The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  At last we are on our way, reclining in our comfortable seats. The flight attendant is blond, tall, and slim. We learn she was born in New Jersey, but that she and her family have returned to live in Germany. Leon again tells me that he would never have decided to accept the Romanian invitation unless I was willing to go, too. Again he tells me that my return to Romania will serve finally to separate me from my old life. I have heard it all before, and though I hope that this might indeed prove to be the case, I prefer not to think about it, or what we represent as a pair.

  “What do you mean?” Leon asks.

  “Well, the classical pair, Augustus the Fool and the White Clown.”

  Leon seems uninterested in the subject.

  “The White Clown is the boss, the master, the authority, the American, if you will, and,” I hasten to add, “the college president, the conductor.”

  Leon smiles.

  “Augustus the Fool is the pariah, the loser, the one who always gets kicked in the ass, to the audience’s delight. Augustus the Fool is the exile.”

  “What do you mean, kicked in the ass? You, a respectable writer, a writer in residence, honored with prizes and with an endowed chair? Does this boss ever kick the poor artist in the ass?”

  “Well,” I say, “we are a pair of travelers going to Eastern Europe, to the old stamping grounds of Augustus the Fool, who will serve as a guide to the foreign maestro, reciprocating the affection with which the American welcomed him into the circus of the New World.”

  Leon, now looking serious, says, “In the American circus, as you put it, the exile represents the victim. In the East European circus, the clown returning from America is a victor, a star.”

  He is now laughing, careful not to disturb the score of the Schumann oratorio resting on his knees. Augustus has now lost his zest for speechifying, and he makes a dismissive gesture. The pair doze off, wake up, take some refreshment, engage in casual remarks.

  …

  The old tourist guide of socialist Jormania, from the 1980s, slips to the floor:

  The Socialist Republic of Romania lies between 43° 37’ 07” and 48° 15’ 06” north and 20° 15’ 44” and 29° 41’ 24” east. With its 237,500 square kilometers (91,738 square miles) the country ranks twelfth in size among the European nations. East and north, it borders upon the Soviet Union, that is, the Maculist Empire, west upon the brotherly Socialist Republic of Hungary, southwest upon the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Around the central plateau of the Carpathian Mountains …

  Augustus is thinking, A beautiful country, fine intellectuals, many decent people. Also, something not quite definable, slippery, too many diminutives, the charm mixed in with the dirt.

  At seven o’clock in the morning we arrive in Frankfurt. There is a two hour wait for the Bucharest flight. We wander through the airport shops. Leon buys some cigars, some ballpoint pens, and pencils, to add to his collection. We return to the lounge, find two seats, and try to get some rest. I hear my first exchanges in Romanian, and I panic. Near the window is a group of youngsters dressed in old sweaters and jeans, swearing cheerfully and profusely in my native tongue. I look around. Are the ordinary-looking passengers perhaps really agents of the new mafias or of the old secret services, hired to keep an eye on the suspect returning to his motherland? I can pick out the Romanian academic returning from a conference, the old lady who has just visited her daughter in Germany, the doctor, the politician, the businessman. In a corner, a man in a dark suit is bent over his expensive briefcase and pile of papers. Is he a secret agent, too?

  We board the plane bound for Bucharest. The division between first class and tourist is less clearly marked. The cabin is filled with bustle and noise. I am now attuned to the pulse of my anxiety. Leon is watching me, intrigued; he understands that I am already at home.

  We land at Otopeni Airport, provincial-looking, small, but somehow appealing in its very modesty. Passport control goes swiftly and soberly. We wait for our luggage in a restricted, crowded space, choked with passengers, passersby, policemen, porters, loiterers — the full Oriental buzz of impatience. Our luggage is late in coming down and we look for a baggage cart. Yes, there are actually carts to be had; some things have changed, after all.

