The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  In the elegant dining room of the elegant country house in an elegant part of New York, the talkers appeared oblivious to the persistent drizzle. The shipwrecked exile found himself telling the company about Transnistria, about the Initiation, about the war, and about Maria, the young peasant woman who was determined to join the Jews on their journey to death. Responding to their interest, he went on to talk about Communism and its ambiguities, and about the ambiguities of exile. The mirrored door opened and closed, and suddenly he saw in its crystal panes the image of the memoirist he did not want to recognize. By now it was too late to stop, and he continued with his story, to wrest a fake victory from the war against the past.

  The next day a letter arrived: “I don’t think it was just because it rained, but I spent a good deal of time after our pleasant luncheon thinking about you, and by that I mean thinking about your story, a fascinating one, not just because it is you, but because you lived and thought and acted at the center of the worst time in history.” The publisher also wrote: “You were an eyewitness, and as a writer you must react.” Publicly decoding his life, writing a personal memoir? Cioran had warned about it: “A cinder bath, a good exercise in self-incineration.” It would also be like peeling away one’s skin, layer after layer, in competition with the tell-all confessions of television talk shows or the self-revelations of group therapy.

  I pondered the typewritten lines. Public commemorations have transformed horrors into clichés, which have been worked over until they have become petrified, thus fulfilling their function, followed, of course, by fatigue and indifference.

  If I committed my life to public scrutiny, would I become its pen-wielding proxy? The audience is hungry for details, not for metaphors called Initiation and Trans-tristia. The training in evasiveness I had received during “the worst time in history” was still palpable. Did I still panic at the thought that I might suddenly be picked out during an unexpected roundup of suspects? I preferred the masks of fiction. Yet the mirror is summoning, I can see there the routes followed by the deportees, the transit camps, the sorting centers, the graves planned by the Marshal.

  “I am in favor of forced migration,” Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Romania, army commander, and leader of the Romanian state, declared in the summer of 1941. “I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire committed many barbaric acts and yet it was the greatest political establishment the world has ever seen.” The noble barbarian did not want to miss the opportunity afforded him of at last eradicating the national pest. “Our nation has not known a more favorable moment in its history. If need be, shoot,” Hitler’s ally declared.

  Sporadic massacres had begun one year earlier, the autumn of 1941 merely accelerated the campaign. On October 4, the general gave the deportation order; on October 9, the trains — with record efficiency — were already on the move. The proclamation was explicit: “Today, October 9, 1941, the trains will begin transporting the Jewish population of the communes Iţcani and Burdujeni, as well as of the city of Suceava, from Ciprian Porumbescu Street to Petru Rares, Street and down to Sf. Dumitru Street and the Jewish House, from Queen Marie Street down to the Reif drugstore on Cetăţii Street, from the first street after the American Hotel to the Industrial Gymnasium for Girls, and all of Bosancilor Street.”

  The operation was due to start at the military depot of the Burdujeni railway station on the designated day, at 4 p.m. The evening before, Major Botoroagă had suddenly appeared on our doorstep: “You’ve got two young children, you’ll have to carry them in your arms. It’s a long way. Don’t take with you more than the basic things,” he told my father in the most friendly manner. The deportation was to begin the next day, October 9, and end one day later. The rules were precise: “Each Jewish inhabitant may take overcoats, day clothes and shoes, as well as food for several days, not to exceed what can be carried. All Jewish residents will take the keys to their houses and deposit them, along with household inventories, in an envelope bearing the name and address of the Jewish inhabitant, to be handed to the commission at the railway station.”

  Maria was listening attentively, looking all the time at little Noah, who stared, petrified, at the messenger. He turned toward her, as if demanding an explanation. Maria smiled back and thumbed her nose at him, their secret sign, meaning “This is all nonsense.”

  The major continued his recitation: “Those who do not comply, or resist, or instigate protest and acts of violence against the authorities, those who attempt to flee or to destroy their own property, as well as those who fail to deposit their currency, gold coins, jewelry, and precious metals, will be shot on the spot. Those who help or hide Jews committing such acts of insubordination will also be shot dead.” The major did not necessarily look at Maria as he pronounced the last words, but she must have decided, there and then, to commit a crime more serious than merely helping or hiding the lepers — she would leave with them.

