by Norman Manea
I flash my watch to Leon, it’s midnight. His cake lies stale on his plate, but he shows no desire to leave. Finally, we make our way out. The dignitaries at the head table do not notice our departure, capitalist guests no longer benefit from special attention, and that is as it should be.
It is raining, the darkness is medieval. On a night such as this, some forty years ago, in Stalinist-era Prague, the representative of the Jewish Agency was assassinated. But Stalinism is no longer fashionable, and Professor Culianu’s Chicago assassins would have had no interest in us. In any case, Leon shows no interest in somber speculation. This Seder in Bucharest has awakened a nostalgia in him.
“This evening has been fascinating. It’s reconnected me to my East European forebears. What you have in Bucharest is unique, you couldn’t find anything like this anywhere else. That rabbi, his wife, the TV man, his wife — these are all shadows from the past. And the choir and that American guy with his young mistress… Thank God, Romania is lagging behind in the race to capitalism.”
I remain silent, I am not convinced of the advantage. I simply stand in the middle of the square, with my arm extended, waving for a taxi that fails to materialize. We proceed on foot toward the city center. Somewhere around here is where I used to live as a student, in a rented room. Here it is, one of those side streets branching off into the dark, on the left, on Alexandru Sihleanu Street, at number 18. That’s it, the sleepy house with the sleepy ghost of Dr. Jacobi, now long dead, and of his fat, scandal-mongering wife, also dead, and the Gypsy mistress in the basement, the object of their daily rows, certainly now dead as well. Hail to sovereign and democratic Death, working nonstop, day and night, bored, but oh! ever so efficient.
“So what was it you enjoyed so much?” I ask Leon, to chase away the phantoms.
“Everything, I liked everything. That idiotic rabbi and his pushy wife, the music critic’s wife, speaking Hochdeutsch, and the New York guy with his mistress, the choir, the soup, the president, the biologist— everything, absolutely everything.”
“It’s a shame you missed the great Chief Rabbi. He was a deputy, for a quarter of a century, in Romania’s Communist parliament, the eminence grise, the great wheeler-dealer, as you Americans say. He managed to convince the Communists of the advantages of getting rid of the Jews, by letting them emigrate.”
“Wasn’t he right?”
“Sure. He convinced the authorities that there were at least three major advantages in letting the Jews go: One, they would be rid of an old troublesome lot. Two, they would get capitalist money, $8,000 per head, to be more precise, for each Jew they let out. Three, by letting the Jews go, they improved their image abroad. The Jews themselves no longer needed any convincing, and so, the latter-day flight from Egypt!”
“A clever man, this Rabbi Rosen.”
“Very clever, a real pragmatist, trying to be useful to all sides. As someone once said, he was for the Romanians what prescription glasses are for the myopic. He was not happy about needing them, but happy to have them. In my parents’ house, they had a completely different idea about what a rabbi should be.”
“But they were believers, and you aren’t.”
Silently, we advance through this night of questions without answers.
“A few years ago, in Israel, a taxi driver asked me whether I was Romanian. He had heard me talking to the relatives I’d just dropped off. Yes, I was born in Romania, I said. I met Rabbi Rosen, the old taxi driver told me, in English, many years ago, on one of his visits to Israel, here, in my taxi. I didn’t know who he was at first, we have lots of rabbis visiting here, but this one spoke perfect Hebrew. I took him first to the Foreign Ministry, then the Labor Party headquarters, then to their opponents, the Likud. Afterward, we went to the trade unions, then to the religious people. Then, if you can imagine, even to the Communists. At the end I asked him, ‘Are you by any chance Rabbi Rosen of Romania?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘How did you guess?’ ‘Well, you’re well-known here. Nobody else would have visited the religious people, and the Communists, and the trade unions, and Mr. Begin.’”
This anecdote about Rabbi Rosen reminds me of how Romanians, in general, used to solve the incompatibilities of daily life, a practice so acutely denounced by Sebastian. I tell this to Leon.