  At the currency exchange desk, a pretty young woman is in charge. “How much?” Leon asks me. “A hundred dollars,” I reply. Leon seems to consider this too paltry a sum and exchanges two hundred dollars, receiving in return a million lei. He stares in bewilderment at the profusion of crumpled banknotes. “Look,” I say, “you’re a millionaire at last!” Outside, we are met by a representative of the Bucharest Symphony and a chauffeur.

  We drive through Otopeni, an impoverished suburb full of potholes, lined by billboards advertising American offerings. Near the Şosea quarter, the perspective opens up, there are trees, parks, old villas. Leon seems intrigued by the area’s architecture, a strange mix of East and West. I mutter some tourist-guide drivel. Yes, the area once had a certain splendor, a sort of elegance, gone to seed under the proletarian dictatorship and further degraded under the subsequent generations of parvenus. We drive along Calea Victoriei, one of Bucharest’s main thoroughfares. My first disappointment. The famous avenue, remembered as elegant even under Communism, now has a shabby look. We cross the bridge over the Dîmboviŏa River, not far from my last residence, turn to the left at the university, and then again to the left in the direction of the Intercontinental Hotel.

  “I wonder if the Securitate still have their eavesdropping devices in the hotel,” I whisper. I tell Leon the story that made the rounds of Bucharest in the early eighties. A nice old French lady staying at the Intercontinental approached the receptionist and said timidly, “Excuse me, I have a request…” The friendly secret police agent, disguised as a receptionist, asked her politely, in acceptable French, what her desire was. She said, “I’ve been told there are microphones in the rooms. Would you be so kind … could I have one without?” Poor chérie. For months she was the laughingstock of Bucharest.

  Day One: Monday, April 21, 1997

  Three p.m. We make our triumphal entrance into the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, the former branch office of the Securitate, Foreigners’ Section. Now I am a foreigner myself, although the receptionist welcomes me in Romanian: “Bine api venit.” We check into two adjacent rooms. At 4:30 the orchestra’s car will return to collect the American conductor for his first rehearsal. I enter room 1515 and am about to unpack when the telephone rings. A pleasant young female voice is on the other end, from Romanian television. She asks for an interview. I decline politely. She understands, I have just arrived and need some time to think it over, perhaps later. What would I talk about— Transnistria, Periprava, Eliade, my success as an exiled writer? No, I shall remain firm in my decision. “You have the honor of being detested,” Baudelaire once told Manet, admiringly. I repeat these words to myself like a mantra, to protect me from emotion and politeness. Should I appear onstage as a public enemy or as the victim of Fascism and Communism, or as the shy, retiring writer applauded by the Americans? I am an intruder, that’s all, and all I want is to be ignored.

  A recent story about Milan Kundera in Prague: After a few secret visits home, after the events of 1989, he finally accepted an official invitation to receive the award that would reconcile the motherland to its famous wandering son. However, just before the ceremony, he suddenly felt that he could not participate. He locked himself, like a besieged man, in his hotel room and watched the proceedings on television, as his wife accepted the honor on his behalf.

  The telephone rings again. My friend Bedros is calling to welcome me back. I am happy to hear his voice after so many years, I am happy that I can still feel happy. He is coming over in half an hour to see me. I have no time to unpack, as the phone rings again. This time it’s my old friend Naum, Golden Brain. I throw my jacket on the bed, open the window, and unlock the suitcases. I notice an envelope pushed under the door, a fax from the Romanian Telev
ision Society: “We repeat our request to you to grant an interview, to be conducted by the Department of Cultural Programs of the Romanian Television Society. We hope that you will understand our wish, given that your presence in this country will not pass unnoticed. The department has a television team available on Tuesday, April 22, 1997. We would be grateful, etc., etc.” I take my clothes out of the suitcase and hang them up, and wash my face and hands. Bedros arrives.

