The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  At half-past nine, Leon and Ken return from the Atheneum, delighted with the concert. We inquire about a good restaurant near the hotel. The receptionist recommends La Premiera, just behind the National Theater. Leon goes upstairs to his room to put away his briefcase with the scores and the baton. Ken reports on the success of the evening. The Schumann oratorio, Das Paradis und die Peri, was remarkable; he would like to buy a recording, but as the piece is rarely performed, recordings must be scarce. The restaurant is crowded, noisy, full of cigarette smoke. The Romanian traditional dishes have bizarre English translations. But Leon, after two days in Bucharest, knows what he wants, the stuffed cabbage. We follow his lead, in honor of his success at the Atheneum.

  Visibly pleased with the surprise of the rousing performance by the orchestra and chorus, Leon is in an expansive mood. He needs excitement, great excitement. “Gomulka!” he suddenly explodes, finding the magic code. “Do you remember Gomulka?” He is asking us and eternity, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Gomulka! I miss Gomulka!” the conductor is claiming. Do I remember Gomulka? I cannot enter the burlesque frenzy, but being grave, solemn, pathetic as a White Clown, comforted, finally, by such a reversal of roles in our partnership. Yes, of course I remember Gomulka, the ghost summoned to entertain us and enhance our appetite. Yet I’m telling my joyful associate not about Gomulka but about the sensation created in Bucharest by the short visit in the early eighties of his aftercomer Jaruzelski, the Polish general and Party leader, with his smoked-glass spectacles, looking like a South American dictator in comparison with whom our shabby megalomaniac Ceauşescu seemed a humble Balkanic caricature. “No, not your little buffoon and not Jaruzelski. Gomulka! Here, in Bucharest, I miss Gomulka!” Leon is repeating like an old song in a renewed Broadway intermezzo before we order the traditional borscht with meatballs and proceed to the stuffed cabbage. Leon asks me whom I’ve been seeing.

  “I met a few people,” I reply. “This afternoon, for instance, I met with a poet friend of mine, a woman who came from somewhere in the provinces to see me. Time is short, it’s true, but I’ve also been a bit wary of seeing old friends. Ken knows that. In fact, he knows that I’ve turned down certain meetings.”

  Leon looks at Ken, sensing an opportunity for a funny story, but Ken smiles and says nothing, giving me leave to say whatever I wish.

  “Yes,” I continue, “some Romanian intellectuals invited us both, you and me, to a meeting, a debate. I explained we were too busy.”

  “You did the right thing,” Leon says, a bit of stuffed cabbage impaled on his fork. “There wouldn’t have been time. I’m leaving on Friday at noon.”

  “There’s been another invitation, of a personal nature,” I say. “A former lady friend of mine. Ken used to know her.”

  My dinner companions prick up their ears.

  “Well,” I go on, “Ken knows a lot of people here.” Ken confirms this. “He once sent me to see a famous literary person turned politician, an arrogant, shallow man. Then he sent me to a publisher who thought I was an American, so he apologized for not knowing English, only French. When I started to speak French, he called his secretary to translate. He waxed nostalgic about the time when culture was subsidized by the state and was the focus of the nation’s attention and respect. People who were never guilty of any dirty deeds under the dictatorship suddenly found themselves, after 1989, disgusted with the masquerade of democracy, with the West’s rhetoric, with the rush with which each and every underdog wanted to become top dog, not on the strength of the Party card, but by dint of the bank account.”

  “I understand very well,” Leon says. “Have you met any of these guys, the new anti-capitalists? Look, I’m letting you off from your duties. Tomorrow you don’t have to come with me. Meet one of these people, talk to them, find out what they believe.”

  “That would be a very awkward conversation.”

  There is a silence. I must not let the pause go on for much longer.

  “As for the woman who asked Ken to let me know she wanted to see me …”

  “Is she a democrat or a traitor?”

  “I am the national traitor, and I won’t give up the title so easily. It was bequeathed to me by Captain Dreyfus.”

  “Okay, Okay, but you must meet with at least one of these anti-capitalists, that’s an order.”

  It is late when we return to the hotel. I ask for the key and am surprised to see that the young receptionist does not understand Romanian. He is from Denmark, working alongside a German woman. Some things have changed, I have to admit, even in the former annex of the Securitate.

  The Bard logbook duly records the long, eventful day. It has reminded me of Milena Jesenka, so it deserves my gratitude. It is past midnight when, under the entry Wednesday, April 23, I write down another Milena’s name. My gaze is fixed firmly on the past. I should leave my room and wander along night’s potholed alleys and find Transylvania Street, Maria’s last home. I would knock on the window, the ghost would emerge, and would listen to me, as she used to a long time ago, when I was her undisputed prince and she had not yet heard of Communism and universal happiness. The Communist wife of her Communist husband had fallen victim to disease and illness, slowly destroyed by the infernal machinery that had joined her to her militant spouse, himself slowly destroyed and finally left to die, senile, drunken, discarded on the ash heap of the utopia. Holy Maria would ask me, in the Yiddish she had learned from Avram the bookseller, to tell her about what it was like to be there, in the American paradise. Peace, charity, kindness? No, Maria, competition. Paradise is no longer the boring place it used to be, a new game keeps its occupants busy around the clock. It’s a different game, but every bit as engrossing.

