Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Today I am to give a lecture at the university, before the faculty of language and literature and their guests, and we proceed to the campus, where we are greeted by the dean and a group of academics. We make pleasant chitchat about America, American education and literature, as well as the projected collaboration between Bard College and the University of Cluj. I recognize many faces in the audience. A TV crew asks for permission to film the proceedings, which I readily grant. I seem to feel less vulnerable in Cluj than elsewhere in the country, although I would rather be having a discussion with the assembled group than giving a lecture on “End-of-the-Century Literature.” Under the circumstances, all I can do is hide my uneasiness.

Before we take our leave, Liviu gives me a recent translation of a study on Eliade by Claudio Mutti, the Italian Fascist scholar. Eliade again? The Legion? What have I to do with all this? I’ve hardly anything to do with myself these days. I am a refugee, hidden away in a corner of the world, that’s all.

Next on the schedule is a short meeting at the modern offices of the Soros Foundation. The head of the local branch is a Magyar who, in a display of ethnic courage, was brave enough to challenge his own community. There is a refreshingly professional manner about him that makes me both pensive and melancholy. Romania, I think to myself, has always had such solitary fighters, but, alas, too few.

After lunch, I go to the Vartics’, where we are to be joined by the rector and his wife. Marta takes me on a brief tour of the book-lined apartment. I am reminded of the wall-length bookshelves of my old room on Sfîntul Ion Nou Street, then my books on Calea Victoriei, then in noman’s-land. Wine and Easter cake are passed around. Ion asks me about the phrase felix culpa , happy guilt, which was the title of my now notorious essay on Eliade. I am among affectionate, faithful friends and I don’t see the question as a threat. Still, I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I am some kind of dubious character, a leper, someone with a shameful disease that everyone knows about. What have I got to do with … But I refrain from going into these old-new questions.

I decide to put an end to the prolonged silence and pick up the thread of conversation. Oh yes, the phrase felix culpa , that famous fragment from Saint Augustine. O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem —”O happy guilt, which merited such a great Saviour.” The term culpa , not devoid of ambiguity, means sin, error, disease, crime, mistake. However, most encyclopedias of religion render it as guilt. The silence that follows this learned outburst seems longer than the preceding one.

The rector and his wife arrive, we clink glasses and sit down to a pleasant lunch and some easygoing conversation. Then Marta, taking fidelity to its limits, drives me to the airport, where I will catch a flight back to Bucharest. She is right, this is no ordinary departure. I came only for a brush with posterity.

The plane to Bucharest is full, narrow, cramped. The lady in the next seat is quick to engage in conversation. I had noticed her upon boarding — tall, slim, with a simple, casual elegance. She appears worried by the weather conditions, not exactly favorable for flying. She asks where I come from, where I am going, and receives my replies with no visible signs of shock. She is surprised that I speak Romanian so perfectly, without a trace of foreign accent. Even Romanians who left the country more recently, she says, come back with changed intonations. My seatmate, an engineer from Cîmpia Turzii, asks what I do. I am also an engineer, I tell her. I graduated from the Institute of Construction in Bucharest, not Cluj. Yes, I worked in design offices and on building sites and also did research. The old profession conveys an impression of normality. My parents were indeed right about engineering, a respectable profession; one has no need to apologize for it.

Emboldened by my confessions, the lady engineer asks how well I am doing in America as an engineer, but does not wait for an answer. She rushes on, eager to tell me how she had to change her job in recent years. With her husband, also an engineer, she is now running a small private timber-processing company that produces lumber for coffins, boxes, and smaller items. Nothing much, she adds, but it’s lucrative. She is on her way to Bucharest for the auction of a forest, but things aren’t going well: the Communist legacy is still a burden, corruption is rampant, it would be good to have a king again; yes, her family are royalists, they have always been so. Her father, she tells me, was a top pilot in an elite royal aviation unit, a monarchist who educated his daughter in the same spirit. Of course, he was persecuted by the Communists.

I ask minimal questions. The woman admits that she and her husband had been Party members. This was common practice, nobody believed in those slogans, it was all a lie. Not that things are perfect now. Although there have been free elections, young people don’t care about morality anymore, all they know are American movies with their violence and sex. We’re lucky to have the people from the mountain regions — the people she meets in her work. They’re the only guardians of faith and decency, they’re the only ones to have preserved their beliefs, they are the future. Once more she expresses her surprise at my perfect Romanian. And what are the impressions of my visit home? I remain silent for a while, finding it difficult to come up with an adequate answer. I have a friend in Bucharest, I say at last, my friend George. One spring morning, “the morning of the most beautiful spring,” as the story puts it, George, a man with many amusing nicknames, finally decided to finish a letter he had started writing to his old friend who, many years before, had escaped to a faraway land, where he was “toiling to no avail among strangers.”

The lady engineer is listening to the story, wide-eyed. My friend George, I go on, continued to stay where he was. His letter, therefore, was all the more important. That Sunday morning, “the morning of the most beautiful spring,” seemed the right time to finish the letter he had begun a long time before. He was wondering what he should say to his friend, living in a real exile.

My listener grows more intrigued. I continue, pretending not to notice her growing bewilderment. So, George is wondering what he should say to his exiled friend. Should he advise him to return home, to take up his old life, re-establish the old connections, including their old friendship? Should he tell him, indirectly to be sure, that the experiment has failed and he should consider coming home? But if he did so, he wouldn’t understand his old motherland, if he ever did. If he returned, he would remain a foreigner, as he was everywhere and always. Therefore, having lost his friends, his family, his language, he would be better off staying where he was, “among foreign people,” as the story puts it.

There follows a profound silence, the lady engineer is obviously at a loss for words. She must be wondering why I answered her perfectly ordinary question in such a bizarre way.

“Why did you keep repeating ‘as the story puts it’?” she asks, fidgeting nervously in her seat.

I allow myself another long silence.

“I read this story somewhere, I think it was a book of children’s tales. It was called ‘The Judgment,’ if I’m not mistaken.”

By now, the woman is staring at me, and it is clear that our chat is finished. For the rest of the flight, she doesn’t even move in her seat for fear we might touch. As the plane lands, she rushes to the exit without saying goodbye.

The Balada restaurant, on the seventeenth floor of the Intercontinental, is decorated in red and gold, with red leather chairs, red tablemats with a rustic motif. The waiters wear red jackets and the waitresses, red skirts. The band is also decked out in red, each member sitting behind a little red stand with a gold emblem. It is nine in the evening, and I am the only customer. Undiscouraged, the band plays for my benefit. There is a female vocalist, also in red, singing in Italian, mimicking the passion of our Latin cousins. The dark-haired, mustachioed waiter greets me in English and brings me a massive red leather folder containing the menu and drinks list in Romanian and English. I order in English, not only to get better service, but to give the silent, morose-looking waiter the illusion that at least one customer this evening is a tourist.