by Norman Manea
At that same time, my own first book of fiction was being published. Concomitantly — fortune was still smiling on me — I got a new job at a top engineering institution, the hydro laboratory of Ciurel, where my job applications had been rejected for years because of my unfortunate dossier. At that point, in 1969, I became the youngest principal scientific researcher in a genuinely academic institution. In order to justify my new title, I was supposed to begin studies for a doctorate. Had I actually done so, the imposture would have reached its apogee. Instead — now my fortunes took a dip — I was admitted, albeit briefly, into, of all places, a mental hospital. Somehow, after some reflection, this seems the most appropriate crowning of my dubious professional achievements.
So here I was, in the mid-seventies, confined in a mental ward, twenty years after I had first attempted, in my third year, to drop out of the university. I had tried to keep up appearances for far too long, and this performance was now duly recorded in the psychiatrist’s notes. How did this compare with the duplicity and political imposture of my fellow citizens? “Professional maladjustment” appeared less serious than the alienation produced by the great political masquerade from which we all suffered, the schizophrenia of false self-representation in a false world where your substitute is not yourself yet exists within yourself. Was this not like the twisted posture of a Modigliani portrait or a caricature by Grosz or Dix?
Suddenly, when you least expect it, there you are, you have lost control, or you think you have, or you perfectly mime the condition. Now you can finally get the medical certificate that will send you home to your room, your cell, the coffin where you are quarantined from the environment — all paid for by the benevolent state. Did becoming an engineer protect me from the depredations of my society, as I had hoped? If so, it was a costly protection. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, my troubles, I concluded, were not just the result of interrogations, imprisonments, labor camps, and penitentiary colonies for “re-education” that were the hallmarks of socialist Jormenia, but were simply the outcome of the wear and tear of everyday somnambulism. The perversity penetrated everywhere, nobody was immune from the toxins of idiotization, nothing could provide a perfect shield against the insidious disease. On the other hand, a number of writers and artists and anonymous ordinary people had taken the risk of living in poverty and uncertainty, outside the reach of the brain-mincing machine. Maybe one did not have to become an engineer after all.
Had engineering, at least, cured my uncertainties and anxieties, my inclination to sloth and the scattering of my energies? Did it help me conquer my vice of hair-splitting and excessive nuance? Engineering introduced me to situations that otherwise would have remained inaccessible to me and to people whom I would otherwise not have met. These were gains, to be sure, but how positive was another matter. Such gains had been paid for with that priceless currency, time. However, no error deserves to be overestimated. Would life lived otherwise have matched our idealized blueprint for it? Was engineering slavery? What about the slavery of commitments to family to friends, lovers, and children, or the slavery of hatred toward one’s enemies?
Among the hopes I had pinned, at eighteen, on that modest profession had been the need to protect myself from myself. Such hope remained unfulfilled. Engineering had not cured me, thank God, of myself.
Periprava, 1958
I didn’t recognize him at first in his prison uniform as he suddenly materialized before me, pale, head shaven, cap in hand, eyes lowered. He sat quietly across from me on the opposite side of the long, narrow table, among the other prisoners. Guards kept alert watch on each side of the table. We had ten minutes, and the parcel I had brought was to be opened only under a guard’s scrutiny, at the end of the visit.
He was waiting with bowed head for the words he needed to hear. They failed to come. He looked up, smiling childishly, eyes red, swollen, scared, with deep, purplish bags under them, blotched, scorched lips. He assured me he was in good health and was coping. The work was hard, naturally, all heat and dust, but he was coping. He continued to smile, with the gratitude of orphans happy to find their parents again.
Father was fifty years old, but the desolate circumstances made him look older. I was in my fourth year at the university in that spring of 1958.1 was twenty-two. Weakling that I was, I was struck dumb by the enormity of the moment, helpless to disregard the rules and cross over to the other side of the table, hug my father, and comfort him, as you would a child. I was unable even to utter the few words allowed.