  There is no longer a Transylvania Street. There is no Maria, no past, only the stray dogs of night. Their relentless howling reaches the occupant of room 1515.

  Day Four: Thursday, April 24, 1997

  We are at the Composers Union, located in the former palace of Maruca Cantacuzino, wife of composer Georges Enesco. Leon makes inquiries about the archives. We discover the desperate condition of thousands of the composer’s manuscripts. Our hosts mention the complex copyright issues raised by Salabert, the French publishers, and tell us about the lack of funding. We learn that there is an acute need for archival equipment, photocopying, computerization, expanding the editorial activities, and, above all, a new agreement with Salabert, since the contract of 1965 allows for the use of Enesco’s scores only in the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

  At this point, Leon interrupts. “It so happens,” he says, “that the new owner of Salabert is my neighbor in the Hudson Valley.” There are smiles all around. Then Leon goes a step further and offers to support the “relaunching” of Enesco in the world. He asks for a detailed list of requirements, which includes the restructuring and computerization of the archive, the reissuing of recordings, the international publication and distribution of the works, a new, authoritative biography.

  Leon, as if waving an imaginary baton, brings the discussion to a crescendo. “If we can bring Enesco’s whole body of work to the concert halls, then the history of music in this century will reserve a place for him right next to Bartók and Szymanovski. The present century, as you know, is haunted to the point of obsession by Schönberg and Stravinsky. Bartók, being Hungarian, is marginalized, and so is Enesco, as a Romanian, while the Americans are marginalized as Americans. This picture will have to change. Enesco will no longer be regarded as an exotic but as the master of syntheses, the creator of highly original musical ideas. Communist Poland adopted Chopin, the Czech Republic did the same with Smetana, though not with Dvořák, while the Hungarians had difficulties with Bartók until Kodály intervened in his favor. Enesco needs a triumphal re-entry into the world. We have a good opportunity, let’s take it.”

  As we step out of the elegant building, we both have the feeling that, beyond the minor and the major circumstantial difficulties, something important and enduring has happ
ened, which has revived our spirits. Was this the state of well-being of those who do good? “Enesco was a democrat, you know, somewhat of a rarity among Romanian intellectuals. He was a Western European, in the best sense of the term,” Augustus the Fool recites, like a zealous tourist guide. I stop, however, annoyed with my own self-complacency. The prospect of a major international “Operation Enesco” has also taken hold of Leon. He speaks about the Bartók archive in Budapest; he is scandalized by the provincialism of Romanian Communism, by the fact that Enesco is visible only as statues. Had the Romanian Communists been put off by the fact of the composer’s Parisian exile, by his having an aristocratic wife? Why is the archive in such a state of disaster? I get no chance to respond.

  It is the evening of the second concert. The entrance of the Atheneum is blocked by scaffolding, the courtyard is muddy. The red plush seats are worn, the auditorium looks like the set of a period film. In the lobby, housewives, sitting behind shabby little tables, are selling concert programs, two thousand lei each. I also buy a newspaper for eight hundred lei. The woman has no change. “You know,” she says, “not too many people tonight, it’s Holy Week, people have gone to church.” The cloakroom charge is five hundred. I give the young woman a larger bill, she thanks me, I do not wait for the change. The audience starts to arrive — pensioners modestly but neatly dressed; a few foreigners, possibly from some embassy; a couple who look like bit players in a Mafia film; a white-haired gentleman, with the appearance of a monk, the son of the famous avant-garde poet Saşa Pană, looking exactly as his father did thirty years ago; a group of students from the conservatory; another group of schoolchildren, carrying schoolbags; elderly widows.

  I find my seat, number 12, in box 18. The hall is only three-quarters full, and I am the only occupant of my box. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” a clear, melodious voice addresses the audience. “We wish to inform you that the next concerts will take place on May 7 and 8, Maestro Comissiona conducting. We would also like to remind you that the Dinu Lipatti Festival and Competition will open on May 5. We wish you a pleasant evening and a happy Easter.” The orchestra comes onstage, and the players tune their instruments. Leon appears to the sound of applause.

  My gaze remains fixed on a youngish couple in the last row of seats, next to my box. The man is about thirty, with thick brown hair and a mustache. Under his soiled parka he is wearing a gray suit, a purple shirt, a striped tie. He has a firm profile and arched eyebrows. His companion, who arrives after him, smiles and sits down without saying a word. The man looks at the young Greek-Wallachian princess, hypnotized. She has a long, finely chiseled nose, with trembling nostrils, deep-set eyes, long black eyebrows, dark lashes. She exudes an air of delicacy and mystery. A long bronze-colored scarf encircles her neck and flows down her dress and her hips. Her lips are a deep, ancient red.

  You have returned from the dead to the concert hall, I’m saying to myself, where you once vibrated, childishly, as you do now, once again.

