by Norman Manea
Soon the noise around him increased. People were hurrying toward the ticket booth and the bus. Quite a throng — women, children — a summery bustle. Remaining on the bench, he observed the commotion. Reluctantly, he got up. As usual, the bus was packed. This happened every year after St. Elias Day, the day of the famous fair in Fălticeni— iarmarok, as the local Ukrainians called it. The crowds came from near and far. He tried to push forward down the aisle of the bus, then stopped. The bus was due to depart any minute now, he had to settle down. He carefully opened the leather roll, which turned out to be a tripod chair. He carefully extended the three legs of the chair and positioned it next to the small suitcase, on top of which he had placed his hat.
He sensed he was being watched by the young woman sitting to his left. He had noticed her in the park, as he was eyeing the passengers heading to the bus. She was dark-haired, Spanish-looking, with dark, deep-set eyes, a slender waist, and delicate ankles, in a white short-sleeved dress with a flowery print pattern, high-heeled suede sandals, a fancy leather handbag shaped like a basket. Slim and graceful, she seemed eager to see and be seen.
The handsome elegant gentleman had no trouble engaging the beautiful elegant lady in conversation. His young tenor led off in even, measured tones, her young alto vibrated in a quick rhythm, but avoided the higher notes.
“Are you by any chance related to Mrs. Riemer?”
This was the question that had occurred to him as he watched her hurrying toward the bus earlier.
Startled, she turned her delicate face to him, scrutinizing him intently.
“Yes, Mrs. Riemer is my aunt. My father’s sister.”
After only a few remarks, they felt like old acquaintances. The tripod seat lent a comic yet engaging touch to the young man’s otherwise impeccable appearance. Clearly, he was mindful both of his place in the crowd of society and on the equally crowded bus.
The conversation passed from Leah Riemer to her husband, Kiva, the upholsterer, and also chess partner of the writer Sadoveanu during the latter’s summer vacations in Fălticeni; then it moved on to the Riemers’ academically gifted children, and proceeded to mutual acquaintances who lived in the town where the July fair was to be held, a town that, as they now discovered, they both visited frequently.
Neither of the pair got off at Suceava, as each thought the other would, but at the adjacent market towns — the gentleman at Iţcani, the first stop after Suceava, and the lady at Burdujeni, the first stop after Iţcani
Engrossed in conversation, they were oblivious to the contours of a strange gestation forming in the air, though perhaps they did sense something. For in spite of the conversation, animated as it was by the young woman’s Mediterranean vivacity, they had observed each other attentively all the time. When they parted, the feeling that they had indeed been on a journey, not homeward, but into the unknown, sought an appropriate means of expression in each.
They saw each other again, as agreed, the following week. The young man showed up, on his shiny bicycle, in front of Librăria Noastră—Our Bookstore — a medium-sized house-cum-shop halfway up the sloping main street of Burdujeni, with yellow walls and narrow shuttered windows. Only three kilometers separated the sugar factory in Iţcani, where the young gentleman worked as an accountant, from the other little town, where the bookstore, owned by the parents of the young woman, was located. An easy, pleasant ride, especially on a sunny Sunday morning.
My earliest memory is linked to this trip. A memory preceding my birth, a memory of the being I was before I came into being — the legend of a past before the past.
When the ancient Chinese sage asks me, as he has so many of his readers, “What did you look like before your father and mother met?” I conjure up the strip of road between two neighboring towns in northeast Romania in the mid-i930s, a narrow expanse of cobblestones between two slender columns of trees under a homely, sleepy sky. A ribbon of golden space made time, the necessary length of time to go from somewhere to somewhere else, from something to something else. Fairy tales call this love, the comedy of errors that we all seem to need.
After that first Sunday meeting, the accountant from the sugar factory of Iţcani continued his visits to the neighboring town. That strip of cobblestones, earth, and dust gradually turned into a magnetic tape of illusions making that forgotten corner of the world into its very center. Destiny’s Chinese brushstrokes were chasing each other chaotically all over that bucolic sky, offering no vision of the future but the incandescent nebulae of the moment.
