Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The magic circle has disappeared, but I can buy in the bookshop near the hotel old postcards for Saul’s collection, as he had asked me to do. There were also old picture postcards of Suceava and Fălticeni; here was a treasure to take back to New York.

On his first visit to us, Saul did not bring the customary bottle of wine, or the even more customary several bottles, as he did later on, but an old colored postcard of Buzău, the home of his grandparents and parents and his early childhood. He offered it to us, watching carefully to see if Cella and I were worthy of such a gift. This was the calling card of the exile who could not stand to hear the name of Romania being mentioned, but could not extract himself from the past, even after half a century of absence from the native places. “I cannot make my peace with the language,” he said.

I am now standing in front of the Intercontinental, in full spring sunlight. My protective ghost has returned. I recognize the silhouette, the gait, the shopping bag on her arm. Am I following her again, as I did, not long before in New York, up Amsterdam Avenue? She is smiling, her eyes filled with joy and that intelligent gentleness I had been yearning for. Reality had made enemies of us and had divided us so many times, but then again reunited us. Her smile follows me for a fraction of a second into room 1515. I return quickly to the street, to be in the midst of the daily din, and to be on my own, completely on my own, as I deserve to be.

In the evening, I dine at the Café de Paris, a new and expensive restaurant not far from the hotel. Also in the party are the counselor and the chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy, with their wives. The atmosphere is cordial. I confirm that the week I have spent in Bucharest has been peaceful, busy but peaceful. At the official luncheon in honor of Leon and myself, we had agreed that I would report anything of a dubious nature. There was nothing to report.

Indeed, nothing that I have encountered here so far has helped me to unravel any better than I had done in New York the Chagall image of the martyr tortured on the pyre of the East European pogrom. There was nothing here that could have helped me better understand whether the postcard contained a message of hostility or sympathy. The conversation in the restaurant focuses on post-Communist Eastern Europe. The diplomats offer cautious assessments of today’s Romania; question me about Mircea Eliade, the assassination of Professor Culianu in Chicago in 1991. “Soon, even here, in the East, the intellectuals’ nationalist nonsense will become irrelevant,” says the young chargé d’affaires. “The intellectuals here will become as irrelevant as they are in the West. The debate on nationalism will be marginalized, too. All intellectual debates end up like this, don’t they?” I give up trying to inquire about the diplomatic ramifications of his missions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I accept, serenely, the pleasant young man’s optimistic pragmatism, the friendly atmosphere of the dinner table, comforting in the very limitations it presupposed.

The group insists on seeing me back to my hotel. They accompany me, all four of them, into the lobby, where we spend ten minutes chatting. Were they observing the obsolete rules of the Cold War? Was this little drama destined, as in the old days, to signal to the receptionists and their superiors that I had been in the company and under the protection of American officials?

Once in my room, I open the blue notebook. I hold the pen in my hand, but a shadow seems to envelop the room, taking possession of it. I shut my eyes and close the Bard notebook, and conclude a pact with the shades haunting me.

Ken’s perception that my face lit up at the sound of Romanian, even a casual exchange on Tuesday with the hotel desk clerk, was probably correct. For that one instant, the native language had become my true home. It had happened before. In Zürich, the hotel porter, having heard us speak Romanian, had addressed Cella, all smiles, “Buna dimineaţa,” good morning, and then continued on with some small talk, in which I happily joined.

Waking up was a joke. Once one had done that, one had no choice but to go out and earn one’s living, with words. The days follow in succession, one on the heels of another, step by step, in the nomad’s labyrinth. Then, there was the day not long ago, in New York. I had woken up without actually waking up, after a night as short as a second. My American friend, an early riser as usual, was on the phone.

The voice, the bantering tone, were the same, but the words themselves, the sound, the accent… this was a strange substitute, a Balkan doppelgänger. Still half asleep, on my way to the bathroom, I heard voices in the living room. Who had invaded our apartment at such an early hour?

On her way out to work, Cella had left the TV on. It was the O. J. Simpson trial, playing out in California but suddenly transmuted into another vocabulary, other phonetics. Clutching the remote control, I switched to a different channel, then another, through all the 75 channels on New York television. On each — there was no mistake — everybody spoke Romanian! I switched off the TV and went to the bathroom. The mirror told me I was in a state of jubilation; I had an idiotic smile pasted on my face. That mask of happiness contradicted what I thought I had been feeling in the minutes after the telephone rang. I lowered my eyes into the white shell of the sink, to avoid looking into a stranger’s face. My hands were trembling, the soap slipped into the sink, but in spite of the anxiety, my face still wore an emblem of triumph.

I managed to get out of the bathroom without another look in the mirror, got dressed, went out into the hallway, and proceeded cautiously to the elevator. I was going to get the newspaper, as I do most mornings. At any moment, the door might open on yet another hallucination. On the ground floor, Pedro was at his accustomed place, behind the marble desk, smiling with his usual affability. “Good morning, sir,” he would greet me every day, in his Spanish-accented English. This morning, nodding his head in the usual way, he said, “Bună dimineaţa, domnule!” The simple “Good morning,” which was my usual response, didn’t seem right this time. The cretinous smile of enchantment continued to light up my face. Pedro, too, was speaking Romanian. And not only Pedro but also O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran and Marsha Clark and President Clinton and Magic Johnson, all of whom I had seen, only a few minutes before, on TV, along with Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Ray Charles, all singing, if such a thing could be imagined, in Romanian. “Doamne Dumnezeule” I found myself muttering, convinced that God spoke Romanian, too, and could understand me. The young Asian at the newsstand stared at me, stupefied, not because he could not comprehend the strange language in which I addressed the divinity, but because, actually, he, too, understood the code. Of this I was certain. I left the change on the counter and bent over to pick up a copy of The New Tork Times .

I looked at the headlines. What was I looking for? A wish, a promise, a message from an oracle? Such a message had indeed arrived the year before, from a town with the romantic name of New Rochelle. It came in the form of a handwritten card from Cynthia and again I recalled her words: “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 (with the world doing the strange things it is doing today, there is no reason for this NOTto happen).” Words, mere words, there was no power of predestination in the way they were put together. Should I have been suspicious of the parenthesis? I am not among the fans of Jacques Derrida and of “textual ambiguity.” Cynthia’s words were naturally affectionate, playful, innocent, well-meaning. Had I passed too quickly over the “ NOT” that Cynthia herself set in capital letters? Should I have reminded myself of the old Chinese curse about not wishing for anything too much, lest the wish come true? The wish had come true, and indeed, it had brought me not felicity or healing but total bewilderment. I felt as though I were a puppet in one of those TV children’s shows, which, to my horror, suddenly began speaking in Romanian. Does a foreigner win his linguistic citizenship, like an outlaw bursting in? When the motherland orders you out, do you take the language and run? What does the “Home of Being” really mean, Herr Professor Heidegger? Is it language, disabled alienated language, insomniac language, the Greek hypocrinoï Is language simulation, dissimulation, lies? Is it theatricality, the retarded playing at imitation? Is it masque and masquerade? All of a sudden, everything was fake, falsified. President Clinton in Romanian, Ray Charles in Romanian, Magic Johnson in Romanian — an absurdity; Romanian turned into a global language, with nobody having any difficulty understanding and speaking it. Had exile become universal exile? Was everybody now a performer in Hypocrino’s circus?