by Norman Manea
The colonel’s intense gaze signaled that he was aware of the past called “Transnistria” and, more recently, “Periprava.” He also knew what “decent” meant. Both the guilty and the innocent survivors of detention were subsequently pressured into becoming informants for the state. However, former comrade and former inmate Manea had declined the honor for over a year, invoking the same refrain: “I am a decent man.” Repeated with idiotic monotony, the comic statement had finally vexed the policeman, and his superior was duly informed of the failed recruitment.
The colonel made some laconic comments; he was an intelligent but dangerous interlocutor. His seeming reserve was a subtle tactic to trap me, but this was no time for caution.
“An Israeli spy?” I said. “In what way?”
I did not really expect an answer; the interview followed its own dynamic.
“He is accused,” I continued, “of accompanying, in his capacity as Secretary of the Jewish community, dignitaries from America and Israel on their visits to Bukovina. These were official visits, sanctioned by the Foreign Ministry and, probably, by all the relevant ministries. The surveillance agencies must have been aware of everything everybody was saying and doing.”
The colonel smiled again, inscrutably, and confirmed my bold statement with a slow nod.
“Yes, yes, of course we knew,” he said, without uttering a word.
I pressed on. “It is alleged that among the visitors was a certain Brill, head of an Israeli secret service. He visited the famous Jewish cemetery in Siret, near the Soviet border. Are we to suppose that he was there to gather information, to spy on the border area with his bare eyes or with the binoculars he didn’t have? He didn’t even take a single step outside the zone where tourists are allowed. As for my father, how could an obscure employee of the small Jewish community in tiny Suceava know the names of suspects on the Romanian secret service lists? And after all, surveillance is quite efficient, the Romanian Securitate is well appreciated around the world.” The colonel was almost laughing now, the captain raised his eyes from the minutes he was typing and joined in. Yes, he was definitely laughing.
I could not be stopped. “And what if Mr., formerly Comrade, Manea suffered, let’s say, a heart attack? His old body bears the scars of Marshal Antonescu’s Transnistria, of postwar Stalinism, and the Stalinless Stalinism of the 1950s. The errors of the past should not be repeated in the 1970s. This is what all the papers say.”
My two listeners seemed more interested in this new narrative twist than in the previous recital, so I stepped up my tempo. “The descendants of the ghetto make no distinction between the policeman of the old nationalist state, with his vile frame-ups, and the socialist militia man of today. For them it is not always clear-cut. Socialist laws proclaim the equality of all citizens, and it is true that after the war there were Jews in important, even ministerial, positions. There are still some left. But this does not heal memories, or panic. The suspects are wary, Comrade Colonel. Maybe they have a right to be.”
I had come to the end of my grand aria. I had demonstrated alertness and courage, so what were my two interlocutors waiting for, standing there smiling, hands on hips? Where was the applause, the bouquets?
My fear and my spirit of revolt had joined in producing a coherent, even brave, discourse, but the drama wasn’t over yet. Still, here I was, alive, with all my thoughts and accelerated emotions still alive.
The colonel, in his turn, performed his role to perfection; it was difficult not to be persuaded by his performance. He had not objected to any of my reproaches; his resigned air seemed that of a man weary of the idiocies he had to deal with daily. By accepting my argument, he almost broke down my emotional defenses. However, I managed to keep my composure until the very end, when he had his final word: “Thank you, this is very important information on the psychology of the ghetto. We do not often receive such helpful information. Our colleagues in Bucharest will ask for your cooperation, I’m sure.” All I could do was to mumble feebly, “No, I’m not suitable, not I.” The colonel was no longer listening. He got up and extended his hand. The interview was over.
As I was leaving, the captain assured me that the misunderstandings concerning Mr. Marcu Manea would be dealt with quickly. Comrade Colonel always kept his word; he is a very special man, as you could see for yourself. Indeed, the occasion had been special, but I was no longer paying any attention to the captain and his words drifted away.
The tension of that meeting had been excruciating. Focused on my objective, blinded by my own drive, I had ignored where I was, to whom I was speaking. Had the whole business gone on for five more minutes, I would probably have collapsed, like a rag doll, into the arms of the colonel and the captain, and then they really could have started squeezing me for information. I was exhausted from the effort and amazed at my own audacity. I made my way down the stairs of the accursed building, eager to make my escape and forget everything.
I could not forget, however, that nobody has a right to play moralist when confronted by such demented dilemmas. Alin knew of the police pressure that had been exerted on pensioner Marcu Manea after Periprava; he knew of Colonel Vasiliu’s persuasive charm, as well as of the two conversations his colleagues in Bucharest had had with me, their future expert on victim psychology. He knew that the meetings had been short and that I had declined the flattering request to cooperate. Now the police were closing in again. They must have possessed more information on their suspect than that provided by the routine reports and weekly conversations with my poet friend.
Alin, good friend that he was, told me what he had written down about me for his interrogator: “An honest man, uninterested in politics. Withdrawn, melancholy, he enjoys books and solitude.” But that description somehow seemed unconvincing, it lacked the gloss of Party clichés. I had become infected with suspicion myself and began to think that my friend was keeping things from me, to protect me from myself, not only from my pursuers. I was becoming increasingly dependent on my double informant.
