Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

At seven, I go back to my hotel, accompanied by my host, who wants to walk his dog. Along the way, we meet people we know, an actress, an actor, a professor. The street is tranquil, the sun is setting. It feels like the old life. We talk about the confusion and the dangers of the last days of the Communist regime, when rumors flew, changing hourly, fed not just by the omnipresent Securitate but also by obscure forces poised to gain from the people’s resentments.

At eleven, I am at the Gara de Nord, the main railway station, to board the night express to Cluj. The flight that I wanted to take was canceled at the last minute because of the small number of passengers, as well as the Easter celebrations. There are only two other passengers in the sleeping car and two young attendants, who look like college students. I miss the old, colorful conductor. When I was a student, I used to travel by train several times a year, making the seven-hour night trip between Bucharest and Suceava. Later, in the Juliet years, I would travel between Ploieşti and Bucharest. It was also a train that took me to the labor camp of Periprava to visit my father, and another train that carried me on my farewell journey, in 1986, to say goodbye to my parents and to Bukovina.

I am now traveling in the train of the past. My fellow passengers are the ghosts accompanying the ghost I have been and have become. The compartment seems clean enough, but there is a persistent smell of disinfectant, and the sheets, when I make up the berth, have suspicious-looking stains. The pillow, located directly over the carriage wheels, gives little promise of soothing away the exhaustion that has accumulated over the week in Bucharest. I spread the blanket over the sheets, take off my clothes, and, feeling cold, climb into bed. I draw the curtains. The darkness is shot through with moving shafts of light. The wheels are clanging under my head, and I try to cover my ears against the night’s din. The iron horse, snorting and bellowing, is racing through the darkness.

It is October 1941. Dozens of people lie piled on top of each other on the cold, damp floor of a cattle car. Everywhere, there are bundles of personal belongings, whispers, moans, the smell of urine and sweat. I am armored in my own fear, diminished, constrained, separate from the body of the collective beast which the guards managed to push onto the train and which is now writhing and struggling with its hundreds of arms and legs and hysterical mouths. I am alone, lost, as though I am not tied to the arms and the mouths and the legs of all the others. “Everybody in!” the guards had shouted. “Everybody, all of you,” they had screamed, raising their shining bayonets and guns. There was no escape. “Everybody in line, everybody in, everybody.”

We were shoved into the car from behind, and we huddled together, ever closer, until the car was sealed. Maria was beating with her fists against the wooden slots of our pen, begging to be allowed to go with us, her cries growing weaker. The guards gave the signal for departure and the train’s wheels began to turn, clanking rhythmically. The train, a mortuary procession, moved into the dark belly of the night.

My second journey by train was the miraculous Return, in 1945. It was April, just like now. Centuries had passed since my first train trip, and by the time of the second, I was old. I did not know then that, centuries later, there would be another return. Now I am old, really old.

The wheels are beating out their nocturnal rhythm, and I am sliding along the fault lines of sleep, of darkness. Suddenly I become aware of fire. The train’s cars are ablaze, the iron horse’s mane is on fire. Fire and smoke are everywhere. The ghetto is burning, a pogrom is under way. A pyre has been erected in the center of the town, ready to receive the sacrificial lamb. The martyr, a young man with reddish hair and a scraggly beard, is tied to the pyre. The scene is a kind of crucifixion, but the horizontal bar of the cross is missing. There is but a single stake, to which the martyr is bound, his hands tied behind his back. The sacred straps of the phylacteries encircle his body, which is wrapped in a prayer shawl. His legs are tied to the stake with rope. His feet, his chest, his arms, one shoulder are bare. His skin is yellowed, his face pale. His tired lids are closed, his brimmed ghetto cap askew. The windows of a nearby building are flung open and one can hear screams. People are running desperately to and fro. The vertical stake dominates the scene. Death on the cross has transmuted into a burning at the stake, simple and crude. To one side of the tragic scene, a man stands poised to jump from the window of the burning house. A fiddler rushes about in the crooked street to escape the burning houses, collapsing onto one another. A woman holds an infant in her arms, a pious scholar tries to decipher the day’s curse in the pages of his book. Reaching out to the martyr at his feet is his mother, or wife, or sister, her long veil touching his body. Over all looms the ominous stake.

I am walking, seemingly forever, toward the young martyr. The pyre is on the point of igniting. I cannot walk faster, I am powerless to save him, I have only a few moments to find a hiding place. I desperately want to tell him that this is no crucifixion, no resurrection, just an ordinary pyre, but the flames are getting closer and closer. I hear the train approaching. I hear the deafening sound of its clanking wheels. I see smoke and flames. The train is a moving torch, hurtling through darkness. It is getting closer, booming and rattling, ablaze, ever closer.

I wake up in terror and try to free myself from the tangled blanket. I am rolling on top of the wheels, propelled by their sharp, heavy rims. It takes some time before I realize that they have not punctured my skin, that I am not being dragged by the wheels. I am in a train compartment, in Romania, a passenger in an ordinary night train.

I remain there drenched in sweat for a long while with the lamp switched on, unable to summon the courage to reenter the present. I try to remind myself of fairy-tale journeys of the past, youthful sleigh rides in a wintry Bukovina, train trips to smart Bukovinan summer resorts, that autumn train journey in an empty compartment when my mother divulged the secret of her wounded youth. Of course, somehow, I fall asleep again and then wake up, with a sudden thought: the postcard of the Chagall painting, at which I had often stared, unable to understand who had sent it and why.

The train arrives on time, at seven in the morning, at Cluj. I had visited the capital of Transylvania only a very few times. The last time was in the late 1970s, for the anniversary of the excellent literary review Echinox , which brought together leading writers of the younger generation. I had always had good relations with the writers of Cluj. My books were always well received in Transylvania, which had never participated in any of the public campaigns launched in the media against the “traitor” and the “cosmopolitan.”

I proceed to the University Hotel. I should shave, take a shower, and, especially, get some coffee. But I am exhausted and lie down, fully dressed, on the hard bed, trying to relax my body and mind. I lie there for half an hour, numbed, unable to sleep; then I leave the hotel, stumble into a nearby restaurant, and at last get the resuscitating coffee.

It is a sunny day, a light breeze is blowing. The tranquillity of the scene and the short walk have cheered me up. The hotel room is modest, the bed inhospitable. Even less pleasant is the bathroom — faulty taps, the continuous murmur of leaking water in the toilet bowl. “This was my life in Romania,” I can hear the voice of one of my Romanian friends, now living in the West, saying. “The heaps of shit are a memory not easily forgotten,” he had once told me. He was the descendant of an illustrious family of Romanian scholars. There are few moments more revealing, he had said, than those moments when, after a subtle conversation with a friend who overwhelms you with quotations in French and German, you go to the cafe’s feces-infested toilet and are dazed by the mounds of refuse, felled by the stench, horrified by the swarming flies.