Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

More than half a century ago, on May I, 1945, having but recently returned from the labor camp in Transnistria, I participated, at age nine, in the celebrations of the “first May Day in freedom.” After the Nazi nightmare, that spring promised resurrection and liberty. In my pocket was the Provisional Certificate that guaranteed my “repatriation” to the motherland. The Iaşi police had taken us under their wing as soon as we had crossed the border, and had endowed us with official proof: “Mr. Marcu Manea, together with his family, comprising Janeta, Norman, and Ruti, is hereby repatriated from the U.S.S.R. through the customs point at Ungheni-Iaşi, on April 14, 1945. His destination is the commune Fălticeni, county of Baia, Cuza Vodă Street.” No mention, of course, of why we were “expatriated” and then “repatriated,” or by whom. Two weeks after our return, I was marching with my father on the streets of Fălticeni, to honor the promises of the repatriation.

Now, more than half a century later, I have made a new return and am witness to another May Day in freedom, this time, however, after the fall of Communism and not, as then, before its imminent advent. The quartet named in the 1945 document has, in the meantime, disbanded, and estrangement from the motherland has become our new state of belonging. Only the resident of the grave in Suceava has stayed behind, and that against her will. Today, I will be observing May Day with a visit to another cemetery, not the one in Străuleşti, where I might have a short chat with the Flying Elephant, or Bellu, for a reunion with Maria. I have little time, as both the dead and the living well know. I am going to the cemetery in the Giurgiu section, to visit the graves of Cella’s parents and grandparents and to pass on to them her incommunicable messages.

After ten years of separation, I would also be reunited with my friend Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. “Love is not just an abstract term … A man is someone who leaves behind a vacuum greater than the space he previously occupied,” he had written me before he died. The poet had turned Ohm’s Law into a Law of Humanity. “I think of you with great love and lonely longing. I can hear kids playing in the streets. Shall we ever play together again?” After 1986, we continued our play, albeit from a distance, and we are still playing now.

I set out for the cemetery, again accompanied by Golden Brain. The gatekeeper is the same old man of years before. We pay the entrance fee and make a “contribution” for the community. We look in the register of burials and find the location of the graves we want.

Just inside the entrance is a sculpture in the shape of a tree trunk with broken-off limbs. A plaque, with white lettering in the style of the early postwar years, reads: “During the Second World War, the Fascist armies invaded and devastated the Jewish cemeteries in the U.S.S.R., using the forced labor of the Jewish detainees. Tens of thousands of granite gravestones, genuine works of art, were destroyed or transported by the Fascists to their own countries. The gravestones on display here were saved from that destruction.” The granite slabs rise from a pedestal to form a tree trunk from which emerges a body with amputated arms. On one of the slabs is inscribed in Russian: “Journalist Julia Osipovich Shakhovalev.” Next to it; “Sophia Moiseeva Gold. Mir tvoemu, dorogaia mato” —Peace unto you, beloved mother. A marble monument, dated 1947, bears the inscription: “To the memory of the holy martyrs from Romania who perished for the Sanctification of the Holy Name, in the waters of the Black Sea, on the ship Struma.” —commemorating the 769 fugitives from Romania seeking haven in Palestine, who met a watery death when their boat was sunk by a Soviet torpedo in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942. Their names are inscribed on three sides of the marble.

I am silent, lost in the past. I see a tall, slim man, slightly bent, moving with a kind of quick determination and totally engrossed in his tasks. I also see a neat, elegant woman, with a serene air of distinction about her. And I see another woman, lost in the fog of old age, enjoying a secret sip of cherry liqueur. They have finally found their roots here; nobody can accuse them anymore of being “rootless aliens,” foreigners. Now they are all dust, the nation’s soil, property of the motherland. Once they were strangers, now nobody cares. They are dust of planet Earth, which does not belong to anyone. I lay my palms on the white slab marking the grave of Cella’s father, Jack, and on the stone of the grave shared by Evelyne and Toni, Cella’s mother and grandmother. I place a pebble on each gravestone, as is the custom of the ancestors, now all turned to stone, to dust. I see the cemetery in Suceava and the small cemetery awaiting me at Bard College. We look for the grave of the poet Half-Man-Riding/Half-Dead-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare/Half-One-Legged-Dead-Hare.

“Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment” —one moment, please, Mr. Executioner, my friend had pleaded uselessly, still riding a half-lame illusion. “The fire is weaker than the book it is consuming,” he is saying, as he hobbles around, frightened and sweating. “You may ruin yourself, if you wish, but you must do it with enthusiasm,” the tireless one tirelessly repeats, shaking with fear at each syllable, as though it were a sword. “Where are you, student of fear? Where are your Bibles?” he asks me as he hops around on one leg, together with his lame black dog. Then he again whispers his secret into my ear, with brotherly tenderness: “Poetry, the lie detector prone to burst into tears.” The shadows and the clowns take off their masks, their prostheses, leave aside their crutches, and line up into a neat row of phosphorescent letters: “Florin Mugur — Poet—1932–1991.” I am alive, still alive, for yet another living moment, leaning against the gravestone of Florin Mugur, and against that other gravestone, in the cemetery of Suceava. “I hope to be the first to die,” she had said. “Without Marcu, I’d be a burden for you. I’m difficult, not easy to live with. I’ve always been nervous, prone to exaggeration. It would be too hard on you.”

Indeed, it would not have been easy. She panicked easily, she was difficult, she certainly had a tendency to exaggerate — yes, it would have been hard. “Someone you love is someone whose absence in the space he or she previously filled is greater than their presence there.” Her prayer was fulfilled; she was the first to die, leaving behind a vacuum even greater than her overflowing presence had been. Yes, she fulfilled the criteria of Ohm’s Law, as reformulated by the poet Florin Mugur. Her presence could be unnerving, possessive, unbearable, but the vacuum she left was even greater, even more unbearable. “You and Cella, look after Father,” she had said. “He’s not like me, he would never ask for anything. He’s silent, unsociable, you know him. He’s remote and fragile, easy to hurt.” Destiny had looked after him. The widower was extricated from his native land and sent to the Holy Land, into the loneliness where, in fact, he had always lived. Recently, he had been transferred to the desert of Alzheimer’s disease.

The day before, at the cemetery, we had not had a chance to speak about Father, or about Cella. Our reunion had been brief, the dead woman’s questions concerned only with her son and her father. These, it would seem, had been the only important men in her life, the son now living in the Babylon of New York and the bookseller Avram lying in a nameless forest in Ukraine. Now, as I was leaving the graveyard of the past, I must speak to her of her husband.

I visit him at least once a year, I tell her. His eyes brighten whenever he sees me. He smiles happily, an even, unchanging smile on a serene face. I tell her of my last meeting with him.