The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  It was getting dark when I stepped off the train, and I had to reach the nearby village before nightfall to look for a place to sleep. Through the dust, I could just make out the villagers on their porches, looking, without much interest, at the cluster of strangers gathered down the streets. These were people like myself who had come to visit the prisoners. It seems that such spontaneous gatherings took place regularly, to exchange information and rumors. I got closer and stopped a small distance away. I could hear what they were talking about, but felt unable to participate. After a while, a woman, dressed in a shabby coat, broke away from the group and came over to me. Had I unintentionally given her some sort of signal? The young, freckle-faced woman immediately asked me where I had come from and whom I came to see. The next day she would be visiting her brother, she told me, who was convicted, along with other employees of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, on trumped-up charges in a politically motivated trial, the collective nature of the verdict making individual appeals impossible. The personal disaster that had brought her here to the edge of the world seemed to have shattered any reserve she might have had. She told her story simply, directly, in her deep, guttural voice.

  We left the small cluster of people and walked along the narrow, winding streets of the village. Her nervousness was evident in the way she occasionally shook her large head and hunched her coat around her shoulders, despite the heat of the day. When she adjusted her scarf, I could see her tangle of abundant hair, like a wiry crown. She was speaking about the brother she was going to meet, and about the other brother back home, and her mother, who, upon hearing of the sentence, suffered a stroke and was now nearly paralyzed. I asked her again what she knew about the camp. “Sinister, sinister!” she repeated. Had I heard of the Communist prison at Pitesti, she asked, where each prisoner, in turn, was forced to torture his fellow prisoner, the tortured becoming the torturer? And had I heard about that Stalinist project, the Danube-Black Sea canal, where the prisoners — those who had not been brutally murdered — had died in the thousands? Periprava was certainly the worst of the post-Stalinist camps, she continued to inform me, small portions of pig swill for food and labor performed by blind slaves, from dawn till night, with the perpetual barking of the guards in their ears, filthy, overcrowded barracks, and the daily quota of square meters to dig — barbaric! Those unaccustomed to physical work, or those no longer young enough, collapsed on the spot. In addition, from spring till autumn, there was scorching heat to contend with, and in the winter, merciless winds.

  Obviously, she needed to unburden herself, but I no longer heard her, preoccupied as I was with the meeting of the following morning. What did he look like now, the man who undoubtedly, at that very moment, was thinking of the next morning’s reunion? What was I supposed to say to him? That he was going to survive this tribulation, as he had so many others? He had survived the camp in Transnistria and would survive this one, too. What should I say to him — that these were hard times, that innocent people were being dragged through absurd espionage trials, that they were being beaten in brutal interrogations about their relatives in the capitalist world? Or should I tell him about the Yankee or Zionist or Catholic conspiracies against Communism? Could such idiocies serve as consolation?

  My companion had stopped talking, perhaps because of my prolonged silence. Then she told me that the villagers were renting rooms for the night, that I had to wake up at dawn in order to make it on time to the penal colony’s barracks. Then she quickly walked away. I had not listened to everything she had been telling me. The thought of seeing, next morning, the prisoner I had come to visit overwhelmed me. The minutes started ticking away, my thoughts wandered aimlessly.

  The next morning, when I saw that weather-beaten face, creased by the winds and the dust of the hard labor, I still could not find words for my unspoken thoughts. What could I tell him, how could I overcome the awkwardness that had always stood in the way of our communication? Should I offer the slogans of hope, the clichés of common sense that were a mockery in the face of his lice-ridden uniform? I shook myself, determined to find my voice, to let emotion speak directly, but my mind kept repeating the same commonplaces: “The case will be reopened, I shall be graduating soon, you’ll be coming out of this hell and we’ll be leaving; we’ll leave and be out of here, like all our relatives, like so many of our friends.” But the soothing words couldn’t come out. Some obscure and powerful force inhibited me. Why?