  He stands in the doorway for a while. We look at each other, smiling. We see ourselves in each other’s face, as if in a mirror, a sad measure of the time that has elapsed, but also a measure tinged with the kindness that time accords to such reunions. He has the same face, the same black beard, the same big eyes, small hands and feet, the same gravelly voice, as though he were one of the characters in his own Encyclopedia of the Armenians. He even seems to be wearing the same sweater. Short and stubby, a fast talker, he hasn’t changed a bit from those latest days in the Bucharest of socialist masquerades, when we used to talk about the day’s books and exchange literary gossip. Subsequently, we had corresponded for a while. Apparently he still keeps in touch, as the fax from the television people, slipped under my door, turned out to be at his behest, as head of Cultural Affairs.

  “Yes, the message was my idea, I admit.”

  I explain why I want to keep my return discreet, why I do not want anyone to approach me, why I do not wish to trouble anyone.

  “I’ve been thinking about you lately, especially when I was reading Sebastian’s Journal. It’s strange how the past returns.”

  He pauses for a moment, then continues in his brisk fashion: “A character enclosed within brackets, that’s how I remember you, a character from Proust. I’ve been thinking about you, and talking to friends. They all agreed, definitely a character from Proust.”

  I seem amazed by the flattery, so he explains: “Even when we chatted about minor stuff, you had a way of always speaking in nuances, a phrase within a phrase, a bracket within a bracket.”

  I recall my walks with Bedros, the Proustian detours, the twists and turns of the socialist tunnel. We go out on the balcony and he points out the Telecom Palace and Calea Victoriei running as far as the bridge, the street of my last residence in Bucharest, at number 2. The city appears old, tired, apathetic. Proustian memories? Proustian exile, in one’s own room? What about the genuine exile, what about the charge of “enemy” that was hurled at me by the motherland’s newspapers?

  Our reunion has the calm, affectionate air of an earlier one, in 1990, in Paris, at the Salon du Livre. Bedros had traveled from Bucharest; I, from New York. My book, displayed at the Albin Michel booth, bore the title, appropriate to our present conversation, Le thé de Proust. Bedros on this occasion was a mere extra, not part of the official delegation, the new elite, among whom I found myself an alien. Our lunch in a small restaurant confirmed the genuineness of our reunion. Now, here at the Intercontinental, I am grateful to Bedros for reminding me of my old private self and rescuing me from the caricature that has served as my substitute on the Romanian public stage.

  “Would you like a drink? Beer, mineral water, Pepsi?”

  Pepsi, he says, and I bring two bottles from the fridge and two glasses. After a hearty swig, he continues: “Recently, when Sebastian’s Journal was published, I reflected on the similarities of your situations. I can understand why you don’t want to meet people and give interviews. These days, most Romanians returning from abroad scramble for all this attention, interviews, applause, celebrations. They bask in all the kowtowing they get in abundance here, at the Gates of the Orient. They love adulation.”

  Then he speaks about the country’s misery, its literature, its politicians and members of the Securitate turned nouveaux riches, the stray dogs and the vagabond children. After half a century of waiting, the country deserved better. I look at his new book on the table, with the face of an Armenian priest on the cover.

  The ringing telephone saves me from imminent melancholy. It’s Joanna, the poet, a former cultural attaché at the Romanian Embassy in Washington, now working for the Soros Foundation. I have to go downstairs and discuss with her the schedule of Leon’s visit. More than ten years have passed since our last meeting, just before my departure from socialist Jormania. It was springtime then, just like now, lunchtime. “The place of our truth is here. We are writers, we have no other solution,” she had said. I was familiar with such banalities. I myself had once been a victim of misery’s pride, it had often fed my despair. That time, however, I had a different answer: “You have to be alive to write. Death is keeping an eye on us, and not only from the offices of the Securitate. The unheated apartments, the pharmacies without drugs, the empty shops — these are the masks of death.” Joanna had survived nicely the nightmare of those years. She had become an able cultural and diplomatic official after 1989, and she had published books. I had survived in exile, and now I had some difficulty in stopping her flow of politeness and bureaucratic detail.

