Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

The toad-turned-prince was smiling idiotically, but was feeling quite uncomfortable talking in Romanian to Pedro the Mexican and to the Asian newspaper vendor, or even to Philip. What Cynthia had in mind, when she played with the words, was something altogether different. Like so many writers, and nonwriters as well, she was oblivious to the dangers hidden in words.

My lunatic smile, my apoplectic seizure of happiness — everything had become simple, natural. Had I suddenly been cured of the hesitancy with which, in old age, I was trying to interpret my childhood, in a different vocabulary? That bewildering farce had not set things right but had just twisted them into caricature instead. Monsieur Derrida would have had reason to be pleased: language cannot pretend to be nonam-biguous, this is what he claims, isn’t it?

Too late, Cynthia, too late! If the miracle had happened on March 9, 1988, when I landed, as innocent as an infant, at the Washington airport, coming straight from the moon, then yes, I would have been happy to talk in Romanian to Cynthia and Philip, to Roger and Ken, to Leon, Saul B., Saul S., and so many others. Had that been the case, I would have joyfully conversed in Romanian even with Dan Quayle or George Bush. But now, everything had got mixed up. I was no longer the infant who is just learning, through gestures and babbling, its way into language. The new language to which I had exiled myself had, in the meantime, infiltrated itself into the interstices of the old. I had become hypocrino , a hybrid. Nothing in me remained pure or whole.

I now understood a conversation I had had, a short while before, with Louis. We talked about the bizarre similarities and differences of our personal histories, not only our traumatic childhoods, but also what happened to us subsequently. I could have imagined for myself an American destiny comparable to his — studies at a reputable university, work as a lawyer and writer — had my parents, like his, immigrated immediately after the war to the United States, and had they had the mean to finance their son’s tuition. Conversely, I could see Louis — a name, I guess, as unusual in Poland as Norman was in Romania — having stayed on in his native country and following, who knows, a course of life not too different from mine, through the meanderings of Polish socialism.

There were few diners in the smart East Side restaurant where the famous lawyer and writer seemed to be a regular, judging from the attentiveness of the waiters.

“Yes, you could be right,” he said. “We are very much alike without even realizing it. The only difference is that you, at least, have a language.”

The quiet of the restaurant was immediately shattered, as if some one had dropped a tray full of dishes on the floor. No, the clatter was only in my mind. Louis’s remark did not make me jump from my chair, but I froze. What did he mean? I had just lost a language and no other loss could equal it. What was he saying, he, an American writer, perfectly at ease in his country and language.

As if reading my thoughts, he continued: “I live comfortably in the language of my American milieu. It’s a language I handle, if I may say so, to perfection. The difference is that you have your own language. This is quite obvious, believe me, even in those translations you complain about. My language, perfect as it is, may be merely a tool. Sure, I can do with it whatever I wish. But you are one with your own language; you have a coherence, a wholeness, even in exile, especially in exile.”

A coherence? A wholeness? In my exotic language, Romanian, which gets lost in translation? Do I write in an easily translatable language, with a vocabulary that travels effortlessly across international borders? In the silence of that smart restaurant, I was again assaulted by a battery of questions, as I had been on that day when I went out to buy a copy of The New York Times on Amsterdam Avenue. One stroke and I was transfixed: the words had found their captive again, and had regained their meaning.

I stood there, suddenly transfixed in that unlikely moment. A century passed. My hand continued to reach out for The New York Times . I bent to pick up the newspaper. Yes, a Romanian newspaper! But now I was back in Bucharest. On a morning that felt as improbable as the one on Amsterdam Avenue in New York. I was standing at a news kiosk in Bucharest and saw the headline THE POSTHUMOUS JOURNAL OF MI-HAIL SEBASTIAN.

Whatever Monsieur Derrida might claim about the ambiguity of language, limpid words have a limpid, unequivocal meaning. No ambiguity there. Yes, Louis was right. Nobody could take away my coherence and my wholeness. Nobody and nothing, not even that dream that had suddenly turned into reality.

Today I am having lunch with my friends Bebe and Silvia. The street where they live is no longer called Fucik — in honor of the famous Czech Communist journalist and author of Notes from the Gallows —but Masaryk, a more optimistic designation. Because of neglect, the building has lost some of the prestige of its privileged location. The apartment, once comfortable and elegant, now looks shabby and modest. But my friends do not appear to have aged, they have maintained their composure despite their environment. Bebe edits an excellent cultural magazine, Silvia helps with editing the manuscripts. The conversation runs smoothly. We talk about the post-Communist transition and about nationalism, about New York and Bard College, about the visiting American conductor, about Eliade and Sebastian’s Journal . Bebe, a former student of Sebastian’s during the war, talks about the postwar life of the actress Leny Caler, Sebastian’s former mistress, a central character in the Journal’s first part. The actress kept a diary herself — Bebe owns the manuscript — which turned out to be less interesting than her tempestuous life would lead one to expect. Her sister’s life, however, was truly sensational. A refugee in Berlin, like Leny Caler herself, she formed inscrutable relations with the secret police of at least one country, or even more, whose names Bebe reels off with the rapture of an old collector of dubious narratives. It is a lengthy, Oriental-style conversation, lasting over five hours, and it seems almost to come from a previous life.

My next visit is with Donna Alba. When I rang her up to arrange the visit, the telephone instantly recaptured the voice of a decade before, but her talk now was no longer about books, a subject on which she had held forth at length and with verve.

Donna Alba, as I had nicknamed her, was, in her youth, a starry apparition. Beautiful, delicate, intelligent, she dominated literature seminars with her chimerical presence, intimidating her fellow students. They would never have dared address her in — what seemed, compared to her elegant locutions — their crass, plebeian jargon. After graduation, she survived for only a few months as an editor at a publishing house before being fired for her cosmopolitan style of dress and her silences. But the firing was not a disaster. This fragile offspring of the middle classes acquired in the meantime a new name and a new family — she got married. The godlike creature abandoned Mount Olympus and descended on terra firma as the spouse of a famous critic and feared ideologue of the new Communist elite. The apparatchik needed no permission from officialdom in his choice of spouse, and serenely accepted the incompatibility between his socalist aesthetic criteria and those of his own wife.

The famous critic, lame, myopic, sarcastic, had once been an underground Communist, tortured and condemned to death under the dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu. He bore the double scar of an invalid and of a rebel. For this admirer of Proust and Tolstoy, whom he reread every summer, the class struggle must have simply meant revenge against a corrupt Romanian society, a society that would remain corrupt under socialism, as he was to discover, himself overtaken by the speed of the turncoat disguises.