Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

I am now standing, thirty years later, at that same astral spot, at the fateful intersection, a place that belongs only to me.

I decide to go over to the news stalls. Once again, I descend into the underpass and emerge facing the hotel, a pile of newspapers under my arm. Back in my room, I look at the headlines. Of course, today is the eve of the Orthodox Easter. Curierul National announces, in bold red letters, CHRIST IS RISEN. Ziua proclaims, LUAŢT LUMINĂ, receive the light, above a half-page image of the Saviour, surrounded by saints and disciples. România Liberă carries the greeting SĂRBĂTORI FERICITE, CU HRISTOS INVIAT DINMORTI, a happy Easter with the risen Christ, accompanied by the image of Christ and a message from His Beatitude, Father Teoctist, Patriarch of Romania. Cotidianul also displays Christ’s image, as well as a photo of King Michael I, who is celebrating this Easter in Romania and to whom the paper extends greeting. Adevărul , above its name, runs a box reading: “On this holy night of rebirth in hope and love, let us all rejoice, CHRIST IS RISEN.”

I spend a longer time with Adevărul , the Truth, a name not easy to find in the West. Le Monde, The New York Times, Corriere della Serra, The (London) Times, Die Zeit, El País , the Frankfurter Allgemeine , the Neue Zürcher Zeitung —none of these have the certainty of Adevãrul , the Truth. In interwar Romania, Adevãrul was a respected daily. Immediately after the war, the proletarian dictatorship suspended its publication. The Communists in Moscow had their own Pravda , another Truth, the inspiration for the daily Sctnteia , meaning “spark,” the organ of the Romanian Communist Party, its title borrowed from Lenin’s sparkling Iskra . After 1989, Adevãrul was resuscitated as an “independent newspaper.”

Five years ago, in its issue of March 7, 1992, Adevãrul , listed me as subhuman. The author of this information, a former journalist from Scînteia , had exchanged the usual Communist revolutionary rhetoric for a new jargon, recycled to meet the debased tastes of the current readership. His article “The Romanianism of a Complete Romanian,” devoted to Mircea Eliade, cited me among those “fractions, halves, quarters, of a human being” who stood in the way of the motherland’s path to a better future. Half a man, a quarter of a man? It was not necessarily an insult. My friend, the poet Mugur, had made a point of calling himself Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. So much for “hope and love,” as proclaimed by Adevãrul , five years later, this holy eve of April 26, 1997.

I skim through the papers looking for reviews of Mihail Sebastian’s Journal , the literary event of that Romanian spring, competing in importance with the debates about Romania’s being accepted into NATO. Published half a century after the author’s death, the volume focuses on the “rhinocerization” of the leading interwar Romanian intellectuals, Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and so many others. “Lengthy discussion on political topics with Mircea, at his place. Impossible to summarize. He was in turn lyrical, nebulous, brimming with exclamations, interjections, apostrophes. Out of this, all I wish to select is his — finally loyal — declaration that he loves the Guard, places his hopes in it, and looks forward to its triumph,” Sebastian wrote in January 1941.

The Iron Guard, the ultranationalist movement, “wiped its ass” with Romania, Cioran had declared. Indeed, even as Sebastian was writing, some Legionnaires were believed to proceed, on January 22, 1941, with the ritual killing of Jews, at the slaughterhouse in Bucharest, to the ecstatic accompaniment of Christian hymns.

Late that night, I watch on TV the church celebration of the Resurrection. I go back to the pile of newspapers. Reactions to Sebastian’s Journal are varied. They run the gamut from emotional to bewildered to irritated. Why should I care? After all, I wasn’t present when an overheated Ariel harangued his audience, in those Hooligan Years before my birth, in Grandfather Avram’s bookstore in Burdujeni, nor did Sebastian have anything to do with either Transnistria or Periprava. It is true, he, too, had wanted to leave the ghetto, and he, too, had been welcomed not with flowers but, predictably, with the prospect of more ghettos. He, too, under siege, had remained a captive of inner adversity. These are similarities that cannot be easily ignored but that do not, however, annul the radical differences between us. He had lived in the world of the old codes, at a moment when they were ready to implode. I lived after the codes had already imploded. No, I am no Sebastian, but if I were to write about his Journal , would I be once more covered in abuse? Would I again be called “traitor,” “extraterritorial,” “White House agent”? I could read the future in the past, or in today’s newspapers: “Augustus the Fool has come back for more! Augustus the Fool will write about that hooligan Sebastian’s Journal and will, once more, become a hooligan himself! He has insulted the Romanian people and has prevented Romania from joining NATO!” And more. Again, I would have provoked the ire of Bucharest’s intellectual elite over the Jewish “monopoly on suffering” and the Jewish “monitoring” of Romania.

It is late, I have no strength left to tackle the future’s charades. I have been hard hit by an item in the newspapers, the death of the writer and scholar Petru Creţia, a religious Christian. Only days before he died, the journal Realitatea Evreiască (Jewish Reality) had published an essay of his on anti-Semitism in which he excoriated the new stars of the intellectual elite—”figures who in public display flawless morality, an impeccable democratic conduct, a wise moderation, accompanied, in some cases, by a pompous solemnity, yet are capable of, privately and sometimes not so privately, foaming at the mouth against the Jews.” Just as in Sebastian’s Hooligan Years. Creÿia’s voice suddenly fills the room: “I have seen the irrefutable proof of the fury triggered by Sebastian’s Journal and of the feeling that lofty national values are being besmirched by the disclosures made, so calmly and with such forgiving pain, by this fair-minded, often angelic witness.” Petru Creÿia’s words resound: “The most monstrous thing after the Holocaust is the persistence of even a minimal anti-Semitism.”

The traveler that I am can now go to sleep with these words in his ears, here in the motherland he had not wanted to leave and to which he did not want to return and where he was racked by ambiguities. A tardy therapy, sleep. One can take into the healing night everything that one has lost, as well as everything that one might lose, things one doesn’t even know about yet. I think of the hooligan Sebastian, and the hooligan Jesus, mocked by the Pharisees and resurrected in thousands of faces and burned alive, under thousands of faces, in the crematoria of the hooligan century. I can no longer fight my fatigue, I am like an old child who has finally been given the anesthetic he has been asking for.

The narrow streets of the old quarter are, for the most part, demolished. I am walking, cautiously, along Sfînta Vineri Street, toward the Choral Synagogue, the headquarters of the Jewish community. It is almost ten o’clock in the morning, but the street is deserted. After the long night of the Resurrection, the population of Bucharest is enjoying a late-morning sleep. The synagogue’s courtyard, too, is empty. Only the Christian porter is at his post.