The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  Her face becomes blurred, fragmented, like her voice. Maybe they will return later, but the dream was lost, memory could no longer hold it in focus. The ghost had disappeared.

  Nomadic Language

  Congested waiting rooms, overcrowded hospitals … The long lines of patients were like mystical processions, and access to health care required special connections — So-and-so knows So-and-so, a friend of one’s wife, or sister, or mistress. Finding a taxi to take you to the hospital in the morning rush hour, at the other end of the city, was also a challenge to the apathy of the socialist system. To transport a patient to the clinic, you had to know an accommodating taxi driver or have a friend with a car. If successful, you finally found yourself in the anteroom of the suffering, in full possession of the right to wait, along with all the others so privileged, for the magic moment when the doctor would deign to see you.

  The ophthalmologist, who only a few years earlier had been promoted from the provinces to the capital, Bucharest, had overnight become the miracle worker; to see him you had to make an appointment half a year in advance. The visit with him lasted only a moment. The miracle worker made the diagnosis and named a date for the operation.

  The eighty-two-year-old patient had a heart condition, diabetes, and suffered from a nervous breakdown. Her son, no longer young himself, did not appear to have resigned himself to the inevitable, still troubled by the blind woman’s slow gestures and equally slow speech.

  The old woman took the much coveted referral form. It was to be a hospital admission, “with accompanying caregiver,” for two days before and two days after the operation. Her daughter-in-law would have to take a week off from work to cope with all that was required, a week rather than just the four before-and-after days, because her role also involved acquiring the cartons of cigarettes, soap, deodorant, nail polish, and chocolate, all with Western labels, that were the currency of securing the goodwill of the nurses, cleaning ladies, and assorted functionaries whose assistance would be needed.

  Payment for the operation itself would customarily require sealed envelopes with greasy, crumpled banknotes, the normal transaction under socialism’s free medical insurance, but in this case it was a question of finding something less conventional. An autographed copy of my latest book would hardly do the trick, we had to find out what would really please the miracle doctor. A painting? Fine, we’d browse through the studios of socialist Jormania’s artists. But even after the pastel drawing, in a gilded frame and paid for with a month’s salary, reached the doctor’s home, the coveted private room failed to materialize: the patient and her “accompanying caregiver” would have to make do with a single bed, in a shared ward with six other beds. They would sleep together in the same bed, for the two nights before and the two nights after the old woman’s operation.

  These were nights of moaning and spasms, of lengthy confessions, nocturnal mumblings issuing from the depths of slumber. It was hardly the calm and quiet needed to sustain the preliminary tests, the delicate surgery and convalescence. The old woman demands attention — coded laments, incomprehensible requests. Nobody can understand the bizarre language… Only the daughter-in-law, lying beside her, knows it is Yiddish, although she herself does not understand the meaning of the alien words.

  During the day, the old woman speaks only Romanian, but the unreal night is not erased by daytime realities. The peasant women lying in the adjacent beds scrutinize her suspiciously, but are not bold enough to make inquiries from the young woman who sleeps in the same bed as the old pagan. The next night come the same ramblings, first a murmur, like water, short guttural signals, followed by an agitated, secret confession, an arcane lexicon, wailing and reproaches, lyrical, tender refrains, meant for the ears of initiates only. The daughter-in-law listens tensely. It is a sort of hypnotic release of pain, in a nomadic language, the voice of an ancient oracle in exile, wrenching from eternity a message in turn morbid and unyielding, or gentle and forgiving, enhanced by the bizarre sounds of a barbaric, sectarian phonetics, electrifying the darkness. It sounds like a mix of German or Dutch dialect, mellowed by age and by a passionate delivery, Slavic and Spanish inflections, biblical sonorities, oozing forth like some linguistic alluvial mud, carrying with it all the debris gathered along the way. The old woman is telling a tale of wanderings to her ancestors and her neighbors, and to no one in particular; her monologue is punctuated by spasmodic sounds that could be laughter or pain, one cannot tell. Is this a soliloquy about the nomads’ Odyssey, the urgency of love, the call of divinity, the fears of today? The night is broken only by moans uttered in code by the incomprehensible spasms of the unknown.

