by Norman Manea
“Are you interested, shall I read it to you?” he should have asked. Yes, most certainly, how could she not be interested? After all, she must have known all about the people mentioned in the documents, she must know about all the places and dates, the people and their families, professions, ages, appearances, circumstances. But he said nothing. The papers remained in his pocket.
At that time, in the early 1980s, I was not yet used to irreversible loss. Wasteful of moments, I was also skeptical about the possibility of storing them in archives. Therefore, I had no tape recorder, I did not transcribe events, I did not preserve the voice and the words of the woman who was still of this world, alive, there in front of me.
Bloomsday
On May 6, 1986, Ruti returned to Jerusalem. Two days later, my parents went back to Suceava, in Bukovina, after my mother’s operation, which was unlikely to prove successful.
The days that ensued were days that Leopold Bloom would probably have sauntered through with greater detachment than myself. But if Dublin was less than an ideal place for living one’s true life, as the exiled James Joyce seemed to be saying, Bucharest, in the spring of 1986, had reached levels of degradation for which even sarcasm was no longer sufficient. Not even the chimeras could survive in the underground labyrinth of Byzantine socialism. Everything seemed about to fall into decrepitude and die, including the chimeras. Facing the inevitable, a writer could either become a character in fiction or disappear altogether.
I was still supposed to be a writer. According to the rumors circulating at that time among the German-speaking literati of Bucharest, I had been awarded some kind of grant in West Germany. However, the letter of invitation to Berlin never materialized. Was all this a figment of the Bucharest intellectuals’ gossip? What had happened to the proverbial punctuality of the German authorities, even though, in this case, they were only cultural authorities? Surely they would not have neglected to inform me of the award, had it been true. Thus, skepticism and hope played out their counterpoint for months on end. Finally, I decided to take action.
On June 16, the day when James Joyce sent his hero Leopold Bloom, the new Ulysses, roaming through Dublin, I arrived at the police station to fill out an application for a passport, for a one-month trip to the decadent West. I left the mystique of numbers and names for destiny to decipher.
I had in my pocket the credo I had learned by heart a long time before: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” I was finally leaving, I refused to become a mere fictional character in the place where I had hoped to be counted as a writer, and I had accepted the fact that I was not going to die in the place where I had been born. And yet, in exile, what else was I about to become but a character in fiction — a Ulysses without country and language? However, there were no other alternatives, I had run out of excuses for delay.
I had read and reread the Irishman’s text dozens of times, I knew it by heart, but on this particular day it was important to write it down and carry it in my pocket, like some kind of identity card. “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,” I repeated silently, as I slowly moved up the appropriate line, “whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.” The credo deserved repeating: “… as freely as I can and as wholly as I can.” Next followed the words that legitimated that anniversary day for me and the way I had chosen to celebrate it: “… using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use.” Yes, “… using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.” The word “exile” had revealed its true meaning on that anniversary day — Bloomsday.
The Escape
The hesitation to leave Romania was mostly due to the question of how much of me was going to die with departure. I was wondering if exile was the equivalent of suicide for a writer, yet I had in fact no doubt about that. But what about the death lurking here at home? The rapid deterioration of living conditions and the increasing dangers rendered irrelevant any doubts about a rebirth in my mature years in another language and another country. Still, I was gripped by such uncertainties even after the celebration of Bloomsday at the passport section of the police department.
This was probably what was going on in my mind as I walked along the street, unaware of the passersby. Raising my eyes, I looked straight into the serene face of Joanna, a poet friend, just back from a trip to Paris. She promptly started to tell me about the frivolousness of the French, about the decline of French literature. Most of the East European writers, myself included, were experiencing provincial frustration and were also subject to a kind of megalomania. Our Western colleagues, sheltered from socialist suffering and dilemmas, were incapable — so we chose to believe — of producing work that was in any way comparable to our grand, complicated, tragic, obscure writings, which had remained faithful to what we supposed was genuine literature.
“There’s nothing we can do, we have to stay here,” said Joanna. “We are writers, we have no alternative.” I had repeated the same words to myself many times before.
“Is there really no alternative?” I asked, smiling. The young, tall, blond poet, with her good Scandinavian looks, was smiling, too. It was hard to believe that we were engaged in such a grave dialogue.
“We have to stay here, within our language, until the very end, whatever may happen,” Joanna repeated. A short silence followed, quite different from those silences I normally used to signal my confusion.
“But to write, we must be alive in the first place,” I heard myself saying. “Cemeteries are full of writers who no longer write. They stayed here, in their graves and don’t write anymore. This is my latest discovery,” I added, cheered by my belated banalities.
My young colleague stared at me and stopped smiling. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve only been back one day. I’m happy to be back home, but I can feel death all around me.”