Tall, with big hands and flaming hair like an Irishman’s, exploding with vitality, with a booming voice and wide gestures like a conductor’s, Alin somehow became small and big-nosed, with his mane of hair suddenly sticking, like an oily helmet, to his diminished skull. His once-resonant voice was now a screech, difficult to understand. Was he omitting details that were likely to make me worry? I kept asking to see him, no matter how briefly. Again and again, I went over details with him, no matter how minor they seemed. Had the police inquired about my medical records? Detention in psychiatric wards, of course, was a practice much favored by the socialist police.
The interrogations appeared to be routine, bureaucratic affairs. The police put off any blackmailing tactics, just as they postponed the resolutions of the thousands of dossiers that had accumulated at headquarters. To forestall accusations that they were either lazy or ineffective, they kept adding to the numbers of their collaborators, not for the minute information that might be gained, but in order to maintain the network of complicities.
As reported to me by my poet friend, the information about me that he was passing along gave no cause for alarm and even provided some amusement. The police learned nothing about me that they didn’t already know. But the anxieties that I discovered buried within me revealed more about me to myself than my police dossier, uncovering old, obscure traumas.
I discovered that I was the real beneficiary of the investigation, not through what I had learned from Alin’s reporting, but through the reaction it triggered in me. I saw myself as being in the privileged center of a farce that yielded fascinating insights. The description alone of the private apartments where officer and informant met each week would have merited the attention of any anthropologist, but I could focus only on my own anxiety, like a drug addict looking for a fix. Suddenly I was plunged into the terror of the 1940s and given a chance to understand, albeit belatedly, the anxieties of that time, with all its recycled incertitudes and neuroses.
How long did this strange condition last — a year, two? Alin proved that, even in the Communist police state, friendship could be affectionate and enduring.
He continued to provide his reports and keep me informed of their trivial contents until, at last, he decided he had had enough of the socialist paradise and opted for emigration to a faraway place, from which he would write me regularly. We met again years later, but never referred to the delicate subject of his informing. I was happy to know that my friend had remained one of the few from whom destiny had not separated me.
Alin’s replacement was less quick to reveal himself, and I never discovered his identity. The powers above must have refined their criteria for recruitment. I kept an eye on my close contacts, one never knew who the informer might be, every face wore a mask. This apprehension, verging on paranoia, had become so generalized as to be considered the ordinary condition. Anxiety was now a collective possession.
The exploitation of man by the state had proved no more appealing than man’s exploitation by man. The dismantling of private ownership had fractured the economy and gradually established the state’s ownership over the citizens. Xenophobia became more refined, suspicion ruled all individual lives. Instead of the demagogic competition among parties, there was now the absolute demagogy of the single Party. The chaos of the free market and of free speech was replaced by the schizophrenia of taboos. Enforced complicity culminated in a symbolic perversion — the red card.
Were there taboo topics, even on the psychiatrist’s couch? The doctor I went to see to discuss a medical discharge from my engineering job, whose dissatisfactions were becoming intolerable, was a poet, too, like my informant of a few years later, but unlike him, he was not a friend. The risk of talking openly remained difficult to assess. The anxieties confessed on the psychiatrist’s couch were no longer an individual’s private property.
As the new order extended its domination, the gray areas in which one could maneuver became more restricted, as did the enclaves of normality. Years passed as everybody waited for the magic thaw. Indeed, this happened periodically, but only in order to reinforce incertitude and add to the number of traps. Suspicion and duplicity gradually infiltrated the kitchens and the bedrooms, insinuated themselves into sleep, language, and posture.
Should I tell the psychiatrist-poet what he surely knew very well, that not only the schools, hospitals, publishing houses, and printing presses belonged to the state but also the forests, the air, the water, the earth, the stadiums, banks, cinemas, button and weapons factories, the army and the circus, the kindergartens and old people’s homes, the music industry, pharmaceuticals, and the flocks of sheep? The doctor and his patient, too, were state property. When you bought your package of tissues, your bed, or your morning milk, your watch or shoes or dentures, you were at the mercy of apathetic and insolent state functionaries who subscribed to the code of “socialist ethics and equity,” which translated as “We pretend we are working, they pretend they are paying us.”
What else was the psychiatrist but another state employee — with a red card, probably. The Party was supreme. It was the Party Secretary, not the directors, themselves appointed by the Secretary, who respectively ran the high schools and the slaughterhouses and the tailor shops and, of course, the clinics.
In a country with a strong tradition of right-wing politics, the number of red cards had increased exponentially. Without a red card you were worth very little, but even with one, you did not amount to much. In the new party of the parvenus, after half a century of Communism, one would have been hard put to find many genuine Communists. The propaganda clichés served the jugglers of the totalitarian circus, but nobody believed in them anymore. Life, or what remained of it, had moved into underground tunnels filled with muted sounds and secret codes.