I did not immediately answer his inquiries about Mother. It was better that he should not know that, because of his conviction, she had been fired from her position and finally had had to take a job as an unskilled laborer in a canning factory. She slaved for ten hours a day, stooped over the huge troughs of peppers, potatoes, and cucumbers that she was required to slice by hand. I reassured him that Mother would come to see him next month, and I also gave him the news he had been waiting for: the lawyer claimed that political tensions were easing, that the campaign of arrests had slowed down, and that somewhere “at the top” there had been acknowledgment that abuses had been committed. I leaned across the table, when the guard wasn’t looking, and whispered, “The lawyer’s brother is a Supreme Court prosecutor.” That meant the appeal was going to be successful, probably, and the injustice removed.
His freshly shaven face was in contrast to the miserable uniform. Normally, his clothes assumed something of his own fussy, tidy nature. Now the uniform clothed a mere louse, as in the early weeks in Transnistria, when he had noticed in horror a louse on the collar of his once white shirt. “This is not a life worth living,” he had said at the time, defeated, overwhelmed by shame, ready to give up. Mother, the great spokesperson for hope, had then assured him he would be wearing white starched shirts again, but she was unable to shake him out of his despair. Nonetheless, he had survived, only to find himself back again what he had been in that long night of deportation, a louse. Now, here, it was I, the young louse, son of a louse, promising rebirth, the hope of a clean white shirt again.
A few years before his arrest, he had been dismissed, without explanation, from his position as director of OCL Metalul, Suceava’s metal and chemicals state trade. He had always been disciplined and honest in his work; even those who didn’t like him had to admit that. With no other choice, he took a job as an accountant at OCL Alimentara, the local food-distribution organization. “Socialist commerce” was a contradiction in terms, just like “socialist philosophy.” The ancient trade that kept people and goods moving implied individual will, initiative, and intelligence. State commerce, on the other hand, since all businesses belonged to the state and operated on a strictly planned basis, required only bureaucracy, regular replenishments, fresh victims.
My father had neither the vocation nor the experience for commerce. Its psychology, strategies, risks, and subtleties had always eluded him. He simply became a conscientious state functionary, just as, before the war, he had been an exemplary functionary in the private economic system.
“When we moved to Suceava,” he once told us, “in 1947, I worked in marketing for the Cooperative Association. I was in charge of supplies for the newly set up cooperative farms. One day, someone came to us with an offer to sell us wood for heating. The director asked my opinion. I said it was a good deal and we immediately agreed on terms. However, we did not have enough cash to pay the man. So I contacted a few families I knew, offering them wood for heating over the winter. Most households at that time were still heated by woodstoves, and wood was hard to get. Many were ready to pay in advance, so we collected the money and paid the man who brought us the deal. The Cooperative Association made a handsome profit from this transaction. When the top people in Bucharest learned about it, I was promoted to head of supplies, which meant I had the power to sign bank drafts as a member of the association’s management team. All this stopped in September 1948, when the socialist state took over all businesses and I w
as appointed director of the local trade association for metals, chemicals, and construction materials.”
What happened, in fact, in September 1948, was that trade as such ceased to exist. Having joined the Party at the insistence of Comrade Varasciuc, Maria’s husband and the city’s leading Communist, my father was brought into the ranks of the new stars of that great aberration named state commerce. Disciplined and persevering, with the zeal of an old-fashioned white-collar worker, Father seemed oblivious to the absurdity he was serving. By 1953, after Stalin’s death, both I — the high school’s secretary of the Union of Working Youth — and Father — the director of Metalul — came to the crossroads: I disengaged myself from the political militancy, and Father was demoted from his management position.
