Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

We are back in the center of town, not far from my parents’ last home. The hardworking reporter goes off in search of a camera, reappears, and tells me that somebody, a woman architect, wants to talk to me. A woman of about fifty comes running out from the building on our left where her firm has offices. She has an attractive appearance and seems flustered by the occasion. She is at a loss for words, and simply keeps saying that she used to go for a weekly cup of coffee at a neighbor of my parents. She is nervously searching for words. She mentions my mother’s intelligence, her intensity, especially the way she used to speak about her son. “She adored you, simply adored you. You must know this, of course. She would have done anything for you.” Her pleasant, deep voice comes to a halt. I mutter something, we shake hands and go our separate ways.

I am now about to make another foray into the past and I tell Golden Brain about the man we are soon to see. Dinu was a high-school classmate at the time the dictatorship of the proletariat was consolidating its power and class struggle became more acute and the weakened enemy increasingly aggressive, as Joseph Stalin taught us. Any deviation from the accepted Party line, whether to the right or to the left, was not to be tolerated, and the remnants of the old society were to be isolated. As Secretary of the school’s Union of Working Youth, I was charged with the task of routing out the three ideological deviants in our midst. The last was Dinu, son of a former liberal solicitor who had done time in Communist prisons. Dinu was majestic in his indifference. “I, an enemy of the people?” he seemed to be saying, as he slowly advanced to the Red podium for his punishment. His dark, sleek hair was parted in the middle, like that of an Argentinian tango dancer. His face was pale, his gaze self-assured. He was looking straight at me, and I could read in his eyes the miserable duplicity of the proceedings over which I was presiding. Or so I remembered. In fact, Dinu returned his Party membership card without looking at, or seeing, anybody.

“I was no longer the innocent celebrity, and very soon I would cease to be a celebrity altogether, cured as I was of the illusions of the stage on which I was performing and of the subtlety of the masquerade,” I said, as we were walking toward Dinu’s small apartment. After that high-school event, Dinu and I met again, during one of my visits back to Suceava. Neither of us was happy with the arid profession of engineering that we had chosen to escape the confusion of the times. Dinu soon dropped out of the race after only two years of study and ended up as an obscure petty functionary. He managed to preserve his aristocratic aura by becoming a professional failure. In so doing, he avoided having to wear the equalizing uniforms and bureaucratic masks, nor did he have to worry about the mediocre trophies coveted by the parvenus.

In 1959, as a newly graduated engineer, I visited him at his old home in Suceava, at no. 17 Armenian Street. His father was now dead and Dinu lived there with his stepmother, my former history teacher. She remembered me as a pupil and overwhelmed me with praise, which, I suspect, was partly for the benefit of the stepson, who did not complete his studies and settled for a modest job in his hometown. The unflappable Dinu seemed untroubled, he was happy managing his life in his own discreet way. We shared a taste for the same books and records and, probably, a girlfriend or two. It was an easygoing camaraderie, without intimate confessions.

After I moved out of Suceava, I used to see him when I came to Bukovina to spend holidays. By then, he had moved into his own place, furnished with items he had brought from his family home — a pull-out couch, which served as his bed, two armchairs, a small table, two or three pictures, and an old carpet. The Soviet portable radio must have been purchased on his last trip to Riga or Kiev and shared space with the Czech-made tape recorder from Prague and his collection of records, acquired on his summer trips to various socialist destinations. In each of his holiday photos, he was pictured with a different girlfriend. Most of his books were not on display; they were probably in storage somewhere. The only books visible, in the old glass-fronted bookcase, were a set of the red leather-bound Classics of World Literature and a set of the brown leather-bound Classics of Romanian Literature. On top of the bookcase there was an array of wine, vodka, liqueur, and whiskey bottles. Each time I saw him, nothing seemed to have changed, while my own life underwent change after change. I abandoned engineering, got married, published books, entered new stages of exhaustion or exasperation. All these seemed emptied of meaning, as if annulled by the ultimate triviality of any change. Dinu’s lack of ambition and zeal, the austere harmony of his provincial life, seemed proof of a lofty indolence compared with my own milieu, as well as with my anxieties and illusions.

As we continue walking, I tell Golden Brain the anecdote about the two Romanians, former high-school classmates, who bump into each other on a flight from New York to Paris and proceed to run through their class roll. Mihai? He practices gynecology in Milan, now on his third wife. Costea? Oil refinery in Venezuela, unmarried. Mircea? He died, poor guy, of a strange infection, in Algeria. Andrei? In Israel, a bank director. Horia? Engineering, in Basel, five children. And Gogu? Gogu Vaida? Gogu stayed home in Suceava. Are you surprised? Not at all. Gogu was always an adventurer.

We climb the stairs to the third floor and ring the bell. Within seconds, Dinu appears at the door, smiling. We go in, sit in the two armchairs, and are offered a sweetish wine he bought on a recent trip to Cyprus. But for the wear and tear, the decor seems unchanged: the same carpet, furniture, drab walls. The leather-bound red and brown volumes are in their familiar places, as are the rows of bottles. My schoolmate seems unchanged, too, apart from one or two extra wrinkles. Otherwise, the recently retired Dinu — he immediately informs me of his change in status — seems only a slightly retouched version of his old self. He tells us that no one in his family is left, they are all dead, including his brother, an engineer in Hunedoara. The brother’s wife was Jewish and she and her son later left for Israel. These two, his sister-in-law and nephew, are his only living relatives. What else? He has sold the family house and has just sold off a valuable collection of old silverware for a laughable price. It was hard to find buyers because of the economic crisis and he didn’t want to deal with nouveau riche former Securitate agents. He should have sold it in Germany, as advised by another of our former schoolmates, Ştefi, now a photographer in Bremen, but he had no time for the complications involved. Without extra sources of income, however meagre, he would not make it; the pension is an insult.

I ask about Liviu Obreja, “the tormented blond guy,” as I used to call him, on account of all his allergies and obscure anxieties, as well as his unnaturally fair, almost white, hair, invisible eyebrows, and albino skin, so delicate and sensitive that even the air irritated it. His pale forehead was always scarred, and he was scarred, too, by the imbecilic political atmosphere and his equally imbecilic engineering job. He withdrew into books, music, and art, and had married a very blond, very shy student. They lived in Bucharest, and I might have run into them last week at the Dalles bookstore or at Leon’s concert, or as I walked by the library.

“Obreja!” Dinu says, with some irritation; he had never liked him. “That sissy! His father, the prosecutor, is dead; his uncle, too. Do you remember him, the director of our high school? His old mother lives alone here in Suceava. Instead of living with her, he prefers to move from one rented room to another, in Bucharest. He and his wife now have two dogs. How can they look after two dogs when they are incapable of looking after themselves?”