The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  Augustus the Fool, a clown whose sarcasms turned on himself rather than on others, was always suspiciously lying in wait for the moment when he would be offered, yet again, the role of the victim, which the audience always wanted him to have.

  Leaving socialist Jormania behind in 1986 gave birth to a kind of symbol-laden symmetry: my exile, which had begun at the age of five because of a dictator and his ideology, came full circle at the age of fifty, because of another dictator and an ideology that claimed to be the opposite of its predecessor. Emphatic laments over this duplication were nothing to be proud of and irritated me again and again. I would simply prevaricate in the hope that, suddenly, a moment of enlightenment would stop Augustus the Fool’s amorphous monologue.

  “I came out relatively clean from the dictatorship. I didn’t get my hands dirty. And this is not something that’s easily forgiven. Do you remember Bassani’s Ferrara stories?” My interlocutor remained silent, unwilling to interrupt me. He knew I was straining to come up with arguments as to why I should not go back to Romania, precisely because at that point the trip had become inevitable.

  “Bassani,” I continued, “is known here for the film based on his work, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini. Among his Ferrara stories there is a novella entitled Una lapide in via Mazzini. The Italian sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? U-na la-pi-de in vi-a Maz-zi-ni, a commemorative plaque on Mazzini Street.”

  My listener seemed happy to listen patiently for as long as that kept me pacified.

  After the war, Geo Iosz returns unexpectedly from Buchenwald to his native town, Ferrara, the only survivor of all those sent to hell in 1943. His former neighbors look away in embarrassment, wishing to forget the past and the old sense of guilt. In the end, the unwelcome witness, now even more of an alien than he was on the night of his deportation, chooses, of his own free will, to leave his native town forever. Should I mention, by way of contrast, the joy Primo Levi felt, upon his return from Auschwitz, of being able to live in the same house in Turin where his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents had lived before him?”

  Unimpressed with my musings, my listener kept smiling benignly

  “As I said, I escaped from the dictatorship relatively clean, I managed to keep myself apart. But I found that guilt, compromise, and even heroic resistance are easier to forgive than apartness.”

  My friend didn’t seem bored and had failed to notice that I was. I was tired of myself

  “I was neither a Communist nor a dissident. Isn’t that a bit arrogant? Anyway, I wasn’t too visible in the Balkan world of Bucharest. More arrogance, of course. And then, emigration … as far away as possible … supreme arrogance.”

  The slim blond waitress appeared, with her miniskirt and the name tag Marianne on her right breast — a French girl from Israel, studying in New York and working part-time as a waitress at the Café Mozart, on Seventieth Street, on the Upper West Side, not far from the apartment where I was busy experimenting with my afterlife. She had brought the two bowls of gazpacho, the spoons, the bread, all that was needed.

  My grandiose country — this was what I had tried to describe to my listener, the grandiosity of Dadaland, which I had not wished to forsake and to which I did not wish to return. The ineffable charm and the ineffable feces. It probably wasn’t too different from anywhere else, but what happened in other places didn’t really interest me.

  “Over the last few years, I’ve suffered from a particular sickness. The Jormania Syndrome.”

  The pianist of the Café Mozart hadn’t turned up yet, and neither had the lunchtime habitués. The newspapers were in their place, arrayed in their specially designed rack, trying to impersonate old Vienna. Wolfgang Amadeus was gazing skeptically from the gilded frame of his portrait at the two bespectacled diners at the table in the back.

  “Self-hatred masquerading as ‘Come, let me embrace you, mister.’ The Romanians have this saying, as untranslatable as their soul—Pupat Piaţa Independenţei general embracing in Independence Square. It’s a quotation from our great writer Caragiale, impossible to translate, just like that world full of charm and feces that is equally lost in translation. It’s not the embrace of Cain and Abel but a wallowing in the national mud-bath after a bitter fight, the same muddy pond where, before a new assault, the swan-whore and the ass-scholar and the hyena-minister and the innocent kid are locked in drunken embrace. No, believe me, the Romanians did not have to wait for Sartre to discover that hell is other people. Hell can be as sweet and soft as that stagnant quagmire.”

