by Norman Manea
But hatred was not my métier. I would gladly leave it for somebody else to vent, anybody, including the motherland. I was content to leave that boiling lava behind me. It had not been too difficult, after 1989, to reject all invitations to visit Romania. However, now I found it difficult to refuse the invitation to go there with the president of Bard College, also a musician, who was scheduled to conduct two concerts in Bucharest. Bard College had been my host in America. It was only natural, therefore, that, at least for a few days, I should be his host in Bucharest. Such an opportunity, unhoped for ten years earlier, should have been a source of joy. It wasn’t.
When I had first heard about the projected trip, in 1996, I shrugged my shoulders and gave my reasons why I couldn’t consider undertaking the journey. But Leon Botstein wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. In the winter of 1997, his arguments were given new impetus. “The political situation is changing, Romania is changing. If you are ever to return, you might as well do it now. You will have a friend going with you.” I had left the motherland late, without really intending to leave. I was not prepared for a reunion with the self I had been, or for a translation of the one I had become. In the spring of 1990, after the collapse of the utopia, along with its buffoons, I had had a sudden and belated revelation. It happened at a cultural conference at the Salon du Livre in Paris. The Romanian delegation there was composed, for the first time, not of the usual cultural apparatchiks, but of real writers. It was an emotional reunion, laden with nostalgia. However, after a little while, I felt that morbid frisson of fear. I was sweating, without apparent reason, attacked by something deep, hidden, tortuous. I had to get out, and I left the hall in a troubled state. My former compatriots had been polite, friendly, and yet somewhat changed, as though liberated from the entanglement that had previously joined us. Living in exile as I was, outside my native habitat, I was like a snail wearing the shell of the Romanian language. Was that a scandalous imposture? Could this “extraterritorial,” of all people, properly represent Romanian culture to the world? “In the struggle between yourself and the world, you must side with the world” was Kafka’s advice. Had I heeded his counsel?
Leon insisted. I heard myself saying, “Perhaps,” then, “We’ll see,” “Possibly,” “I’ll think about it.” I could not get used to the idea, yet I was gradually coming around. Finally, I gave a timorous yet clearly audible “yes,” convinced that I would soon withdraw it. I didn’t. I had to break the chains finally, or so I was being told. Only a return, whether happy or unhappy, would mark the final break, liberating me. Could I really be helped by such slogans, or by some emotional reconciliation feast, a “cultural” lunch, perhaps, where I would find myself decorated with a red-and-green ribbon, awarded by the Society of Transcendental Pensioners for my services to my country’s reputation abroad? After partaking of the usual spicy sausages and beer and the usual jokes and embraces, I would then faint under the lightning stroke of destiny, the final stamp of approval: accepted in the motherland. You have been accepted at last, the old scores have been settled. You don’t have to prove that it’s merely a matter of your country putting on one of its performances to fool the rest of the world. No, you no longer have to prove anything … I could almost hear Golden Brain’s voice whispering in my ear, when, suddenly, I was startled from my half-sleep by the ringing of the phone.
It was six in the morning and the voice at the other end was not my old friend making jokes but someone from Suceava, the town of my childhood and teenage years, a polite, gentle voice — the director of the Commercial Bank in Suceava. He had learned about my forthcoming reappearance in Romania, and it was his duty to inform me, belatedly, that the previous winter the Bukovina Foundation had awarded me its Prize for Literature. The citizens of my native town would be honored if… Suceava! Bukovina! It was there that I had been reborn after my return from the labor camp, I had never forgotten it. Would it be possible for me to receive the prize without any ceremony, without television or publicity? The director assured me that the ceremony had already taken place the year before, in the absence of the American recipient. The banker from Suceava seemed ill at ease talking about literary matters, but he was doing his duty, urging me in his soft dialect, so familiar to me, to accept the “modest” award. The word “modest,” as well as the name of the speaker, Cucu, won my heart. I was firm, though, in establishing iron rules — no interviews, no public appearances. After all, the justification for the trip had already been fixed — the cemetery in Suceava. Truth be told, I wasn’t prepared for even that consolation.