  Months before, I might have said to him, “I am going to tie myself to the table leg to which you once tied me. Only now can I understand what you thought I should have understood then, the price of freedom and price of captivity. You have no idea how I inverted these terms.” These were the thoughts that were going through my mind months before I knew of the disaster that was about to fall on us. In my vanity, I had thought I could define my captivity as freedom, and imagine myself the inhabitant of a language rather than a country. Now, of course, I could not burden him with my selfish, naïve obsessions, neither did I find the strength to conjure up the prospect of departure. Feeling guilty as I did, I could not promise him, even now, the break with the past called Transnistria and with the present called Periprava. I remained silent, ashamed, unworthy of the miracle of seeing him, with my own eyes, still alive.

  We were both silent, our eyes lowered, after the short conversation in which he kept asking questions, like a child trying to encourage a parent, while I answered in a parental voice, bewildered with emotion, as my father, like a shadow, emaciated, pale, humbled, sat there before me. His small accountant’s hands were on the table. His palms were bruised from the spade handle and full of blisters. The blond hairs on the back of his hands and on his fingers were interspersed, I could see, with white hair. His nails were cut, as always, but unevenly this time, who knows how, in the absence of scissors.

  A bark from the guard and he was out of his seat in a second, propelled toward the columns of uniforms suddenly springing out of nowhere. I caught a last glimpse of him, with my parcel under his arm, walking leadenly with his comrades, each with his own parcel under the arm, all perfectly enslaved by fear of committing the slightest error. Their terror, the rapidity with which they all got in line like robots ready to move on command, shattered my hopes of ever seeing him again.

  However, I did see him again. Unlike so many other terrible socialist legal masquerades never or belatedly set right, my father’s more modest case was reopened and the sentence reduced from the original five years to the ten months he had already spent in the Periprava camp. A reduction rather than a revocation of the penalty enabled the socialist state to cover up its “judicial error” and avoid paying damages to the prisoner, who, in any event, remained state property.

  The Functionary

  Father was strict and authoritarian as a director and as a parent. His fits of rage were implacable, his moments of tenderness rare and understated. He was not unjust and never lied even when that would have been the easier solution.

  Mother, shifty, fearful, was of a subtler order. She advised him, even on professional matters. She possessed intuition and instinct to spare, but she couldn’t say no and couldn’t resist appeals. Prone to shifting emotions and black fits of depression, she would veer quickly from reproach to remorse. She had retained strong ties to family and people in her past, from the time she had been her father’s favorite. Hungry for affection and recognition, anxious, enterprising, passionate, fatalistic, sociable, she believed in miracles, kindness, and gratitude, but suffered frequently from despair. The interdictions and punishments she tried to mete out to her son seemed slightly ridiculous, because she always appealed to her husband to administer the correction and was ready to retract when the latter, as so often happened, was too severe. Life together had brought no changes in either of the partners nor did it until the very end.

  Formed and deformed by his childhood as an orphan and then by his struggle to achieve a respectable social position, Father was close to the typi
cal “Bukovinan” type, although he was born not in Bukovina but in Moldavia, near Fălticeni. He was rational, solitary, prudent, taciturn, undemonstrative, dignified, fussy, modest, with a constant, sad reserve of shyness that translated into a reluctance to engage in or condone aggression. Quite happy to be left to his own devices, careful not to intrude, he valued and embodied decency, discretion, and dignity, even in extreme circumstances. Discretion, no doubt, implied a secret life, and indeed, here and there, there were small signs of secrets, which his wife discovered with astonished indignation. Assailed by the enormity of her reproaches and incriminations, he neither protested nor denied, but simply wished the incident to be forgotten and to recede into the obscurity it deserved.

  The laconic and precise style of his writing expressed the same discretion: no lyrical effusions, no outbursts of feeling. “I was born on June 28, 1908, in the small market town of Lespezi, then in the county of Baia”—so begins his terse autobiography, a document of just a few pages, written not in 1949 for the dossier that was required of every citizen of the People’s Republic of Romania but four decades later, at his son’s request. In the 1990s, my father was no longer a director, the son no longer a commander in the Pioneers, and we were both far from the town where we used to live and far from each other.

