by Norman Manea
She suddenly swings round toward the door; someone has entered.
“Celluţa? Is that you, Celluţa?”
Cella has made her serene and sunny entrance onstage.
“There were many times, Celluţa, when I was more desperate than he was,” she says, addressing her daughter-in-law.
Cella is standing in the doorway, looking at the three of us on the couch. She is being addressed as though she has been there throughout the whole conversation.
“How many times … I would cling to anything, to the German officer’s coat, begging him to save us from the Ukrainians who wanted to murder us, bands of Ukrainians in the service of the Germans. I clung to the arm of the peasant for whom I worked. I would walk eight kilometers, in winter, dressed in sackcloth. I worked the whole week for a few potatoes, a loaf of bread, and some beans. When the Russians liberated us, in 1944, I clung to Yossele, our rabbi, begging him to perform a miracle and save Marcu. Their first action was to send Jewish men to the front to fight against the Germans. They were little more than skeletons …”
“But what could the rabbi do? Did he know you personally?”
“Yossele, the rabbi of Suceava? He’d been deported at the same time as us. Of course he knew me. He knew my parents, too, in Iţcani, before the war; we used to send him money, oil, and sugar regularly. I went to him and started crying: Look, Rabbi, look what we have become. I live in a derelict house with no windowpanes. The children are starving, my husband is being sent away by the Russians. I am alone and desperate. I was so thin, I weighed only 44 kilograms.”
“And did he help you?”
“He did, he did. He sat there, looking at me, with his hand under his chin. And then he said, ‘Go home. Go home, and tomorrow morning, there will be a real miracle.’ Everybody who heard the story said so: God’s miracle. ‘Go home and everything will be all right. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be all right,’ he told me.”
“And were you?”
“Marcu had escaped from the Red Army. A miracle, isn’t it? He ran through the forests, for days and nights, and he managed to find us there, in the middle of Bessarabia, another miracle.”
“Look, here comes the escapee. Elegant, fussy, just like you said, with his white shirt, immaculate as usual,” I announce, turning off the tape recorder.
“Marcu, is Marcu back?” she asks, anxiously.
My father has just walked in, in his jaunty hat, gray summer suit, white shirt, and blue tie. Only the three-legged folding stool seems to be missing. As usual, he is his easygoing self, calm, with measured steps.
“Marcu, you went to the market? Did you get anything?”
“What could he get?” I intervene. “Do you think he can bring you lilacs and roses, as he did in the old days?”
“I bought a newspaper,” Father announces dryly, “and apples. They were unloading some trucks with nice apples.”
He gives me the paper, Romania libera (Free Romania). The lead story reads: “An announcement of the Party and State Commission for the Control and Monitoring of the Environment. On the sixth of May, reduced radioactivity levels were recorded in most affected areas, including the municipality of Bucharest.”
“Hear, hear, pollution is decreasing,” I say. “Ever since Ruti arrived from the Holy Land, the press announcements have become more optimistic.”
The report goes on: “In some areas, radioactivity levels increased slightly, but they pose no threat to the population.” Pose no threat, yet we are advised to be increasingly cautious about our drinking water, vegetables, and fruit. Children and pregnant women are being told to avoid prolonged exposure in open spaces. Open spaces, indeed! We should consume only milk and dairy products sold within the official commercial network — wooden language, more deadly than radioactivity. So, now that the danger has lessened, caution must be heightened. Can one really believe them? Control and monitoring, that is the only credible news, control and monitoring.
We are waiting for lunch, for the afternoon nap, the moments of solitude. We are all squeezed into that small apartment, as we had been squeezed within the narrow confines of narrow-minded socialism for the last forty years.
“Listen here, a few days ago …” I start, pulling another newspaper from the pile on the table. “A few days ago, the comrades from Control and Monitoring were telling us: ‘During the night of May 1 and 2, a rise of radioactivity well above normal levels was recorded, as a consequence of winds blowing from the northeast — the area of radioactive emission — toward the southwest.’ What exactly does that mean, ‘above normal levels’? Disaster?”