“You’re right,” Leon says. “It would have been worth meeting Rabbi Rosen, but even without him, it was a fascinating evening.”
“Ah, the famous American enthusiasm, the goodwill, the openness to the world.”
“Had I told anyone at that table that I had nowhere to sleep, I’m sure they would have offered to put me up. Who would do that in America?”
“Bard College.”
Leon laughs, we are both laughing.
“Taxi!” A miracle, the cab stops, and off we go into the post-Communist rain and darkness, squeezed together, in a beat-up car, a relic from a museum of socialism, the conductor-president in his handsome suit and bow tie and his fellow traveler, Augustus the Fool.
“To the Intercontinental, please,” I repeat for the third time, in Romanian.
The taxi has not turned left, as it should have, but has gone straight on, toward God knows what subterranean garage of the mafia. I look through the window, trying to recognize the route; no, it is not the old Calea Călăraçi, which no longer exists. We are probably coasting along the avenue formerly called the Victory of Socialism, which leads to the new Balkan Versailles, the White Palace, the residence that our beloved Supreme Leader Ceauçescu had no time to enjoy. The taxi finally turns onto Bălcescu Boulevard in the direction of the university and the hotel. There we are, at last, on the twenty-second floor, in the deserted bar. One last toast in honor of our first day together in Bucharest. Leon seems content, the Seder has regenerated him, it all looks like a promising adventure. We say good night at one o’clock, 6 p.m. in New York, twenty-four hours since our takeoff from Kennedy.
I am here and I am there, neither here nor there, a passenger in transit, claimed by several time zones, and not only by them.
The red light of the phone blinks to signal a call. It is Ken, an American friend who has come from Moscow especially to see me. On my night table a blue-covered notebook lies open, with bold white lettering reading BARD COLLEGE, the logbook to record my pilgrimage.
Day Two: Tuesday, April 22, 1997
Ken works for the Privatization Project in Eastern Europe sponsored by the Soros Foundation. I met him five years ago, after receiving an unexpected letter from him. “This is something of a shot in the dark,” he wrote, and went on to describe a project he was working on, a book about the aesthetic reaction to the Holocaust as reflected in literature, music, and art. “Something you said at the conference at Rutgers/Newark last spring has troubled me ever since. The phrase of yours that haunts me is this: the commercialization of the Holocaust.”
We arranged to meet in an Irish bar in Manhattan. He told me about his grandfather who, as a penniless young man, had emigrated to America, eventually to become an important scientist, winning a Nobel Prize; about his French mother, who taught at Princeton; about his brother killed in the Vietnam War; and about himself, author of several books and a forthcoming critical study of modern conservatism. Gradually, a friendship developed. I appreciated his openness of spirit and his cosmopolitanism, the result of his French and Irish origins, as well as his Oxford education, his Catholic moral sense, and his jovial American sense of fair play.
He had come from Moscow to see me, here, in my old haunts. “When you were talking in Romanian to that young man at the reception desk,” he said to me, at our reunion in the lobby of the Intercontinental, “your face lit up. You were relaxed, even transfigured. I can see that language remains an open wound for you.”
Transfigured, talking to a state hotel employee, about whose secret allegiance I knew nothing? However, I accepted the challenge, language is indeed a subject worth talking about. “My country is my language” was my answer, in 1979, responding to my American
sister-in-law, who kept trying to persuade me to leave socialist Jormania as soon as possible. I finally did leave, but I did not leave the language in which I lived, only the country where I could no longer breathe. “I wish for you that one morning we will all wake up speaking Romanian,” Cynthia, aware of my linguistic distress, once wrote me. An impossible dream … but not in Bucharest. Maybe Ken is right. It might very well be that the language in which I was immersed is working its magic on me. Then again, perhaps not. I have discovered that, in the years of my absence, the Romanian language has recycled all the old clichés of the socialist wooden tongue with injections of jargon deriving from American movies and advertising. Yesterday, when I switched on the TV in my hotel room, I was greeted by a battery of members of the Romanian Senate, all incapable of articulating a fully formed sentence. In the waiting room of the Frankfurt airport, I was assaulted by the same mutterings, the same mutilated words.
