The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  The first door to the right led to our rooms. The next door, also on the right, led to the apartment of Nurse Strenski, who, not long after we moved in, married an apathetic but gentle drunk. The door at the bottom of the corridor opened onto the communal lavatory, a tall, narrow room, one step wide, the toilet lacking a seat, the flush chain rusted and useless. Water was brought in a bucket from the tank in the corridor.

  Our apartment consisted of two medium-sized rooms. The first, the sitting room, where we had our meals and received our guests, also served as a bedroom and workroom for the family’s two schoolchildren. The next room was the parents’ bedroom, with the massive family wardrobe. There were no pictures on the walls, but in the front room, over one of the beds, was a rectangular photograph in a thin black wooden frame, history’s festive recording of the young Pioneer receiving his red neckerchief on Revolution Day, when the young activist made his fiery speech in the public square and saluted the red banner on which golden letters spelled out, in Russian: STALIN.

  My student lodgings were also fine examples of socialist Jormania’s residential regulations — eight square meters per person. Old Mrs. Adel-man rented me her only room, at the back of the courtyard, on 27 Mihai Vodă Street, near Podul Izvor, in order to augment her meager income. There was a table, two chairs, and a bed. The lavatory was shared with the neighbors, Captain Tudor, who was always away on training exercises, and his always available wife, also occupying a single room. Proletarian equality had divided the old bourgeois house into units for several socialist families. On cold winter nights, old Mrs. Adelman would bring her folding bed from the communal kitchen, where she now slept, and install it next to her old bed, given up to her boarder.

  The move to the row of townhouses off Calea Călărasi marked a step up. In one of these, I rented a room from Dr. Jacobi, a pediatrician who worked mainly at the hospital but also saw the occasional illegal patient at home. The glass door of his consulting room would open when you would least expect it. Out would come fat Mrs. Jacobi, jealous of her husband, or Marian, their son, a timid grind studying to become a dentist, who squirmed under his mother’s thumb, yet was always ready to tell stories about his father’s mistress, a garrulous, aggressive Gypsy who lived in the basement.

  As I moved from one rented room to another, my suitcase was the only space I could really call my own. But after my marriage, I finally became officially entitled to a room, all housing being administered by the state. It was a pleasant room, overlooking the street, in an apartment on Metropolitan Nifon Street, not far from Liberty Park. We shared the bathroom, kitchen, and hall with a couple of old-age pensioners who lived next door.

  The next move, both into and out of the spacious apartment on Sfîn-tul Ion Nou Street, near Union Market, afforded a good illustration of the socialist Byzantine comedy. One of the two apartments on the third floor of the apartment house was occupied by Cella’s parents, an uncle, and an aunt. In the other apartment, her grandparents occupied a room, while the other two rooms were home to a theater director and his family. When the director successfully applied to emigrate to Germany, we were given the opportunity to move into the vacated room. According to housing regulations, Cella’s grandparents could exercise an option right on the space for occupation by close relatives, and we, as their granddaughter and her husband, qualified. The two rooms, of course, were more than the one room usually permitted, but the law allowed for an extra room for members of artists’ and writers’ unions or scientific researchers, to be used as a study. Beyond the law, there was the customary baksheesh and string-pulling. At last we were installed in a respectable middle-class home, two big rooms, high ceilings, a hall, bathroom, and kitchen.

  On the fatal night of the big earthquake of March 4, 1977, Cella came home from work carrying a box of pastries she had bought in town. I was in the study, sitting on the red couch by the night table, listening to Radio Free Europe. I rose to greet her when suddenly the room began to shake, the furniture shuddered, and the wall-length bookshelves collapsed noisily onto the very spot where I had been sitting a few seconds earlier. Terrified, we took shelter inside the door frame. Then we ran down the staircase filled with debris, out into the street. We joined a crowd of frightened people, lost and wandering among the collapsed buildings, and made our way to the center of the city. By now it was nearly midnight. We looked at each other with relief and realized that only good luck had saved us, Cella from being crushed under the wreckage of the Scala pastry shop’s baked goods, and me under the fallen bookshelves.