  The rehearsal I had attended just a few days before had been a disaster. The orchestra looked like a band of juvenile delinquents and imposters, junior hoodlums in jeans, giggling hysterically, just to annoy the teacher. But a miracle has occurred. The jeans and torn sweatshirts have been exchanged for dinner jackets and black dresses, effecting a total transformation and proving that a uniform can also perform miracles and not just bring disaster. The swelling chords of the Schumann oratorio begin to fill the hall, and we surrender to this glorious telling of a return from the netherworld. It is the reverie of childhood, the dream of a hypothetical existence.

  The program informs us that Das Paradis und die Peri was first performed on December 4, 1883, under the composer’s baton, in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. The peris were fairies living with the gods in Paradise, according to Persian myth, feeding on the fragrance of flowers, but sometimes descending to earth to mate with mortals. Thomas More’s poem, on which Schumann based his work, was about such a peri, banished from Paradise, to which she will be readmitted only if she brings back the most precious of gifts, something human. She returns with a tear of remorse shed by a sinner moved by the sight of a happy child. The simple but affecting story unfolds in a symphony of majestic sound, a perfect harmony between soloists and chorus. The concert is a great success, a triumph for Leon, confirmed when I pick up my coat in the cloakroom. I am approached by a distinguished-looking woman who says, “I was looking for you. I’d heard that you would be here this evening.” I recognize a brilliant music commentator I used to listen to on the radio and later on television. She does not seem to have aged, and her voice, with its warm inflections, is as lovely as ever.

  The conductor emerges, flushed with the success of the performance. We repair to a nearby bistro, joined by Ken and a lady friend of his. On our way back to the hotel, we stop at a currency exchange. The large young man in the doorway bars our entry — closed. We point to the sign on the door, OPEN NONSTOP. Yes, but there is a break between eleven-thirty and twelve. We look at our watches, eleven-forty. Again we are caught in the straits of confusion, neither order nor absolute chaos, always something in between. You never know here, with any precision, what you have to face or avoid.

  “Bad luck was your good luck, Norman,” Leon is telling me, as the curtain falls on another full day that the concert has made memorable. “Your dictator was your good luck. Otherwise, you would have stayed here forever.” I have given up attempting to explain my more skeptical view of good luck and bad. Later, I try to formulate the matter in Romanian, in my Bard College logbook, but the words refuse to come. What is it precisely that blocks my contact with the present, while being ineffectual against the past? In my constricted, broken shell, I entertain those old omnivorous snakes, my questions. Today has already become yesterday, the future is playing at hide-and-seek.

  The future would soon turn this day into a bureaucratic joke, which arrived in a letter addressed to Leon six months later, in October 1997. It was from a representative of the Soros Foundation, to which Leon had sent a memorandum regarding the Enesco project. The letter read: “As you know, I asked a distinguished French archivist to look at the Enesco archives. I just had a report of the visit. The Enesco Foundation received him with some impatience. They told him the documents were in fine shape and he was not allowed to see them. I am at a loss to explain this. Obviously it will be impossible to provide support if the organization holding the Enesco materials will not even permit an independent assessment of their condition.”

  A commonsense comment, that both Leon and I could have made to our hosts in Bucharest, or just for our own amusement, had we not already identified ourselves with our roles of improvised Samaritans.

  Nocturnal Interlocutors

  The light is turned off, it is past midnight. I have not drawn the curtains, the darkness is not total. Seeping in from the street is a vaguely luminous fog. I am surrounded by an uncertain nimbus, the face of Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti.

  “I know a few things about you. I’ve heard things,” he says.

  I know what is coming next — a long pause. I also know what will follow.

  “Have you been to America before? Do you know America? You can’t have any better lessons in solitude anywhere else.”

  We met in January 1989, when the ten-month Fulbright grant that had brought me to Washington, D.C., had just ended. I had not completely dissociated myself from my past, had not yet explored the tricks whereby one takes possession of the future.

  The Buckingham section, in a suburb of Washington, was modest and quiet. I had got used to the two small, well-lit rooms, with the wooden plank on a wooden frame that served as a desk. We would have to leave soon. Cella had found a job with an art-restoration firm in New York and had already moved into a midtown hotel, at the corner of Forty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. I had stayed there myself for a week. It was a cheap hotel, unlike the luxury Bucharest Intercontinental, where I am now being visited by Bezzetti’s ghost. The room in New York
was small, only two steps from the door to the bed. The grimy windows looked down on a narrow street heavy with traffic. On the corner there was a firehouse, from where huge red mastodons would race out in a roar. The area, not far from Times Square, was infamous for its drug trade and prostitution. In the morning, on her way to work, Cella was surrounded by a cast of extras from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: beggars, addicts, bums, hustlers, the orphans of the metropolis.

  The small white rooms of the modest suburb in Washington seemed, by comparison, idyllic. I did not want to leave the shelter to which I had finally become accustomed. However, the couple’s support would now be coming from New York. We had to move by the end of January.

  Despair stimulates not only schizophrenia but also extravagance. In the last week before I was due to leave my first American home, my sense of helplessness forced me to become a different person, in the hope that destiny would be different, too. A few days before leaving Washington, I was scheduled to have an interview with Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti, the cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in the United States.