Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Suddenly, through the misty window, I see Cioran. He walks cautiously down the hospital corridors, muttering some incomprehensible words. Over half a century earlier, he had freed himself, through an infernal transplant operation, from his native language, and had settled, like a sovereign, in the realm of the Cartesian French paradoxes. At this very moment, however, he is muttering again the old words. The Romanian language, so suited to his temperament — which, in his exaltation, he had managed to “denationalize”—returned to him, in his Alzheimer’s fog. He is muttering old senseless words in his old language, his countryless exaltation replaced by a gentle prenatal senility.

He would probably appreciate being addressed as Mr. Hypocrino. We might dissect the wanderings of exile, as we had done one evening in 1990, in his Paris attic. Should I now knock on eternity’s window and remind him of the letter he had sent me, after I had left Romania? “C’est de loin l’acte le plus intelligent que j’aie jamais commis,” he had written — emigration was by far the most intelligent thing he had ever done. Was that mere post-trauma vanity, Monsieur Cioran? Why survival at any cost? Do we need the adulation of our name and nothing else? Why don’t we accept the end, why do we want to become orators again?

And what do you think about hatred, Monsieur Hypocrino? Does other people’s hatred of us finally cure us of confusion and illusions, does it render us more interesting in our own eyes? Does the “metaphysical Jew” Cioran have a better grasp of the ancestral articulation of hatred than the genuine Jew? Would our own beloved Bucharest be the suitable arena for such a debate?

The watch face on my left hand, near my heart, does not have three hands, as my old watch used to, one for seconds, one for minutes, and one for hours, and I no longer need to wind it in the evening before going to bed. I no longer listen to its tick-tocking to hear my time crumbling away, second by second. I would not have heard anything anyway. The seconds died out, unknown, in the new watch’s tightly closed belly.

Should I go downstairs to the lobby and listen to the language of the past, listen to Cioran, listen to my own self, to the old sound, the old language, the memory of what one was before coming into being? Such opportunities should not be missed. In Turin, in 1992, at a writers’ conference on Eastern Europe, the English translation of my presentation, thank God, proved useless. There were many excellent interpreters from Romanian into Italian at hand. Saved, resuscitated, happy at learning this, I found myself accosted by two fellow countrymen. The short, plump, and smartly dressed man, wearing a wide, conventional smile, introduced himself as the Romanian cultural attaché in Rome; the other, as a literary man from the Casa di Romania, also in Rome. “What language would you use?” the cultural attaché asked, looking me straight in the eye. “Romanian,” I answered. “At long last, I can speak Romanian,” I added cheerfully. My fellow nationals had some difficulty hiding their smiles, a mix of skepticism and suspicion. They continued to scrutinize, in silence, the face and gestures of this surprising literary representative of the motherland, so happy, would you believe it, to address the world in Romanian. Poor thing, happy to speak in Romanian, even to the officials of an officialdom which he had little reason to trust.

As we said our goodbyes and I was advancing toward the stage, I unwittingly left an eavesdropper behind. The two had not realized that, one step away, there was a witness to the scene, my wife. Her wary ear had caught their reaction. “Have you heard,” one said, “he’s going to speak in Romanian. Big deal! And he’s pleased about it, too.” His companion replied, “He can even speak in Hungarian if he wants to, for all I care”—Hungarian being, of course, worse than English.

Yes, Ken was right to question Mr. Hypocrino about language. Its nocturnal murmur wakes me up frequently, like a vagabond electric current searching for its outlet — the night’s deep underground waters capturing words in gentle tumultuous wavelets, the somnambular monologues about the richness of failure and the benefits of insomnia.

The clock face now indicates past five in the morning in Bucharest, the dead of night in New York. The silence of the room and the silence of the old heart measure out the rhythm of time’s childish, implacable pulsation. For time’s temporary lodger, the hotel space is adequate enough.

In a 1992 interview, my friend reminded me that I had asked her ten years earlier, “Who would hide me?” A decade later, it was her turn to ask me who was hiding me there, in faraway America, land of easy disappearances and rediscoveries. Now, five years later, we are to meet again and I wonder behind which mask can I hide, the one of the man I once was in the homeland of failure or the one I have become in the land of success?

She is waiting for me in the lobby, dressed in a green tailored suit, as if for an academic conference. She is no longer the young poet I used to know in the 1980s. She is now a Ph.D. in philosophy and a university lecturer, the editor in chief of a literary review and the head of a publishing house. But her smile is the same as before, and as her letters had confirmed, her character has remained unchanged.

We look at each other, and I see her features through my memories — the face of Maria Callas, a Balkan effigy, asymmetrical, mobile, the gentleness easily turning into asperity and back again. We go upstairs to my room and she puts down her jacket and her bag. Her thin silk blouse outlines the fragility of her shoulders and arms. There is a prolonged silence. Should I tell her about my wanderings, my thoughts about aging? I have no idea where and how to start. The letters have not replaced the familiar voice and the eyes now before me again. The words, however, are welling up with a will of their own. We are not talking about the nationalist, Communist, and anti-Communist hysteria, but about something else, and we are both, at long last, laughing. The jokes do not seem related to what we say, for I can hear her summing up an unuttered monologue, addressed to me: “In spite of the awards, the prizes, the translations, and the professorship, for all of which you are envied, I sense a wound festering in you. It is not difficult to guess what it is. You must write more books, that’s the only solution to your problem.”

Of course, this is the wound, and that is the solution. Have I ever told her about my comic doppelgänger, the stereotype in which I feel I have been imprisoned, the witch who has been found out and is set on fire in the marketplace by the napalm of hostility and burned to a crisp by the past? As usual, my mind fills with quotations, as if only the rhetorical hysteria of other people’s words could release me from myself. “Should you miss your native place,” I hear an alien voice saying, “you will find in exile more and more reasons to miss it; but if you manage to forget it and love your new residence, you will be sent back home, where, uprooted once more, you will start a new exile.” Wasn’t it Maurice Blanchot who said that? Should I tell her about the straitjacket of stereotypes, should I open the drawer into which Kafka crammed his co-religionists? Should I mention the circus performer riding astride two horses, or the man lying flat on his back on the ground, Kafkaesque images both, and indeed to be found in a postcard written by Kafka in 1916?

I am not sure whether she replies to my outburst, or whether it is my own voice I am hearing: “No, you are wrong. You are evading the issue with all these metaphors and these quotations and all this rhetoric.” That is what she should have said. My talkativeness seems to have no other purpose than to speak, the words pouring out in Romanian. If Ken was looking for further evidence of my linguistic transfiguration, he would have found it here.