by Norman Manea
The applicant had no chance to say all this. His young examiner turned to other matters and was now intent on filling out the forms. A pity, for he probably would have appreciated such ironic digressions as a form of pro-American flattery intended to win the favor of the Great Power. When he raised his eyes from his briefcase again, the applicant saw that the American official had stood up, was smiling and extending his hand.
“Good luck to you, sir, the best of luck,” he wished him, American-style, finally abandoning the language of their common enemy.
The next step on this fateful day was to see the British lion, no longer a lion. The lady at the controls was engrossed in a telephone conversation and failed to notice that the American examination was over. Even when she finally hung up, she appeared not to see the shadow standing in front of her.
“What happens next? The interview with the British?” the applicant asked timidly.
“Nothing happens next. It’s all over. Mr. Jackson signed for the British as well.”
The applicant gripped the handle of his briefcase and headed for the door.
“Don’t forget, sir, tomorrow morning at nine-thirty.”
He looked at the secretary, bewildered.
“Tomorrow you have the final interview with the German authorities. First floor, room 202. Remember, nine-thirty sharp.”
The day was leaden and damp. He walked slowly to the bus stop, then slowly up the stairs to his third-floor apartment, took the key from his winter-coat pocket, opened the door, and remained standing on the threshold for a few moments. The apartment was warm, silent. Without taking off his coat, he picked up the thick red pen and went over to the calendar. He crumpled the page for January 20, then the page for the twenty-first. He drew two thick red circles on the page for January 22, 1988. Across it he wrote, “If I’m still alive tomorrow,” adding, in brackets, “Count Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana.”
…
He had survived another night. He remembered The Report on Paradise, by the Polish poet, and started to recite it loudly.
In Paradise the work week is
fixed at thirty hours
the social system is stable and
the rulers are wise
really in Paradise one is better
off than in whatever country.
It was easy to guess the place the poet had in mind. He transcribed the verse into prose. The French, American, or English officials might have understood the code: In Paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours, prices steadily go down, manual labor is not tiring (because of reduced gravity), chopping wood is no harder than typing The social system is stable and the rulers are wise. Really, in Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. He then condensed the text in his mind: The social system is stable, the rulers are wise, in Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. Well, this, he thought, makes a good daily prayer.
He read the poet’s words over and over again, read other verses, choosing one or two lines from each, for the benefit of the German officer he was to see the next morning. They were not able to separate exactly the soul from the flesh and so it would come here with a drop of fat, a thread of muscle. Then: Not many behold God. He is only for those of 100 percent pneuma. The rest listen to communiqués about miracles and floods. At last, he sank into a dreamless sleep, until the alarm bell rang.
As he was leaving his apartment, he turned back to pick up the scrap of paper on which he had written his final version of the prayer: 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 in whatever country. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He felt more protected, he had survived the night, he would survive the day as well.
At nine-thirty sharp he was in the interview room, with the German civil servant, a short, stumpy man. Oddly enough, he was wearing not a suit and tie but corduroy trousers and a thick, knitted green vest over a woolen shirt, also green. He had fair hair, parted in the middle, and big hands with large discolored patches, which also showed on his forehead and throat.
After an interrogation that lasted for an hour and a half, the applicant emerged unable to remember the questions he had been asked. What he had retained, however, was a remark the bureaucrat had repeated twice: “The road you are taking is going to be long and uncertain, and the first step is just that, a first step.”