  The head of the police, the prefect, the deputy prefect, the local garrison’s commanding colonel, and Major Botoroagă himself, as commander of the local gendarmerie, looked on in disgust as the madwoman was dragged away from the train door. Execution would have been too honorable a death, the best punishment was to allow her to live among those she had betrayed.

  A few months later, Maria was at the gates of the labor camp, loaded with suitcases filled with clothes and food for her little prince Noah and his parents. The luggage, confiscated on the spot, would be used as evidence in her court-martial.

  “From across the millennia, a tragic destiny has united the Babylonian captivity with the inferno of starvation, disease, and death in Transnistria,” wrote Traian Popovici, the Christian mayor of Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina. “The looting at the assembly points along the Dniester River of whatever personal possessions the deportees still had, the long marches, barefoot, in wind, rain, sleet, and mud, the hunger and thirst, could be from the pages of Dante’s Inferno,” the mayor continued. He had tried, until the very last moment, to halt the deportations. “In one single transport, out of sixty babies only one survived,” he wrote. “Those too tired or too disabled to walk were left behind on the roadsides, a prey to vultures and dogs. Those who made it to their destinations live in appallingly unsanitary conditions, with no proper accommodations, no firewood, no food and clothes, and are exposed to the harsh weather and the torments of their guards and of the camp’s administrators.”

  This lesson in history and geography would not be complete without mentioning the crossing point on the Dniester — Ataki. Not Ararat, as in the biblical flood, but Ataki. Little Noah was only five years old at the time, but he would never forget that name. Fifty years later he still remembered it. The president of the Jewish community in Suceava, recalling the place, wrote: “Ataki will remain a mystery, to be understood only by those of us who stumbled, as if in chains, along its winding streets. Once-strong men suddenly collapsed. Previously sane people lost their minds. Rosa Stein, the widow of the lawyer Samuel Stein, believed she was still in Suceava and kept asking, politely, ‘Could you please kindly show me the way back to my house? I live in the same building as the Weiner bookstore.’” The Weiner bookstore still survives in the memory of the exile now being lulled to sleep in his New York refuge. After the war, it became a haven for the townspeople, brimming with miracles, until the moment when the Communists suppressed private property and all other private benefactions.

  In 1941, another Jewish communal official, from Rădăuti, sent a desperate message from Ataki to his equivalent in Bucharest: “On October 14 we were evacuated and brought here, where we are now waiting to be transported over the Dniester and sent to an unknown destination in the Ukraine. We live outdoors, in rain, mud, and cold. Here in Ataki, hundreds of people have already died. Many have lost their minds, others have committed suicide. If something is not done immediately to save us, none of these unfortunate beings will survive. For the time being, there are around 25,000 souls in this situ
ation. Some are on their way to the Ukraine, others are in Moghilev, still others here in Ataki.”

  The name Moghilev is also one that is not easily forgotten. It was to Moghilev that the four members of the Manea family were sent. In a letter to a Zionist office in Geneva, dated January 6, 1942, a report from Moghilev mentioned “60 deaths daily.” That first winter was indeed the ally of Hitler’s army, Marshal Antonescu.

  Transnistria did not live up to expectations and could only show a balance sheet of 50 percent dead. In that respect, it could not compete with Auschwitz. Transnistria’s achievement remained ambiguous, as did most things Romanian. Could Romania be considered Europe’s most anti-Semitic country, as some chronicles were claiming? The competition is difficult to assess, but the dubious Holocaust prize should still go to Nazi Germany, despite the reports that the German Army was scandalized by the random acts of barbarity committed by their Romanian allies, always ready to kill without orders and by any primitive means at hand.

  Little Noah was initiated into life, as well as its opposite, in Transnistria. First death claimed my beloved grandfather Avram, then my maternal grandmother, striking twice within three weeks. The sudden magic of lifelessness: the afterlife, in a dead grave without a name.