But I cannot get anyone interested in the matter. The whole family is placidly waiting for lunch.
I persist. “Above normal levels? What does ‘normal’ mean? Can we still comprehend the concept of ‘normality’? And look here …” I pull another newspaper from the pile, on the off-chance I might trigger a reaction in my audience.
“The next day, it says, ’A relative decrease in radioactivity was recorded, but it still remains at a high level.’ A relative decrease … but still at a high level. The Russians have announced that radioactive pollution affected only the territory of the U.S.S.R., and Radio Free Europe — broadcasting to the Un-free Europe — announced yesterday that the American Embassy in Bucharest took its own measurements, and that if they haven’t yet sent their staff back to California, it may mean that everything really is okay after all. Who knows? Anyway, let’s get back to Mutter Courage and her tired heart.”
“My heart is not too good. But the real problem is that Mutter cannot see,” the old woman whispers. “If only I could see a little, after all the pain of the operation. This morning in the hospital, at the check-up, I was with the doctor for an hour. He told me I’m going to be able to see. Well, who knows…”
“Can you tell the direction of the light, can you see that?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Anything else? Can you see who’s in the room? Or when someone moves around?”
“Just shadows. When someone comes near, I can see a shadow. Now, as you talk to me, I can just make out your shadow. I wanted to see Ruti, that’s why I pressed her to come. I wanted to see her one more time, but at least I can feel her presence.”
“Do you remember, Auntie …?”
It is the Israeli guest’s turn to take the stage.
“Do you remember when they took me off the train when we were going back to Romania?”
“Of course I do, how could I forget? They’d agreed to the repatriation of orphans from Transnistria. You were an orphan, your mother had died before we were deported. That’s why we took you into our home, and that’s how you came to be in the camp with the rest of us. You were on the orphans’ list, for repatriation. But when they got you on the train, Moishe Kandel hot arranzhirt az zein yingl zol nenien ir ort”
In recent years, especially since she lost her sight, Mother had begun to use Yiddish words more frequently — the ghetto code. Turning to Cella, I translate: “Moshe Kandel had schemed for his son to take her place,” and then I resume my role as the innocent who has forgotten the story.
“How could that be possible? And did you thank Kandel for his dirty deed? He probably posed as a God-fearing man, didn’t he?”
“God thanked him, not me. He emigrated to Israel, and one of his sons died there in a motorcycle accident.”
“There you go again — God, rabbis, miracles. What can rabbis do when God sends you to Transnistria?”
“It was not God who sent me, He brought me back. And rabbis really performed miracles in my life.”
“What about that story of the sieve?”
“Which sieve?”
“The magic sieve. Didn’t you tell us the story about Şulim, your brother, how he seemed so set in his bachelor ways, until the would-be bride used a magic trick or two. Didn’t she go to some woman who spun that sieve around to work magic? Isn’t this how you charmed Marcu, with a sieve?”
She laughs; every
body laughs.
“Marcu had no need for sieves. And I never went to that woman. She died a long time ago, before the war.”
“What about your son, to what do I owe my happy marriage? Maybe the magic sieve spun for me, too.”
“I didn’t recommend your wife to you. You found her yourself.”
Indeed, I had. Fortune had spun the sieve in my favor.
“No, you didn’t recommend her, but you stopped me from marrying somebody else once.”
“Fate always decides.”
The ancient conflicts have become the targets of feeble humor. Only irony retains some of its poison.
“Exactly, you protected me, you made me protect myself.”
“You, protect yourself? You never protected yourself.”
“When I couldn’t protect myself, the sieve did it for me. You used to go to the cemetery, to visit all those rabbis buried there; maybe they’d spin the sieve the way you wanted it to turn, to change fate.”
The joke is limp, and so is the moment, and our reconciliation means only that we are older, all of us, in the same small cage, within that larger cage.
