by Norman Manea
Measures placing a cap on emigration were soon introduced and reprisals launched against those who applied. Rellu, immediately expelled from the university, was lucky to escape early. In the spring of 1959, I saw him to his train for Vienna, from where he would proceed to Italy, where he would board a boat for Israel. The moment of separation was charged with emotion. His mother asked me, smiling, just as the train was about to pull out, “How am I going to cope with him without you?” It was hard to tell whether she referred simply to the disruption of our friendship or whether she meant more. Awkwardly, Rellu handed me a thick notebook, which turned out to be a diary of our happy youthful friendship. Reading his tidy hand, which covered the wide pages, I soon discovered an account of an intense, even erotic affection of which neither of us had really been aware. His departure signaled the end of an era we had lost forever. On the first page of the notebook he had written: “The separation from the main character of these pages seems irreversible. It is only natural that this journal should stay with him.” The world that lay ahead would be deciphered only by a cryptic code to which neither of us had the key. I did not see much chance of a reunion.
I left the station, on that soft spring evening in Bucharest, filled with questions, but I had no doubt that my decision to stay, in spite of all the servitude that would be demanded of me, and the dangers, was the right one — right for me, that is. I did not believe that changing the place from which I observed the game-play of the world, or changing the religion into which I had been born, would improve my chances for happiness. In any case, I was suspicious of such changes, and even viewed them with contempt. The “common people,” I thought, can continue sucking on their dumb lollipop of hope, they can keep on believing in instant rewards. My claustrophobic survival depended on other reflexes, but it would have been unfair, I admitted, for others to adopt my strategy.
What about the prisoner of Periprava, exhausted by his forced labor and humbled by his prison uniform? What strategy for survival could I suggest to him, forever indifferent, as he was, to rewards, wishing simply to be left alone to live in peace and dignity? That question opened up an emptiness in my brain, in my stomach, in my heart. Fidelity to a chimera — a fierce selfishness — had, once again, proved stronger. I had been busy constructing my own rhetoric of self-justification. I had no wish to join the ranks of the free in all their competitions, least of all in a foreign place. I had nothing to offer on the free market, the handicap of exile would annihilate me. I was content with the local brand of discontent and could do without the complicated adventure of escape. Impoverished in my twisted socialist tunnel, I even felt, probably, a glimmer of satisfaction with the socialist attempt to “equalize” unhappiness, to diminish social divides by reducing opportunities for the greedy acquisition of money, honors, and position. This sleight of hand was by no means innocent. The crises which my parents underwent periodically— especially Mother, whose links to family and Israel were strong — failed to move me.
Unswerving fidelity to a chimera may look like a good thing, but I suspected it would lead me into trouble. Could such fidelity, by no means a mystical matter, nevertheless possess quasi-religious aspects? It sometimes seemed that only mystical faith, even in this bizarre variant, could lend meaning to life in the socialist tunnel. I could not guess at the time that, one day thirty years later, my turn to leave would come, when I would apply for a passport in honor of old Leopold Bloom.
The Night Shift
In the early 1960s, I was busy building apartment blocks in the center of Ploiesti. I suppose the nine-story edifice, the so-called Pergola Block, next to the covered market, is still standing, one of the mitigations for my sin of not having had children or for having written ephemeral books.
The quick pace of Ploieşti came as a shock to the slow-moving Buko-vinan that I was, even after my years in Bucharest as a student. A more senior engineer had warned me to “keep a close eye” on people’s movements at the building site. “You can wake up one morning and find that there are fifty bags of cement missing, or that you’ve signed for twenty loads of concrete more than you actually received, or that you’ve been supplied with only half the amount of brick mentioned in the invoice.” What he hadn’t told me, though, was how I could become a good policeman, when I was not even sure if I was a good engineer.