  At the age of five I started attending cheder, the beginning Hebrew school, where I was taught the rudiments of the Jewish alphabet. At seven, I started at the Jewish school in Lespezi. I learned Yiddish and Romanian. In 1916, my brother Aron was sent to the front, my father was conscripted. In 1917, there was an outbreak of typhus. My mother passed away in that year. I was left an orphan with my brother Nuca, three years my junior. I was only nine at the time, but I had to look after him as well, for about a year. Then an aunt of mine, a sister of my mother’s, came from Ruginoasa, county of Iaşi, and took us both to live with her. Nuca started as a young, too young salesman in a food store, where he also received room and board, and I went to school. When my father came back from the army, he remarried, a young girl, Rebecca, from Liteni, in the county of Suceava. I stayed in Ruginoasa for a year to finish primary school. There was a cheder there as well, and I excelled because I already knew quite a lot from Lespezi.

  The narrative continues:

  At the end of that year in Ruginoasa, I returned to Lespezi to find I had a stepmother. I studied privately at the gymnasium in Paşcani, which meant that I did not attend classes, only sat for the examinations. Then I went on to high school in Fălticeni. I gave private lessons to primary-school children, in order to support myself. Afterward, I got a job at the glass factory in Lespezi. When the chief accountant moved on to the sugar factory in Itcani, he took me along. So I started a more civilized life, among engineers, technicians, and economists. The factory had a canteen run by those who ate there. When my turn came, I arranged for sweets and pickles to be served, in addition to the more traditional fare, as I had learned to cook as a young man. In 1930, I was conscripted for military service. I first served with Infantry Regiment 16, in Fălticeni; then I returned to Iţcani, and to the factory, where I had a very good income. I could afford most things and was very contented. I worked at the sugar factory in lucani until the deportation, and was appreciated as a good organizer and accountant. At that time, each summer in Fălticeni there was a great annual fair, on St. Elias Day. The whole of Moldavia went. I would go every summer, and spend a whole Sunday there. In 1932, as I was returning from the fair, I spoke to the young woman sitting next to me on the bus. She looked like Mrs. Riemer, from Fălticeni. She told me she lived with her parents in Burdujeni, where her father, Mrs. Riemer’s brother, ran a bookstore. Our idyll lasted three years. I used to go to Burdujeni on Sunday and would return to Iţcani in the evening by horse-drawn carriage. In 1935, we got married. I worked in the bookstore, and the book business seemed to go well, but after a while, the expenses started to exceed the revenue, so I returned to the factory. We moved to Iţcani, leaving my wife’s parents to run the store. Maria came with us… you were born in 1936 … Our normal life ended in October 1941, when we were deported.

  From among many family events, only a handful are mentioned:

  In 1939, Anuţa, my brother Nucă’s wife, died of a heart attack. She just collapsed suddenly, with her little girl in her arms. I arranged to be sent, along with a delegation, to the sugar factory in Roman in order to attend the funeral. My wife, Janeta, was in Botoşani and I did not tell her anything about it at the time. In 1939, the Legionnaires were already in power. Janeta wanted us to cross the border over into the Soviet Union, to save ourselves, but I didn’t agree. When I returned from Roman, I told Janeta everything. We decided to take Ruti, my brother’s little girl, until Nucă could remarry. When I came back to Roman, I found Ruti in very poor condition, malnourished, unwashed, and neglected. Her grandmother was decrepit, and Nucă had never been much of a housekeeper. I brought Ruti back with me to Iţcani. Maria, who had worked for my in-laws in Burdujeni, was there with us in Iţcani, and so was Clara, my sister. At the dinner table, I used to feed you, and Clara fed Ruti. Maria took good care of her and Ruti blossomed. Maria looked after her as lovingly as she did you. But our normal life ended in October 1941, when we were deported.

  So, in 1939, Mother wanted to save us from the Romanian Legionnaires by crossing over to the Soviet Communists. That initiative would have assured us, probably, free travel to somewhere well beyond Transnistria, where we were sent, not long afterward, by the former ally of the Legionnaires, the self-appointed “General” Antonescu. We would have gone, like so many others, to that renowned tourist spot, Siberia, where we would have become acquainted, sooner than we actually did, with the benefits of Communism. Instead, the Red utopia came to us as the dictatorship of the proletariat, traveling west from Soviet Russia to Romania. We were unsure of its benefits in 1949, but we responded to its signals. Father, who in 1939 had been skeptical of the Red promises, became, albeit halfheartedly, a functionary of the Communist regime, and his son, the Pioneer with the red neckerchief, believed himself to be the embodiment of the new world’s luminous future.