“Fate, what fate? That Christian woman you wanted to marry was no fate.”
“That Christian woman? Hasn’t she got a name? Has she lost that, too? Isn’t that what you were asking for from all the rabbis, dead and alive, for the shiksa to lose her name?”
That was the old bitterness at work, now transmuted into good-humored jokes. Is it resignation or tolerance? Tolerance in the face of imminent death? Yes, in the face of death.
“The rabbis really helped me, you know, and they helped her, too, I’m sure. If you must know, I was praying for her as well. She’s doing fine, in England; she has two children now and she’s doing very well.”
“She may be doing well, but she isn’t aware that you prayed for her.”
“She knows, she knows. And even if she didn’t know …”
“That you prayed for her? Not even God would believe this.”
“Oh, but I did, I prayed that she keep out of harm’s way. I don’t hate her, you must know that.”
“Why would you, now that she is safely out of the way? She took the danger away with her, to England. It’s just too much, praying for her.”
“No, it isn’t. I didn’t wish her any harm, you know that. I never spoke ill of her. She has two children, I’ve heard, Mrs. Waslowitz told me. She’s always so elegant, that’s what Mrs. Waslowitz says. She was always like that, but she was no beauty.”
“How would you know?”
“I don’t, I never met her. But this is what they say.”
“If you are still in touch with Mrs. Waslowitz, why haven’t you arranged to send my former lover a recent photograph so she can see my receding hairline and potbelly, so she can rejoice over what the ravages of time have done to her Romeo? You probably didn’t want her to see how age has disfigured me. That sieve spins for each one of us at one time or another, doesn’t it? Well, the sieve would come in handy now, with Chernobyl; it might rid us of these troubles. Have you heard what the papers say? We shouldn’t stay outdoors, we can be irradiated. We have to protect pregnant women and those who could become pregnant. Boil food, if we can find any to buy. Listen to Radio Free Europe and learn from them what’s happening here in our own country … That sieve could sort everything out, with one simple spin. If it could sort a love affair out, then I suppose a nuclear accident would be mere child’s play.”
She does not respond, she is tired. There are five of us around the table, for lunch — eggplant salad, roast peppers, meatballs, potatoes, pancakes. We have no reason to complain, all shall be well, in this place between good and evil… Lo, the dessert, the golden apple, peeled and carefully cut into thin, spiraling slices; splendid apples, unloaded from the truck straight onto the sidewalk, at the peak of the radioactive fallout.
We lie down for the afternoon nap, the siesta which proves the superiority of placid, Eastern socialism, over the degenerate West. After sleep, we engage in diluted dialogue and two hours of TV madness, with the President Clown stammering away — another day gone, never to return. The Chernobyl accident brings incertitude to a head. Any stunted, sluggish sense of hope is bound to get the occasional slap in the face, the shock of some perverse trick. Headaches, swollen eyelids, palpitations, nausea? This is routine neurosis, not irradiation. This is the toxin that has infiltrated our bodies and minds for decades. The urgency to leap into the void has been felt by many, and for a long time, but the force of apathy is undiminished.
Within a Budding Grove
It was the summer of 1959, and I was back in Suceava. I had left there five years earlier to attend university and win, if not the world, like Balzac’s Rastignac, then at least the armor that would protect me from my circumstances and my own vulnerability. But here I was, back in Suceava, back to square one, so to speak. My engineering job offered no protection and, besides, proved wholly unsuitable for me. Nevertheless, when one is twenty-three, the streets, the rooms, the faces hidden behind the mysteries of the moment, the women, the books, the friends — all served to intensify the magnetic field of my being.