Before working on the Pergola Block, then the tallest building in the new town center, I had done my apprenticeship with the L-Block, which stood on the opposite side of the market and was only four stories high. As the youngest of the site’s engineers, I had been assigned to the night shift. So, from six in the evening till dawn, I worked not only with the regular construction crew but also with a group of prisoners. The contract with the local penitentiary, regarding the number of workers, the skills required, the working hours and days, and the payment due by the Building Trust, had been signed by the prison’s commanding officer, Major Drăghici, brother of the feared Minister of the Interior and member of the Politbureau.
If, in my early days at the university in 1954, I had practically fainted at my first encounter with the eggplant and the cucumber concoctions in the student canteen, what was I supposed to do at the sight of prisoners and guards? In fact, nothing happened. I did not faint as I saw the prisoners, in their drab uniforms, being brought in by the guards, just as I had not fainted at Periprava in 1958, seeing my father, in his dun-colored prison garb, being watched by guards. I turned pale and speechless, as I had done before, but I did not faint. In any case, contact with the inmates was to be kept to a strict minimum, and I was only allowed to deal, in the guard’s presence, with their foreman, himself a former construction worker. Moreover, the inmates and their guards were restricted to specific areas of the building site. I had asked the boss if there were any political detainees among the prisoners and was assured that the crew contained only “common criminals.” I knew very well, from my own family history, that this designation was as little to be believed as any other in the farcical socialist lexicon.
The inmates were given a chance to reduce their sentences by working outside the prison, and their participation in the building of the town’s new center was more to their benefit than to the Building Trust’s— after all, Ploiesti, even from dusk to dawn, was hardly Periprava. In actual fact, many of the inmates could well have been “common criminals.” Socialist deception did not exclude a measure of truth, however perverted. The work itself was not too demanding, and it was certainly better than being locked up all the time.
For all the assurances meant to calm my apprehensions, I still went to work each evening in a state of anxiety, mindful not only of what I was supposed to sign for — the number of loads of concrete, bags of cement and bricks — but also of the tricks that the prisoners or the guards might be trying to play on me. I was never fully at ease. As soon as evening set in, the women would appear, slinking through the still-wet concrete and the exposed girders. Carrying parcels or bulging envelopes, wide-eyed with impatience, they came to meet their husbands or brothers or lovers and to give them their offerings. The measures taken to bar the women from the building site did not keep them out. One after another, they kept coming, silently, stealthily.
I tried to shut my eyes to the “network” that facilitated these nocturnal trysts. Apparently, I had been studied by the prison contingent, who concluded that I was all right and would keep my silence about these visits. You never knew, however, where the next challenge might come from, where the next trap was being set. I had been approached more than once, outside the gates of the site, or while I was working, by relatives of the inmates or go-betweens, and it was difficult to tell them apart from the agents provocateurs. At dawn, I breathed a sigh of relief. I returned to my shabby room, improvised from a hut, where, on the iron bed, my Juliet lay sleeping.
What had been the point of my Initiation between the ages of five and nine, if, at twenty-five, I was unable to set fire to myself in the public marketplace — like those prot
esting Buddhist monks in Vietnam — to denounce the Big Lie that encased our lives like the thin shell of an egg? As you touched it, the membrane burst, and you suddenly found yourself alone and helpless, at the mercy of a whip wielded by authority. If in a moment of madness, you shouted out, “The Party has no clothes,” the eggshell would disintegrate in an instant. You were immediately pinned by your arms, like the demented criminal you indeed were, as witnesses stepped forward to confirm your malfeasance. The Big Lie, like a new placenta, prevented us from both dying and being born. One imprudent gesture and the filmy membrane exploded. You had to hold your breath and check yourself constantly, so that your mouth, choked with lies big and small, did not let out, involuntarily, the breath of air that could have shattered the protective cocoon. In fact, we were constantly wrapping the eggshell in other coverings, one inside another, like a nest of Russian dolls. So, what was this blessed Big Lie? An egg-shaped plate of armor? A gift from Mother Nature? The membrane of lies had become, for many, a thick protective coating, dense, indestructible, resistant to cracking. Inside the armor-plated egg — the penal colony of the Big Lie — the prisoners were condemned to compulsory happiness.
