by Norman Manea
My mother’s relations to the others in the family seemed to protect her, for a while, from herself. Her son, so intimate a part of her, received no good-night kiss in that narrow, constricted refuge of ours. I was never read to or told bedtime stories. Mater Dolorosa had no time or patience for that. Bound up with herself, and with an exaggerated emotionalism, she was prey to her own contradictions; only the core of her strong, vulnerable, agitated personality remained indestructible. Her theatricality stimulated her passion, and her panic did not undermine her spirit, her resilience, and her devotion.
Even if the roles had been reversed and the son had been able to give the mother what he had not been given, he still would not have been able to re-create a Bukovina version of the Proustian childhood. Fearful and narrow, the East European ghetto had survived, wrapped in its twisted mysteries, secure in its peculiar sins, a shadowy space that in the course of time had learned to adapt to all the convulsions that had come its way. And beyond the ghetto was the packed closeness of the Orthodox churches, so different from the majestic spectacles of the Catholic cathedrals in the West, with their soaring Gothic stage sets, a backdrop for magnificent performances of grace and harmony — a sacred staging, to the accompaniment of the solemn, stately chords of the organ.
When she took her lunch break from the socialist store where she worked, Mother instantly reconnected to the ghetto. She preferred the exchange of news and whispers with the neighbors to conversations with her son. She had a regular route. First she would look in on the overweight Mrs. Abosch, who lived in the first apartment with her small daughter, following her Zionist husband’s disappearance into the Communist prisons. Then there was Mrs. Segal, the widow, with her beautiful daughter, Rita, a final-year student at the high school. Then there was the family of the accountant Heller. After all those calls, there was little time left for lunch. She grabbed a quick snack, then perfunctorily asked about the two schoolchildren in her own family. But what a fuss she made when we were laid up with flu or sunstroke! Any unforeseen event in the lives of her husband or her son, or some relative from near or far, signaled an imminent catastrophe, for whose warning signs she was ever on the alert. This most devoted mother and wife seemed, in fact, totally unsuited to her role, just as her extreme involvement in the daily round of life seemed to cover some essential lack, for which she found a measure of relief in religious faith.
Food was mainly Austrian-Bukovinan cuisine, with its own specific sweet and sour flavors. Meat was not separated from milk, as the Law prescribed, but all dishes and pots and pans were thoroughly scrubbed for Passover, as was the house. In autumn, the New Year brought with it seasonal rituals and reflections, culminating in the fast of Yom Kippur. Faith had become a sort of genetic tradition, an encompassing code of rules to help one cope with all the major and minor events of daily life. Mystical, superstitious, with an unfailing faith in the workings of fate, Mother, the daughter of the ghetto, maintained a cordial suspicion of the surrounding Christian milieu, as well as a moderate curiosity about it. On the other hand, her absolute solidarity with her own people did not preclude her directing her wit at critical assessments and judgments.
Socialism did not seem to have affected her. She was aware of the new order and its myriad regulations, but she was untouched by the vision of utopian happiness that had turned the heads of so many of her coreligionists. She regarded the changes with resignation. She saw her son distancing himself day by day from the world of his ancestors. These were troubled, dangerous times. The past, for all its bleakness, was remembered as a time of color and élan, and pointed an accusing finger at the venomous drabness of the present. Like the Greek agora, the ghetto had stimulated an active trade in emotions and ideas, as well as business. Socialist propaganda may have unmasked the petit bourgeois spirit with its speculators and traders, but it also promoted corruption at a deeper level, she seemed to be saying. I myself was suffocating in the ghetto, choked by those possessive excesses and that incessant panic, but my hostility became only another face of servility and bondage. After my juvenile fling with the Communist madness, I had come to hate anything that had to do with “we,” with collective identity, which seemed to me suspect, an oppressive simplification. The chasm between “me” and “us” was one I was no longer disposed to cross.