However, the young gentleman was to discover, over the next few months, what I discovered only half a century later, in the early 1980s, on the train taking me and my mother, by then almost blind, to an ophthalmologist in a town situated more than two hours away from those old places.
During my first trip to the West, a few years earlier, I had met in Paris my mother’s famous cousin Ariel, the subject of some exotic family legends. By then, he had stopped dyeing his hair green, or red, or blue, as he had done in his youth, and it was not clear whether he still dealt in arms sales, as in the days of De Gaulle, or whether he still wrote for Le Monde, as he had claimed. The heavy, bald gentleman, almost blind himself, like many in the family, owned a dazzling personal library where you were hard-pressed to choose one book over another. When I asked about the early years of my mother, the daughter of Ariel’s adored Uncle Avram — the bookseller — what she was like in her youth, all I got for an answer was an ambiguous smile. He refused to go into the matter, in spite of my insistence.
Had there been an unsettling episode in her youth, from the time before she married my father? Did the young woman, when my father met her on the bus, have a past that had scandalized the provincial society of her small hometown? Not scandalous enough, it would seem, to deter her distinguished suitor from persevering for three years through all the phases of courtship. What was I like before they met? I am not Chinese enough to remember the past before the past, but I can see the beginning before the beginning, that interval between July 1933 and July 1936, from the meeting on the bus to the arrival, more dead than alive, of their only offspring.
It was in my maternal grandfather’s house, where the family’s culinary and diplomatic talents were always on display, that the potentialities that were to culminate in my birth were accumulating — at the sumptuous Austrian-style balls organized in Iţcani and Suceava; during those rare trips to Czernowitz, Bukovina’s end-of-the-world Vienna, at the holy days of the old-style calendar in Burdujeni; at the Dom-Polski theater in Suceava and in the old movie house where the screen flashed before the lovers the name of that American or English or Australian actor, my namesake Norman; on the bus route between Fălticeni and Suceava. The air was heavy with the smell of conifers and speeches about Titulescu and Jabotinsky, Hitler, Trotsky, and the Baal Shem Tov; the smoky rooms, redolent with the vapors of hot frying pans, the buzz of gossip and rumors. The darkness was electrically charged and the newspapers filled with alarms of planetary passions.
Nothing, however, could be more important than the hypnosis that had suddenly placed a man and a woman at the very center of the world: a sober and lonely young man, who had risen through his own efforts from an obscure family of country bakers, discreet and hardworking, keen on preserving his dignity and the respect of his fellow citizens, and an ardent young woman, avidly searching for the signs of the destiny that would embrace her panic and her passion, inherited from the neurotic Talmudic scholars and booksellers who were her ancestors. The coming together, you might say, of bread and the book.
The very differences between the two seemed to have cemented their relationship in the early stages of the marriage and possibly even later, though they were both to remain their own selves up to the very end. Engagement versus aloofness, an almost theatrical yet genuine pathos on one side and solitude, discretion, moderation on the other. Alertness versus apathy, panic versus prudence, risk-taking versus reticence and dignity. The end result of their union
— not necessarily a perfect dialectical synthesis of thesis and antithesis — had new contradictions added to it, naturally; otherwise the comedy would have been utterly humorless. Was there some impatience in the contradictions that had fused in the newborn? Paradoxically enough, the premature birth of their only child, in July 1936, on the eve of St. Elias Day — the day of the Fălticeni fair — was no indication of impatience but rather of reluctance. The unborn refused in fact to be born, refused to activate his innate and acquired contradictions. He remained stuck in the placenta, and this lingering endangered his emergence, which only looked like a birth, a wounding that was dangerous for both mother and child, as they struggled for life, day after day.
