Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Leaving the motherland was by far the most intelligent thing he had ever done, he had once told me. But he had not managed to heal. “Romanians” goes one of his posthumous aphorisms. “Everyone who comes into contact with them becomes shallow, even our Jews.” Ah, la nostalgie de la boue , the sweet delights of the mud! This country has given birth not to saints but to poets…

“You are not Cioran,” I tell myself. “A Jew cannot say that he is wiping his ass with the motherland, as Cioran’s beloved Iron Legion did in 1940. Nor that the Romanian’s heart is an asshole, as one of his disciples recently declared. Nor that the history of the Romanians is the history of Romanian public lavatories. You haven’t been granted that sort of legitimacy. You don’t have the impudence, the therapeutic impudence. It’s difficult for you to give up shame. You are ashamed for their sake, for your own sake, aren’t you?”

Impudence as identity, the hidden shame, swelling with infected wounds, yes, I knew all about that, the shame of not having left on time, and then of having finally left, and the shame of being brought back to square one. “I have consecrated too many thoughts, too much chagrin, to my tribe,” Cioran cries out, unheard by anybody, as he kneels by the window staring at the invisible, derisory authority.

The hidden thorn, twisted in the flesh, would not allow itself to be extracted. Kafka would probably understand. “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world,” he had advised me. But how could one, when under siege, distinguish among the hostile faces? It is all one face, the same illegible grimace. How can you be on their side if you cannot distinguish their faces, and how can you distinguish their hostility from the enemy within, with whom you spontaneously fraternize? “Too much chagrin,” Cioran mutters, his head between his knees. They could have been my own words, too many thoughts, too much chagrin. The old century is tired, this is the endgame. We are all making our own beds, to hide somewhere from the monsters of tomorrow. Pajamas are not the most appropriate costume for this. “The night’s circus requires magic,” the ghost whispers, “and you have never been any good at magic.” That’s true. I have failed again. Magic would solve everything, would turn everything upside down, inside out.

Cioran disintegrates, leaving me in the night of nothingness with the echo of his whimper in my ears. “My country,” he cries out wildly, as he disappears. “I wanted to cling to it at any cost, and there was nothing I could cling to.” At any cost? I could no longer afford that. I was bankrupt, not the first or the last to be so. One cannot lose what one does not possess, and there is no return. “No return, either good or bad,” Cioran had repeated, as had so many others, from time immemorial. What privilege can compete with this impossibility? To belong to nobody, to be a stone, with no other legitimacy than the present moment. Nothingness, and no revenge apart from transience.

I was suddenly looking forward, impatiently, to my return to America, to be back among my fellow citizens, the exiles, the lodgers with equal rights in the motherland of all the exiles, freed from the excesses of involvement and the aspirations to ownership, reconciled to the nomad’s tent and the present moment. “You have come to the right place” was how Philip welcomed me, the East European Augustus the Fool, in the spring of 1989, upon my arrival in the New World. Nothing in the wanderer’s face showed that there might be any place in the world he could call his own. Stuttering, with his hand pointing to the wheel of fortune — is this what I looked like? My American interlocutor looked at me with moderate curiosity, from behind gold-rimmed glasses, and smiled encouragingly. He was leaning back in his comfortable armchair. He had put up his long feet, American-style, on the table. I could see the Italian-made shoes, soft as gloves, in which his bare feet luxuriated.

“I don’t think so. America doesn’t suit me,” I muttered. “I did not mean to end up here, and now I can’t find a hole in which to hide.”

He continued to smile his encouraging smile. “Everything will be fine,” he murmured, with a kind of parental resignation. “Gradually, you’re going to start writing again, you will be published. You will even have your own circle of fans. Not many, naturally, but in America everything comes out well in the end. You will gradually get to understand how great this country is.”

“How many generations ago did your family settle here?” I asked, just for the sake of asking something, to forget my self.

“Three,” he answered.

“My family buried five generations in Romania. Then something happened, as in Germany, or in medieval Spain. My mother’s parents are buried, not in Romania, but in a forest in the Ukraine, in that ethnic dumping ground called Transnistria, in an unmarked grave. My mother always wanted to leave Romania after the war, but that is where she will be buried, she is old and ill. Only my father might yet make it to the Holy Land. He will get his own privileged grave, close to his God.”

Philip listened politely to my little speech. I was aware of how boring the sound of East European self-pity can be.

“In America these things cannot happen. The Constitution will not allow it, and neither will the country’s diversity. There are immigrants here from all over the world.”

The silence that followed confirmed that the wanderer’s pathetic recital had not been to the taste of his host, a master of irony and sarcasm. I was on the point of supplying this last ingredient, but in the meantime, the conversation turned to other topics. I managed to do that years later, when we had become closer, and after I had started to make sense of America’s triumphs and disasters. So free within the freedom of the country he loved and represented, he was by now himself under public siege. Under siege, one can no longer distinguish the faces on the merry-go-round. I had had similar experiences in socialist Jormania, and I was now reliving them in the messages that reached me from the post-Communist motherland. I now had the exile’s advantage of being able to contemplate the meaning of my “belonging” from a distance, even though no one can ever claim they are far enough from themselves.

Philip believed that my visit to the motherland was absolutely necessary to my healing process. Now, having arrived in the place that, until the other day, had been “home,” I was thinking of those I had left behind, in America. “I have no prejudices. I can stand any society,” the American Mark Twain declaimed from beyond the ocean. “All that I care to know is that a man is a human being, that is enough for me. He can’t be any worse.” Céline and Cioran could not compete with such sarcasm. “A man is a human being… He can’t be any worse.” Supreme toleration, supreme skepticism, that’s the way to go, as the Americans say.

I continue to receive nocturnal messages from beyond, and by day, requests to confirm that everything is okay. But the fax machine at the hotel in Bucharest is not working. An American, even one endowed with a fine sense of humor, would hardly get a joke like this. Still, we had telepathy. Through the long night, the guest in room 1515 of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest is transmitting, over oceans and countries and time zones, the news that the earth continues to rotate and that its insomniac passenger is okay. There is nothing suspicious lurking behind the night’s curtains. Everything’s okay.

Today we are to visit the imperial compound, the White Palace of the White Clown, Jormania’s Versailles. We pass through a long avenue of apartment buildings, each with a slightly different façade, designed as residences for the Party bourgeoisie. On the top of the hill, dominating the cityscape, is the White Palace, an eclectic mix of East and West, not unlike some prewar villas but grotesquely “modernized,” with a strong North Korean imprint. This is the first time that I see this monument of the Byzantine Communist dictatorship, and I am reminded of the epic destruction of the old neighboring areas following the “working” visits of our President and his beloved wife to the building site not far from my last home in Bucharest. I would stop my ears to keep out the sound of the sirens heralding the cortège of black limousines bringing the imperial pair. At night, the cranes stood out against the night sky, lit by the welders’ flames. By day, the sidewalk trembled under the rumble of the cement mixers. I can still hear the wail of the police sirens, the mechanical cadences of the construction workers.