My co-religionists were disparagingly accused by the socialist tenets, as by the former nationalist tenets, of an addiction to commerce. It was not until much later in life that I untangled the complexity of this ancient occupation and came to appreciate what it required — intelligence, risk-taking, a flair for negotiation, hard work with no fixed hours, trust, a good name. Only law or psychiatry would have suited Mother equally well, had she had the chance to pursue higher education. Socialism, however, had stifled freedom of initiative and innovation, and the trade of old, under the new dispensation, had become forced, stultifying labor, “planned” bureaucracy. Salespeople, marketing experts, planners, accountants — all were under constant surveillance by the Party watchdogs or the regular police.
From the socialist Our Bookstore, Mother stumbled into another job in a socialist haberdashery, one for which she was completely unsuited. Now, instead of books, her lifelong calling, she dealt with buttons, threads, ribbons, laces, scarves, and stockings. On unsteady feet, she would climb the rickety ladder to reach the boxes of the upper shelf. She then climbed down slowly, panting, with the needed box trembling in her big, wrinkled hand. Meanwhile, the customer, usually a peasant woman, had changed her mind. However, there was no time for argument, as other customers claimed her attention. On more than one occasion, it happened that the length of embroidered lace or a roll of ribbon vanished, along with the presumed thief, possibly a young apprentice whose work ethic was minimal and who cared only about her socialist salary, equally minimal. “Thief, thief!” I could hear my mother shouting at the part-time salesgirls, always different ones with dexterous fingers that frequently dipped into the till.
The store nightmare always culminated in the hysterical days of stocktaking, when the staff worked from morning till late at night, itemizing and pricing the goods. The tension this occasioned would affect even my father, who, after his own working hours, would check the various accounting procedures at home, to correct the errors of incompetent or even downright corrupt managers. Eventually, all the black forebodings were confirmed, and in the aftermath of a disastrous accounting error, Mother escaped prison only because of her age and some discreet string-pulling. She broke down at her trial, as she had on the night train that took us back after a visit to Periprava, where Father was churning in his humiliation. Humiliation itself did not affect her, but when it touched her husband or her son, she assumed the guilt for their disgrace.
“God will help you for all you’re doing,” she would repeat on those mornings in Bucharest when I accompanied her to the doctor — the same words she had used on the train from Periprava and in the days of her trial. Blind, she would wait patiently on the street corner for me to return with a taxi, no mean feat at rush hour in Bucharest.
Her obsession with my estrangement and with my plans for leaving our hometown brought on devastating nervous crises, often triggered by something trifling. She had no strength to confront me directly. Incapable of hurting me verbally, she still wanted to hurt me, deeply, incurably, for the indifference with which I distanced myself from her impasses and traumas. Her tenseness, aggravated by her feeling of helplessness, turned me into an exasperated, ice-cold witness. Were her wailings and laments a performance, produced for effect? I tried to armor myself against these assaults, but was not always successful. I was unable to escape from her possessiveness, her steely, irredeemable egoism. She seemed to want to punish all those in her immediate surroundings, by torturing herself and them, only because they were unable to reward her spectacular martyrdom, her absolute devotion.
This, indeed, was the tyranny of affection, the unbearable malady of the ghetto. The claw, covered in velvet and silk,
would clutch at you when you were least prepared. I could not escape, even after I had extricated myself from the ghetto. Then, unexpectedly, she would become serene again and her sense of humor and her gentleness would, miraculously, return.
Paradoxically, the calmness seemed to authenticate yesterday’s anxieties and hysterics. Retrospectively, serenity afforded a strange foundation to her previous lack of balance. It was a case not so much of split personality as of a confirmation of both sides of herself. She could not be one thing, she seemed to be saying, without also being its opposite. Neither side could assume supremacy over her troubled, turbulent personality. A mysterious ancestral strength persisted in the face of her vulnerability “I’m praying for them as well,” she appeared to be saying, casting a glance at the Christian society surrounding her. She thought long and hard about that contingent world, her hands covering her eyes, as though in prayer, as she implored protection from the unknown.