This is what Father told us some years after: “When, some time later, I asked an activist from the regional Party committee why I had been let go, he answered with a sort of parable: During Hitler’s time, a Jew who was frantically running down the street was stopped by another Jew, who asked why he was running. Haven’t you heard? Hitler has just ordered every Jew with three testicles to have one cut off, the panting runner answered. But have you got three testicles? asked the other. Well, they cut first and count later, shouted the runner, as he ran off. This is exactly what happened to you. An anonymous letter claimed that you gave someone a bicycle for free… How could I give away bicycles? I wasn’t in charge of supplies, I was the director. You’re right, nobody bothered to verify the charge. Only later did they find out that it had all been a lie. What could one do?”
In 1958, when he was head of financial services of Alimentara, Father was suddenly placed under arrest. Was it bad luck, the outcome of a curse? Plenary sessions of the Party regularly pointed to rivalries at the top; there were unexpected tactical shifts that scrambled the ranks of the nomenklatura, sending shock waves through the vast network of the anthill, whose apathy needed to be shaken with capricious prods of terror. The mist of socialist daily reality was quickly becoming a blood-tainted darkness. Distinct “minorities” were singled out for attention.
As he did almost every day after work, Comrade Manea stopped by the butcher’s. He didn’t notice anything unusual, the puppets were all going through their regular routines. Father went over to the counter, where the butcher was standing, ready to hand him his usual package. Like other workers of OCL Alimentara, Comrade Manea had an arrangement with the butcher, who in a way was his subordinate: he bought on credit and paid his debts twice a month when he received his salary installments. That day, however, without warning, the puppeteer’s strings swung as though electrified and coiled around the unsuspecting victim’s throat.
The scene that followed played according to the prepared script. The butcher handed Comrade Manea his package, Comrade Manea not suspecting that it was a decoy. The witnesses, masquerading as customers, were at their assigned posts, ready to confirm what they had been instructed to do, to testify that the culprit had indeed taken the ticking bomb. Backstage, the puppeteer tugged on the strings, the helpless puppet fell on his nose, and the curtain dropped on Act One of the drama. Arrested right on the spot, the accused found himself right in Act Two— the trial.
Under emergency powers, the trial began the very next morning. The overnight respite was not for the benefit of the defendant but to allow the drummers to parade through the deserted marketplace, beating out the latest official measures — the strengthening of socialist vigilance, the unmasking of any and all attempts to undermine the great socialist achievements.
The lawyer, court-appointed and therefore reluctant to challenge authority, mumbled the word “clemency,” invoking the defendant’s sinless past, his lack of criminal record, his devotion to the principles of socialist morality, socialist economy, and socialist justice. The defendant insisted on offering his own explanations to the court. This was allowed and he, firmly but politely, denied any intention of fraud. But then — in what was considered an impudence on the part of the hook-nosed upstart — he went on to say that the deed of which he was being accused, of not having paid on the spot for the two kilograms of meat, did not, in his opinion, constitute fraud and was too minor an infraction to warrant penalty. The People’s Tribunal erupted in commotion. The prosecutor, sitting to the left of the judge, interrupted the perpetrator of the impertinence with visible irritation. Was he the defendant trying to claim that delayed payment did not constitute grounds for prosecution? Was he claiming that the amount of money owed warranted only a fine? This was “legal trickery,” of the old bourgeois kind. In tense silence, the court heard the former director of OCL Metalul and current department head of OCL Alimentara sentenced to five years in prison. The farce, was quickly over and the condemned man was dispatched to Act Three — the Expiation.
A dense, poisonous dust fills the extended stage. The setting is a labor camp, whose entrance proclaims, in glaring red letters, PERIPRAVA LABOR COLONY. Shadowy figures in dun-colored uniforms move about. They carry picks and spades, they push carts filled with debris. Under the merciless sun and the howling winds, burly guards jab at the necks of the slaves with the barrels of their guns. A sense of injustice doesn’t necessarily make the injustice easier to bear. It wasn’t only the butcher shops that delivered hostages to the regime’s labor camps, all other socialist institutions sent their regular tribute, as well. For my father, imprisonment in Periprava meant not only confinement and humiliation but also the wreckage of his life. The accountant-turned-socialist-turned-prisoner did not have the philosopher’s detachment or the merchant’s pragmatism that might see him through the ordeal.