  The next year, Cella’s grandparents decided, in spite of their advanced age, to emigrate to Israel. We had no rights to their room and didn’t qualify for the whole apartment. Accordingly, we notified the housing authorities that we would like to be allocated a new two-room apartment, as our current residence, now a three-room apartment, could be assigned only to a larger family or to a family belonging to the nomenklatura. If some Party bigwig had been interested in the apartment, he could probably have arranged for us to receive a suitable apartment in its place. Indeed, second-echelon Party activists and a few vice ministers did come to see the place, but weren’t impressed by it. Apparently, we had underestimated the tastes and aspirations of the people’s representatives. We made useless appeals for help to the Writers Union, placing our hopes in its own bigwigs and in its channels of communication with the authorities.

  For two weeks after the old couple’s departure, nothing happened. Then, one morning, a family of Gypsies showed up with an authorization to take occupancy of the empty room — a father, a mother, their daughter, and a fourth member of the ensemble, in prominent view, an accordion. They had no furniture, just a few bundles, which they began to unpack. They then hammered nails into the walls, from which they strung a rope, onto which they hung all their possessions. The occupancy accomplished, the father grabbed the accordion and treated us to some lively cadenzas.

  Our new neighbors’ cheeriness was in marked contrast to our more dour mien. Until we could find a way of solving the impasse, we ceded the entire kitchen to them, on condition that the bathroom would remain exclusively ours. For their rare ablutions, they could use the kitchen sink and the second toilet off the corridor. However, very quickly, they managed to invade the bathroom, and came and went as they pleased, as though we had never reached an agreement. The smell of roast sausages and the sounds of the accordion dominated our shared home, from dawn till late at night.

  There was only one solution left — to take extreme measures. After suffering for a year, one Monday morning, at ten o’clock, I showed up at the Writers Union, to remind its vice president of our previous discussions. I also informed him that if, by 2 p.m., the issue was not resolved, I would hold a press conference in the apartment for the foreign press. I would show them how our poor working classes lived — three persons, mother, father, and daughter, sleeping on the floor in the same room and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with the couple next door, who were rather averse to the trio’s incessant accordion playing. My colleague, the representative of the state, attempted to calm me down. He understood, however, that it was to no avail, and anyway, the microphones in his office had already relayed my threats to the appropriate authorities. He made a phone call and, after a brief conversation, informed me that I had an appointment at the Party’s Central Committee, entrance B, floor 3, room 309, at eleven, in half an hour’s time.

  Once in the inner sanctum, I was invited to sit down before a panel of four comrades. They seemed equal in rank and probably came from different departments — Culture, Ethnic Minorities, Security, and, who knows, maybe even Foreign Press, given the nature of my threat. I was invited to summarize the situation, and then was questioned by each member of the panel. Finally, I was asked whether I could suggest a solution. I repeated what I had already said: one year earlier, prior to the old couple’s departure, I had suggested that the apartment be allocated to someone legally entitled to occupy it and that my wife and I, in return
, be given a smaller, more appropriate residence. Yes, they were aware, mistakes had been made, but did I, they asked, have a concrete proposal in mind?

  Actually, I did. The numberless small ads that I had placed, seeking an apartment exchange, had finally yielded a result, which the comrades might take into consideration. A lieutenant-colonel from the Executive Command, with a wife and a son in his last year of high school, were willing to move into our three-room apartment, in exchange for their two-room apartment, at no. 2 Calea Victoriei. However, this required special approval from the army, complex formalities, as the lieutenant-colonel explained. I gave them the officer’s name, and one of the members of the panel, a grumpy-looking sort, signaled to his bald colleague, who dialed the number of Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, who confirmed what I had said.