  In his mind, the boy saw himself lying, mummylike, in an eternal stupor. He could see the grave, the snow-covered earth, the frozen blades of grass, the wriggling worms. The wind was howling, the bearded men were swaying to the cadences of the ancient Kaddish prayer.

  I was alive, thinking about my own death, but what I understood then was that crying and hunger, cold and fear belonged to life, not to death. Nothing was more important than survival, Mother kept saying, as she sought to sustain her husband and son. Death was extinction, which had to be fought at any cost. This was the only way in which we could be worthy of survival, she kept repeating. Gradually, the situation improved. The war was shifting westward, an Allied victory seemed imminent, and Marshal Antonescu resigned himself to keeping the insects alive, as alibi and collateral.

  Former citizen Marcu Manea obtained permission to work in a factory, where he was paid the price of a loaf of bread, the daily sustenance of the four members of the family. Nobody could predict where the roulette wheel of life and death would next stop. The logic on which my father had carefully built his life was now useless. Saving one’s skin through corrupt dealings and bargains with fate disgusted him, as did the supreme reward, survival. My father’s views remained unchanged, despite his brutal beating by a formerly friendly officer, who now, disfigured by hatred, seemed ready to crush the insect as the insect deserved. He could accept death, but not humiliation. Risking everything, he recoiled in disgust from the grim truth of his present reality. He did not become servile and hypocritical, as was demanded of the slaves; he would not surrender his dignity. His wife didn’t care about such idiocies, but he did. The black market in sentiment, not only in aspirin or bread, that prevailed in the camps, disgusted him, and so did the barbarity of victims determined to save themselves at any cost from the barbarity of the oppressors. Monster-executioners breed monster-victims, he used to repeat in his soft but determined voice.

  The Führer’s Final Solution did not take into account the thoughts that went through the minds of the victims condemned to extinction. Nazism defined its purpose in clear terms, kept its promises, rewarded its faithful, and annihilated its victims without hesitation, without offering them the chance to convert or to lie. In contrast, the Communism of universal happiness encouraged conversion, lying, complicity, and was not reluctant to devour even its own faithful. The thought police, so essential to the system, imposed a truth serving the Party. Between the increasingly irreconcilable promise and the reality, the field was open for suspicion, perversion, and fear.

  These were the thoughts that coursed through my mind that autumn afternoon in Bucharest in the eighth decade of the mean and insatiable twentieth century. In the quiet room, reader and book were engaged in silent dialogue when, barely audible, the phone rang. I didn’t feel like talking to anybody and had turned the volume down; still, I picked up the receiver.

  “Do you care to go for a walk?” asked my friend.

  “It’s raining, where could we go? Come on over and we’ll talk.”

  “No, I’d rather go out. The rain is stopping. Let’s meet in half an hour, in Palace Square, in front of the library.”

  My friend was ordinarily a sedentary sort, and his sudden eagerness for a walk surprised me. The rain had indeed stopped, and the air was fresh. He led me to the small deserted park nearby. The benches were still damp.

  “It finally happened. We always think that it will be just the neighbor who falls into their net. Now it’s happened. They struck.”

  I kept silent, waiting for him to continue.

  “There were two of them, a colonel and a captain. The captain took notes. The interrogation lasted about three hours.”

  The reason for the walk became clear. Rooms have ears, policeman’s ears.

  “It all had to do with you. They wanted to know everything about you, what you do, the people you see, the mail you get from abroad and send. They wanted to know if you have a mistress, or if Cella has a lover. They asked about your financial situation, your parents’, your mother-in-law’s. They asked if you had expressed any hostility toward the Supreme Comrade and his wife, whether you intend to emigrate.”

  In socialist Romania, the roster of informants came to resemble a census of the population. The strategy of self-effacement, to give the appearance of normality, no longer functioned. Isolation had proved no protection.

  “You won’t believe it, but I finally gave in and signed. There was no choice. They also gave me a code name, ‘Alin.’”

