by Norman Manea
Should his honesty and common sense have prevailed to keep my father out of the clutches of the Communists? By an irony of history, Maria had returned, in a new incarnation, to the family’s life. Face-to-face with the city’s leading Communist, Mr. Manea tried to maintain his old reticence toward politics and politicians, but finally, he had no choice but to succumb to the pressure and become Comrade Manea. Usually a cautious man who observed and respected the norms, he now found himself an exception to the popular, if untrue, view: instead of being those who inflicted Communism on the populace by an act of will, that is, the Jews, he was a Jew being pushed into the Party by a thoroughgoing Christian woman. At ease with stereotypes, Comrade Manea did not, however, fit the stereotype that had been stamped on so many of his coreligionists. Not long after receiving his red card, the new Party member was appointed to an important leadership position in the local socialist trade system.
By this time, Mr. Manea’s son had also become a Red figure of authority, but his boyish enthusiasm was, naturally, more visible than the father’s more subdued responses.
The new world’s principle sounded simple and just: “To each according to his work, from each according to his abilities.” Comrade Stalin assured us that socialism would win everywhere, and at that point the hallowed principle would become: “To each according to his work, to each according to his needs.” In the meantime, the exploiting classes were toppling daily. The industries and banks were nationalized, the collectivization of agriculture began; political parties, Zionist organizations, private schools were all banned.
The Red summer of 1949 was for me a grand affair — the Pioneers’ summer camp, trips, campfires, poetry readings, meetings with former fighters of the Communist illegal underground, visits to Red factories and Red farms. And then one day, in the doorway of our tiny kitchen, stood a splendid blonde, elegantly dressed. In reality, she was probably from either Moscow or Bucharest, but no, she must have descended straight from Hollywood. She was a vision of generous cleavage, curvaceous hips, suntanned skin, blond hair, blue eyes. Her stiletto heels and chic dress were from another world. And her voice, what an incomparable voice! Instead of an ordinary “Good day,” she dramatically announced: “I have come to meet the mother of this boy.” From the doorway, she gazed in amusement at my mother and myself, paralyzed with amazement. We invited her in and learned that she was the wife of Dr. Albert, newly arrived in town. “We’re absolutely in love with your boy,” she said. This was how the gorgeous lady made her entrance into our family’s home movie, as a would-be friend of the parents and as an admirer of the boy she coveted as a potential son-in-law.
The Red summer was followed by the Red autumn, the new Red academic year, and the rally of the Revolution, under a podium erected in the town square. Standing with the Party secretary, the colonel of the town garrison, and the representative of the Union of Democratic Women, the Pioneers’ commander addressed the masses from the rostrum and, on the evening of the same day, spoke in the Dom-Polski hall. A new red scarf, of pure silk, a gift from the Soviet Pioneers, was wound around his neck. Next came the preparations for the great Red anniversary, the birthday of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
In the grip of pubescent confusion, his hair was disheveled. The boy’s hands and lips were groping and probing the object of his desire, there, in the dim light of the teachers’ room. One moment I was on top of the world, the next I became a child again, knocking on the frosted-up window for my father to come and open the front door for me.
The young revolutionary found himself alienated not only from the paltriness of the family house but also from the narrow-mindedness of his lower-middle-class family — a restricted world, trapped by its own fears and frustrations, a ghetto suffering from the disease of its past, suffocated by suspicion and rumor. He felt comfortable only outside this confinement; he was secure only within the simple, clear logic of his new allegiance, under the bright rainbow in the Red sky: PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE. Those beings called parents, relatives, family? Their little lies that knotted the hours one to the other? Even their names, their bizarre pronunciations were something to be ashamed of, and so were their minor dramas, their fears, their desire to be with only their own, obsessed with their burdens and their illusions, feeling forever persecuted, held together by the injustice done to them two thousand years ago and seven years ago and yesterday afternoon.