My father was no Hermann Kafka, that brutal owner of the world before whom son Franz quaked, nor was he the Great Magician and Improviser, Bruno Schultz’s father, also known as Jakub the Demiurge. I knew him too well. For him, harder than the forced labor, harder than the pain of this reunion, was the humiliation he was now suffering. He had never managed to free himself from the conventions of dignity. Dignity, the guiding rule of his life, was his eleventh commandment, which for him confirmed the other ten. He could neither ignore an offense nor shrug it off with a laugh. His reputation for honesty, built up through a lifetime, reinforced his unshakable sense of dignity, which had often irritated me and as often touched me. The Communist regime made a habit of staging show trials with stock defendants — anti-Communists, landowners, bankers, Zionists, saboteurs, clerics, generals, or lapsed Communists accused of being American spies. Not as well known, but no less painful, were those accusations that fell into a “gray area,” apparently nonpolitical in nature, but ultimately, and inevitably, political. The horror could fall on the head of the helpless victims, at any time and any place.
Although he had accepted the red Party membership card, my father was totally devoid of political fervor. Like all “ordinary people,” among whom he proudly included himself, he disliked backstage maneuverings. He maintained his dignity only in the anonymity of traditional life, defined by common sense and decency, a man who belonged to that vast category of innocents ignored by the chroniclers. These were some of the thoughts that passed through my mind in those minutes of awkward dialogue with the prisoner of Periprava. I could not communicate my real thoughts, and not only because we were under surveillance. What we really felt remained unexpressed, as it had so many times before in our relationship. He was a man trapped in his own solitude, a man whose main defenses were silence and secrecy. Had he been able to express his shame and defiance, he would have probably found some relief, but complaint was not part of his nature; that belonged to the other conjugal partner. About suffering, as about joy, he would speak only rarely. Unlike my mother, he never mentioned Transnistria; it had been very difficult to get him to tell the story of how he had been beaten over the head with a bullwhip by an officer who, previously, had seemed friendly. He hadn’t forgotten one single detail, but once, when I asked about it, I immediately regretted my error. Telling the story of that humiliation had hurt and shamed him
almost as much as the experience itself.
Humiliation was something to be ashamed of. I knew I was not supposed to see what I now saw — the emaciated face, the shaking hands, the uniform, the prison cap. Just as he would never talk about the Fascist labor camp in Transnistria, he was never going to talk about the socialist labor camp of Periprava. As for me, I knew I would never be able to describe this meeting until after his death.
Then and there, I should have told him, “It’s all over, we’re leaving. You’ll be out of here soon, and we’re leaving.” “Departure, departure, we have nothing to stay here for.” Ariel’s battle cry had once sounded, unheeded, in my grandfather’s bookstore. I had shouted that cry myself, as I rode in the sleigh through the snow in the winter of 1947 and nobody had heard me.
I arrived in Periprava, that Gehenna of dust between the Bãrãgan and the Dobroudja, the previous afternoon, by train from Bucharest. It was a scorching spring day; dust filled my nostrils, covered my hands, my eyes, my clothes. In the distance, I could see the busy anthill, the inmates at their labor, miniature insects in dun-colored uniforms, digging away. They heaved the debris onto carts and dollies and unloaded it at the foot of the dikes, then compressed it with wooden battens. Armed guards looked down from the wooden watchtowers. This was nothing less than a Pharaonic project, socialist-style, for the irrigation of arid fields, each divided into small plots, being worked, as in ancient Egyptian times, by the most primitive methods. Beyond the horizon, there were more slaves, waist-deep in the filthy, murky waters, cutting bulrushes and tying them into bundles.