Of course, Bukovina, his birthplace, had been his very first step, but, as the applicant knew, German identity is about blood, not place. “We are not French or American or British, simply because we find ourselves here, at the headquarters of the Great Allied Commission,” the German bureaucrat had said, raising scandalized eyebrows and arms toward the heavens. “One is not German simply because one is born in German territory, even if it was Germany proper, not to speak of, well…”He bent over the application form, looking for that barbaric name. “Oh yes, Bukovina, admittedly a former Austrian province, but only for some hundred years. Austria and Germany are two very different things, you know. That madman who destroyed Germany, it’s because of him the Allied Commission now sits in Berlin.” The purebred German civil servant again lifted his eyebrows and arms toward God Almighty, who so unashamedly played with Germany’s destiny. “Because of that madman, Germany has to pay and pay, incurring new debts and swallowing insults and suffering the invasion of tramps and beggars delivered by the Allied Commission. That madman was not German but Austrian, as everybody knows. Mad Adolf came from Linz, Austria. He never denied it. And even if one is German, if you have been away from your country for the last eight hundred years, what sort of a German are you? I watched that lady, your compatriot, on TV the other day. Being of German extraction, she said, she had now been repatriated to Germany. After eight hundred years! Eight hundred years, let us be clear, sir! It is eight hundred years since the German colonists arrived in, what do you call it… the … Banat.”
That alien name Banat—the name of a province in southwestern Romania, where descendants of the long-ago settlers still lived — was not to be found in the application form on his desk, unlike Bukovina, but in his own memory. He looked very pleased with himself.
“Yes, yes, bestimmt, the Banat! After eight hundred years … One can tell the difference immediately. From the accent, the vocabulary, the attitudes, believe me, really.”
So, nothing of what had happened yesterday in the American’s office, or the day before, or today was decisive. This seemed to be the message that the benevolent German representative had tried to convey to him.
He boarded the bus, then the tram, thinking all the while of what the German civil servant had said. He forgot to get off at his stop and found himself at the other end of town, a suburban area with pleasant, low houses. He hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him back to the center of town, near the ruins of Gedächtnis Kirche, the Memorial Church. The streets were alive with people, especially young people. He ambled on, absentmindedly, down a side street and went into the first restaurant he saw, ready to make peace with the futility of the day, with its cryptic codes.
He returned in the evening to his apartment, and as he opened the door, he heard the usual greeting from his roommate. “Decision is a moment of insanity,” Mr. Kierkegaard whispered insidiously, as he did every evening. That’s true, but the insanity of indecision is not to be forgotten either, and therefore, such nocturnal debates are now meaningless.
Before he went to bed, he said his evening prayer: In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country. God is only for those of 100 pneuma. They were not able to separate exactly the soul from the flesh and so it would come here with a drop of fat, a thread of muscle. The social system of Paradise is stable, the rulers are wise. God is only for those of 100 pneuma. In Paradise one is better off than in whatever country.
One month later, he was in Paris, where he had numerous occasions to regret that he had not kept the business card of his French reader from the Allied Commissio
n. Another month later, he took an even bigger step — toward the Afterlife world, the World Beyond, the giant step across the ocean that brought him, in March 1988, to the New World.
The joy of being a foreigner among other foreigners, the limitations and masks of liberty, new lands and new grammars, not only without but also within himself, the trauma of dispossession, new maladies of the soul and of the mind, the shock of dislocation, the chance to live on into one’s Afterlife. He gradually accepted the new calendar, the leap years of Paradise: each year in the exile of liberty counted as four conventional years in the old existence.
One and a half years after his arrival in America, that is, six years according to the new calendar, the Berlin Wall collapsed. In socialist Jormania, the Clown of the Carpathians and his wife, Comrade Mortu, were executed. Did he now entertain hopes of repatriation, back to the olden days and to the land of yesterday? The messages coming from the Other Side discouraged such jokes. He reassessed the confusions in which he had lived, reread the Report of the Polish poet that served him as a prayer, remembered the pragmatic message of Paradise: DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER. Did Ovid, the ancient poet exiled from imperial Rome to the Scythian wilderness of Tomi, far away to the east, by the Black Sea — did he transcend the sadness? Now the terms had been reversed, each day added distance between himself and provincial Tomi. In his new home of New York, the new Rome, on the shores of the Hudson, where he had been shipwrecked, sadness was being treated with antidepressants and workouts in the gym. DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER. Everything can be fixed. Call 1-800-HELP.