  I am now back on the balcony, looking at Bucharest from the hotel’s fifteenth floor. Bedros points out more landmarks, the building of the television center, the Atheneum concert hall, the Lido Hotel, the university. We go back into the room and resume our chat. We have to pass over many things rapidly — too many things have happened to us, in different ways and in different places, over the last decade. He inquires about Cella. I tell him she had a difficult time adapting but now has her own restoration workshop. She works hard and has also finally come to terms with exile.

  “I didn’t know her very well,” Bedros says. “My wife, too, only met her once, at that birthday party at your place, in 1986, in July. But she’s remained very vivid in our memories. That’s why I always end my letters with regards to the lady of the house.”

  We need to be able to spend a longer time together, unhurried and without words, in order to recapture the simpler exchanges of the past. Rushed as it is, our meeting feels more like a consolation. Is it my tense watchfulness, “Proust’s wound”? We exchange whispered words and the shadow of a knowing, but subdued, smile.

  It is now five o’clock, and my friend Naum appears in the doorway. With his shiny, bony skull showing through the cropped hair of a conscript, we dubbed him Golden Brain. His eyes are quick, taking everything in. We look at each other without illusions, at what we are, at what remains. He looks even bonier than before, dried up by the winds of another age. His hair is whiter, too, but his detachment, his wit are the same. His nonchalance had been the asset that, a decade earlier, when he was a member of the Central Committee of Liars, had helped him cleverly negotiate the tightrope of the circus, amused at his own performance, no less than that of others. He still has, I am pleased to note, his old smile, his laughter, his carelessness and self-confidence. “Politics never interested me,” the former politician would tell me over the phone in recent years, intrigued that I, of all people, nonpolitical and isolated from public affairs, should wish to rake the “old garbage.” “I don’t want to understand or explain. I’m just telling a story, as simple as that,” he would repeat, again and again, without ever telling, in fact, his own story in that masquerade.

  We had been brought together by books, jokes, perhaps even by his pro-Semitic sympathies, in a place where such things do not earn you merit badges. We are still held together, even now, by the same things. Near or far, our sense of fidelity has held fast. The opening gambit is awkward. I show him, on the bed, the padlock I have bought for him, the one he asked for.

  “This lock is very expensive,” I say. “The Romanian thieves will have some trouble getting past this one. You’re going to be inviolable. Not even the germs will be able to get into your house.”

  Our last meeting took place in the autumn of 1986. The president of the Writers Union had wanted to talk to me, out of reach of the official microphones. The message was transmitted by our mutual friend, Golden Brain. The three of us walked together. The park was brewing in autumn’s cauldron. Tense and
strange, the resonance of our voices disturbed the shivering vapors of the bushes. It did not seem that we had different views or different opinions: the president was complaining that nothing functioned properly anymore and deplored, for both our sakes, the official anti-Semitic hysteria. I maintained an approving silence, and Golden Brain, the go-between, was also silent. Was that a final attempt at domesticating the would-be defector? He must have been aware of the underlying reasons for that meeting. Subsequently, less than two months later, I learned, in Washington, that the Party had scrapped the prize that the union had awarded me. Was that all there was to it? Could the pretext for the conspiratorial walk have been so minor? The negotiations between the Party and the Writers Union had failed, obviously, and the president had wanted us to part on good terms. Doubtless, Golden Brain knew what was behind that mysterious walk.

  Family and friends waiting at home that day were alarmed by my lateness, convinced that the Securitate had laid a trap for me. Even now, on the fifteenth floor of the Intercontinental, I hesitate to ask my friend if the purpose of that walk had been merely an attempt to tame me, before my “defection” to the West, and prefer instead to look at him and be looked at by one who had been a friend even when he played at politics, and who has remained a friend even after the Party’s roulette wheel has stopped spinning and I now belong to another place. It would be futile to ask. This citizen of Bucharest would respond with a joke, as usual, bewildered by my naïveté, cutting me off with “Are you still interested in politics, old man? I was never interested then, nor am I interested now.” Are these his words or are they mine? Who knows, and what is the point of questions in a place that has no answers to give.