  Suddenly the Party activists relaxed and I was assured that everything would soon be sorted out. I was even presented — would you believe it — with an apology for the misunderstanding. It was a splendid day, and as I walked home, I told myself that I didn’t give a damn about the pages that I was certain would now be added to my already bulging dossier. The threat of an international press conference, it seemed, had had an immediate effect. Was this a good sign, a bad sign? Was it all a farce meant to put my nerves to sleep, before the dropping of the final ax?

  I was in no hurry to get home. The day was sunny and this latest development was a lift to my spirits. I arrived at no. 26 Sfîntul Ion Nou Street around one in the afternoon. I did not take the elevator but climbed the stairs to the third floor. The accordion must have been resting or wandering through town. Our neighbors’ door was wide open, with no signs of life inside. I looked in — nothing, nobody, not even the rope strung from one wall to the other, no bundles on the floor, absolutely nothing. As if no one was ever there. The windows were wide open; a ghost had taken pains to air the room.

  As I went out, bewildered, I bumped into the building superintendent, who was just dropping by to let me know that the Gypsy troupe had been taken away, bundled into a truck and driven off. Who had taken them? Nobody knew for sure, but it must have been on the orders of somebody higher up. The socialist circus had performed with admirable dispatch, with a magician’s deftness and efficiency. Within one single hour, a whole year’s tensions had evaporated.

  The two rooms at no. 2 Calea Victoriei — one half of a pre-socialist apartment — would be my last residence in Romania. The hooligan had finally abandoned his high-wire act and had become what he had been reluctant to admit — a writer; a dissident writer, to boot. I had quietly published, in a provincial magazine, a few critical lines about the new Romanian National Socialism. The official attack was prompt. The stone-throwing came from every quarter: I became overnight “extrater-itorial,” a “traitor,” an “enemy of the Party.” In due course, time tore away my masks, one by one — my caution, my timidity, my sense of humor. My insomnia grew worse. I would wake up each morning deprived of yet another of my masks. Before long, I risked losing whatever had remained of my habits as a quiet, respectable citizen. I did not enjoy the new farce. The hooligan had not forgotten the hooligan war, or the years of hooligan peace.

  Time passed swiftly. It seemed as if only a second had elapsed from that distant afternoon forty years ago when I had heard the voice — mine and yet not mine — coming at me from everywhere and from nowhere, assuring me that I was not alone in the universe, as I had thought. Alone in that strange room in the Riemers’ house in Fălticeni, and alone in the universe, I had discovered another home, another universe, and another self. The world of books would become my new home. I lived in this world throughout my apprenticeship years, in Suceava, my fling with revolution, the years of engineering study in Bucharest, my stay in the houses of old Rebeca Adelman, and Dr. Jacobi, and all the other shelters where I dragged my baggage of illusions, my only personal possessions.

  Had I really been protected, as I had hoped, by analytic geometry and the resistance of materials and the structure of building and fluid mechanics and hydroelectrics — had all these protected me from the surrounding demagogy or from the fault lines in my own mind? Duplicity, split personality, schizophrenia were teaching us how to bury collective history deep within our personal history. My need for “something else” had not diminished, however. I had taken refuge in the home that only books could promise. The double exile of the divided ego — was that a redeeming disease? Had the hope of protecting myself from myself been replaced, finally, by the hope of recapturing myself? I followed my own zigzagging route, toward and away from myself, trying to get back to myself, to replace myself and to lose myself, and then do the same all over again. The deprivations I suffered and the dangers I risked had, in the meantime, become everybody’s lot, as if everyone had to atone for some obscure crime. Under the terror, my attractions to books intensified, and I acquired invisible partners in dialogue who, by offering their companionship, delayed death.

  In the room on Mitropolit Nifon Street, next to Liberty Park, where I lived with Cella in the first year of our marriage, I was finally granted the privilege, in the summer of 1969, of listening to my own voice in my own book. The volume had green covers, just like the one in 1945.