In the autumn of 1986, before I left Romania, I took an eight-hour journey by train from Bucharest to Suceava, into the very heart of Bukovina, to say my final goodbyes. As I entered the train compartment, I had no difficulty in identifying my fellow passenger, a stocky man dressed in a suit and tie, an attaché case on his lap, engrossed in the Party paper. Unmistakably, he was the “shadow” who would accompany me to my destination and possibly stay with me the whole time I was there, and see me safely back. It was a cold, gray November day. In the end-of-world atmosphere that was Romania in those years, it was obvious that the once bustling little town of my youth had also fallen on hard times. The people looked diminished, muted. One could read the sadness and bitterness, the smoldering anger, in their dry, wrinkled faces, in their tense greetings, even in the most commonplace exchanges. It mattered little where or under what mask my “shadow,” or perhaps his replacement, was lurking. Those under surveillance and those doing the surveillance appeared equally condemned to the slow poisoning of their dead-end world. I expected no pleasant surprises, the situation was the same all over the country. Suceava, however, seemed permeated with a funereal sadness, which only added to the burden of my pending separation. I would have liked somehow to have been able to lessen that burden. I tried to focus on the amusing aspects, to convert the dour details of the daily routine into the stuff of jokes, but to no avail. All conversations kept coming back, not to the conditions of squalor and terror that were everywhere, but to the reason for my visit. I failed to convince my old parents, listening to me with depressed skepticism, that my going away was only a temporary separation.
The day before my return to Bucharest, I received the rebuttal to my naïve attempts at consolation. In the morning, while I was still lying in bed, my mother was led to my room. Her condition had worsened in the past year. She was blind and could walk only with support.
Their small apartment, in a socialist-style block, consisted of two rooms, a living room and a bedroom. My mother slept on a couch in the living room; the woman who looked after the house slept nearby on a cot. My father had the bedroom, where we both slept in the same bed during the short time of my visit. In the morning, we all shared breakfast, Bukovina-style, Kaffee mit Milch, in the living room, where all the other daytime activities took place, meals, visits, chats.
She had not waited, as usual, to speak to me at breakfast, but wanted to see me earlier, while my father was away at the market or the synagogue. She wanted to talk to me alone, without witnesses. She knocked on the door, then walked, hesitatingly, supported by her helper. Her heart condition had obviously drained her frail body. She was wearing a bathrobe over her nightclothes, her feet were in the slippers I had brought her as a gift from Belgrade. The thick robe was a surprise. All her life, she had complained of being hot. Now it seemed she was always cold and concerned with staying warm.
Supporting herself on her attendant’s arm, she came over to my bed. I signaled to the woman to help her sit on the edge of the bed. As soon as the woman withdrew, the torrent of words began to flow, unchecked.
“I want you to promise me something. I want you to attend my funeral.”
I did not want this conversation, but there was so little time, I could not afford to make a fuss.
“This time, your going away feels different. You’re not coming back. You’re leaving me here, on my own.”
She had been staying with me in Bucha
rest in 1982, when an official mass-circulation newspaper proclaimed that I was an “extraterritorial.” She knew that was no compliment. She also knew that the terms “enemy of the party,” and “cosmopolitan” were not expressions of praise either. She was with me when a friend phoned to ask whether my windows had been smashed. She used to read such signs better than I did. We knew, tacitly, what sort of memories were revived in both of us by those warnings.
I interrupted her, and told her again what I had told her repeatedly over the previous days. She listened attentively, but without curiosity. She had heard it all before.
“I would like you to promise me that, in case I die and you’re not here, you’ll come back for the funeral.”
“You’re not going to die, there’s no point talking about it.”
“There is for me.”
“You’re not going to die, we shouldn’t talk about this.”
“We must. I want you to be at the funeral. Promise me.”
I could only give her the same answer: “I don’t know about my return, I haven’t made any decision yet. If I get the grant for Berlin, then I’ll stay there for six months or a year, whatever the terms of the grant. I haven’t heard from the Germans yet. Who knows, the letter may be lying in some censor’s drawer. But I’ve heard rumors that I got the grant. Nothing certain, just rumors.”