  In the morning, as if nothing has happened, the patient returns to the daily, communal language. Her daughter-in-law washes her, dresses her, combs her hair, feeds her, takes her to the toilet, lowers her underwear, helps her onto the toilet seat, wipes her skin clean, brings her back into the ward, helps her onto the bed. “God will reward you for what you are doing,” says the slow, weak voice from the bed near the window.

  Darkness, however, invariably delivers her to her past. As night comes, she continues her old cryptic monologue, addressed to an even older and more cryptic deity, and accidentally overheard by that audience of strangers, unfamiliar with the nocturnal code. She tells tales of the son and the father and the husband and the daughter-in-law, and of God, who gave them their faces and their peculiarities. The tales speak of the sunny, idyllic years of youth and the Hooligan Years of yesterday and tomorrow, modulated by those old lips, dry with thirst and exhaustion. Here is the language of the ghetto, moaning, murmuring, demanding, living, surviving. The nights in the hospital are laden with untranslatable memories. The normal routine of family life, the earlier visits to ophthalmologists and heart surgeons, retreat from her mind. The biological collapse she suffered revives, with increased intensity, old traumas, to add to the burden of the new — a final rebellion, a swooping flight, before the beginning of the end.

  The Stranger

  Memory finds focus in that regret which binds us to those we can no longer bring back. It is the early 1980s, an autumn afternoon, in the small Bukovinan railway station. The serenity of that moment lingers in the minds of the two travelers, even after they have boarded the train. They sit down in silence, facing each other, in opposite window seats. An ineffable melancholy has washed over them. Their first words, and especially their tone, express an acceptance of the peace which has descended on them after lunchtime that autumn afternoon. The old woman does not seem to like the question that has been put to her, but she obviously delights in the harmony of the moment, in the opportunity for closeness and the interest her traveling companion takes in her.

  After a short hesitation, she begins her story. She talks about her youth, about the pace of daily events in her small market town, where normally one would have expected the stasis of the province to stifle occurrences before they could happen. On the contrary, as it turned out, events happened at hurricane speed. So-and-so became secretly engaged and eloped to Paris, scandalizing the girl’s poor churchgoing parents, to say nothing of the community. The bride was forced into flight at gunpoint — imagine that. A teenager walked a distance of over twenty kilometers weekly — imagine that — to play chess with Riemer the upholsterer. The confectioner, Nathan, has started another lawsuit against his neighbor, the sixth within a year — can you imagine? — for trespassing on the sidewalk in front of his shop. His son — also Nathan, and also a confectioner — talks interminably about Trotsky and Stalin. The grand dramas of a small market town of yesteryear…

  What about the bookstore, I ask. Peasants from neighboring villages would come not only to buy textbooks and school supplies for their children but also to talk about their legal troubles or to find out who won the elections, the Liberal or the Christian-Peasant Party, for Avram the bookseller knew everything.

  “Father would get up early in the morning and walk to the station, to fetch the newspaper parcels, com
e winter or summer, sunshine or rain. He used to tell jokes all the time, and was kind to everybody; he never lost faith. But Mother was sickly, poor thing.”

  What about the troubles and the suffering? That question remains unanswered. “Did you have any troubles at the time?” I ask softly. “Ariel mentioned some scandal, some troubles.”

  “What sort of troubles — when did he tell you that? In Paris, in 1979?”

  Instantly we have turned into protector and protected. The question has unwittingly raised the irritation the son has always felt at the mother’s wish to protect him. She went on protecting him even when it became suffocating. But now the situation is reversed and he is protecting her. This doesn’t seem to bother her; actually she seems touched, even flattered. In his insistence she sensed not only curiosity but also tenderness, in harmony with the serenity of the afternoon, which affects them both. She is being pulled back to the past and is being asked questions that should have been left far behind, but this time she doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Yes, there were troubles then about the divorce.”

