by Norman Manea
I put my hand out, feeling for the newspaper on the night table. There is no newspaper, of course, but I keep caressing the silky surface of the wood, for no particular reason. The chances of self-oblivious confusion have been shattered, only seconds separate me from myself. I shall soon become aware again of who and where I am. I raise my left arm, staring, bewildered, at the clock.
“First you put one box on the left arm, close to your heart. This means that you have feeling,” said my Hebrew teacher, instructing me on how to fit the phylacteries. “Then you put the other box on your forehead, close to your brain. There must be no break between these two moments, no divide between idea and gesture, between feeling and action,” explained the guide who ushered me into manhood, at the age of thirteen.
In my half sleep, the wall calendar shows 1949. “One thousand nine hundred forty-nine! One thousand! Nine hundred! Forty-nine!” I mutter. I have been crossing and recrossing the threshold of age thirteen, without ever really going beyond. It is now half a century since I failed to become someone other than the one I am. All the intervening stages of life collapse into that one teenage year. On my left arm, all these years, I have been wearing not the phylactery but the watch belonging to that same orphan of time, just as I did then.
I look at the profane, silent clock face of insomnia, I turn time’s gilded knob: no, it is not half-past eight in the evening, as it is in New York, but half-past three in the morning, here, between the Carpathians and the Danube. Upon landing, I should have adjusted the watch hands to the new time zone, but I am stuck in the jet lag, in the confusion where I belong.
The future into which I was entering then, in 1949, is past. The space, however, has become the old one. I look at the time on the watch face, I look out the window to terra 1997. “Out there” no longer means, as it did until a few days ago, Romania, the “faraway country.” The faraway country is now America, the homeland of all exiles, which greets me once more with the exiles’ salute: “Hypocrino!”
The language of life after death, in this world and in the nether world, is not owned, is not one’s by right, but is merely rented. Hypocrino! This rented language is a function of survival, among all the tests and tricks and trophies of regeneration. “To function as a citizen of the United States, one needs to be able to read, interpret, and criticize texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media” was an injunction I knew from Robert Scholes’s book The Rise and Fall of English. The foreigners adopted by the exiles’ new country must sit for the obligatory Hypocrino Test. The ancient Greek roots of the term “hypocrisy”? Automatic compliance, interjections of approval? “The roots of ‘hypocrite’ are to be found in the ancient Greek verb hypocrino, which had a set of meanings sliding from simple speech, to orating, to acting on stage, to feigning or speaking falsely.” Does one learn these words and their meaning and their pronunciation as one does in nursery school? Are the natural gestures and facial expressions simply the actor’s lines learned as a child emitted by the double sent to replace and represent you?
I had cut out the review of Scholes’s book from the newspaper and placed it on my night table, intending to buy the book the next day. “Hypocrino.” I was awakened by night’s hypocritical whisper. I tried not to hear. I crumpled the newspaper clipping and threw it on the floor, as if hoping to avert the curse.
In the morning, the crumpled ball of paper was in the same place. I smoothed it out, cut out the sentence that had triggered my insomnia. I pasted it on the wall in front of the computer, then learned by heart the formula supposed to defend the exile that I was from the nightmares of truth: “hypocrino … meanings sliding from simple speech, to orating, to acting on stage, to feigning or speaking falsely.”
It is a sunny summer morning; the year is 1993. Five years have passed since my landing in the New World. Since one year in exile counts as four sedentary years, there were already twenty years. The mail brings a postcard from Cynthia: “I wish for you that one morning we will all wake up speaking, reading, and writing Romanian; and that Romanian will be declared the American national language!” In her familiar handwriting she has added, without realizing the danger of tempting fate, “With the world doing the strange things it is doing today, there is no reason for this NOT to happen.” The apartment building’s doorman suddenly greeting me in Romanian? Bard College’s president speaking to me in rapid Romanian? My accountant explaining to me the American tax regulations in Romanian? The loudspeaker in the subway announcing the next stop in, at last, an intelligible language? A sudden relaxation in my relations with my American friends, students, publishers? A joy, or a nightmare? No, the American environment in which I now live must stay as it is; the miracle imagined in Cynthia’s message would only have added a new dimension to an already grotesque situation. Her wish, however, did come true, but not in the terms she had formulated it. It happened not in New York but upon my return to Bucharest, where everybody speaks Romanian.