I did not puncture that filmy membrane. Like so many others, I had my private compensations. I ignored, as well as I could, the shell under which I went about my business. My main concern was to ignore the public sphere, remain simply the “engineer” who was paid for his work, and nothing more. The day was young, like myself, the city vivid and alive, a sanctuary of eternal summer, like my Juliet.
Juliet had just managed to avoid being expelled from the university. A fellow student had sent a “memorandum” to the dean, alluding to the dubious morality of the dark-haired maid of Verona. She had been asked to appear at the same office where, about eight years earlier, I had been summoned by the future Foreign Minister. The rector of the university had been fired only days before and this seemed a favorable moment for the “unmasking” of his niece’s immoral behavior. However, a few days later, it turned out that the rector had not, in fact, been demoted, but promoted. Overnight, Juliet’s uncle had become a vice minister, and the whole episode collapsed.
There I was, once more, sitting on the terrace of the Boulevard restaurant, in the center of Ploiesti, opposite my building site. I was celebrating the sixties, the time when Western Europe was staging its great youth rebellions, while Eastern Europe was learning to adapt itself, more stringently, to the ambiguity being served up in uncertain and calculated portions. The street below was vibrant with passing humanity. All I had to do, it seemed, to pull up a plump catch, was drop my fishing line. I was waiting for the revelation that reality was real, and that I was real, and that I was meant to discover its meaning, its secret, its justification. At any moment, the gods were about to grant me some encrypted privilege, as I moved on from one stage of my life to another.
I was eating grilled sturgeon, washed down with a light, slightly acidic wine. I was smoking Greek cigarettes and looking into the eyes of my Juliet — and also sneaking a peek at the other jeunes filles en fleur, there in the seventh-floor Boulevard restaurant, in the Romanian town of Ploiesti, close to the 45th parallel. I didn’t give a damn about the Party or the Securitate. I was young, but considered myself old, knowing, justified in my ignoring of the penal colony and its assorted inmates, political prisoners or otherwise. My head was abuzz with all the political, revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, and even liberal and humanist ideas I had gained from my reading, but when all was said and done, I simply didn’t give a damn about anything. World history bored me, my own history was running according to its own beat, as I ate my fish and smoked my Papastratos, alive to the day’s rhythms and not concerned about Comrade Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s illness, absorbed with my Juliet and all the other Juliets around me and not with the disaster of the Vietnam War. I tried to flee into the picaresque particulars of a profession that was alien to me. Eager to know more about the unknown people who crossed my path, exultant in the mountains and the sea that always received me in triumph, avid for the books that might hold the answers to my questions, I did not wish to be drawn into the world’s un-happiness, not even that of my immediate world. I was old and tired, but also obscenely young, engorged with desire and confusion.
“Comrade engineer, your mother is calling, she’s on the line.” The secretary had run to the top of the scaffolding, where I was supervising the pouring of the cement. “Hurry up, she’s waiting. She called yesterday, too, from Suceava. She says she hasn’t had any news from you for the last two weeks.” Two weeks… the boy hadn’t written home for two whole weeks, horror of horrors. Now he was running along the concrete-sheathed girders, past the piles of bricks and the heaps of glass panes, rushing to assure his mother that there was nothing wrong, that nothing bad had happened, that there was no catastrophe. His tribe’s sufferings no longer interested him, he was far away from Mater Dolorosa and the ghetto’s claws — but it would never seem far enough.