The cemetery seemed to mean more to her than the synagogue. It was a form of natural, unmediated, but also transcendental, communication, a way of inserting herself into history. Our ancestors were once us, now we are them; the past and the present are fused. We come out of Egypt every year, as they did, without ever leaving it behind altogether, we relive other Egypts again and again, their fate is ours, just as our fate is theirs, forever and ever. This mystical connection, the identification with all the generations, the invocation of divine potentiality, became more frequent, of course, whenever things here on earth were not going well.
She accepted the fact that the world had changed. One could not, however, believe in the equality that was being offered or consider oneself a patriot, that is, someone entitled to be a critic of the country’s predicament, as I patiently attempted to explain to her. She tried to avoid this delicate topic, just as she avoided talking about my books. But she was always nervous when I was in the center of the storm. She sensed the moments of crisis, and she never demanded that I admit she was right in her apprehensions. In any case, it would have been too late. I refused to let myself be reclaimed and chained by the clan. I had trained myself in skepticism and had learned from that great skeptic Mark Twain that nothing could be worse than being a man. Had I wanted to be Romanian? Did I enjoy the joke played on me? the American wit seemed to be asking. What would it have felt like being Paraguayan or Chinese? Or Jewish, for that matter? This particular piece of bad luck was not less interesting than the others.
Had I really been conceived in God’s likeness, did He really have my face? In that case, the Supreme Being, who had brought everything into existence, had given birth to me. Was He embodied in the nearest of my near ones, the woman who in actual fact had given birth to me? Indeed, no conflict with divinity could have been richer than the quarrels from which I had benefited as my mother’s son, nor could the chains be any stronger.
My mother was no Jeanne-Clémence Proust, née Weil, and her son was no reincarnation of Marcel. I never received any good-night kiss from her, and even now, decades later, when I revisit her in memory and am assailed by nostalgia, this is not what I lie in bed waiting for. The claw of the past is no less painful. Occasionally, she forgets to put in an appearance, but when I wake up from my mindless vagrancy, I can see again, through night’s red heavens, the passage of the blind woman in her wheelchair. In His celestial chair, God is dozing off. He has taken the shape of an old moribund woman. The infirm, blind, and weary form has my mother’s sunken face. Among the foreigners who surround me, here and beyond and everywhere, my confusions — the exile’s ultimate treasure — bring me a familiar and accessible God.
The family album is composed of very few photographs, the rest have been lost in the family’s wanderings. The young woman with a hat, veil, and black fur cape gazes shyly at her new husband. With her dark, vivid eyes, finely chiseled nose, flared nostrils, high forehead, arched eyebrows, she is the very picture of a nervous Mediterranean beauty, tempered in the fire of the East European crucible. Photographs do not represent memories. There are no memories from the years prior to the Initiation, those years were obliterated by amnesia. Those isolated, unforgettable sequences from Transnistria come with no visual aids, they were lost from the archives of history and are replaced, today, by the clichés of lament. The photographer who took the picture of the straggling bands of people dressed in rags, on the streets of Iaşi, as we returned in the spring of 1945 to the motherland that had expelled us, did not, unfortunately, go on to document the images of the rebirth — the year-end festivities, the summer holidays, the park for holiday-makers in Vatra-Dornei, the scorched fields around the dams of Periprava, my father’s labor-camp uniform.
She turned pale when I told her I wanted to drop out of the university. “You’re right,” she finally said, “if you don’t like it, you mustn’t continue.” She had the same reaction when, as a newly graduated engineer, I told her I was renting a room in town. “Well, if you cannot take it anymore …” She fretted in her kitchen as she prepared a meal in honor of her new daughter-in-law. She waited impatiently at the front gate for the postman to show up. In the throes of the illnesses of old age, she accepted her lot and railed against it. She turned her bitter sarcasm on her husband: “When I was young and I gave you pleasure, it was better, wasn’t it?”
