The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  One day, you came home and said you wanted to be in second grade with your cousins. I went to the school and talked to the teacher, and because you were a good pupil, you were allowed into the second grade. In April 1945, we were back in Fălticeni. First we lived with the Riemers. Leah Riemer was Janeta’s aunt. Then we went over to Rădăuţi. There I worked as an accountant at the office that coordinated the shipping of sheep and cattle to the Soviet Union, as stipulated in the armistice agreement. The animals had to be fed and looked after, so I hired veterinarians, assistants, and workers. Farming had not yet become socialist, and the Romanian exporters were present at the weighing of the animals, to make sure that everything went according to plan, as big profits were at stake. Many cattle were kept there for a while, if they were sick. Over 5,000 cattle and some 20,000 sheep were then handed over to the Russians, the new masters of Romania. The operation lasted until 1947. We then moved to Suceava.

  Brevity was also noticeable in the way he talked about his reunion with Maria, after the war, and with Comrade Victor Varasciuc, her husband, as well as about his subsequent entry into the ranks of the Party. The laconic words were the mark of the man. He avoided talking about conflict, error, and failure, just as he avoided ambiguity. When asked, toward the end of his life, why he had never mentioned, not even to his own son, the fact that his wife had been married before or that she was four years older than he, he answered without hesitation, “What would have been the point?” Had I asked him about the Securitate officer who— after his release from Periprava — pressured him for a whole year into becoming an informer, and about how he had resisted, silently, calmly, stoically, until the police got tired, he would have said much the same thing: “What’s the point of talking about this now? What’s the point?”

  The Departure

  In 1947, my father’s younger sister turned up on our doorstep with the good news that she had made boat reservations not only for herself and her boyfriend but also for our family. Father’s response was immediate: “I’ve just unpacked and have no energy left to start packing again.” Of course, there was nothing to unpack after our return from Transnistria in 1945, so there wasn’t much to repack in 1947. His little joke was just an attempt to cover up his reluctance to embark on adventures.

  The question of departure haunted us periodically, and for good reason, but over time, I became the one reluctant to leave. The question arose again when I was at the university, in connection not only with Periprava, but also because of the emigration of a friend.

  We had grown close a few weeks into the first academic year. Dark-haired, tall, slim, Rellu was a brilliant student and a music lover. He liked mathematics, basketball, and concerts, and even seemed willing to give literature a chance. He noticed my lack of enthusiasm for engineering studies, my long hours spent in Bucharest’s libraries, as well as my dalliance with the beautiful daughter of the beautiful Mrs. Albert. He was aware of my discontents, my aspirations, my whims, and we became inseparable friends. His excessive, irritating sensitivity counterbalanced the equally irritating pragmatism that made him avoid anything complicated. However, none of these differences — not even his lack of interest in the opposite sex — were significant enough to stand in the way of our friendship.

  In the spring of 1958, Rellu brought me some sensational news: his mother and sisters had decided to emigrate to Israel. They had filled out the forms and had included him in their plans. We had heated debates over the issue. It seemed like a millennium had passed since that cold day in December 1947 when the King’s sudden abdication sent me flying home through the snow, muttering, “It’s over, we’re leaving now, immediately.” The Zionist ideal, which had attracted me in the early postwar years, when I was drawn to the militant ideas of Vladimir Jabotinsky, had by now lost much of its appeal. Escape to the capitalist paradise beyond the Iron Curtain, with its trappings of well-being and illusions of freedom, now seemed a vulgar notion. I was skeptical of any childish attempts to alter destiny. Taking responsibility for, and understanding, our imperfect, ephemeral condition appeared to me preferable to a mere change of geographical coordinates.

  Not only did my friend come to accept the idea of departure with serenity, he even adduced a few serious arguments in its favor. His father had disappeared in the Iasi “death train” atrocity of 1941, when Jews, hunted out of their homes and dragged through the streets, found themselves packed together like sardines in the cars of a sealed freight train bound for nowhere. The train wandered the countryside aimlessly, in the summer heat, until the starved, suffocated bodies were nothing but corpses.