In 1997, nine years into the new calendar, that is, thirty-six years from his D-Day in Berlin, back in the winter of 1988, he was now being offered the chance to return to the time and space of old. According to the new calendar, he was now ninety-four years old, too old for such a journey. But, at the same time, he was only eleven years old, counting by the time elapsed since his departure from the old life. Such a pilgrimage seemed premature for so young and emotional a person.
The Claw (I)
You should always be allowed in,” said the professor from Brooklyn. “Considering the circumstances, this is an exception, and God will always make an exception for you, believe me.” I could accept such a hypothesis, but this was not about me. It concerned the person waiting there for me — and the One Above, if He existed at all, knew very well who it was. I was keen to play by His rules only because the woman waiting for me there had been playing by them.
That is why I had phoned the Hebrew Burial Free Association and the Jewish Chapel Services, as well as the local synagogue on Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street. Everywhere, the answer, short and abrupt, had been the same, “Call your rabbi.” I was given no opportunity to say that I had no rabbi and didn’t belong to a synagogue, that all I wanted to know was whether one is permitted to visit a Jewish cemetery during the Passover week. Even someone like me, who had never belonged to a synagogue or, for that matter, doesn’t belong anywhere, was entitled to such information. Finally, I called the professor from Brooklyn, whom I had introduced to the works of Cioran, and asked him whether he, an atheist in love with nihilist paradoxes, might possibly know a rabbi.
“Of course. My friend, Rabbi Solomonchik.”
I explained to my listener my dilemma, suspecting he was ready to grant me the dispensation himself, standing in for the One Above, whose existence he denied.
“You’re right,” I reassured him. “I could scramble over the fence of the cemetery in Suceava, that hallowed bit of ground in my native town. I’m not too old for that. But I don’t want to break the rules, not this time, at any rate. If access isn’t allowed, I’ll stay there, in front of the cemetery gates, until I die, like Kafka’s hero, eyeball to eyeball with the Law. But first, I must know what the Law says. Surely there are provisions for exceptional situations, but I must know what the Law says. You understand what I mean, the Law! I need a rabbi.”
“I can call Solo,” my Brooklyn friend said. “I’ll phone him at once. He’ll know; that man knows everything, absolutely everything.”
As it turned out, the rabbi did know everything, and a few other things besides. He pronounced: “Entrance into a cemetery is forbidden in the first two and last two days of the Passover week. It is allowed in the interim days.” I had a calendar in front of me and noted down the dates: The first two days of Passover would fall on the twenty-second and twenty-third of April 1997, that is, 13 and 14 Nisan, 5757. The last two days would fall on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of April, that is, 21 and 22 Nisan, 5757. This would leave me four permitted days, enough time for my purpose. The rabbi, however, had added something that was above and beyond the Law. Learning that I was about to depart for Romania, he felt he could allow himself a doubt. The go-between who was passing on the sage’s wisdom could not hide his bewilderment.
“Can you imagine such a thing? When the rabbi heard about Romania, ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Romania? Romania? Then I’m no longer so sure. He’ll have to ask the people in Romania.’ That’s what he said. Would you expect an answer like this from Alyosha Solomonchik?”
Alyosha certainly was a sage, I had to admit. The next day, a Friday, I rang up my Christian friend in Bucharest.
“Can’t you find out this information in New York?” my former compatriot asked in amazement.
“I could. The rabbi explained the Law to me, but when he heard I was going to Romania …”
My friend Naum — Golden Brain, as he was nicknamed — laughed. I could hear him chortling at his end of the line in Bucharest. “Bravo! I wouldn’t have thought you had such clever rabbis in New York.”
“Of course we do. America has everything, but the American rabbi felt he could not assume any authority over the Romanian Jews. On Sunday morning — Jews go to work on Sundays, so it’s all right — could you call and find out about the rules, especially Suceava, and let me know.”