She repeated her solemn request. Finally, I told her firmly but without real strength, “I cannot promise.”
She suddenly seemed diminished, shrunken. “This means that you are not going to come?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It means that you are not going to die, and that it’s pointless to talk about it.”
“Nobody knows when and how.”
“Precisely.”
“That’s why we have to talk about it.”
“No one knows what will happen to them. I don’t know what might happen to me.”
“I just want you to promise. Please, promise me, I want you to be here at my funeral.”
“I can’t promise. I just can’t.” I then added, without even meaning to, “And it’s not important.”
“It is for me.”
The conversation reached its end, there was nothing left to say. But I went on anyway: “Even if I didn’t actually attend the funeral, I would still be there, wherever I was. You must know that. Just remember that.”
I could not begin to guess whether that answer had satisfied her, and I would never find out. After November 1986 I never saw her again. She died in July 1988, when I was already in America. Father informed me of her death one month later — not because he had wished to release me from the obligation to attend the funeral, but because he knew that if I came back, I would never again be allowed to leave. He also wanted to spare me from the transgression of not observing the seven days of ritual mourning, the traditional shiva, which, in any case, he doubted that his son, however pained, would observe.
Before he himself left Romania for Israel, in the summer of 1989, at the age of eighty-one, my father described to me in a letter my mother’s final months. For as long as I remained in Germany, she seemed to be clinging to life for one reason only, so that she might get news about me. Neither the letters, the frequent phone calls, nor the parcels with food and medicine were able to calm her. In fact, they only confirmed the inevitability of the separation, as she saw it. The news of my departure for America finally shattered her illusion that I might yet return. She had nobody or nothing left to struggle against, nothing to hope for. Soon after, her mind began to wander. Helping her became difficult, even for the few steps needed to go to the bathroom. One day she fell, and it was only with great difficulty that one could lift her frail, inert body. The vivacious speaker she had always been turned deaf and mute, oblivious to her surroundings. When she did speak, it was in a sort of trance, about her father and about me, often confusing the two. She believed we were there, in the immediate vicinity, and was worried that we were late coming home or that we hadn’t told her where we had gone. Sometimes she would say she had been murdered — Marcu and Maria were the names of the murderers, and somehow that didn’t seem strange. She had brief spasms of resistance, but soon tired and fell back into her thin-layered peace of sleep, interrupted only by the same worries: Where is my son, where is Father Avram? The delirium followed the same pattern, and came on without warning, followed by the same gentle slipping into the healing peace of unreality that was to be her real home now. “Are they back? Is the boy back? Where’s Father? Still in town, still in town? It’s late …” She could not let go of these two phantoms, even when she seemed to have given up on most other people and things.
After her death, she began to visit me in strange, haunting dreams. I could sometimes feel her presence, too, in the anonymous rooms where I found rest in my nomadic life. The atmosphere would suddenly become charged, and I felt a strange and tender embrace; the gentle spirit of the past fluttered its wings over my tired eyelids and forehead and alighted in a soft embrace over my shoulders.
I saw her again in the week before my return to Romania. We were walking together in the streets of Bucharest. She was talking to me about Mihai Eminescu, the national poet, and telling me how dearly he would have liked to be with me again. She was animated, focusing on matters that seemed to give her pleasure, but that were mainly intended to please me, when suddenly she fell into a deep trench along the edge of the sidewalk, a kind of shaft where workers were repairing the sewage system. It happened in an instant, leaving me no time to catch her. But she had held on to my arm, and her old, heavy body was hanging suspended over the pit, while I lay flat on the sidewalk, gripping her with my left hand, so that she would not drop into the abyss. With my right hand I clutched the edge of the sidewalk, while my left hand gripped her bony fingers. I could feel myself slipping, I couldn’t hold on to the burden of her body swinging desperately above the void, her thin, pale legs thrashing helplessly in the air.
