Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

It was a Sunday in June. I had arrived earlier than planned at the Beit Reuven Nursing Home in Jerusalem. I went up to the second floor. This time Father was not among the phantoms in the dining room. I went to seek him in his room. I opened the door and stood on the threshold, without making any attempt either to advance or to retreat. I looked at him. He was standing, naked, in front of the window. A tall blond young man, a towel in each hand, was cleaning him up. The young man saw me and smiled. We knew each other from previous visits and had chatted a few times. He was a young German volunteer, working at that old people’s home in Jerusalem. Thin, delicate, he behaved with untiring courtesy, both in his work and outside it. He switched easily from German to French and English, as well as improvising sentences in Yiddish, to make himself understood by the old people in that Babel of senility. We had chatted in German, the language he now used to soothe my father. What I saw confirmed what I had learned from the nurses who sang his praises. He devoted himself, like no one else, to the daily tasks that made the other attendants collapse with exhaustion. He was carefully cleaning each part of Father’s feces-smeared body — the bony arms, the waxen thighs, the flabby buttocks, the glassy knees. The young German was carefully wiping the old Jew clean of the dirt that the Nazi posters had once heaped on him. I looked on, motionless, then left, closing the door behind me. I returned to the dining room. Father arrived half an hour later, smiling. “You’re late today,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping late,” he answered, with the same absentminded smile. He had forgotten all about the young man who had just finished cleaning him, brought him fresh clothes, dressed him, and taken him to the dining room where I was waiting.

I had to give her this last bit of important information before leaving the graveyard of the past, that Father, freed at last from solitude, was now, without any thoughts or worries, in the tender care of a young German seeking to redeem his country’s honor. At last, nine years too late, I had finally showed up for my mother’s funeral, and my motherland’s, too.

The shadow is tiptoeing around the room, careful not to wake me, impatient to wake me, so that she can see me and get some meaning back into her meaningless world. No, I am not going to move, I am not going to wake up. She withdraws at last, and I get up, mindful not to look around, eager to be fully awake and start my preparations for departure.

Marta calls from Cluj to wish me a safe journey and to give me the bad news: her request to the Soros Foundation for a subsidy to publish the books I had finally agreed to let her bring out had been turned down, despite her best efforts. “I don’t know how they could reject this application,” she says mournfully. “I used the American promotional method: The future Nobel Prize for Romania! The Laureate’s Reconciliation with his motherland! I even believe these statements, you know.” I am reminded of the reporter-poet from Suceava, who had boasted of the financial support he had received from the same foundation for one of his books of poetry to be published in England. Marta’s news seems like an affectionate prank, a farcical ending to my journey.

I take a seat near the window in the café off the lobby, one last hour in the bosom of the motherland. I am looking through the quotations I have jotted down on the first page of my blue notebook, to guide me on this trip — Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, all of them with something to say about language as motherland. I needed other people’s words, after having talked to myself for too long. I am seeing and unseeing at the same time. I can, however, make out the silhouettes from the past and I am sure I see them — miraculous apparitions — Liviu Obreja, my former albino classmate, and his blond wife. They are walking past the carpet store on Batiştei Street, with two big shaggy brown dogs pulling at their leashes and dragging Liviu along.

Liviu has a lot of gray hair now. He looks, and doesn’t look, older, like those of us who, not having had the time or the strength to grow up, have extended adolescence into old age. He is the same as he was fifty years ago, the same ghost I have bumped into over the past fifty years in bookstores and record shops. He is the permanent symbol of this place, of any place. In a thousand years’ time, I would probably find him here, unchanged.

I had been waiting for this inevitable meeting since the first day of my return. Here he was at last, on that May afternoon, dragged by his two large shaggy dogs. Here they were, the four of them — father, mother, and two huge, fretful babies. I look at them through the glass wall of the aquarium where I am having my farewell cup of coffee. I would like to get up, go out into the street, and catch up with Liviu, but time has already blinked and the moment is gone.

Dinu was right, I concede in my perplexity, about the two dogs Lache and Mache, they really exist. I saw them with my own eyes, only a moment ago, on Batiştei Street, at the corner of Magheru Boulevard, not far from the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. Was that the route we had started on forty years before, the three of us — Liviu, Dinu, and myself — in the purple days of Stalinism, from which we had tried to escape, with the help of books, music, and other teenage tricks? No, at that time none of us would have guessed what purgatory lay ahead.

Augustus the Fool had been oversensitive, awkward, and remote throughout his tour of posterity. But now, at last, he has found a suitable audience. In an enlightened moment I open my blue notebook and start an epistle to Lache and Mache: “The departure did not liberate me, the return did not restore me. I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography.” Lache and Mache, being genuine cosmopolitans able to adapt anywhere, would understand how enriching the experience of exile has been, how intense and instructive. I have no reason to feel ashamed before such an appreciative audience, so I write feverishly, in scrambled, hurried words, all the unanswerable questions that come to my mind: Was my journey irrelevant? Did this very irrelevance justify it? Were the past and the future only good-humored winks of the great void? Is our biography located within ourselves and nowhere else? Is the nomadic motherland also within ourselves? Had I freed myself of the burden of trying to be something, anything? Was I finally free? Does the scapegoat, driven into the wilderness, really carry away with it everyone else’s sins? Had I taken the side of the world in my confrontation with it?

I have finally found my audience. All those delayed thoughts now find expression, as I scribble away furiously in the hotel café and in the taxi taking me to the airport. The impossible return was not an experiment to be ignored lightly, dear Lache and Mache. Its irrelevance is part of our greater irrelevance, and therefore I bear no one a grudge. As I wait to check in at Otopeni Airport, I write down the ending of a story that, I am certain, the recipients of my epistle will understand: I will not disappear, like Kafka’s cockroach, by burying my head in the earth. I will simply continue my wanderings, a snail serenely accepting its destiny.

I board the plane for the flight from nowhere to nowhere. Only graveyards are permanent. The permanence of passage, the comedy of substitution, the magic trick of the finale — Augustus the Fool could have experienced such banal revelations without ever submitting to the parody of the return from which he is now returning. Now I am certain: America offered the best possible route of transit. At the very least, I now have confirmation of this truth. I climb the stairs to the plane, to the rhythm of the prayer I had learned from the Polish poet, step by step, word by word: “In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. The social system is stable and the rulers are wise. In Paradise one is better off than anywhere else.” I mutter that refrain of the aliens as I settle into the womb of the Bird of Paradise. The emptiness increases, and so does the dizziness. Takeoff — an uncertain suspension, the privilege of feeling dispossessed of one’s own self, the gliding, the void, the absorption into the void. I use the stopover in Frankfurt before my transatlantic flight to complete my letter to Lache and Mache — details from my last morning in Bucharest, the swirling vortex of the thoughts in the passenger’s mind, the scapegoat, the cockroach, the snail’s shell, the prayer of Paradise’s aliens. My blue notebook has been good company at the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, on the train to Cluj, and on the flight to Frankfurt. Over the twelve days of the journey, it filled up with nervous, twisted letters, arrows, coded questions.