Ken and I are walking toward my former home. We pass the State Library, a massive, dusty building, proceed along Lipscani Street, a sort of bazaar arcade, then past the Stavropoleos Church, a miniature jewel set awkwardly amid the surrounding grayness and impoverishment. We encounter potholed sidewalks, decayed walls, comical shop signs, nervous, shivering, harassed passersby. We walk past the former Comedy Theater, cross the new bridge over the Dîmboviŏa River, and find ourselves on Calea Victoriei. The old building, at number 2, is still there. I show Ken the balcony of apartment 15, on the third floor.
When we moved in, the balcony was enclosed with glass panels, which created a bit of extra space. The order to demolish this type of extension came from the country’s First Lady, Comrade Mortu, as Culianu would say. I was bold enough to launch a legal war against the authorities, only in order to obtain written proof of this abuse, one more act of naïveté to add to the list in my Jormanian biography.
“Shall we go up to the apartment, to see who lives there now?” Ken asks.
“I know who lives there.”
Ken insists, but I hold my ground, and not because I am sentimental about my former residence. After I left the country, I continued to pay rent on the apartment, in 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1989, the years of my wanderings through Germany and America. In 1989, after the collapse of the Communist regime and the hunting down of the dictator and his spouse, the building’s administrator had forced open the door of the apartment and had moved in quickly. He had obviously been helped by the country’s Supreme Secret Institution, for which he had been working undercover, like all his sort. The naïve transatlantic tenant sued the administrator, but the authority stood by its collaborator. The impossible proved, once more, possible: democratic Romania’s democratic judicial system pronounced, both in 1990 and in 1991, in favor of the administrator and against the traitor from across the ocean. The alien was ordered to pay not only the court costs, but also, with his filthy dollars, for the expense of redecorating the apartment on which, from his exile, he had been paying rent during all those years.
Socialist law stipulated, as I tried to explain to Ken, that whenever someone left the country “for good,” they had to bequeath the apartment to the state in perfect condition. But even though I had not “returned” the apartment to the state, and the socialist law no longer applied, socialism’s secret police, with its informers and administrators, had survived.
We go up Calea Victoriei and walk past the Central Post Office, turned into the Museum of National History erected by Ceauşescu but, in fact, a shrine to his and Comrade Mortu’s contribution to the glory of the country and the people. The impersonal street, as impersonal as posterity itself, does not seem to have missed me and is not aware that I was its faithful pedestrian for so many years. On our left, next to the Victoria department store, now restored to its prewar name of Lafayette, an ugly modern building is rising. Next to it is the building of the old militia, now restyled as the Bucharest city police headquarters. To the right, as in the old days, is the Fashion House and the Cinemathèque.
Postmortem tourism should never be underestimated. I am aware of the privilege I have been afforded and recognize the instant benefits of its sadism. Having reached the intersection with the boulevard, we turn right toward University Square, where we are assailed by a slogan smeared on one of the walls in big black capitals: MONARHIA SALVEAZĂ ROMNIA (Monarchy Saves Romania). We go through the underground crossing, now full of small shops, then emerge on the opposite side, on Magheru Boulevard, just in front of the hotel.
At one o’clock I meet Leon again, at the Atheneum. The rehearsal is in full swing, Joanna is her usual helpful self. I find it difficult to superimpose the image of the poet of a decade ago, electrifying her audience with her rendition of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” onto her current reincarnation as a cultural functionary. The car of the American Embassy is waiting for us in front of the Atheneum to take us to the lunch in our honor given by John Katzka, the consul in charge of public relations.
