Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Mugur rushed in a sweat from doctors to nurses to orderlies, distributing bribes and smiles, kowtowing to superiors, dedicating his books to Bruno Schulz and to Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. His was the blind stubbornness of life, living in order to prolong the life of one’s beloved. The poet survived purely on his drive to keep his other half going. The cost had kept rising, while life itself was being continuously devalued.

What once had been the painful “destiny” of the poet had now become the collective destiny. However, a burden shared did not mean a burdened halved.

I am lame. I am trembling … The trembling man feels he is multiplying; the man that wants to grasp, to clutch, to smash — or to caress — has a long way to go to reach his objective, a zigzagging path. He feels he is alone, but at the same time he feels that around him there is a plaza full of people trying to reach an apple on a branch. The trembling comes from beyond my own volition, which demands that I be much; hence my idea, which I once expressed in my writing, that, before it is this or that in terms of quality, life is “much.”

I often thought of that “much.” Mugur had told me the parable of the fat Jew who eats voraciously and becomes grossly obese. When questioned about it, the Jew says: “When they come to burn me, I want to burn a lot, I want the burning to last.”

So the poet Mugur had grown fat, too, from his neurosis and his anguish. The trembling got worse, and so did the panic and the cold and the gloom and the terror around him. The messages became rarer, constrained, fearful, and ever conscious of eavesdroppers: “We have no particular reason for complaint.” The word “particular” was laden with meaning: the inevitable had not yet happened. “Thank God, we have no particular reason for complaint.” This is how Mugur had codified the whole situation in a letter addressed to Cella and signed in his tremulous hand “Julia.”

Only in 1989, once Julia had died and the Red Circus had collapsed, did I receive the first letter addressed to me personally.

Shall we ever meet again? A few years ago, I was a whole man: I had five or six hearts, as many pairs of hands and feet, of noses and mouths — like any normal man, no? And now my hearts have been either buried or flung far away over the world. I am trying to replace them, those that can be replaced, with the random sheet of paper and a few scribbled words. Do you really believe that we are going to meet again? I would almost feel whole again. I would be, let us say, Half-Man, rather than the hundredth part of man with no hearts and no eyes and no nothing.

We did not meet again. Murgur died in February 1991, soon after his birthday, with a book in one hand and a piece of bread and salami in the other.

Meanwhile, another friend, Paul, had also died, the Flying Elephant, the Communist who had been spared the post-Communist masquerade after the Communist one in which he himself had been a player.

Also dead was Evelyne, Cella’s mother, who had presided, discreetly and elegantly, over the anniversary of July 1986. In one of her last letters, she asked that we no longer send her mail to her address but to that of a neighbor. After the publication of my essay on Mircea Eliade, when the newspapers of the new democracy were accusing me of blasphemy and treason, local patriots had chosen as their target the mailbox of the culprit’s mother-in-law, which they set on fire more than once. Other guests at what proved to be my farewell celebration had, in the meantime, found refuge in France, Germany, and Israel. Those who had stayed were no longer the same, and neither the city nor the nomad I had become had remained unchanged.

The motherland had retreated deeper and deeper into the past, and deeper inside me. I no longer needed geography or history to test its contradictions.

Was the vacuum left behind indeed greater than the body that had occupied it? This had been the prediction of Half-Man before he vanished together with the half-lame chimera he was riding. Absence was indeed just a prolonged spasm in the aging heart. And the child shouting in the street, “Come on, let’s play,” was now far away, beyond all the oceans of this world.

It was D-Day — Decision Day — January 20, 1988. For almost two years now, I had been lingering in Transit City. Finally, after many delays, the moment had come when there was nothing left to delay. “Decision is a moment of insanity,” Kierkegaard confided. So was indecision. The insanity of indecision had lasted for almost a year, after a lifetime of indecisions.

The pettiness of belonging, nothing more, its ludicrousness, nothing more, were at stake. Our hero was pale, overwhelmed by the farce that had chosen him as its protagonist in a parody of his own making. Had he not shed the tight-fitting skin in which he had previously lived? Had he not forgotten the past — he who forgot faces seen only an hour before?

“You, it’s your turn to appear before the commission,” gestured the lady in the blue tailored suit. He grabbed his briefcase and got up from the bench on which five other people were huddled together.

“First, you’re going to talk to the French representative. When you’re finished, come back and see me again.”

She pointed him toward the door to the left of her desk.

The slender man behind the desk invited him to sit in the facing chair. He sat down, his briefcase on his lap.

“Do you prefer to speak German?” the Frenchman asked in German. “Or would you prefer French?”

“French will be fine,” the applicant answered, in German.

“Good, good,” the examiner continued in French. “Most Romanians speak French, don’t they? My Romanian friends in Paris have no trouble adapting.”

“Yes, French is easy for Romanians,” he replied, in French.

He looked more closely at the man opposite him. These days, the Romanian thought, in Romanian, the examiners are all younger than the applicants.

The official had a long, narrow face, with a prominent, finely chiseled nose, dark, intelligent eyes, a thick mane of hair, and a youthful, likable smile. His tie was loosened, the collar of his blue shirt open, his dark-blue jacket unbuttoned, draped with casual elegance over his bony shoulders. His voice was pleasant.

“I was talking yesterday with a Romanian lady about you. I knew we would be having this meeting today, and I asked her whether she knew you.”

The applicant said nothing. He remained silent, in French, the language that had just delivered this surprise.

The official lit a cigarette and placed both hands, palms downward, on the edge of his desk. He was leaning back slightly in the swivel leather armchair in which he appeared so comfortable.

“You seem to be quite well-known. Yesterday, reading the form you filled in, the titles of all those books you’ve written … I was struck by the coincidence.”

As he said “those books,” he raised the applicant’s form from the desk, held it in the air for a fraction of a second, then put it back on the desk. After a long, untranslatable pause, the Frenchman resumed his melodious Gallic tones.

“I’ve read your novel Captives” he said. It sounded like the call in a fencing match: Touché! Had the foils engaged? No, the silence in the room was unpunctured. “In the mid-seventies, I think,” the Frenchman continued. “I was taking a course in Romanian at the university in Paris. There was much talk in the class about censorship and the coded criticism of the totalitarian system — the captives’ code, I believe it was called.”

The applicant gripped the handle of his briefcase. “Liar!” he would have liked to shout, in all the languages he knew. Now he was certain that he was not talking to a mere civil servant. Was there no difference, then, between the East and West? The same insinuations, the same flattery, the same traps. Was the exile who had refused to cut a deal with the native devil now forced to deal with his international counterparts? Had he become a vulnerable captive, a nameless pariah, an easy target to be manipulated at the first turn in the road?