  I was no stranger to such horrors myself. My Initiation had also begun in a freight car, sealed off and guarded by armed soldiers, but that train had a destination: its carload of captives was to be dumped onto the human garbage heap of a labor camp. Rellu’s justification for departure, however, seemed to me somewhat rhetorical and “contrived.” I had grown wary of attempts to intellectualize what were mere biographical circumstances. Even Periprava could not diminish the force with which my cowardice sought out the most pretentious justifications for staying.

  The candidates for emigration to the Holy Land began lining up the night before, so that on the following day they would have a chance of reaching the desk where the magic application forms were being handed out. The wandering tribes were on the move again. It reminded me of our return to the land of the living, the rebirth of 1945. I recalled the voices and the colors of the fairy tale, the fairy-tale dishes and the fairytale book I received from my strange bookish cousins, the Riemer progeny, who were also my teachers. The blackboard covered a whole wall and was filled with formulas, tables, and puzzles. In that wondrous place I discovered the joys of normality, the colorful sideshow being put on by the relatives who had never been dislodged by war and transported to labor camps. I awoke each morning to a fresh new day, and I gamboled happily like a frisky lamb.

  Yet suddenly, once again, the invisible bird of night swooped down on this sunny world of eternal youth and immortality to which I thought I had been securely transferred. Death struck like lightning, bringing down my young uncle Izu from the telegraph pole on which he was working. Father’s younger brother was brought home dead, a few hours after he had left for work. Up there, on that rain-soaked electric pole, the invisible beak had struck. He had fallen in a single spasm, eyewitnesses said. He was seventeen. His face, in death, resembled the faces of those still alive: his father, Benjamin — called by his affectionate diminutive Buium — and his brothers, Aron and Marcu, who stood silent at his bier.

  Not long after, the cry of the ominous bird was heard once again. This time it sounded for Grandfather Buium, struck down in the full afternoon summer light. His huge, dark figure collapsed suddenly, on the couch next to his wide-eyed grandson. I was petrified. The sudden crumpling of this Methuselah made my blood run cold. Time froze and I could no longer breathe. I remained there in a daze, until I saw, in the big mirror hanging above the sideboard, my grandmother’s long, pale hand.

  There had been some gossip about this statuesque old woman, whom we called Mamaia — though actually she was not so old — about the severity with which, as a young stepmother, she had treated the three orphaned sons of the widower Buium. I was shocked to see her looking at herself in the mirror, smoothing her hair! It was only a few seconds, or perhaps just one timeless second, since she had let out the scream that took account of the disaster. Her gaze met the wide-eyed stare of her grandson in the mirror. Embarrassed, she readjusted her mask of sorrow. Her moaning and gasping increased, but things would never be the same again between her and the grandson.

  In an instant, Izu, the youngest of them all, and Buium, the oldest, were gone. Then Mamaia vanished, too, settling, with her daughters Luci and Anuţa, in the faraway Promised Land near the shores of the Dead Sea. Most of the family were to follow, taking with them their ancient names — Rebecca, Aron, Rachel, Ruth, David, Esther, Sarah, Eliezer, Moshe — names that had wander
ed for hundreds of years through foreign lands and among foreign peoples and tongues, now returning to the place and language where they thought they belonged. The echo of those names would gradually fade, and with them their famed qualities — their mercantile spirit and group solidarity, their anxiety and tenacity, their mysticism and realism, their passion and lucidity. Where did I fit in among all these stereotypes? Had I also been affected by their suspicion, by all the embarrassment and hostility that the environment had injected, insidiously, into all of us?