  However, we had not forgotten the perilous lessons of the 1930s, and the memories of the deportation lasted longer than ten years, longer than fifty. Even my father’s terse narrative acknowledges this:

  We were just collecting a few belongings in the house when the chief of gendarmerie, who knew me from the sugar factory, told me it was useless, we would have to walk a long way on foot and I would be able to carry only the two children. So we left everything in the house, we left with just a knapsack. I took you by the hand, Tătută [his pet name for me, which persisted long beyond childhood], and carried Ruti in my arms. However, we took the 160,000 lei we had saved to buy a house. We were squeezed into cattle cars on top of each other. The train took a long time, day and night, and another day. When it stopped it was night. We were taken off in a market town called Ataki, by the Dniester River. Then the attack started. Many were robbed by the Romanian soldiers, some were thrown into the Dniester. Among these was a neighbor of ours, Rakover, the owner of the restaurant in the Iţcani railway station. In the morning, when the money exchange opened, the money had to be changed into rubles, at a rate of 40 lei to the ruble. A kind Romanian officer whispered to us, advising us not to change our money and to wait until we reached the other side of the river, where the rate was 6 lei per ruble. That tip saved us for a while. But the money did not last. Mother paid a lot to have her parents brought over to Moghilev, the day after we arrived from Ataki, by boat and on foot and in carriages. The old couple had remained in Ataki, on the other side of the Dniester. In Moghilev, there were six or more of us to one unheated room. I did all sorts of work. The pay was one German mark per day, those were the regulations. One kilogram of potatoes cost anything between two and three marks. We sold our watches, our rings, our clothes for food. Then we arrived in a village called Vindiceni, where there was a sugar factory. Among the Romanian soldiers there was one
who had worked in Iţcani, at the factory, and knew me. He would sometimes bring us bread, tea, and potatoes. That was where Maria found us. She arrived with two suitcases full of food and other things. Everything was confiscated. She stayed with us for a while, however, in all that poverty. She looked after the grandparents, both suffering from typhus, as well as after Janeta and Ruti. People would swap a gold ring just for a few aspirin or for bread. Only you and I, Tătuţă, were never ill. In 1942, in the winter, old Avram, your grandfather, died. Three weeks later to the very day, the old woman, his wife, went, too. In Vindiceni, there was an extremely malicious administrator, one Rakhlisky, a brute; he would do anything to torment us, to destroy us. We moved on to Iurcăuţi, to the spirits factory. Minna Graur was with us, the daughter of Rebecca, Janeta’s sister.

  The episode that had caused so many nervous breakdowns, and that acquainted me for the first time with the word “divorce,” was narrated flatly, as if it were a minor detail: Minna Graur, Rebecca’s daughter, was with us. Rebecca was Mother’s older sister, and her daughter’s name was taboo in our house. Minna was involved in a family scandal, and her name was never mentioned again, not until Mother went to the funeral of the guilty Minna’s sister, Betty. Only then was the family reconciled to Minna and my father’s adultery.

  The officer in charge of the village summoned me to come to police headquarters. I knew him, he had treated us well. Without asking me anything, he took a bullwhip out of his drawer and started shouting, swearing, and hitting me savagely over the head with the whip. My head was swollen. I thought I was going to die. Finally, we ran away from the village. We arrived back in Moghilev. This happened after Stalingrad, when the German Army was retreating. When the Soviets arrived, we tried to follow them in their push toward Bessarabia and the Romanian border. However, the Russians caught me, conscripted me into the Red Army, and tried to send me to the front line. I escaped, running through the forest, keeping away from all human settlements for a few days. As if by miracle, I found you all in a small town called Briceni. It was there that, under Russian occupation, you started school.