The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  Then there was the language of the newspapers. The speeches of Comrade Dej, Comrade Suslov, Comrade Thorez, and Comrade Mao jostled alongside the more lyrical words of the poets Mayakovsky, Aragon, and Neruda. Was the word wedded to the Revolution? The gap between the language of the mind and the public language was growing. The language of the newspapers, the speeches, the Party communiqués, and socialist legislation operated on the basis of regimental simplification. The “struggle” demanded simplicity, determination, a restricted language, devoid of surprises. The single Party imposed a single language, official, canonic, without nuance, promoting an impersonal, remote style lacking warmth or wit.

  Simple and clear though it was, the Party’s language remained encoded. Reading between the lines became the normal practice. The weight of adjectives, the violence of verbs, the length of the argument gave the measure of how serious the situation really was and how stringent the remedy was going to be. The terse communiqués about our leader’s meetings with East or West European politicians, or with the Soviet ambassador to Bucharest, allowed lovers of crossword puzzles to scrutinize the cabalistic meanings of the terms and determine their distinctions— “cordial,” “comradely,” or “warm friendship”; “mutual esteem and agreement” or “full agreement and cooperation.” These were the Aesopian formulas that expressed the tension within alliances and marked the opening or the closing of domestic and foreign political strategies. The regimentation of the language mirrored the regimentation of the social fabric. It was a language of encoded terminology, charades, a restricted, monotonous language that only served to undermine people’s confidence in words, encouraging their suspicion of words. The practical professions seemed the only safe haven from this language’s idiocy.

  “What do you mean you’re not going to study medicine?” This was the question put to me at the graduation banquet by my amazed teacher of natural sciences, a discipline rebaptized as “foundations of Darwinism.” I had decided that medicine was not for me and that, instead, I would take advantage of my high marks in mathematics and go on to study engineering; more precisely, hydroelectric engineering. The press was awash with reports on dams and socialist hydroelectric power stations. In 1954, high-school students who graduated with distinction, that is, with a straight run of 5’s (modeled on the Soviet 1 to 5 scale), did not need to pass the entrance examination for the university. I was only vaguely aware of the nature of my choice. I could sense, however, that I was giving up the world of “words,” with all that this implied. Was I choosing “reality,” against my own better nature? Was I choosing the “masculine” over the “feminine,” taking a strong, manly stand against the more ambiguous, fluid, doubtful, childlike side of my nature? That masculine choice was supposed to protect me not only from the traps of the system but also from my own chimeras — the adventure of language.

  The state was all-powerful. It was the absolute owner of persons, goods, initiatives, justice and transport, stamp collecting and sport, cinemas, restaurants, bookstores, the circus and the orphanages and the sheep pastures. All now belonged to the state, including trade, tourism, industry, publishing, radio, television, mines, forests, public toilets, electricity, dairy farming, cigarette and wine production. This was the central tenet of the dictatorship of the left, state ownership, and marked the basic difference from the dictatorships of the right, where private property at least allows one last opportunity for independence.

  After state ownership of space came the most extraordinary of all socialist innovations — state ownership of time, a decisive step toward state ownership of human beings themselves, given that time was virtually their sole remaining possession. A new word was now added to the lexicon of the new age and the new reality: şedinţa, “the meeting.” “We keep meeting at meetings,” ran a satirical verse of the time, a banal formulation that encapsulated a banal reality. The individual’s time had been transferred over to the community: the şedinţa, a linguistic derivative from “to sit,” now signified a major new condition, the theft of time.