Four decades after my first exile, the current one has the advantage that it allows no fantasies about return. The witnesses of my life are now scattered to all the corners and cemeteries of the world. Images from the past visit me occasionally at night, courtesy of the Chinese sage who learned about the way I looked before my parents met. I see shadows on the wall and I can distinguish my mother’s silhouette outlined in the dark. I can make out the frontiers, the place where I was born, the cemetery. When they met, in 1933, my parents could not foresee that they would be buried at such great distance from their own parents, and from each other — and at an even greater distance from the likely grave of their only son, now setting down this report for posterity.
The shadows flicker on the wall and I can see the nameless, unmarked graves in the forests of Transnistria, where my maternal grandparents were left behind. I see the flower-covered grave of another grandfather, my father’s father, in pastoral Fălticeni. I see also, on one of Jerusalem’s hills, the slab of stone set on fire by the Judean sun under which my father rests. Only Mother, of all people, remains in the place where she had always lived and always wanted to leave. She was the only one of us to remain in the motherland to the very end and lies in the cemetery in Suceava, a beckoning motherland for her nomadic son. She had always considered herself to be in exile, and the destiny she so believed in exiled her to eternal rest in the place from which she set out. Was this done to burden her son with yet another reason to feel guilt? Guilt, always guilt — a rich substitute for the lost family albums of the lost families.
Only now, in his more mature years, does the exile appear to need the mother’s adoration and her anguish. Only now can I recognize myself in that whining mama’s boy in Paris. Is Marcel’s East European twin, having long thirsted for liberation, in his senescence now yearning for the comfort of a reconnection with his people? Would I ever hear my mother’s steps, signaled by the swish of her velvet dress, returning from the world of no return, passing through the corridor toward the bedroom of the abandoned child? “A painful moment,” says Marcel, “announcing the next, the next moment when she would have already been gone.” How long would this vision last? How soon will it be before I am left alone again? “The moment when I heard her climb the stairs, then her steps along the corridor … I had reached the point when I wished her to take as long as possible, so that the waiting could be prolonged.” Marcel’s words are now mine, although, unlike him, I was not raised in the world of cathedrals and organ music. I am a different sort of exile, claimed as I am by the dark fogs of Eastern Europe. “I am allowed no moment of calm, I cannot take anything for granted, everything has to be fought for, not only the present and the future, but a
lso the past,” Franz Kafka wrote. I would never have appropriated such words before, but I would certainly have recognized myself at any time in the plight of the East European exile. Yes, everything had to be fought for, nor had we been allowed a moment of calm.
Not only the ghetto had vanished, but a whole world disappeared. It was late evening. There was no way now to begin my search for those lost times, and no miracle drugs could restore them to me. Without past, without future, was I inhabiting the illusion of a rented present, an insecure trap? One late evening I asked Franz Kafka, “Are you really nostalgic for the ghetto?” “Oh, if only I had had that choice,” he whispered. Then he whispered again:
Had I ever been given the chance to be what I wanted to be, I would have been a little East European boy, in one corner of the room, standing there without a trace of anxiety. Father would be in the middle of the room, talking to other men; Mother, warmly wrapped, would be ransacking through travel bundles; my sister would be chattering away with the girls, scratching her head and that beautiful hair of hers. And then, in a few weeks’ time, we would all be in America.
I had often said these words to myself before. Now I was repeating them, and I gazed at the inscrutable sky, across which my old blind mother was crossing in her wheelchair. I was holding my breath, overwhelmed by nostalgia and solitude, and then, like someone in cardiac arrest, I felt the stab of her claw tearing at my chest.
The Viennese Couch
Anamnesis
It was raining, but hardly the Deluge as recorded in Scripture. The biblical hero’s latter-day namesake, Noah, was merely playing his refugee role in the comedy of the present.