  I stopped, exhausted after this lengthy speech, to readjust my syndrome. “Have you heard how much mutual hostility there is these days between East and West Germans? You would need someone like Céline or Cioran, rather than myself, to describe such bilious hatred.”

  “Oh, stop moaning. After all, you’ve written about clowns and the circus. You’ve got a good story to tell. God has sent you one. He hasn’t passed you by.”

  “The story is too complicated, it can be told only in aphorisms.”

  “Well, on this trip, your boss is coming with you. He’ll be well received as the superstar of the superpower. The powerful White Clown, as you say. As for you … you know all the dodges, you’ve got everything in your head. What more could you wish for?”

  “The imperial White Clown from imperialist America? And next to him, Augustus the Fool, the exile. In fact, God has sent me too many interesting stories to tell, and I haven’t been able to do them justice.”

  “The Almighty can’t do everything.”

  “Do you remember what Flaubert said? If you keep preaching the good for too long, you end up an idiot. Flaubert, the idiot of the family, knew what he was talking about. Can sermons change the world? No, I know that, idiot that I am. I’m preaching not to change others but so that I can stay unchanged, a rabbi once said. And yet I have changed. Look at me, I have changed.”

  I took a short break, just to draw breath. After all, I knew that speech by heart, I had been hatching it for a long time. I did not really need a break.

  “A hooligan? What is a hooligan? A rootless, nonaligned, nondefined vagabond? An exile? Or is it what the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language says it is: ‘The name of an Irish family in South East London conspicuous for ruffianism’? In the Romanian novel The Hooligans, by Mircea Eliade, one character says that ‘there is one single productive start in life — hooliganism,’ meaning rebellion unto death, ‘militia and assault battalions, legions and armies linked together by … togetherness in death, perfectly and evenly aligned regiments within a collective myth.’ Did Eliade overcome his Romanian frustrations in exile once he became famous as a scholar? His was the revenge of the periphery against the metropolis. What about his Jewish friend Sebastian? The Jews had isolated him as an enemy, his Christian friends-turned-Legionnaires considered him a Jew and a pariah. Rootless, exiled, and a dissident, was this the archetypal Jewish hooligan? And the homeless cosmopolitan talking to you now, what sort of hooligan would he make?”

  I took out of my pocket a letter from Romania, an undated letter, like a long-festering wound. “Disorientation, confusion, sadness,” wrote my woman friend from the motherland. “You should come over, twice a year, and humbly salute the intellectuals, lend yourself to photo opportunities, participate in talk shows, frequent the taverns, replace the caricature they have made of you. I would like to know what this final outcome means: the poisonous motherland’s attitude toward you.”

  Could it have been otherwise? Would it have been better had it been otherwise? Don’t let yourself be bought with sympathy — this was Gombrowicz’s advice. Remain a foreigner forever! In his Argentine exile, he used to relish sticking out his tongue at himself in an ever-present mirror.

  The listener’s response was an amused smile. Before we went our separate ways, he brought our conversation to a close: “You’ll fax me daily from Bucharest. Just two words, to let me know that everything is okay. And if you can’t cope, leave immediately. Go t
o Vienna, Budapest, Sophia, and from there, back to New York.”

  The old-new questions had been haunting me well before we reached the corner of Broadway and Seventieth. I did not need to be at the Café Mozart or at Barney Greengrass’s to become their target.

  “You shouldn’t go back there,” Saul B. had told me over the phone. We had met twenty years before in Bucharest and then renewed our acquaintance in America. “It’s not right that you should return, not because you’re going to be in danger, but because you’re going to feel miserable. I was reading the other day the biography of another famous Romanian. All well-educated, clever hypocrites, as you know, old-fashioned, fine manners, kissing ladies’ hands, but…” The former friend of Eliade and former husband of a well-known Romanian mathematician was not discouraged by my silence. “You shouldn’t have agreed to make this trip, you just don’t need it.”