The past was hunting me down, always one step behind, and caught up with me when least expected. The escape into books, the majesty of the mountains and the sea, erotic adventure, politics, dictatorship, the fragile egg of the Big Lie — nothing could compete with the tyranny of affections. The velvet claw was always there, ready to reassert its power, its strength, its permanence. Was this a surrogate for normality, the metabolism of duplicity? Why couldn’t twenty million people join in unison to voice their discontent and self-interest, why couldn’t they all explode, simultaneously, in a burst of collective revolt? Were they all protected by the membrane of the eggshell? “Protected, protected,” my brain repeated, as I ran past the wet concrete and the piles of bricks. I was an old man on the run, escaped from the tribe’s clutches without having really escaped. At the age of twenty-five I no longer had time, or eyes, or ears for the political cacophony, for all the speeches, threats, police, prisoners, choruses festive and mournful, the fireworks, all the tragedies and comedies of the socialist reality.
I had no time, no eyes, no ears for any of this — or did I? Perhaps I did.
The Snail’s Shell
The crook who had married Avram Braunstein’s daughter and squandered her dowry forced the old man to sell the house he had bought just one year before. It was always possible to buy a house, he told himself, but his beloved daughter’s peace of mind was more precious. Not long after, the true, intended son-in-law appeared, charmed by the partner sent to him as a gift from St. Elias.
After the wedding, the new couple started saving for a new house. In October 1941, they had almost accumulated the necessary sum. However, in the end, the money would be used to negotiate destiny’s pathways in that terrible winter of the Initiation. The return, in the spring of 1945, did not mean coming home. The houses they left had been reallocated, the personal property sequestered. The survivors had to be content with their survival. My grandparents had died, my parents had survived, and so had we, the younger survivors. The house of their dreams was gone; now the socialist state owned all the houses and all the inhabitants.
The building of Our Bookstore in Burdujeni and the living quarters behind the shop where I was born had been relegated to memory — the pale yellow walls, the door perpetually open in the summer, the colorful interior filled with books, pencils, and notebooks; the back rooms, dark, crammed. I had no recollection of the house in Iţcani, it remained in that historyless time from before the Initiation. It was shown to me, many years after we returned from the labor camp. It stood opposite the railway station, behind a park full of benches, a solid house, in the Germanic style, with a severe façade, flaking paint, a sort of ocher in color, rectangular windows aligned on the front. Entry was through the courtyard.
In the postwar years, I had frequent occasion to be in and out of the railway station, but I was never curious enough to go into the courtyard of the house across the way and walk up the two steps leading to the front door. I also have no memory of the rooms where I languished du
ring the four years in the labor camp, windowless and doorless, with many families crammed together, which I know about mainly from hearsay. Nor do I have any recollection of the houses we lived in in Bessarabia, after the Red Army liberated us — lost spaces all, belonging to a lost time. Only after our return did time recover me, and space, too, began to acquire a shape.
In July 1945 I was restored to fairy-tale normality; the new habitation was in the house of our relatives, the Riemers, in Fălticeni. I recall a room in semidarkness, an imperial-style bed, with its iron bedstead, old-fashioned cushions, and a bedspread of yellow plush, whitewashed walls, a round black table, two chairs, a narrow window covered by heavy curtains. For the first time I felt at home. That time, too, probably marked the beginning of something different from and beyond the immediate calendar. The green book of folktales I had received for my ninth birthday opened up for me the world of the word-magicians who became my new family.
My grandfather had invested his money in a house; my parents, in the early years of their marriage, were saving up to buy a house. After the war, when the state became the sole landlord, people were no longer looking for houses to buy but for shelters. In 1947, after our return to Suceava, we moved into a rented house, on a street that ran parallel to the main street, next to a small, pretty, triangle-shaped park. We had the last apartment on the left side of a single-story building. The entrance was around the corner, through a sort of veranda. One small room was used as a kitchen, which opened onto a shared dark corridor, from which one descended into the basement, used to store potatoes and jars of pickled vegetables. In the corridor to the right stood a basin fitted into a wooden stand, with grooves for soap and toothbrush glasses. On the opposite wall were the towel racks. Water came from a well in the courtyard and was stored in a tank next to the basin.