Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

He hasn’t asked me any questions and I don’t know what to tell him about myself. Should I mention the teenage sweetheart who “lured” me to Bucharest, as he used to say? She has been living in England since the early 1970s. I describe the photograph of herself, with her husband and children, that she once sent me; I also inform him of her recent divorce. The subject doesn’t seem to engage him, and he simply remarks that he has kept in touch with the Londoner’s younger sister. Should I ask him about the political situation? His reply is prompt: “Swine, all of them.” He is not referring to the present government but to their predecessors, the coalition led by the ex-Communist Iliescu. He offers us more wine, and I notice that Golden Brain has dozed off in his armchair. I rise to go to the bathroom — the decisive moment, the condition of the lavatory. The room is tiny, the ancient paint is peeling off the walls, the pipes are rusty, likewise the chain of the toilet. The razor is old, the towel crumpled. The room isn’t dirty or untidy, just impoverished, the loneliness of the bachelor. I return to the room. Dinu is holding a photograph. “Do you remember the class of 1953? Here you are, in the middle.”

I recognize all the faces, but can remember the names of only a few. Lăzăreanu and his accordion; Fatty Hetzel who played the violin; the butcher’s son who, in the years of the left-right deviations, was called an “enemy of the people” and who later became a veterinarian in Israel. There is Shury, grown rich in Caracas. And there is Dinu Moga himself, in a white suit and checked shirt. Behind him, withdrawn and modest, the absolute prize winner, Mircea Manolovici. I spot myself in the center of the second row, with my hand on the shoulder of — I can’t believe it — Fatty Hetzel, whom I had expelled from the Union of Working Youth the year before. I stand there in my checked shirt, sleeves rolled up, with my thick hair and that stupid smile of adolescence. To the right, partly obscured, is the banner with its lengthy slogan: “The great Stalin has educated us … serving with devotion … the people’s interests … a holy cause.”

“Let me take the photo to New York,” I say. “I want to have an enlargement made. I’ll send you back the original.”

He agrees, and then says, “I have all your books. I think this would be a good time for you to inscribe them.”

Surprise! He has never told me before that he has any of my books. But there they are, eight copies in good condition, which he retrieves from some niche hidden to view.

He seems less impassive than before, his disgust and bitterness are on the point of bursting. Is this the accumulated effect of all those socialist decades, or the realization that a new beginning is impossible?

In the old bookcase, the books are still displayed in the familiar order. The bottles stand in orderly rows, as always; the old carpet is the same. It would seem that the incomprehensible entity called biography is looking for an appropriate epitaph. This is an ordinary visit, as in the time when I used to come for a few days to see my parents and my hometown. We say goodbye with few words, as usual, as though I were not going back to New York and as though we were not aware of something called death.

“Quite a character, your friend,” Golden Brain says as we go down the dark staircase, “a mummy, all embalmed arrogance.”

Not far from the park entrance we are met by the reporter-poet, this time accompanied by another poet. We go for a short walk in the direction of Zamca, the thirteenth-century citadel whose remains are among the city’s chief tourist attractions. The hill, the forest, and the ancient walls, marking some old border, are now a no-man’s-land from which one recedes into one’s self before venturing forth again into the city.

On both sides of the sloping street are small, neat houses, which I remember from the old days. On the right, at number 8, is the unmarked headquarters of the Jewish community. Next to it, the three-story apartment building where my cousin, the teacher Riemer, with his wife and four kids, used to live. Now they are all in Jerusalem. At number 20 is the white house with a colonnaded porch, the former home of Dr. Albert and his family. To the left, the small, elegant house of the Moga family, which Dinu has sold to who knows which inhabitant of the future century.

We are now at the top of the slope, facing the Armenian belfry and cemetery. We turn left, walking side by side, and reach the walls of the citadel and church, where the reporter takes our picture.

We return to town along a parallel street, the route, I now remember, that my Juliet and I, intoxicated by our heady words, used to take, under the hostile eyes peeping from behind the curtains. We stop in front of a rustic-style house, displaying a pink sign with yellow letters: LA MIHAI, BAR-CAFÉ. Another sign touts Pepsi-Cola. We continue down the slope. From behind a window, a skeptical-looking white cat, with the pointed nose of a gossip, stares out at us. Not far from the end of the street, just before the high school, is a massive one-story house, with elaborate ornamentation. Finally, we come to the severe Austrian lycée where I was once a student, with its heavy wooden front door, the playground, the gym, the basketball court.

Back in town, we pass the bookstore, the park, the travel agency. There is a bus at the stop waiting for its passengers. I should go back to the cemetery, to the one keeping watch over me. She would have approved of how I spent the day. Yes, I did well to seek out Dr. Rauch, a very kind man. I did well to take a bottle of whiskey to the Secretary of the Jewish community, who had arranged for me to visit the cemetery and who will oversee the repairs to the grave’s iron fence. It was a good thing, too, to have given an interview to the local paper; after all, this was our hometown, and you saw, didn’t you, how that woman architect hasn’t forgotten you, hasn’t forgotten us. People don’t forget, we mustn’t bear grudges against anyone. The gentle, old words of the past …

Has today been a calm day in her anxiety-laden life? I wanted to believe so, a peaceful day of conciliation with the world. She would have listened avidly to my stories about Dinu and the director of the Agricultural Bank and my former sweetheart, who moved to London. She would have wanted to hear about Leon’s success at the Atheneum in Bucharest and about my nightmare on the train from Bucharest to Cluj. She would have repeated all the old words of forgiveness and acceptance. Then she would have asked for news of her husband, now resettled in Jerusalem, and of my dear wife, who shares my life in New York.

But I cannot go back to the cemetery. It has receded, locked up in the darkness, its residents have withdrawn into their well-earned night. At the airport, I wait for takeoff. I look out the glass wall and see the field, the forest, on the distant horizon. A loudspeaker plays Romanian folk music, the same tunes that were played ten, twenty, thirty years ago.

Two hours later, I am back on the seventeenth floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Tonight, the Balada restaurant is offering an evening of folk music, instead of the Italian and American popular songs. This time I am not the only customer, I share the golden and red space with a pilot from British Airways.

Back in my room, my eyes glued to the ceiling, I try to regain possession of the day I had left behind. The wall behind the bed is cold in the blackness of the night.

May I, International Workers’ Day, is no longer celebrated in post-Communist Romania. The tiny group who have rallied in front of the hotel are a joke compared to the mass rallies of socialism’s early decades. The modest, straggling assembly, the improvised banners, the cheeky rebelliousness, all belong to the country’s impoverished present, not to its equally impoverished past. The Tyrant himself, in the last decade of his reign, had canceled all “internationalist” festivities. Those that remained acquired a pronounced nationalist character, focusing on the figure of the Incomparable One.