  I explained that what was at stake was the “tyranny of affections”; I had been won over by the insistence of Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College. I heard Saul’s delicate laughter at the other end of the line. Instantly, I could see his friendly, wrinkled face, his lively eyes. “You shouldn’t have been. I know that country. Just cancel everything, protect your peace of mind. You have enough difficulties here, but here you have the advantage of distance. Don’t waste it.”

  Addresses from the Past (I)

  July 19, 1986, an evening of celebration. My invited guests had been treated to Russian vodka, Bulgarian wine, Greek olives, and Romanian cheeses, all purchased well in advance and with great difficulty.

  Here come the artists, watch out!

  The artists go from door to door, the monkeys, the mimics,

  The fake one-armed, the fake one-legged, the fake kings and ministers.

  Here they come, drunk with glamour and heat

  The sons of Emperor Augustus.

  Among the guests, limping and sweating, my friend, the poet, the lonely, shy, half-disabled poet, thought he recognized himself in a character from an old Romanian fairy tale, Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare. Short and stumpy, with a blond beard, swaying, limping, he walked always slightly inclined toward the left, gentle and fearful, terrified by his own duplicities, and ready to admit and pay for them, if that was the price of survival. He suffered for every word that he wrote, for everything written about him or his friends. As an editor in a publishing house, exasperated by the endless negotiations between censors and authors, he masterminded complicated transactions of flattery and emotional blackmail in order to promote the books in which he believed.

  The pain of writing that he underwent, and on behalf of writing, was equaled only by his devotion to his wife. Julia submitted to dialysis every second day, in a socialist hospital, with ancient equipment and frequent power cuts. In addition to his poetry and the neurosis that was calibrated by the number of pills he swallowed in a day, Julia had also become the daily measure of his heroism.

  As usual, he was sweating profusely. He wiped his face and forehead with a big white handkerchief he clutched in his large and powerful fist. However, he had not taken off his best jacket, or his best tie. He had withdrawn with Julia to a side of the room, by the wall-length bookshelves, overcome at finding himself surrounded by so many close friends — poets, critics, novelists — the monkeys, the mimics, the false kings, the false one-armed men, all the friends of Emperor Augustus the Fool. We were united by our books and our readings, made brothers by the competitive guild of vanity. Party members and nonmembers, the privileged and the merely tolerated, all had become suspect — the false kings, the false one-armed, the false apes — in the socialism of generalized suspicion.

  That July evening in 1986, in Bucharest, in apartment 15 at no. 2 Calea Victoriei, was the celebration of the end of an era. Very few of my guests knew it, but the month before, on Bloomsday, the day set aside to honor James Joyce’s exiled hero, I had applied for a visa to the West. Little did I know where that trip would finally take me.

  Exile rapidly swallowed up the decades that unrolled from that summer evening. It was as if I inhabited a set of Russian dolls, one figure retracting into another and then another and again into another, with each new time identical to the time before yet also different.

  Infantilism is what feeds the TV talk shows in which fifty-year-old children claim that their unhappiness stems from God knows what unfortunate event that happened to them at the age of five or fifteen, misunderstood children, misunderstood women or men, to say nothing of age abuse, sex abuse, religion abuse, and race abuse. Victimization, the whole repertoire of planetary complaints. The trauma that happened at the age of five explains the compulsion that manifests itself at the age of fifty? Or sixty, or six hundred? Wouldn’t a real grown-up, by that time, have developed a thick rhinoceros hide of insensitivity?

  I was racked by the guilt of not having left my motherland in time, by the guilt of not having stayed there to the very end. In that land, the chimera of hieroglyphs first appeared to me. In that land, I concluded the pact that did not promise anything but demanded everything instead. Lady Art had remained as intangible as ever, a specter here and there, on random pages of the obituary.