Ken’s comment about the transfiguration he noted in me when he saw me speaking Romanian had targeted the very poisoned heart of joy. At the age of forty, on the occasion of my first trip to the “free world,” the relatives and friends whom I was visiting had urged me finally to leave accursed Romania. “What if I do not inhabit a country but a language?” was my response. Was this the sophistry of evasion? And now that I am in actual exile, can I continue to carry the Promised Land, language, with me? Schlemiel’s nocturnal shelter? The home that I carry on my back, the snail’s shell, is not completely impenetrable. New sonorities and meanings belonging to the new geography of exile manage to infiltrate the nomad’s shell. Futility can no longer be ignored, however. Every second is a warning of the death one carries within oneself. Language provides only a proud emblem of failure. Failure is what legitimizes you, Mr. Hypocrino.
Suddenly, through the misty window, I see Cioran. He walks cautiously down the hospital corridors, muttering some incomprehensible words. Over half a century earlier, he had freed himself, through an infernal transplant operation, from his native language, and had settled, like a sovereign, in the realm of the Cartesian French paradoxes. At this very moment, however, he is muttering again the old words. The Romanian language, so suited to his temperament — which, in his exaltation, he had managed to “denationalize”—returned to him, in his Alzheimer’s fog. He is muttering old senseless words in his old language, his countryless exaltation replaced by a gentle prenatal senility.
He would probably appreciate being addressed as Mr. Hypocrino. We might dissect the wanderings of exile, as we had done one evening in 1990, in his Paris attic. Should I now knock on eternity’s window and remind him of the letter he had sent me, after I had left Romania? “C’est de loin l’acte le plus intelligent que j’aie jamais commis,” he had written — emigration was by far the most intelligent thing he had ever done. Was that mere post-trauma vanity, Monsieur Cioran? Why survival at any cost? Do we need the adulation of our name and nothing else? Why don’t we accept the end, why do we want to become orators again?
And what do you think about hatred, Monsieur Hypocrino? Does other people’s hatred of us finally cure us of confusion and illusions, does it render us more interesting in our own eyes? Does the “metaphysical Jew” Cioran have a better grasp of the ancestral articulation of hatred than the genuine Jew? Would our own beloved Bucharest be the suitable arena for such a debate?
The watch face on my left hand, near my heart, does not have three hands, as my old watch used to, one for seconds, one for minutes, and one for hours, and I no longer need to wind it in the evening before going to bed. I no longer listen to its tick-tocking to hear my time crumbling away, second by second. I would not have heard anything anyway. The seconds died out, unknown, in the new watch’s tightly closed belly.
Should I go downstairs to the lobby and listen to the language of the past, listen to Cioran, listen to my own self, to the old sound, the old language, the memory of what one was before coming into being? Such opportunities
should not be missed. In Turin, in 1992, at a writers’ conference on Eastern Europe, the English translation of my presentation, thank God, proved useless. There were many excellent interpreters from Romanian into Italian at hand. Saved, resuscitated, happy at learning this, I found myself accosted by two fellow countrymen. The short, plump, and smartly dressed man, wearing a wide, conventional smile, introduced himself as the Romanian cultural attaché in Rome; the other, as a literary man from the Casa di Romania, also in Rome. “What language would you use?” the cultural attaché asked, looking me straight in the eye. “Romanian,” I answered. “At long last, I can speak Romanian,” I added cheerfully. My fellow nationals had some difficulty hiding their smiles, a mix of skepticism and suspicion. They continued to scrutinize, in silence, the face and gestures of this surprising literary representative of the motherland, so happy, would you believe it, to address the world in Romanian. Poor thing, happy to speak in Romanian, even to the officials of an officialdom which he had little reason to trust.