Would Comrade Doctor allow himself to be psychoanalyzed by a patient obsessed with the comedy of double roles? Could the poet find the lyric correlative of duplicitous chaos, conducted on the surface by the masked men of power and perpetuated, underground, by the venom of resentment?
The patient’s questions quickly rebounded back to himself, as though he had borrowed the doctor’s mannerisms and was able to read the theme of the psychiatric session with closed eyes: the Initiation after the Initiation. Or should it be called adaptation? And what exactly did the survivor adapt to? A familiar question. Over a decade later, it would also be asked by an American psychiatrist. The answer was familiar, too: The patient adapted to life, as simple as that. Indeed, it is to life that all survivors adapt, whether they are survivors of black, green, or red dictatorships. They do so with that impertinence of normality which is life itself. This was how I summarized my own biography on the eve of exile, an experiment no less educational than the preceding ones.
How can one be a writer if one has no freedom was the dilemma posed by the American psychiatrist, an expert on the psychoses of freedom in the New World. The question would have sounded like a bad joke if uttered by his East European counterpart, but an exchange of expertise between the specialist in the pathology of constraint and the analyst of freedom’s traumas would not have been useless. The psychiatrists of these two very different worlds would have discovered many surprising resemblances alongside the differences.
The freedom of the New Man meant accepting necessity — this was what doctor and patient had learned from the Marxist dialecticians of a party that became less Marxist every day: necessity, hence adaptation; adaptation, hence pragmatism: hence, accepted necessity. Adaptation to life, Doctor, this was the task facing the apprentice in the banality served pedagogically by daily life. Life, that was all. In the East, in the West, in the cosmos.
The future promised in the Communist fairy tales became a hell for those under interrogation and in prisons. In between, there was the burlesque of purgatory, subject to the Party’s variable shifts. When the grind of earning one’s daily bread ceased to be the only purpose, the traffic in subterfuges allowed for some delectable falsifications. This was the face of the post-Stalinist “liberalization” in Eastern Europe. The growing ambiguities even allowed us — doctor and patient, patient and informant— to make our debuts in the periodicals and publishing houses of the Party and the state.
It was a game with shifting rules: the taboo words and the taboo ideas and the taboo allusions were regulated according to the capricious canon of the Party’s shifting necessity. After one book, and then another, which I managed to squeeze past the censor’s detectors, did I enjoy greater social protection? To be sure; but the surveillance also increased. The Party honored artists with privileges and penalties, writing was a profession legitimated only by membership in the Writers Union, run and controlled by the Party, and a suspect with no job and no income risked being accused of “hooliganism,” that is, of leading a parasitic life, as socialist legislation termed it.
Evasiveness was all that was left — is that not so, Comrade Doctor? The true face of reality was revealed not only by the condition of the fruit markets and butcher shops, but also by the condition of the hospitals. The story was told of a policeman who had been called to the capital’s largest psychiatric hospital and been shocked to find the patients deliriously shouting, “Down with Communism! Down with the Leader!” He was on the point of having them arrested, but was stopped by the hospital’s director, who objected: “We are in a psychiatric hospital. These people are mad, don’t you understand?” The policeman replied, with perfect common sense, “Mad? What do you mean, mad? Why doesn’t anybody shout ‘Long live Communism, long live the Leader’?” Unwittingly, he had stumbled on the crux of the very ambiguity of the national malady.
The wrinkled face of the old poet, saved from all illusions by medical practice, looked up at you. The potbellied, balding doctor, with his guttural r’s, had adopted the attitude of an expert in failure.
“And what are you going to do after a year or two? The pension is small, not even half of your engineer’s salary. And for
how long do you think you can extend a medical pension? Endlessly, is that what you were about to say?”
A lunatic works at engineering twelve hours a day in a huge warehouse with drawing boards, telephones, and cigarette smoke, suffocating under blueprints and dazed by interminable formulas.
Why shouldn’t the sleepwalker receive a cage of his own, for life? Would the remedy for the trauma be an even bigger trauma? Writing at least offers a quick way of exiting the penal colony, leaving the carnage behind. As Kafka said, “Outside the ranks of the assassins, you can observe the facts.”
“So, a grade-two pension, or maybe a grade three?” the poet-doctor asked. “Grade three means subject to review every six months by a panel of specialists. Grade two is reviewed on an annual basis.”
“What about grade one?” the patient asked.
“That means incurable, a serious mental condition, with no hope of recovery. I wouldn’t choose such a diagnosis. Don’t even think about it!”
“Why not?” the madman was on the point of protesting. Isn’t a true writer beyond hope of recovery? Isn’t he capable only of sitting in his cage, playing with words, like a mental patient? Reading, writing, reading, then more writing, isn’t this his life, Doctor — malady, therapy, therapy, malady, and so on, until the end of ends? You practice medicine, Doctor, so you are not incurable, but what about the engineer sitting before you? I have been practicing for too long that schizophrenia of double personality and duplicity. I have been dealing with calculations, drawing boards, invoices, almost being the person I have pretended to be, living constantly with the fear that, at any moment, the impostor would be unmasked and thrown down the stairs, a mental-hospital clown, the butt of the cheers and jeers of the audience. Only evasiveness can save us, Doctor.