  “If only 5 percent of the criticism leveled against you is correct, you have to internalize it” was the mantra repeated in the meetings of the early years of socialism. The rule had been enunciated by the great Stalin himself, and nobody would have mustered 5 percent of their courage to challenge it; implicitly, by accepting 95 percent to be untrue, the principle established the supremacy of imposture and false denunciation. It consecrated the intimidation of the individual and the exorcism of the community; it was distinguished by demagogy, routine, surveillance, intimidation, but also stage performance. Did this ritual of obedience also imply a subversive solidarity, in the act of submission itself and in spite of it? Whenever, with amused apathy, he voted “unanimously” in favor of ready-made decisions (“in the name of the people”), the anonymous individual became a part of the masquerade in which his consent was solicited as a token gesture. Alongside and together with others, the “dazed and confused citizen” joined the collective farce, which helped him dispense with his own individuality and personal responsibility, and be free of electoral dilemmas and political choices. Whether he laughed up his sleeve or was bullied into silence, the member of the “laughing popular chorus,” as Mikhail Bakhtin called it, was always part of a fake confraternity, a humorous subterfuge.

  What about the actors, those on stage? The child-actor was no different from the orators of the nomenklatura, the socialist establishment. Both the smaller and the greater pulpits of the agit prop festivities were part of the same general hypnosis of the mise-en-scène. The young guinea pig went through all the stages of the rise, the decline, and the fall.

  It was now my turn to taste the miseries of the renegade. It happened in the autumn of 1954, my first year at the university. At last I was in Bucharest, captivated by the choruses of “Gaudeamus Igitur,” the academic anthem that greeted the entrance of the professors into the auditorium. A few days later I was informed that, on the basis of my activities and academic achievements in high school, I had been nominated to be a member of the executive committee of the Union of Working Youth.

  This time, I declined the honor. I justified my desertion by saying that I now wished to devote myself fully to my studies. The court-martial was promptly convened, and this time I found myself the defendant, much like Dinu Moga a few years before, my flimsy justification being nothing less than an excuse to evade my duties. However, unlike Dinu Moga, I was spared expulsion.

  Freshly arrived from the provinces, I was relatively unknown to my peers. The few colleagues who took a stand at the official meeting attempted to minimize my sin out of a sheer sense of skeptical decency— “If he doesn’t want it, let him be, we’ll find someone else.” The aborted expulsion infuriated the puppeteers working behind the scenes. Comrade Çtefan Andrei, “number two” in the student political hierarchy, took the initiative of sending me to a higher political court. At the headquarters of the Bucharest University Center, I had to submit to the appropriate reprimands and threats.

  I was to meet Çtefan Andrei again, one month after the start of the academic year, at Medgidia, in the country’s south, on the site of a cement factory, where our entire student body found itself unexpectedly dispatched for “voluntary work.” Coming from “up north” to see his son — so precipitously snatched from his academic cloister — my father was shocked to see my huge rubber boots, duffel coat, and Russian-style cap. When he arrived, I was wading through the building site’s endless quagmire. We looked at each other, and in that quick glance swapped memories of the war and the labor camp. That, of course, was an exaggeration. The workers’ sheds were improvised and the food dreadful, but the atmosphere was pleasant enough, not unlike that of an adventure film. In the evenings, someone would play the guitar or the accordion; there were attempts at conversation, even romance.

  I did not feel at ease with the man in the bed next to mine and tried to ignore him. However, Çtefan Andrei, a fourth-year student, soon started to initia
te nonpolitical chats. He enjoyed talking about books, a rarity among the polytechnic students. I reacted with cautious reserve. During one of our talks, he mentioned the book he was just rereading, How the Steel Was Tempered, by the Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky. The plot concerned a writer who was both paralyzed and blind, and it demonstrated how adversity could strengthen human character. Had I read it? Yes, I had read the book, which at the time of its publication, had been hugely promoted. “And what did you think of it?” asked Comrade Andrei. “A book for children and Pioneers,” I replied honestly. “I read it myself when I was a Pioneer.” My companion remained silent, gave me a long stare, and inquired about my recent reading. I did not know which titles to name. I casually mentioned Romain Rolland’s LAme enchantée. My companion fell silent again and changed the subject.