  “Which divorce, whose divorce?” is the unuttered question. The story has barely begun, it needs room to breathe.

  “We lost a house, with that divorce, the house given to me as a dowry. My brother, as a male, had priority, but even though I was the youngest, and also a female, I was the favorite.”

  I am no longer looking out the window, but now give my full attention to the storyteller.

  “Had you been married before?”

  “Yes, to a swindler. He lost everything gambling. He’d disappear for long periods of time. It was a disaster, it lasted less than a year.”

  “And you never said anything about this?”

  She does not seem troubled by the son’s naïve bewilderment, nor is she in a hurry to answer.

  No one in the family had ever mentioned the episode, not the slightest allusion. The silence had been tightly maintained all these years and was only now being broken, in the train carriage where mother and son sat once more in silence. Not even Ariel, her cousin, had mentioned the divorce, that day in Paris, on the only occasion we met. He had just smiled, suggesting something questionable in his cousin’s past, but had never mentioned another marriage. Ariel had quickly switched to the core topic of our meeting — the departure. “How,” he asked, “can you live in that cul-de-sac? How can you put up with the petty local pleasures, the delicate diminutives, the charm and the feces?”

  I used to bristle at such arrogant aggression; I had been its target so many times, both in Romania and abroad, but in the late 1970s, when the disaster of dictatorship had run its course, I had no counter-arguments left. My mother, Ariel’s cousin, was prey to the same obsession, the departure, but she had learned not to press me with questions. She knew why I could not leave and had stopped asking. Ariel himself now learned why I chose to stay in the cul-de-sac he had left a long time before — I was a writer, and I had to write in my own language. After all, he too had flirted with the idea of writing in his youth and had remained an avid reader, as testified by the shelves laden with books and the chairs covered with books, and the tables and the couches and the floors all invisible under the piles of books.

  “What was that man’s name,” Ariel asked, “the writer who created such a furor in the 1930s? Inner and outer adversities, that’s what he used to talk about, didn’t he?” He was lost in thought, he knew no cure for the madness of writing, but turned to me after a few seconds, staring at me with wide, opaque eyes, like a blind man’s, and then grabbed me by the left arm with his powerful grip. “There’s no cure for that, for writing. Not even women; even less, money; and even less, freedom or democracy,” he said, laughing.

  However, he did know a cure. He kept my arm firmly in his clutch and transfixed me with the stare of his large, dead eyes, ready to impart his revelation. “Only a belief in God can cure the writer’s disease, or at least faith.”

  “Maybe. But I…”

  “I know, I know, I really didn’t mean it. You are not a believer, and you don’t see the attraction of the Land of Canaan, where I shall soon retire to live out my last days. Of course, you could not be a taxi driver or an ice-cream vendor, or an accountant, like that decent man, your father, I can see that. But then again, why not a yeshiva in Jerusalem, where you can engage in passionate study.”

  I managed to free myself from his clutches, and stared, wide-eyed, at the blind man, who looked back at me with his unseeing eyes.

  “A yeshiva? What sort of yeshiva? At my age, and with my lack of faith?”

  So here I was, engaged in dialogue. Was this a sign that the absurd idea could after all compete with the absurd chimera that kept me chained among those Danubian diminutives? The rebellious Ariel had no hair left, or eyes, but the devil’s fire was still raging in his goblin-infested mind.

  “A special yeshiva, a theological seminary for intellectuals who have never had an opportunity to study such topics but who need to ask questions about religion, even though they may have doubts. I can fix it for you. I’ve got good Zionist connections. Believe me, this is the only solution. This is a true inspiration, and I haven’t had one in a long time. But inspiration comes when you need it most.”