  I had finally found my true home. Language promised not only a rebirth but also a form of legitimization, real citizenship, and real belonging. Exile from this ultimate place of refuge would have been the most brutal form of extirpation, would have touched the very fiber of my being.

  Fifty years of a hooligan century had passed since Grandfather Avram had asked whether the newborn infant had the fingernails necessary for survival. In 1986, history seemed to recycle its black farces. Did Augustus the Fool get tired of the old role of victim? The Initiation had been precocious, and its educational value relative. I had delayed leaving the motherland I had regained in 1945 out of some hypnotic illusion that I could substitute language for homeland. Now all that was left for me to do was to take language, my home, with me.

  I would be carrying the snail’s shell on my back. Wherever the shipwreck would toss me, the snail’s shell, the juvenile refuge, was still to be my true home.

  The Claw (II)

  My struggle against the ghetto was, above all, a struggle against the anxieties, the exaggerations, and the panic that my mother possessed to excess, and that she also transmitted, in excess, to all those around her. I did not emerge victorious from this never-ending confrontation, I merely survived.

  “The only comfort, as I went to bed, was that my mother would come and kiss me good-night,” as Proust wrote, is alien to my life story. The Jewish Jeanne-Clémence Weil, married to the Catholic Dr. Achille-Adrien Proust, was quite unlike my mother, and the social, religious, geographic, and historical differences between them were considerable. Inner adversity, which Mihail Sebastian, Proust’s Romanian admirer, considered inherent in a Jew, abated when external adversities were themselves diminished. The rarely resolved tension between inner and outer adversity in the world of my childhood required different conventions and different masks. The ritual of the comforting kiss before going to sleep would have jarred with the anguish of the real or imaginary conflicts in our East European family.

  By the early 1940s, my mother had foreseen the catastrophe. Confronted with disaster, her energies abruptly changed direction. The neurotic exhaustion of waiting was refocused on brisk action.

  After the early weeks in Transnistria, my father abandoned any illusions. He had started without many opportunities in life and he would have liked simply to live in quiet dignity. What he dreaded was not death but humiliation. The attempt at redressing the situation was assumed, as so often before, by his wife. Her inner anxiety was nourished by uncertainty and exacerbated by a need for hope. Extremes of behavior and of danger, stormy relationships, the excitement of shared news and gossip, as well as a strong sense of community — all these mobilized her vast energies. She was good at planning the transactions of survival; she would borrow here, give back there, surfacing
with a bowl of cornmeal, or an aspirin, or some piece of wonderful news.

  For her son — that perpetually hungry, ghostly creature — the supreme evocation was not Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea but onion pie, a miracle as unknown to the Parisian Marcel as was hunger. Tea for me, as for many other East European youngsters, was the hot drink offered by the Red Cross upon our return from the labor camp.

  Fragile, crumpled, invincible — this was how our traumatized savior looked as she stood on the border of the motherland in 1945. She was instantly caught up in the vortex of revival, chained, as usual, to her brothers in suffering, dependent on that association, which contrasted strongly with the dignity and silences of her husband, who preferred solitude. She gave of herself with careless generosity, and demanded devotion and gratitude in return. My father’s prudence, his self-effacing awkwardness, did not depend on others. This gentle man did not demand or expect gratitude.

  When we returned to Romania, all contact with the family of my aunt Rebecca Graur was broken off. The names of my mother’s older sister and her daughter Minna were never uttered by my parents, not even in the heat of argument. The ban on speaking the unmentionable names was shattered by a piece of news that struck like thunder: the death of Aunt Rebecca’s other daughter. Mother took the first train to Tîrgu Fru-mos, home of the Graur family, and returned after the week of mourning. A year later, in our house in Suceava, we celebrated the marriage of Minna, the “sinner,” to the widowed husband of her deceased sister. The festivities confirmed the re-established family link, and my mother could once more share in the events, good and bad, of her sister’s family; the incident of Minna’s and my father’s adultery was never mentioned again, not even in passing.