Indeed, the terms of the options had changed. Poverty and danger had been the staple diet, delivered to us in abundance by glorious socialism. However, the last years of that hysterical dictatorship had had a catastrophic impact on our capacity to cope. Departure did not mean only dying a little, as we say when trying to mythicize lovers’ separations. Departure could also mean suicide, the ultimate voyage. On the other hand, it promised at least a partial, temporary salvation, a fire escape, an emergency exit, a quick solution. Uncertain as to whether the roof of your house will hold, you get out as fast as you can to escape the blaze. The only thing you can do is save yourself from death, not a metaphoric death but a real, imminent, irremediable death. The urgency had its own challenges and confusions. Was it the survival instinct? My contemplated departure was more bewildering. I simply did not know where I wanted to be.
In the prehistory of my biography, in another life and another world, the unborn that I had been had previously attempted the experiment. The prehistoric time was that time before the Initiation of Transnistria — a world without contours or motion, happiness without history, the infinite peace of the unremembered unconscious of the time before I was five years old. There was one moment, however, that helped in the mythmaking — the Escape.
The period photographs help to reconstruct the details. After returning from the labor camp, we retrieved family photographs from relatives to whom the boy’s parents, over the years, had been sending regular visual reports marking the progress of their blessed progeny.
“With much love to my cousins,” my mother had written, signing her son’s name on a photograph showing a young woman, with dark hair, in a flowery dress and white strapped shoes. Standing next to a stroller, in front of a wall covered in advertisements, she is holding a blond, chubby infant. The poster on the left says: “Read about it today, May 12, in Curentul. The tenth of May celebrated at home and abroad. Loyalty and homage.” This fixes the day of the snapshot, two days after May 10, King’s Day,
the anniversary of the Hohenzollern ascent to the throne of Romania. The year could well be 1937, when the baby was less than one year old. The woman’s body partly covers the second poster. One can see only the paper’s name, Timpul, and the text below: “Be on the lookout for your trusted daily paper, Timpul. Director: Grigore Gafencu.” To the right, the front page of Dimineafa, on which only one headline is visible: THE NEW YORK DISASTER.
“A photo taken on the occasion of my conscription,” wrote the soldier-father on the back of another snapshot showing the little two-year-old, which he kept in the pocket of his military tunic. The little cherub, with a small nose, chubby cheeks, and dressed in white, is looking straight at the photographer, rather than at liberty’s distant horizon. Even in the later photograph, in which he no longer wears a ribbon in his hair and has his arm around the shoulders of the orphan cousin-turned sister, his rebellious intentions are masked under the false, familiar smile.
When I was four years old I ran away from home. After the punishment that followed, my face remained the same, inscrutable, with no signs of trauma, visibly plumper perhaps, after resuming the normal routine and comfortably resettled in respectability. In this photograph, a studio portrait taken not long after the escape, the boy is wearing a heavy winter coat with large buttons and a brown fur collar. His hair is long, like a boyar’s, an Oriental mane, topped by a huge cone-shaped hat. His hands are folded behind his back, his stomach thrust forward in an arrogant pose. His feet are turned outward. Puffy breeches complete his costume, along with tumbled-down socks and solid boots. He has a double chin, a large mouth, and small teeth ruined by too much chocolate, the result of furious gorging after his recapture.
The four-year-old boy, hungry for freedom, does not seem to belong to quite the same world as the prematurely aged upstart of only six months later. The photographer, Sisi Bartfeld, to whose studio he was coaxed every few months to have his picture taken, treated him like a star in order to win the attention of his chaperone. He was unaware — stupid as he was — that Maria would never have betrayed her beloved charge for anything in the world. The photograph was stamped on the back: Film-Photo, Lumière, Josef Bartfeld, Iţcani, Suceava, October 1940, one year before the hour of destiny, the deportation to Transnistria — the Initiation.
The images retrieved after our return from the camp are again to be lost, over forty years later. The Initiation does not end at nine, or at nineteen, or even at forty-nine. You escape from the burning house without loading your pockets with the decades-old juvenile portraits by the photographer Sisi Bartfeld. The picture of the runaway, in the autumn of 1940, appears to be full of promise, even after four decades. His eyes are vivid and intense, his mouth contorted halfway between smile and grimace, as if the captive can no longer put up with the allurements of his jailers, who force-feed him every morning the poison of soft-boiled eggs and Kaffee mit Milch. There were other things he could not stomach — the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by the grown-ups, their daily grind of worries, their hypocritical chattering, their marionettes’ gestures. Soon, the pampered, beloved son will run away without looking back. He will finally escape into the big, wide world, and take his destiny into his own hands.
The kingdom of emptiness is swallowing him up, second by second. He is counting, carefully, the blinks of the desert’s eyelids, the morbid cadence of routine — three, six, nine, ten, annihilation, torpor, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, the void is murmuring, nothing and nobody, death is slowly embracing the present moment, the age, the old man he has become. In a flash, the runaway shakes himself out of his hypnotic trance. Reborn, he finds himself out-of-doors, turns left, turns right, and then he is on the highway to freedom, bound for nowhere.