  This cultural interlude was no compensation for the misery of the “voluntary work.” The reward came, however, when I least expected it — a weekend trip, just one hour away from Medgidia, to Constança, the Black Sea port. Bukovina-born, raised among forests and hillsides, I would be seeing the sea for the first time in my life. That historic encounter was to be the first in a series, over the next decades, of annual pilgrimages to the shores of the Black Sea. During that time, my former classmate, Ştefan Andrei, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s admirer, was climbing spectacularly to the top and into the charmed circle of the new leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, whose Foreign Minister he would eventually become. He also became a serious book collector, the owner of rare books and early newspapers, as well as valuable foreign volumes, gifts from his foreign colleagues. Comrade Minister Andrei enjoyed a reputation as a literate and benevolent man, the understanding husband of a beautiful and talentless actress, whose amorous adventures were spied upon by the agents of the priceless consort of our priceless President. The Foreign Minister indulged his refined tastes during visits abroad and meetings with his opposite numbers across the world and, back home, conformed to the standards embodied by the dictator. I did not enjoy his privileges, nor did I crave them. Fidelity to the Party had conferred its advantages in his case, infidelity had conferred its own advantages in mine. I made no attempt to cross the path of the now famous admirer of Nikolai Ostrovsky and of Nicolae Ceausescu, nor did I exult when he mouthed the customary official ineptitudes in his East European French at the annual sessions of the UN.

  However, thirty years after our literary discussion, the Foreign Minister surprised me. It was during his visit to the Laboratory of Book Pathology of the Central State Library in Bucharest, where old books and prints were restored. Welcoming him, the head of laboratory, who happened to be my wife, was taken aback at the familiarity with which the distinguished visitor greeted her: “And how is your husband doing these days?” Diffidently, Cella replied with a brief “Fine.” It seemed clear that the visitor had studied the couple’s dossier and knew everything about her and her husband. Later, he acknowledged his former acquaintance with her husband, with whom he had attended the university a few decades earlier, and for whom he had the highest regard. He asked her to kindly pass on his greetings, as well as his request for two copies of her husband’s latest book. The book could be purchased — as many copies as one wanted — directly from the publishers or bookstores, property of the state and Party, as were the books themselves, as were the authors, as was everything else produced in socialist Jormania at the time. Why two copies? It was sheer lunacy, and that cryptic request would stay with me in my faraway exile, where it seems even more absurd.

  Could engineering really protect me from political pressure and the idiocy of the “wooden tongue”? The slogans, the clichés, the threats, the duplicity, the conventions, the lies big and small, smooth and rough, colored and colorless, odorless, insipid lies, everywhere, in the streets, at home, on trains, on stadiums, in hospitals, at the tailor’s, in tribunals. Imbecility reigned everywhere supreme, it was difficult to remain immune.

  Was our inner life the only treasure that could be saved? Was this oh-so-vague inner life all that important? Did it not also have its own sources of conformity and complacency?

  Hydroelectric engineering studies were difficult, I could tell that immediately, although I did not know at the time that, out of one hundred and twenty students registered in the course, only twenty-seven of us would finally graduate. The starry-eyed enthusiasm of my debut into the academic unknown received a shock at the outset — lunch in the students’ canteen. “Eggplant casserole” and “cucumber casserole” were the names of socialism’s gastronomic innovations. After only a few mouth-fuls, I blacked out, poisoned, and fell into serene nothingness. My stomach, used to the delicacies of Bukovinan cuisine, was registering a protest against the garbage of the metropolis. However, the first lectures offered some compensation for that early setback. Everything seemed new and interesting, especially mathematics and applied mathematics, but I would soon have to grapple with technical descriptive disciplines, which held me back.

  I lodged with an old lady who slept in a folding bed she managed to squeeze into the narrow space between the table and the couch. I had discovered, however, more welcoming hosts: the Central University Library, the Arlus Library, and the Library of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Exchange. Late into the night, I would escape into reading that took me far away from hydraulics, building structure, and reinforced concrete.