Everybody sighed with relief upon learning that the young mother, she being more important than the fetus, would live. As for the child, only when his fate was no longer so closely dependent on his mother’s did the grandfather, old Avram, ask, “Has he got fingernails?” Told that I had, he calmed down: I would survive. Over the short time that I knew him, and later, during the years in the labor camp in Transnistria, he should have taught me that in the real world it was not just fingernails that one needed for survival but claws.
Premature birth indeed, followed by a time of solar blankness, without contours or memories. An idyllic time out of which the mind picks up only a flash of a sloping street and the entrance to my grandfather’s bookstore. Memory does not say much about the way I was before the true birth, which was still to come. Much later, fiction was perhaps more eloquent: a scene from the Tarkovsky film lvan’s Childhood, which I watched endlessly, many years later. The blond child, the laughing mother, happiness. Suddenly the arm of the water well swinging madly. The mirror of the lake shattered by the thundering explosion: war.
The thunder of October 1941. Thunder and lightning in one stroke split the floor of the stage set. Expulsion, the exiles’ convoy, the train, the dark emptiness. The hole into which we had been hurled was no baby’s cot. Behind us, only the desperate scream of the Good Fairy Maria, who had not wanted to relinquish me from her arms and was pleading with the guards to let her come with us into the abyss, she, the Christian, the Holy Virgin, together with the sinners whom she could not possibly abandon. Night, shots, screams, plunder, the bayonets, the dead, the river, the bridge, cold hunger, fear, the bodies — the long night of the Initiation. Only there and then was the comedy about to begin. Transnistria, beyond the Dniester … Transtristia, beyond sadness. The prebirth Initiation had begun.
Yes, I know what I looked like before I was born. And I know the way I looked afterward, in April 1945, when the surviving expatriates had been repatriated to the patria, the motherland that had banished them and that had not, after all, managed to get rid of them. Though it did get rid of some — old Avram the bookseller; his wife, Haia, and so many others. A diaphanous spring day was embracing the town, in 1945 still called Fălticeni, as it had been in 1933, the same departure point of destiny’s bus.
The truck bringing us in 1945 back “home” to Fălticeni, to the relatives who had not been taken away, did not, however, stop near the park or the booth where bus tickets to Paradise used to be sold. It stopped next to the market, on the corner of Beldiceanu Street.
A bell sounded. The wooden screen at the rear of the truck was removed. From Beldiceanu Street the crowd came running toward us, bit players whose role was to celebrate the return. A melodrama as sweet and delicate as the placenta of the newly born swelled the concertina bag’s rainbow in honor of the victors — us.
I watched them cry, embrace, recognize each other. I hung back on the platform of the truck, biting my fingernails. The street was the stage and I was a bewildered spectator. Finally, they came back for the one left behind, left behind in the past.
Before I allowed myself to be lowered back into the world, I managed to bite my fingernails deeply once more. I had acquired this bad habit. I bit my fingernails.
The Hooligan Year
The premarital idyll of the baker’s son and the bookseller’s daughter lasted from 1933 to 1935. Mrs. Waslowitz, the Polish dressmaker who catered to all the ladies of Suceava and environs, could barely cope with the orders issuing from the bookseller’s household. Elegant and serious, the future bride’s knight insisted on escorting her in a different dress to each of the town’s charity balls. The slim, nervous brunette had blossomed. Her vivacious black eyes sparkled, the intensity of her face was transfigured by a magic aura whose origins were easy to ascertain. Always rushed and pressed for time, she worked, as before, from morning till night, but now she also devoted more time to her dresses, shoes, bags, hats, gloves, face powder, hairdos, and lace trimmings.
One can imagine embraces in the carriage and car, visits to Suceava, Fălticeni, and Botosani, perhaps also to Czernowitz. Balls, walks in the moonlight, gatherings at the synagogue, and festivities at the home of the future bride’s family. Cinema and theater and summer gardens, skating rinks and jingling sleigh bells, trips to Bukovina’s resorts. Perhaps they even stopped by the bachelor’s rooms. The scenario is easy enough to imagine, the quick pulse of love throbbing with the rhythm of the times, the last idyllic holiday before the catastrophe.