He passes the park and the railway station before stopping. He hadn’t hesitated, he just stopped, time to tighten the belt of his puffy breeches, to check his boot laces, to fasten the flaps of his military-style cap under his chin and push his hands deep into his soft, woolen gloves. He knows the way, past the German church where the road stretches on and on. He is on his way, this is it, his Big Chance.
The photograph shows the child’s girl-like face, with that pathos of the moment. The sudden disappearance of the renegade, at four years of age, meant estrangement, exile, the violence of rupture. In a trance, he had slipped away from the house, then into the courtyard, then into the street. Was he actually leaving the placenta, or was he just roaming through it, among the polyps and membranes that were obediently parting to let him pass? Was it merely a trancelike extension of the same old boredom, a slide downward into the belly of a huge anesthetized hippopotamus?
He recognizes the church, with its pointed roof and the metallic arrow of its belfry aimed at the sky. He sees, as through a fog, the unending highway that might lead anywhere. He doesn’t stop, he doesn’t hesitate. The yeast of all those slumbering days is finally doing its job. There is no time to waste. He lets himself be carried farther away, along the highway to Czernowitz, about which he has heard. The road unrolls before him, steadily taking him forward.
It is hard to say how long that rebellious adventure, in that autumn morning of 1940, lasted. The stranger who stopped the fugitive at some point did not seem threatening, merely polite. He was one of those faces he had left behind in that lazy, slumbering past, back home. The man looked on with amusement at the face and dress of the walker. Concerned, he asked him his name. Bad luck, that was all…
The punishment was commensurate with the scandalous misdeed. Spanking — rarely resorted to, and only on extreme occasions — did not seem sufficient. The criminal was tied to a table leg with the belt that was used to punish him. At first, his mother had demanded a punishment to fit the crime — capital punishment, if possible, for such an ungrateful son. But backing off as usual, she asked for the hooligan to be pardoned, invoking extenuating circumstances. Hooligan? In her anger and worry, she must have been searching for the appropriate word, and “hooligan” would have been apt, better than “good-for-nothing,” “brat,” “rascal.” The next moment, however, the mother, alarmed at her own severity, turned from fury to tears, and to appeals for mercy. “He’s just a child,” the hapless mother kept repeating, imploring clemency, but it was too late, tears were of no avail. The paterfamilias — that Court of Final Appeal — remained adamant in his stern decisiveness. The adored offspring must receive the appropriate punishment. The verdict was not subject to appeal: the runaway was going to stay there, tied to the table leg. Who knows, it might bring him to his senses.
Was this destiny’s rehearsal? A few months after that failed escape, the fugitive was to undergo the real Initiation, compared to which being tied to the leg of a harmless kitchen table — laden with food — was Paradise itself. The real captivity was to prove not only difficult and instructive but also a rite of Initiation.
For the next forty-odd years, captivity and freedom were to strive for supremacy through hypothetical negotiations, compromises, daily complicities and feints, occasionally allowing secret enclaves of rest. The Initiation continued, however, and the captive, tied to the granite pylon of the socialist system, kept on dreaming, like all captives, of liberation and escape. In the meantime, however, he tied himself, like a pathetic Ulysses, to the mast of his own writing desk.
Addresses from the Past (II)
If ten righteous men could be found in the wicked city, would Gomorrah be saved? The friends — more than ten — celebrating, in July 1986, my fifty-year war, were embodiments of the motherland, not of departure. Here come the artists, watch out! / The artists go from door to door, the monkeys, the mimics, / The fake one-armed, the fake one-legged, the fake kings and ministers. / Here they come, drunk with glamour and heat, / The sons of Emperor Augustus. Among them, the poet himself, with a page of verse between his teeth, my friend Mugur, Half-Man-Riding, Half-One-Legged-Hare.
V-Day… The guests gathered on the evening of July 19, 1986, in the apartment on Calea Victoriei, were cel
ebrating precisely this — V day. I had survived, they had survived; we were alive and together, lifting a glass of wine, sheltered by heaven and earth — poets, novelists, literary critics, the apes, the mimics, the false kings, the false one-armed men, all relatives of Emperor Augustus the Fool.
I was not interested in drawing up balance sheets at that particular time, but I was prepared to confront the invisible Chinese sage who was waiting, in a corner, to tell him not just what I looked like before I was born but what I was going to look like after the death that had already set in at the passport desk. Missing at the gathering were my neighbor Paul, the Flying Elephant, the Communist who reread Proust and Tolstoy every year, and Donna Alba, his artistic and ethereal wife. Also missing were the dead, the exiled, and the simply forgotten friends. However, those who were actually present could easily constitute the appropriate quorum for the symposium at hand. An intruder such as myself had no right to forget the delights and joys of Gomorrah, the intensity of the present moment, life as transient moment.