, or so I thought, and determined to share with my fellow countrymen in all the splendors of the present, which the Communist motherland served in equal portions to each of its citizens. The chimera of writing subsequently took me under her wings. In the early 1980s, her tattered garb could no longer conceal the wretchedness of that circus world. The new horror had not only replaced the old one but had coopted it: they now worked together, in tandem. When I made this discovery public, I found myself thrown into the center of the ring. The loudspeakers barked repeatedly — foreigner, foreigner, anti-this and anti-that. Once again, I had proven myself unworthy of the motherland of which, truth be told, my ancestors had been equally unworthy.

In the summer of 1986, I was leaving behind, terrified, the horror of Communism and its twin horror, nationalism. Was I again being infected with the “ghetto disease” from which I had persuaded myself I was immune?

Ten years later, many things had changed, and so had I. One thing remained unchanged, and that was my obstinate refusal to again be a victim. Liberation from belonging had not in fact freed me. A true fighter would have returned to Jormania confident in himself and his new identity, a victor, through absence, over the place he had left behind, proud of having become what he had always been accused of being, honored to embody futility itself.

Ten dearly beloved people represented for me the real motherland. Could these be the friends — nay, more than ten — who had been celebrating the victory of my fifty-year war in July 1986?

The first to die was Julia. Because of Communist censorship, the letters that her husband, the poet Mugur, had been sending me after my departure had been signed “Julia” and addressed to Cella, my own wife. “I think of you with great love and lonely longing. I can hear kids playing in the street. Shall we ever play together again? Poetry, too, has grown old and can no longer write itself. We hope the days ahead will be uneventful.” There was a shortage of gas and also taxis in socialist Jormania. Mugur was paying a truck driver to shuttle back and forth from the White Palace that the Carpathians’ White Clown was building for himself. He took Julia to the overcrowded, grim hospital in the morning and brought her back home in the evening. They drove through unlit streets, past empty shops and pharmacies. “However, there is love. Love is not just an abstract term,” the poet wrote. “Just as in the sciences we have Ohm’s Law, let us imagine that we also have a Loi de l’Homme, a Law of Humanity: a man is someone who leaves behind a vacuum greater than the space he previously occupied. Absence is a prolonged spasm — once a day, once a week, several times a week. The heart grows older, and no man can bear more than a man can bear. Oh, what a playful, bashful friendship we had! If only we could start anew. Now we stand by the window like kids and wave to each other across the road, except that in the middle of the street lies the ocean.”