  In the weeks before my return, I looked back on the bends in the road of time. I remembered the taste of food and jokes, the wine and song, the mountains and the sea, the loves, the books. And, of course, the friendships that had lit up so many impasses. Yes, even someone like me, born under the sign of the intruder, was permitted to enjoy the delights of Gomorrah.

  The charm of the place and its inhabitants was no illusion, I could testify to that. Paul Celan, too, had experienced it, when he lived in Bucharest after the war, the time of “puns on words,” as he later called it with amused nostalgia. Tolstoy had known it, too, in 1854, in the seven months or so that he spent in Bucharest and Kishinev, in Buzău and other places. The mix of charm and sadness had not escaped his youthful gaze, hungry as he was for reading, but also for carnal adventure, obsessed as he was with perfecting his character and his writing, yet also keen to accost the barefoot young peasant girl or enjoy an evening in a whorehouse.

  Yes, the intensity of a whole lifetime within one moment…

  V-Day, Victory, this is what we were celebrating on that evening of July 19, 1986, in the apartment on Calea Victoriei. Decades after the first exile, I was facing real exile. That celebration was — although many of the guests, myself included, were unaware of this at the time — a rehearsal for the separation to come.

  In April 1945, I was a boy of nine, reborn and repatriated, returning from the Transnistria labor camp. I rediscovered food, clothes, school, furniture, books, games — bliss. I had obliterated the horror of the past, that ghetto disease. I was healed, or so I thought, and determined to share with my fellow countrymen in all the splendors of the present, which the Communist motherland served in equal portions to each of its citizens. The chimera of writing subsequently took me under her wings. In the early 1980s, her tattered garb could no longer conceal the wretchedness of that circus world. The new horror had not only replaced the old one but had coopted it: they now worked together, in tandem. When I made this discovery public, I found myself thrown into the center of the ring. The loudspeakers barked repeatedly — foreigner, foreigner, anti-this and anti-that. Once again, I had proven myself unworthy of the motherland of which, truth be told, my ancestors had been equally unworthy.

  In the summer of 1986, I was leaving behind, terrified, the horror of Communism and its twin horror, nationalism. Was I again being infected with the “ghetto disease” from which I had persuaded myself I was immune?

  Ten years later, many things had changed, and so had I. One thing remained unchanged, and that was my obstinate refusal to again be a victim. Liberation from belonging had not in fact freed me. A true fighter would have returned to Jormania confident in himself and his new identity, a victor, through absence, over the place he had left behind, proud of having become what he had always been accused of being
, honored to embody futility itself.

  Ten dearly beloved people represented for me the real motherland. Could these be the friends — nay, more than ten — who had been celebrating the victory of my fifty-year war in July 1986?

  The first to die was Julia. Because of Communist censorship, the letters that her husband, the poet Mugur, had been sending me after my departure had been signed “Julia” and addressed to Cella, my own wife. “I think of you with great love and lonely longing. I can hear kids playing in the street. Shall we ever play together again? Poetry, too, has grown old and can no longer write itself. We hope the days ahead will be uneventful.” There was a shortage of gas and also taxis in socialist Jormania. Mugur was paying a truck driver to shuttle back and forth from the White Palace that the Carpathians’ White Clown was building for himself. He took Julia to the overcrowded, grim hospital in the morning and brought her back home in the evening. They drove through unlit streets, past empty shops and pharmacies. “However, there is love. Love is not just an abstract term,” the poet wrote. “Just as in the sciences we have Ohm’s Law, let us imagine that we also have a Loi de l’Homme, a Law of Humanity: a man is someone who leaves behind a vacuum greater than the space he previously occupied. Absence is a prolonged spasm — once a day, once a week, several times a week. The heart grows older, and no man can bear more than a man can bear. Oh, what a playful, bashful friendship we had! If only we could start anew. Now we stand by the window like kids and wave to each other across the road, except that in the middle of the street lies the ocean.”