  The name the policemen had chosen for him was the very pen name their new informant used for the poetry and theater reviews he published in literary magazines. Let this be a lesson for him; both vocations, poet and informant, after all, probe the mystery in which we all hide.

  “Why did you sign? You’ll only get rid of them in your coffin, and perhaps not even then. Had you held out for another hour, they would’ve given up. This is no longer Stalin’s time, they would’ve left you alone.”

  Alin did not reply, so I fell silent, too. After all, I couldn’t pretend that I was such a great hero myself, it would have been condescending. Advice or reproaches would have been equally pointless. In hell, bread means everything, and it means a good deal in purgatory, too. On the gate of the labor camp, the guards used to write: “Paradise,” “Hell,” “Purgatory.” Bread was everywhere the leverage for blackmail.

  “They threatened me. You are a public employee, they told me, you have a duty to help us.”

  In other words, one could lose even a mediocre job. Such a threat was contrary to the law, as this public employee knew, but he also knew that law was the plaything of power. Not only Alin’s bread was at stake, so was that of his old, ailing parents.

  Thus my friend became Alin in life as well as in literature. His usual double-triple life as a socialist citizen was now augmented by a precise, secret, unpaid mission: to report on the double-triple life of his best friend. He would be having weekly meetings with the liaison officer, not in the latter’s office, the expected venue, but in “safe” private houses that the Securitate had at their disposal. Was the humble domestic setting, a gray, constricted, socialist living space, supposed to humanize the activity? The number of police informants had grown much more rapidly than the gross national product, and the recruitment campaign had speeded up. “The traumatized survivors of the ghetto make no distinction between the police of the prewar nationalist state and the successors of the socialist regime, Comrade Commanders,” I once had occasion to say.

  The all-night train trip from Bucharest to Suceava — from one end of the country to the other — ended in a short visit to the old couple. There was time for a cup of coffee and an opportunity to look into their faces and read what the telephone
conversations couldn’t register, their look of panic, panic nurtured by millennia of terror and ever renewable. I looked at my parents once more and got up to go out, leaving my coffee half drunk. The sense of urgency that drove me onto the train was now impelling me back to the streets of the past.

  The guard at the entrance of the former Austrian town hall, now the headquarters of the local Communist Party, listened attentively to what I had to say. The Writers Union membership card still carried some authority in provincial Romania of the late 1970s. Gogol’s employee seemed somewhat disconcerted by my sudden appearance and was not sure how to respond. He wrote down the details and, looking at his appointment sheet, said, “I don’t know when Comrade First Secretary will be available to see you, but I shall pass the message along.”

  “I must see him today. I have a train to catch back to Bucharest tonight,” I insisted. He hesitated for a moment, then said, with the air of someone resigned to his fate, “Come back around lunchtime. I’ll have an answer for you by then.”

  I wouldn’t wait and decided, increasing my risk, to go over to the Securitate headquarters, located in a new, modern building not far from the old hospital. Again, I showed my membership card. The officer did not seem impressed. An interview? With the commander? Today? Why the rush?

  “Yes, today, before lunchtime. After that, I’m seeing the First Secretary.”

  The guard picked up the phone and dialed a number, then he left and someone else took up his position. After a lengthy wait, the first guard reappeared.

  “Comrade Commander is not in town, but the deputy commander, Comrade Vasiliu, will see you at eleven.”

  It was now five past ten. On every corner my idyllic native town offered flowery gardens and inviting benches. Alder Park was nearby. The spring sunshine was making me drowsy. I walked past the old trees, witnesses of ages past.

  At eleven I was escorted to the first floor. Behind the massive desk was a pale man with thinning gray hair, dressed in a gray woolen vest and a white shirt with no tie. On his left sat a handsome, dark-haired man with a black mustache, in a captain’s uniform. I came right to the point: “For months, pensioner Marcu Manea has been pestered by an agent who keeps accusing him of being either a spy for Israel or a crook making shady deals as Secretary of the Jewish community. If there is evidence, let him be prosecuted. If not, this campaign of terror must stop. The suspect has suffered enough, both in the past and more recently. People in the town where he has lived for the whole of his life know him as the decent man he is.”