Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Everything is pure kitsch. The waiters without diners, the band, the Italian singer, the second vocalist, singing rock and blues, the twenty-three empty tables add a Gothic touch to the scene. The food itself seems fake. The stuffed cabbage that Leon and Ken had so fancied I find tasteless. My palate fails to detect the old flavors; stuffed cabbage belongs to posterity, I should have explained to my American friends. Is my palate at fault? as Proust put it. Only a year before, after learning that I was about to go to Budapest for an academic conference, a Romanian reporter asked me why I did not go on from Budapest to Bucharest, only an hour’s flight away. For me, Budapest is as far away as Sydney, I told him, while Bucharest … No, it was the fault not of my palate but of posterity.

The band has stopped playing, the waiters are frozen, like mummies, in the night’s red vaults. Nobody pays any attention to the placid customer now wiping his glasses with a red napkin. More visions … the ghost walking slowly up Amsterdam Avenue. “There is a Führer in every mother, and a mother in every Führer,” the Flying Elephant used to quip.

Finally, I was alone and free, as I lay there, on the edge of the sidewalk, gripping her hand and trying to stop her from falling back, once more, into the abyss of no return, into the bottomless pit. My teeth were still grinding with the effort of hanging on to that familiar touch. Her hand had stiffened round mine, and I was screaming, but nobody could hear me in the red, empty vault of the restaurant. The claw was gripping me tightly, piercing my chest. The pain was all the wealth I inherited for my wanderings in the wilderness.

The secretary of the Jewish community in Suceava, an old friend of my parents, assured me on the phone that even though the cemetery is closed because of the Passover holiday, an exception will be made for me, “since you’ve come all the way from America,” he says. “Jewish law allows for exceptional situations.”

The cemetery in question is the one on the hill, just past the little woods known as the Pădurice, not the one in town. That cemetery, not far from our old home at no. 18 Vasile Bumbac Street, was closed a long time ago. In the early 1960s, when a new highway was being built whose route would cut through the cemetery, the workers, local peasants, refused to disturb the rabbis’ graves where, for as long as one could remember, they had been leaving petitions addressed to the Almighty. I knew the old cemetery well, with its eerie stillness, far removed from the bustle of the town. I had never been to the cemetery on the hill.

The flight to Suceava makes a stop in Iaşi. My friend Naum, Golden Brain, is accompanying me. While we are waiting to board the plane again, I tell him about my experiences in Cluj, and he rewards me with juicy gossip from the literary scene. This is the kind of “Oriental” talk that I know so well, with its concealed narratives and inside jokes.

In Suceava, as we come out of the airport, we are greeted by a tall man with a camera slung over his shoulder, unknown to both of us. It turns out that he is a local reporter and a poet, sent by bank director Cucu to meet us and bring us to the headquarters of the Commercial Bank, where I am to receive the Bukovina Foundation Award. I tell him that first I must go to the cemetery. We get into his car.

Looking somewhat shrunken since I last saw him, but wearing the same hat and the same short winter coat, the Secretary of the Jewish community is waiting for me, as arranged, in front of the Tarom travel agency. We drive past the old Austrian town hall, turn left toward the power station and the Pădurice, scene of my adolescent adventures. We go down, then up, turn left again, toward the hill. We catch a glimpse of Stephen the Great’s old citadel in the distance, turn right, and reach our destination.

I see the grave for the first time. In the top right-hand corner of the headstone, set in a gilded oval, is her picture. Underneath is the Hebrew text and the Romanian translation, four lines: JANETA MANEA / DEVOTED WIFE AND MOTHER/ born 27 MAY1904 / died 16 JULY1988. This is my father’s terse style, an expression of the tired tone of their last years together. Had my father died first, my mother would surely have composed a more generous inscription.

The grave is surrounded by a low iron railing. I see a lamp holding a flickering candle and a glass jar containing a few wildflowers. Obviously the caretaker has been alerted to my arrival. I place my hand on the cold railing and look at the gray stone. “I want you to promise me that you will come back for my funeral,” she had said. The stone feels rough and cold, but not unfriendly. “You can’t leave me here alone. Promise you’ll come back, it’s important to me.” Someone nearby is murmuring the ancient words of the Kaddish: Tisgadal veyiskadash shemei rabbo . The words of the prayer for the dead drift in the air. I recognize the voice of that friend of my parents, now feebler with age. He is reciting the memorial prayer in their son’s name. I listen to the mournful chant, without joining in and without understanding: Be-olmo divro chirmei veyamlich malchusei .

The blind woman had knocked on the door and entered the room, hesitating. She was wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and she seemed cold. “This time, you’re not coming back, I can feel it. You’re leaving me here alone.” I knew nothing of the future. Unlike her, I was incapable of reading the invisible. “I want you to promise me that if I die and you’re not here, you’ll come back for my funeral. You must promise me.” I had not promised, fearing the binding burden of promises. Now I am free, nobody promises me anything, nor do I have anyone left to make promises to. The God who gave birth to Augustus the Fool was a woman. I could not bear her adoring love and her crushing anxieties, and now there is nothing I can replace them with. She descended into the depths and then ascended into the ephemeral stems of the flowers and the trees and toward the opaque heavens. She is nowhere to be found now, not even in the indifferent, cold stone that I keep touching absent-mindedly.

Min kol birchoso veshiroso , the dirge continues. The chanter is bent with age, and he is swaying back and forth, as custom requires, in memory of the woman who was a friend and whom he accompanied to her grave. He is now invoking her memory on behalf of the son who has come back for the funeral, nine years too late. The prayer is over. We observe a moment of silence — I, Golden Brain, the Kaddish sayer, the poet-reporter, the peasant who tends to the graves, all of us, our heads covered by white skullcaps.

I go on ahead alone, up the hill, and am met by my mother’s new neighbors — David Strominger, Max Sternberg, Ego Saldinger, Frederica Lechner, Gerson Mihailovici, Lazăr Meerovici, Jacob Kaufmann, Abraham Isaac Eiferman, Rachel Schiller, Mitzi Wagner, David Herşcovici, Leo Hörer, Leah Lerner, Leo Kinsbrunner, Sumer Ciubotaru, Lazăr Rauch, Joseph Likornik. I know them all, and she knows them even better, sociable as she was and eager to share in their gossip, rumors, and praises. This is her ideal home, I tell myself. Here there is peace, amid the trees and the stones and the neighbors. This idyllic hilltop in Buko-vina should bring rest at last to my anxious, neurotic God.

On the last day, before we said goodbye, she had stopped her laments and requests. “You’re right, we must not think of what lies ahead. Nobody can predict anything, and at this age, nothing really matters anymore. I may be old and ailing and feeble, but even at this point, I would be happy to leave Romania anytime you want me to, don’t forget.” It was not to be. She had stayed behind, among her own kin, but far from the one dearest to her. Now she resides on a hilltop in Suceava, and her husband is dying in Jerusalem. A grave for their son awaits him in the non-denominational cemetery of Bard College, where Hannah Arendt and her husband, Hans Blücher, a Bard colleague, both also escapees from the nightmares of twentieth-century Europe, lie buried.