  I no longer felt at ease among the names and reputations of my fellow clansmen, nor did I feel bound by the fluctuations of their nomadic destiny. Had I become alienated from those among whom I had been reborn ten years earlier? In truth, I felt relieved to know that they were safe in their faraway ancestral homeland — and that I was now freed from their proximity. Their vanities, their impatience, frustrations, hypocrisies, and rhetoric were not, in fact, worse than other people’s, but I was happy to be able to forget about them and to no longer be associated with them. I held no grudges against their exodus, it was a proof of normality that I accepted with undisguised relief. The chimera that had claimed me seemed to have created between us a divide that was wider than any physical distance. The geographic space between us came only as a necessary, protective confirmation.

  What about my friend Rellu, and what about Periprava? Rellu now strapped on his own nomad’s knapsack and joined the ranks of the dreamers and the rejected. The haste of these emigrants to leave the socialist utopia, each with nothing more than a single bundle, spoke volumes about the impasse they were leaving behind. Never before, not even in the immediate aftermath of war, had so many been in such a hurry to pack up and go. The lines forming to join the exodus were different from the routine lines for food or fuel or clothes, but they were not unconnected. I was well aware of the baggage of memories, passions, and anxieties these nomads were taking with them.

  A firsthand account of this moment in history, October 1958, complements my own ambiguous response:

  At first the Jews began queuing for their emigration applications to Israel around three o’clock in the morning. Now they start at two, one, and even eleven o’clock the night before. They are ruined small-tradespeople, old people who have no family left, but also Party members, directors, and directors-general in ministries, civil servants in central state institutions, cadres from the political apparatus, from the militia and the Securitate. The impact of the queues is powerful. I am a Jew myself, but even I am beginning to experience strange feelings…

  These lines were written by a Romanian writer named Nicu Steinhardt, who continued:

  The simple gesture of taking one’s passport out of one’s pocket seems like sleight of hand, it has something of a cheap trickster’s magic about it. Or it seems like something that an odious mama’s boy might do: I’m not playing anymore, I’m going back to Mama. Or it seems like the winning gambler who gets up from his seat, grabs the money, and leaves: I’m going home. I’m not playing anymore. So, you take everybody to the dance, you urge them on, you pay the fiddlers, you get the party going, you cheer them on, you are one of them — and then you just drop out, you leave them all standing there like idiots: So long, I’m leaving. The trick, the scam, the treachery, the lie! Any man in his right mind cannot help but be disgusted, others merely smile. The more simple-minded are piqued, envious, and bear baleful grudges for an eternity to come.

  This passage is followed by a narrative on Cervantes and a tale about a traitor, one Judas, a symbol, obviously, of all that Judas and his co-religionists have always symbolized.

  The original — but maybe not so original — transfer of hatred, from hatred of others to self-hatred and vice versa, is not difficult to read in these lines. I was probably not immune myself at that time to such miserable subtleties, but I managed to remain more detached than their author, a future Orthodox monk.

  Arrested in i960 together with a group of intellectual friends, all accused of “conspiring against the social order,” the writer was condemned to twelve years’ hard labor, seven years of civil degradation, and the confiscation of all personal wealth. Prison for the Jew Steinhardt was a place of revelation, where he found Christ and converted not only to the Christian faith but also to the “heroism” of the Legionnaires, themselves condemned for “conspiracies,” albeit of a less intellectual nature. His subsequent book, A Diary of Happiness, in which he narrates his experiences in prison and the bliss of religious conversion, would become a best-seller and required reading for elite Romanian audiences of the post-Communist period.

  My own reaction to the Jews and non-Jews who were choosing to leave Romania sprang from a more private, less grand irritation. As a teenager I had dreams that were radically different from those of the young Jew Nicu Steinhardt, who saw himself as the savior of his hero, Corneliu Codreanu, the anti-Semitic Iron Guard “captain.” I had a different way of assessing the consequences of the heroic “betrothal to Death” promulgated by the Legionnaires. My own Initiation had been nothing less than a mystical betrothal to transcendence, and I would probably have been incapable, even in prison, of asking forgiveness from a Legionnaire for the fact that I was a Jew, as did the new convert to Christianity, Nicu Steinhardt.

