Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

From the restaurant we visit a woman writer, a friend of Golden Brain’s. By now I am quite tired and the only thing that stays in my mind from the conversation is her monologue about her spouse: “My husband, an admirable man, admirable but stupid, so stupid that even now, when the Communist polenta has exploded, he still doesn’t want to leave the country. Can you imagine such idiocy?” We return to the hotel around midnight. We are both tired. Tomorrow morning Leon has his last rehearsal, and in the evening, his first concert. I will be attending the second. Midnight is the time for phone calls to New York. Cella reminds me of Philip’s request that I send him a daily fax to reassure him that everything is fine.

C rino,” the darkness murmurs, then after a moment, “Hypocrite.” After another pause, the whisper returns, and I finally make out “Hypocrino, hypocrino,” repeated by the small, insidious voice of the night. I twist in sleep’s muddy waters, I raise my left hand, heavy, soft, and pull the covers above my cotton-filled head, then slip down again into the underground of slumber.

My eyelids blink. The curse has already insinuated itself, there is no escape. “Hypocrino,” I hear the voice once more, whispering into my ear. The covers cannot protect me, I cannot defend myself anymore; I shall be slowly, slowly, extracted from the black, sweet mud of oblivion, I know that only too well. It has happened to me before, more than once, to be invaded in my sleep by this murmuring in Esperanto, out of which, gradually, decipherable words separate, heralding the awakening. Tiredness no longer helps, nothing can return me to sleep’s depths. Lifted slowly, not for the first time, from the therapeutic mud to the surface, I attempt, nevertheless, to stay, as much as I can, in the blackout, with closed lids and heavy, empty mind, the body equally heavy, burdened, weighed down like lead into the heavy night. It lasts only a few long seconds; I have failed again, of course. The window’s opaqueness is now dispersed and has become purplish, translucent, as on previous occasions. The curtains are swaying to a tender, perfidious, easily recognizable whisper: “Hypocrino.”

I put my hand out, feeling for the newspaper on the night table. There is no newspaper, of course, but I keep caressing the silky surface of the wood, for no particular reason. The chances of self-oblivious confusion have been shattered, only seconds separate me from myself. I shall soon become aware again of who and where I am. I raise my left arm, staring, bewildered, at the clock.

“First you put one box on the left arm, close to your heart. This means that you have feeling,” said my Hebrew teacher, instructing me on how to fit the phylacteries. “Then you put the other box on your forehead, close to your brain. There must be no break between these two moments, no divide between idea and gesture, between feeling and action,” explained the guide who ushered me into manhood, at the age of thirteen.

In my half sleep, the wall calendar shows 1949. “One thousand nine hundred forty-nine! One thousand! Nine hundred! Forty-nine!” I mutter. I have been crossing and recrossing the threshold of age thirteen, without ever really going beyond. It is now half a century since I failed to become someone other than the one I am. All the intervening stages of life collapse into that one teenage year. On my left arm, all these years, I have been wearing not the phylactery but the watch belonging to that same orphan of time, just as I did then.

I look at the profane, silent clock face of insomnia, I turn time’s gilded knob: no, it is not half-past eight in the evening, as it is in New York, but half-past three in the morning, here, between the Carpathians and the Danube. Upon landing, I should have adjusted the watch hands to the new time zone, but I am stuck in the jet lag, in the confusion where I belong.

The future into which I was entering then, in 1949, is past. The space, however, has become the old one. I look at the time on the watch face, I look out the window to terra 1997. “Out there” no longer means, as it did until a few days ago, Romania, the “faraway country.” The faraway country is now America, the homeland of all exiles, which greets me once more with the exiles’ salute: “Hypocrino!”

The language of life after death, in this world and in the nether world, is not owned, is not one’s by right, but is merely rented. Hypocrino! This rented language is a function of survival, among all the tests and tricks and trophies of regeneration. “To function as a citizen of the United States, one needs to be able to read, interpret, and criticize texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media” was an injunction I knew from Robert Scholes’s book The Rise and Fall of English . The foreigners adopted by the exiles’ new country must sit for the obligatory Hypocrino Test. The ancient Greek roots of the term “hypocrisy”? Automatic compliance, interjections of approval? “The roots of ‘hypocrite’ are to be found in the ancient Greek verb hypocrino , which had a set of meanings sliding from simple speech, to orating, to acting on stage, to feigning or speaking falsely.” Does one learn these words and their meaning and their pronunciation as one does in nursery school? Are the natural gestures and facial expressions simply the actor’s lines learned as a child emitted by the double sent to replace and represent you?

I had cut out the review of Scholes’s book from the newspaper and placed it on my night table, intending to buy the book the next day. “Hypocrino.” I was awakened by night’s hypocritical whisper. I tried not to hear. I crumpled the newspaper clipping and threw it on the floor, as if hoping to avert the curse.

In the morning, the crumpled ball of paper was in the same place. I smoothed it out, cut out the sentence that had triggered my insomnia. I pasted it on the wall in front of the computer, then learned by heart the formula supposed to defend the exile that I was from the nightmares of truth: “hypocrino … meanings sliding from simple speech, to orating, to acting on stage, to feigning or speaking falsely.”

It is a sunny summer morning; the year is 1993. Five years have passed since my landing in the New World. Since one year in exile counts as four sedentary years, there were already twenty years. The mail brings a postcard from Cynthia: “I wish for you that one morning we will all wake up speaking, reading, and writing Romanian; and that Romanian will be declared the American national language!” In her familiar handwriting she has added, without realizing the danger of tempting fate, “With the world doing the strange things it is doing today, there is no reason for this NOTto happen.” The apartment building’s doorman suddenly greeting me in Romanian? Bard College’s president speaking to me in rapid Romanian? My accountant explaining to me the American tax regulations in Romanian? The loudspeaker in the subway announcing the next stop in, at last, an intelligible language? A sudden relaxation in my relations with my American friends, students, publishers? A joy, or a nightmare? No, the American environment in which I now live must stay as it is; the miracle imagined in Cynthia’s message would only have added a new dimension to an already grotesque situation. Her wish, however, did come true, but not in the terms she had formulated it. It happened not in New York but upon my return to Bucharest, where everybody speaks Romanian.

Ken’s comment about the transfiguration he noted in me when he saw me speaking Romanian had targeted the very poisoned heart of joy. At the age of forty, on the occasion of my first trip to the “free world,” the relatives and friends whom I was visiting had urged me finally to leave accursed Romania. “What if I do not inhabit a country but a language?” was my response. Was this the sophistry of evasion? And now that I am in actual exile, can I continue to carry the Promised Land, language, with me? Schlemiel’s nocturnal shelter? The home that I carry on my back, the snail’s shell, is not completely impenetrable. New sonorities and meanings belonging to the new geography of exile manage to infiltrate the nomad’s shell. Futility can no longer be ignored, however. Every second is a warning of the death one carries within oneself. Language provides only a proud emblem of failure. Failure is what legitimizes you, Mr. Hypocrino.