And indeed, on Sunday I received my answer.
“A very nice lady gave me all the necessary information,” Golden Brain reported. “I asked her to repeat everything, so I could take it all down. Here goes: The cemetery is closed between the twenty-second and twenty-ninth of April, access forbidden. It reopens on the thirtieth. That would be — I’m reading carefully now — the twenty-third of — how do you pronounce it? — Nisan, which, I repeat, is April 30. So April 30 is the first day after Passover, when entry to the cemetery is permitted.”
I fell silent. My friend didn’t know whether this was in tribute to Rabbi Solomonchik or to the nice Jewish lady in Bucharest, or maybe it meant something completely different.
“What’s the problem, say something. So, you’ll have to extend your stay by two days, it’s no big deal. That way, we’ll be able to have a nice long talk. Anyway, what’s the hurry? Think about it, we haven’t seen each other for ten years, what the hell!”
In fact, it had been almost eleven years, but Naum the Golden Brain was right about one thing, the cemetery wasn’t the problem. The truth was, I did not want to go on this trip at all. I would have liked someone, preferably not myself, to explain my neurosis. Better still, I would have liked to be done with both the neurosis and the trip. I needed a simple explanation, something like “You don’t want to go back to a place that kicked you out,” for example. I needed a coin that would fit all possible vending machines. You insert it and out comes the sandwich, the soda pop, or the tissues for wiping away the tears. But all I was offered were pathetic clichés: “At the age of five, in the autumn of 1941, you woke up in a cattle train, squeezed in with neighbors, relatives, friends. The train was taking you eastward, east of Eden.” Yes, I knew all the litanies, uttered in the name of memory and served out to posterity in films, speeches, and at fund-raising dinners. What I needed was a laconic summing up by an impersonal voice: “In 1945, when the war ended and you were a boy of nine, you didn’t know what to do with your newly earned title of survivor. Only at the age of
fifty, in 1986, did you finally understand what survival meant. Once again, you were leaving, but this time, westward, the ‘definitive departure’—the phrase then in use for such leave-takings—‘to the West.’”
The impersonal voice was lagging in wit but gaining in rhetorical force: “But in the meantime, you had found a home — language.”
An “interstitial” home, is that what the voice had murmured? No, just a “home”—“interstitial” would have sounded too pretentious, although it conveyed the meaning exactly. The familiar platitudes followed: “Survivor, alien, extraterritorial, anti-Party … After all, language was your home, wasn’t it?” Yes, I recognized the recital. “At the age of five, you were dispossessed, the first time, because of a dictator and his ideology. At the age of fifty, a second time, because of another dictator and his opposing ideology. A farce, wasn’t it?”
I could recognize that simplified summary, although it failed to encompass the trap of hope, the education in futility. And what of the privilege of separation? “Being excluded is the only dignity we have,” the exiled Cioran said repeatedly. Exclusion, as privilege and justification? On the threshold of old age, exile offers the ultimate lesson in dispossession: preparing the uprooted for the final rootlessness. “In 1982, you were an extraterritorial and an enemy of the Party. Ten years later, now an exile, you became an actual extraterritorial, like the Party itself, now vanished into nothingness.” The newspapers of socialist Jormania had continued to pay their tributes to their exiled son: “traitor,” “the dwarf from Jerusalem,” “Half-Man.” Indeed, the motherland had not forgotten me, nor did it allow me to forget it. My friends had spent vast sums of money on postage to send me these tributes across the ocean, year after year, season after season. In 1996, new patriots were demanding “the extermination of the moth”—a Kafkaesque formulation indicating that the despised cockroach had somehow metamorphosed into a moth and flown away to exile, across the ocean, to Paradise. Why couldn’t I compose such terms of endearment myself, why did I leave it to an intermediary? “One confronts one’s homeland out of a need for despair, out of a thirst for even more unhappiness,” Cioran had said in one of his monologues.