  The attempt to flee the Communist cage seemed to me both justified and vulgar. I was not complaining about the mental handicap that prevented me from making this natural decision, and I would have preferred it if my friend Rellu had shared the same handicap. Was his moral argument for leaving the country prompted by the fact that this was the scene of the brutal anti-Semitic murder of his father, the same country that never offered his family the least official apology for the atrocity, just as my own family had never received one after Transnistria? I was irritated by those who invoked such reasons. My cynicism had reached such depths that I regarded those horrors as a mere step toward the great, ubiquitous, universal crime, Death, the premise of all our lives. Premature death, violent death, was just the same old, plain, unfair death, and it did not matter how and where it hunted us down — such was my insensitive logic on the matter. In the heat of debate, I did not seem to care to whom I was addressing such words.

  I had a bond, naturally, with Nicu Steinhardt’s anger. There was a certain connection between us, but the differences between us remained unbridgeable. Romanian citizenship did not appear to me as exalted as it did to Nicu Steinhardt, who regarded it as a certificate of membership in the gentlest and most Christian people on the planet. No, for me, being Romanian was a fact, nothing more, nothing less. I had no liking for “transfigured” people, be they Romanian, French, Paraguayan, or Cambodian. Lacking the comfort of religious faith, as well as the convert’s passionate nationalism, I believed that those who chose to change their citizenship were no worse than those who changed their faith. No, I would not ask forgiveness from the Legionnaire who, on the contrary, should himself kneel and beg the Jew’s pardon. Was I condescending toward my poor fellow Jews, lining up for their exodus? Did I feel contempt for their lucidity? In the same way that the Christianized Jew and litterateur Steinhardt spasmodically defended his chimeras, I, the agnostic Jew and litterateur-to-be, defended mine. It was not religion or nationalism that kept me in Romania but language and all the chimeras it offered — and not only language and its chimeras, but my whole life, of course, with its good and bad, a life of which language and its chimeras were the essence.

  When my friend Rellu spoke about the adventure on which he was about to embark, he displayed none of the con man’s “scam,” as Steinhardt so elegantly put it. There was nothing in him of the “odious mama’s boy” or of the “winning gambler who gets up from his seat, grabs the money, and leaves.” This did not describe any member of my family either, all hardworking, humble people, living in privation and fear. The applicants for the perils of uprootedness are not necessarily worse than those who accept the hazards of rootedness. In the country where they had lived for so many generations, th
ere had not been many “winners” among them, certainly not of big money. Even those who had “danced” the waltz of Communism, even those who had paid the “fiddlers” and cheered at the masquerade, had a right to admit their error and to leave for the other end of the earth, taking their guilt with them. My relatives did not, however, belong to this category either, and neither did Rellu. That accusation would have applied appropriately to me, the Red teenager, the inflexible thirteen-year-old commissar. Yet I chose to stay, not because I considered myself guilty or because I still believed in the “specter that haunted Europe.” Rather, I had found another chimera that, unlike the political one, made no promises of happiness to anyone.

  No, my friend Rellu embodied not “the trick, the scam, the treachery, the lie” of Steinhart’s scornful litany but its very opposite, and neither was he a traitorous Judas. Far from being “disgusted,” any people in their “right mind” had every reason to envy him for seizing an opportunity they wished for themselves — to leave the country. Had the gates been opened to all, irrespective of nationality and not on the basis of the deliberate campaign of discrimination aimed at the “evil” of which the country had repeatedly tried to rid itself, then the lines of people seeking to get out would have criss-crossed the land. It was not the first time that Jews were the object of such campaigns, but this time their departure confirmed the failure of Communism in Romania, the happiest place on earth, according to Father Steinhardt. Their departure was an indictment of Communism, with which Steinhardt and his partners in philosophical debate — themselves arrested for anti-state and anti-Party “conspiracy”—should have agreed as a matter of course.