“In a few years’ time, this boy will get us all killed,” whispered Sheina, daughter of Avram the bookseller, one night to her husband, Comrade Marcu, also father of the commander. He did not respond to the challenge, he had enough to think about: socialist commerce was more socialist than commerce. Life, however, could not be stopped in its tracks by such bourgeois concerns. The class struggle was becoming ever more acute, Comrade Stalin warned, the enemy’s agents were everywhere, even in the old Habsburg boys’ lycée which I now attended, in the company of rigid, imperialist teachers and reactionary fellow pupils, sons of nouveau riche farmers, lawyers, merchants, priests, rabbis, and politicians of the former regime.
I was at an age when I was filled with, nay intoxicated by, urgent desires. Touching a female schoolmate in the darkness of the movie house was only a substitute for the real sexual initiation, for which there was no available partner, except perhaps the servant girl who slept in the kitchen and whose movements I spied upon at night, breathlessly.
There was another reason for feeling guilty. I had a new classmate, from Giurgiu, in the country’s south, who had applied to join the Union of Working Youth. He was tall, quick-thinking, good with words, and I liked him. His parents’ shady situation — nobody really knew why they were transferred to Bukovina — should have made me authorize a deeper investigation; nevertheless, I accepted his request and he received the red card. Was this the poison of compromise and treason?
Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Party posters, with their bold red letters laying down the Party line on every conceivable issue, remained irresistible — Party Day, the agrarian problem, the international situation, the Korean War, the Tito menace, vigilance. At all times there were deviations, excommunications, reorientations, new directives, coups de théâtre. The people’s best sons and daughters would suddenly turn into deviationists, traitors, and agents of the bourgeoisie or of American imperialism. “The cadres are the Party’s golden treasury,” proclaimed the inscription at Red headquarters, adorned with portraits framed in red. Missionaries drawn from factories, farm fields, institutions and schools were the “professional revolutionaries,” linked by a code of secrecy. At the top, the Political Bureau ruled, then came the Party Central Committee, below them the Central Committees of the Youth Union, the trade unions, the Women’s Union. The whole system branched out downward into regional, borough, and town committees. At the bottom were the organizations in towns, villages, factories, collective farms, militia and Securitate units, and schools. At the very bottom of the heap were the public assemblies, the masses who formed the final link of the operative chain.
It is Thursday, 4 p.m., in the high-school auditorium. The year is 1952, autumn. The table on the platform is covered with a red cloth, four large portraits of the Marxist-Leninist fathers, framed in red, look down from the stage. The Secretary of the Union of Working Youth— for that indeed is the position to which I have risen — comes to the rostrum, followed by a delegate from the regional committee, followed by the high-school director. The director advances obediently to his seat on the front bench, alongside other members of the staff. The comrade Party activist opens his briefcase, takes out the day’s newspaper, and reads the communiqué of the Political Bureau, dealing with deviations among Party members on both the right and the left. He comments solemnly on this resolute text. Next on the agenda is a set of carefully prepared speeches. The Comrade Activist intervenes, interrupts, asks questions, reprimands those who still hesitate to deliver the names of the enemy.
The final item on the agenda is meting out punishment to miscrea
nts, enemies of the people, and traitors to the revolution. These hapless creatures are the son of a nouveau riche farmer, the son of a butcher, the son of a former Liberal Party lawyer. “These are dangerous times for the country, which demand closing ranks around the Party, its Central Committee, and its Secretary-General,” Comrade Activist intones. “We must strengthen our vigilance and eliminate dubious elements.” His voice rises: “We cannot go below three! Three!”
The first defendant remains silent, while the audience waits. The farmer’s son cannot summon the courage to tell them that his father was not exactly a kulak, a peasant landowner who employed hired labor, he had simply refused to join the collective farm. The eighth-grader, new to the town, is almost ready to faint with emotion and remains foolishly tongue-tied. The vote is taken. It is unanimous: expulsion.