  The results were predictable, and I was slipping down the academic ranks. Should I jump off the university bandwagon and give up my studies altogether? Mother declared in a pained voice, “The disease must be stopped in its track”—the aria of absolute devotion. But devotion, I knew only too well, went hand in hand with emotional blackmail. Psychoanalysis has taught us that one’s parents are to blame for the ruin of one’s life, but perhaps my life was ruined by my own conflicting emotions, and in any case, life destroys itself moment by moment, no matter what opportunities we miss. Would a degree in the humanities offer me an alternative under the dictatorship? My family counseled against it and I complied. The Ten Commandments were an attempt to tame my fractious ancestors, exile and the ghetto reinforced the rules of prudence, vitality and courage seemed provocative and risky. Had my over involved mother and father ruined my life? Formation through deformation, however, is not to be despised. Even within an authoritarian political system, there are imponderables.

  I graduated in hydroelectrical studies in 1959. Then the conveyer belt of the profession started — probationary engineer, project leader, site engineer, chief project leader, principal researcher. Duplicity was recycled daily, time after time. After fourteen years, four months, and sixteen days, I was finally able to abandon the role of this character.

  Had the Initiation of the deportation taught me as a child to reject the outer world, to resist being born, to delay the escape from the nurturing placenta? As a result, later in life, if you accepted all the scenarios that were available to you, did this lead to a multiplicity of selves, only one of which represented your real self? And should you ever be lucky enough to find this real self, should you ever renege on it? You have managed to be drugged and tortured by ambiguity. Churches and bureaucracies, careers and marriages only add, daily, to the archive of multiple identities.

  Destiny thumbs its nose at us to keep things lively. In my last year at the university I bumped into Ştefan Andrei, now promoted to assistant lecturer in the Department of Geology. It was a modest interim job; he was pretending to be a “scientific” researcher before re-entering the political arena. Socialist residence regulations allowed a work permit in Bucharest only to those with long-term domicile there, and nobody was allowed to move to the capital city. I didn’t have the political connections of Comrade Andrei, who, like me, came from the provinces, and so, unlike him, I could not have this handicap overlooked. “You seemed to be in line for a great career, yet you chose to return to mediocrity,” I had been told in my high-school years after my withdrawal from politics. The same could have been said of me upon my return, in 1959, to
my hometown in Bukovina.

  I was to return to Bucharest six years later, after the “liberalization” eased the rules, having successfully passed a qualification test for an engineering post in the capital. On this occasion, I only had to produce evidence that I had a minimal residential space of eight square meters, the legal requirement for resident status in socialist Jormania. The Jewish community in Bucharest issued me a certificate testifying that I resided in a room in the ritual bathhouse of the former Jewish quarter, of all places.

  Destiny was celebrating my residential victory, for no sooner was I settled than I learned about the publication, in Romanian translation, of Kafka’s The Trial. The news came to me from a former high-school friend, Liviu Obreja, now mixing in the capital’s obscure circles of cultural consumers. Booksellers in the city kept him regularly informed of such important developments. The line at the Academy Bookshop, next to the institute where I had just taken up my job, started to form on that spring day at around seven o’clock in the morning, an hour before the shop was due to open. I saw the first customers lining up as I went to work. I signed in, asked for a two-hour leave of absence, without divulging the reason, so as not to add to the suspicion already aroused by the bizarre newspapers, magazines, and books that my engineer colleagues, themselves readers of The Sport, had already caught me perusing. Those were the years of the great “thaw,” and new publications and translations would appear regularly, in small print runs, so that one always had to be in the right place on the precise day and early enough to join the line of avid readers, waiting to be lucky purchasers of a hot-off-the-press work by Proust, Faulkner, Lautréamont, Malraux. In this endeavor, Liviu Obreja, with his pallid face and shy conspiratorial amiability, was joined by a fanatic band of like-minded devotees, I among them, who, when the signal was given, showed up at the right bookstore at the right time.