We — the American star and the Romanian exile, an incomparable team — go up the stairs of the imposing building. The White Clown, tall, relaxed, elegant, accompanied by Augustus the Fool, tense and oblique, are welcomed by the cultural attaché, an inexpressive woman, and by Mr. Katzka, tall, blond, voluble, who expresses an immediate interest in Bard College, in the MacArthur Prize that I had been awarded in 1992, and in our schedule. Soon, the Romanian guests start to appear, “academics” is how they are described on the invitation. I introduce Andrei Plesu to Leon, having been informed by George Soros that he is likely to be the preferred candidate to head the Central European University in Budapest. Pleşu regrets the fact that I didn’t let people know in advance of my visit; he could have arranged a meeting with an “interesting group” from the New Europe College, of which he is presently head. I have no chance to be self-deprecating about my talent for missing happy opportunities, as I find myself in the arms of Laurenţiu Ulici, the Writers Union’s current president, older than I remember him. He, too, is full of reproaches that I gave no advance notice of my visit. He insists that I drop by the union, where he would like to “organize something” to celebrate my return, a meeting, a festivity, a colloquium. Was that “something” supposed to be an occasion for my former colleagues finally to express the indignation they had failed to express seven years before, and since, when public lies about their fellow writer were bruited? He monopolizes my attention, eager to tell me about the union’s organizational and financial achievements in these “difficult times”—for instance, from the money produced by renting out buildings to foreign agencies, they were funding pensions, sick-leave support, and literary awards; an international writers’ association had been founded, with holiday homes and residential accommodations for translation projects; the Rome-based Biblioteca di Romania would be the venue for major international writers’ conferences; the union has also established publishing collaborative ventures with Paris. I nod my approval, relieved that he is not questioning me about my own affairs. At lunch, we are all under the spell of Leon’s animated recitation of musical anecdotes. The consul is a good host, the food plentiful, the wine acceptable.
It is getting warmer outside and sunnier. Perhaps I should go out, maybe take another look at the Dalles bookstore. I allow myself a moment of relaxation instead. I take off my jacket and shoes and lie down on the hotel bed. My tiredness increases, becomes heavy; it feels as though I am being enveloped in clouds of mist as I sink into oblivion.
“Greetings, Mynheer.” The voice is slightly hoarse, slightly tipsy, guttural. “Are you back in the beloved motherland?”
I recognize the voice, but cannot see the speaker. I know who used to call me “Mynheer” and why.
“Back in the beloved motherland, Mr. Nordman?”
Should he repeat the question a third time, he will surely address me as “Tank Division General.” “You’re shy, but also violent, Mr. Nordman,” he had told me after reading a text that triggered the Manea scandal in 1982, in the socialist press. “I have cla
y feet, like the Golem, as you know, but here I am, standing on one leg, reading your text. I could not set my foot down, I was so excited. Mes hommages, Général! You are a tank division general, mon cher Nordman,” he repeated, in his panting voice, on the telephone.
“Are you back from the capitalist paradise? What are things like over there, in the Garden of Eden, General?”
I was now fully awake, and was looking at the curtains, at the dead man who had been my friend, the Communist, the lord of nicknames and gossip. When we first met, he had promptly changed my name to Nordman. I had instantly become the man from the north, not only from northern Bukovina, but also from the North Atlantic. I met him in the mid-seventies, probably. One evening, I received a call from an unknown woman. She had read a piece of mine in a literary weekly and was inviting me to a soirée of friends at no. 24 Sfîntul Pavel Street, apartment 12. My caller had a pleasant voice and seemed to be a discerning reader. She gave her name, and it turned out she was the wife of a well-known critic and writer. It was a familiar name, even to someone earning a living outside the literary field. I had heard much about this eminence grise of socialist culture in the years of Stalinist dogmatism, about his legendary double life, this sophisticated lover of books and conspiracies.
On the evening of my debut in Donna Alba’s circle, I was soon won over by the classical, old-fashioned elegance of my beautiful hostess. The fragile brunette pulsated with a supple, blade-like intelligence. Her famous husband was not there. The rebel used to spend his weekends with his mistress, in another, symmetrical literary salon, presided over by himself and by his younger muse.