  It would have been useless telling my mother about all this, it would only have fed her meaningless hopes and illusions. After my return to Bucharest, the inspired Ariel would ring me up at the oddest times of night, not only to repeat his yeshiva proposal, but also to pour scorn on the country he had left behind. “Diminutives, sweet terms of endearment, are these the things that keep you all there?” he whispered in his Frenchified tones, while the Securitate agents on duty were assiduously eavesdropping. “I’m warning you of the horrors to come, as I warned your mother half a century ago. Such endearments, even about your stammering President. I’ve heard that the people call him Puiu, baby chick, can you believe it, Puiu! So, Puiu goes abroad and gets hugs from the planet’s crowned apes and presidents and general secretaries and zoo directors …”

  Surely this was meant for the Securitate eavesdroppers, to make life difficult for me, and have me arrested perhaps, or at least force me to leave the cul-de-sac and go, by remote control, straight to the theological seminary in that capital of capitals, where he was about to settle his final accounts. Not once did he ask about his cousin, my mother. As for the matter of that bizarre divorce, destiny was reserving that for the train trip of several years later, in that resplendent Romanian autumn that was now embracing mother and son with the softness of a diminutive term of endearment.

  Ariel had simply smiled as he made insinuations about his cousin’s tempestuous youth, he never mentioned another marriage. The reason for the divorce may not even have been the one the old woman was disclosing now. It was one of those non-issues, a topic on which everybody had always observed total silence. One knows next to nothing about the people one has lived with for a whole lifetime.

  The mother was now over seventy-five years old, the son turned fortyfive. They were traveling to Bacãu — some two hours away from Suceava— to see an ophthalmologist. Her eyesight had deteriorated markedly, in phase with the general weakening in the last few years of her whole body, assaulted by disease and pain. The son had come all the way from Bucharest to accompany her to the doctor. They had no luggage, only a small case containing their night things and some frozen provisions; the hotel room had been booked in advance. He carefully helped her off the train. They walked slowly away from the station, the old woman supporting herself on her son’s arm. The hotel was nearby; the room, on the third floor, was clean. She then took the food out of the bag and placed it in the small refrigerator. She took out her slippers and nightgown and housecoat from the bag as well. She took off her dress and stood there, barefoot, in her camisole. It was a humbling moment of awkward complicity: the frail body, sagging, old, with disproportionately big hands and feet — her usual lack of modesty. Long-forgotten memories were instantly unlocked, the d
oubts and confusion of puberty, the guilty moments — the prenatal home, the placenta. The woman would have offered herself, any part of her body, anytime, as a sacrifice, if it would be for her son’s good.

  He turned away in embarrassment, as he had done so many times before. He went to the window and cast his eyes far beyond the street. He could hear her slow movements, the rustle of the dressing gown. She slowly pulled her nightgown over her sad, humble body, one sleeve, then the other. Then silence… she must be fastening her dressing gown. Then she bent down to put on her slippers, first the left, then the right. The sun was setting in the window’s narrow frame. The echoes of her surprising confession on the train lingered in the air. However, the day’s harmony had not been broken. She took out her knitting; he went out into town, but quickly returned. He found her still knitting away, calmly, even happily. Our short reconciliation with the world still prevailed. Where had the son gone, to the bookstore? She knew his habits. Was he hungry? She had already taken the food out of the refrigerator and put it on a plate, to let it thaw. She sat at the table, facing him; he watched her, in silence. He had brought with him another surprise, apart from the question he had asked her on the train, in that improbably empty carriage.

  He had discovered a few years earlier, in the archives of the Jewish community in Bucharest, documents about Burdujeni, the market town where his great-grandparents, grandparents, uncle, and aunt had lived, where the old woman now sitting opposite him had spent her youth, had got married, not once to his father, but twice, as she had now disclosed; the place where she had been divorced, remarried, and borne the son with whom she was now sharing this autumn idyll. He was about to take from his pocket the sheets of paper that, he was certain, she would find amusing. But that sensational confession, made in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as if the news were some commonplace comment, had somehow stopped him in his tracks. Everything else paled compared to that moment of shock that revealed to him how easily the long-time secret had been kept and how casually it was revealed. Could the chronicle of the past, enclosed in those typewritten pages, surpass the secret he had just learned that afternoon?