Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

My gaze remains fixed on a youngish couple in the last row of seats, next to my box. The man is about thirty, with thick brown hair and a mustache. Under his soiled parka he is wearing a gray suit, a purple shirt, a striped tie. He has a firm profile and arched eyebrows. His companion, who arrives after him, smiles and sits down without saying a word. The man looks at the young Greek-Wallachian princess, hypnotized. She has a long, finely chiseled nose, with trembling nostrils, deep-set eyes, long black eyebrows, dark lashes. She exudes an air of delicacy and mystery. A long bronze-colored scarf encircles her neck and flows down her dress and her hips. Her lips are a deep, ancient red.

You have returned from the dead to the concert hall, I’m saying to myself, where you once vibrated, childishly, as you do now, once again.

The rehearsal I had attended just a few days before had been a disaster. The orchestra looked like a band of juvenile delinquents and imposters, junior hoodlums in jeans, giggling hysterically, just to annoy the teacher. But a miracle has occurred. The jeans and torn sweatshirts have been exchanged for dinner jackets and black dresses, effecting a total transformation and proving that a uniform can also perform miracles and not just bring disaster. The swelling chords of the Schumann oratorio begin to fill the hall, and we surrender to this glorious telling of a return from the netherworld. It is the reverie of childhood, the dream of a hypothetical existence.

The program informs us that Das Paradis und die Peri was first performed on December 4, 1883, under the composer’s baton, in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. The peris were fairies living with the gods in Paradise, according to Persian myth, feeding on the fragrance of flowers, but sometimes descending to earth to mate with mortals. Thomas More’s poem, on which Schumann based his work, was about such a peri, banished from Paradise, to which she will be readmitted only if she brings back the most precious of gifts, something human. She returns with a tear of remorse shed by a sinner moved by the sight of a happy child. The simple but affecting story unfolds in a symphony of majestic sound, a perfect harmony between soloists and chorus. The concert is a great success, a triumph for Leon, confirmed when I pick up my coat in the cloakroom. I am approached by a distinguished-looking woman who says, “I was looking for you. I’d heard that you would be here this evening.” I recognize a brilliant music commentator I used to listen to on the radio and later on television. She does not seem to have aged, and her voice, with its warm inflections, is as lovely as ever.

The conductor emerges, flushed with the success of the performance. We repair to a nearby bistro, joined by Ken and a lady friend of his. On our way back to the hotel, we stop at a currency exchange. The large young man in the doorway bars our entry — closed. We point to the sign on the door, OPEN NONSTOP. Yes, but there is a break between eleven-thirty and twelve. We look at our watches, eleven-forty. Again we are caught in the straits of confusion, neither order nor absolute chaos, always something in between. You never know here, with any precision, what you have to face or avoid.

“Bad luck was your good luck, Norman,” Leon is telling me, as the curtain falls on another full day that the concert has made memorable. “Your dictator was your good luck. Otherwise, you would have stayed here forever.” I have given up attempting to explain my more skeptical view of good luck and bad. Later, I try to formulate the matter in Romanian, in my Bard College logbook, but the words refuse to come. What is it precisely that blocks my contact with the present, while being ineffectual against the past? In my constricted, broken shell, I entertain those old omnivorous snakes, my questions. Today has already become yesterday, the future is playing at hide-and-seek.

The future would soon turn this day into a bureaucratic joke, which arrived in a letter addressed to Leon six months later, in October 1997. It was from a representative of the Soros Foundation, to which Leon had sent a memorandum regarding the Enesco project. The letter read: “As you know, I asked a distinguished French archivist to look at the Enesco archives. I just had a report of the visit. The Enesco Foundation received him with some impatience. They told him the documents were in fine shape and he was not allowed to see them. I am at a loss to explain this. Obviously it will be impossible to provide support if the organization holding the Enesco materials will not even permit an independent assessment of their condition.”

A commonsense comment, that both Leon and I could have made to our hosts in Bucharest, or just for our own amusement, had we not already identified ourselves with our roles of improvised Samaritans.

The light is turned off, it is past midnight. I have not drawn the curtains, the darkness is not total. Seeping in from the street is a vaguely luminous fog. I am surrounded by an uncertain nimbus, the face of Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti.

“I know a few things about you. I’ve heard things,” he says.

I know what is coming next — a long pause. I also know what will follow.

“Have you been to America before? Do you know America? You can’t have any better lessons in solitude anywhere else.”

We met in January 1989, when the ten-month Fulbright grant that had brought me to Washington, D.C., had just ended. I had not completely dissociated myself from my past, had not yet explored the tricks whereby one takes possession of the future.

The Buckingham section, in a suburb of Washington, was modest and quiet. I had got used to the two small, well-lit rooms, with the wooden plank on a wooden frame that served as a desk. We would have to leave soon. Cella had found a job with an art-restoration firm in New York and had already moved into a midtown hotel, at the corner of Forty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. I had stayed there myself for a week. It was a cheap hotel, unlike the luxury Bucharest Intercontinental, where I am now being visited by Bezzetti’s ghost. The room in New York was small, only two steps from the door to the bed. The grimy windows looked down on a narrow street heavy with traffic. On the corner there was a firehouse, from where huge red mastodons would race out in a roar. The area, not far from Times Square, was infamous for its drug trade and prostitution. In the morning, on her way to work, Cella was surrounded by a cast of extras from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: beggars, addicts, bums, hustlers, the orphans of the metropolis.

The small white rooms of the modest suburb in Washington seemed, by comparison, idyllic. I did not want to leave the shelter to which I had finally become accustomed. However, the couple’s support would now be coming from New York. We had to move by the end of January.

Despair stimulates not only schizophrenia but also extravagance. In the last week before I was due to leave my first American home, my sense of helplessness forced me to become a different person, in the hope that destiny would be different, too. A few days before leaving Washington, I was scheduled to have an interview with Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti, the cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in the United States.

He observed me from the top of the stairs. Before we shook hands, I also took a good look at him — dark face, distinguished, handsome features, well groomed, altogether an elegant appearance. He waited for me to sink into the huge leather armchair, then sat in its twin, both set in front of a massive, wood-carved desk. The room looked more as if it should belong to an old Italian palazzo rather than a modern embassy in the New World.