Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The language has returned, vibrating irresistibly, returning me to myself. I can hear myself again, in the language of our past conversations and in the silences. My friend in the green suit is now looking at me and smiling: “You, a hooligan? That is sheer imposture, borrowed armor. If I now scream to my countrymen, You have replaced him with a caricature, you don’t give a damn what he has to say, you only want to defile him, would the real hooligans listen?” No, she didn’t really say that. These are words she had written me in a letter not long before. “You should come here twice a year,” she had added, “to salute our distinguished colleagues, to let yourself be filmed, to sit in the taverns.”

She is listening to me attentively, and she does not seem aware of the verbal collages that Augustus the Fool is composing in his head. During the terror of the eighties, I had asked her, “Who would hide me?”—a question from the 1940s that has orbited for forty years before returning to its point of origin. “My Lavatories , this should be the title of my memoirs,” another exiled Romanian colleague, a Christian, told me recently. “I have traveled the world, from the Euphrates to San Francisco, and I can testify, no place can compete with the Romanian lavatories — the apocalypse of the feces.” Could my poet friend understand why a Romanian Jew could never utter such words? The one who was denied a motherland had to gain it, and giving it up is not so simple. “I have not been allowed one second of tranquillity, nothing was ever given to me, I had to obtain everything,” Kafka said. But this was not what we were talking about. We had not even mentioned our exchange of 1992 over an Israeli anthology, Jewish Writers Writing in Romanian , and about my displeasure with the title. I considered myself a Romanian writer and regarded ethnicity as a strictly personal matter. Should I now ask: Was being Romanian something to be wished for? We may want to read Cioran on the subject for an answer. What label was I wearing now, and why should I need one? To my relief we did not revisit the issue in our conversation. The verbiage, the quotations were all in my mind and in my memory.

At some point she must have taken off her glasses. For the first time, I see a different face and hear a different voice. She remains by the window, then turns to look at me, as in the old days, frozen in expectation. Was the pendulum of that hour of long ago ready to start moving again, at a first touch? What could be the hiding place, where could it be? She is looking at me, I am not looking at her, and I am not asking her anything, out of a fear that she, in turn, might ask me to hide her away from the new times and I might find out that I do not have the place and the means to do so.

“Let your books come home,” she says. “Even if only one person loves them, it will be enough. Ten were enough to save Gommorah.” As she starts to describe the daily warfare among our compatriots, I interrupt her and launch into my own evocation of exile, its theatricality, mimetic fission, its division of the self. The infantile stand-in is allowed to perform his new script, while the grown-up other half is bending over in the schizophrenia of ancient reflexes. This is now me, bent over in a spasm that has punctured Hypocrino’s pneuma, talking to the poet about language and the dynamics of a life underground and other preciosities.

Suddenly I am tired. I take off my glasses, rub my eyes, and observe a respectful moment of silence for the funeral subject. Then she says, “Norman, we are not all the same.” I nod in agreement. Of course not. Some people would have given me shelter not only in 1992 but also in 1982, and even in 1942. I quote Mark Twain, my new compatriot: “A man is a human being, he can’t be any worse.”

We smile and laugh and understand just how long the words have taken to find us and that, in fact, it took no time at all. I learn that after the execution of the dictator and his wife, Comrade Mortu, my poet friend had sworn never to be afraid again, never to surrender her sense as a free human being. Subsequently, she was often afraid, but behaved as though she wasn’t. I nod again. I have also learned, in the meantime, a few things about the fears of free men. I manage to mutter, “Our meeting has tamed me, it’s made me vulnerable,” a confused synthesis of confusion itself. I might as well have believed myself in another room and in different circumstances. I might as well have thought of Prague and of Milena Jesenska, yes, Kafka’s Milena, who, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, sheltered fugitives in her home. I am troubled, I admit, by the solidarities that posterity still permits. Before we say goodbye, I promise, rather unconvincingly, to send her something for publication by the small press she runs. We exchange promises of letters and reunions, a sort of melancholy conciliation between the halves of the still-in-transit passenger I have become. Am I being disputed over, like Kafka’s rider astride the two horses? No, I am flat on the ground, as I should be.

At half-past nine, Leon and Ken return from the Atheneum, delighted with the concert. We inquire about a good restaurant near the hotel. The receptionist recommends La Premiera, just behind the National Theater. Leon goes upstairs to his room to put away his briefcase with the scores and the baton. Ken reports on the success of the evening. The Schumann oratorio, Das Paradis und die Peri , was remarkable; he would like to buy a recording, but as the piece is rarely performed, recordings must be scarce. The restaurant is crowded, noisy, full of cigarette smoke. The Romanian traditional dishes have bizarre English translations. But Leon, after two days in Bucharest, knows what he wants, the stuffed cabbage. We follow his lead, in honor of his success at the Atheneum.

Visibly pleased with the surprise of the rousing performance by the orchestra and chorus, Leon is in an expansive mood. He needs excitement, great excitement. “Gomulka!” he suddenly explodes, finding the magic code. “Do you remember Gomulka?” He is asking us and eternity, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Gomulka! I miss Gomulka!” the conductor is claiming. Do I remember Gomulka? I cannot enter the burlesque frenzy, but being grave, solemn, pathetic as a White Clown, comforted, finally, by such a reversal of roles in our partnership. Yes, of course I remember Gomulka, the ghost summoned to entertain us and enhance our appetite. Yet I’m telling my joyful associate not about Gomulka but about the sensation created in Bucharest by the short visit in the early eighties of his aftercomer Jaruzelski, the Polish general and Party leader, with his smoked-glass spectacles, looking like a South American dictator in comparison with whom our shabby megalomaniac Ceauşescu seemed a humble Balkanic caricature. “No, not your little buffoon and not Jaruzelski. Gomulka! Here, in Bucharest, I miss Gomulka!” Leon is repeating like an old song in a renewed Broadway intermezzo before we order the traditional borscht with meatballs and proceed to the stuffed cabbage. Leon asks me whom I’ve been seeing.

“I met a few people,” I reply. “This afternoon, for instance, I met with a poet friend of mine, a woman who came from somewhere in the provinces to see me. Time is short, it’s true, but I’ve also been a bit wary of seeing old friends. Ken knows that. In fact, he knows that I’ve turned down certain meetings.”

Leon looks at Ken, sensing an opportunity for a funny story, but Ken smiles and says nothing, giving me leave to say whatever I wish.

“Yes,” I continue, “some Romanian intellectuals invited us both, you and me, to a meeting, a debate. I explained we were too busy.”

“You did the right thing,” Leon says, a bit of stuffed cabbage impaled on his fork. “There wouldn’t have been time. I’m leaving on Friday at noon.”