Next in the dock is Fatty Hetzel, son of a butcher and cattle trader. A mediocre student, the assembly is informed, the only things he is good at are fighting and cows, just like his father. Worse, the father has applied to emigrate to Israel! The son of Zionist exploiter Isidor Hetzel mutters something, but fails to find the right words. The verdict, again unanimous, is expulsion. Young Herman Hetzel, now no longer Comrade Hetzel, advances toward the red table of the Red committee and hands back his red Party card.
Next up is Dinu Moga, from the top class, the lawyer’s son. The expulsion verdict comes easy. Tall, impassive, handsome, he hands in his red card to the Red secretary and walks with composure to the exit, looking as though he had no connection whatsoever with either the kulak, the butcher, or the tribunal.
This was an ordinary procedure, like so many others of the times, and yet this occasion was somehow different. Truth to tell, the Secretary of the Union of Working Youth was not at all happy with his revolutionary deed. Embarrassment was eating away at him. I was no longer a boy of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, no longer proud of my privileged function. Lost in the glamour of the show’s magic, that solemn, glacial farce, I was busily trying to cover up my doubts and embarrassment by stammering the routine inquisitorial slogans. An up-and-coming actor, I was imitating other, more senior actors, performing on bigger stages, to grander scripts, and unfurling, over all those red stages, huge red flags and banners, with the gold-and-red hammer and sickle and the gold-and-red five-pointed star. Could revolutionary consciousness separate itself from moral consciousness? Was my initial elan still buzzing under the apathetic, aping gesturing? What did it all add up to, the Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Qestions of Leninism, that verse by Mayakovsky, that phrase of Marx’s, Danton’s laughter?
At the close of that memorable meeting, did the Secretary-orator distance himself from the dirty revolutionary deed? I was sixteen. The occasion had not yet revealed to me the full horror of what was going on, but I sensed that something had gone wrong under the weakened surface.
Was I so privileged that in such a short time and at such a tender age I had undergone experiences others extended well into old age? I had taken part in meetings, expulsions, informing, and assorted rituals, which, I must admit, had an enormous effect on the ego, to the point where it believed itself capable of ruling the world. Appointments to positions, the techniques of secrecy, the vanity of honors — others, to be sure, had experienced these on a much grander scale, reaching heights of glory and depths of tragedy beyond my range. My moment in the spotlight, in that auditorium, over which I presided from the red-covered table, was something that all players of that utopian-turned-inquisitorial game knew only too well. It is the moment when you are forced to choose, from all the selves who inhabit and claim you, not only the one required by the moment’s ultimatum, but also the one who genuinely represents you. It is not only during childhood, puberty, and the teenage years that we experience our potential multiplicity. I was not the head of a family, I did not have a profession, I did not have to face the real risks of a political renegade. However, my dilemmas were hardly frivolous, to say nothing of the fact that for adolescents there are no frivolous dilemmas.
Fortunately, there are actors who lack the gift for power, even when they are attracted to Utopian constructs and theatrical games. On that autumn afternoon of 1952, I fell back, without anyone noticing it, to the humble level of the anonymous crowd. It was a major turning point, a moment when the wound has turned gangrenous and something must be done. Was it the face of that young man, Dinu Moga, as he left the school auditorium in silence, stripped of the precious red card? I did not reveal my personal feelings in front of that audience, transfixed as it was with fear and curiosity, nor would I ever tell anyone. Subsequently, I took pains to learn the destiny of the young man expelled that afternoon. The bright and capable Dinu Moga was admitted, the following year, to the Polytechnic Institute in Iasi, where he did not do so well. A few years later, he came back to Suceava, where I was to find him in 1959, when I returned home as a newly graduated engineer. It was only then that we became friends. With his books, records, and strings of casual affairs, the young man was building an enclave for himself in which he could agreeably spend the passing years — snug in his bachelor’s apartment, untouched by Party or public trivialities, discreet in his liaisons, laconically polite, a comforting symbol of failure, invariable and permanent, like a monument.
“Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, fellow fighter and heir of Comrade Lenin, great leader of the Soviet people, died on the fifth of March 1953 at…” A medical verdict without appeal. The supreme leader of peoples, the great ideologue, strategist, and army commander, promoter of the sciences, bastion of the peace, revered father of children throughout the world, the one deemed immortal, was, after all, mortal like the rest of us. His office in the Kremlin, where the lights were never turned off, was now in darkness.
The column of students and teachers was advancing toward the city’s central square. I followed along, outside the marching ranks. Large loudspeakers fitted on trees and power poles were broadcasting the funeral live from Red Square in Moscow. The sonorities of funeral dirges filled the air. Party leaders, as well as delegates of all the organizations— youth groups, trade unions, women’s leagues, sports associations, the disabled, stamp collectors, hunters — all marched, wearing red armbands with a black stripe in the middle. I was wearing one, too, on my left arm, at the very place where my ancestors would wind one of the two phylacteries, the very thing that might have reconnected me to the Chosen People.
The square was packed, but I had a reserved place, between the girls’ lycée and the mechanics’ school. I saw the Secretary of the Union of Working Youth of the girls’ school sobbing helplessly into the arms of two of her schoolmates. Other schoolgirls were crying, too, and even a few of the teachers. The boys were manfully controlling their sorrow.
The Great Leader’s death had sent shock waves into the African jungle and the Mediterranean, and as far as the Chinese Wall and the Wild West. The whole earth was in mourning. The Romanian People’s Republic was also holding its breath. Bukovina, too, was grieved. Suceava was draped in black banners, including the boys’ lycée.
At the start of the new academic year, I was seeking to be replaced as Secretary of the Union of Working Youth. I had begged off serving an other term because I needed time to prepare for the university entrance exams. I had already nominated my successor and had been assiduously training the peasant’s son from the eighth grade for his important new mission. He was now standing on my right, eyeing me with the shyness and respect due to a veteran militant about to retire.
In Red Square, the funeral cortège wound its sorrowful way. The Romanian delegation was led by Comrade Gheorghiu Dej, alongside Comrade Maurice Thorez and Comrade Palmiro Togliati and Comrade Dolores Ibarruri and Comrade Ho Chi Minh and Comrade Frédéric Joliot-Curie and so many other comrades from around the world, all known to us by name and face. The absence of television rendered the radio broadcast even more powerful. The funeral march, the graveside speeches, the sense of loss
that had overwhelmed the world, the country, Bukovina, the city, the school, and my own tenth-grade class, all were evidence of the huge uncertainty that now surrounded us. What next, we thought, what was going to happen in a few hours, tomorrow morning, next week? The red-and-black armbands felt alien to me. I was no longer the same person I had been. The Dinu Moga episode had signaled the beginning of my break.
In July 1945, Fălticeni held its annual fair. That month, too, my formal education began, home schooling in the Riemers’ living room. There were books, notebooks, little classmates parroting declensions. There was a book with hard green covers, a book of miracles, the most amazing of which were the words themselves. No one had ever told me stories when I was a small child, and nobody now was patient enough to do so. I had gradually become familiar with the only story I knew — the one I was actually living.
The green book, however, was an object of instant fascination. It contained a topsy-turvy world, colorful, irresistible. Its picturesque language was flavored with wonderful spices and herbs and rare lexical condiments. A tale of traps, pranks, and delusions, it revealed to me the world as miracle, at once narcotic and illuminating. Other books soon followed, books about adventure, love, and travel. The words, the sentences, page after page, and book after book were clearing the ground and uncovering the unreal reality of the self. Books became my world, the vehicle through which the ego was discovering and inventing itself. The inner discourse was evolving slowly, imperceptibly.
In my first year of high school, I attempted to win the heart of my homonymous schoolmate, Bronya Normann, with an amorous speech that amazed not only the object of my juvenile love but also the schoolmates invited for the occasion. The power of words, their curious radiating force, expanded into caricature. On and on I kept reading: Engels’s: Anti-Duhring, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Goncharov’s Oblomov, the tales of Maupassant. The churnings were searching for a language of their own.