As we said our goodbyes and I was advancing toward the stage, I unwittingly left an eavesdropper behind. The two had not realized that, one step away, there was a witness to the scene, my wife. Her wary ear had caught their reaction. “Have you heard,” one said, “he’s going to speak in Romanian. Big deal! And he’s pleased about it, too.” His companion replied, “He can even speak in Hungarian if he wants to, for all I care”—Hungarian being, of course, worse than English.
Yes, Ken was right to question Mr. Hypocrino about language. Its nocturnal murmur wakes me up frequently, like a vagabond electric current searching for its outlet — the night’s deep underground waters capturing words in gentle tumultuous wavelets, the somnambular monologues about the richness of failure and the benefits of insomnia.
The clock face now indicates past five in the morning in Bucharest, the dead of night in New York. The silence of the room and the silence of the old heart measure out the rhythm of time’s childish, implacable pulsation. For time’s temporary lodger, the hotel space is adequate enough.
Day Three: Wednesday, April 23, 1997
In a 1992 interview, my friend reminded me that I had asked her ten years earlier, “Who would hide me?” A decade later, it was her turn to ask me who was hiding me there, in faraway America, land of easy disappearances and rediscoveries. Now, five years later, we are to meet again and I wonder behind which mask can I hide, the one of the man I once was in the homeland of failure or the one I have become in the land of success?
She is waiting for me in the lobby, dressed in a green tailored suit, as if for an academic conference. She is no longer the young poet I used to know in the 1980s. She is now a Ph.D. in philosophy and a university lecturer, the editor in chief of a literary review and the head of a publishing house. But her smile is the same as before, and as her letters had confirmed, her character has remained unchanged.
We look at each other, and I see her features through my memories — the face of Maria Callas, a Balkan effigy, asymmetrical, mobile, the gentleness easily turning into asperity and back again. We go upstairs to my room and she puts down her jacket and her bag. Her thin silk blouse outlines the fragility of her shoulders and arms. There is a prolonged silence. Should I tell her about my wanderings, my thoughts about aging? I have no idea where and how to start. The letters have not replaced the familiar voice and the eyes now before me again. The words, however, are welling up with a will of their own. We are not talking about the nationalist, Communist, and anti-Communist hysteria, but about something else, and we are both, at long last, laughing. The jokes do not seem related to what we say, for I can hear her summing up an unuttered monologue, addressed to me: “In spite of the awards, the prizes, the translations, and the professorship, for all of which you are envied, I sense a wound festering in you. It is not difficult to guess what it is. You must write more books, that’s the only solution to your problem.”
Of course, this is the wound, and that is the solution. Have I ever told her about my comic doppelgänger, the stereotype in which I feel I have been imprisoned, the witch who has been found out and is set on fire in the marketplace by the napalm of hostility and burned to a crisp by the past? As usual, my mind fills with quotations, as if only the rhetorical hysteria of other people’s words could release me from myself. “Should you miss your native place,” I hear an alien voice saying, “you will find in exile more and more reasons to miss it; but if you manage to forget it and love your new residence, you will be sent back home, where, uprooted once more, you will start a new exile.” Wasn’t it Maurice Blanchot who said that? Should I tell her about the straitjacket of stereotypes, should I open the drawer into which Kafka crammed his co-religionists? Should I mention the circus performer riding astride two horses, or the man lying flat on his back on the ground, Kafkaesque images both, and indeed to be found in a postcard written by Kafka in 1916?
I am not sure whether she replies to my outburst, or whether it is my own voice I am hearing: “No, you are wrong. You are evading the issue with all these metaphors and these quotations and all this rhetoric.” That is what she should have said. My talkativeness seems to have no other purpose than to speak, the words pouring out in Romanian. If Ken was looking for further evidence of my linguistic transfiguration, he would have found it here.