The year 1934 could be called, then, a happy year. The few kilometers of road between Burdujeni and Iţcani became the Milky Way for the love story that had begun one year earlier in the hot, crowded bus bringing the pair back from the St. Elias fair in Fălticeni. The people in Iţcani, and especially the inhabitants of Burdujeni — the shtetl metropolis, as it were — were keen to comment on events as they unfolded: political debate and female gossip enjoyed an equal share in that particular corner of the world theater; small events and grand utopian discourses, the clamor of the planet as heard in the Romanian, Yiddish, French, and German newspapers jostled with workaday noises. Friends and relatives all partook in this feast, the brother and the sister and the father and his ailing and pestering wife, my grandmother Haia, nicknamed Tzura, “the affliction.” A keen participant in all this was the beautiful Maria, the orphaned peasant girl adopted by the family, eager to accompany the bookseller’s youngest daughter to her new household.
A happy year, then, 1934. The young Ariel, the well-educated Zionist rebel, always up-to-date with the latest news, had, however, decreed that it was the Hooligan Year. The future bride and groom were among those who gathered in old Avram’s bookshop, turning the pages of the day’s newspapers and the latest books. They were therefore probably not in the least surprised by Ariel’s announcement: the novel De două mii de ani (Two Thousand Years), published the year before, was enjoying a succès de scandale in Bucharest. The author’s name, inscribed on the gray-blue cover, was Mihail Sebastian, the pen name of Joseph Hechter, and the incendiary preface was by the Iron Guard ideologue Nae Ionescu. Incredibly, this extreme right-wing national was poor Hechter’s mentor! In the introduction, Legionnaire Ionescu claimed that his admirer and disciple was not purely and simply a man from the Danubian area of Brăila, as he had assumed, but a Jew from Danubian Brăila.
Apparently, this fact could not be ignored or altered: Hechter-Sebastian and his co-religionists, even when they were atheists or assimilated, could not be considered Romanians. Romanians are Romanian because they belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and they are such because they are Romanians, Legionnaire Ionescu explained. As simple as that!
By 1935 the bookshop already stocked another volume by Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan), in which the author pronounced that 1934, a year of such happiness for the future bride and groom, was a Hooligan Year. “Why should we care?” bookseller Avram asked out loud, just to provoke his rebellious nephew. Ariel, with fanatic zeal, persisted in selling old news. Mr. Nae Ionescu claimed there was no solution for the damn situation! Shaking his wildly tousled hair, dyed blue, he would recite the verdict passed by the Legionnaire: “Judas is suffering because he gave birth to Christ, because he saw him but did not believe in him. This in itself wouldn’t hav
e been so bad. The trouble is, we Christians did believe in him. Judas is suffering because he is Judas, and he will continue to suffer until the end of time.”
Sebastian’s former friend Nae Ionescu had become an Iron Guard philosopher, a militant advocate for an Eastern Orthodox state. In the next Hooligan Year of 1935, Ionescu’s message was even more unmistakable and Ariel’s frenzied concern was hard to challenge. “Joseph Hechter,” Ionescu had written threateningly, “dost thou not feel that thou art seized by the cold and the darkness?” “He’s talking about us,” Ariel whispered dramatically. “Our Legionnaire friend is pointing at us.”
But if neither assimilation nor conversion afforded a solution to the so-called Jewish question, what could? This dilemma, Ariel helpfully supplied, was addressed in a contemporary guide, titled Mein Kampf. Whatever Ariel’s audience’s feelings, the Legionnaire had made his point. The darkness and chill of the Final Solution were not the invention of the Romanian Eastern Orthodox legionari. All of his forebears, from time immemorial, had endowed Judas with a gene that enabled him to sense hidden danger. Not so the family of bookseller Avram.