There were men working in the bottom of the hole below. I could see their white helmets, but they could not see me or hear my vain cries for help. I was screaming as loud as I could, but I didn’t produce a single sound. I was suffocating, I could feel my strength draining. I was being pulled down by the bony clasp of the old hand into the black void. I was slipping toward the edge of the sidewalk, ready either to let go of the burden or to let myself be dragged into the bottomless depth, over which my mother was writhing. I had just found her again, I had been talking to her, and I could not bear to lose her again.
No, I could not surrender that familiar touch. The thought sent a pain shooting through my mind, but it failed to give me the strength I needed. On the contrary, I almost fainted, my last reserve of energy drained. Still, I was not beaten, it was not over yet, I was still struggling, although I knew it was hopeless.
I held tight to the hand clutching mine, but I could feel the grip loosening with every second that passed. We were slipping, together, into the abyss. But no, it was not over yet, I could not let go … Whimpering, exhausted, I kept slipping, inch by inch, deeper and deeper. The fingers of my left hand were already numb, defeated, while my right hand, almost useless, could barely keep its grip. It was over, I was letting go, helplessly, guiltily. It was over, finis. So be it, the end, I could resist no longer, I surrendered. As we were falling, I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if I had been stabbed repeatedly by a stiletto.
I woke in a sweat, spent, defeated, in my familiar bed on the Upper West Side. I was in bed, next to the window bright with morning sun. It was Wednesday, the sixteenth of April 1997, four days before I was due to return to the motherland.
The First Return (The Past as Fiction)
The Beginning before the Beginning
A torrid summer day in July. Standing in line to buy bus tickets, the would-be travelers fan themselves with newspapers and wipe away the sweat with their handkerchiefs.
The newcomer, with his cropped light-brown hair, full lips, and bushy eyebrows, did not seem
troubled by the slowness of the queue or by the scorching heat. His look was friendly. His nose, although quite prominent and somewhat hawkish, was not unattractively so. He wore a pale-gray lightweight suit, double-breasted, with wide lapels, complemented by a white shirt, a stiff collar, a dark-blue tie with white polka dots, and shoes with pointed toes. The tip of a blue-checked handkerchief poked out from the right upper pocket of his jacket. The very picture of an impeccably dressed young gentleman, around twenty-five years of age, intent on respectability.
Propped against a wall, and secured by one of the young gentleman’s feet, was a small leather suitcase, about the size of a largish briefcase, and a leather cylinder that looked almost like an umbrella, over which he had placed his straw hat.
The young man took a shiny brown leather billfold out of his breast pocket and extracted two banknotes, crisp new bills, folded in two. As he unfolded them, they made a pleasant rustling sound. He handed the banknotes to the mustachioed clerk behind the counter, leaned forward, gave the name of his destination, then straightened up. His voice was hard to make out, for all that had been spoken was a brief request, addressed to the ticket seller. The young man took the ticket handed him and put it inside his left trouser pocket. He then folded the crumpled bill he had received as change and slipped it among the others in his fine leather wallet. He then bent down and picked up his suitcase, his leather cylinder, and his hat. He looked at the rectangular Anker watch on his left wrist. He still had half an hour before his bus was due to depart. He turned toward the park. The only vacant bench was in full sunshine. The bus stood waiting a little way off. He sat down and took a newspaper from an inside pocket of his jacket. The front page of the Universul carried the date in bold letters: July 21, 1933. The editorial was warning, in two columns of feverish text, that the world was “laden with dynamite” and could ignite sooner than the skeptics might expect. However, the earnest, concentrated expression of the newspaper reader had not changed since he had bought his ticket. The printed words did little to intensify the moderate attention with which he viewed his surroundings, or quicken the slow-rising yeast of that sluggish afternoon hour. He seemed pleased with himself, content with the world in which he lived, with the day he inhabited. The park, the lake, the sky, even the garrulous bustle of passengers were a sort of confirmation: he was part of the world, part of society. Only those who had never had to work hard enough to find their place in the world could fail to grasp exactly what such an idyllic day had to offer.