The language has returned, vibrating irresistibly, returning me to myself. I can hear myself again, in the language of our past conversations and in the silences. My friend in the green suit is now looking at me and smiling: “You, a hooligan? That is sheer imposture, borrowed armor. If I now scream to my countrymen, You have replaced him with a caricature, you don’t give a damn what he has to say, you only want to defile him, would the real hooligans listen?” No, she didn’t really say that. These are words she had written me in a letter not long before. “You should come here twice a year,” she had added, “to salute our distinguished colleagues, to let yourself be filmed, to sit in the taverns.”
She is listening to me attentively, and she does not seem aware of the verbal collages that Augustus the Fool is composing in his head. During the terror of the eighties, I had asked her, “Who would hide me?”—a question from the 1940s that has orbited for forty years before returning to its point of origin. “My Lavatories, this should be the title of my memoirs,” another exiled Romanian colleague, a Christian, told me recently. “I have traveled the world, from the Euphrates to San Francisco, and I can testify, no place can compete with the Romanian lavatories — the apocalypse of the feces.” Could my poet friend understand why a Romanian Jew could never utter such words? The one who was denied a motherland had to gain it, and giving it up is not so simple. “I have not been allowed one second of tranquillity, nothing was ever given to me, I had to obtain everything,” Kafka said. But this was not what we were talking about. We had not even mentioned our exchange of 1992 over an Israeli anthology, Jewish Writers Writing in Romanian, and about my displeasure with the title. I considered myself a Romanian writer and regarded ethnicity as a strictly personal matter. Should I now ask: Was being Romanian something to be wished for? We may want to read Cioran on the subject for an answer. What label was I wearing now, and why should I need one? To my relief we did not revisit the issue in our conversation. The verbiage, the quotations were all in my mind and in my memory.
At some point she must have taken off her glasses. For the first time, I see a different face and hear a different voice. She remains by the window, then turns to look at me, as in the old days, frozen in expectation. Was the pendulum of that hour of long ago ready to start moving again, at a first touch? What could be the hiding place, where could it be? She is looking at me, I am not looking at her, and I am not asking her anything, out of a fear that she, in turn, might ask me to hide her away from the new times and I might find out that I do not have the place and the means to do so.
“Let your books come home,” she says. “Even if only one person loves them, it will be enough. Ten were enough to save Gommora
h.” As she starts to describe the daily warfare among our compatriots, I interrupt her and launch into my own evocation of exile, its theatricality, mimetic fission, its division of the self. The infantile stand-in is allowed to perform his new script, while the grown-up other half is bending over in the schizophrenia of ancient reflexes. This is now me, bent over in a spasm that has punctured Hypocrino’s pneuma, talking to the poet about language and the dynamics of a life underground and other preciosities.
Suddenly I am tired. I take off my glasses, rub my eyes, and observe a respectful moment of silence for the funeral subject. Then she says, “Norman, we are not all the same.” I nod in agreement. Of course not. Some people would have given me shelter not only in 1992 but also in 1982, and even in 1942. I quote Mark Twain, my new compatriot: “A man is a human being, he can’t be any worse.”
We smile and laugh and understand just how long the words have taken to find us and that, in fact, it took no time at all. I learn that after the execution of the dictator and his wife, Comrade Mortu, my poet friend had sworn never to be afraid again, never to surrender her sense as a free human being. Subsequently, she was often afraid, but behaved as though she wasn’t. I nod again. I have also learned, in the meantime, a few things about the fears of free men. I manage to mutter, “Our meeting has tamed me, it’s made me vulnerable,” a confused synthesis of confusion itself. I might as well have believed myself in another room and in different circumstances. I might as well have thought of Prague and of Milena Jesenska, yes, Kafka’s Milena, who, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, sheltered fugitives in her home. I am troubled, I admit, by the solidarities that posterity still permits. Before we say goodbye, I promise, rather unconvincingly, to send her something for publication by the small press she runs. We exchange promises of letters and reunions, a sort of melancholy conciliation between the halves of the still-in-transit passenger I have become. Am I being disputed over, like Kafka’s rider astride the two horses? No, I am flat on the ground, as I should be.