Still, the terror of ending up in the trash bin of failure, that creeping fear, expanding and contracting in turn, was with me always, asleep or awake. As for my strategy of escape, my mistrust of political matters extended even into the area of personal relationships. I found that I functioned better, including romantically, when I had a “double solution,” that is, an alternative possibility — in my case, Plan B, the safety hatch of my engineering profession, useful in extreme or unpredictable situations. My youthful energy defied the ambiguities of the job and my family’s modest social status, keeping the hidden fears at bay, invisible as lizards in waiting. Mrs. Albert, stunning as ever, was playing her familiar role again. Her daughter, now married and the mother of an infant son, was also back in town, the scene of our adolescent love. The families around us were unchanged, their offspring away studying, waiting for the chance to emigrate. Behind the drawing board next to my own sat a slender young blond Russian woman who would always let me know— with her inimitable lapses in grammar and her irresistible accent — when her husband was going to be away. There was ample opportunity for romantic diversion, and my professional duties were not overwhelming.
The high school that had once witnessed my fifteen minutes of fame had become coeducational, and the graduation festivities, to which I had been invited, now included a ball. The class of 1959 seemed very relaxed. After two hours in the company of my former teachers and of the new graduates, I left, with my date of the evening, to join a party of engineers with their wives and girlfriends. The graduate was only eighteen, but there was nothing immature or provincial about her. She was graceful, bold, and had a sense of humor. She was wearing a blue voile gown, with a corsage pinned to her shoulder. At dawn, dazed by too much drink and by the summer night, we climbed the hill of the old fortress of Zamca, near where she lived. She seemed at once innocent and provocatively alluring. She had a certain air about her, a mixture of Mediterranean, Slavic, and Andalusian. The flicker of her eyes was enticing, yet certain. Over the next few weeks, we conducted a steady dialogue, marked by an undiminished sense of surprise. The impatience of hands and lips intensified, the wanderings of fingers grew bolder.
We decided to spend a weekend in the nearby mountains. However, before I could do that, I had to slay the dragon from the past. I found myself on Armenian Street, standing before the house with its tall veranda that could be seen from the street. As in former days, I climbed the wooden stairs and knocked discreetly on the door. Inside, the house was wrapped in darkness; outside, as the script demanded, shone a blood-red moon. The summer night was strewn with stars, the single lamppost cast a dim glow. There I was, poised to squeeze myself through the door of the past. As it happened, the door opened after my first knock. Destiny had arranged it all very well on that July evening. Dr. and Mrs. Albert were away on holiday, the
ir son-in-law away on business. Their daughter, my former sweetheart, welcomed me as the script prescribed. I could hear her whispering the next line of stage dialogue into my burning ear: “Slowly, slowly, to the left, slowly, let’s not wake him up.” I knew what was to follow, but did not know where. The beautiful daughter of the beautiful Mrs. Albert had not, after all, married the man of her choice; but marry she had, as required by the rules of the world into which she had been born. The young couple, now a trio, had not yet found a suitable house, so they lived with her parents.
We were about to commit the unlawful act in the very house where, until not so long before, I had been regarded as a desirable candidate for the daughter’s hand. I did not become the son-in-law of the striking Mrs. Albert, who had once descended from her divine heights into our small and very terrestrial kitchen, with her legendary declaration “I want to meet the parents of this boy.” The boy had not lived up to expectations, yet that unlikely night offered the chance of a conclusion, as well as the opportunity for revenge. Her busy hand was guiding me, delicately and patiently, through time’s tunnel, toward the door at the left to the old sitting room, which I knew so well from former visits, years before, on many a pleasant Saturday night. There, in the family parlor, the sacrilege was about to be performed.
I shut the door, leaving the darkness behind. The gods had already lit the sinners’ lamp, a tiny candle flickering in a corner of the room. In the family parlor, where once stood a sumptuous couch, now stood a double bed, installed there for the young couple. Next to it, the baby’s crib— the crib of innocence next to the bed of sin. The air was rife with piquant connotations, but our impatience allowed no delay. I rushed into the torrid tunnel of the past, instantly recharged with every spasm of her body. Salvo after salvo, moan after moan — exhausted and drenched in sweat, the masters of the night had seen the revenge and redemption each had sought.